and so, of very necessity, are all the orders which are derived from him. 6 The mission of Augustine into this country might be invalidated by a reference to his personal character, and the means by which he ultimately succeeded in establishing his power and the power of Rome on the ruins of our ancient liberties. Augustine invaded the territory of an independent and orthodox church for the purpose of corrupting its faith, and trampling its liberties in the dust. That the ancient British church was incomparably purer than that of Rome, has been demonstrated by many, but by none with greater erudition and effect than by Ussher. Augustine, finding that neither his lying wonders,' the brand of the beast' (2 Thes. ii. 9) nor yet his arrogant assumptions, could prevail to subvert the ancient constitution of the British church, had recourse to the ordinary logic of Rome ( drunk with the blood of the saints') and excited a persecution against our pastors, by which 1200 of these holy men were in one day butchered in cold blood. Such is the parentage which Mr David Aitchison is so ambitious of claiming for himself, and for the other prelatic ministers of Scotland and England; and it is because, as he contends, we have renounced all connection with that heavenly, meek, and apostolic Roman missionary, Augustine the Monk, that he would deny to us the character of ministers of Christ Jesus, and to our church the claim to be a part of the church of Christ. Mr David Aitchison may now, if he gets any to join him, raise a pan over the butchery of our pure and primitive clergy, and exult at his descent from the meek and merciful monk. But we have not yet done with Augustine, or at least with his immediate successors. We now proceed, in the 5th place, To show, that even granting that the orders of Augustine himself, and the orders conferred by him and his successors, were rigidly canonical and valid, so many flaws crept into these orders by reason of foreign admixture, as to render them altogether invalid on high church principles. A person who knows no more of the early history of Christianity in England than Mr David Aitchison and his modern popish co On the Religion of the Ancient Irish (passim,) printed along with his Answer to a Jesuit, &c. Cambridge University press, 1835.-See also, both on this and on the other points we have stated, Gieseler's Text Book of Eccl. Hist. (translated by Cunningham,) who gives many of the original authorities in their own words, i. 361-363. Neander's Allgemeine Geschichte d. Christ. Relig. u. Kirche 3ter. Band, s. 33. Bede's Eccl. Hist., lib. ii. c. 2. Godwinus de præsulibus Angliæ, p. 33; who proves that Romanists, as is their wont, have corrupted the text of Bede, in order to conceal the above damning fact of the massacre of the British clergy by Augustine. adjutors think proper to communicate, would be led to suppose, 1. That Christianity was introduced into that kingdom by Augustine; 2. That he and his monks converted the whole island; and, 3. That there was no church, or body of pastors in the kingdom, but those who were in subjection to him and his successors. Now, each of these three suppositions is the very reverse of the truth. We have already shown that Christianity was planted in this country centuries before Augustine was born. When he arrived in A.D. 596 or 597, Christianity, or rather the public estatablishment and profession of it, were, we have acknowledged, violently removed from a part of England, by the persecutions of heathen Saxons. It was to that part alone that Augustine at first displayed his Roman craft and mummeries, and how small a part it was we know, on the authority of Archdeacon Mason and others. Mason has shown most amply (to use his own words,) that Augustine' was not the apostle of the Britons, nor of the Scots, nor of all the Jutes' (i.e. the Saxons who came from Jutland,) but of (the county of) Kent alone.' Archbishop Ussher,† by reference to the earliest and most authentic authorities, has demonstrated that nearly the whole of Saxon England was converted by our own Scottish missionaries, Aidan, and Finan, and Colman, and their brethren. The character of these, our primitive presbyters, may be estimated from the reverence with which they inspired even their adversaries, and from the singular fact that Rome, whom they so strenuously and successfully opposed, availed herself of that reverence with which the people cherished their memories, and, to increase her own power after their death, actually canonized them as British saints, placed their names in her calendar, and set apart shrines for their worship, and holidays for their commemoration!