s, in itself, for of course Providence may
refuse to us its legitimate issues for our sins.

"I am afraid, that in one respect you may be disappointed. It is my
trust, though I must not be too sanguine, that we shall not have
individual members of our communion going over to yours. What one's duty
would be under other circumstances, what our duty would have been ten or
twenty years ago, I cannot say; but I do think that there is less of
private judgment in going with one's Church, than in leaving it. I can
earnestly desire a union between my Church and yours. I cannot listen 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