Scenes in Switzerland
PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, 150 NASSAU-STREET, NEW YORK. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by the AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. Contents. Gretchen PAGE 5 A Night in the Cathedral 28 The Glaciers of Savoy 45 The Bride of the Aar 63 A Sabbath in Lausanne 79
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 had not brought into
prominence which later events compelled the Church to express its mind
PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, 150 NASSAU-STREET, NEW YORK. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by the AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. Contents. Gretchen PAGE 5 A Night in the Cathedral 28 The Glaciers of Savoy 45 The Bride of the Aar 63 A Sabbath in Lausanne 79