of our dearest Lord to St. Peter, were also spoken to me; 'Tu autem conversus, confirma fratres.'" Taught in this school, he "endeavoured to break in pieces almost all those propositions, upon the confidence of which men have been negligent of severe and strict living," and became eminently a preacher of repentance.
Lastly, I would beseech those, for whom these tracts are mainly intended, our younger labourers in our Lord's vineyard, for their own sakes, as well of those, of whose souls they must give account, neither here, nor in any other portion of these tracts, to be deterred by any vague fear of an approximation (as they may be led to think) to any doctrines or practices of the corrupt Church of Rome; not to allow themselves to fall in with any of those charges, which ignorant men are wont to make, of "the early corruptions of Christianity," and which are the bulwark of Socinianism, and of every other heresy. Since the Swiss reformers set aside primitive antiquity, and took a new model of their own. Antiquity, if tried by the standard of Zuinglianism or Calvinism, must, of course, appear to approximate to the modern Church of Rome; for that Church has retained, in a corrupted form, doctrines and rites, which the Swiss reformation rejected. Hence, the Lutheran (see p.104), the Bohemian (p.233), and our own Church, have, by the admirers of that reformation, ever been looked upon as Papistical; as they, in their turn, have, by the "extreme reformation of the Socinians" (p. 198–9), been held, and rightly, to have stopped short of the results of their own principles, and have been represented, though wrongly, as retainers of Alexandrian "corruptions of Christianity." Hooker's defence of our Church is but one instance of this wide difference between ours and the Zuinglian reformation. Our Church (blessed be God,) never took Luther, or Calvin, or any modern name for its teacher or its model, but primitive antiquity: and by the
