rgo the loss, as
time goes on, of some whom they would least like to be lost to our
Church. If private judgment can be exercised on any point, it is on a
matter of the senses; now our eyes and our ears are filled with the
abuse poured out by members of our Church on her sister Churches in
foreign lands. It is not that their corrupt practices are gravely and
tenderly pointed out, as may be done by men who feel themselves also to
be sinful and ignorant, and know that they have their own great
imperfections, which their brethren abroad have not,--but we are apt not
to acknowledge them as brethren at all; we treat them in an arrogant
John Bull way, as mere Frenchmen, or Spaniards, or Austrians, not as
Christians. We act as if we could do without brethren; as if our having
brethren all over the world were not the very tenure on which we are
Christians at all; as if we did not cease to be Christians, if at any
time we ceased to have brethren. Or again, when our thoughts turn to the
East, instead of recollecting that there are sister Churches there, we
leave it to the Russians to take care of the Greeks, and to the French
to take care of the Romans and we content ourselves with erecting a
Protestant Church at Jerusalem, or with helping the Jews to rebuild
their temple there, or with becoming the august protectors of
Nestorians, Monophysites, and all the heretics we can hear of, or with
forming a league with the Mussulman against Greeks and Romans together.
Can any one doubt that the British power is not considered a Church
power by any country whatever into which it comes? and if so, is it
possible that the English Church, which is so closely connected with
that power, can be said in any true sense to exert a Catholic influence,
or to deserve the Catholic name? How can any Church be called Catholic,
which does not act beyond its own territory? and when did the rulers of
the English Church ever move one step beyond the precincts, or without
the leave, of the imperial power?

"pudet haec opprobria nobis
Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli."

There is indeed no denying them; and if certain persons are annoyed at
the confession, as if we were thereby putting weapons into our enemies'
hands, let them be annoyed more by the fact, and let them alter the
fact, and, they may take our word for it, the confession will cease of
itself. The world does not feel the fact the less for its not being
confessed; it _is_ f