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they allow these prayers to be orthodox? What then becomes of the allegation, that their prayers to the Virgin and the saints are merely intercessory? Do they deny them to be orthodox? What then becomes of St. Vincent's golden rule and the infallible sense of the Catholic Church?

3. But it may be urged by a Romanist, that we Protestants of the Church of England are guilty of a manifest inconsistency: for, while we declare the Bible to be the SOLE rule of faith, we nevertheless require subscription to those mere human and confessedly fallible expositions of it, the Articles and the Homilies.

It will, I presume, be granted, that, if men congregate together for any given purpose, they must adopt by mutual agreement certain rules or laws by which to shape their sentiments and to regulate their conduct. Without such a compact, it is perfectly clear that they would constitute an absolute Babel : without such a compact, they could no more form an harmonious body politic, than the builders of the tower when their language was miraculously confounded.

On this obvious principle, if I mistake not, the Articles and Homilies of the English Church were framed and composed. She had thrown off the

but unfortunately, as Bp. Walmesley says, "the Catholic "Church speaks but once, and her decree is irrevocable." The strange dogma of Infallibility is as a mill-stone round the necks of the Romanists: it renders every acknowledgment of error, either in doctrine or in practice, impossible.

usurped

usurped authority of the Roman bishop: and she had openly declared of those in communion with him, that she had come out from among them that she might not be a partaker of their sins and that she might not receive of their plagues *. Under such circumstances, most strange and inconsistent would have been her conduct, had she not given a distinct exposition of her own religious sentiments; that so it might lucidly appear to the whole world, wherein and on what grounds she differed from those whom she had left. But this were of small emolument in the internal arrangement of her discipline, if she did not carefully learn from her ecclesiastical children, previous to her admitting them to minister in her communion, whether their views of revealed religion as deduced from the Bible were the same as her own: for, without such a precaution, every heresy, which had disturbed and corrupted the Catholic Church from the very days of the Apostles, might be confidently preached within her pale; various doctrines and opinions, not in themselves absolutely damnable and heretical, but which rest upon no sure and certain warrant of Holy Scripture, might be impertinently advanced and unwisely insisted upon by insulated individuals; and thus, while discord and confusion raged within her walls, she might well be exposed to the scorn and derision of her adversaries as a rude and indigested and turbulent chaos.

*Rev. xviii. 4.

Hence

Hence originated the necessity of demanding from her clergy a formal subscription to her own avowed sentiments, as expressed in her Articles and her Homilies and her Liturgy: her very existence as a body politic, just as the very existence of any other body politic, plainly and wholly depended upon it.

But what then? Does she profess to be infallible in her exposition of Scripture? Does she presumpe tuously anathematize all who differ from her in the least particular, as manifest and convicted heretics? Does she unchurch all Christian societies, which have been led to differ from her on some points whether of doctrine or of practice? Does she deny to those other Churches the same right of searching the Scriptures and of promulgating for their own members their respective confessions of faith and schemes of discipline, which she justly claims for herself?

Nothing of the sort. This is indeed the principle and practice of the pretended Catholic Church of Rome, but it is neither the principle nor the practice of the national Church of England; however, in the evil days of the arbitrary Stuarts, some bigoted and mistaken men may have thought fit to misrepresent her. She asserts, it is true, that the Church has authority in controversies of faith: but let us hear her explain her own assertion; and nothing can be more reasonable and modest. What then is this authority, which she claims for the Church? Is it an infallible authority, from which there lies no appeal? Is it a final authority, to which

we

we are required to subject all that we either have written or may write; such an authority in short, as that to which Mr. Rutter professes to bow with an unmanly sacrifice of every intellectual power? Quite the reverse. The authority in question is not made to rest upon certain vague traditions, which, like those of the old Pharisees, make void the Bible: but it is expressly declared to be limited and confined and hedged in by Holy Scripture. "It is not lawful "for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary "to God's word written: neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to "another." Accordingly, in strict agreement with this rational principle, which is evidently propounded by way of accounting for the conduct of the English Church in setting forth her Articles authoritatively so far as her own members are concerned: in strict agreement with this rational principle, while she rightly declares, that "Holy Scripture containeth "all things necessary to salvation," she further declares almost at the very commencement of her Articles, that "whatsoever is not read therein, nor

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may be proved thereby, is not to be required of "any man, that it should be believed as an article "of the faith or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." Hence, still on the same principle, she rightly teaches, that "general councils both may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things per"taining unto God: wherefore things, ordained by "them as necessary to salvation, have neither "strength

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"strength nor authority, unless it may be declared "that they are taken out of Holy Scripture *."

Thus moderate are her views, as to the authority of the Church in matters of doctrine; she considers her decisions as binding only upon those, who remain in communion with her: nor are they less moderate, when she is allowed to speak for herself, in what regards discipline and ecclesiastical polity.

She evinces her preference of episcopacy indeed, by adopting it as the form of her own internal government, and those of her members, who have at all examined into the question, have no hesitation in expressing their full conviction, derived from the careful perusal of history, that episcopacy is the primitive and apostolic model: but, since it is doubtless possible that our Lord's apostles may have ordained many things for the sake of decency and order which were most suitable to the Church of their day, while yet they may not so have ordained them as to bind them upon all ages in the way of divine and perpetual obligation; the English Church very wisely does not take upon herself to determine

* Art. vi, xx, xxi.

This opinion, whether accurate or inaccurate, is maintained with no small learning and dexterity by Bp. Stillingfleet in his Irenicum: but he afterwards, I believe, retracted it. The epistles of Ignatius, which are received as genuine, oppose most vehemently: but even these epistles are allowed to contain some spurious passages. The question therefore is, which passages are spurious, and which are authentic. Of this knotty point I will not undertake the decision,

the