non-Catholic
aspects of the Anglican Church.

CHAPTER XXI

POINTS OF VIEW

Mark did not find that his guardian was much disturbed by his doubts of
the validity of Anglican Orders nor much alarmed by his suspicion that
the Establishment had no right to be considered a branch of the Holy
Catholic Church.

"The crucial point in the Roman position is their doctrine of
intention," said Mr. Ogilvie. "It always seems to me that this doctrine
is a particularly dangerous one for them to play with and one that may
recoil at any moment upon their own heads. There has been a great deal
of super-subtle dividing of intentions into actual, virtual, habitual,
and interpretative; but if you are going to take your stand on logic you
must be ready to face a logical conclusion. Let us agree for a moment
that Barlow and the other bishops who consecrated Matthew Parker had no
intention of consecrating him as a bishop for the purpose of ordaining
priests in the sense in which Catholics understand the word priest. Do
the Romans expect us to believe that all their prelates in the time of
the Renaissance had a perfect intention when they were consecrating? Or
leave on one side for a moment the sacrament of Orders; the validity of
other sacraments is affected by their extension of the doctrine beyond
the interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas. However improbable it may be
that at one moment all the priests of the Catholic Church should lack
the intention let us say of absolution, it _is_ a _logical_ possibility,
in which case all the faithful would logically speaking be damned. It
was in order to guard against this kind of logical catastrophe that the
first split between an actual intention and a virtual intention was
made. The Roman Church teaches that the virtual intention is enough; but
if we argue that a virtual intention might be ascribed to the bishops
who consecrated Parker, the Roman controversialists present us with
another subdivision--the habitual intention, which is one that formerly
existed, but of the present continuance of which there is no trace. Now
really, my dear Mark, you must admit that we've reached a point very
near to nonsense if this kind of logical subtlety is to control Faith."

"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "I don't think I should ever want to
'vert over the question of the validity of Anglican Orders. I haven't
any doubts now of their validity, and I think it's improbable that I
shall have any doubts a