maintain the doctrine of the priesthood are disloyal to the Church of England, or deviating from the principles of the Reformation. For, not merely according to what right reason must, I think, enforce to be the intention of those who drew up our formularies, but according to the simple sense of those formularies, this doctrine and none other is the only doctrine which can be made consistent with the documents themselves, or which they can justly be taken to enunciate. We have at times heard not a little of the dishonesty of those who, it is said, have taken our formularies in a non-natural sense, on the Catholic side, though in a sense which they deemed they would fairly bear. If this argument be good for anything, against whom can it so conclusively be brought as against such as will affirm that, when in the most solemn exercise of a bishop’s office, the bishop says, “Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God,” the Church intends that there is no gift of the Holy Ghost bestowed, and no priest made at all? Or, again, when he says, adopting Christ’s own words of commission,—“Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven unto them, and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained;”—that in this there is no intention to teach that the commission of Christ extended beyond the Apostles themselves, and that no power of binding or loosing is conferred by this solemn act? Or, yet again, who tell us that when the priest is instructed to exercise this holy function of absolving penitents, either that they may come “with a full trust in God’s mercy and with a quiet conscience” to the Holy Eucharist, or, in the solemn moments of serious sickness, perhaps the near prospect of death, (things and times surely beyond all others to drive away the very notion of unreal or unmeaning words, which must also, if they be such, be to the poor penitent most deceitful and misleading words also); that then the Church gives her instruction to use the word of absolution, and say, “By His authority committed unto me, I absolve thee from all thy sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” and yet means hereby only a mockery and a delusion; that there is no such power, no such authority, no such absolving at all; surely all this is not a mere non-natural sense which the words will bear, though it may not be the most obvious at first sight, but is a non-natural sense so monstrous that they will not bear it at all.