have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?” {75a} Why, then, should we expect to escape such things? But I said, also, we need not be dismayed at them. Is there not the exhortation, “Ye have need of patience?” {75b} and again the encouragement, “In your patience possess ye your souls?” {75c} and again the gracious promise, “He that endureth to the end shall be saved?” {75d} What though in the latter times some shall depart from the faith? {75e} What though “the time will come when men will not endure sound doctrine.” {75f} Shall this make any difference in our faith, or cast any gloom upon our hope? No! Brethren, let us ever remember that what we have to rely upon is, not “man’s wisdom,” nor “an arm of flesh:” what we have to cleave to with all constancy is “that which was from the beginning;” {75g} for it is this which gives us “fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.” {75h} And surely here we may see and bless the goodness of God towards us in this our Church of England that He put it into the hearts of our Reformers not for one moment to think of making a new religion or a new Church, but only (throwing off errors and corruptions) to go back to the teaching of the early ages, and embrace the doctrine of the Church universal. If the Church of England had _begun_ at the Reformation, (as sometimes men speak,) no man, who knew anything of the essentials of Christianity could belong to her for a moment. But, blessed be God, He put it into the heart and minds of those who, in His providence, guided the course of the English Reformation, to make it a maxim, _Stare super antiquas vias_, to give heed to the injunction of the prophet: “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths where is the good way; and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” {76} It is this which has been, under God, our safeguard. From time to time assaults have been made to destroy our true Catholic character and our bond of union with primitive Christianity; but God has, of His mercy, hitherto, ever kept it in the heart of the rulers in our Church to “ask for the old ways, and to walk in them.” That our Church has kept to the old ways is manifest from this, that the very persons who disbelieve and desire to drive us from the ancient faith, are the same who, as the means of doing so, are striving to new model our formularies and alter our Prayer-book. They feel no less than we that, whilst we retain these, we cleave to the doctrine which has been of old; and they, desiring to deprive us of the doctrine, are as anxious to alter our formularies as we are to keep them unchanged. And many of them would perhaps, even more openly than they do, advocate extensive measures of liturgical revision, in a doctrinal sense, but for the consciousness that to shew too great anxiety on the point is too like a confession of how