A Cause Neither Lost nor Gained

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph” – T. S. Eliot

Has that strange sound from beneath the high altar of St. James’ Anglican Cathedral in Toronto finally ceased?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The forty-second General Synod of the Canadian branch of the Ecclesia Anglicana convened in Vancouver, British Columbia on the tenth of July. Prominent on the agenda was a motion to alter the canon governing holy matrimony to allow for the performance of same-sex marriages. Canon law requires that such a motion pass two consecutive General Synods. At each of these Synods it must receive a two-thirds supermajority from the lay delegates, from the clergy, and from the episcopal college. It received this, albeit through some questionable shenanigans, at the last General Synod in Richmond Hill, Upper Canada, three years ago. This year, however, while it received 80.9 percent of the lay vote, and 73.2 percent of the clerical vote, it was defeated in the House of Bishops who gave it only 62.2 percent, with fourteen bishops voting against the motion, and two abstaining.

It was this motion to which I alluded when I suggested in the concluding paragraph of my Dominion Day essay that John Strachan, first Bishop of Toronto, was probably spinning in his grave. While it is good that the motion was defeated it is important that we recognize that although this was a defeat, of sorts, for liberalism it was not a triumph for orthodoxy. Had orthodoxy triumphed we would be talking about a liberal motion that never made it past its first round through Synod because it was voted down by lay, clerical, and episcopal supermajorities larger than those required to pass it. The reason it is important to recognize this is because the temptation for the orthodox faithful in the Anglican Church of Canada will be to look upon this as the end of a decades long battle of which they are already weary. This is not the end, but rather the beginning. The liberals may not have had the numbers to overcome the constitutional roadblocks that were wisely placed in the way of quick and easy changes to canon law but they clearly outnumber the orthodox and they are not giving up. Indeed, it is quite apparent that they came to Synod with their Plan B already in place in the event they lost the vote. Their Plan B is basically to treat canon law in the same way in which they have long treated the Holy Scriptures, the Creeds, and the traditions of the Church – as texts that can mean anything, which is another way of saying they mean nothing, and therefore mean whatever they want them to mean. It is this sort of thinking, rather than the mere symptom which is their desire to redefine marriage to suit the alphabet soup crowd, that is the essence of the cancer of liberalism that has been eating away at the Church.

Indeed, the breakdown of the vote reveals that the path that lies ahead for the orthodox faithful will not be an easy one. The duty of the orthodox, when a portion of the Church has fallen into grievous error, is to win those who have strayed back to the truth. This is never easy, but it is much more difficult when those who have fallen away have the larger numbers, and especially when they are a majority even among the bishops, those to whom the specific duty of safeguarding the faith had been passed on by the Apostles. It is interesting that the motion received a larger percentage of the lay vote than the clerical vote. Twenty-one years ago Rev. George R. Eves in a book which addressed the growing divide between liberalism and orthodoxy in the Anglican Church of Canada at a time when the battle over same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage was in its early stages (1) observed that the clergy were a lot more liberal, both theologically and politically, than the laity. If the vote at General Synod accurately reflects the thinking of clergy and laity today – and this is a big if, since it may simply suggest that liberals had control of the lay delegate selection process – then this would appear no longer to be the case. The laity are the largest segment of the Church and if they are also now the most liberal it will be that much harder to reclaim the Church for orthodoxy.

In light of this, the orthodox faithful would do well to remember the words of our Lord and Saviour as recorded in Luke 18:27 “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

The fight for orthodox Christian truth has being going on since the very founding of the Church – the Apostles first encounter with Simon Magus, to whom the Fathers of the second and third centuries traced the origin of the heresy of Gnosticism, (2) is recorded in the eighth chapter of the Book of Acts – and will continue, according to prophesies made by both Jesus Christ and His Apostles, until the Second Coming. Explicit warnings against false doctrines and/or exhortations to remain true to the Apostolic faith are found in almost every book of the New Testament. With regards to the outcome of this ongoing war and the battles within it the faithful have both the assurance of the Lord Jesus Christ that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church built upon the Apostolic faith (Matt. 16:15-19) and the warnings given to particular Churches about the judgment that will come if they fall away from the faith. The letters to the angels – which in this somewhat singular use of the term means bishops – of the seven Churches of Asia Minor in the second and third chapters of Revelation are a particularly good example of this. Note the warning to the bishop of Ephesus: (3)

Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent (Rev. 2:5)

The falling away that is addressed here was less than the abandonment of the faith for which the term apostasy is usually reserved. Had the Ephesians been guilty of apostasy the warning would hardly have been lesser.

