Tracts for the Times

throughout Oxford one universal feeling of alarm, (which under the name of "panic," the heathen, more religiously than we, would have ascribed to "the gods,") as soon as the appointment was known. These individuals but joined what already existed. But I would now speak of the truth of the imputation only; you have known, or have been aided (we have ground to think) by others acquainted with those of whom you speak; and you dare not, in your own person, avow your belief, or even your suspicion, of the truth of the allegation, which, under your assumed character, you have insinuated. You know and believe it to be untrue; and thus there is another evil of these unhappy disguises, that they furnish men the temptation of half saying, what they would shrink from speaking openly, as knowing or suspecting it to be untrue: but now, if untrue, it is to pass as part of the jest, and so they take courage, and stifle their consciences.

For ourselves, you will have done us good service; your attack will fall harmless alike on those who are now with the Lord, or upon those who remain; but your revival of the old Presbyterian cry against "Prelacy and Popery," will show the

avowed in the "Specimens of Theological Teaching," and in the Edinburgh Review. To any one acquainted with Oxford, the notion is altogether absurd there is in Oxford, happily, far too much thoughtfulness and scrupulousness to be influenced by any party, however powerful: men here form their individual convictions, according to their own consciences; party-feeling neither existed, nor had it existed, would it have had any influence; but, in truth, individuals of every shade of religious opinion within the latitude left free by our Articles, were united by one feeling of common danger impending over the Church, and that, independently of each other; they met and acted together spontaneously, actuated only by one common apprehension. The opinions, then, of a certain number of the "Corpus Committee," is, in reality, nihil ad rem; but will any one say that the charges against Dr. Hampden were confined to undervaluing antiquity, or the sacraments, or the authority of the Church, or that the prominent charges were not rather his vague and Sabellian notions on the doctrine of the Trinity, the rationalizing of the Atonement, and generally, a system opposed to the Articles? The Articles of our Church, not the teaching of any set of men, were made our standard; and to this standard and primitive antiquity would we appeal for ourselves.

members of our Church what is really censured under the name of Popery: they will see the necessity of striking back into the old paths, and manfully avowing truths, which many of late have shrunk from, as invidious. You, Sir, have been consistent it is, if we are rightly informed, a favourite maxim with you that the bishops have been the great hinderers of the development of the Reformation for the last 300 years; i. e., of such development as Germany has suffered under for the last half century, and from which she is now in part recovering. The Rationalists, it is known, ever maintained the same; they also complained that our bishops were the great hinderances to the extension of their theories among us. Therein they saw, indeed, but a portion of the truth; since our bishops were produced by the system, which under God's blessing they contributed to perpetuate; but still they saw that our system possessed a principle of stability, or as they deemed it, stationariness, foreign to their own. Those who wish well to our Church will now see who, under Almighty God, are the real upholders of sound doctrine among us; they who respect the office of a bishop, even antecedently to any consideration of individual merit in the person consecrated thereto, or they who, as yourself, (p. 16.) ridicule such respect; they will see that the cry of Popery is but a feint devised by the archenemy of the Church, whereby to hurry men down the steep descent of ultra-Protestantism to its uniform end, the "denial of the Lord who bought them." And knowing that that

Church alone is safe who guards the deposit of sound doctrine committed unto her, they will not be scared by shadows to abandon the reality, or shrinking from the reproach which our forefathers bore faithfully, fall into the toils, on either side spread for them, whether of the Socinian or the Papal antiChristianism.

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