INTRODUCTION. SOME years have elapsed since the publication of the second volume of my "Early Years and Late Reflections," and I have continued to be pleasingly occupied in writing, when I should otherwise have been slumbering, till I have again got together more than enough manuscript to fill another volume. Coleridge, who, in his early years, often worked for bread, and much against the grain, once said to me, that "the conception of a poem was very pleasurable, but that the throes of parturition were apt to be much the reverse." Now I can truly say, without questioning Coleridge's correctness, that I have had quite as much pleasure in committing my thoughts to paper, currente calamo, as I have had in their conception; and that the task of composition has been further lightened by my habitually communing with the works of more learned and brighter men than myself, and with the recorded thoughts of departed worthies; which I account the only real communion with de parted spirits on this side the grave, and until the last trump shall summon all mankind to appear before the judgment seat of Christ. Being now on the verge of four score years, I feel more perhaps than I did twenty years ago the responsibility of my every word, thought, and deed; and I can confidently declare that no selfish consideration whatever could have induced me to overlook the danger of protruding my opinions on others, if my own conscience had not accorded them a favourable verdict. I do not profess to be a lecturer; my highest ambition is to call the attention, not of the inconsiderate merely, but of the considerate likewise, to matters of the highest importance; and what I deem to be more especially such, will be seen in the present volume. When we speak of unity as appertaining to the Church, we are bound to have regard, not to a Church over which the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or any other spiritual or temporal potentate may be set, but to that universal Church of which Christ is the Head, and which has been made known to us in the Scriptures by Christ Himself and His Apostles. Of this Church, the Church of this land is a branch; and estimated according to the standard of her ritual set forth in her Prayer Book, she justifies the compliment awarded her by Grotius, of being chief among the Reformed Churches. How happens it, then, that Dissent is so preva lent? I cannot allow that it is to be attributed so entirely, as some suppose, to the pride or weakness of minds impatient of restraint, or puffed up with their own conceits; or to the want of churches and church accommodation ;-my belief is, that the teaching of our Church in some of her Articles, and, more especially in one of her Creeds, is repulsive, and calculated to lead her members from the wholesome pastures of the Apostolic Church into a mediæval battle-field, where the glare of angry militants is strangely and wofully contrasted with the mild beams of the everlasting Gospel, which irradiate those portions of our Prayer Book which are derived from Apostolic times. The Prayer Book of a National Church should be conversant with nothing more than Christian worship, and the vital doctrines of revealed religion-the creation of man; the fall of man, and his redemption through Christ; and the few and simple ordinances in connection herewith. Of these the chief, and almost the only essential, are the two Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and that connecting bond of all, the observance of a seventh day of rest. The doctrine of the Trinity is to the Bible what the sun is to the natural world; but when we make a merely dogmatic Creed the shiboleth of our Church, and, in the vain endeavour to meet besetting heresies, attempt to unfold a mystery far above human comprehension, we not only narrow her portals, but oppress her appointed guardians and ministers by the weight and revolting incongruity of their defensive armour. But I must stop here for the present. I have much more in manuscript; for which I find that the small space allotted to the Appendix affords very inadequate room: so I am necessarily driven upon a fourth volume, which, if I am spared yet a little while, shall complete the circuit of "My Early Years and Late Reflections." |
