be of opinion that your principles and practices have tendencies of these descriptions, I absolutely acquit you of any intention, which might authorise any of these charges. I believe, on the contrary, that you are actuated by the best and purest motives, and impute to you only an excess in your anxious desire to recover our common church from a remissness, into which it had confessedly fallenbut an excess tending very directly towards many and important errors, both of practice and of opinion. The very respect, however, with which I, in common with many others, regard you as a sincerely religious man, renders it more imperative, that I should point out those errors, because the example of such a man must otherwise recommend them with a prevailing authority."

In perusing your letter I am, I confess, staggered not a little by your disapprobation of the name protestant, which I have been ever taught to value and to venerate. It is, you say,* negative. But I cannot admit that it is on that account illfitted to characterise the faith of any portion of the christian church, because I see on every side, in all their enormity, the very abuses, in the rejection of which that appellation was originally assumed; and I cannot deem it unimportant, that the appellation should still be retained, as a standing evidence of our continued and undiminished dissent from those abuses. Perhaps, indeed, I might even

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plead in its behalf, that a negative is better fitted than an affirmative appellation, for designating the faith of those who, in separating from the abuses of the church of Rome, wished still to be considered as adhering to the same catholic church of Christ, of which they regard that of Rome as a corrupted member. An affirmative appellation might have been understood to denote a new sect of Christians, as holding a peculiar and appropriate creed, and therefore to imply a separation from the general body; whereas the negative designation, protestant, indicates only a partial disagreement, which may nevertheless be reconcilable to general or catholic unity.

Nor has this obnoxious appellation been actually used to denote any schismatical separation from the church of Rome, for the members of the protestant church of England have never refused to receive into communion those of the church of Rome, whenever they chose to assist in its services, though the corruptions of the latter had rendered it impossible that themselves should participate in the observance of its ritual. The separation, therefore, was but partial, being limited to the necessity, by which it had been occasioned. The members of the church of Rome were regarded by us as erring brethren, with whom we were still anxious to maintain religious communion, so far as it might be practicable without acquiescing in the continuance of abuses, which we had deemed ourselves

bound to reject. Nor has this been a mere effort of christian forbearance, moderating and miti gating the violence of contending churches, but a result springing essentially from the constitution and character of our own, for from the church of Rome, corrupted though it was, we profess to have received the sacred orders of our priesthood, and the commissioned authority of our episcopacy; and we are accordingly ever ready to acknowledge, as already invested with the holy orders of our church, and therefore requiring no new ordination for admission among our clergy, those of the clergy of that church, who have from time to time connected themselves with ours.

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With extreme regret, therefore, have I read, in a periodical publication believed to be now an organ of your association, and actually quoted by yourself as expressing your sentiments, the following passage, occurring indeed, where it might little be expected, in a review of the Republic of Plato. "Can we not trace back," says the reviewer, "our own present crimes and miseries, as a nation, to the hour when first we abandoned the only true standard of external truth by losing sight of a catholic church, as the external witness of an external revelation ?" Do these words, then, indeed, mean, that we should never in any degree have separated ourselves from the church of Rome, because it was the external witness of an external revelation ?

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Were we so bound, as Christians, to continue to participate in a worship which, in our hearts, we abjured as corrupted? Could we possibly have done less than was then done, and yet preserve the purity of our christian principles ? Extreme reformers have heretofore deemed themselves justified in separating from our church, because we had not effected an entire separation from that of Rome; and now it seems that the more zealous members of it look back with sorrow and regret to even our moderate separation, as detaching us from a church, with which it was still our duty to continue a full and entire connexion.

This opinion must be founded on a belief, that the existing church might have been purified from its corruptions, if the reformers had remained in its communion, however repugnant to their own conception of genuine christianity. But how can such a belief be reasonably entertained at this day? The assumed infallibility of the church of Rome must for ever forbid any essential amelioration in its own character, because in the very act of improvement that pretension must be renounced. It has arrogated the attribute of God, and it cannot be amended in any ordinary process of human improvement. In the century preceding the reformation, the necessity of reforming the church had been very generally felt by men not at all disposed to be concerned in a separation, and various efforts were exerted for attaining this desirable object;

but the result served only to demonstrate, that the improvement could not be effected within the church, as it was then constituted. In that century, a council was held first at Pisa, afterwards at Constance, and another subsequently at Basle, for the express purpose of reforming the church from its manifold and gross abuses. Their exertions terminated in utter failure, and the council of Constance has even rendered itself for ever infamous by ratifying the papal ordinance, that faith should not be observed to the prejudice of the church. A church arrogating infallibility may transmit faithfully the creeds and orders of our religion, but must leave its own abuses unamended, so long as it retains its form and character.

You profess, indeed, even while you borrow the language of the very periodical publication which has spoken so hardly of the reformation, to be, at least, "at this moment," well satisfied with "the existing state of things;" but your whole argument directs the mind to a different standard, to be discovered, as you conceive, in the ordinances of another and purer church, according to which you believe that our reformers wished to trace their path. This assumption involves the main question at issue between your association and those members of our church who differ from you, which is simply whether our reformation has indeed

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