colour, and speaks generally with a stammering tongue, and well it may; for with such an open confession who can doubt that its true place is one of external opposition to the English Church, alongside the various forms of Puritan regimen that divide the profession to Christianity in our land, and which all have once distinctly and intelligibly disavowed her and her formularies?

If this representation of the school opposed to the Tractarian be correct, it is certain that to support its pretence to compatibility with the English Church it must maintain the Reformation to have been the entire destruction of the old system, which we see enshrined in the writings of Churchmen as a part of Christianity for eighteen hundred years. And here is the test. Will Mr. Smith deny that this repudiated theory of the Catholic Church is enshrined in the writings of all the (to use the constant phraseology of the Homilies) "most ancient, learned, and godly doctors of the Church?" Mr. Smith will not, cannot deny it, nor will we trifle so much as to adduce evidence against the assumption that he would. From S. Ignatius downwards what marks in the pages of the Fathers the Catholic Church more than the divinely exclusive polity of its continuous organization? "We believe," says Jewel, speaking confidently for the Church of England,-will any ultraProtestant reject his testimony or his authority?" we believe that as S. Jerome saith, 'all Bishops, wheresoever they are settled, whether it be at Rome or Eugubium, at Constantinople or Rhegium, they are of equal worth and of the same priesthood.' And as S. Cyprian saith, there is but one episcopacy, and each of them hath a perfect and entire share of it."" For indeed the matter rests here on the question of the divine right of Bishops, that is, of the ministry. If the threefold ministry be a divine institution, it must be instituted to last till abrogated by the authority that did institute it; and if it be instituted by divine appointment as an accident or concomitant of the Church, that can alone be known as the Church which possesses this concomitant, or else the Divine Institution is open to our acceptance or rejection as we please, that is, the divine authority is to us of no authority, which is a contradiction, and we are at liberty to construct as many different Churches as caprice may fancy or self-indulgence may desire. But what is more plainly taken for granted throughout the whole Prayer Book and documents of the Church of England than this divinely ordered ministry, that is, "speciality of constitution?" Could our ordinal be constructed for use in giving legal mission to a mere staff of officials which human wisdom appointed and human convenience could alter or discard? GOD is supplicated as having appointed three orders of ministry in His Church. The power to execute any of them is given in the name of the Blessed Trinity; all the overwhelming importance is attached to them as emanating directly and in each individual case from God Himself. Now does this imply no "speciality" in the external constitution of the

Church? Must not the possession of this divine ministry be a "special" mark of the divine community? And if the assertion of a divine appointment of the ministry is tantamount to the assertion of its presence as a mark of the true Church, equally is this assertion the inclusion of "Apostolical Succession" as a parallel characteristic. For how else is the ministry to be propagated? How else to be preserved and ratified, if special and repeated interposition in visible process from above be not the rule of CHRIST'S kingdom? Hereditary succession can be the only substitute for this. A divinely appointed ministry to continue in the world supposes this succession. Christianity itself is succession. It is a chain composed of regularly descended links, continued from one age and one Christian to another. Baptism which admits into the Church, can be administered only by the baptized, as ordination by the ordained. The Christian Church is a company separated from the body of the heathen world and propagated in itself by succession, not by the recurring visible interposition of heaven. The Christian ministry is a company separated from the body of the laity by ordination, and propagated in itself by succession, not by the visible interposition of heaven. To raise perplexities about the integrity of the priestly descent is vain, if the expression of unsimulated misgiving, and dishonest, if to serve a purpose, just as to busy ourselves in speculations upon the possibility of heathen intrusion into the line of the baptized, or in many cases the nonoccurrence of Baptism at all. To imagine exceptions is not necessary, as to reason upon them to effects is not practicable. The rule is ours, so far as its administration is concerned, but it is due to a merciful Providence that the interruptions of infirmity and the variations of accident are beyond our province as much as they are beyond our capability.

