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LECTURE XXIII.

I.

INTRODUCTORY.

WHEN

THE CONTROVERSY WITH ROME.

HEN I attended the Lectures of the Regius Professor of Divinity, now more than forty years ago, the prescribed division of his year's work was, that in one Term he gave a course of lectures on the Bible; in another, on the Articles; in the third, on the Liturgy. When I succeeded to the Chair myself, I found that, for several years previously, the subject of this Term's lectures, as set down in the University Calendar, had been, not the Articles, but the Roman Catholic Controversy. It is easy to understand how the change took place. It was, of course, impossible in the Lectures of one Term to treat of all the Articles; and, some selection being necessary, it was natural that the Professor, on whom the duty is imposed by statute of giving instruction on the controversies which our Church has to carry on with her adversaries, whether within or without the pale of Christianity, should select for consideration the Articles bearing on the controversy which in this country is most pressing, and in which the members of our Church took the deepest interest-the controversy with Rome. This limitation of my subject being only suggested by precedent, not imposed on me by authority, I was free to disregard it. As I have not done so, I think I ought to begin by telling you my reasons for agreeing with my predecessors in regarding the study of this controversy as profitable employment for the Lectures of this Term.

I readily own, indeed, that I have found, both inside and outside the University, that this controversy does not excite

B

the same interest now that it did even a dozen years ago. In your voluntary Society, in which the members read theological essays on subjects of their own selection, I notice that topics bearing on this controversy are now but rarely chosen ; whereas I can remember when they predominated, almost to the exclusion of other subjects. There are many reasons for this decline of interest.

One effect of Disestablishment, in not merely reviving the synodical action of the Church, but widely extending it, introducing the laity into Church councils, and entrusting to them a share in the determination of most important questions, has been to concentrate the interest of our people on the subjects discussed in such assemblies; and in this way our little disputes with each other have left us no time to think of the far wider differences that separate us from Rome on the one hand, and from various dissenting sects on the other. But besides this cause, special to ourselves, of decline of interest in the Roman Catholic controversy, there are others which have operated in England as well as here.

First, I may mention a reaction against certain extreme anti-Romanist over-statements. It was only to be expected that, at the time of the Reformation, men who had with a violent effort wrenched themselves away from beliefs in which they had been brought up, and who, for the exercise of this freedom of thought, were being persecuted to the death, should think far more of their points of difference from their persecutors than of the points on which they agreed with them. A considerable section of the men who had witnessed the bloody scenes of Queen Mary's reign scarcely thought of their adversaries as worshippers of the same God as themselves. The form in which one of the opponents of Queen Elizabeth's marriage with a French prince put the question as to the lawfulness of marriage with a Roman Catholic was, whether it was lawful for a child of God to wed with a son of the devil. When Fox, the Martyrologist, has to speak of the religious services, not merely of the Roman Catholics of his own day, but of the Church in the days before any reformation had been attempted, he seems to regard them as fit

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