The assurance of Matthew 16 and the warnings of Revelation 2-3 do not contradict each other. The former is made to the catholic Church, the latter to particular Churches. The gates of hell, of which heresy and apostasy are weapons, shall never prevail against the catholic Church, that is to say, the entire or whole Church, but particular Churches within the catholic Church - and, sadly, Church history demonstrates that this is as true of entire dioceses and provinces as it is of individual parishes – can fall to heresy or apostasy. Fortunately, the same history also provides examples of particular Churches that have been recovered from heresy. (4) The orthodox must be ever vigilant for the “faith once delivered unto the saints” but must not succumb to despair when error appears to be in the ascendancy. The present situation in the worldwide Anglican Communion is a particular smaller-scale illustration of this point. However much the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church in the United States have been permeated by the leaven of liberalism, orthodoxy prevails in most of the other provinces of the wider Anglican Communion.

There are those who would object to depicting the marriage debate as one between orthodoxy and heresy. The grounds for this objection, when it is based on something more than mere squeamishness over the use of strong language, have only the most superficial sort of validity. That same-sex marriage has never been formally condemned as a heresy by an ecumenical Council is due entirely to the fact that up until the last twenty to thirty years or so nobody would have ever dreamed that the need for such an anathema might arise. That the Creeds do not contain a line to the effect of “and I believe in one holy, sacred, matrimony between man and woman” is not because this is something about which there has been no “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus” consensus among the faithful, but because like many other truths about which the Scriptures are clear this one would be out of place there. Creeds, as the formal affirmations of the Church’s faith, are not intended to be comprehensive lists of all the truths she adheres to but of those upon which she rests her confidence in God’s grace. (5)

There is, however, a sense in which the objectors are right, but to the opposite effect of what they intend. The ancient heresies were affirmations of the Christian faith that deviated from orthodoxy on some essential point because of an overemphasis upon another. Sabellianism emphasized the unity of God to the point of denying the Trinity, whereas Tritheism was the reverse of this. Arianism denied the full deity of Jesus Christ, whereas Docetism and Apollinarism denied His full humanity. If this is what heresy is, liberalism is something much worse. Keep in mind the point made earlier about the push for same-sex marriage being merely a symptom. (6) The disease to which it points is a way of thinking in which individual wish-fulfilment is the highest good, truth can be discovered or created by majority vote, and every affirmation of the Creed, every tradition of the Church, and every statement of Scripture is open to an infinite number of re-interpretations to bring it in accordance with these ideas. Heresy affirms the Christian faith while distorting its truths, liberalism denies the Christian faith under the guise of an affirmation. It is far more dangerous than any mere heresy.

This does not make our duty to contend for the orthodox faith against liberalism any less than against heresy. If anything, the duty is greater. The same Scriptural warnings apply – but mercifully, so do the Scriptural promises.


(1) The book entitled Two Religions – One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada was self-published by Rev. Eves in 1998 and has just been revised and updated for this year’s General Synod. The updated version is available here: https://georgereves.com/books/two-religions-one-church/

(2) St. Justin Martyr, Apologia Prima, 26, St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.23. St. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, IV.51 and VI.2, 4-15.

(3) At the time the Book of Revelation was written, this would have been St. Timothy, the same St. Timothy whom St. Paul recruited to join his evangelistic mission from the Church in Lystra in Acts 16 and to whom he later wrote two canonical epistles. Since St. Timothy was bishop of Ephesus until his death in 97 AD, he would have been the one addressed regardless of whether St. John’s exile to Patmos took place under Nero or Domitian.

(4) Take the history of the orthodox Church’s struggle with Arianism in the third and fourth centuries, for example. Several provinces which accepted or leaned towards the heresy condemned by the first ecumenical Council in 325 AD were later brought back into communion with the orthodox Church. There was a period, however, not long after the Nicene Council, when the Arians very much appeared to have the upper hand.

(5) Peter Toon made this point with regards to other truths. “Neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creeds mention hell or Satan. To add to either of these the words, “and in one devil, tempter and enemy of souls; and in damnation to hell everlasting,” would sound odd; belief in Satan and hell is of a different nature than belief in God and heaven. The contents of the creeds point to realities which are to lay hold upon us and grip us in faith and love: Satan and hell are to be avoided, not greeted.” Austin Farrer said something that was very similar in Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.

