Arthur Wollaston Hutton’s The Anglican Ministry: Its Nature and Value in Relation to the Catholic Priesthood is a polemical essay in controversial theology, published in 1879 with a preface by Cardinal Newman, under whom Hutton served as a priest of the Birmingham Oratory. The book argues, at length and with historical documentation, that the Church of England did not and does not possess the Catholic priesthood: that its Reformation settlement deliberately discarded the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and that its orders are therefore null in Catholic eyes. Newman’s preface frames the volume as a serious contribution to the old controversy between Rome and the Anglican claims, written by a man who once held the Ritualist position himself.
The Case Against Anglican Orders
The Book, Its Author, and Newman’s Preface
The volume opens with its formal apparatus: a dedication, a title page naming Arthur Wollaston Hutton, M.A., of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, as author, and Cardinal Newman, Founder of the English Oratory, as writer of the Preface. The copy itself carries the marks of its passage through English Catholic hands—purchased and presented by a Mr. William Thomas of Bootle to the Theological College at Bala in December 1891, having earlier sat in the library of a Liverpool clergyman. The publisher is C. Kegan Paul of Paternoster Square; the epigraph sets Pope Pelagius II before the schismatical bishops of Istria.
Newman’s Preface, dated from the Birmingham Oratory in September 1879, explains why he has lent his name. Hutton is a member of his Oratory and a dear friend, and the book is a serious contribution to the controversy between the Catholic Church and Anglican claims. Newman worries that his sponsorship may confuse the argument’s drift rather than clarify it. He then frames the dispute with care. All Anglicans hold the Church of England to be an integral part of the polity that has lasted since the Apostles; the Ritualists go further, holding detailed doctrines their fellow-Anglicans do not, and so expose themselves to an argumentum ad hominem from which Anglicanism as such is sheltered. The doctrines are true, but they are declaratory of gifts the Ritualists must first prove to be theirs before they may lawfully claim them—and this, Newman says, they have not attempted. Each side throws the burden of proof on the other; the Ritualists shift it onto their own shoulders, where their fellow-Anglicans are only too willing to leave it.
The Anglican controversialist, by contrast, is “in possession,” like soldiers behind earthworks, needing only to stay on the defensive, answering positive arguments, adducing hypotheses and possibilities, complaining of flaws in the Catholic proof. Augustine planted the Catholic Church in Anglo-Saxon England; Anglicans claim to be its veritable continuation, “super antiquas vias,” with the old Sees, Churches, Chapters, property, temporal status, laws, rights, Colleges and schools—one with Gregory the First, not with Leo the Thirteenth. The sixteenth-century interval was “very trying,” but the Church weathered the storm, and its survival may be read as a providence and a positive argument. Anglican advocates narrow their polemic to formal acts, documents, the validity of Orders, the authors and drift of the symbolical Articles—technical and legal, recalling Shylock’s demand for a full pound of flesh. Hutton’s volume, following Canon Estcourt and others, lifts the controversy to higher ground, judging not by archaeology but by history and common sense.
