nstead of eating his daily
portion of food in his Father's house, he is called upon to search and
inquire whether indeed he have found that house at all, and be not rather a
fugitive or an outcast from it. Such, however, is the hard necessity which
is come upon us. Let no one imagine that it is our _choice_ to speak on
such subjects. We are in the case of a beleaguered soldier in an enemy's
country; he may not think of peace; he must maintain his post or die; his
part is not aggression, but defence: the matter at issue is the
preservation of all that he holds dear, or extermination. The question of
_schism_ is a question of salvation.

But over and above the general course of events which forces us to
reconsider this question, circumstances have taken place in the past year
which we may boldly pronounce to be without a parallel in the history of
the Church in England since she became divided from Catholic communion.
Those who have followed with anxious sympathy that great restorative
movement which, for twelve years, has agitated her bosom,--those who have
felt with an ever increasing conviction, as time went on, and the different
parties consolidated and unfolded themselves, that it was at the bottom a
contest for the ancient faith delivered to the saints, for dogmatic truth,
for a visible Church, in whom, as in a great sacrament, was lodged the
presence of the Lord, communicating Himself by a thousand acts of spiritual
efficacy, against the monstrous and shapeless latitudinarianism of the day;
against the unnumbered and even unsuspected heresies which have infected
the whole atmosphere that we breathe; against, in fine, the individual will
of fallen man, under cover of which the coming Antichrist is marshalling
interests the most opposite, and passions the most contradictory; and
further, those not few nor inconsiderable, we believe, who, by God's grace,
owe to the teaching of _one man_ in particular a debt they never can
repay,--the recovery, perchance, of themselves from some form of error
which he has taught them to discern, or the building them up in a faith
whose fair proportions he first discovered to them,--these will feel with
deeper sorrow than we can express the urgency of the occasion to which we
allude. For how, indeed, could the question, whether the Church of England
is fallen into schism, or be, as from the laver of their regeneration they
have been taught to believe, a member of that one sacred Body in w