An Appeal from the Twentieth Century to the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: or, The Faith and Practice of the Two First Centuries of the Reformed Anglican Church

This book is also recommended for anyone pursuing ordination in the Anglican Church. 

Last year I co-operated with the Dean of Canterbury in issuing an Appeal from the New to the True Catholics, in which it was my part to compare the ceremonies, practices, and doctrines now urged upon the Church of England on the score of their being Catholic usages, with the ceremonies, practices, and doctrines of the Church of the first 600 years; and this comparison showed that none of them could be rightly designated " Catholic," because they were not the common usage of the Church of those first 600 years.

In making our Appeal to the early centuries we did not for a moment forget that the highest Court of Appeal is Holy Scripture, the authority of which is unique and incontrovertible; nor did we dream of superseding the regulations of Statute and Canon law already binding on members of the Church of England by a reference to the usages of the early Christians, which were not always consistent with themselves, are liable at this distance of time to misinterpretation, and are some of them unsuitable in the changed circumstances of the world.

My present purpose is to show that medievalist demands can no more justify themselves by the authority of the Anglican Church of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than by that of the primitive ages.

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