(6) An even more serious symptom is evident in the apology retiring primate Fred Hiltz made on behalf of the Church to Canadian aboriginals at General Synod and in some of the articles regarding dialogue with the Jewish community that have appeared in recent issues of the Anglican Journal. While dialogue and better relations between these communities can hardly be viewed as a bad thing per se, liberalism is willing to sacrifice the truths of the Christian faith to achieve these goals. One such truth is that there is only one true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The idols of pagans – whether we are talking about the gods such as Zeus and Odin that European peoples worshipped prior to converting to Christianity, the gods that North American aboriginals worshipped before being evangelized, or other pagan deities of other peoples – are demons. Another such truth is that the saving grace of the one true God is only available through the Redeemer He has provided for the fallen race of mankind, His Son Jesus Christ. Liberals appear to be willing to sacrifice both of these truths to achieve “reconciliation” with the aboriginals, and the second of these truths to achieve dialogue with the Jews. Stephen Roney, who is a member of the Roman Church, has pointed out how a denial of these truths is latent in Hiltz’s apology. For why the second truth should not sacrificed to the goal of better dialogue with the Jews see the chapter on evangelizing the Jews in Suicide - The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada?, written by the “Anglican Billy Graham” Dr. Marney Patterson and published by Cambridge Publishing House in Cambridge, Ontario in 1999.

When do we get to Stop Clapping?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells in the Gulag Archipelago of a conference in the Soviet Union during the days of Stalin in which a tribute was given to the tyrant and the standing ovation went on for over three hours because the NKVD were watching to see who would be the first to stop. Eventually, the director of the paper mill sat down, thus relieving everybody else, but later that night he was arrested. At the end of the interrogation, before he disappeared into the Gulag for ten years, he was reminded “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.” The same held true for all the speeches of the Soviet dictator himself. Eventually a system was devised whereby a bell would ring letting people know when they could stop clapping.

Stalin’s Soviet Union was what is known as a hard tyranny – a state where the absolute rule of the tyrant is enforced by naked force such as making people disappear into hard labour camps or just outright shooting them. Today, in a Canada whose government is once more led by a Trudeau, the son of the Communist traitor who did everything he could to replace our beloved Royal Dominion with a People’s Republic, we have what is known as a soft tyranny. The enforcers wear smiles on their faces, speak softly, and use sweet sounding words like “compassion”, “tolerance”, “understanding” and the like. Rather than forced labour camps and bullets we have sensitivity classes, the loss of jobs and careers, and Human Rights Tribunals, the last mentioned of which should perhaps be classified as medium-soft, or medium-hard tyranny. The effect, however, is remarkably similar. People are afraid to be the first to stop clapping – not for the goofy, sappy, superficial, empty-headed, shallow little twit who is a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s First Minister – but for the causes he champions, foremost among them being that of the alphabet soup gang.

Twenty years ago the average Canadian, if asked, would say that what people did behind closed doors was their own business, that if it was two men or two women rather than a man and a woman it wasn’t hurting anyone else, and as long as they weren’t shoving it down everyone else’s throats, we shouldn’t care. In the Canada of the Current Year, it is no longer safe to take that attitude. Today, we are all expected to agree – in the name of diversity, no less – that if a man likes men, or a woman likes women, or a man thinks he’s a woman, or whatever, that it is wonderful, superb, marvelous, and of course, absolutely fabulous, that they are that way, and if your enthusiasm is detectably less than that of the next person, you might be suspected of being a horrible, homophobic bigot with criminal thoughts from which the public must be protected.

If you think this to be an exaggeration contemplate the words of Justin Trudeau during his recent visit to Auschwitz “Tolerance is never sufficient. Humanity must learn to love our differences.” Those differences which we must learn to love do not include, of course, differing in opinion with Trudeau and other progressives. Observe also the amount of pressure that is now being placed on public officials and politicians of all parties, to attend the ostentatious displays of depravity and bad taste that are now known merely as Pride parades, “gay” being too limited a designation to please the crowd that calls itself something like LGBTTQAEIOUANDSOMETIMESY.