Mr. Smith draws two lines between the two religious systems, dividing the possession of the Christian world. One maintains a specially constituted Church, a threefold ministry, lineally descended link by link from the Apostles, as the normal condition of Christianity. The other casts off all ancestral connection, and claim of precedent, arrogates the mere "literature" of Christianity, and proposes to form associated bodies of theorizers or believers (which you will), whose claim to be Christians consists in adherence to this "literature," and belief in certain doctrines collected therefrom. The Church of England he would have us take for one of the latter bodies, the Reformers being its "founders," and the Church of Rome the complete and only developement of the former. On this assumption, as we have noted, the Church of England must have disavowed at the Reformation inherence in the ancient system of things. She must have renounced deference to traditional authority, or appeals to a pre-existent Catholicity. She cannot have professed herself to be the old Church, but a completely new and independent construction. What we wish to make plain is this,

how in the acknowledgment of this outrageous caricature, evangelicalism, being one of these religious systems, shuts itself out from being a part of the Church of England. Deference to the ancient Church, protests of dependence upon her, are in the English Church no less than propulsions and expressions of instinct: that deference is so bred into her habit, that to take it away you must destroy her; it is the pulsation of her life, a spring of the machinery, which if you excide all is deranged, paralyzed, in fact annihilated, perverted to an experiment wholly foreign to her being and constitution. We find in every document, of more authority and significance or of less, everywhere where the slightest expression as well as the greatest can be gathered of her will and intention; a constant reference to a former state of ecclesiastical developement, with which she is intimately connected, and of which she assumes to be a propagated limb. We cannot but be all conscious that through and in her we are entered into relations, which our immediate connection with her does not bound, and which are correlative with a certain comprehension of time and space expressed in our belief in one Catholic Apostolic Church. What are these relations? In the evangelical theory no room is left to assign any; the idea of a visible organization, "a specially constituted" body, transmitted from the Apostles' days, is abscinded, and the hereditary body is left to be claimed by the subjects of " S. Peter's see" alone. But the very acceptance of the creeds with their ancient sense by the English Church is a link of her formal attachment to the ancient Catholic system. As clearly as there is a recognized nomenclature in logic or in metaphysics, so it is unnecessary to observe must there be a settled nomenclature in theology, the most accurate science of all. The English Church then has confirmed as her own in accepting the creeds, the ancient idea of the Catholic Church. We find her indeed appealing to the first general councils for the test of heresy and the confirmation of truth, referring to the consent and "judgment" of the ancient Church, and even adopting the very canon of Vincentius, which shuts the door for ever to all ultra-protestant replications.

Are we not to receive her as represented by herself? Are we not to take her as represented by the Reformers? Are we not to acknowledge her as continually and undeniably opened out to us in the doctrinal pages of all succeeding divines? What meant she by forbidding her clergy to teach anything to be religiously believed, "unless it be consonant to the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments and that which the Catholic Fathers and Ancient Bishops have gathered out of that very doctrine ?" What means the constant adduction of the example of the ancient Catholic Church as the vindication of her decrees? What mean her pertinacious asseverations that the great movement of the sixteenth century was in her, the purification of corrupted Catholicity after the model of the ancient system? It is vain that we should revive

a series of considerations already hackneyed ad nauseam. But we say that "evangelicalism," to prove its right to be considered a characteristic of the Church of England, must show that these things are absolutely nothing. And are they nothing? How agrees with them the theory which calls upon us to actually neutralize the ancient Church, to renounce our belief in her as a "" specially constituted" body, and disregard as meaningless all her professions of adherence and deference, strewed thick and threefold through Prayer Book, Homilies, and Canons? Which reverses her own description of herself and imposes upon her the character of a production of the sixteenth century, isolated, independent, selfcreated, and self-sustained? It cannot, cannot be, and the pretence is, in the stern phraseology of truth, an imposture. An imposture surely, when we have seen that even according to Jewel, her own definition of the Church's constitution is that very "special" one of S. Cyprian himself: "Episcopatus unus est, cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur:" of which one episcopacy if she professes to hold a branch, Tractarianism, to which Mr. Smith's remarks are directed, is certainly, and that in what he thinks its objectionable point, a revival of an elementary principle in her organization.

