‘Yet the will to subvert the doctrines and discipline of the Reformation is not wanting, and is not concealed. Mr. Froude himself, were he still living, might, indeed, object to be judged by his careless and familiar Letters. No such objection can, however, be made by the eminent persons who have deliberately given them to the world on account “of the truth and extreme importance of the views to which the whole is meant to be subservient,” and in which they record their “own general concurrence.” Of these weighty truths take the following examples: “You will be shocked at my avowal that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain that in all matters which seem to us indifferent, or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church which has preserved its traditionary practices unbroken. We cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church of Rome that it is not a development of the Apostolic ἦθος, and it is to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings of the first six centuries: they must find a disproof if they would do anything.”――“I think people are injudicious who talk against the Roman Catholics for worshipping Saints and honouring the Virgin and images, etc. These things may perhaps be idolatrous: I cannot make up my mind about it.”――“P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance, as we are Catholics without the Popery, and Church of England men without the Protestantism.”――“The more I think over that view of yours about regarding our present Communion Service, etc., as a judgement on the Church, and taking it as the crumbs from the Apostles’ table, the more I am struck with its fitness to be dwelt upon as tending to check the intrusion of irreverent thoughts, without in any way interfering with one’s just indignation.”――“Your trumpery principle about Scripture being the sole rule of faith in fundamentals (I nauseate the word), is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth and axiomatic character, of the original.”――“Really I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more, and have almost made up my mind that the Rationalist spirit they set afloat is the ψευδοπροφήτης of the Revelations.”――“Why do you praise Ridley? Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer?”――“I wish you could get to know something of S. and W.” (Southey and Wordsworth), “and un-Protestantise, un-Miltonise them.”――“_How is it_ WE _are so much in advance of our generation?_” Spirit of George Whitfield! how would thy voice, rolled from “the secret place of thunders,” have overwhelmed these puny protests against the truths which it was the one business of thy life to proclaim from the rising to the setting sun! * * * * *