tions and beliefs of all, or certainly nearly all, priests and doctors alike."

That then is Catholic which is everywhere held and taught in the Church. When a doctrine is proposed as Catholic we have in the first place to look to its universality. The local is checked by the universal. This test at once excludes local peculiarities, not as necessarily untrue, but as not being binding on Christians with the necessity of Faith. The teaching of a Church like the Anglican may contain many things which are the outcome of the historical circumstances of England during the last few centuries; these may be true and they may be important, but they cannot be imposed as Catholic. Fortunately the Anglican Communion has not been given to Creed making and has nothing to take back in these matters.

This note of everywhere is, of course, common sense. Christianity is a revealed religion, and whatever was revealed in it to be held with the necessity of faith must have been as necessary in the first century as in the twentieth; and is as necessary for one set of Christians as for another. If it appears then that certain groups of Christians are insisting on certain dogmas as "of faith," which are unknown to other Christians, then they fail of the test of universality and may be set aside so far as their claim to Catholicity is concerned.

That faith must not only have been universally held, but it must have been so held from the beginning. It is conceivable that we should discover in Christendom a dogma or practice which makes the claim of Catholicity and which supports its claim by an appeal to universal acceptance; and yet it may turn out on examination that the belief or practice is a complete novelty

that its origin and development can be traced back to the period of the Reformation or to the Middle Ages. It can be demonstrated that it has not been always believed. It therefore fails to be recognized as Catholic. What was of faith at the beginning, is of faith now; what is of faith now must have been so from the beginning. The function of the Christian Church in matters of faith is not to invent but to transmit. What is called development of doctrine is either the attempt to add to the faith new dogmas (which is illegitimate), or is but the completer statement of what has always been held. This latter, which is always going on, is not a process of developing truth-germs, but is a further thinking into old truths which must always take place where the truths are being used. We believe in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and all Christians have been bound to so believe from the beginning; but the mind of the Church finds fuller

content in these words as the centuries go on. The third Vincentian test is that the truth proposed to us must be a truth accepted by all, by which it is meant that the recognition of the truth must be by a moral universality, not by a numerical unity. S. Vincent does not mean "all Christians"; he is careful to say, "by all, or certainly nearly all, priests and doctors alike." Dr. Kidd points out that S. Vincent really means by priests, bishops; that is the actual appeal is to those to whom has been committed by our Lord the keeping of the Faith.

This process of identification of the faith, so to call it, is seen in the method of the statement of the faith through the Ecumenical Councils. Those Councils do not meet from time to time in the history of the Church to set forth new dogmas of the faith; but they meet, when the faith is being denied, to testify as to what is the faith. They do not say, This shall be the faith from henceforth; they say, This has been the faith from the beginning. And their testimony is not final; it requires ratification by the mind of the Church. It is not till the decrees of Ecumenical Councils have been accepted, in S. Vincent's words, by "all, or certainly nearly all, priests and doctors alike" that they are of Catholic force.

This Vincentian test does not prevent a proper restatement of the articles of the faith. To-day the need of restatement is being urged with great force and insistence. Restatement is always needed. Each generation has to think over its faith in the terms of its own experience. But a proper restatement must be one that preserves, not destroys, the thing restated. One rather more than suspects that some of the loudest advocates of restatement would, if they were frank, be advocates of destruction. It is not a restatement of the Catholic doctrine of the resurrection of the body to deny that our Lord rose again the third day with his entire humanity; or that we shall in any sense have a bodily resurrection. But to define the word body in terms of our present knowledge of matter, and not in terms of ancient or mediæval science, would seem to be proper restatement.

What we have most to see to is that we hold fast the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and which has been everywhere, always and by all believed. So doing we shall be Catholics.

NOTE. I am greatly indebted to the following: Lacey, Catholicity." The Young Churchman Co., Milwaukee, Wis. Kidd, "How Can I be Sure that I am a Catholic? In Modern Oxford Tracts. Longmans, Green & Co, 1914.

IV

THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

HERE," asked the Roman controversialist, was your Church before the Reformation?" "Where," was the Anglican retort courteous, was your face before you washed it?" The same truth has been expressed with more suavity by Bishop Bramhall, who said, “I make no doubt that the Church of England before the Reformation and the Church of England after the Reformation are as much the same church as a garden before it is weeded and after it is weeded is the same garden." The weeding of gardens, however, is a delicate process not apt to be successfully prosecuted by amateurs; the expert is needed, else the flowers will go and the weeds remain.

Looking at the Reformation in Western Europe as a whole there is evidence of a good deal of amateurish work. Plough up the garden and make a new start," was a ruling maxim when institutions, beliefs, practices, good, bad, and indifferent, were swept out of existence, and new