tioned rest, but these alarms your Lordships present Petitioners are disposed to believe entirely groundless and imaginary, and they cherish this belief with greater confidence and satisfaction in as much as the contrary persuasion would require from them a melancholy confession, which they are not prepared to make-namely that the Pure and Primitive system of faith and worship to which they are fondly and conscientiously attached and which they have been ordained to minister, is only upheld by a support and influence which has no necessary connec tion with its positive merits, and can be no evidence either of its truth or excellence.

"Your Petitioners beg leave further to state that as civil proscriptions on account of religious opinions can never in any Christian community be less than religious persecutions, such proscriptions cannot be justified either in their origin or continuance, by any less measure of political necessity than would equally justify the suspension of the exercise of the first both of Christian charities and moral duties.

"In the instance of our Catholic Brethren, without venturing any opinion on the degree of necessity which dictated the original enactment of those penalties and disfranchisements under which they are suffering, and of which they so loudly complain, nothing appears to your Lordships Petitioners more clear than that they have at least been pursued far enough and tried sufficiently long-generation has followed generation, and they have neither conciliated allegiance nor produced conversion, they have often disturbed, instead of promoting public tranquillity, and endangered instead of ensuring the security of the State. On the other hand your Petitioners observe that no detriment has in any instance ever flowed from that course of relaxation and concession which has for more than twenty years been almost annually adopted by the Legislature, and which work of wisdom, charity, and justice your Petitioners humbly hope will this year find its full accomplishment; assured that nothing can so effectually tend to soften the asperities both of political and religious differences, to reconcile man to man, to promote the growth of general piety, and as an especial part of it, the prosperity and welfare of our own Established Church.

"To an enlightened and improved condition of society, to the tone and spirit of an age widely differing from those which have gone before it, and to their own individual exertions in their sacred calling, your Petitioners are persuaded may much more safely be trusted the progress of Divine Truth and of a correct estimate of civil obligations, than to any attempts to force them by acts of violence, or to guide them by any statutory restrictions, in matters which are scarcely cognizable by human laws.

"Lastly-Your Petitioners beg humbly to solicit the attention of your Lordships to a part of this question, which seems never to have its due weight in the discussion of Catholic Claims, namely, that the points of religious difference which separate the members of the Church of Rome from their fellow Christians of our own pale, are, when candidly examined, neither so many nor so great as the heat of party spirit, and circumstances of political emergency, have caused them to be considered; that they involve no point of doctrine

which the best and soundest Divines of the Church of England have held to be fundamental; and that in the mysterious tenet of Transubstantiation itself, when its definition, as set forth by the Romish Councils and highest individuals of that persuasion, is compared with the strong language of our own Articles and formularies of worship, there seems to your Petitioners, instead of its being made a touchstone for trying how far subjects of the same empire are fit to enjoy the same civil rights of society, to be barely sufficient discrepancy to prevent the respective parties from joining in religious communion.

"For these reasons, and mindful that we are Ministers of a Church, of which the broad and leading principle, as laid down at the Reformation, is an assertion of the right of conscience for every Christian Community, your Petitioners humbly hope that they shall be spared in future from presenting the strange inconsistency of pursuing in their own practice what they charge as a matter of accusation upon others, and be permitted to greet in the persons of their Catholic fellow subjects and fellow Christians, a body of men sharing the same duties, and enjoying the same privileges, and cherishing towards each other no other spirit of jealousy than which shall best manifest the influence of the faith and hope that is in them, by the observance of whatever is due to God, to their country, to society and to themselves."

We have inserted at full length the above Circular letter of the Venerable Archdeacon of Sudbury and the petition proposed by him. to the Clergy of this Archdeaconry, in order to give our readers a fair opportunity of becoming acquainted with the contents, and history of a petition, every word of which, to the best of our recollection we heard read on the 17th ult. by His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex in the House of Lords, when he presented the petition. No one will suspect us of an improper desire to expose the weakness or the ignorance of dignitaries of our Church-but when all the weight which authority and rank are wont to give to the opinion of an individual, is publicly employed to propagate error and misrepresent the doctrines of the Church of England, we feel ourselves to be only discharging the duty of defending "the faith, which was once delivered to the Saints", when we endeavour to guard the unsuspecting and the ill-informed, from being led astray by such false statements of the differences in dispute between the Church of England and the Church of Rome.

