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reason (p. 6,7.) That communion, of which the present circumstances of your country have made you, almost unavoidably, members. (p. 11.) While we perceive with delight that you have always spoken, in your own persons, in accordance with our sentiments on this head, you have, at the same time, selected some tracts from early writers of your communion, in which our sentiments are impugned. These old tracts will not be read with much attention, compared, at least, with your own more lively productions: they can too be readily withdrawn when it is expedient: for they are not a pledge of your opinions as strong as your own writings. In the mean time, you may appeal to your republication of them as a proof that you have not leagued yourselves with us."

Now of all this, Sir, you do not believe one syllable; you do not think that, either in the republication of the older, or the protests of the more modern tracts against Popery, their editors or authors were actuated by any such motives; 1while you impute insincerity, you have reason to believe them as sincere as yourself. It is an ill tree which brings forth fruit thus corrupt.

But is it then a duty to forget that Rome was our mother, through whom we were born to Christ; that she was the instrument chosen by God's good providence to bring the Gospel to the wild Heathen tribes from which most of us are sprung? Are we to be so engrossed with modern controversies, and modern corruptions, as to forget ancient heresies, and those the most deadly, those of Arius and Pelagius, against which she maintained the faith once delivered to the Saints ?-are we to forget all past gratitude, all bowels of mercy towards her who was our mother? So to pray against her corruptions as not to pray for her, to cherish no memory of what she was, to Europe and to ourselves? and in her present guilt, to forget our own gratitude? What should we think, if in some future age, New Zealand and Taheite were to cast out our name as evil? She

1 Meanwhile, however, the calumny is spread in real earnest. The anonymous compiler of the 'Specimens of Theological Teaching,' &c. among the very few statements on which he ventures, echoes it, 'Indeed, while these writers profess their love and reverence for the Church of Rome [as it is?], they take care to protest against it, as all Protestants of course must do.' (p. 37.)

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has been an unnatural mother, but are we therefore to be unnatural children? Should we glory in a mother's shame?

Let me quote the warm language of a modern writer', whose bias lay in an opposite direction, and whose words come fresh from a conscience freeing itself from such ingratitude.

“The aboriginal Briton may dispute the gratitude which he owes to the church of Rome for his conversion; the Englishman, who derives his blood from Saxon veins, will be ungrateful if he be not ready to confess the debt which Christian Europe owes to Rome; and to profess, that whenever she shall cast off those inventions of men, which now cause a separation between us, we shall gladly pay her such honours as are due to the country which was instrumental in bringing us within the pale of the universal church of Jesus Christ."

There is one more evil desertion of truth, which I fear cannot be ascribed to any wish to "adorn your tale," although you have thereby been enabled to convey it in a form less manifestly offensive. You say,

"Another piece of advice which we shall give to you, (as we give it to all our Missionaries,) is, that you should adopt every means to undermine the influence of those whose writings hold out no hope that they may be won over to the true Church. They are, in truth, dangerous men, and you should represent them as such. Be not deceived by their apparent amiability, by their virtuous conduct, or by their extent of learning. These very circumstances render them the more to be dreaded. Suffer not such men to be the instructors of youth. Do not permit them to occupy those places which public spirit alone ought to make you anxious to occupy, even independently of any desire for your individual advancement." (p. 34.)

I can the less lay this to the account of the fiction, because it is manifestly the one object of your whole attack upon these writers; whether out of private friendship to Dr. Hampden, or of alarm for yourself, as a member of the same schoolnam tua res agitur, cum proximus ardet Ucalegon-it is notorious that you imagined these writers to be the principal authors of the measures taken in consequence of that unhappy appointment, and that your avowed object was, to “effect a diversion." Herein you were mistaken; since there prevailed 1 Short's Sketch of the History of the Church of England, sec. 14. The object, thus covertly conveyed in this first essay, is now boldly

throughout Oxford one universal feeling of alarm, (which, under the name of "panic," the heathen, more religiously than we, would have ascribed to "the gods,") as soon as the appointment was known. These individuals but joined what already existed. But I would now speak of the truth of the imputation only; you have known, or have been aided (we have ground to think) by others acquainted with those of whom you speak; and you dare not, in your own person, avow your belief, or even your suspicion, of the truth of the allegation, which, under your assumed character, you have insinuated. You know and believe it to be untrue; and thus there is another evil of these unhappy disguises, that they furnish men the temptation of half saying, what they would shrink from speaking openly, as knowing or suspecting it to be untrue: but now, if untrue, it is to pass as part of the jest, and so they take courage, and stifle their consciences.

For ourselves, you will have done us good service; your attack will fall harmless alike on those who are now with the Lord, or upon those who remain; but your revival of the old Presbyterian cry against " Prelacy and Popery," will show the members of our Church what is really censured under the

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avowed in the "Specimens of Theological Teaching," and in the Edinburgh Review. To any one acquainted with Oxford, the notion is altogether absurd there is in Oxford, happily, far too much thoughtfulness and scrupulousness to be influenced by any party, however powerful: men here form their individual convictions, according to their own consciences; party-feeling neither existed, nor had it existed, would it have had any influence; but, in truth, individuals of every shade of religious opinion within the latitude left free by our Articles, were united by one feeling of common danger impending over the Church, and that, independently of each other: they met and acted together spontaneously, actuated only by one common apprehension. The opinions, then, of a certain number of the " Corpus Committee," is, in reality, nihil ad rem; but will any one say that the charges against Dr. Hampden were confined to undervaluing antiquity, or the sacraments, or the authority of the Church, or that the prominent charges were not rather, his vague and Sabellian notions on the doctrine of the Trinity, the rationalizing of the Atonement, and generally, a system, opposed to the Articles? The Articles of our Church, not the teaching of any set of men, were made our standard; and to this standard and primitive antiquity would we appeal for ourselves.

name of Popery: they will see the necessity of striking back into the old paths, and manfully avowing truths, which many of late have shrunk from, as invidious. You, Sir, have been consistent; it is, if we are rightly informed, a favourite maxim with you that the bishops have been the great hinderers of the development of the Reformation for the last 300 years; i. e., of such development as Germany has suffered under for the last half century, and from which she is now in part recovering. The Rationalists, it is known, ever maintained the same; they also complained that our bishops were the great hinderances to the extension of their theories among us. Therein they saw, indeed, but a portion of the truth; since our bishops were produced by the system, which under God's blessing they contributed to perpetuate; but still they saw that our system possessed a principle of stability, or as they deemed it, stationariness, foreign to their own. Those who wish well to our Church will now see who, under Almighty God, are the real upholders of sound doctrine among us; they who respect the office of a bishop, even antecedently to any consideration of individual merit in the person consecrated thereto, or they who, as yourself, (p. 16.) ridicule such respect; they will see that the cry of Popery is but a feint devised by the archenemy of the Church, whereby to hurry men down the steep descent of ultra-Protestantism to its uniform end, the “denial of the Lord who bought them." And knowing that that Church alone is safe who guards the deposit of sound doctrine committed unto her, they will not be scared by shadows to abandon the reality, or shrinking from the reproach which our forefathers bore faithfully, fall into the toils, on either side spread for them, whether of the Socinian or the Papal antiChristianism.

Christ Church, St. Mark's1 Day.

1 See Collect for the Day.

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