“Another party in the English church, almost as strong as the evangelicals, and daily gaining a greater ascendancy, are the broad-churchmen. Their belief is like the rainbow, many-colored, hazy, shaded, clouded, changing according to the temporary taste and fashion. While the evangelicals are trampling on the mitre and the Crosier, attacking baptismal regeneration, confession, and Real Presence, but fighting for the Bible and its plenary inspiration, the Broadchurchmen pitifully smile at the evangelical war against popish trifles, concentrate their force against the Bible, and do not accept but a few “truths sifted from amongst a heap of rubbish here to considered as sacred relics.“ But, in the end, Broadchurchism evaporates in Pilate’s saying: “What is truth?!“ Well, what is truth? I ask you. They shrug their shoulders and point to the light of scientific researches, shining forth from pre-Adamite human skeletons, from the vertebral knot of an ape’s skull, from the extent of physical and ethnographical studies. Well then let us live to see Christianity crumbling down under the hammer of such powerful miners! They have already by their watery arguments, quenched “the fire that never shall be quenched,” changing eternal punishment into temporal correction. Judas Iscariot, nay, Satan ( provided they admit his real existence ), we will be saved one day. They will be able, I expect, two wheeled the cyclopean hammer, forging thunders more effectual than those of the Vatican, in order to smash the church to pieces. They will be able, I expect, to climb and force, with the titanic bravery, the pinnacles of heaven in order to dethrone the good old Christian God, and to replace him by their weak sentimental phantom of a deity molded out of goodness without holiness and justice, a deity encompassed by a Magna Carta of human rights, versus divine usurpations, a deity of “limited liability.“ Broadchurchism strikes at the very root of Christianity. And do you think, after this, that Broadchurchmen really care a bit for intercommunion between the Orthodox and English churches? They like to be left alone; they have no wish to be bothered in their state of perfect ease and comfort; and if they do wish for any intercommunion at all, it is not with Christians only, not with Jews and Muslims only, but with Parsees, Hindus, and Zulu... There is, however, a grand and prominent feature in Broadchurchism, the undoubted merits of which claim our just appreciation. The Broadchurchmen are the only consistent protestants as opposed to the evangelicals. They alone can boast of standing on the genuine ground of the reformation, sticking fearlessly to the right of private judgment, which Luther so emphatically claimed for himself, but denied to others. Si fractus illabature orbis, Impavidum ferient ruinae. Never mind the ruins they make; the ruins are but the necessary process of dissolution. Bishop Colenso speaks out what he thinks, and he may do so, for Protestantism has no lawful authority to restrain Private Judgement.” From Julian Joseph Overbeck’s “Catholic Orthodoxy and Anglo-Catholicism” More than any mere rationalism, was the long term liquid mind and soul Elizabethian Via media policy cultivated. For some mere; short term earthly peace, she set in motion centuries of spiritual and philosophical chaos, sown across the world by her empire. I recently learned that her remains are just a short distance from the Martyr Mary Stuart. This is like Saint Gordianus having to share a tomb with Julian the Apostate. The Cherry on top of a 450 year disaster against all Christian sanity. Of course, if Henry 8th and the Pope had been Orthodox Catholics all along, he could have petitioned the Patriarchates, not just the Pope, to make Archbishop Fisher an Autocephalous Patriarch of Britainia, which would have changed absolutely NOTHING in how they worshipped. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean they would have agreed to override the Pope to grant him it. They may have agreed with him or decide to stay neutral. But he would at least have had a chance. But I digress. The roots of this “Anything goes” nonsense in postmodern leftism ARE with the Unrestrained Broadchurchism, and the spirit of “Unrestrained Judgement” makes of the lunatics of the Universities the MOST Logical Protestants of our time.
