M. L. Cozens on the heresy of Anglicanism
Things go badly when the secular authorities take the pope's place
Described, a little patronizingly, by Maisie Ward as “our theological charwoman,” Miss Cozens was essential to the work of the Catholic Evidence Guild in the early twentieth century, especially in helping create its teaching materials and in acting as the “devil’s advocate” who asked the difficult questions to people trying to qualify as public speakers. Ward’s husband Frank Sheed encouraged her to write a book, which Sheed and Ward published. One of the chapters in A Handbook of Heresies addresses Anglicanism, a live concern for English Catholics.
Her [the Church of England’s] supreme distinction among the sects is this: that while Erastianism was, in the case of other denominations, an inevitable and sometimes hated condition — it is the very root and essence of her being.
After describing how the king and later Parliament came to take the pope’s place, she writes:
Individuals, indeed, have protested against this bondage; the whole High Church section studiously ignore this humiliating fact and profess loyalty and subjection to the laws of “The Church’; but exactly what they mean by this no one of them seems able or willing to declare.
It is by Authority of Parliament that Public Worship has been controlled and regulated from Elizabeth’s day till our own. Even when divines sit in Judgment they do so, not by right of any Apostolic jurisdiction, but as commissioned by the State. Bishops take oath that they hold temporalities and spiritualities alike from the sovereign.
Kings, indeed, no longer rule the pulpits, choosing the preacher’s subject or at times silencing all preaching, but this is not because they now recognise a Church teaching with Divine Authority, supreme in its own sphere, but because all arbitrary government is now dead, and also because the teaching of the Church of England being simply the reflection of the religious thought of the nation, as that thought becomes more and more disconnected and nebulous, freedom must be left for various teachings to suit all the vagaries of the hearers.
Despite the devotion, the learning, the personal holiness of thousands of her ministers past and present, the Church of England to-day is essentially the Erastian body her Elizabethan founders made her.
Cozens remarks in her chapter on Jansenism,
The theory from which all their false teaching drew its strength being the theory professed by many Anglicans to-day; that the teaching of the Church is something to be searched for in the records of the past rather than something to be heard and accepted in the living present.
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