,--not in that great system which
first subdued and then impregnated with fresh life the old Roman Empire,
delaying a fall which nothing could avert, and which lastly built up out of
these misshapen ruins all the Christian polities of Europe,--not in that
time-honoured and universal fabric of doctrine to which our own Prayer-book
bears witness, but in the wild, inconsistent, treacherous sympathies of a
Protestantism, which the history of three hundred years in many various
countries has proved to be dead to the heart's core. Farewell, indeed, to
any true defence of the Church of England, any hope of her being built up
once more to an Apostolical beauty and glory, of recovering her lost
discipline and intercommunion with Christendom, if she is by any act of her
rulers, or any decree of her own, to be mixed up with the followers of
Luther, Calvin, or Zuingle: with those who have neither love, nor unity,
nor dogmatic truth, nor sacraments, nor a visible Church among themselves:
who, never consistent but in the depth of error, and the secret instinct of
heresy, deny regeneration in Baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit in
Confirmation and Orders, and the power of the keys in absolution, and the
Lord's Body in the Eucharist. That is the way of death: who is so mad as to
enter on it? When Protestantism lies throughout Europe and America a great
disjointed mass, in all the putridity of dissolution,

"Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, _cui lumen ademptum_,"

judicially blinded, so that it cannot perceive Christ dwelling in his
Church, while she grows to the measure of the stature of the perfect man,
and making her members and ministers His organs--who would think of joining
to it a living Church? Have we gone through so much experience in vain?
Have we seen it develop into Socinianism at Geneva, and utter unbelief in
Germany, and a host of sects in England and America, whose name is Legion,
and who seem to be agreed in nothing else but in the denial of sacramental
grace, and visible unity; and all this at the last hour, in the very
turning point of our destiny, to seek alliance with those who have no other
point of union but common resistance to the tabernacle of God among men? A
persuasion that nothing short of the very existence of the Church of
England is at stake, that one step into the wrong will fix her character
and her prospects for ever, compels one to say that certain acts and
tendencies of late have struck dis