THE REV. GEORGE BAYFIELD ROBERTS 147
by the One Episcopate of the One Church. When once you have passed beyond those limits, you have arrived at the confines of heresy. The private interpretation of Scripture by a provincial Synod seems to me to differ only in degree from the claim of the individual to interpret for himself. Both processes are Protestant to the core. What differentiates a sect from the Catholic Church is that the sect has its own system, its own doctrine, its own discipline, its own absolute independence. If, then, the Church of England has its own peculiar doctrine and discipline, it is a sect it is not the Catholic Church in England. The conflict of this century will rage round this point, and the question will have to be settled once for all whether these two provinces of Can terbury and York are provinces of the Catholic Church, and therefore subject to its authority and deriving their authority from it, or whether they are independent and owe no obedience to the voice of the living Church. We have to teach Churchmen that the English Church is not an independent member in a confusion of inco herently waving arms and legs, attached in some mysterious and inexplicable fashion to an inert Primitive Church which became fossilised, accord ing to the Archbishop, about 300 years from the Apostolic times, or according to the authority of a Reformation Act of Parliament, some 500 years or more later. We have to teach men
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