In a note to your Sermon published in 1838, speaking of “controversial publications by Clergymen in defence of our Church,” you observe, “the occupation is in most cases neither happy nor improving.” Ought not such a consideration to have withheld you from challenging your brother to take so questionable a course as you consider its defence, by publishing such opinions of the Subscription required and made by the Clergy, as must, if correct, involve them in the suspicion of being either ignorant of its meaning, indifferent to its obligations, or insincere in their acceptance of them?—warning them at one time against the unhappy occupation of self-defence, and leading your readers at another, to draw an inference to their prejudice, from their silence; for you say with reference to “your objections, no attempt at a refutation of them has appeared, so far as you know, from any quarter,” {62b} and further, that our Diocesan’s pamphlet, in “defence” of his speech on Subscription, so strongly corroborative of your own objections “remains unanswered.” {62c} I must, therefore, request of you to share any blame that may attach to us, in consequence of the courses, _offensive_ and _defensive_, which we have respectively taken in this matter. I am fully conscious of the very questionable position in which it places me, as one of his subordinate Clergy, with respect to my Diocesan. And I trust I feel it with as becoming a sense of the doubtfulness of its propriety, as you must your own with its reference to our venerable and universally respected Metropolitan. But when his Lordship is informed of the alacrity with which our opponents have availed themselves of his published opinions, to cast them “unbated and envenomed” against the bulwarks of our Zion, I feel assured that the well known liberality of his Lordship’s sentiments, will dispose him to make for me every allowance. I could have wished that the silence the Clergy have hitherto preserved, and which has been construed to their disadvantage, had been broken by some one better qualified than I am to do justice to the subjects I have presumed to handle; by some one, whose name would have carried with it, far more weight than I have the vanity to imagine can attach to my own. Indeed, I have sometimes hesitated whether to affix it to this Letter, but as you have shrunk from no responsibility by withholding your own, from your published objections to our Subscription, I have felt it due to you not to shelter myself under the irresponsibility of an anonymous address. In penning which, if I do not deceive myself, I may hope to stand acquitted of having been influenced by any unfriendly feeling. If in any part of it my style may seem to border upon anything savouring of discourtesy—let me hope it may be considered by you as _seeming_ only. And should I have misapprehended your sentiments and done you thereby any injustice—