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the very opinion which has kept many yet safe in the Church of England? (not that alone, but combined with other reasons.) Some have said, we have a right to think for ourselves; the Church of England is heretical, and we think so; it is time to leave her, and we think so; we as private priests and individuals think so; and so they have become members of the Roman Communion; whereas by simply saying, as I think they should,—we are not the judges of that, let us leave it to higher powers, let us leave it to the Church herself and her Bishops, we have no right to form an opinion about it; by simply saying this, they would have gone on in their place, humbly and cheerfully, and the miserable fallings off that have rent us all asunder would not have been heard of.
Now it seems unfortunate that in that very point in which I thought I had done most to save members of the Church of England from joining the Church of Rome, I am most blamed; and where I was striving most to keep souls together in unity, there I am accused of doing most to break it.
Then comes the third point—
"All ideas of the Bible, and the dispensing of the Bible, as in itself a means of propagating Christianity, are a fiction and an absurdity."
Here again, I am sorry to say, I cannot retract. A matter of fact is such a stubborn thing that all the sophistry in the world cannot overthrow it. And this is a matter of fact. For, "in itself," as I say, can the Bible save a man's soul? Must not you learn to read it first, and having read it, to understand its meaning? And who is to understand its meaning unless he have a teacher? And who is the teacher? It is either the parent, the schoolmaster, or the parish priest. And who teaches the parent, the schoolmaster, and the parish priest? Who but the Church? It cannot surely be meant that the stereotyped words of a book save a man, and that by being merely looked at through the vision of the eye? That would be a doctrine of "opus operatum," frightful to think of. It is meant
