or constitution whatever, and recognizing only Alexandria and Antioch as Patriarchal Sees, because both connected, indirectly and directly, with the Apostle Peter.'

On this followed the epistle to the Illyrians, whose most salient propositions, separated from the charges against Acacius, set forth at much length, are these: (1) That the Pope has a right, as Universal Bishop, to try all cases of heresy by himself, without the aid or intervention of any council whatever; (2) that the Holy See has power to revise and reverse all ecclesiastical sentences, to sit in final judgment on all Churches, and cannot have its decisions called in question by anyone; (3) that it has the power of reversing all conciliar decisions; (4) that synods have no further use than that of giving greater publicity to sentences which in fact rested on Papal authority alone, itself having no limitation in its discretion in executing the laws of the Church; (5) that the Roman Primacy is divine, and antecedent to all ecclesiastical legislation; (6) nay, superior to it, in that no canons or conciliar decrees whatever can narrow that original jurisdiction, nor are so much as valid for any purpose affecting the rights of the Roman See, unless with its express or implied sanction; (7) that no power, secular or conciliar, can confer any rank in the Church, unless such as is acknowledged by the Pope, so that the decrees of Constantinople and Chalcedon, erecting the former city into a Patriarchate, were null and void, and it remained in right a mere suffraganate of the Exarch of Heraclea; (8) that the Pope may use any means he pleases for the suppression of any assumption of spiritual character in derogation of the Holy See, if the ordinary tribunals should prove insufficient for the purpose.2

Such was the position taken up by a Pope at the close of the fifth century, and it is clear that even the Vatican decrees themselves add almost nothing to so vast and wide-reaching a programme, in which the most daring assertion takes the place of proof, evidently regarded as entirely superfluous. Gregory VII. and Innocent III. did nothing to enlarge these claims-save in the one particular that Gelasius admitted the duty of bishops to obey the Crown in temporal matters-and did but translate them as far as possible into practical action. But any intelligent student of history will need no further proof of their untenability than the broad fact that it needed six more centuries of incessant struggle to bring them to bear even in the West, while their failure to affect the East has continued to the present day.

Baron. Ann. 494, §§ 20, 21.

2 Hardouin, Conc. ii. 905-916.

ART. VI.—DR. ALLON ON CONGREGATIONALISM. Congregationalism. By HENRY ALLON, D.D. (London, 1881.)

DR. ALLON'S essay is chiefly interesting as a fresh illustration of the remarkable change of front which has been executed by the modern Independents. It was originally composed to serve as the address from the chair of the Congregational Union, as a kind of ex cathedrâ syllabus at its annual gathering in May, 1881. It was much too long to be read in its entirety on that occasion, and the portions which were omitted in delivery are now added in print. Its length appears to be due to its literary form rather than to its contents, to its manner rather than its matter. The author is a somewhat gushing and wordy writer, and his address has the tone of an after-dinner eulogy upon our noble selves' delivered before the members of a mutual admiration society. It is not void of other and better qualities, but the ceaseless stream of laudatory and optimist talk, upon which these sparse better things are floating, is wearisome reading. An attempt to estimate Congregationalism as it is,' as Dr. Allon calls his essay, ought to contain more dry facts and figures, such, for instance, as the useful information that thirty per cent. of the income of its 'Irish Evangelical Society' has been swallowed up by its working expenses.

Dr. Allon says to the Independent ministers and congregations of England and Wales :

In these closing years of the nineteenth century we find ourselves an important factor of the aggregate ecclesiastical organizations which collectively constitute the Visible Church of Christ. Three great ecclesiastical types generically divide ChristendomEpiscopacy, or government by diocesan bishops; Presbyterianism, or government by a synod of co-ordinate and co-equal elders; and Congregationalism, or self-government by the individual congregation.' As he excludes Papacy, or government by a single infallible autocrat, from any place or part in 'Christendom,' we may conceive that in this one point at least Dr. Allon holds fast to the traditions of the fathers of Independency. It was the positive aim of each successive Puritan sect to found, or rather to refound, the Visible Church of Christ, perfect in doctrine, discipline, and membership; and it was one of the principles common to all the Puritan sect-founders that all

the Latin Churches were beyond controversy anti-Christian. Hence each new sect which was successively developed out of the Puritan germ had a negative as well as a positive aim: it had to cast away certain remaining elements of 'Popery' which the sect immediately preceding it in the Puritanical evolution had retained. The Independent saw Popery in Presbyterianism, the Baptist saw Popery in Independency, the Quaker saw Popery in Independency, and the Muggletonian saw Popery in Quakerism. The complete negative ideal, the consummated 'dissidence of dissent,' was only reached by the Adamite, who stripped himself of everything. The Chairman of the Congregational Union, by his wholesale excommunication of all the Churches of the Roman obedience, although he concedes the Christianity of individual Papists, shows that he holds fast this part of the original Independent deposit of Barrowe and Greenwood. But when Dr. Allon uses such a word as Christendom,' when he includes Episcopacy and Presbyterianism in 'the Visible Church of Christ, he shows that he has cast away another part of the original Independent traditions. The founders of Independency or Congregationalism believed that there was no Christendom.' If they had believed that there was a visible kingdom of Christ upon earth, a Catholic Church, there could never have been any Independent sects, any Congregational Union.1 They were not 'Nonconformists,' as the modern Dissenters have so absurdly called themselves, and as Churchmen have politely but unhistorically called them since 1862, the bicentenary of 1662; they were Separatists. They did not quarrel merely with the form of the actual and existing Church, as Baxter and Philip Henry did; they did not urge its reformation. They were Separatists: their quarrel was with the very substance of the actual and existing Church : it could not be reformed, it was a part of the anti-Christian