With the Circular letter itself we have no wish to find fault, for though the purport of it be decidedly opposite to our own views on the subject of the Catholic Claims we should be the last to check the expression of the opinions which any portion of the Clergy may entertain on a question, which we believe to be intimately connected with the interests of the Protestant Church-Neither should we be very angry with the Archdeacon for insinuating to his Clergy that the prayer of the Petition is in accordance with the views of the Bishop of Norwich his diocesan, but we have good reason to object to the authority of the Bishop being so made use of to persuade the Clergy to sign a petition, which contains statements

of the nature of the Protestant religion, which the Bishop himself, as a Bishop of a Protestant Church, would be the first to disclaim. The Venerable Bishop Bathurst we know to be as mild, as candid, and as liberal as any of his subordinate clergy, but we should be shocked to conceive the possibility of his being as ignorant of the fundamental principles of the Reformation, as one of his Archdeacons shall presently be proved to be. In the second Paragraph the Archdeacon gravely tells us that "alarms of danger to our own Church Establishment are the sole arguments" of the Petitioners against further concessions to the Catholics; an argument which even if it stood alone and unsupported by fear of danger to the State as well as to the Church, we should have thought deserved some more powerful denial of its truth than that which the Archdeacon has been able to make. Admit the danger to the Church Establishment (argues the venerable divine) and you admit that the pure and primitive system of faith which the clergy are ordained to minister ("ministering system of faith") is upheld by a support and influence unconnected with its positive merits, and which is no evidence of its truth or excellence an admission which is described as melancholy and which the Petitioners are unprepared to make. In this unwillingness to admit the consequence here stated to follow, we most heartily join. We neither admit it generally, nor as following by any fair deduction from the premises laid down. We have no alarms about the existence of our pure system of faith and worship, we believe that the faith of the Church of England is built upon a Rock, and that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it; that the Protestant faith should be rooted out by the labour of the Catholic clergy in the present day, would be a triumph of error over truth, for which we are quite unprepared. The question of the existence of a Protestant Established Church and the existence of the Protestant faith are perfectly independent of each other, but the Archdeacon has intermixed them in strange confusion together; in his premise he speaks of danger to the "Establishment" in his conclusion of danger to the "Faith" and in the confidence which we have in the divine origin and protection of the one, he would find an argument for the perpetuity of the other. We fear danger to the Church Establishment from the admission of Catholics into the Legislature, because the union of that Church with the State would then depend upon a Parliament still more insensible to the positive merits of the Church than the present House of Commons appears to be.

The Archdeacon goes on to talk about proscriptions and persecutions; but we decline arguing on the use of such words with a man who is weak enough to call a disability to legislate, a civil proscription: he might as well say when a Clergyman is refused a seat in the House of Commons, that he suffers religious persecution. With the morals of the Archdeacon we have more serious fault to find; for he seems to admit that there is "a measure of political necessity" which justifies the suspension of " the first of moral duties"-we trust however that the Archdeacon has in his zeal represented his opinion in a light unfavourable to himself.

We must hasten on to what may be termed the theological part of

this petition, but before we examine this strange mass of inconsistency and error, we must confess that our vision is too dull to enable us to foresee in the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament that reign of peace, with the glories of which the Archdeacon appears almost enraptured. We do not see how political asperities can be softened or religious differences diminished by weakening the Protestant influence and increasing that of the Catholics, we do not see that Lord Thanet and Lord Lowther, Mr. Coke, and Colonel Wodehouse are made more friendly to each other, the nearer they approach to equality in power. We do not see that the growing wealth of the Catholics of the North of Ireland has produced more harmony with the Protestants, we do not see how "general piety will be promoted," when a Parliament of England shall allow the public endowment of Monasteries and Nunneries; and we are too sceptical to believe that "the prosperity and welfare of our established Church will be increased" by a multiplica tion of Roman Catholic Chapels, and by the exertions of members of the Monastic orders to gain Proselytes amongst the Members of our own communion.

