they acknowledge, for true, and at the same time necessary to salvation, that doctrine alone: which, welling out from the fountain of Holy Scripture, has been derived, through the consent of the Ancient Church, as through a channel, down to these present times. Ibid. Epist. 838.

II. Thus rationally and soberly theologises the truly Apostolic Church of England: and those moderns know little either of her Principle or of her Practice, who would expose her to the scoffs of the Romanists, by gratuitously exhibiting her under the false aspect of an advocate for all the wildness and uncertainty of insulated and uninformed Private Judgment; as if she made every man, qualified or unqualified, with examination or without examination, his own prophet and his own church.

Truly, in the hands of such a goodly company of preachers, the City of God would speedily indeed become, a very Babel, a mere City of Confusion!

The exhortation of the English Church to her children may be conceived to run in some such manner as the following.

Qualify yourselves: and then judge, upon the intelligible Principle of adequate Historical Testimony, whether I indeed declare unto you the mind of Scripture. But, without qualification, what can your mere insulated Private Judgment be worth? If you either cannot, or will not, qualify yourselves : your Judgment must, as plain common sense teaches, lie in abeyance. In that case, just as you depend upon your lawyer or your physician, because you have not studied Law or Physic agreeably to the fixed Principles of those sciences; so, because you have not studied Theology agreeably to the fixed Ecclesiastical Principle of that science, must you be even content to depend upon my decisions. Meanwhile, fancy not that I have the slightest wish to hoodwink you or to exact the blind submission demanded by the Romish Priesthood. I simply say: Qualify yourselves, by a diligent study of Primitive Antiquity, to decide what are really the doctrines taught in the Bible; and then, like reasonable beings, exercise your right of Judgment upon Evidence, as to what Scripture does or does not propound for our belief as Articles of Faith.

III. To this effect, I apprehend, speaks the Anglican

Church and, in her language, I certainly cannot discern any absurdity.

1. Unless I greatly mistake, the DIRECT purpose of that Church, in her godly work of self-reformation, was not so much to run counter to the Church of Rome (with which, in truth, as a perfectly independent Church, she had no concern), as to return to the Catholic Church of Primitive Antiquity.

From this purpose, sprang, no doubt, her protest against the Roman Church: nor in the way of cause and effect, could it well be otherwise. But, still, her censure of Rome, however just, was the INCIDENT only: her return to Catholic Antiquity was the Purpose.

Such a Purpose, indeed, even had she wished it, she could not have carried into effect without tacitly censuring the Romish Apostasy: but, nevertheless, she might have carried it into the utmost fulness of effect, without saying a single syllable about the corruptions of Popery.

Hence, if we please, we may call her a Protestant Church as well as a Primitively Reformed Church: but, in the conventional sense which the word Protestant has now acquired, we must never forget, that her Protest is only the INCIDENT, while her Primitive Reform is the PURPOSE.

2. In this peculiarity, if I rightly comprehend her case as it is excellently explained by Jewel and as it was indisputably understood by Casaubon, she stands distinct and apart, both from any other Reformed Church, (save her two independent daughters, the Reformed Episcopal Churches of Scotland and America), and likewise from all the various Sects of scattered Dissidents who dislike and renounce her Communion.

Hence it was, that, in her Liturgy, she systematically retained whatever in the Romish Missal was scriptural and primitive not perceiving any good reason, why she should promiscuously reject alike, the venerable remains of true Catholicism, and the spurious superstructure of hay and stubble piled upon it at a later period by a simulated Catholicism.

And hence, at the same time, it was, that some of her ignorant opponents, whom in her own archaistic language of the day, she would term certain slanderous folk, and who seem to have fancied that true religion consists, rather in the widest

possible departure from every thing that has ever been touched by Rome, than in an appeal to Scripture, the Sole Rule of Faith, as understood from the beginning by Unanimous Antiquity, its best and most legitimate Interpreter; hence it was that some of those opponents triumphantly deemed themselves to have given her a death-stab, when they ludicrously enough denominated her unrivalled Liturgy An ill-numbled Mass-Book.

These somewhat tastless individuals perceived not, that, what they idly imagined her to have done from a lurking wish to revisit the flesh-pots of the spiritual Egypt, she had really done from a fixed System quite irrespective of that same leek-producing country: a System which would equally have been acted upon, had the figurative leeks been produced only within her own independent domain, and had Egypt and all her frogs been for ever overwhelmed and scattered by the mythologic Oceames. Let her PRINCIPLE of reformation, only, be borne in mind: and her PRACTICE will be, at once, perfectly intelligible, and perfectly consistent. She determinately wished, as Causabon speaks, to acknowledge alone that Doctrinal System, which, welling out from the fountain of Holy Scripture, has been derived, down to the present time, through the consent of the Ancient Church as through a channel. And, accordingly, on this precise ground, the same eminent person pronounces her Scheme of Reformation to be the soundest of all the Schemes that were severally adopted in the sixteenth century. It received from him that honourable and glorious character, BECAUSE, within her hallowed walls, along with the devout study of Essential Truth, flourished also the diligent study of Antiquity.

