"Has not all our misery, as a Church, arisen from people being afraid to
look difficulties in the face? They have palliated acts, when they
should have denounced them. There is that good fellow, Worcester Palmer,
can whitewash the Ecclesiastical Commission and the Jerusalem Bishopric.
And what is the consequence? that our Church has, through centuries,
ever been sinking lower and lower, till good part of its pretensions and
professions is a mere sham, though it be a duty to make the best of what
we have received. Yet, though bound to make the best of other men's
shams, let us not incur any of our own. The truest friends of our Church
are they, who say boldly when her rulers are going wrong, and the
consequences; and (to speak catachrestically) _they_ are most likely to
die in the Church, who are, under these black circumstances, most
prepared to leave it.

"And I will add, that, considering the traces of God's grace which
surround us, I am very sanguine, or rather confident, (if it is right so
to speak,) that our prayers and our alms will come up as a memorial
before God, and that all this miserable confusion tends to good.

"Let us not then be anxious, and anticipate differences in prospect,
when we agree in the present.

"P.S. I think when friends" [i.e. the extreme party] "get over their
first unsettlement of mind and consequent vague apprehensions, which the
new attitude of the Bishops, and our feelings upon it, have brought
about, they will get contented and satisfied. They will see that they
exaggerated things.... Of course it would have been wrong to anticipate
what one's feelings would be under such a painful contingency as the
Bishops' charging as they have done,--so it seems to me nobody's fault.
Nor is it wonderful that others" [moderate men] "are startled" [i.e. at
my Protest, &c. &c.]; "yet they should recollect that the more implicit
the reverence one pays to a Bishop, the more keen will be one's
perception of heresy in him. The cord is binding and compelling, till it
snaps.

"Men of reflection would have seen this, if they had looked that way.
Last spring, a very high churchman talked to me of resisting my Bishop,
of asking him for the Canons under which he acted, and so forth; but
those, who have cultivated a loyal feeling towards their superiors, are
the most loving servants, or the most zealous protestors. If others
became so too, if the clergy of Chester denounced the heresy of their
diocesan,