Thus at length have we discussed the contents of the preamble to this petition of an Archdeacon of the Protestant Church of England in the nineteenth century-we have given the whole composition fair consideration, lest we should be suspected of quarrelling only with a detached passage, the meaning of which might appear otherwise when viewed in connection with the whole petition. And here we are prepared to shew that Mr. Archdeacon Glover is guilty of one of two faults; either of ignorance of the doctrines of the Church to which he has been appointed a leader and a guide or of dissimulation. He is guilty of dissimulation, if knowing the strong line of demarcation which the Church of England has drawn in her articles between her own doctrines and those of the Church of Rome, he has deliberately defaced it; -he is guilty of ignorance, if the papers before us to which he attached his name, and requested the signatures of the Clergy within his jurisdiction, may be considered as an index to his knowledge, and a summary of his faith, as regards the controversy between the Catholic and Protestant Church. It is a fearful thing to the Established Church when the man who has the ear of his Sovereign, who is considered and worshipped by his followers as the most enlightened statesman of his days, who is surpassed by none in eloquence and unrivalled in his powers of ridiculing things serious or profane, in the face of the great council of a Protestant nation ridicules our differences with the Papists, and appeals to our Common Prayer Book for proof not indeed of our differences but of the points in which he asserts that we most nearly resemble each other. It is a fearful thing when Cabinet Ministers, and Laymen who have been for years acting under a belief that the Catholic religion is a dangerous and a false religion, by their recantation of their former professions give proof, that their knowledge of their own faith is as much founded on prejudice as was their aversion to that of the Catholics. Such statements as those of Dr. Doyle, and such works as those of Milner and of his shield-bearer Butler, can influence none in favour of

Catholicism but those who are ignorant of the principles of the Protestants. It is fearful when laymen err, how much more when dignitaries of a Protestant Church, conspire to spread the same errors, and from the very chair and place of authority proclaim, in the words of the Archdeacon's petition," that the points of religious difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England are neither so many nor so great as the heat of party spirit and circumstances of political emergency have caused them to be considered that they involve no point of Doctrine which the best and soundest divines of the Church of England have held to be fundamental ! ! !

In what school of Theology the Archdeacon has been instructed we are at a loss to discover; he appeals to the best and soundest divines of England with a degree of confidence, that would make a stranger to their works imagine that the Archdeacon must be conversant with them. Can he ever have heard of Jewell's famous Sermon at Paul's Cross, or of his Apology?—or of his controversy with Harding?-has he ever heard of Hooker and Andrewes, and Usher, and Bramhall, and Taylor, of Burnett, of Tillotson, of Barrow, of Wake, of Secker, of Pearson, of Chillingworth? Yes; he must have heard of their writings, but he cannot have read them, or he would not have ventured to assert of men, whose works abound with treatises directed against the errors of the Church of Rome, that those errors "involve no point of doctrine which the divines of our Church have held to be fundamental." Has Mr. Archdeacon Glover carefully studied the meaning of the 39 Articles, or is he amongst the number of those unhappy few, who are charged by Mr. Charles Butler with "subscribing those articles with a sigh or a smile." If he has studied them, how dare he have the hardihood to tell his subordinate Clergy, that the points of difference are not so great or so many as from "circumstances of political emergency" they have been considered. Does Mr. Glover know that the Church of Rome places her traditions on an equality with the Holy Scriptures, calling it the unwritten word of God? that the Council of Trent pronounced an anathema on those who disclaimed the authority of this unwritten word? and that Dr. Milner, (end of Controversy, p. 95.) has asserted, that to appeal to the Bible as an authority independent of the unwritten word of tradition, is to appeal to what is a dead letter? Surely, if there were no other difference, this would be as great as any that could be imagined; it amounts to this-the Protestants have one Bible, the Holy Scriptures; the Papists have two, the Scriptures, and tradition. Can any examination, however candid, make us think less of the falsehood of the Romish doctrines condemned in our Articles, such as relate to works of Supererogation, Purgatory, the adoration of the images of the Virgin Mary, and Invocation of the Saints? Can we admit that our disagreement in the number of sacraments is of a trivial kind? Can we become more reconciled to communion in one kind, and to the denial of the cup to the laity, the more we examine the authority on which it is refused? Is the doctrine of indulgences less at variance with the Scripture now than our Reformers thought it to be? Is the doctrine of the Sacrifice of Christ, and the offering up of him in the Mass, less destructive now of our belief in the efficacy of one oblation of Christ on the Cross, than it was two centuries since?