AN ATTEMPT

ΤΟ

ILLUSTRATE THE CONNECTION

BETWEEN

THE CATECHISM AND ARTICLES

OF

THE CHURCH.

IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND.

OXFORD,

JOHN HENRY PARKER:

J. G. AND F. RIVINGTON, LONDON.

1839.

667-

The following Letter was originally addressed to an intimate friend; it is now published, because, among many valuable works on the subject, the writer could find no short treatise which embodied this particular line of argu

ment.

MY DEAR

I WILL .endeavour to explain to you on paper what I meant by saying, that I conceived the Catechism to furnish a key for the right interpretation of a division of the Articles, that, namely, from the Ninth to the Seventeenth.

Frequent and long quotations from what we know so well as the text of the Catechism and Articles must necessarily appear tedious, but are, I think, required to set before you my meaning.

It will probably make what I have to say clearer, if I state at once, that I conceive that, what the early answers in the Catechism set forth, as the order of God's providence, in calling, by Baptism, into a state of salvation in His Church, is the same as is laid down in more technical language in the XVIIth Article, and (in its several portions, or in connection with truths flowing from it) in the Articles from the IXth to the XVIth.

Now I do not deny, that separate statements in the Catechism may possibly admit of interpretations other than what I claim for them; but I think we should remember, that, however a possible interpretation of some one out of many passages may be true, even where another is more probable or natural; yet that there exists a limit to all this, and that, as passages on a subject multiply, the probable and natural interpretation of each, if agreeing, becomes the almost necessarily true

B