Church which adds to the evils of false doctrine those of schism.” Impudent assertion! From what religion, sir, did the religion of all ages and nations go out? From what Church was it cut off? From what chair of unity, to use the language of St. Cyprian; from what origin of the priesthood; from what chair of St. Peter did it separate? Whence, sir, came the Apostles of our country; whence did they obtain all their spiritual jurisdiction; whence did they receive their licence for their lawful, valid, and canonical consecration ? From the chair of St. Peter ; from St. Gregory the Great. Who clings to the chair of the Prince of the Apostles; who yields all due and canonical obedience to the successors of St. Gregory, your religion or mine? Whence came those our sacred ordinations to the priesthood and the episcopacy, which even Dr. Pusey acknowledges to be both valid and lawful; which none of you dare to gainsay? From the ancient bishops of our religion, some of them consecrated to their sees by the hands of the Roman Pontiff; none consecrated without his apostolical permission and canonical confirmation. Which, sir, remains in communion with that common Father of the Christian faithful, your religion or mine? Whence even did those invalid ordinations proceed, which you claim as the noble origin of your pseudo-episcopacy? From Barlow, a deposed prelate, but deposed in that Church which you now dare to calumniate. "From the Church of Rome, (writes your Protestant Dr. Miller), corrupted though it was, we profess to have received the sacred orders of our priesthood, and the commissioned authority of our episcopacy." (Letter to Dr. Pusey, p. 6.) Accuse us of schism? Produce, then, the title-deeds of your religion, from which you would pretend we have gone out. Where was the headship of your Church four-hundred years ago? Where were your bishops? Where were your parsons? Where was that spiritual power now vested wholly in the hands of your temporal rulers? Trace the lineage of the head of your Church, the Sovereign of these realms, to the days and the person of St. Peter or any of the Apostles. Show by what ever-enduring authority your ministers are now ordained;-who it is that lawfully places them to rule in the Church of God which Christ purchased with his blood. But be assured that your mere assertions are not worth a single rush. Your idea of schism is very different from that of the ancient fathers of the Church; very different from that of the illustrious St. Optatus of Milevis, who, writing in the fourth age to the schismatical Bishop Parmenianus, says to him:"The Church is one, which Jesus Christ calls his dove, his spouse; and this one Church cannot be among heretics and schismatics. It must, then, be in one place ; and this, you pretend, is where you would have it to be, that is, in one corner of Africa; not with us who occupy the remaining portion; nor, if

we pass over all the regions of the earth, can the Church, it seems, be found, but where you are. Then, where is the propriety of the word Catholic, which has been given to the Church? And if it must be confined to your narrow limits; if you exclude all nations from it, where is the truth of the promise made to Christ in the Psalm (Psalm ii.), 'I will give thee the nations for thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession'? Allow the Son to enjoy his inheritance: allow the Father to fulfil his promise.-Why will you put boundaries-lay down limits? You cannot deny that St. Peter, the chief of the Apostles, established an episcopal chair at Rome: this chair was one, that all others might preserve unity, by the union which they had with it: so, that whoever set up a chair against it, should be a schismatic and an offender. It was in this one chair, which is the first mark of the Church, that St. Peter sat. Your's, sir, like the Church of Parmenianus, is confined to one spot on the earth; all other sects of the sixteenth century, you have condemned, because they are not united with your pseudo-episcopacy; your Church stands disowned by all but the subjects of one prince; it stands disunited even in itself; it lies rather, cut off from the universal religion of Christendom; it has set up a chair against that chair which St. Optatus said was placed at Rome, that all might preserve unity by being united with it; and that whoever set up a chair against it, should be a schismatic and an offender. Even what do your co-religionists of the sixteenth century think of your pretended claims to Catholic orders, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, apostolical succession? How often have I heard it remarked by persons of various dissenting congregations; men of thought, ability, and knowledge; that to members of the Catholic clergy, maintaining the importance and necessity of an apostolical succession and an episcopal hierarchy, they always listen with attention and respect; they weigh their arguments; because, if there be an apostolical succession existing anywhere, the Catholic Church, the ancient Church, the Church from which, since the days of Luther, all other religions have gone out, alone possesses it. But for a Church of England parson to upbraid the dissenters with not having any true apostolical succession, and lawful or valid ordination; himself only a dissenter from the only ancient Church of Christendom; himself a member of one of the religious communions of the sixteenth age; himself like them a Protestant— a Protester against the old Catholic Church of this country; himself a clergyman of a religion whose homilies tell them the whole Christian world was plunged into idolatry for more than eight hundred years before the pretended Reformation; himself a descendant of those men, who scouted the idea of there being any judge in faith, but the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing

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but the Bible; himself a descendant of men who turned the ancient religion of the country out of its own churches-out of its own universities-out of its own colleges;—who sacked its monasteries, and pocketed their revenues; for him to talk of the necessity of apostolical succession-of episcopal ordination derived from the ancient bishops of this kingdom-of a succession which comes down from the hands of some of the holy predecessors of the Pope (for some of our ancient bishops were consecrated at Rome itself;)-of a succession, therefore, which comes from the very hands of him, whom great men in your Church in former days-whom some in the present (witness the Rev. Hartwell Horne), have denounced as the very Antichrist and Man of Sin; from a Church parson, they can receive such doctrine, only with open laughter. "The books of the Puseyites (says the Chaplain of New and All-Souls' Colleges), are like their sermons

-a system of pulling down in the night whatever they may build up in the day-putting here and there, to beguile the doubting soul, a bit of patchwork-divinity taken from the Gospel of our Lord Jesus."

