Rome reform and reaction Author:Peter Taylor Forsyth Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WHAT DID LUTHER REALLY DO? If we ask what the real nature of the issue is in a serious crisis of the Church we must always fall back on its conception ... more »of faith. The contention implies on one side or the other some serious decay and involves some serious reform there. If there be in the Church long malaise, resulting in acute periodic disturbance, we may be sure that the seat of the mischief is in some vital part ; and in the severest forms of it, it is in the vital centre; and the vital centre of the Church is faith. What is then needed is not a revival, and it is not primarily a reformation, far less is it mere regulation Acts. The present crisis is far too serious to be dealt with by parliamentary regulation. It is even beyond the reach of episcopal reformation. The priest has broken loose from the bishop. He claims an authority above the bishop ; he goes behind him, as, in a sense,we do. He appeals to some authority prior to the bishop, which made the bishop, and which the bishop must obey. He goes to the Church, as, in another sense, we do. He accuses the bishop, for the sake of the State connection, of betraying the Church and the Catholic faith. For him the Church is virtually the priesthood. There, of course, we are not with him ; but we can only welcome his appeal to the Church from the episcopate because our own appeal is to the Church, and our inquiry is, what makes it ? We hold that the Church is made by the Gospel and its Word of Life held forth to the world. Catholicism holds that it is made by something institutional, by the twofold institution of the bishop and the priest. But priest and bishop are now in antagonism. And we cannot but be glad that the institutional idea of the Church is thus proving unworkable as its essential idea. It all tends to plac...« less