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What then, in the first place, are the circumstances under which they were each written? We will state these circumstances for the benefit of such of our readers as have not been much behind the scenes of Anglicanism while they have been "shifting" during the last ten or fifteen years-years of not less eventful progress to Anglicans (though in another way,) than they have been to ourselves. It was about the year 1840, or 1841, that the agitation in the English Church, which is so generally termed the Oxford movement, rose to its height. That movement dated from July 14th, in the year 1833, and after nearly eight years of persevering and unceasing gress," it gained that point than which it never afterwards rose higher. At that time it is true that one or two of its disciples had quitted "the Church of their baptism" for a more solid and substantial faith; but these were not the leaders of the school; they were weak and unstable brethren, of course, and were entitled to little weight. The 90th Tract had not yet been published; the Surplice question had not been mooted; the Times, as yet eager in their favour, had not blown the trumpet of Protestant alarm, or excited the feelings of our Protestant nation against the weekly Offertory; and he who was the master-spirit of the movement, though visited, as it would seem, with secret misgivings as to the reality and tenableness of his "Church's" position, had not as yet exchanged Anglo-Catholicism for Catholicism proper; Baptismal Regeneration had been satisfactorily drawn out, explained, and enforced, and the English people had even begun actually to receive it in part; for their eyes as yet were sealed to the necessity of the Sacrament of Penance as its balance and counterpoise in the analogy of the faith; and what is still more to the point, Mr. Gorham and Mr. Goode as yet were not. The antagonism of "Oxford principles" to the theoretic union of Church and State, and to that Ecclesiastical supremacy, before which the Reformers bowed down in abject reverence, and with which the English Reformation invested the reigning Sovereign, had not as yet been drawn out on the stage of Church Unions, and Meetings at Freemason's Hall; and Dr. Hampden was so far from being Bishop of Hereford, that he was only engaged as Regius Professor, enforcing Sabellian doctrines upon the young men of Oxford who were soon about to receive Anglican orders

from others as unorthodox as himself. We may fairly say, then, that in 1840, and 1841, "Church principles were in the ascendant, and appeared to be rapidly gaining ground, both in public and in private, among members of the Establishment. And we may say with equal truth, that up to that period the same embryo principles, in a qualified sense at least, had met with some amount of approbation-(" cautious," of course, and "judicious,")-from such of the Episcopal Bench as entertained any approximation to fixed principles at all. However dangerous such opinions as those of the Oxford school might be when pushed to their legitimate lengths, still they could not (how could they?) be wholly unpalatable, when stated in the abstract, to those Bishops who ever dared to reflect on what grounds the members of their own Establishment must be led to respect their persons. A set of doctrines whose first and foremost point was reverence for the office of the English Bishops, as such, as the true successors of the Apostles, and representatives of Christ, was naturally, we say, most acceptable for a time to many of the Episcopal body. How could it be otherwise, and with such principles as these, at least so long as they remained in their original and abstract state, and assumed no definite practical shape and substantial form, to the annoyance of those very prelates whose groundless claims they had been put forward to defend?

But among those eight-and-twenty prelates of the English bench, there was one at least, (if not more,) who, from a very early time, had watched their rising growth with a jealous eye. In the lofty tones which were used by the Oxford school in claiming a divine authority on the part of the English Clergy, and especially of the English Bishops, one of that body, Dr. Sumner, Bishop of Chester, since translated for his services to Canterbury, contrived, by a clever hit, to discern a sign of the cloven foot of Rome. A leading "Evangelical" in opinion, he knew that if the principle of the Divine authority was to be maintained at all, the cause of the English Reformation must be abandoned by thinking persons; he felt that if members of the English Church were once led to fix their minds on a visible Church, the Apostolical Succession of their Clergy, and all that cluster of connected doctrines which together make up what is called the Sacramental System," they

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would soon see themselves, upon their own principles, driven on to acknowledge that their Bishops and Priests could prove no lawful mission, and to confess that the Anglican Reformers, after all, worked sad havoc with the popular belief in a visible Church, and Sacraments of Grace. And so, convinced, as he tells us, (Appendix No iii., p. 83,) that "if God's purpose had been to set up a visible Church as the medium of man's communication with Himself, He surely would have revealed this to us in clear and intelligible terms, whereas Scripture contains nothing of the kind," the Lord Bishop of Chester sat down, composed, and delivered to his Clergy a Charge, against which it would appear that his Lordship of Exeter thought it his duty to protest at the time; and now, after the lapse of ten years, having become his suffragan, speaks thus: "I declare solemnly, and with a deep sense of the responsibility which attaches to such a declaration, concerning a

