Probably the oldest existing institution of its kind in present-day Dissent, though now but a shadow of its former self, is that which has long gone under the name of ‘The Exeter Assembly’. This body, composed of ministers only, and in the main of ministers of Presbyterian congregations in the county of Devon, first met at Tiverton on 17 and 18 March 1691, with fifteen ministers present. The inaugural meeting was followed by regular meetings held twice a year, usually in May and September. Save for three short breaks (1717-21, 1728-33, and 1753-63), the Assembly’s minutes, or for the years 1691-1717 a contemporary copy transcribed by the Assembly’s scribe and published in 1963 by the Devon and Cornwall Record Society, have been preserved for the whole period from 1691 to the present time.

The Revolution of 1688 began for the clergy of the Church of England an era of grave crisis. It was not merely that the deposition of James II had posed for many of them a critical question of conscience. More serious were the effects of the Toleration Act of 1689 which quickly showed themselves in diminished attendances at church, and in a marked decline in the authority and status of the parish priest. By its literal provisions the act permitted dissenters a bare liberty to worship in their own way; but, as interpreted by successive administrations and by the great majority of the laity, it effected an ecclesiastical revolution. Although various statutes required all Englishmen to attend their parish-church each Sunday, and though the act merely permitted them to go to a meeting-house instead, it was widely held after 1689 that church-attendance was voluntary. The ecclesiastical courts continued to exercise their traditional jurisdiction in matrimonial, probate, and faculty causes, and over the clergy; but their coercive authority over the morals and religious duties of the laity became virtually impossible to enforce.

Even quite eminent Tractarians tended to think that, however impossible things might be in the Church of England, the colonies provided the sort of field where they could create the kind of Church in which they really believed. That Church would follow patristic patterns, of course, would be free from the nexus of establishment, and would be governed by synods. As regards South Africa they nourished particularly high hopes. Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Cape Town, was campaigning for synodical government, the creation of ecclesiastical courts to replace the Erastian Privy Council, and to check and outlaw the heresy of Bishop Colenso. It looked so very much as though this were a situation—heresiarchs and councils locked in battle—straight out of the pages of early church history. So when Gray lost his case against Colenso in the Privy Council in 1855, Dr Pusey wrote in a letter to the Churchman, ‘It is no loss to us that it is discovered that the Queen had no power to give the temporal powers which the former legal advisers of the Crown thought she could.. .The Church in South Africa, then, is free.’

Centenaries are supposed to be occasions when we take stock of the event we are commemorating. In the light of developments in the last hundred years how does the work of the First Vatican Council look today? And since it so happens that the hundred years in question includes the Second Vatican Council, recently concluded, it is natural to put the question in this form: how does the work of Vatican I look today, in the light of Vatican II?

I think it would be fair to say that it is widely considered that the work of Vatican I was a little unfortunate, and has since proved embarrassing, because its definitions enhanced the authority of the papacy. Vatican II is supposed to have helped to redress that balance by disclosing the nature of the Church as a whole, from the bishops down to the People of God, or perhaps I should say from the bishops up to the People of God, in view of our preference nowadays for turning everything upside down. Such critics of Vatican I are not, of course, denying either the dogmatic infallibility or the juridical primacy of the Pope, which were defined at that Council; but they are saying that it is a distortion to stress the powers of the papacy and to neglect the powers of the college of bishops or the rights of the rest of the Church, and they are saying that the one-sided definitions of Vatican I tended to create such distortion in men’s minds until they were balanced by the pronouncements of Vatican II.

Two conferences of some significance took place shortly before the First World War: the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, and the Kikuyu Conference, held at a Church of Scotland mission station at an out-of-the-way place in East Africa in 1913. In an Ecumenical Age, the fame of the former is likely to endure, the notoriety of the latter to be forgotten. Yet it was the controversy raised by the second conference which caused Lord Morley to remark that the ‘cacophonous’ name of Kikuyu might one day rival in fame that of Trent. Another grand claim was made for Kikuyu by the Bishop of Zanzibar—one with which The Times agreed—that ‘there has not been a conference of such importance to the life of the Ecclesia Anglicana since the Reformation’.