ROMANISM IN ENGLAND

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 3, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 21.

ROMANISM IN ENGLAND.

THAT Romanism is gaining ground very rapidly in England is beyond question, and this too in opposition to the well-known conservatism of the English people. This gain is not in proselytes which are made to Romanism, but in the sentiment of the people, especially the more aristocratic. Some entire churches have become Catholic, and many others are so now in all but name, and it certainly seems to be only a question of time when almost the entire State church of that country will do homage to the Pope. The following extract from a letter to the Irish Churchman and Protestant Review (London) will perhaps give the reader a better idea of the drift of the High Church than anything that we could say:—

“As a member of the Church of England, I have been simply astounded during the last few years at the rapid growth of Ritualistic practices, and the wholesale dissemination of Ritualistic doctrines in our Established Church, and at the barefaced effrontery of the High Church party in thrusting forward, on every possible occasion, the pernicious theology of the Church of Rome. The question which all this has naturally suggested to my mind—as I doubt not it has to the mind of many another—is, Where is this to end? Carlyle, in 1840, said, ‘Popery cannot come back any more than Paganism can.’ Dr. Ryle, bishop of Liverpool, writing in 1888, said, in the face of such proofs as those now furnished in the services, the practices, and the doctrines of the Ritualistic party, ‘It is absurd to tell us that extreme Ritualism has no tendency to Popery, and is not the highway to Rome.’

“With the doctrine of Transubstantiation—a doctrine against which our ancestors, three hundred years ago, contended with their very lives—ringing in our ears, and preached week after week in Protestant churches throughout the length and breadth of the land; with the practice of auricular confession growing up in our midst from day to day; with the introduction into our services of strange gestures, vestments, incense, candles, and a host of other relics of the Church of Rome, can we, as honest members of our grand old Church of England, come to any other conclusion than that arrived at by the bishop of Liverpool?

“Unfortunately for the Evangelical party, High Church principles have now attained such a hold on the minds of the people that the difficulty of combating the evil is becoming daily—I had almost said hourly—a more and more stupendous task.”