rion by which to distinguish between the acts of the faithful, and those of others professing to speak in their name.

If you assume that they are entrusted with this authority only in their corporate capacity, that is, as one single corporate body, how will you bring together the whole body, which at this moment are so many millions, and enable them to act as a single corporation, with an official voice, through an official organ?

If you assume the faithful to be divided into separate congregations, and that each is an independent polity, possessing in itself the right to claim and exercise all the prerogatives of the church of Christ, we demand the principle of this division. May any number of individuals, at their own pleasure, come together and resolve themselves into a Christian congregation, and, therefore, into a church of Christ? Will such congregation be a true church? If so, you must treat it as a church, and extend to it all the courtesy, civility, fellowship, due from one Christian congregation to another. Suppose, then, a number of real infidels should come together, and resolve themselves into a Christian church, and their infidelity to be Christianity, you must extend your fellowship to them; for you have no right to judge them. A case bearing some analogy to this has actually occurred in our own neighborhood. We know a Congregational church whose minister is to all intents and purposes an unbeliever, and yet that church claims the fellowship of sister Congregational churches, and our Unitarian friends so interpret Congregationalism that they feel that they cannot disown either the church or its minister.

If you say, that there must be some authority outside of the congregation competent to decide whether it be or be not a Christian church, you depart from Congregationalism. But assume such authority,-Where is it? The practice is, we believe, for the churches already existing in the neighborhood, officially to recognize the new congregation. Whence the right of the neighboring churches to do this? Is the new church, when recognized, a true church? If so, according to your own principles, it is independent, and possesses plenary powers as the church of Christ. On what ground, then, in case it becomes heretical, can you so far judge it as to withdraw fellowship from it? On what ground, moreover, does this recognition by neighboring churches introduce the new congregation into the family of Christian churches? They must themselves have been

recognized by other churches, and these by others still; and where will you stop this side of churches founded by the apostles themselves? The churches recognizing must themselves be apostolic, or their recognition is good for nothing. How establish this apostolic character, without establishing their lineal descent from apostolic churches? Congregationalism, then, as well as Episcopacy, is obliged to resort to Apostolical Succession.

In the great questions concerning the church, and the regularity of Protestant churches, we have here, so far as we can see, all the difficulties usually alleged against Episcopacy, and, if the Protestant Episcopal church cannot make out the regular succession of her bishops, still less can Congregationalism make out the regular succession of Congregational churches. Partial as our education has made us to Congregationalism, we should be loath to undertake its defence on any ground whatever. For the same reason, if for no other, that we reject the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the people, would we reject the sovereignty of the brotherhood. We would much rather-if it must come to this be under one tyrant than many. Moreover, we cannot conceive of a church with the authority lodged in the brotherhood. The minister, if commissioned by the congregation, is not placed by the Holy Ghost over it, is not immediately accountable to Christ, but mediately, through the very body over which he is nominally an overseer. How can he rebuke, warn, reprove, discipline, teach with authority, the very body from which he derives his authority, and which may revoke it at will? Make your clergyman absolutely dependent on his congregation, receiving his authority from it, and accountable to it for his doctrines, and for the manner in which he discharges his duty, and you deprive him of all authority as the minister of God. His congregation are his masters, his critics, his judges; and every time he preaches, he is virtually on trial, and the question is, whether his congregation shall acquit him or condemn him, continue him in his pulpit, or dismiss him, and send him forth to the world branded with their disapprobation. The evils of Congregationalism glare upon us from all sides, and deeply are they felt by not a few of our brethren; and sorry are we to find Bishop Hopkins and his brother Evangelicals taking a ground, we were about to say, even below that of our old-fashioned Congregationalism. Practically, the Congregational minister ceases, in New England, to be the min

ister of Christ to the congregation. He is no longer a bishop, or overseer, placed by the Holy Ghost over the congregation. The congregation is his overseer; and in cases not a few, he becomes, is forced to become, or leave his charge, the mere tool of one or two ignorant, conceited, perhaps worldly-minded, but wealthy and influential members of his flock, or of some four or five good sisters, who indemnify themselves for their abstinence from the pleasures of the world, by getting up and managing all sorts of societies for the general and particular supervision of the affairs of their neighbors. Woe to the poor man, if he refuse to cooperate with the restless, the gossiping, the fanatical members of his congregation, ready to do any thing and every thing but lead quiet and peaceable lives, in all godliness and honesty." He must be foremost in their daily and nightly religious and philanthropic dissipation, or else, alas! it will be instantly discovered that he is an unfaithful minister of Christ, unadapted to the wants of his congregation; and, broken in health, broken in spirit, poor and friendless, with a wife and children, it may be, to provide for, must be dismissed in disgrace, to make way for another, a dapper little man, right from the seminary, and with just as little religion in his heart, as brains in his head.