As bad as it is that progressives like the Trudeau Liberals insist on bullying everyone into professing conformity with their “enlightened” way of thinking, it is even worse when this sort of thing goes on in the church. Which is exactly what has been going on in the Anglican Church of Canada. At the General Synod of the ACC, which convened this month in Toronto, a motion was heard proposing that the marriage canon be changed to allow for same-sex marriages. When the motion, which to pass required two thirds support from the bishops, clergy, and lay delegates each, was initially defeated by a small margin, the activists who have been agitating for this change despite its clear and obvious violation of the teachings of both Scripture and Church tradition and the fact that it threatens the ACC’s standing with the See of Canterbury and the larger Anglican Communion worldwide which, in contrast with the ACC and the Episcopal Church (USA) in North America, is overwhelmingly orthodox, demanded a recount, and several of the bishops declared that they would allow same-sex marriages within their dioceses with or without the canon change, on the grounds that it is not explicitly prohibited. One wonders how these bishops would react if one of their parishes were to justify holding a Black Mass, complete with human sacrifice, with the same reasoning (assuming this is not explicitly prohibited by canon law – I have not bothered to check). At any rate, the next day the vote was examined, it was determined that someone’s vote had been misclassified, and Archbishop Fred Hiltz declared the motion to have passed. It requires a second vote at the next General Synod before the change can take place, although the same bishops, with the same specious reasoning, have said that they will be going ahead and authorizing the ceremonies anyway.

I am not going to spend a whole lot of time explaining why the Synod had no business hearing such a proposal in the first place. The arguments I put forward in my essay “Why the Church Should Not Perform Same Sex Blessings” when my own Diocese (Rupert’s Land) approved the blessing of same-sex couples four years ago are as applicable to the fiction of same-sex marriage. It can be added that the Founder of the Christian Church, when asked about the lawfulness of divorce, pointed out that in the beginning God made mankind “male and female” and said that “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh”, concluding that “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Matt. 19:4-6) If man ought not to break up the union of marriage because God is its Author, how much less ought he to mutate it beyond recognition. The Anglican Church has considered itself since the Reformation to be both Catholic – a Church in organic and organization descent from the Apostolic Church in possession of magisterial authority to teach the Word and administer the Sacraments – and Reformed – acknowledging the revealed Word of God as the highest authority. The Church’s authority, therefore, does not extend to changing the truth of God, which is not subject to democratic vote, and to make this change makes complete mockery of the admirable canon of St. Vincent of Lérins, supposedly revered by Anglicans, in which Catholic orthodoxy is defined as holding to that which “has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.”

My point, rather, at least for the sake of this essay, is that the same kind of smiley-faced Stalinism that is the essence of the Liberalism of Justin “Sunny Ways” Trudeau, has been the tactic used by the Gaystapo to effect this transformation in the Canadian arm of the Church of Richard Hooker, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson and C. S. Lewis. As Dr. David W. Virtue reports:

VIRTUEONLINE has received word that intimidation and bullying took place behind the scenes at the recent Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada over the push for same sex marriage…Here is what VOL learned. When the Synod members broke up into small discussion groups, some members complained about being “intimidated” and “harassed.” Archbishop Fred Hiltz spoke against harassment tactics, but the victims weren't identified. It wasn't until later that the identity of the "harassed" was made public. Those bishops and their delegates from the orthodox dioceses of Caledonia, Yukon, and the Arctic, because of their opposition to same-sex marriage, were identified as the victims.

The same harassed and intimidated bishops have issued an excellent dissenting statement, which I recommend that you read in its entirety, drawing your attention in particular to the following:

The Resolution as carried does not provide adequate protection for the consciences of dioceses, clergy and congregations. We are concerned for all those of a traditional conscience on marriage within the Anglican Church of Canada.

There is plenty of reason for such concern. Intimidation, harassment, and bullying have been the tactics of the pro-homosexual activists within the Church all along, as anyone who has followed the sad story of how they have gotten their way over “same-sex blessings”, by hook or by crook, in diocese after diocese, beginning with New Westminster in 2002, is well aware. Now that they have a sympathizer in the Prime Minister’s Office, these bullying wolves-in-sheep-and-shepherd’s clothing, are even more emboldened and brazen about it.

It is somewhat ironic that these Social Justice Warriors claim to be motivated by the desire to protect the alphabet soupers from something called “homophobia”, when this term would seem to more accurately describe the fear and hatred that are sure to be generated by their tactics than that to which it is more usually applied, namely the orthodox doctrine that male and female were designed to be attracted to each other, that homosexual erotic relations are sinful, and that forgiveness and freedom from such can be found in Jesus Christ through faith and repentance. Stalin, was not exactly highly esteemed after his passing, except among idiotic liberal academics, and eventually, when the progressive regime falls, as all regimes that govern by fear do, Justin Trudeau and those marching under the banner of the Pride that precedes their inevitable fall, will be remembered in the same way.

In the meantime, kudos to the orthodox bishops who dared to sign their name to the dissent. One wonders when all other Canadians will get to stop clapping.

