THE BRANCH THEORY. As already noted,
the Branch Theory maintains that the Church of Christ consists of three parts
or branches,--The Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican, and that consequently the
Anglican Church is truly Catholic, since it is a part of the Church universal
and a corporate continuation of the Church of England before the Reformation.
The following quotation from Father Finlay will show the utter absurdity of
this theory: “Though it has been prominently before the world for
three-quarters of a century, it finds no one to accept and advocate it outside
of the Anglican Communion. A section,--a small minority of the Church of
England,--maintains the theory. The large majority of Protestant Episcopalians
know nothing of it; while Greeks and Roman Catholic repudiated it utterly. Is
it likely that the Church of Christ is constituted on a pattern which not one
in a hundred of her members will acknowledge? Are we to believe that the true
constitution of the Church was hidden from mankind,--from the Church
herself,--through nineteen centuries, and was only then to be made known to a
little group of Anglican theologians who have failed to persuade any but a
handful of their own Communion that their conception of the Church is that of
Christ?” (“church of Christ,” p. 168) (E. Sylvester Berry, The Church of
Christ: An Apologetic and Dogmatic Treatise [Frederick County, Md.: Mount
Saint Mary's Seminary, 1955; repr., Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2009], 100-1)