Introduction
The following dispatch shows Arthur Machen’s deep concern with the course of the Anglo-Catholic, or High Church movement. Clearly partisan, it also illustrates his constant skepticism of the Low Church, or the more clearly Protestant sections of the established church. More on this important congress can be found in greater detail here and here. As of now, it is not clear if Machen publicly commented on the results of this particular congress, but privately, he often expressed disappointment in the theological and liturgical developments of the Ecclesia Anglicana.
What the Anglo-Catholic Congress Means
by
Arthur Machen
July 1, 1920
The Albert Hall, packed with faces throughout and about all its vast circumference, a speaker addressing this multitude, on the platform beneath the organ a great crucifix of the size of life. Such was the picture at the opening session of the Anglo-Catholic Congress.
What does it all mean?
It means this: that the process called the English Reformation was a complex of extraordinary intricacy. It began in the reign of Henry VIII. with the rejection of the rule of the Pope. It went no farther till Edward VI. came to the throne. Then foreign Protestantism, Calvinist and Zuinglian, began to work. The first English Prayer Book showed signs of the new influence, but hardly more than signs. The second English Prayer Book, issued in 1552, marked the furthest advance of Protestantism in the English Church.
A Symbol
Since then things, at least so far as the text of the Prayer Book is concerned, veered in the opposite direction. The Elizabethan Book was less Protestant than King Edward’s second Book; the Charles II. formularies—the Prayer Book of to-day—show another advance in the Catholic direction.
But this difficulty remains. The main settlement of the Church of England was Elizabethan, and the idea of this settlement was that you could have a Protestant-Catholic Church. When the King is crowned he swears to defend the Catholic Faith and also to maintain the Protestant Religion; and that symbolises, very fairly, the whole temper and constitution of the Church of England.
Hence, naturally enough, the two parties; the Evangelicals, or Protestants or Low Churchmen; and the Catholics or High Churchmen.
Holding the Balance
And, owing to the dishonesty of the Elizabethan divines and statesmen—I am afraid that they were profoundly dishonest—each party can go to the Prayer Book and quote it, truthfully and triumphantly, in favour of its own opinions. The Low Churchman can ask the High Churchman to find the word “altar” in the Prayer Book. It is not there, but “priest” is. So the Communion Service is, on the whole, Catholic; but the “Black Rubric” at the end of it is Protestant.
And so on, and so on. The Anglo-Catholics now in Congress desire, no doubt, to reform the Church, so that, in all essentials, it would be pretty much the Church of the Middle Ages. The Protestant party would prefer to see it not unlike the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland.
What will the end be?
The Weekly Machen
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