Possession, Newman concedes, is a strong antecedent reason but not a proof; it may be met by stronger presumptions—no Anglican would hold his Church Catholic if it turned Unitarian, and inward characteristics carry more weight than external properties. The real question is whether the Anglican Hierarchy and the English people, in faith, formularies and acts, have stripped themselves of Christian truths and gifts essential to Christianity—gifts they have no power to reclaim at will after three centuries, and to claim without tradition is to confess their irrecoverable forfeiture. The argument tells against all Anglicans but more forcibly against the Ritualists, since the gifts they claim to share with Catholics are called by their own co-religionists “blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits.” To claim awful gifts and powers one’s fellow-Anglicans deny is to play with edged tools. The author, once in that case himself, hopes they will give him a patient hearing. If the Catholic view of the Sacerdotium be revealed truth, yet was never held by any Anglican minister till the last thirty years—if Anglicans neither believed, professed, used, taught nor honoured it, but called it blasphemy—who shall say a small minority suddenly possesses it while the main body persists in denying such a gift was ever made by our Lord? The Church of England has ever claimed Sacraments, never Sacrifice in the Ritualistic or Catholic sense. A High Churchman holds Episcopal government, Apostolic Succession, baptismal regeneration, perhaps the Real Presence—not the Sacerdotium. All Anglicans and Protestants admit “sacrifice” as a synonym of divine worship, and “priest” as its correlative; but what does it mean? Newman cites Waterland’s Treatise on the Eucharist: the Eucharist in whole or part, in a proper or improper sense, is a sacrifice agreed upon among all knowing and sober divines, Popish, Lutheran or Reformed; but Romanists abused the names oblation, sacrifice, propitiation, grafting false doctrine and worship on them, so Protestants have been justly jealous of admitting them. Mr. Mede asserted a proper, material sacrifice of bread and wine, analogous to the Mincha of the Old Law; in 1642 Dr. Cudworth denied any proper or material sacrifice, admitting a symbolical feast upon a sacrifice—the Grand Sacrifice commemorated under symbols. This was the prevailing doctrine of Anglican divines before and since, down to 1737; the current doctrine down to Mede (1635) is certain, and three eminent divines wrote in 1685, 1686 and 1688.
Marks of a Sacerdotal Community
The argument then turns to a comparative analysis, contending that the Church of England is not sacerdotal. It first lists the marks of sacerdotal communities: recognition of the visible unity of the Church and protest against the isolated position of separated communities; an unwilling tribute to a vague pre-eminence belonging by rights to the successor of St. Peter, whom they accuse of ambition and tyranny while conceding his office and that Christendom cannot be one without communion with him as Primate. Such communities possess internal unity in fact—uniform ritual, discipline and faith binding Bishops, clergy and laity—with authority in force from layman to priest and priest to Bishop, traditions jealously guarded, changes suspected. In details: belief in the supernatural powers of the Priesthood, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, sacraments and sacramental rites; mystery protected by symbolical ritual, with lights, vestments and incense indispensable; confession and penance as the groundwork of discipline; celibacy as the higher state; counsels of perfection as the ideal; intercession of Saints, devotion to the holy Mother of God, some kind of Purgatory with prayers and Masses for souls detained therein—all immemorial, universal, necessary.
Non-sacerdotal communities are described as almost exactly the contrary, except where subjective pietism and reverence for the letter of Scripture substitute for traditional faith; these substitutes do not exclude an ever-widening Liberalism, their distinctive characteristic. Submission to living authority is repudiated in matters of faith; the pew judges the pulpit; the minister weighs and finds wanting his superiors’ doctrine; the individual spirit destroys corporate unity; doctrines are let go one by one, faith diminishing and yielding to Rationalism.
The Sacramental Claim and the Eucharistic Test
The argument turns first on what Catholic ordination actually is. It is a true Sacrament, conferring a supernatural power, and not the mere external authorisation that the Anglican Ordinal supplies. The writer distinguishes Holy Order from benedictions that are not sacramental at all—the blessing of an abbot, say, with its mitre, ring and pastoral staff. Catholic ordination is a distinct consecration that infuses spiritual power and imprints an indelible character, conforming the man to Christ’s sacerdotal character and adding both sanctifying grace and the grace of office. If a rite is no Sacrament and confers no sacramental power, its Orders lack any substantial share in the divinely instituted Priesthood, and are therefore invalid. High Churchmen, if they are consistent in claiming a Catholic priesthood that enables them to say Mass and absolve, must hold this; so did the Catholic Church of England until the Reformation.
