STATEMENT OF THE REV. W. W. ANDREWS.
With these remarks we introduce a fuller inside account of the Catholic Apostolic Church, which was kindly prepared for this work by the Rev. W. W. Andrews, of Wethersfield, Conn. He has been thoroughly acquainted with the movement from the beginning, and is highly esteemed by all who know him as a Christian gentleman and scholar:
'The body of Christians who call themselves by the name of the Catholic Apostolic Church, not as exclusively their own, but because it is the proper designation of the one Catholic Church, is distinguished from all other Christian communions by the claim to the possession of gifts and ministries which, after having been long lost or suspended in their exercise, they believe to be now again restored to prepare the way for the coming and kingdom of the Lord.
History.
'The history of this religious movement can be given in few words. About the beginning of the second quarter of the present century, there was much prayer in many countries, but especially in Great Britain, for the outpouring of the Holy Ghost; and early in the year 1830 supernatural manifestations occurred in several parts of Scotland, in devout members of the Presbyterian Church, in the form of tongues, prophesyings, and healings. The following year similar manifestations took place in London, first in members of the Church of England, and afterwards among other religious bodies.
'Towards the end of the year 1832, by which time the supernatural character and divine origin of these spiritual phenomena had been abundantly attested, and a considerable number of persons had become believers, another and most important step was taken in the restoration of the apostolic office. The will of God that certain men should serve him as apostles was made known through supernatural utterances of the Holy Ghost by prophets, as when, at Antioch, he said, "Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them." The apostolate to the Gentiles, begun in the calling of Paul, but then left unfinished, the Lord now, at the end of the dispensation, set his hand to restore; and by the middle of the year 1835 the full number was completed, and they entered as a twelvefold Apostolic College on the work of caring for the whole Christian Church. As Great Britain had been chosen of God to be the centre of this catholic movement, one of the first duties laid upon the restored apostles was the preparing of a Testimony to the Bishops of the Church of England and Ireland, and of another to the King's Privy Council, in which they pointed out the sins and perils of those lands, and testified to the coming of the Lord as the only hope of mankind, and to the work of the Holy Ghost as the necessary means of preparation.
'A year or two later, they addressed a more full and complete testimony, of the same general character, to all the Rulers in Church and State throughout Christendom. They did this, because it was their duty, from the nature of their office, to seek the blessing of the whole flock of God. Apostles alone have universal jurisdiction, as they alone receive their commission directly from the Lord; and it belonged to them, when restored towards the close of the long history of the Church, to take up those questions in respect to doctrine, organization, and worship which had broken the unity of Christendom; and having examined the creeds and rites and usages of every part, to separate the evil from the good, and to stamp with their apostolic authority every fragment of divine truth and order which had been preserved. This they have been doing for more than forty years, and the results to which they have arrived may be thus briefly stated.
Doctrines.
'They hold the holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (the Old Testament as received from the Jews, without the Apocrypha) to contain the sum and substance of all divine revelations, and therefore to be the supreme and infallible standard of doctrine.
'But they also believe that Christ's promise to be with his Church to the end of the world has not been made void, and that the Holy Spirit has borne a living witness to the one faith in all generations; and they have adopted the three great creeds commonly called the Apostles', the Nicene, and the Athanasian, as expressing more clearly than any others the belief of the Universal Church. The great doctrines of the holy Trinity, the incarnation, the atoning death and bodily resurrection of the Lord, his ascension and high priestly work in heaven, the descent of the Holy Ghost to draw men to Christ, and to regenerate, sanctify, and endow with heavenly gifts them that believe, together with the second personal coming of the Lord to judge the quick and the dead, and to administer eternal retributions, they hold in their plain and obvious import, in harmony with the whole Orthodox Church, Greek, Roman, and Protestant.
'These creeds they have appointed to be used in divine worship: the Apostles', at the daily morning and evening services; the Nicene, in the ordinary celebrations of the eucharist on the Lord's Day; and the Athanasian, four times in the year, at the great festivals of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and All-Saints. They use the Nicene Creed in the form in which the Western Church receives it, retaining the Filioque, but not condemning the Eastern Church for using it in the form in which it was left by the Council of Constantinople.
'In respect to the great central truth of the incarnation, the key to all the purposes and works of God, they teach that the second Person in the adorable Godhead, the only and eternally begotten Son, became man by assuming our entire humanity--body, soul, and spirit --under the conditions of the fall, but without sin, through the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost. They reject, therefore, the dogma of the immaculate conception of the mother of the Lord as against the truth of holy Scripture, which declares the whole human race to have been involved in the fall of the first Adam. They teach that by being born of a mother of the fallen race, he took the common nature of man, with all its infirmities, burdens, and liabilities, so that he could be tempted in all points like as we are, and be dealt with in all things by the Father as the representative of mankind. But they also make prominent the work of the Holy Ghost in effecting the incarnation, holding that it was through his presence and power that the Son of God was conceived of the Virgin Mary, and afterwards anointed for his public ministry; so that while it was a divine person who became incarnate, he had no advantage of his Godhead in his earthly life, but did every thing as man upheld, guided, and energized by the Holy Ghost.
