ten
to the thought of your being joined by individuals among us."

2. "April 26, 1841. My only anxiety is lest your branch of the Church
should not meet us by those reforms which surely are _necessary_. It
never could be, that so large a portion of Christendom should have
split off from the communion of Rome, and kept up a protest for 300
years for nothing. I think I never shall believe that so much piety
and earnestness would be found among Protestants, if there were
not some very grave errors on the side of Rome. To suppose the
contrary is most unreal, and violates all one's notions of moral
probabilities. All aberrations are founded on, and have their life
in, some truth or other--and Protestantism, so widely spread and so
long enduring, must have in it, and must be witness for, a great
truth or much truth. That I am an advocate for Protestantism, you
cannot suppose--but I am forced into a _Via Media_, short of Rome, as
it is at present."

3. "May 5, 1841. While I most sincerely hold that there is in the
Roman Church a traditionary system which is not necessarily connected
with her essential formularies, yet, were I ever so much to change my
mind on this point, this would not tend to bring me from my present
position, providentially appointed in the English Church. That
your communion was unassailable, would not prove that mine was
indefensible. Nor would it at all affect the sense in which I receive
our Articles; they would still speak against certain definite errors,
though you had reformed them.

"I say this lest any lurking suspicion should be left in the mind of
your friends that persons who think with me are likely, by the growth
of their present views, to find it imperative on them to pass over to
your communion. Allow me to state strongly, that if you have any such
thoughts, and proceed to act upon them, your friends will be
committing a fatal mistake. We have (I trust) the principle and
temper of obedience too intimately wrought into us to allow of our
separating ourselves from our ecclesiastical superiors because in
many points we may sympathise with others. We have too great a horror
of the principle of private judgment to trust it in so immense a
matter as that of changing from one communion to another. We may be
cast out of our communion, or it may decree heresy to be truth--you
shall say whether such contingencies are likely; but I do not see
other conceivable causes of our leaving the Church in whi