15. All thus, sir, both friends and foes, unite in bearing an honourable testimony in favour of the elected Church of God. You may prophecy against it; your prophecies serve only to manifest more plainly that the God of Jacob is with it: you may deride its priesthood; and even its very enemies will tell you that its ministers are the true anointed sons of Aaron: you may, as in page 190, and elsewhere, call the successor of St. Peter and the High Priest of God, "an Italian priest ;" and history tells you, that it was that "Italian priest" who scattered all the blessings of Christianity throughout our beloved country; and that he was the only source and the only root of all apostolical succession in England. Elymas withstood the Apostle of God, and threw doubts into the minds of his friends regarding the truth of the mission of the vessel of election; but he proved an unwilling instrument of mercy to many, and his blindness conciliated admiration for the doctrine of the Lord.

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16. Sir, concluding this chapter, I will finish with a most apposite quotation from your favourite, Palmer, and I hope, in no vain triumph, turn against you a canon of theology, which he was pleased to propound, when trying, for the successors of Matthew Parker and his miserable companions, to bolster up wretched, ludicrous, and contemptible title to a true apostolical succession." It is clear," writes Mr. Palmer, "that a true and lawful ministry is essential to the Church, and that any society in which there is no such ministry, is not the Church; and it is equally clear, that such a ministry must exist at all times, because it has been proved that the Church was always to exist. If it be admitted that the ministry of Christ has at

any time ceased to exist, there can be no certainty that it now exists; for the only proof of its present existence is derived from the Scripture, which represents it as essential to the Church, and which affords the promise of perpetual divine aid to the apostles and their successors in the Christian ministry. And if there has ever been a period when this ministry was extinguished, it cannot be necessary to the Church." (vol. i. p. 162.) Now write, sir, these sound words of a true Catholic theology upon the tablet of your heart; place your hand upon that heart, and then tell me, on your honour as an English gentleman, whether there was not a time, since the coming of Jesus Christ, when your Protestant ministry existed not? Then tell me, whether her most bitter opponents have not a thousand and ten thousand times acknowledged, that since the ascension of the Saviour, when unknown was the hierarchy of the Catholic religion, the day has yet to dawn. Before the sun of that day shall sink into the ocean, the revolutions of time will have passed away for ever.

17. Twelve hundred years ago, our forefathers taught the ineffable advantage of clinging, with fond affection, to that Catholic hierarchy, when they bequeathed their children, with their dying benedictions, to the paternal love of Augustine and his sainted successors. They told their beloved progeny, that the conversion of England had been the work of Heaven, shown forth by signs and wonders, which only a priesthood of the eternal God could ever have been able to manifest. They taught them, that a ministry sent forth, like St. Augustine, by the inheritors of the chair of St. Gregory, the successor of St. Peter, would never fail; and that if they rejected it for any pretended ministry or pseudo-episcopacy, its ineffable blessings would be given to others. Their dying admonition we also will cherish with the fondest affection; and dear accompanying hopes we will treasure up in our bosoms.

"Ark, altar, temple, we left with our breath

To our children, a sacred bequest!

O guard them, O keep them, in life and in death;

So the shades of your fathers shall rest,

And your spirits with ours be in Paradise blest."

CHAPTER IX.

"A man is to ask himself the question, Does this appear so to me? But where the matter has appeared differently to the universal Church, is he not to ask himself the further question, Is it more probable that I or that they should be right?"-Gladstone.

1. NOTHING can form a more perfect manifestation that the God of all truth still remains with his faithful people, than that spirit of contradiction, that spirit of infatuation, that spirit of confusion, which is in the camp of our opponents. Their Church is not the watch-tower of truth, but a very Babel of inconsistency. For little, I am sure, will my readers expect, to find him to be any other but an orthodox Catholic, who has uttered such sentiments as I am soon going to quote from the fifth chapter of your publication. Yet greater will be their surprise to find you, in the same chapter, turning round upon that venerable religion, whose very principles you maintained with all the apparent ingenuousness of an honest heart; to see you attacking it, aided by every auxiliary you can press into your service, from the mercenaries of bigotry and bitterness; unfurling the standard of ignorance, and fighting with weapons of misrepresentation.

2. Sir, we are not told by you, as our fathers were by Chillingworth, The Bible is the only religion of Protestants." We meet not, in any part of your book, with that declaration which I find in the pages of my old copy of Dr. Jeremy Taylor's Dissuasive against Popery, "The Scripture is a full and sufficient rule in faith and manners.' Nor are we taught in your school, who profess yourself, in page 171, to be an admirer of the education in religion given by Henry VIII (and I wish you joy of your benevolent and holy pedagogue), the same lesson which we learn from the following passage in a speech made by the present Lord Bishop of Chester, at Exeter Hall, May 2, 1838. It is so particularly complimentary to my protégés, Dr. Pusey and his party, that I beg leave to quote it. It was not stated, perhaps, in vain," said Bishop J. B. Sumner, "for I have found in reading an erudite volume which has been recently published, the question proposed, whether the Scriptures were actually to be comprehended by a common understanding? It was admitted that a person of a shrewd understanding might comprehend them; but it was doubted whether that could be the case with the mass of society, But only let the records of this society be examined, and abundant proof will be furnished, that the scriptures are able to make wise unto salvation, through faith in Christ. Nor is it necessary to go back to distant centuries, to see how men of old understood and explained the Scriptures,