undivided Church, the East and the
North and the West, so long severed, meet: we are not alone, who have with
us, on the very point which divides us from our Mother Church, the still
unbroken line of successors from St. Athanasius and St. Chrysostom. There
is no break in the descent or in the doctrine of the Eastern Churches.
There is the same dogmatic, the same hierarchical fabric, subsisting now as
when St. Gregory addressed Anastasius of Antioch, and Eulogius of
Alexandria. It may suit the purposes of unfair Roman controversialists to
brand them as schismatics, and overcome, by calling them a name, their own
most formidable opponents: but history cannot be so overcome. They have
_never_ admitted the Papal sway, any more than the Fathers who passed the
28th Canon of Chalcedon: they have, indeed, admitted the Roman _Primacy_,
as those same Fathers admitted it; for the very system, for which they are
witnesses, is not complete without the Bishop of Rome stands at the head of
it: the _due_ honour of Rome is involved in the due honour of
Constantinople; and, we may add, the due honour of Canterbury: the same
temper, the same persons, who reject the one, hate the other. What we say
they never have admitted is, that which has really worked the disunion of
the Universal Church, as St. Gregory foretold it would, the doctrine which
is the centre of the present Papal system, which alone makes all its parts
cohere, and justifies all its acts, and triumphs over all appeal to
argument, and all testimonies of antiquity, viz., that, "the Pope is set
over the whole Christian world, and possesses in its completeness and
plenitude that power which Christ left on earth for the good of the
Church."[168] They have never for a moment admitted that the Bishops of the
Universal Church were the Pope's delegates, and received their jurisdiction
from him. _We_ fight, it must be admitted, at some disadvantage with our
opponents. The long subjection which our Church yielded to Rome, the
manifold obligations under which we lie to her, the complete unsettling of
the ecclesiastical and doctrinal system in the sixteenth century, the
horrible vices of those who effected the change, the connection with those
whose doctrine has now worked itself out into Socinianism, infidelity, and
anarchy, the inability we have ever since been under of shaking ourselves
completely clear of them, the thoroughly unsatisfactory position of the
state towards us, as a Church