Whether the Reformed Church of England kept the doctrine is then tested against the Eucharistic Sacrifice. As early as 1548 the Order of the Communion betrayed to anyone versed in Catholic theology that King Edward’s advisers had abandoned the true doctrine: communion in one kind can be squared with the Real Presence but not with the Sacrifice, since it destroys the integrity of the act. Edward VI’s Ordinal, even in its first, non-Puritan edition, contains no word implying the sacrificial nature of the office. It kept the delivery of chalice and bread but added a Bible, and where the old form said “Receive power of offering sacrifices to God” it substituted “Take thou authority to preach the Word of God, and to minister the holy Sacraments in this Congregation.” The First Prayer-book’s silence exactly where the Sarum Missal spoke plainly confirmed the rejection of the Holy Sacrifice; the name “Mass” was retained only to draw people into conformity. The distinctively sacerdotal vestments—chasuble, stole, mitre—go unnamed, while cope, rochet, pastoral staff, surplice and hood are specified. Sacrificial expressions were expunged except the Scriptural ones, elevation was forbidden, and the rite professed at most “a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”; “our bounden duty and service” was transferred to the offering of “ourself, our souls and bodies.” Set beside the Sarum Missal, it denies a true, proper, propitiatory Sacrifice for the living and the dead. The 1549 service is called a caricature of the Mass—thoroughly Protestant, admitting the Real Presence while denying the Sacrifice—and the High Churchman’s eagerness for permission to use it shows how weakly he grasps his own case.
The Second Prayer-book and the Elizabethan Settlement
Edward’s second Prayer-book of 1552, which High Churchmen repudiate, was substantially the same as Elizabeth’s and the present book; Convocation had no voice in it and it was never extensively used. The alterations of 1558, 1604 and 1661 did not change its essential character. The Elizabethan Communion service made no pretence of being a Mass: the structure was radically altered, there is no reference to altar or oblations, and only the word “priest” survives, kept as a political expedient. Elizabeth herself repudiated the Holy Sacrifice—before her coronation she told a bishop about to say Mass in her presence not to elevate the Host; he refused, and she left the chapel after the Gospel. All chosen to form the Protestant hierarchy were Calvinists or Zwinglians save Cheney of Gloucester, a Lutheran. Article XXXI calls “the sacrifices of masses” blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits, and the plea that this condemned only medieval corruptions is rejected. The Article’s title, “Of the one Oblation of Christ finished upon the Cross,” is appealed to, but the Reformers rejected the Universal Church’s teaching because they thought it interfered with the all-sufficiency of Calvary. The hypothesis of widespread pre-Reformation corruption, put out by the author of Tract XC, has since been withdrawn, though High Churchmen still insist on it. English Catholics of 1530 believed the priest offers Christ in the Mass, a propitiatory Sacrifice availing for the living and the dead; that is precisely what the Reformers rejected. The plural “sacrifices of Masses” makes no difference—the phrase occurs in the Decree of Union signed at Florence in 1438. If the Reformers honestly thought Catholic doctrine inconsistent with Christ’s all-sufficiency, that lessens their guilt but does not excuse heresy, nor help High Churchmen who know the Sacrifice of the Altar does not derogate from Calvary but applies its efficacy.
At the Reformation, then, the Church of England deliberately rejected the Catholic faith concerning the Eucharistic Sacrifice, repudiating the principal function for which priests are ordained. A Catholic priest using the Communion Service’s language, and supplementing it with significant acts, might really offer the Holy Sacrifice—though sinning gravely each time; but as commonly performed by Anglican clergymen it is certainly not the Mass, since reciting the words of institution without intention to consecrate or sacrifice would not suffice. From 1560 to 1860, how many clergymen had such an intention? Conformably with the Prayer-book, which excluded the Sarum rite’s sacrificial expressions from the first Introibo to the Ite, missa est, they thought of doing no such thing; if sacrifice came to mind, it was to repudiate the duty. Allow them to be priests for the moment: by merely reading through the service they would neither consecrate nor sacrifice.
