ized guardians of the Church, or some untoward circumstances peculiar to the times, have served to give it such an unwonted impulse.

In briefly adverting to some of the more prominent of those causes, which appear to have encouraged in this country the rapid progress of religious dissension, and to have produced that utter ignorance of the nature and foundation of ecclesiastical authority, which cannot fail to propagate the evil, I apprehend we shall be disposed without hesitation to recognize among the most efficacious, some of our choicest blessings, even those which we are accustomed to regard, and most justly too, as distinguished marks of the Divine favour. The wisdom and goodness of Divine Providence are constantly and conspicuously exerted in bringing permanent good out of temporary and partial evil; whilst man, by that perversion of faculties and wilfulness of purpose, which characterize his fallen nature, seems as regularly engaged in counteracting these gracious interpositions, and deriving for himself evil from good.

It would not be easy to set too high a value on the advantages of the Reformation, on the blessing of being emancipated from the unreasonable usurpation and gross corruptions of the Papal see. But at the same time it is sufficiently manifest, that men have been unable to maintain the balance evenly between the opposite extremes; that the scale of ecclesiastical authority is at least as much depressed now, as it was before exalted; that, exulting in their escape from a "yoke which neither

е

they nor their fathers were able to bear," they formed far too extravagant an idea of that "liberty wherewith Christ has made "them free;" detesting their former thraldom, they spurned at every the least vestige of spiritual subjection; having learned to view with disgust the corrupt practices and superstitious mummeries of Rome, they began to conceive that all was corrupt, and all was superstitious, that could be traced to that polluted channel; until every ceremony, however decent and significant; every posture of devotion, however expres

e Gal. v. 1.

sive of humility and reverence; every garment of worship, however simple and unostentatious, became offensive to their unreasonable prejudices.

The Reformation too, being in point of fact a separation from an established Church, has manifestly operated with many weak minds, incapable of drawing accurate distinctions, as a precedent for any future separation whatever; and forgetting the wide difference between a corrupt Church usurping an authority beyond her sphere, and a reformed Church claiming her just dominion over her natural members, men have too readily conceived themselves justified in adopting every schismatical measure which caprice or fanaticism or party-spirit might suggest to them.

Who again can appreciate too highly the blessings of that glorious system of toleration, which we have so long enjoyed; of the utter extinction amongst us, not only of the form, but even of the spirit of religious persecution; and the liberty which all alike enjoy of professing, without molestation or reproach, whatever tenets they

may have adopted? But to this source also consequences unfavourable to Christian unity may be plainly traced. To the standard of human opinion we are all too prone to look, as the measure of our duty. By the penalties annexed to crimes, we unconsciously perhaps, yet still in a degree which produces no inconsiderable result in our conduct, regulate our ideas of their atrocity; and where the laws of man pronounce no condemnation against us, we too readily conclude that we are guiltless altogether, and are little disposed to prosecute with scrupulous minuteness the ungrateful inquiry, how far this decision is seconded and sanctioned by the laws of God.

pre

Another very manifest cause of the sent contempt of the authority of the Church, is the relaxed and inefficient state of ecclesiastical discipline. In this respect it cannot be disguised that our Reformation was £ incomplete. "There was one thing

f Eight commissioners, among whom Cranmer appears to have taken the lead, were appointed in the reign of Edward VI. to reform the ecclesiastical laws. They completed their work, and delivered it for revision and

yet wanting," said Bishop Burnet, “to complete the Reformation of this Church, "which was, the restoring a primitive dis"cipline against scandalous persons, the "establishing the government of the Church "in ecclesiastical hands, and the taking it "out of lay hands, who have so long pro"faned it, and have exposed the authority of the Church, and of the censures of it,

66

chiefly excommunication, to the contempt of the nation, by which the re" verence due to holy things is in so great

a measure lost, and the dreadfulest of "all censures is now become the most "scorned and despised."

Whether from a horror of the former abuses of ecclesiastical power, or from a natural assimilation to the independent spirit of modern times, or from the unreformed, and by consequence the complicated and

correction to another commission of thirty-two. Unfortunately the death of the king interrupted their progress, and the business has never since been resumed. For an account of this, as well as of the chief heads of the intended laws, see Burnet's History of the Reformation, vol. ii. p. 195-202.

Burnet's Abridgment of the same, p. 369.