Kudos to the Archbishop

When asked by a friend, a couple of weeks ago, how I reconciled all the positive things I have been saying about the very anti-elitist populist political campaign of Donald Trump in the country to our south with my own political convictions, which are High Tory, a form of conservatism that is ordinarily thought of as being extremely elitist, my answer was to point to the plurality of elites. There always have been and always will be elites of many different varieties, rather than the single monolithic ruling class or power elite that Marxist sociologists are always raving about, and the elites whose traditional authority I would argue in favour of are not the same elites that Donald Trump, himself obviously a member of the elite of successful entrepreneurs, rails against as a populist. The elites that Trump has been blasting, including those of his own party, are globalist elites, relentlessly pursuing the goal of an integrated world in which borders will in no way significantly impede the movement of either labour or goods, no matter the negative impact this may have on their own country. Such elites are quite new, having attained elite status through the economic and political innovations of the last century, whereas the elites that High Tories such as myself believe in are those whose prescriptive status and authority are rooted and grounded in a history that goes back much further. These include royalty, nobility, and the clergy of the church.

It is most unfortunate that some of the attitudes of the newer, globalist, elites have infected some of the older elites. Consequently, it is extremely rare in this day and age to hear anything sensible about immigration come from the mouth of a clergyman. Most clergy, be they Roman Catholic or Protestant, evangelical or the infidels who dress their unbelief up in the language of faith and call themselves liberals, speak as if they worshipped at the idolatrous shrine of the cult of one-world-without-borders. The prime example of this is the world’s most recognizable clergyman, Jorge Bergoglio, the Jesuit - in every sense of the term - who recently rose from the archbishopric in Argentina where he had preached Bolshevism and called it “Christianity” to become the pretender to St. Peter’s throne in Rome after it was left vacant when his predecessor was ousted through some diabolical chicanery that is as yet to be explained. Forty years ago, in his prophetic novel, The Camp of the Saints, about a Western apocalypse brought about by an invasion of Third World migrants that the West found itself unable to defend itself against, being paralyzed by liberal guilt, Jean Raspail described a pope, newly risen to the post from Latin America, who in a Good Friday address, told Europe that it was their Christian duty to welcome and embrace the migrants. The sentiments of Raspail’s fictional pope, eerily anticipated those which Bergoglio has expressed in real history regarding the migration crisis that has been menacing Europe.

It was refreshing, therefore, the other week, to read the remarks that had been made by the present successor to St. Augustine – the other St. Augustine that is, not of Hippo but of Canterbury - the Most Reverend Justin Welby, in an interview given to the parliamentary periodical The House. In the interview Welby acknowledged the legitimacy of people’s concerns about how mass migration will affect their communities and public services, and described the tendency of the bien-pensants to condemn or dismiss those who voice such concerns as being “racist” as “outrageous, absolutely outrageous”, which, of course, it is. He is quoted as having said:

Fear is a valid emotion at a time of such colossal crisis. This is one of the greatest movements of people in human history. Just enormous. And to be anxious about that is very reasonable.

This is quite right, and the Archbishop went on to talk about specific concerns about housing, jobs, and access to health services.

Now we need to be careful and not read too much into these remarks. It is clear from the article as a whole that Welby has a generally positive view of the mass migration that is taking place and that his idea of addressing these legitimate concerns of people is to increase funding to programs upon which large scale migration places strains rather than doing something to stop the flow of migration.

It is, however, a step in the right direction for such a high-ranking prelate to accept the legitimacy of negative views of migration and to condemn the condemnation of such as racism. For the many who are sick and tired of hearing from the pulpit that racism is a far worse sin than all the Seven Deadly combined and that they are guilty of it for wanting the people they order coffee or lunch from, buy groceries from, and otherwise do business with in person or on the phone to speak the language of their country in an understandable manner, for wanting their government to select newcomers with the needs, interests, and security of the whole country in mind, for not wanting to overload the public services network with too many newcomers at one time, for wanting to pass their country on to their children and grandchildren, hopefully improved but substantially intact and untransformed from when they received it from their ancestors and for resenting government policies that go against all these wishes and which were enacted without their consultation, Welby’s words are a breath of fresh air. Hopefully, they are also an indication that we will be hearing less sanctimonious and self-righteous tripe and pious prattle about “the stranger” – which never in the Scriptures meant unassimilable migrants by the hordes of thousands or millions– and more truth, sanity, and good sense.

So kudos to the Archbishop of Canterbury. If only Canadian primate Fred Hiltz would take a page out of his book.