hat public prayers have been offered up in France and
Italy for such a consummation? Let us begin to pray for each other, and we
must end by being one. Let _us_, too, pray that the clouds of error and
prejudice, the intense blind jealousy on one side, the cruel and
disingenuous temper on the other, may be subdued by the Spirit of God, who
in some great and blessed Pentecost shall draw long alienated hearts
together, and mould them into a union closer than has ever been, against an
attack the last and most terrible of the foretold enemy, the tokens of
whose coming are at hand.

But the Roman Catholic, who seems to escape this difficulty, and points to
his communion as one organic whole, falls into another. Grant that it is
one, but it is at the expense of ceasing to be Catholic: it has lost all
the East and the North, and part of the West. Thus, in this choice between
difficulties, it seems the least to suppose that the unity of Christendom
may be for a time suspended, during which the several parts of Christ's
Body retain communion with the one Head, and thence derive life, though
active communion with each other is suspended. A less difficulty, I say,
than to cut off, not merely our own Church, but the seventy millions of the
Eastern Church, having a complete inward identity with the Roman, from the
covenant of salvation, merely because that intercommunion is prevented by a
claim to spiritual monarchy, which was unknown in the best ages of the
Church, and has been resisted ever since it was set up. If this view be
true, we should expect that the several parts, though living, would yet be
languishing, and far from that healthy vigour which they ought to possess;
that the Great Head would give manifold warnings of the injury done to His
Body. Now, it is very remarkable that the circumstances, no less of the
Latin than of the Eastern and the Anglican Church, exactly agree to this
expectation. I need not speak on this point of the second and third; but I
cannot help thinking that they who have suffered themselves to be driven by
fearful scandals out of our bosom, who have brooded over acknowledged but
unrelieved wants, till the duty of patient long-suffering has been
forgotten, close their eyes to the state of France, Spain, and Italy, under
what they have now learnt to call _by itself_ the "Catholic" Church. Yet
are there tokens abroad which men of less spiritual discernment might lay
to heart. Does the "obscene rout" of Ro