sh tenet; it would
merely prove the Church-system to contain contradictions, and not to
deserve that absolute declaration of its truth, which is demanded of
Church ministers. With little hope of advantage, I yet felt it a duty
to consult many of the Evangelical clergymen whom I knew, and to ask
how _they_ reconciled the Baptismal Service to their consciences.
I found (if I remember) three separate theories among them,--all
evidently mere shifts invented to avoid the disagreeable necessity of
resigning their functions. Not one of these good people seemed to have
the most remote idea that it was their duty to investigate the meaning
of the formulary with the same unbiassed simplicity as if it belonged
to the Gallican Church. They did not seek to know what it was written
to mean, nor what sense it must carry to every simpleminded hearer;
but they solely asked, how they could manage to assign to it a sense
not wholly irreconcilable with their own doctrines and preaching. This
was too obviously hollow. The last gentleman whom I consulted, was the
rector of a parish, who from week to week baptized children with the
prescribed formula: but to my amazement, he told me that _he_ did not
like the Service, and did not approve of Infant Baptism; to both of
which things he submitted, solely because, as an inferior minister of
the Church, it was his duty to obey established authority! The case
was desperate. But I may here add, that this clergyman, within a few
years from that time, redeemed his freedom and his conscience by the
painful ordeal of abandoning his position and his flock, against the
remonstrances of his wife, to the annoyance of his friends, and with a
young family about him.

Let no reader accept the preceding paragraph as my testimony that the
Evangelical clergy are less simpleminded and less honourable in their
subscriptions than the High Church. I do not say, and I do not believe
this. _All_ who subscribe, labour under a common difficulty, in having
to give an absolute assent to formulas that were made by a compromise
and are not homogeneous in character. To the High Churchman, the
_Articles_ are a difficulty; to the Low Churchman, various parts of
the _Liturgy_. All have to do violence to some portion of the
system; and considering at how early an age they are entrapped into
subscription, they all deserve our sincere sympathy and very ample
allowance, as long as they are pleading for the rights of conscience:
only