feels to the very centre of his soul the sentiment therein expressed; namely, that there is no hypocrisy or imposture more detestable, or that will be exposed to more overwhelming confusion and severe chastisement, at the great accounting day, than that of Christian Ministers, who make the Gospel subservient to their vanity, their ambition, their avarice, or their resentment. Alas, my dear Sir, what answer should I make to your cries, and those of your fellow converts, for vengeance on my head at the bar of inflexible justice, had I led you into the abyss of idolatry, by inducing you to return to the bosom of your ancient mother the Catholic Church! And what alleviation would it be to my sufferings, in the dungeons of eternal misery, to have made you my partner in them!

Neither is it, my dear Sir, from any apprehension that the arguments of my Reverend and Right Reverend opponents will unsettle the faith of any one amongst you, or incline you to exchange the peace and conscious security of mind you now enjoy, for your former doubts and fears, that I follow up the present controversy; for it is not by the calumnies or arguments of her opponents that the Catholic Church loses any of her children: the experience of forty years in her service, and an extensive acquaintance with her history, are my warrants for making this

assertion.. No there are other inducements, mentioned by an Apostle,* which have seduced, and must continue to seduce some of them to belie their consciences.+ Nevertheless, as my more dignified opponent, whose rank gives an accidental weight to his words, publishes that "The End of Controversy affords no answer to his Protestant's Catechism," and as his less polished ally has the assurance to charge me with

perverting passages from their meaning, with misquoting, garbling, adopting lying legends &c. ;" and more particularly as a noble ExSecretary of State has reconciled it to his religious feelings, to patronize these with other numerous calumnies, and to recommend them

* 1 John, ii. 16.

+ This is frequently manifested at the death-bed scene of apostate Catholics. No person who renounced his religion, was less suspected of being influenced by worldly motives than the last Lord M*****e, who died at Brussels; yet, when he found himself on his death-bed, he never ceased conjuring his friends, his family, and his servants, to make it known, that the change of religion he had made, proceeded from libertinism of principle and libertinism of practice.— Since The End of Controversy was published, another Right Hon. personage, Lord Dunsany, has returned to the Catholic communion previously to his dissolution; and if a late Duke did not go that whole length, at least he did not die a member of the Church to which he conformed.

The Bishop of St. David's One Word on Dr. Milner's End of Controversy, p. 16.

The Right Hon. Viscount Sidmouth, to whom the Rev. Mr. Grier's book is dedicated.

and their author to the Royal favour, it seems an act of justice, I owe to you and my other friends, and indeed to the public at large, to demonstrate how completely routed, and plunged into the abyss of absurdity and contradiction, the Bishop of St. David's is, on all the leading points of his novel system; and to prove that the Rev. Mr. Grier, so far from substantiating his grievous charges against the writer and his religion, is himself convicted on each one of them. To few persons is the Apostle's reproach more applicable than it is to the Vicar of Temple-bodane: Wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself.*

I remain,

1

Dear Sir,

Yours, &c. in Christ,

J. M. D. D.

*Rom. ii, 1.

LETTER II.

Origin of "The End of Religious Controversy."

DEAR SIR :-You have learnt, from The Address prefixed to the work here mentioned, that the author of it, having been, above twenty years ago, forced into a public debate on religious subjects with a learned Prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, Dr. Sturges, and being prepared to follow up the success which the superiority of his cause gave him, by publishing a work, which would answer its title, namely, THE END OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY, was prevailed upon to abandon his undertaking by the celebrated Dr. Horseley, then Bishop of St. David's, who had laid the author under obligations to him, by twice advocating his cause in Parliament. The work accordingly lay dormant, and was nearly forgotten* till the present Bishop of St. David's published his Protestant's Catechism, and other Anti-Catholic writers published, in great numbers, different

* One of the author's present opponents, the Rev. Mr. Grier, who never speaks with greater confidence than when he speaks of matters with which he is totally unacquainted, asserts that The End of Controversy "lay dormant in the author's study twice the period prescribed by the poet (eighteen years), receiving, each day, such embellishments from his master-hand as might exhibit his portraiture in its most attractive form."-PREFATORY REMARKS, p. iv.

books, pamphlets, and speeches, equally calumnious of the Catholics and their religion, and equally confused and discordant among themselves. In these circumstances, it appeared evident to the author that the only way of obtaining justice from those writers, for his religion, and of reducing them to terms of peace and consistency with each other, was to convince them of the necessity there is of discovering and following the right rule of faith. Destitute of this, we are all at sea without a compass, tossed to and fro with every wave of doctrine: possessed of this, we may keep a steady course, and arrive at the blessed harbour of unanimity and truth.

That Jesus Christ has left us the means of attaining to the truth of his religion, or, in other words, a rule of faith, I assumed as a principle, in which all thinking Christians must agree: the only question then is-which of the three following methods he has appointed for this purpose an individual private inspiration or feeling, such as the Montanists of old pretended to be guided by, and the Quakers and some other modern Dissenters lay claim to at present? Or, secondly, the Holy Scriptures, as each individual may understand them? Or, thirdly, the whole word of God, whether written or unwritten, as preserved and interpreted by the Great Universal Church of all ages and all nations? That the first of these methods is not the ordinary rule