self, will easily act that part of
the Publican, 'who smote his breast, and said, God be merciful to me a
sinner'.

Alas! so far from this being the case with ninety nine out of one
hundred in Spain, Italy, Sicily, and Roman Catholic Germany, it is the
Gospel tenets that are the true School doctrine, that is confined to
books and closets of the learned among them.

P. 161.

And the like may be conceived here, since, especially, the idolatry
practised under the obedience of mystical Babylon is rather in false
and will-worship of the true God, and rather commended as profitable
than enjoined as absolutely necessary, and the corruptions there
maintained are rather in a superfluous addition than retraction in any
thing necessary to salvation.

This good man's charity jarring with his love and tender recollections
of Father Paul, Fulgentio, and the Venetian divines, has led him to a
far, far too palliative statement of Roman idolatry. Not what the Pope
has yet ventured to thunder forth from his Anti-Sinai, but what he and
his satellites, the Regulars, enforce to the preclusion of all true
worship, in the actual practice, life-long, of an immense majority in
Spain, Italy, Bavaria, Austria, &c. &c.--this must determine the point.
What they are themselves,--not what they would persuade Protestants is
their essentials or Faith,--this is the main thing.

P. 164.

I answer, under correction of better judgments, they have the ministry
of reconciliation by the communion which is given at their Ordination,
being the same which our Saviour left in his Church:--'whose sins ye
remit, they are remitted, whose sins ye retain, they are retained'.

Could Bishop Bedell believe that the mere will of a priest could have
any effect on the everlasting weal or woe of a Christian! Even to the
immediate disciples and Apostles could the text (if indeed it have
reference to sins in our sense at all,) mean more than this,--Whenever
you discover, by the spirit of knowledge which I will send unto you,
repentance and faith, you shall declare remission of sins; and the sins
shall be remitted;-and where the contrary exists, your declaration of
exclusion from bliss shall be fulfilled? Did Christ say, that true
repentance and actual faith would not save a soul, unless the priest's
verbal remission was superadded?

'In fine.'

If it were in my power I would have this book printed in a convenient
form, and distributed