Read this morning Phillips Brooks’ sermon on “Visions” and “Tasks,” and several others--among them, the “Church of the Living God.”
With reference to doctrines, she understood the Church’s position. The great facts of Christianity as set forth in the Apostles Creed, she did not doubt; and she liked the comprehensiveness of a Church, admitting those who accept these facts and desire to live a Christian life, and permitting a private opinion on many complicated questions of theology. And yet, with her appreciation for the Church, she could not make up her mind to enter it. There were objections difficult for her to overcome.
These objections were not of a devotional or theological, but of an ecclesiastical character. High-Churchism, including in that term Sacerdotalism, offered a barrier. She felt that, by joining the Church, she would seem to approve of this teaching, and while she was willing to admit the historical fact of Apostolical continuity, she could not accept a theory of Apostolical succession which in any way seemed to exclude from good standing, as Churches, the various religious denominations which she had known and loved. She said, “In the broad idea of Christ’s Church, Episcopacy at times seems to me no less sectarian than other ‘isms.’” She had too much of the Puritan in her to make any such admissions about the Episcopal Church that would seem to indicate that she felt it was the only Church. Her position, as late as 1890, is very well put, in a letter to Mrs. S. I. Spalding, of Newburyport.
“I do feel nearer a conclusion, such as you would approve, than I ever have yet. I think, sometimes, I can see my way perfectly clear, but old notions are hard to change. Do you think I can take all the Puritanism implied in ‘A New England Girlhood,’ into the Church with me? Is it possible to be inside the latter, and yet feel that all the others are Churches, too, and that I am only signifying that I want to be more completely in union with them all, by identifying myself with this one? This is the way I should want to feel and do.”
By means of letters and conversations with Mr. Brooks, she saw that it was not necessary for her to give up all her Puritanism, on coming into the Church, nor was she bound to accept the interpretation that some Episcopalians put upon the Sacraments or Orders in the ministry. She learned that the difficulties she was considering were dispelled by the conception of the comprehensiveness of the Church. Mr. Brooks wrote her, concerning a discussion in the Church papers, in which Sacerdotalism was especially rampant: “There is nothing in it, which is not now repeated for the hundredth time. The solution of it all is in the comprehensiveness of the Church, which includes the vast expanse both of breadth and narrowness.” In March, 1890, she came to the end of her discussions, and seemed to see the true meaning of the Episcopal Church, as one method of entering the larger Invisible Church of Christ. She preferred this path to others, but looked upon it as a path, not the end of the journey.