ing, I beg to lay before your Lordship the
following extract from a defence of the English Church, which I wrote
against a Roman controversialist in the course of the last year.

"The Church is emphatically a living body, and there can be no greater
proof of a particular communion being part of the Church than the
appearance in it of a continued and abiding energy, nor a more
melancholy proof of its being a corpse than torpidity. We say an
energy continued and abiding, for accident will cause the activity of
a moment, and an external principle give the semblance of self-motion.
On the other hand, even a living body may for a while be asleep.

* * * * *

"It concerns, then, those who deny that we are the true Church because
we have not at present this special note, intercommunion with other
Christians, to show cause why the Roman Church in the tenth century
should be so accounted, with profligates, or rather the profligate
mothers of profligate sons for her supreme rulers. And still
notwithstanding life _is_ a note of the Church; she alone revives,
even if she declines; heretical and schismatical bodies cannot keep
life; they gradually became cold, stiff, and insensible.

* * * * *

"Now if there ever were a Church on whom the experiment has been
tried, whether it had life in it or not, the English is that one. For
three centuries it has endured all vicissitudes of fortune. It has
endured in trouble and prosperity, under seduction, and under
oppression. It has been practised upon by theorists, browbeaten by
sophists, intimidated by princes, betrayed by false sons, laid waste
by tyranny, corrupted by wealth, torn by schism, and persecuted by
fanaticism. Revolutions have come upon it sharply and suddenly, to and
fro, hot and cold, as if to try what it was made of.

"It has been a sort of battlefield on which opposite principles have
been tried. No opinion, however extreme any way, but may be found, as
the Romanists are not slow to reproach us, among its Bishops and
Divines. Yet what has been its career upon the whole? Which way has it
been moving through 300 years? Where does it find itself at the end?
Lutherans have tended to Rationalism; Calvinists have become
Socinians; but what has it become? As far as its Formularies are
concerned, it may be said all along to have grown towards a more