or Elizabeth is to
surrender the whole ground of controversy with Rome. A Church," he
continues, "which cannot trace its origin beyond the sixteenth century
is obviously not the Church which Christ founded."
The late Anglican Canon MacColl is, of course, perfectly right, and
his inference is strictly logical. A Church, however highly
respectable and however richly endowed, which came into existence only
1,500 years after Christ, came into existence just 1,500 years too
late, and cannot by any intellectual manoeuvring or stretching of the
imagination be identified with the one Church established by Christ
1,500 years earlier. Consequently every member of the Anglican
community finds himself, _nolens volens_, impaled on the horns of a
truly frightful dilemma. For either he must frankly confess that his
Church is not the Church of God, _i.e._, not the True Church, which
(human nature being what it is) he can hardly be expected to do; or
else he must assert that it goes back without any real break to the
time of the Apostles; which though absolutely untrue, is the only
other alternative.
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