gious celebration, will derive from it the spiritual advantages which its own nature coinciding with his prepared temper and his dependence upon God, and his earnest supplications, may be calculated to produce? This question raised by some respecting the validity or invalidity of their sacraments, has reference to a very different conception of those august institutions; to a theory which ascribes to them the possession of graces inherent by divine appointment, in order to whose effectual communication, penitence, and faith, are indeed conditions in the adult, but which, when there is no bar raised against their entrance by a disobedient will, are proved to be capable of operating through means additional to, and in so far independent of, the understanding, by the fact that one at least of them is applicable to infants.

110. Why is it then that these classes of our fellow-Christians have so warmly protested against what they themselves have taught? Why having denied an intrinsic value in Sacraments, and the inherence of spiritual powers in the visible Church, do they shrink from the remotest approach to an application of these their speculations to their own cases? It is not, as I believe, from the love of controversy, or from antipathy to their opponents, or from ignorance, or from spiritual pride; but it is because the instincts of men are often wiser than their understandings,-because that which the grace of God has taught them is not utterly effaced by the floods of shallow argumentation,—and now being put to the test they betray their indistinct but real

consciousness that there should be in the hands of the Church, in order to make it truly and fully a Church, an actual possession of spiritual powers historically transmitted to her by her Lord; and that, within the external forms of the Sacraments, there is an abiding of those essential graces, which He has purchased with His precious blood. In their indignant reclamations therefore I see a ground, not of rival indignation, but of rejoicing; and a real, if yet infant, hope of ultimate agreement.

SECTION IV.-THIRD OBJECTION.

111-5. Objection III. generally stated and answered. 116-8. Specific reply. 119-29. Injurious influences upon Church principles subsequent to the Revolution of 1688, and consequent decay then as at some earlier periods. 130. Illustrative facts. 131-6. Corresponding decay of general doctrine. 137. Why freely stated. 138-42. Other proofs of decay. 143-58. Reaction first in general doctrine, next in Church principles: temporary excess, and permanent tendency to good in both. 159-66. Illustration from the controversy prevailing in Scotland.

111. The third and now only remaining imputation against Church principles is, that they tend to introduce division into the communion of the Church, or even to provoke an actual and formal schism. This

There are some excellent remarks on this subject in the valuable work of the Rev. W. Gresley, entitled 'The Portrait of a Churchman.' The train of reasoning is one long familiar to my mind, or I should not have been ashamed to borrow from such a source. Some kindred observations are to be found in the Charge of the present Dean of Chichester, May, 1839, pp. 23, 4.

of all the three is the most peculiar, the worst supported, and the most easily exposed.

112. First let us consider the supposed tendency to produce schism or separation from the communion of the Church. It can hardly be meant that the holders of Church principles are themselves likely to abandon that communion; inasmuch as this would be to ascribe to them the total inability to comprehend, or the positive intention to disobey that obligation to abide with the Church of God, which, of all others, they have most unequivocally taught, and their teaching which has brought upon them the most plentiful reproach.

113. But is it meant that, by teaching men the duty of remaining in the Church, they will induce them to withdraw from its pale? Thus it has recently been argued, and that by a writer of the greatest ability, that the French have become an irreligious people because religion lent its aid to their governments, and thereby assumed the aspect of compulsion, so that it seemed a thing to be repudiated without inquiry into its merits. This argument seems to rely on some such postulate as the following: that man is a being who will do right if he be let alone, but who will certainly do wrong if he be told what is right, and that he is even bound or compelled to do it. To the subject-matter of duty, according to this theory, he has no particular objection, but the law of duty he cannot for an instant tolerate. To this postulate I demur. It • M. de Tocqueville, Democratie en Amerique.

seems to be as nearly as may be an exact inversion of the truth, although in particular cases it may hold good; under a faithful inculcation of the law of duty men will generally do right, and without it will almost certainly do wrong. The faithful inculcation of duty will not fail to produce positive results in accordance with that duty; and therefore if there be any security in great moral laws, the fuller inculcation of the duty of abiding in the Church will the more dispose and induce men to abide there.

114. But is it meant that Church principles will so alter the aspect of the Church, that men who do not receive them will find her to be another than what they had believed, and themselves therefore already in virtual separation from her, and will seek elsewhere the antitype of their ideal? If such be the form of the objection, I firmly believe that the apprehension is groundless: firstly, because Church principles are far from implying any alteration in the Church, and only aim at imbuing her members with the fuller understanding of her constitution. And it is not to be supposed of an intelligent people, that their impressions of that constitution generally are not merely imperfect representations of its real essence, but totally at variance with it. Secondly, because experience tells us of many whom Catholic principles have brought and retained within her pale; but of none whom, for ages past, they have driven from it. And thirdly, if they be true, as in this place may now be assumed, Christian faith binds us to believe that, according to God's good pleasure,

their attraction will be found much stronger than their repulsive influence.

115. So much, then, for schism; and now as respects divisions of opinion within the Church. Undoubtedly the Reformation of the sixteenth century was charged, and was fairly chargeable, with dividing opinions in the Church; and indeed the original preaching of Christianity itself was that which turned the world upside down, and more than any other event in the history of men laid its propagators open to this imputation. But the answer was conclusive and manifold then. As thus: that the alterations proposed were founded on truth; that the benefit to flow from truth must be greater than the evil to flow from the divisions, of which, through the perverseness of men, it is made the occasion; that the final effect of truth must be by temporary division to arrive at ultimate union, whereas the sufferance of religious error could only purchase a false and hollow as well as short-lived tranquillity at the expense of a long futurity of discord; and lastly, that the pains and mischiefs of the division are chargeable in equity not upon the returning truth which merely claims her own, but upon the usurping untruth which has excluded and would still exclude her.

116. These are answers of a general kind which may fairly be made to the charge of creating divisions by the advocates of any doctrine claiming to be catholic or true; but there are also the materials of a reply more specific, and appertaining in particular to the Church principles with which we are here concerned.