The Missing Altar and the Ritualist Illusion
A Ritualist, on authority the writer cannot dispute, obtained permission to “say Mass” in a Catholic church in France; the curé was deceived and later suffered severe ecclesiastical penalties for failing to detect the impostor, who was under excommunication and took by fraud what he obtained. The same condemnation falls on self-styled Catholics who communicate in Catholic churches abroad while intending to return to Anglicanism, or who go to confession without disclosing their position; their absolution is null unless the confession includes abjuration of heresy and schism and a resolve to remain Roman Catholics for life. Priesthood, Altar and Sacrifice are correlative, so the High Churchman argues that having the priesthood entails the other two. The reply is to be sure of the priesthood first, for the absence of altar and sacrifice is a fatal objection. Since 1552 the Reformed Church has made no official claim to a true Altar: the word is absent from the Prayer-book rubrics though it occurred everywhere in the Missal and Ritual. The semi-official Coronation Service contains it, apparently to preserve Catholic ceremonial for royal dignity, but there the religion is described as Protestant. Not only was the term excluded; actual altars were thrown down, and consecrated stone put to common use or laid in the church porch to be trodden on as an act of disbelief in the Mass. Popular speech testified: “Communion table,” or simply “the table,” was the universal designation until recent years.
The Six Points and the Demand for Moral Certainty
Newman closes the Essay by weighing the plausibility of the High Church claim rather than merely restating his case against it. He sets out six debateable points, the denial of any one of which—except that the second and third cover each other—would be fatal to the Ritualist position. Grant the first, decline to press the last as incapable of formal proof, and allow that the second or third alone suffices, and three serious questions still remain. All three must be answered affirmatively, and not merely probably but safely, with moral certainty, or the whole position collapses. A footnote adds that the apparent intention behind the compiling, authorising and use of rites must be weighed, since the meaning of a form depends on it.
The Futility of an Act of Faith
Against the appeal to “an act of faith in the Church of England” Newman is blunt: it is an evasion. An act of faith means unconditional submission to an accepted infallible teacher about the unseen world. But the Church of England disclaims infallibility, teaches that General Councils may err and that venerable Churches have erred, and holds Scripture alone infallible though not infallibly interpretable. An act of faith in Anglican doctrine is therefore impossible, and on the question at issue there is no Anglican doctrine at all. The High Churchman’s quasi-act of faith rests on his private judgment about the infallibility of “the undivided Church,” which reduces his theory of Anglican Catholicity to mere opinion.
Nor can faith be made in facts, since Anglican Orders is a question of facts. A Catholic’s faith concerns doctrine, not the fact that a given priest was validly ordained; faced with evidence that a priest had never been ordained, he would investigate. Newman tells of a young priest recognised by his old nurse on the way to his first Mass, who learned from her that in anger against his parents she had neglected to have him baptised; he investigated, was baptised, confirmed and ordained afresh, and only then said Mass. The recommended act of faith is thus a culpable refusal to consider plain facts.
The Price of the Claim
Those who repudiate the assumed principles may defend Anglican Orders as Anglican, but not as Catholic; they must then abandon chasubles, stoles, cottas, Roman collars, birettas, candles, incense, genuflections and elevation, and cease to call themselves Catholic priests or to say Mass and absolve. Catholics may admire the Ritualists’ consistency and self-devotion while holding the theory a mistake—the modern school deceived by the Elizabethan compromise as would-be Catholics were at her accession. Strip away the bare names of Bishop and priest, and Catholic-minded High Churchmen would become Roman Catholics.
No single syllogism persuades a man his long-held opinion is wrong; the plausibility of his error must be recognised. The historical and theological objections gain force from the urgency of visible facts: clergy whose descent comes, if at all, through Barlow and Parker show by their tone, uncertain faith, mode of life, estimate of the Eucharist and hostility to the Catholic idea of the Priesthood that they are Protestant ministers, not sacrificing priests.