*It would seem that His Grace of Canterbury is wholly ignorant of what St. Paul meant by "the Church." We never met with a writer, even in the English Communion, who more completely ignored it as a visible Body. In the appendix to his charge, he enters at considerable length into the question, and-(not much to the satisfaction of High Church-Anglicans, we fear,)-contrasts together the Catholic and the Protestant mode of salvation. He declares that Holy Scripture, "uniformly addresses us as individuals," and not as members of Christ's body the Church. In his eyes, the Church is nothing but an aggregate of such individuals as accept the terms of "an offended sovereign," namely, God. He again and again declares that "all the promises of God's Word are annexed to individual faith.” (See pp. 31, 32, 33, for further proof.) He denies that the Church has any corporate existence, and therefore any life or consciousness, strictly speaking; and declares that those who maintain the contrary doctrine, teaching men that by incorporation into the Church of Christ, they are incorporated into Christ, and made one with Him, do nothing else but "interpose the Church instead of Christ as the mediator between God and man." We do not deny, that in spite of the Creeds, which the Anglican Church so inconsistently retains, in outward form at least, His Grace's sentiments are wholly in keeping with the general tenor of the English Articles, aud especially with the twenty-first, which defines the Church to be "a congregation of faithful men, where the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments duly administered." But we are constrained to ask, whether these principles, when we come to analyse them, are not essentially one with those of the Independent and the Quaker?

document proceeding from such a quarter, that I could not name any one work of any minister in our Church, which, though of double the bulk, contains half so many heretical statements as are contained in this one charge." (Bishop of Exeter's Pastoral, p. 39.) But it is time for us to go into an examination of the Charge itself. Having entered into some dry details of Church building and school building connected with his own diocese, he congratulates his Clergy on a general "growing attachment to the (Established) Church, an acknowledgment of its excellence, and a practical sense of the value of its services." And in the increase of worshippers, or hearers, or of candidates for confirmation at his hands, his Lordship proceeds most complacently to find "proofs......that opposition or indifference towards the Establishment, or even separation from it, has not generally arisen from any distrust of its discipline, or doctrines," (why should it?) "but from the difficulty, or practical impossibility of obtaining instruction within its pale." Next, upon certain subjects which, in our opinion, even heretics and schismatics generally deem important, he speaks in terms in which, as we shall hereafter see, the Bishop of Exeter has commented most forcibly, but which we shall at once dismiss with the single remark, that however heretical they may be in the abstract, they seem to us, after all, quite consistent with the principles of the English, or indeed of any national establishment-we mean, as showing a perfect indifference to all real external truth, as such.

"Perhaps it is too much to expect," says his Lordship, "what nevertheless we earnestly desire, that there should be no schisms or divisions among Christians; that the Church of Christ should ever be a seamless coat; that all the congregations of faithful men should ever be so strictly one, as to think alike, and agree unanimously on all subjects: upon such subjects, for instance, as Diocesan Episcopacy, or Infant Baptism, or Liturgical Forms, or Church Membership, or a National Establishment. There may be always some minds, which, on questions such as these, may differ from the conclusions which”—(mark here the very essence of unbelief, ) "we believe to be justly deduced from Scripture..... .The comfort and peace of the Christian world would be greatly increased, if it were commonly understood that the unity which the Scriptures demand, were the unity of those who hold alike the great doctrines of Christian truth, but consent to differ on matters concerning which Scripture does not carry determinate conviction to every honest mind."-pp. 16, 17. (The Italics are ours.)

Now we may be allowed to remark, that if ever we read a passage containing more wide and comprehensive sentiments than another upon the most sacred subjects, it is this which we have just extracted from the Bishop of Chester's charge, in 1841. Nothing more purely liberal in its worse sense, ever flowed from the lips or the pen of even the Dean of Bristol. And yet, to use his Lordship's own phrase, the above passage is written entirely "in the spirit of those articles which our Church maintains," that is, in the spirit of the purest rationalism. And as, in matters of which a spiritualized Faith alone is cognizant, the human reason is but a sorry guide, we shall be much surprised if a further enquiry would not satisfy us that his Lordship is wholly at variance with the Holy Bible which he professes exclusively to venerate, though, here at least, he may be quite in harmony with the spirit, if not always with the letter, of the Anglican Prayer Book; and that as a consistent follower of what is essentially a mass of contradictions, he is consequently led to betray a certain amount of inconsistency with himself, and with the positions which he, at times, elsewhere assumes.

Of course, there is not a Catholic of the most ordinary talents and education, who does not know and believe that Holy Scripture sets forth to all men one, and one only, way of salvation, the faith of Christ; in other words, that of the "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church," which bears His name. Every instinct of the Catholic's soul and reason, as well as every instruction that he has received from the days of childhood, conspire to press upon his mind the simple fact that, if he will be saved, he must firmly believe all those sacred truths which the Catholic Churcli, as the one accredited teacher sent by God, believes and teaches, because God has revealed them to Her and to us through Her. This, we say, is the plain doctrine of Holy Scripture; and therefore without fear of contradiction, we challenge the Anglican Archbishop to prove to us from Holy Scripture, that God requires no higher unity than a mere rationalizing acceptance of certain great doctrines of Christian truth," teaching us to "consent to differ" on lesser matters. Who is it that shall arbitrarily define, we ask, what matters are great, and what are small and trivial, in the one Catholic faith? Every portion, every particle of that faith is God's eternal truth, and nothing which refers to God and to the salvation of souls, can be

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