where only, for the most part, appeal to it is needed. Ask for the Church in England, and we know which way people will point. In Greek countries, the Roman Church will be popularly described, I suppose, as the Latin Church. These two facts go a good way against the application of St. Augustine's argument, to the ordinary use of the word Catholic among Protestants.

Indeed, in the present unhappy state of Christendom, one can scarce imagine a person changing his Communion merely for the sake of the old visible unity, without more or less of haunting scruple and distrust of his own choice: and where will he be then? He will still, as before, run the risk of having to fall back on the excuse of invincible ignorance for involuntary schism: but the position will now be one of his own choosing, and who can say how much difference that may make in it to the All-seeing Eye?

It would be another matter, if our faith in the Church of England caused us to anathematize other Churches, or to declare them in any sense aliens. Such a spirit, universal among us, would indeed be a sad token of something too like the old Novatianism or Donatism: God grant it may never prevail! But if it should, besides silencing our old divines, the Prayer Book must be made another book than it is: for at present it implies throughout, and asserts in its Preface to the Ordination Services, that we hold of antiquity through

the medieval times: and therefore that Romans and Greeks, abiding as they were in those times, are still Catholics, and we in true communion with them; though the visible use of that communion (which God restore!) be in His just judgment suspended for a while.

Roman Catholic controversialists are fond of comparing this view with that of the more moderate Donatists, and of inferring that we are liable to St. Augustine's censures on them. They do not consider, (among other differences,) what a large portion of the "orbis terrarum," for many many generations past, we should have to anathematize on our own private judgment: whereas Donatism in St. Augustine's time was scarce a hundred years old, and reached but to a handful of men in a single province. And I suppose it would be true to say, that whenever Roman Catholics will prove the supremacy of the Pope with any thing like the same mass of authority and argument, as that by which St. Augustine proved the necessary imperfection of the visible Church, we will at once submit ourselves to him. Until then, the cases cannot be parallel.

This suggests the further remark, that our debates with the Roman Catholics turn more on matters of fact and detail, than on principles.

For example: we are no more minded than they, to set up the private judgment of an individual or a province, against that of the Church universal.

Only we require to be satisfied, before we affirm that the present Roman obedience is the whole Church.

Our minds are as open, we hope, as theirs, to the fearful mystery of post-baptismal sin: but we dare not take on ourselves to pronounce it necessary to salvation, that a person should receive the precise statements of the Roman Schools concerning Purgatory.

We receive as a principle every statement of Scripture and of the early undivided Church, on the Presence of our Lord in the Holy Eucharist : we hesitate in limiting those statements, on peril of men's souls, to that one only manner of which is called Transubstantiation.

presence

We venerate the Blessed Virgin as most truly the Mother of God: and we know of no honour vouchsafed to any creature, at all comparable to that which she received at our Lord's Incarnation. Neither do we take on ourselves to limit the prerogatives, which the King of Saints may have assigned to those whom He delights to honour. But we dare not of our own authority decide that our Church has forfeited her being as a Church, by her censure passed on the particular system of mediation and tutelage which the Roman Church has countenanced'.

This example is not inserted without some painful hesitation. For if indeed the Church of Rome had authoritatively sanctioned the view, lately, alas! understood to have been put forth in her

And so of other things: we feel all along that we have not set out from the beginning in opposite directions, nor do our courses tend continually to wider separation. It is no such violent imagination, to fancy ourselves re-united as of old, without any sacrifice of principle on either side. on either side. I say, of principle: because undoubtedly certain statements of fact, and applications of principle, would have to be waived or withdrawn.

Now, what is the result of such a feeling as this, on a modest and thoughtful mind? Plainly to render a man more easily contented with his place; more willing to hope and wait with patience, as having a right to reckon certainly upon a great

behalf: the substance of which view appears to be, That some one among creatures must be preeminent above the rest; that this can be no other than the Mother of God; and therefore that as long as we account her less than God, we cannot possibly idolize her in a bad sense:-if this were part of the recognised Roman Creed, then by adhering to that Creed we should not only be acknowledging new facts, but also adopting new principles: and, so far, the argument in the text would not apply. Only in proportion to the strange and startling nature of those principles, and the right which they assume in us, a priori, of judging what must or must not take place in the world out of sight, it is plain that we should naturally look for very distinct and unanswerable proof. Amounting as they really would to an additional dispensation, over and above those of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, we might without presumption hope for the same kind of evidence, as was vouchsafed when the Gospel and the Church were revealed. But the comfort is, these antecedent grounds of the worship in question are not yet put forth by authority; and most devoutly is it to be wished, that they never may be so: for they would set all our relations on a new footing, more hopeless, humanly speaking, than ever.

deal of unconscious sympathy, and virtual communion in Divine offices, on the part of those even who esteem themselves most alienated from him. But suppose the same person once made aware, that in order to stay where he is, he must contradict something which has been held as an axiom by the mass of believers from time immemorial;some rule, so to call it, of the common law of the Christian kingdom;-this is surely another case altogether. The providential call on such an one to consider where he is, and why, becomes much more direct; and the possible sacrifice, if as great or greater, yet more evidently worth making.

Consider next, how this bears on the obvious position of the several communities of Christians, apart from Rome, from Greece, and from England. The Donatists and Novatians of old, (to say nothing of grosser heresies,) avowedly denied the commission of the Church from the beginning, to remit or retain all sins. The Eastern Separatists, whether Nestorians or Jacobites, must feel that if they are right, the great visible Body of Christ has in all times been either undecided or wrong, on no less a point than the reality of our Lord's Incarnation. Again, (to omit for the present all other points,) the Lutheran and Reformed Continental Schools are themselves not slow to acknowledge, that their doctrine of Justification, though traceable, as they say, through considerable portions of Church history, has never been dominant, never universally enforced. These