No, we have had enough of Congregationalism. Not a few, if we may judge from the letters we receive, of our ablest and best Congregational divines are fully satisfied of the utter impracticability of the Congregational scheme. It has run itself out, and we are sorry to see the war that is raging against Episcopacy. We may not, indeed, be able to accept the Anglican church, or her American daughter, as the Holy Catholic Apostolic church; but she has departed less from the apostolic model than the other Protestant comanunions. The lay delegation admitted by the Protestant Episcopal church of this country, led on by her Duers, already begins to show the evil one day to be expected from it; and the original cause of her separation from the rest of the Catholic church, and the Protestant elements she originally accepted to conciliate the Protestant party, are now showing themselves, by destroying the simplicity of her speech, compelling her to speak with a double tongue, and rending her bosom with, we fear, an invincible dualism; but still she retains many of the essential features of the Catholic church, and, if we are to unite on any ground out of the Roman communion, she must be the nucleus of union for

all that portion of Protestantdom which speaks the English tongue. She has it in her power, if she will but free herself from her Protestant elements, bring out her Catholic elements, elements which have survived the Goths and Vandals, in their truth and consistency, to perform no mean part in recalling us all to the unity of Christendom, to the unity of the church, and enabling us of the Anglo-Saxon race to feel that the term of our banishment has expired, and that we may henceforth dwell in the home of our fathers.

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH SCHISMATIC.*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for October, 1844.]

We

WE have introduced The Churchman to our readers, because we have a high respect for the learning and ability of its distinguished editor, and because, as the organ of that section of the Anglican church, in this country, which has been supposed to have some Catholic tendencies, it undertakes to answer certain objections to Anglicanism brought forward in our review of the Letters of Bishop Hopkins on The Novelties which disturb our Peace. stated, in our remarks, that we could not see how the Anglican church, on the principles of the Oxford divines, could justify her separation in the sixteenth century from the church of Rome. According to these principles, as we stated them, and as we understand The Churchman to accept them, the church of Christ is a single corporate body, existing and acting only in its corporate capacity, and therefore capable of manifesting its will only through corporate organs. Hence, the separation of any one member, or particular church, from the communion of another, not authorized by the church in her corporate capacity, speaking through her corporate organs, is not authorized by the church. The separation of one member from the communion of another, not authorized by the church, is schism. But the separation of the church of England from the com

*The Churchman.

Edited by the REV. SAMUEL SEABURY, D. D. New York: No. 698. August 3, 1844.

! munion of the church of Rome was not authorized by the church. Therefore, that separation was schism.

This was substantially our argument. The Churchman admits that the church is a corporation, and, therefore, that it can exist and act only in its corporate capacity; but to the assertion, that it can manifest its will only through corporate organs, and, therefore, that the separation of one member from the communion of another, not authorized by the church speaking through her corporate organs, is not authorized by the church at all, he opposes, or seems to oppose, 1. The invisibility of the corporation, that is, of the church, and 2. That the analogy of the corporate body to the natural body is inadmissible, and therefore no argument founded on the assumption of such analogy can be valid. He says:

"If Mr. Brownson had termed a corporation an 'invisible body,' he' would have had both truth and authority on his side; but we apprehend that he has neither, when he makes a 'visible centre' and a 'visible head' essential to the existence of such body. A corporation may have a particular place for the transaction of business, and an officer to preside in its proceedings; and this place and this officer may in an improper and metaphorical sense be called its 'centre' and 'head.' So far are they, however, from discharging the functions corresponding to the heart and head of the natural body, that they are mere accidents of the corporation, and not at all necessary to its unity, individuality, or corporate faculty."

The Churchman must pardon us for saying that we do not perceive the pertinency of this reply, even admitting its abstract truth, which, however, we are far from admitting. It is true, we applied the terms "visible centre" and "visible head" to the ecclesiastical corporation; but we evidently meant no more by them, in our argument, than that a corporation, if but one corporation, must have a visible unity, a unity of thought and will, and an official organ through which the thought and will are to be expressed and executed. The Churchman has apparently misapprehended our allusion to the church of Rome. He replies to us as if we had asserted that the pope and the church of Rome the source of the authority of the corporation. But we asserted no such thing. We did not contend that it is essential to the existence of a corporation that it have a head ruling by virtue of its own inherent authority; but that the body cannot exist and act as a corporation without an official head through which it may

are