CHURCH, or ANGLICAN Cnmtcn, a term frequently employed to designate collectively those churches which embrace the principles of the English ref formation. The following are, in brief, the views generally entertained of those prin ciples by the members of the churches in question: By referring the Anglo-Catholic church to the English reformation, it is not meant that her origin dates from that event. but that her tenets, as she now exists, are those which the reformation cleared of what she holds to be corruptions. For, as the word "church" itself suggests--being derived, like "kirk" in Scotland, from the Greek adjective kuriake, which means "the Lord's" (i.e., house)—the origin of the Anglican church is t6 be traced not to a Roman but to an eastern source. She claims the name of Catholic—which also is from the Greek katho like, universal—because she is united, in origin, in doctrine, and in form of government, with the universal church as it has existed, with various differences of rites and cere monies, in all countries and in all ages. Eusebius even asserts that some of the apostles passed over into Britain. Teruillian, who lived in the 2d c., speaks of places in Britain which, though inaccessible to the Romans, were subject to Christ: "Britannorum inac cessa Romanis loci, Christ° zero subdita." At the Council of Arles, 314 A.D., there were three British bishops present; and St. Alban suffered martyrdom, under Diocletian, about the close of the 3d c., or nearly three centuries before the landing of St. Augus tine (q.v.)and his missionaries, 596 A.n, Christianity, however, was driven by the hea then Saxons into the mountainous districts of Wales; and though Augustine, on his arrival, found no less than seven bishops and one archbishop in those parts, and though Bertha, queen of Ethelbert, was a Christian, yet the whole Saxon part of the country was in a state of heathenism. The British church differed from the Roman and other western churches, as to the form of administering baptism, and the time of keeping the festival of Easter (see EASTER), following the customs of the Greek or eastern church; and it was not until the close of the 71.11 c., under Theodore, that the two churches be came united. In the meantime, the conversion of Britain was as much due to the labors of St. Aidan, the Scottish bishop of Liudisfern, in the north, and of St. Chad, the
Saxon saint, as to the missionaries of the Roman church in the south. See ANGLO SAXONS.
Nor is this glance at the history of the Anglican church, in the earlier period of her existence, unimportant, when we come to consider what and whence are her present form and tenets. From the beginning of the 8th to the middle of the 16th c., she became gradually, and at last completely, assimilated in doctrine and practice to the church of Rome, as well as subject to her domination; and the fact of her having at length freed herself from both, is in no small degree due to her having existed, in Saxon times, in a state of freedom and purity. It required, as we have seen, a struggle of nearly a century to make the British church conform to the Roman in the matters of baptism and Easter; and it was the same spirit which offered a strenuous, and for some time an effectual, resistance to the peculiar doctrines of the church of Rome and the claims of papal domin ion. There were always found individuals, some of great eminence, to protest against the former, whilst large sections of the church never ceased to protest against the latter. For a hundred and fifty years previous to the reformation, the doctrines of Wickliffe were leavening the body of the Anglican church. The overthrow of the papal supremacy was indeed effected by Henry VIII.; but that monarch rather hindered than favored the reformation of doctrine, as appeared from the rapid progress which it made when Edward VI. came to the throne. The bloody reign of Mary interposed a check to further progress; and it was not till the accession of queen Elizabeth that the principles of the reformation finally triumphed, and the Anglo-Catholic church assumed the form in which she has since continued to exist. During the period of more than 800 years preceding the reformation, she became gradually, and at length completely, merged in the Roman Catholic; at the reformation, she may he said to have emerged; when Rome, at the Council of Trent, anathematized all who would not receive her articles, the separation became final, and the positions of the two churches with respect to each other irrecon cilably hostile.