and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without
the fact of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme
Being. What I held in 1816, I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864.
Please God, I shall hold it to the end. Even when I was under Dr.
Whately's influence, I had no temptation to be less zealous for the
great dogmas of the faith, and at various times I used to resist such
trains of thought on his part, as seemed to me (rightly or wrongly)
to obscure them. Such was the fundamental principle of the Movement
of 1833.

2. Secondly, I was confident in the truth of a certain definite
religious teaching, based upon this foundation of dogma; viz. that
there was a visible church with sacraments and rites which are the
channels of invisible grace. I thought that this was the doctrine of
Scripture, of the early Church, and of the Anglican Church. Here
again, I have not changed in opinion; I am as certain now on this
point as I was in 1833, and have never ceased to be certain. In 1834
and the following years I put this ecclesiastical doctrine on a
broader basis, after reading Laud, Bramhall, and Stillingfleet and
other Anglican divines on the one hand, and after prosecuting the
study of the Fathers on the other; but the doctrine of 1833 was
strengthened in me, not changed. When I began the Tracts for the
Times I rested the main doctrine, of which I am speaking, upon
Scripture, on St. Ignatius's Epistles, and on the Anglican Prayer
Book. As to the existence of a visible church, I especially argued
out the point from Scripture, in Tract 11, viz. from the Acts of the
Apostles and the Epistles. As to the sacraments and sacramental
rites, I stood on the Prayer Book. I appealed to the Ordination
Service, in which the Bishop says, "Receive the Holy Ghost;" to the
Visitation Service, which teaches confession and absolution; to the
Baptismal Service, in which the Priest speaks of the child after
baptism as regenerate; to the Catechism, in which Sacramental
Communion is receiving "verily the Body and Blood of Christ;" to the
Commination Service, in which we are told to do "works of penance;"
to the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, to the calendar and rubricks,
wherein we find the festivals of the apostles, notice of certain
other saints, and days of fasting and abstinence.

And further, as to the Episcopal system, I founded it upon the
Epistles of St. Ignatius, which inculcated it in various ways. One
passage especially impr