‡ And as to their subjection to Rome, our Scottish, British, and Irish primitive churches refused even to hold communion with Augustine, denounced him as a heretic, and excommunicated him as a schismatic. All this is most ingenuously acknowledged, even by Bede himself. Then our Scottish missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons, although in history they are designated bishops, were no canonical prelates, for they received their consecration only from presbyters. Prelatists, as might be expected, have strained every nerve, and made every effort, per fas aut nefas, to disprove this fact. But so long as even the venerable Bede§ retains any authority, the point remains • Vindiciae Eccl. Angl., lib. iv. c. 4. + Religion of the Ancient Irish, ut supra, p. 618, &c. See the Calendar prefixed to the Roman Missal, where, for example, the 31st of August is set apart in honour of Aidan. 5 Lib. iii. c. 4, 5, &c. impregnable. And to make the matter still more irrefragable, it is evident, upon the most cursory perusal, that Bede, if he could, would himself have demolished it.* These our Scottish primitive presbyter-bishops ordained and consecrated their coadjutors and successors for years after Augustine had butchered almost the whole of the ancient British clergy. In When Rome subsequently triumphed in England, as she did in the rest of western Europe, the lineal successors of our presbyterbishops remained in the land; and when ultimately they conformed, there is no evidence whatever extant to induce us to believe that they voluntarily or compulsorily received re-ordination from Rome, while there is the strongest presumption that they did not. deed, their orders were never called in question; and had they but owned the supremacy of Rome, and submitted to Augustine as their metropolitan, they would have been at once recognised, and from the first incorporated into the Roman church. Re-ordination of such as voluntarily conformed, was never, except in very extreme cases, required in the ancient church. Nor did even the Anglican and Scottican prelatists, until a very late period, insist upon it as essential to admission into their body. No bishop in Scotland," says Bishop Burnet,+ during my stay in that kingdom,' (that is, we presume, from 1643 to 1688, a period of forty-five years,) ever did so much as desire any of the presbyters (who apostatized from the Church of Scotland,) to be re-ordained.' The arch-dean or arch-deacon of St Andrews,' says the late Prelate Walker in Edinburgh,t 'whose name was Waddel or Wedel, was a presbyterian minister before the Restoration. He readily conformed to the episcopal church, but he would not submit to be episcopally ordained. . . . With all the bigotry of which our poor church has at every period been accused, his scruples, and the scruples of many in similar circumstances, were respected, and his clerical character recognised, without that episcopal ordination which, by episcopalians universally, is considered so essential. This is surely no proof of bigotry.' To be sure, it is not; but then it is proof of something just as bad, if not worse. It is proof that Scottish prelates hold their principles so very loosely, that on certain profitable conditions, they have no qualms of conscience in violating what they 'universally consider so essential.' It is, besides, proof, or at least presumption, that Scottish prelatists put forth their lofty exclusive Upon the whole of this subject, see that singularly eloquent and admirable History of the Church of Scotland, by the Rev. W. M. Hetherington, pp. 7-19, where, as throughout, without a shadow of parade of research, are given the results of deep and matured erudition, and a wide and well-sifted induction of facts. + Bishop of Sarum's Vindication, 1696, pp. 84, 85. Charity Sermon in behalf of the Gaelic Episcopal Society, 1831. pretensions merely for the purpose of making proselytes, but the moment a man has conformed, they grant him a dispensation to believe and practise just as he did before. Nor was this absence of bigotry,' as Prelate Walker terms it, confined to Scottish prelatists. The high church Bishop Cosins thus describes the practice of the Church of England, in a letter to Mr Cardel, who scrupled to communicate with the French Protestants, because their ministers had only presbyterian orders: If at any time,' says Cosins, a minister so ordained in these French churches, came to incorporate himself in ours, and to receive a public charge or cure of souls amongst us in the Church of England, (as I have known some of them to have done of late,' [that is, about the end of the seventeenth century,] and can instance in many other before my time,) our bishops did not re-ordain him before they admitted him to his charge, as they must have done if his former ordination in France had been void. No. It was only after Laud had thoroughly inoculated the Church of England with the virus of his own papistical sectarianism, and after the ministers of that church, having lost the Calvinism of their creed, and the catholicity of their fathers, began to value beggarly elements of