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Updated: June 4, 2025
But in 1839 he began to have doubts about the Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican formularies cannot be at variance with the teachings of the authoritative and universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the Tracts, Tract Ninety, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote.
Jameson and others in these days are fully recognising, that "we cannot safely combat the errors of any man or system without first giving them full credit for whatever excellences they may retain"? Such a course is the true fruit of that free spirit of Protestantism which ought to delight in recognising good to whatever party it may belong; which asserts that every good gift and perfect gift comes directly from above, and not through the channel of particular formularies or priesthoods; which, because it loves faith and virtue, for their own sakes, and not as mere parts of a "Catholic system," can recognise them and delight in them wherever it finds them.
It cannot, however, be proved and is extremely improbable that, as respects these towns, there was an actual historical accursing of the ground on which they were built, such as really took place at Veii, Carthage, and Fregellae. It may be conjectured that old accursing formularies were applied to those two hated towns, and were considered by later antiquaries as historical documents.
He proceeded to observe, that from what he had said, it was plain in what point of view the Anglican formularies were to be regarded; viz. they were our mode of expressing everlasting truths, which might be as well expressed in other ways, as any correct thinker would be able to see.
The 'tradition of Western Catholicism' is a phrase which has a meaning for him, and he probably hopes for a reunion, at some distant date, of the Anglican Church with a reformed Rome. It is therefore essential, in his opinion, that no alteration shall take place in the formularies which we share with Rome; the Bible may be thrown to the critics, but the Creeds are inviolable.
These propositions open much grave and complex discussion, and they are not to our present purpose. We only desire to state the evil of the notion that a man is warranted in comforting himself with dogmas and formularies, which he has first to empty of all definite, precise, and clearly determinable significance, before he can get them out of the way of his religious sensibilities.
Their half comprehended words had however decided him in the part he should take, making him sure that Colet was not controverting the formularies of the Church, but drawing out those meanings which in repetition by rote were well-nigh forgotten. It was as if his course were made clear to him.
Now here, at the very time that the Anglican Bishops were directing their censure upon me for avowing an approach to the Catholic Church not closer than I believed the Anglican formularies would allow, they were on the other hand, fraternizing, by their act or by their sufferance, with Protestant bodies, and allowing them to put themselves under an Anglican Bishop, without any renunciation of their errors or regard to their due reception of baptism and confirmation; while there was great reason to suppose that the said Bishop was intended to make converts from the orthodox Greeks, and the schismatical Oriental bodies, by means of the influence of England.
The Church of England was essentially a Protestant Church; though, being constructed more than most other Churches under political influences, by successive stages of progress, and with a view to including large and varying sections of opinion in its fold, it retained, more than other Churches, formularies and tenets derived from the Church it superseded.
The Anglican answer was that though the formal and conciliar authority was not the same in each case, the patristic literature of the time of the great councils, all that it took for granted and preserved as current belief and practice, all that resulted from the questions and debates of the time, formed a body of proof, which carried with it moral evidence only short of authoritative definition, and was so regarded in the Anglican formularies.
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