[Most people who know him are just beginning to recognize that Dr. Charles A. Briggs is practically a Roman Catholic, and will soon be in that church. We said he would end there when he left the Presbyterian Church and became an Episcopal. The following article, from the New York Sun, printed in the Catholic Mirror, clearly shows where Dr. Briggs and many other so-called Protestant ministers who have left the Bible are trending in their search for “authority.”]
THE Rev. Charles A. Briggs, whose “higher criticism” of the Bible caused his withdrawal from the Presbyterian Church and his entrance into the ministry of the Episcopal Church, seems to be preparing to go a step further in his search for authority and to render adhesion to the pope.
In the last North American Review Dr. Briggs has a significant paper on “Reform in the Catholic Church.” The present pope he looks on as essentially a “reformer.” “Great reforms are in his mind, which ere long will become evident in fact,” and the “fundamental principle of reform” with Pius X., is “to make Jesus Christ Himself the center and mainspring of reform,” and as “this is exactly what the most enlightened Protestants desire for their own churches, what more,” asks Dr. Briggs, “can they ask for from the Church of Rome?” Then comes this significant paragraph:
“The more advanced Protestant scholars have been working for half a century and more to lead Christians back to Jesus Christ, and have only partially succeeded. If now, the pope, as head of the Roman Catholic Church, owing to the reverence and obedience given him by that whole church as the successor of St. Peter and the living representative of our Lord, can succeed in raising up Catholics throughout the world to this exalted position of reforming everything in Christ, there will be ere long the greatest revival and reformation known to history, and the Protestant churches will have to bestir themselves to keep pace with it.”
Here are other remarks of Dr. Briggs which seem to indicate his drift Romeward:
“There are many Protestant theologians who think it [the dogma of the Immaculate Conception] an inevitable consequence of the doctrine of original sin.”
“It was a purely academic question whether infallibility is to be lodged in the Council or the pope.”
“The infallibility of the pope, as defined by the Vatican Council, limits infallibility and so hedges it with conditions that infallible decisions in the past are hard to find, and not likely to occur in the future except in great emergencies.”
“The Catholic Church made an important reform in dogma when Leo XIII. directed that Thomas Aquinas should be used as the standard authority in all Catholic colleges and seminaries.”
“It is doubtful, to say the least, if there would have been such antithesis between the Protestant and Catholic dogma if Thomas Aquinas had been the universal standard of doctrine in the sixteenth century.”
“A more thorough study of the Bible has shown that the Reformers were, all of them, greatly mistaken in their interpretations. Protestant theology has, for the most part, abandoned the high Augustinianism of the Reformers. The common doctrine of the present Protestant theologians would not be recognized by many of the Reformers. The dogmatic differences with Rome either no longer really exist, or are different forms, and concerned with different questions.”
“There is authority in the ancient church for bishops, parochial, diocesan, and provincial, and even for the pope, in the judgment of many historians.”
“The intrusion of the Curia into civil affairs, which was the chief occasion of the Reformation, has been rendered more and more impossible by the providence of God in history.”
“It is of the highest importance that the reform movement has been renewed with so much promise under a pope of such spirituality, simplicity, and open-mindedness; a man who impresses those admitted to his presence and converse as being possessed of unusual grasp of mind, insight, and real moral power.”
Utterances like these seem to suggest that the Rev. Charles A. Briggs, now of the Episcopal Church, is turning his thought in the direction of the church of which the pope is the head on earth. All along it has appeared evident that if he did not follow the lead of his teachings into square rationalism he was bound to fetch up at Rome.
