them without a grievous sin. And what the nature of this commission should be, I will tell you presently.

But I will tell you first, what the clergyman of your parish will or ought to say to you, when you are thus beset with doubts, and obliged to drive off men who threaten to intrude on his privilege of guiding and instructing you in your duty. It may be, his words may be different from these; but these are what he ought to utter. If he take other ground, he is not asserting his own rights as they may be asserted with truth, and without the possibility of their being defeated.

He would say to you, " You believe me now to be your proper religious instructor in your duty both to God and man; to have in my hands your manual of Christian Ethics; to know best the proper mode of making you good, and wise, and happy -because your parents and the laws of the land have told you this. It is a wise and adequate reason. But God has given you not only a heart to obey them and trust in them, but a mind capable of understanding in many cases the reasons of their injunctions. It is one thing, and a great thing, to do what rightful authority commands us to do; it is another thing, added on to this as an ornament, and indulgence, and confirmation, and guide, to see the wisdom and rectitude of the command. And now that you are doing your duty in putting confidence in me, I will do my duty by shewing you that I am entitled to it. I will produce to you my title-deeds. I will indulge you with a sight of my commission from God; prove to you that I am no pretender; not self-appointed; not a teacher of my own inventions; not a profferer of a forged message; not one who dares to promise and threaten

in the name of God, without having received His especial injunctions so to do, and His engagement to ratify my terms.

Learn

"You look on me now as an individual. as the very first thing, that so far as concerns my teaching you, my claim to make you good and happy, I am not an individual, but the representative of a vast body. I have neither will of my own, reason of my own, goodness of my own, nor power of my own. Almost, as Balaam said of old (Numb. xxiv. 13), ' If thou wouldest give me thy house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the commandment of that body, to do either good or bad of mine own mind; but what that body saith, that will I speak.' I may be ignorant; I have many faults; I may be weak and old; unworthy, most unworthy, of being employed as a messenger from God to man. Or, on the other hand, I may have talents, be eloquent, be blessed with many graces, have power over many affections. But all these have little to do with my office as regards yourself. A letter is little affected by the appearance of him who brings it. A truth is still a truth, though he who reports it is in other matters a liar. Woe to me, if I so present to you my message, as that from fault of mine you shall be disinclined to receive it! But woe also to you, if you will not accept with reverence what I bring to you from God, because you dislike or despise in me something which comes from man!

"I told you that I was only the representative, the agent, of a vast body; armed with their power; declaring their words; inviting you to place yourself under their guidance, not under mine; doing little or nothing but as of them. Look round you on this side and that, and in every part of the country you will see others like myself, each in his

D

own district representing the same body, and ministering like me in an ancient holy building, especially called the church; each acknowledging with me the same fact, that as individuals they are nothing.

you

"How came we here? Did we come among you of ourselves, without any authority to send us? Should I be permitted to preach in this pulpit, or to minister at this altar, if I came and claimed a right to do so as of my own will? No; before any one of us could venture to do this, we received a special and most solemn commission from the heads and rulers of this body or society, of which I need not tell you that the name is the Church. They delegated to us the power to which, if would ever become good, you must have recourse at our hands. They bound us to watch over you, to teach you, pray for you, enlighten you, do for your feed you, minds all that the most affectionate of parents would do for your bodies; which, if we have failed to do, as too often we have failed, the curse is upon our heads, not on them who sent us forth. And they swore us to a rigid adherence to the truths which they put into our mouth. Nothing was to be added, nothing to be taken away. A certain body of teaching we were commanded to proclaim before you, constantly and earnestly, in public and in priIt was not our own invention; it was put into our hands by others. Any thing which might win you to listen, bring you to understand it, so long as the teaching itself was not an iota altered, we were permitted and encouraged to employ. We might set the jewel in gold work, but not work which injured the stone, or hid it, or impaired its lustre; only such as would fix it in your minds, and enhance its glory."

vate.

What this teaching was, and what these powers, is not for my present purpose. But one thing you

may be told this teaching is full of mysteries-of things which human reason, as many men around will tell you, cannot fathom, cannot reconcile with experience, cannot explain. How far these words are true, I do not attempt to assert. But I ask you, if at the very first sight this does not seem to be a mark of knowledge not invented by man. Man would not invent for man a system of belief so full, as you are here told, of contradictions and perplexities. He would try to make it simple and easy; as men, who will not receive the doctrines of the Church, try to alter them into some form, which they can explain, and others can understand. Once more, these powers are very great; they are even awful: if not truly conferred by God, they are blasphemously assumed by man. I ask you, does this seem to indicate a human invention? Impostors, indeed, have endeavoured to subdue the minds of followers by vague threats and promises, which cannot be proved, of Divine favour. But the promise of communicating to man the Divine nature itself, of bringing down the Deity from heaven, and infusing his own Spirit into the souls of miserable mortals,— this, which is nothing more than the every-day promise of the Church, proclaimed and administered by every minister of the Church every time that he stands by the font, or serves at the altar,—is it not so awful, so tremendous, that we scarcely bear to read it written, except in familiar words which scarcely touch the ear? Should we not expect that such a lie, if lie it be, if God has never sanctioned the offer, must long since have drawn down vengeance on the blasphemer, instead of being preserved for 1800 years as a great and holy treasure, the very palladium of the Church, the corner-stone of the Christian faith, the salt of the earth?

From whence, then, did the rulers of the Church

receive these truths, and the powers thus mysteriously committed to them. It was not yesterday, nor one generation back, that they were framed, and nearly in that form and order in which we now possess them. Our creeds, our articles of faith, our Bible, these contain the system of ethical teaching by which clergymen are bound to abide, and which they are to inculcate upon you. Our liturgies and offices of worship,-these are the acts and exhibition of that power, which they are bound to exercise towards you. Whence did they come? They came to us in this land, varied slightly but not impaired in any essential part, from a still vaster Society, just as the branch of a tree receives sap from the trunk, or the limb of a man receives blood from the heart. That society was called the Catholic Church; not, remember, I entreat you, the Romish Church: the two things are very different, though through the Church of Rome much Christian truth did come to us. The fountain-head was farther up: it lay deep in antiquity. Trace back 1500, and more than 1500 years, and there you will find the source from which the clergy of this day trace their teaching and their powers; and to which, at the Reformation, our ancestors went back, when they suspected, or rather knew, that the stream, as it came to us through the channel of the Romish Church, had been mixed and corrupted with novel and human imaginations.

What, then, was the Catholic Church? It was a society framed to extend over the whole earth; which, like that Indian tree, might grow up in stateliness and beauty, throwing out its roots on all sides, and from them shooting up fresh trunks, each to become a giant tree itself, each to send forth new roots, and those roots new trunks and trees, until the surface of the earth was covered, and all the beasts of the field might lie down for shelter in its