3. Whenever, under the vain upstart plea of insulated and independent and uninformed Private Judgment, the Church of England shall depart from the complexity of her own recognised mode of theologising, Ichabod will be written, in characters of fire, upon her recreant forehead. She will have quitted the path of Cranmer and of Ridley and of Jewel and of our wise Reformers and she will be on the high road to every evil imagination. Like a ship without a rudder, she will be carried about by each wind of doctrine, whatever may be the fashionable humour of the day: and the obvious reason will be, because,

:

in such a supposed case, she has forsaken the stedfastness of Historical Testimony, and has trusted to her own vain and unauthorised hallucinations.

4. Perhaps it might be useful to inquire: whether the plague has not already gone forth among us; whether, in the pride of our high speculations, we are not, even now, in our irreverent dealing with God's Word, too frequently building upon the independent sufficiency of our own unaided powers of interpretation; whether, in the stubborn self-conceit of our own insulated knowledge, we are not, too many of us, among those, whose language is, We are they, and wisdom will die with us: but I forbear; and with real feeling of christian anxiety when I behold the facility with which strange doctrines are disseminated and received among us, leave the consideration of these matters to those whom they may concern. Suffice it to say, that this spirit of arrogant self-sufficiency and inflated self-dependence, in the work of Scriptural Interpretation, is the very spirit of high-vaulting Socinianism and of neologistic Rationalism. The pretence is, An honouring of the Bible: the reality is, An overweening estimate of ourselves.

IV. From what has been said and exhibited, we may now safely lay it down: that, In the settlement of Articles of Faith on the authority of Scripture the only Rule, the PRINCIPLE of the Anglican Church is that of AN APPEAL TO THE RECORDED CONSENT OF PRIMITIVE ANTIQUITY FROM THE VERY BEGINNING.

This CONSENT may be variously recorded, either in the early Creeds, or in the early Apologies, or in the early Liturgies so far as they accord with the early Creeds, or in the concurring statements and unanimous expositions of the early Fathers.

Its character, until broken in upon by innovating heresy or error, is that So far as we can learn from distinct HISTORICAL TESTIMONY, the CONSENT in question has, every where and universally, subsisted from the beginning.

In other words, its character is: that It can justly claim the possession of the QUOD SEMPER, QUOD UBIQUE, QUOD AB OMNIBUS, laid down and demanded, in order to the safe and exclu sive reception of really Catholic Doctrines, by the sagacious Vincent of Lirins.

Thus the PRINCIPLE of the English Church is, in truth, nothing more, than the easy and reasonable and intelligible Principle of HISTORICAL TESTIMONY TO A NAKED FACT.

She calls in the aid of such Ancient Documents as (happily, in sufficient abundance) we possess: not under the aspect of their abstractedly possessing any mysterious right or power of interpreting Scripture; but simply under the aspect of their being WITNESSES to the Scheme of Doctrine, which, by the Primitive Church from the very beginning, was understood to be taught by the Apostles and to be propounded in the Written Word.

For she rightly and solidly judges: that, If, on adequate HISTORICAL TESTIMONY, this NAKED FACT can be ascertained and established, she has thereby reached what may well be deemed a moral impossibility of serious error.

As Tertullian wisely determines, and as Bishop Jewel soundly quotes him to that effect, Those Doctrines which were universally received FROM THE FIRST, cannot but be true: while those Doctrines, which are evidently shewn to have been brought in AT A LATER PERIOD, cannot but be spurious and adulterate.

V. One might really think, that so very plain and obvious a PRINCIPLE, as that of mere HISTORICAL TESTIMONY TO A FACT, could scarcely have been mistaken and misrepresented. Yet, strange to say, it has, again and again, been misapprehended: insomuch that some persons might seem, either physically incapable of understanding it, or through prejudice and perverseness determined to shut their eyes against the very absoluteness of its simplicity.

Hence, I suppose, it is, that so many foolish things have been said, and (the more the pity) written to boot, touching an Appeal to the Consent of the Early Fathers. Perhaps it may throw yet further light upon a matter which, however, might fairly claim to require but very little illustration, if I here notice some of the extraordinary grounds of repudiating an Appeal to Primitive Antiquity, which happen to have come within my own observation.

1. I have somewhere, though I cannot specify the exact place, actually seen a grave attempt to depreciate the value of