The point therefore to which the matter resolves itself is this. "Tractarianism" and "Evangelicalism," as rivals for the right of exclusive existence in the Church of England, may be viewed as the assertion and negation of a certain ecclesiastical theory. Question. Is this the theory of the English Church-nothing can be plainer; as thus indeed this theory, it will at all events be admitted, is patent in the history of the primitive Church-not as the opinionative production of a separate theology, but as an essential and inseparable condition and system, put forward as an integral part of the Gospel kingdom, so that whoever accepts generally and as a whole the system of the early Church, does, though if we say without being pledged to certain incidentalities then existing, give in his adherence to this fundamental truth. But the Church of England, it is as notorious, does profess a most enlarged acceptance of the ancient theory: whatever was universally acknowledged as part of the ancient system, coming from GOD, she most faithfully accepts as true, putting herself forward in short, as a branch of the Church Catholic of all times and places, working out the divinely organized idea of the Christian kingdom, within the proper limits of its "obedience." The conclusion then is, that the Church of England becomes involved in the opprobrium of Tractarianism, and that "Evangelicalism" is an anti-Anglican demonstration and conspiracy.

As regards the subject of a tendency to secession, doubtless the theory of a new Church founded in the sixteenth century on the entire subversion and putting aside of the old system, and actually based by its founders on an antagonism to the Church of Rome, involves the most definite distinction and the broadest barrier between the two; and that on the other hand, the admission of the Catholic

theory of the Church, as an element in the question, shows the shades of difference less marked, and the points of sympathy more numerous, running hither and thither the one into the other, rendering indispensable a more acute discrimination, and a more instructed judgment. The settled conviction that Rome in the entirety of her religious system is Antichrist, no doubt finally disposes of the question, and merges all the particular points of controversy under one view of indiscriminate condemnation. But then, although the Protestant may look upon this blunt definition, as highly favourable to the particular side of truth, to which Protestantism as Protestantism addresses itself, it is by no means a consequence, that the definition is itself true. From the theory enunciated in this pamphlet, it follows, that our opposition is to the Church of Rome as a Church, not to a certain set of doctrines as a super-induction, upon her normal system;-that the difference between the Church of England and her, is not that the former is purer, and the legitimate heir, and she more corrupt, and an intruder, but that Rome claims to be a part, and the present representative of the ancient Catholic system, and the Church of England claims complete isolation, and denies the existence of any such system in Christianity. Mr. Smith complains that Tractarianism admits Rome to be a fellow member with the Church of England of the Church Catholic. But in his theory it would be an equal reproach to speak of the Episcopal Churches of Scotland or America as members of the same sisterhood. But then, where did Mr. Smith learn that the Reformation of the Church of England consisted in a repudiation of the Church of Rome considered as built on this as the fundamental idea of Christianity? On the contrary, while disclaiming only the additions which Rome has introduced, she is most painfully anxious to dissipate the calumny, that it was her intention to disavow connection with the ancient organized Church, or, at least if Rome can demonstrate her inherence in that ancient organization, even with Rome. But with Mr. Smith and "Evangelicalism," the possibility of the proof of this inherence being established is no bar to absolute reprobation of Rome, for the very fact that Rome advances such a theory of Catholicity at once defines the opposition, and marks the difference between Reformed and Unreformed. We need not again remark, how outrageous a caricature of the Church of England is this, and how if Tractarianism displays its tendency to secession in the characteristic here proscribed, it is a but too faithful manifestation that the Church of England herself is in the first principle of her constitution a constant facilis descensus to Rome.

Now, in this is apparent how truly external to the Church of England is the point of view from which Evangelicalism contemplates her; how it symbolizes with professed Dissenters, in its conception of what really prove to be her own principles. We know how the nature of our judgment on the relation of any