Typed Letter Signed ('B. H. Streeter') from the biblical scholar Burnett Hillman Streeter of Queen's College, Oxford, to 'Dear Major', responding at great length to criticisms of a book ('Foundations'?), discussing schism and the union of churches.

Author: 
B. H. Streeter [Burnett Hillman Streeter] (1874-1937), Provost of Queen's College, Oxford, and biblical scholar
Publication details: 
Queen's College, Oxford. 3 May 1917.
£220.00
SKU: 13528

4pp., 4to. Good, on lightly aged and worn paper. With numerous autograph emendations. A significant letter, in which Streeter carefully expounds his position on schism and the union of churches. Streeter divides his response into three numbered sections, the last of which is subdivided into three more. The first section discusses the question of whether the fact that the Church of England 'only allows Episcopally ordained persons to minister the sacraments' is only 'a matter of discipline and Church order'. The second section discusses the 'really fundamental issue': 'the question of the nature and meaning and consequences of schism'. Streeter concludes this section, with a passage whose heavy emendations show the care with which it was written: 'I cannot myself see any logical position between that of the Roman Church which says that no community which refuses in all points to conform to the judgement of the Church of the majority can be part of the true church, and the position which I maintain in my book, viz., that whatever a community exhibits the fruits of the Spirit of Christ we must suppose that it is part of the Body of Christ.' In the final section he answers 'the question why I seem more anxious to arrive at some kind of union (which I fully concede must be of a federal character) with Nonconformists and Presbyterians, rather than with the Latin and Greek Churches'. Streeter concludes with the convoluted (and again heavily-emended) assertion that 'what really keeps the Churches apart, is the belief, which every existing denomination at present entertains, that not to possess some of the special qualifications itself possesses rules those who lack them out of any claim to be considered as branches of the Church of Christ.'