The Plausibility of the Claim, and Its Collapse
Newman then explains why the claim retains its hold: the wealth, dignity and social position of the Establishment; its ancient Universities, Cathedrals and parish churches, endowed mainly for the Mass; its retention of historical titles implying succession from saintly prelates whose thrones have been vacant three hundred years; its attraction of learning and artistic skill; its earnestness and activity. None of this yields a probability of a sacerdotal Ministry—rather the reverse. Had the Reformers transmitted a divine Priesthood, the world would not have tolerated its wealth. The Ritualists’ assertion has already charged the guns of political enemies, and attack must end in disestablishment and disendowment. Earnestness and activity prove nothing of sacerdotal character, being shared by Protestant and non-Christian communities; once the external bond is removed, the Church’s want of dogmatic unity must cause disintegration.
Quasi-Catholic language in the Prayer-book gives some support, but Newman holds that Catholic words were deliberately retained to secure conformity and tolerated as interpretable in a Protestant sense; the book has twice been revised by High Churchmen, favouring the Anglo-Catholic position more than its Elizabethan predecessor. High Churchmen bring their principles to the Prayer-book as Protestants bring theirs to the Bible. Catholics remember it as the product of times of apostasy, deceit and violence, its compilers violators of solemn obligations, its authority only that of an Act of Parliament; despite literary merits, hardly a page is unmarked by heresy through omission—a soiled fragment of Catholic England’s liturgical wealth. The wonder is that so few Catholic expressions remain. The seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic divines seem to support the theory to those newly influenced by Ritualism, but their hollowness is detected by those who have learnt the true faith; advanced High Churchmen admit the extreme Jacobite men belonged to a distinct school contemplating no ceremonial innovations.
Answering the Charge of Shifted Ground
A specious defence alleges that Catholic impugners used unproved statements and shifted ground. Newman replies that until fifty years ago Catholics lacked free access to documentary evidence, and that despite differences there has been substantial unity: the main contention has always been that the Church of England does not ordain priests to offer the Holy Sacrifice. Catholics honestly abandoned the technical Scholastic objection when the antiquarian school arose.
Personal Authority and the Prohibition of Rome
The Ritualistic priest’s authority over his people, Newman observes, is personal rather than official. Unlike a Catholic pastor, whose infallibility is official—he speaks as the Church’s representative, bound to believe what he teaches on pain of ceasing to be Catholic—the Anglican priest’s authority originates in his own self-assertion and depends on the attractiveness of his social position, natural gifts and University education. One Ritualistic congregation accepts as Catholic teaching what another denounces as unsound, even on grave dogmatic and practical matters. When the popular priest is removed by death or preferment, his views go too, and his successor, though also a High Churchman, will likely hold widely different opinions; yet with tact and ceremonial he soon gains enthusiastic adherents, since Ritualistic congregations, however divided in faith, agree in believing wholly in their priests.
Newman urges the Anglican clergyman unsure about the character and succession of his Orders to hesitate before teaching, by word or act, that he is a Catholic priest who can say Mass and absolve. To do so when not bound, and when the most consistent Anglican traditions condemn it, is unsafe unless done in perfect good faith; it involves tremendous responsibilities and is practically the introduction of a new religion into the Established Church. The dismay of well-intentioned followers upon learning that what they received as certain truth was an ill-founded opinion should deter others from a position difficult to withdraw from.
What the Argument Assumes and What It Contests
The essay rests on a distinction it never argues for but treats as settled: that the Catholic priesthood is a true sacrament conferring a supernatural power to consecrate and offer the Body and Blood of Christ and to remit sins, and that a rite which is not a sacrament, conferring no sacramental power, cannot confer a substantial share in the divinely instituted priesthood. Against Protestant opponents who argue from the silence of the New Testament—no Christian minister is ever called a priest there—Hutton has little quarrel; such divines, he says, may claim a Scriptural and unsacerdotal ministry if they like. His real target is the Ritualist, the High Churchman who professes the Catholic doctrine of the priesthood and asserts that he possesses its powers. To him the book addresses an argument from consistency: if you claim the awful gifts, you must show they were transmitted to you, and the historical record, read without special pleading, shows they were not.
