commission—if she discards the pomp and trappings of an external ceremonial, that she may not obscure the simplicity of the truth, and that she may be clothed in the Church’s true glory, the righteousness of Christ;—if such be the Church of England, as our fathers and fathers’ fathers have held her to be; and such, as while Scripture remains in its integrity, and sole authority over faith, nay, as long as the primitive fathers remain to interpret it, she can prove herself to be against all gainsayers; great will be the sin upon our heads if we refuse obedience to her as our guide, and great the crime towards those who come after us, of whose inheritance we are the guardians, if we permit so much as one stone of our holy house to be moved—if we suffer the efficacy of her Sacraments to be neutralized by modern scepticism—her offices to be mutilated by doubting priests and self-elected interpreters—and the beauty of her Unity to be marred by the Latitudinarian spirit of concession and expediency. There is one practice which has so unhappily, in my humble opinion, obtained extensive usage as to render a notice of it, I conceive, very important; but that I might not be deemed presumptuous or illiberal in doing so, I will lay it before you in the very words of the present Bishop of St. David’s, as they occur in his last Charge, merely prefacing them by saying, I am confident the practice they condemn is a fruitful source of promoting disunion in the Church; and though it emanates, I am willing to acknowledge, from zeal in the cause of religion, it is a zeal without discretion, palatable, indeed, to Separatists, and consequently productive of schism. These are Dr. Thirlwall’s words:—“There are, I fear, not a few cases in which a lecture in a school-room, or some other common building, is substituted for the Church service, while the Church remains closed. Such a practice appears to me equivalent to an admission that our form of prayer is really a _bar_, not a _help_, to devotion, and may be advantageously superseded by the minister’s occasional effusions. I cannot distinguish such meetings from conventicles; the presence and presidency of the Clergyman only renders the implied admission more glaring and pernicious. It is a breach of faith to the Church, as well as a violation of an express engagement. The same remark applies to every departure from the Rubric, grounded on no other motive than deference to the taste and prejudices of a part of the congregation.” {28} Now I will not weaken the force of these powerful and sensible remarks of Dr. Thirlwall, by any further comment of my own on this point.