Untitled - Electric Scotland

484 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. xvn.
Romeward leanings. The question of some possible cor
porate Reunion of the Roman, the Anglican, and the
Eastern Churches had become prominent in 1865, by
means of a published correspondence between Cardinal
Patrizi, as representing the Roman Church, and a body
of clergy of the Church of England, said to be 198 in
number. The Cardinal had somewhat contemptuously
"
declined to reciprocate the friendly feeling of good-will
which was expressed by his Anglican correspondents, and
Archbishop Manning, in a Pastoral Letter published early
in 1866, had dealt with the subject at full length, and
rejected in a tone of uncompromising
vances which had been made. 1
sternness the ad
Bishop Tait referred thus to the matter in his Charge :-
* We do not forget how desirable it is that Christendom
should be one and at peace with itself. We long and pray for
this peace and union ; but we want no hollow peace, still less a
peace which shall be purchased by sacrificing our liberty and
( iod s truth. Thus we feel ashamed when told of members of
our noble Reformed Church going, cap in hand, to seek for
some slight recognition from that old usurping power so unlike
the gentle, truth-loving Church of the Apostles, of which it
vaunts itself the sole representative which slew Latimer and
Ridley and Cranmer and Hooper in the old time, because they
would not surrender God s truth, and which certainly values the
pure Gospel now at as low a rate as of old. And we feel some
satisfaction in learning how these advances were coldly rejected
by the old haughty spirit which they seek in vain to propitiate.
"It pains me also deeply to find men labouring, as I noted
above, to show that the Church of the Reformation has, after all,
by some felicitous accident, escaped from being reformed ; that,
if we could only see it, there is nothing really Protestant in the
Thirty-nine Articles, and nothing really Romish in the Decrees
of Trent. If this were so, language must be a still more uncer
tain vehicle of men s thoughts than all acknowledge it to be.
"
But, indeed, there is no sign that this mode of making peace
1 The Reunion o 1 Christendom : A Pastoral Letter. 1866.