will-worship,' and tithing of mint, and cummin, and anise, above the weighty matters of the law,' aye, and of the gospel also, that they could stoop to crouch to Rome, or dared to look askance at the Protestant churches. And it was also only of late that they began to venerate Augustine the monk, one of the greatest curses to Britain and the world, that God in his wrath ever let loose upon sinful mortals. Our conclusion from this long induction of facts is inevitable, and is also fatal to the pretensions of our prelatic friends. It is thisThere has been at all times an infusion of presbyterian orders into the channel of succession, both in Scotland and England. The This is partly acknowledged by the very high churchman, John Johnson, in his Clergyman's Vade-Mecum, third edit. vol. i., pp. 3, 4; is also maintained by Neander, Allgemeine Geschichte, &c., vol. iii. p. 33; and is proved by Ussher, Stillingfleet, Godwin, &c., ut supra. It were ludicrous in the extreme, if its perversity did not render it pitiable, to notice the manner in which those bodies who claim catholicity act towards one another. Thus, the Greek church excommunicates the churches of Rome and England: the church of Rome excommunicates the Greek and Anglican churches; and the Anglican high churchman excommunicates the Continental and Anglican "sects." It is just a rehearsal of the old scene in the farce at which boys are accustomed to laugh during the Christmas holidays:-the father kicks the son-the son kicks the valet-the valet kicks the footboy-and the footboy, to prove that even he has an inferior, kicks some still more subordinate menial! Thus, our proud high church neighbours, while they receive with most edifying patience and humility the salutation of the Greek and Roman churches, strike out their heels most valorously against others, whom, in their very laudable modesty, they conceive inferior to themselves. The whole subject is so irresistibly ludicrous, that our indignation and pity are often "smothered" in our laughter. only orders possessed in this end of the island before the arrival of Augustine in the Isle of Thanet, and for many a year afterwards, were avowedly presbyterian. These our presbyterian orders were diffused throughout England from a period coeval with the arrival of Augustine, or even prior to it, and were made the substratum of consecration, even when those bearing them did not, as they commonly did, act up to the full powers of canonical prelates. Here, then, we have the stream poisoned, not only at its fountain-head, but also throughout its whole course. The effects of such an infusion of a foreign element into the canonical repository, were thus elegantly described by that consummate master of the belles lettres, John M'Hale of Tuam, in an address delivered, not very long ago, to his subjects,' for the purpose of preventing a buryingground he had just consecrated from being desecrated by having any Protestants buried in it. Now, boys,' said the elegant titular of Tuam,- Now, boys, as one drop of poison will spoil a whole churn of buttermilk, even so will one grain of heretic dust spoil this whole yard! John M'Hale was perfectly correct upon his own principles, and, by parity of reason, one drop of an uncanonical clement poured into the reservoir of the sacred deposit' will corrupt the whole contents; and so, by inevitable consequence, every thing that depends upon Augustine, and ancient Anglican orders, is utterly null and void. What now, then is to be done? Froude would undo the Reformation; or, to give his own words,—for these high churchmen, as we have just seen in the case of M'Hale, are very choice and fastidious in culling elegant metaphors and illustrations,- The Reformation,' says Froude, is a limb badly set, which must be broken again in order to set it anew.' But if Mr Froude had paid proper attention to the subject, he would have seen that the evil is of a much more ancient date than the Reformation. For although many of our primates and prelates of ages subsequent to Augustine received their orders directly from Rome, still the Church of England was laid upon so rotten a foundation, that a sound pillar here and there could only disfigure without strengthening the building. The whole edifice must be pulled down and built again from its very foundations. In civil matters, indeed, length of possession is supposed to supply whatever might be awanting to the original title. But in ecclesiastical affairs, a flaw at the commencement can never be repaired. The evil, like an error at the commencement of an arithmetical process, goes on increasing at every step. A flaw at any stage in the succession, is like a break in the wires of a voltaic battery,-the Promethean fire,' the heavenly spark,' is arrested at the gap, and all beyond is unvisited by its influences. . Nothing will do for our Scottish prelatic friends, but to repair to |