The corollary is a theory of names. The English Reformers, on Hutton’s account, meant by bishop and priest something very different from what Catholics mean. They wished to be quit of the substance of the priesthood while retaining the ancient titles—to keep bishops who would govern, but without altar or confessional. The retention of the word “priest” in the Prayer-book is explained as a political expedient, a concession to popular habit rather than a doctrinal statement. This is why the argument spends so much energy on vocabulary: the absence of the word “altar” from the Prayer-book rubrics, the expunging of sacrificial language from the Communion service, the substitution of “Take thou authority to preach the Word of God” for “Receive power of offering sacrifices to God.” Words, for Hutton, are evidence of intention, and the intention was Protestant.
The Ritualist’s Predicament
Newman’s preface supplies the book’s sharpest framing device: the argumentum ad hominem. All Anglicans hold the Church of England to be a continuation of the Apostolic polity; Ritualists additionally hold detailed doctrines that other Anglicans deny. These doctrines may be true, Newman grants, but they are declaratory of gifts the Ritualist must prove to be his before he may lawfully claim them—and he has not attempted the proof. The Ritualist, in other words, has shifted the burden of proof onto his own shoulders. His fellow-Anglicans will not grant him the priesthood he claims; the Catholic will not grant him the orders he needs; and the historical record, on Hutton’s reading, will not grant him the continuity he asserts. To claim powers one’s co-religionists call blasphemous fables is, in Newman’s image, to play with edged tools.
Hutton presses the point home in his closing sections with an observation about authority. The Ritualist priest’s authority over his congregation is personal, not official: it rests on social position, natural gifts, education, and force of personality, not on an infallible commission. One Ritualist congregation accepts as Catholic teaching what another denounces as unsound. When the popular priest dies or moves on, his views go with him, and his successor holds widely different opinions. And yet this same clergyman forbids his people, under pain of sin, to enter Catholic churches or read Catholic books—a prohibition Hutton finds grotesque in a communion that disclaims infallibility and could not have produced the clergyman himself without the free use of private judgment. The High Churchman, he suggests, has led his flock nine-tenths of the way to Rome and then forbids them to look at the guidebooks he himself used.
Why the Claim Still Persuades
The book’s final movement asks how a theory so poorly supported retains its hold, and answers with an anatomy of plausibility. The Establishment’s wealth, dignity, and social position; its ancient universities, cathedrals, and parish churches, endowed mainly for the Mass; its retention of historical titles implying succession from saintly prelates whose thrones have stood vacant three hundred years; its attraction of learning and artistic skill—none of this yields a probability of a sacerdotal ministry, and Hutton thinks it yields the reverse. Had the Reformers transmitted a divine priesthood, the world would not have tolerated its wealth. Earnestness and activity prove nothing, being shared by Protestant and non-Christian bodies alike. The quasi-Catholic language of the Prayer-book gives some support, but Hutton holds that Catholic words were deliberately retained to secure conformity and tolerated as interpretable in a Protestant sense; the book, in his account, is the product of times of apostasy, deceit, and violence, its authority only that of an Act of Parliament, and hardly a page is unmarked by heresy in its omissions.
The essay’s tone is not that of a controversialist enjoying a victory. Hutton writes as a former Ritualist who hopes his old associates will give him a patient hearing, and the book’s most striking passages are addressed to the clergyman who suspects his orders may be doubtful. To such a man he urges hesitation before teaching, by word or act, that he is a Catholic priest who can say Mass and absolve—not because the claim is certainly false, but because it is unsafe, because the most consistent Anglican traditions condemn it, and because the dismay of well-intentioned followers who learn that what they received as certain truth was an ill-founded opinion is a responsibility not lightly assumed. The alternative he holds out is submission to Rome, and he describes the convert’s course with sympathy: the accusations of hastiness and vanity, the social excommunication, the ghosts of old prejudices, and then the gradual assurance, year by year, of a religion whose exclusive claim is proved in practice. The book ends, in effect, at that threshold—not with a syllogism but with a choice.