1 A Confession or Protestation of the Faith of Certain Christians in England, holding it necessary to observe and keep all Christ's true substantial Ordinances for His Church Visible and Political (1616, with a petition to James I. for Toleration), says, under Art. VI., 'Of a Catholic or Universal Church Politic:''No such Church, say we, is found in the New Testament.' John Robinson, the famous second founder of Congregationalism, three years later (1619), in his Apologia justa quorundam Christianorum, æque contumeliose ac communiter dictorum Brownistarum ac Barrowistarum, republished by Robinson in an English translation in 1625, states that the "Catholic" Church neither is nor can be called "Visible." The use of the term 'Independent' is generally traced to the passage in which Robinson elaborates this hypothesis of the nonexistence of a Christendom, but the word had been applied to the same use in 1611 by the Brownist Henry Jacob.

Babylon; a true Christian must come out of it. Hence, to use their own phrase, the Independents or Separatists 'gathered Churches' out of the actual Church; whereas the Nonconformists sought merely to protestantize, puritanize, or presbyterianize, the existing National Church and parochial Churches. The distinction was clearly recognized in the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, and the earliest Independent literature is quite as full of bitterness against Nonconformity as it is against Conformity. The Nonconformists asserted that their 'way' was the true via media between the two ungodly extremes of Conformity and Separatism. The modern Independents are the heirs of the Separatists and not of the Nonconformists. The original Independents did not claim to be merely a part of Christendom; they claimed to be Christendom. When Greenwood, one of Dr. Allon's heroes, was cited before the Bishop of London's commissioners, they asked him if he were a minister?' He replied, 'I was one according to your orders; I degraded myself, through God's mercy, by repentance.' When he was asked, 'What say you of the Church of England-is it a true established Church of God?' he answered: 'The whole commonwealth is not a Church.' The 'Episcopal inquisitors' did not believe that any commonwealth as such could be a Church: so they asked him, 'Is not the whole land as now ordered (that is, on the basis of the baptism of every parishioner) a true Church? No,' said Greenwood. Do you know any true established Church in the land?' asked the commissioners. If I did,' replied the

Independent, I would not accuse it unto you.'

The fundamental difference between the Church and the Independent sects, in spite of all superficial changes, remains the same, and the basis upon which Dr. Allon stands is as narrow and intolerant as that upon which Brown, Barrowe, and Greenwood stood. The hypothesis of Congregationalism starts with the wholesale excommunication of Christendom. It assumes that the entire parish, although every member of it be baptized, is not a Church or congregation; it assumes that the entirety of baptized persons in this or that nation does not constitute a National Church. Dr. Allon is full of pity for the misery of the 'Episcopalian,' whose ' assumptions compel him to excommunicate so large a portion of the highest spiritual life of Christendom.' But the assumptions of the Congregationalist compel him to excommunicate whole parishes, whole dioceses, whole National Churches, the whole of Christendom. If he does not excommunicate these, he is

illogical. Dr. Allon says that 'there is no principle, injunction, or precedent of the New Testament which demands any specific form of Church government,' and that Congregationalism is consequently as valid and legitimate as Presbyterianism or Episcopacy. It is hardly necessary to say that if Robert Brown, John Greenwood, or John Robinson had held this as the only rational inference,' as their 'cardinal principle,' they could never have founded Congregational sects outside the existing Church. If they could have subscribed Dr. Allon's formula, 'Because we are Congregationalists we are of necessity Catholics,' they would never have 'gathered churches' out of the Church. Imagine the Elizabethan Brownists saying to Archbishop Whitgift, as Dr. Allon says to Archbishop Tait, 'We must concede to all others the prerogatives that we claim.' They would have regarded such a concession as treason against Christ. They did not look on Independency as merely the preferable type of 'those great ecclesiastical types which generically divide Christendom.' If they had done so, they would have remained in the actual Church, and would have directed their efforts to the more thorough Congregationalizing of the existing parochial Churches. Every congregation of Christ,' said Greenwood at his examination, ' ought to be governed by that presbytery which Christ appointed-a pastor, a teacher, and an elder.' But he held that the baptized and communicating entirety of the faithful in an English parish was not in any sense a 'congregation of Christ,' nor capable of becoming one. Baptism was given in the Church to the children of those who were not Christians, who were not God's elect, who were not in the Covenant. Baptism as administered by the Catholic Church rests upon the broad and world-wide basis of the Incarnation; it implies that the Head of the Church is a Second Adam, a new father of entire humanity. Baptism as administered by the Puritan sects rests upon the narrow and exclusive basis of an exceptional election or an individual conversion; it implies that the Head of the Church is a second Abraham rather than a second Adam.

"The people of the Church of England,' said Henry Barrowe, 'be rather of the refuse, common pebble, chalk-stones, which cannot be used to any sound and sure building, even all the profane and wicked of the land, atheists, papists, anabaptists, and heretics of all sorts, gluttons, rioters, blasphemers, perjurers, witches, conjurers, &c. &c. All without exception, or respect of person, are received into and nourished in the bosom of this Church with the Word and Sacraments. None are here refused, none kept out. This Church