The bishops at Lambeth “beg for loyalty to the universal Church.  The doctrinal standards of the undivided Church must not be ignored.  Nor must modern developments, consistent with the past, be ruled out merely because they are modern.  Men must hold strongly what they have received; but they must forsake the policy of denying one another’s positive presentment of truth.  That only must be forbidden which the universal fellowship cannot conceivably accept within any one of its groups[5].”

[Footnote 5:  Lambeth and Rennion.  By the bishops of Peterborough, Zanzibar and Hereford.]

The bishops just quoted add:  “We rejoice indeed at this new mind of the Lambeth Conference.”  Whether it is a new mind in Lambeth Conferences we need not consider; it is certainly no new mind in the Anglican Church, but is precisely its characteristic attitude of not claiming perfection or finality for itself, but of looking beyond itself to Catholic Christendom, and longing for the time when reunion of the churches which now make up its “broken unity” will enable it to speak with the same voice of authority with which it did in its primitive and undivided state.

In attempting to decide what as a priest of the Anglican Communion one may or may not teach or practice, one is bound to have regard, not to what is asserted by anyone, even by any bishop, to be “disloyal” or “unanglican,” but to the principles expressed or implied in the utterances of the Church itself.  From those utterances as I have reviewed them, it appears to me that a number of general principles may be deduced for the guidance of conduct.

I. The Churches of the Anglican Communion are bound by the entire body of Catholic dogma formulated and accepted universally in the pre-Reformation Church.

The Anglican documents, to be sure, speak constantly of the “Primitive Church,” but they do not anywhere define what they mean by that; and frequently, by their appeal to the “undivided Church,” and to “general Councils,” they seem to include in their undefined term much more than is commonly understood.  In any case, the Church has no special authority because it is primitive:  its authority results not from its being primitive but from its being Church.  The only point of the Anglican appeal would be the universal acceptance of a given doctrine.  Such universal acceptance must be taken as proof of its primitiveness, that is, of its being contained, explicitly or implicitly, in the original deposit of faith.  The Anglican Church was content with the summing up of this Faith in the Three Creeds, and attempted to formulate no new Greed of her own—­the XXXIX Articles are not strictly a Creed:  they are not articles of Faith but of Religion.  But the very history of the Creeds implies that they are not final, that is, complete, but that they are a summing up of the Catholic Religion to date.  There are truths which the circumstances of the Church in the Conciliar period