present possessor of that See be meant. In that case I should have strong reasons for thinking that the inference which you intend us to draw is altogether groundless; for at a meeting of the friends of Scriptural Education, in Ireland, held at Dublin on the 11th of January last, the following letter was read by the Secretary, the Reverend Thomas Kingston: "SIR, I am obliged to inform you that it will be totally out of my power to attend the Meeting of the Friends of Scriptural Education, which is to be held at the Rotunda to-morrow. It is with much regret that I feel myself unable to do so; as the object of it is one which I view with intense interest. "I remain, Sir, your obedient humble servant, Again, in the expressed opinions of the present Bishop of London, I can discover nothing which, being allowed, would shew that Protestants may blamelessly and even laudably assist in giving facilities for the diffusion of Roman Catholic principles. His Lordship, according to your quotation of his words, remarks that service is to be rendered to religion "not by retaliating mistatements, invectives, and calumnies, or crudely asserting an unqualified right of private judgment, but by referring to primitive antiquity." Few, be asssured Sir, if any, in the Church of England, whose opinions are worthy of attention, will refuse to unite in sentiment with the Bishop of London.Where, let me ask, have any of that description asserted the "unqualified right of private judgment?!" The right of judging for ourselves is, like the right of acting for ourselves, an endowment bestowed upon us by the Author of all good; and although the one right be cognizable by human laws, the other not, yet if we use either of them in an unqualified" manner, that is with ont due regard to the lights of reason and revelation, or to the known will of God, and to the circumstances in which He has placed us, I do not believe that any sound divine of our communion wil, any more than the Bishop of London, contend that we exercise them without guilt. There is always a mean, if we are willing to trace it out, between slavery and licentiousness. There is a great difference, you must admit, between referring to the opinions of those holy men who had immediate, or next to immediate, communication with the Apostles, that they may serve as guides to us in fixing the true sense of Scripture, and referring, as you do, to the traditions of a less carefully discriminated antiquity with a view to set them up as rivals of the Scripture. The former of these is a resource which no judicious and humble Protestant will decline, when he is enquiring what doctrines are contained in Holy Writ, or may be proved thereby. If you still doubt whether the Church of England does make that acknowledgement of the principle that primitive antiquity ought to be consulted, let me refer you to the creeds which she has adopted as summaries and expositors of Scripture. Do not these represent the sentiments of a truly primitive antiquity? and does she not daily refer to them as a test of her principles? And I must be permitted to observe, since you challenge the comparison, that in her exclusive adherence to the earliest models, the Church of England may read a lesson to your's upon the intermixture of comparatively modern forms which the latter has adopted.— From the ancient and orthodox Creed of Nice, which we have followed, and for every article of which the Scripture affords a warrant, you make us to pass, by a violent revulsion to those newly imagined tenets which in the Creed of Pope Pius 4th are, after a most inartificial and unsatisfactory manner, added to the ancient profession. Many times have I sought earnestly, but in vain, to discover a tolerable rea 66 son why those Holy Fathers who assembled to fix a summary of the Christian fath should have omitted from it all those articles which you now make to rest wholly or par tially upon tradition, if they believed, as you do, that tradition and the Scriptures stood upon the same footing of authority. Why, when they had professed that Jesus Christ 66 was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary," should they have neglected to add that the Virgin Mary is to be worshipped? When they introduced "one Catholic and Apostolic Church," why did they not point out one Church distinctly as the mother and mistress of all Churches;" or wherefore with the "remission of sins" did they not unite some mention of indulgences for them? I assure you, Sir, that I ask these questions not with any design of catechising you. I would not be guilty of such incivility. But I write thus in the hope that you, as a sincere enquirer after the truth, may be induced to give a fair hearing to what the Protestant has to object, and to consider these questions, not with an unqualified, but still, with a freer use of your own understanding than you may have hitherto exerted. "Call no man your master upon earth." "Prove all things: hold fast that which is good." Having detained you already perhaps too long, I will only observe that my intention was to point out the real difference, that which lies at the bottom of every other difference, between our respective Churches. Such differences may be deemed very unimportant, nay sometimes highly ridiculous even, by men who pride themselves upon their enlightened and liberal views. Upon these I can have little hope of producing any effect. But they who think seriously of their obligation to obey God rather than man, will not fail to remember that all the corruptions (as wę esteem them) of the pure doctrines of God have arisen from a desertion of his word. To the equalization of tra dition with the Scriptures, we trace the rise, and attribute the maintenance, of those opinions which Protestants adjure the infallibility of your single Church: the suppression of the right of private judgment; the reception of seven Sacraments; the tenet of transubstantiation; the denial of the cup to the laity; the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass; purgatory; prayers for the dead; the invocation of saints; the veneration of relics and images; the power of indulgences; the supremacy of the Pope as Universal Bishop; prayer in an unknown tongue; restrictions upon reading the Scriptures; and the denial of our justification by faith alone. It is easy to maintain, so long as general terms are used, that the difference between us and you is unimportant; but when the consequences of that difference come to be thus stated in detail, it evidently appears to be vital, and, so long as you continue to insist upon your present rule, must be incurable. My opinions upon this subject I should have been satisfied, as heretofore, with maintaining in private, had I not been informed of your public attack upon the principle of the Reformation, and of your application to the Protestant inhabitants of the Colony to favor the religious interests of the Roman Catholics. It became then my duty as a Protestant Minister to tell them plainly that they could not do this without guilt. I do not repeat your not very reverent or becoming parody upon Scriptural language; but in effect you say there is no prohibition against a Protestant subscribing to build a Roman Catholic Chapel. I must differ from you upon this point, and maintain that the whole tenor of the Gospel is opposed to such a proceeding; in that it requires us to have in all our doings, a single eye to the advancement of truth. It is a characteristic of genuine charity that it" rejoiceth in the truth:" in the discovery, and exclusive support and encouragement of it. Carry then as far as you will the maxim that all meh should be permitted without molestation to worship God agreeably to their own consciences, it can never lead to the conclusion for which you are contending; nor justify Protestants in lending active aid to strengthen and extend a system which, if their principles have any meaning, they must regard as the parent of error and opposed to the truth of God, "Let every man," your Scriptures say, "abound in his own sense ;*" let him follow his own way of thinking. But before we allege this maxim to justify our connivance at those sentiments in others from which we ourselves dissent, let us be at least well satisfied that our differences turn upon such harmless scruples alone as the Apostle was referring to. It is a different thing when the dispute goes to affect the foundations of piety itself. Then undoubtedly we should take no step without due consideration of the account which we all must render of our employment of our several talents; when the sole enquiry will be "Hast thou occupied them for my service?” My design in writing thus is, I repeat, to warn my Protestant brethren against submission to the insidious paralyzing influence which has been exerted to persuade them that they are justified in encouraging the Roman Catholic religion, as being but another equally acceptable mode of worshipping the same God. I wish to excite them to reflect whether they have a real, and not merely a nominal, belief; whether the Reformation proceeded upon any distinguishing fundamental principle; and if so, whether it is worth contending for. Why did the Reformers at the cost of their lives refuse to do any act which might be thought to express the slightest acknowledgement or approval of the Church of Rome, but that they were persuaded it had adopted a false Rule of Faith, and believed that in its Rom. XIV. 5. D |