'They hold, with the Church of England, and all the great leaders of the Reformation, that the death of the Lord Jesus Christ was "a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world" (and not merely for those of the elect); and on this ground they stand aloof both from the rationalism which denies its vicarious and expiatory nature, and from the Roman doctrine of the mass, which teaches that the sacrifice of the cross needs to be supplemented by the sacrifices of the eucharist, in which the Lamb of God is continually immolated afresh.
'But they go beyond the theology of the Reformation in respect to the Church, which they look upon as the fruit of the death and resurrection of Christ, and of the descent of the Holy Ghost which followed his ascension; and as differing, therefore, fundamentally in its spiritual essence and prerogatives from all the companies of the faithful in the preceding dispensations. They believe that in rising from the dead he became the fountain of a new life, the head of a redeemed humanity, of which those who believe in him are made partakers by the operations of the Holy Ghost working in and through the ordinances of his Church. The Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper are the divinely appointed means of conveying and nourishing this new life of his resurrection, by the implanting and energizing of which the whole multitude of the faithful are made to be the One Body of Christ.
'As to the structure and endowments of the Church, they hold that its original constitution contains the abiding law for all generations. The fourfold ministry of apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors, first fulfilled by the Lord himself when upon earth, was continued in his Church after he had gone into heaven, because it was the necessary instrumentality of conveying his manifold grace and blessing, and of bringing his Body to the stature of his fullness (Eph. iv. 11-16). The Holy Ghost was given to be the permanent possession of his people; and the apostles reject the common distinction between ordinary and extraordinary gifts as wholly unscriptural, and as restraining the manifestations of the Spirit. They lay great stress upon the connection of the descent of the Comforter with the glorifying of the Lord Jesus (John vii. 39), and teach that the object of his mission was to reveal the glory and manifest the energies of the Man whom God had exalted from the weakness and dishonor of the grave to his own right hand. Supernatural gifts and miraculous workings are therefore in accordance with the nature of the dispensation, which began with the resurrection of the Lord, and is to end with the resurrection of his saints.
Worship.
'Its chief features are the celebration of the Eucharist on every Lord's day; services at six in the morning and five in the evening of every day in the year, requiring for their complete fulfillment the three ministries of angel, priests, and deacons; the observance of the great feasts of the Church, excluding those in honor of particular saints; and a monthly service by the seven churches in London gathered into one as a symbol of the Universal Church, which is also observed in all the congregations throughout the world.
'The holy Eucharist is made to be the centre of worship, of which Christ, the great High-Priest in the heavens, is the leader, and the Mosaic ritual the shadow and type. The showing to the Father of that one sacrifice of the cross, which is the basis of all intercession, is effected by the Lord himself, by his own bodily presence in heaven; and the Church is enabled to do the same upon the earth by means of that sacrament in which he places in her hands the symbols and spiritual reality of his body and blood. The eucharist is regarded as the antitype of the priestly act of Melchizedek in bringing forth bread and wine to Abraham, the father of the faithful, from whom he received the tenth of all; and in the offertory, both the tithes and the offerings of the people are brought up and presented to God as an act of worship.
'As the death of the cross was itself the fulfillment of all the bloody sacrifices of the Law, the commemoration of it in the holy Supper becomes the distinguishing Christian rite, from which all other acts of worship, especially the daily morning and evening services--the antitype of the daily services of the Tabernacle--derive their life and power. All the purest and most catholic parts of all the rituals of Christendom have been gathered up and woven together, to form, with such additions as the present exigencies of the Church demand, a comprehensive and organic system of worship, at once purely Scriptural, and embodying the richest liturgical treasures of the past. Among the errors and superstitions which have been weeded out are transubstantiation, the worship of the Virgin Mary and of saints and angels, the use of images and pictures, and prayers for deliverance from purgatorial fires. But in rejecting the corruption of the truth, the truth itself has not been cast away; and the doctrine of the real presence (as a spiritual mystery involving no physical change of the elements), the thankful and reverential mention of the Mother of the Lord ("And with the holy angels, and with thy Church in all generations, we call her blessed"), and continual supplications and intercessions in behalf of the faithful departed, that they "may rest in the peace of God, and awake to a joyful resurrection," all have place in the services appointed by the apostles.