under God, this country has been conducted to the acmé of national pre-eminence; by opposing a barrier to those licentious opinions and irregular practices, which, if not counteracted, must terminate in the destruction of our excellent constitution; and by exposing the fallacy of that specious reasoning on Church subjects in particular, by which uninformed minds are continually drawn astray from the established road of truth into the byepaths of error and schism; is an undertaking for which, as a minister of the Church of England, I have no apology to offer. At the same time, when I consider the vitiated taste of a fastidious public, which causes the generality of readers to pay more attention to polished periods than to the matter they contain, and, from an insatiable thirst after new things, to neglect the laying in that fundamental information necessary to qualify them to distinguish the chaff from the wheat in any subject of importance; I certainly feel it necessary to claim indulgence for a work, which, rejecting all meretricious ornaments unsuited to its dignity, professes only to deliver those plain words of truth and soberness, which are best calculated for general edification. Whilst to every one seriously attending to the subjects contained in the following pages, (and to no other we write) it must, it is presumed, evidently appear, that the opinion of the world can constitute no standard, by which the judgment of any reader of them ought to be determined.

The kingdom of Christ, confessedly, is not of this world: it was established with the intent, that this world should be conformed to it; not that this

kingdom should, from time to time, be made conformable to the fluctuating opinions of a capricious world. As this kingdom, then, according to the account given of it in Scripture, is to endure to the end of time, it is to be expected, that the government of it should correspond with its naturé, no less than with the character of the faith it was intended to preserve,—that of being "the same "yesterday, to-day, and for ever.".

That such is the case, (we have authority for asserting) no honest enquirer, properly qualified, can entertain a doubt. "It is evident (says our Church, in the preface to her Consecration Service) unto all men diligently reading Holy Scripture, and ancient authors, that from the Apostles' time there have been these orders of ministers in Christ's Church-Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. And, therefore, to the intent that these orders may be continued, and reverently used and esteemed, in the Church of England, no man shall be accounted, or taken to be, a lawful Bishop, Priest, or Deacon, in the Church of England, or suffered to execute any of the said functions, except he be called, tried, examined, and admitted thereunto, according to the form hereafter following, or hath had formerly episcopal consecration or ordination.” On this supposed unquestionable ground, established by historical proof of the uniformity of the Ecclesiastical Constitution for a long succession of ages, the Church of England has proceeded with confidence in her judgment on this important subject. Hence it is, that in her Canons she exclu sively appropriates the title of a true and lawful

Church to that society of Christians in this country assembled under Episcopal government; and determines all separatists from it to be schismatics: the sin of schism, according to its old and established definition, consisting in a wilful and needless separation from a true and lawful church. In praying, therefore, against schism in her litany, the Church prays against that sin which, in the Act for Uniformity, 14, c. ii. is described as attaching to those Christians, who, following their own sensuality, and living without knowledge and due fear of God, do wilfully and schismatically abstain from, and refuse to come to, their parish churches," &c.

With the same view of the subject, the visible Church of Christ (which the Church on earth was designed to be) is described in our article to be “ a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments duly administered according to Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same. For on the ground that a commission authorising the administration of the sacraments constituted an essential part of Christ's ordinance, as the Apostles could not become stewards of the mysteries of the Gospel till our Saviour thought fit to make them such, and consequently did not administer the sacraments previous to their having received a commission from hin authorising them so to do, therefore the sacraments cannot, in the judgment of the Church of England, be duly administered according to Christ's ordinance, but by those ministers, who, * Article 19.

being lawfully called, and sent into the Lord's vineyard, thereby receive the same divine commission transmitted to them from the Apostles,

for the discharge of the same sacred trust. And a commentator on the Apostles' Creed has observed, that those two articles, "the holy Catholic Church, and the Communion of Saints," were inserted on purpose to prevent schism; and that that alone is their true sense and aim. No schismatic, therefore, can with a safe conscience repeat these two articles; inasmuch as by his schism he far too clearly and emphatically declares his disbelief of any peculiar holiness in the Catholic Church, and his disregard of the duty and the blessing of a Communion of Saints."+

The question then is, Has the Church of England judged correctly on this subject, or not? To the determination of this question, the establishment of her own right to the title of a true Apostolical Church of Christ may be thought a necessary preliminary. Admitting this right to be established, a point which every well-informed reader is competent to decide for himself, what was schism in the days of the Apostles must continue to be schism still. For, on the assumption that the body of Christ, under its appropriate government, remains what it originally was, no circumstances of piety, learning, or wisdom, joined with schism, can change the nature of the sin.

But we venture to say, and it is by no means a hasty position that we advance, but one that has

* Vide 23d Article.

King on the Creed, 310, 325.

stood the test of deliberate and repeated investigation, that no ancient historical fact in the annals of mankind is capable of equal demonstration with that of the original constitution of the Christian Church. Nay, we say further, that no point of doctrine professed in the Church stands on equally unquestionable ground with it. For we know of no doctrine, however clearly revealed, that has not during the progress of Christianity in the world, met with its occasional oppugners. But such, for the space of the first fifteen centuries of the Christian æra, was not the case with respect to the Apostolic Government of the Church. Bishops, indeed, were occasionally set up against bishops, and thereby the communion of the Church broken by schism; at the same time that the general position respecting the divine origin and establishment of Episcopal government was admitted on both sides. In fact, the position relative to the Apostolic government of the Church by Bishops, stands confirmed by the testimony, not of this or that country only, but by the united, and for a long time uninterrupted testimony, of all Christendom. For the first fifteen centuries, no Church of Christ, in any part of the world, was known to exist under any other government; and it has been only since that period, which unfortunately gives date to the introduction of a different form, that Episcopacy has met with opposition from those, who have found themselves obliged to write it down, as the only way to discharge themselves from that sin which must necessarily attach to a needless separation from it. At the same time, the attacks that for

we have