the Church, it was his duty to obey established authority! The case was desperate. But I may here add, that this clergyman, within a few years from that time, redeemed his freedom and his conscience by the painful ordeal of abandoning his position and his flock, against the remonstrances of his wife, to the annoyance of his friends, and with a young family about him. Let no reader accept the preceding paragraph as my testimony that the Evangelical clergy are less simpleminded and less honourable in their subscriptions than the High Church. I do not say, and I do not believe this. _All_ who subscribe, labour under a common difficulty, in having to give an absolute assent to formulas that were made by a compromise and are not homogeneous in character. To the High Churchman, the _Articles_ are a difficulty; to the Low Churchman, various parts of the _Liturgy_. All have to do violence to some portion of the system; and considering at how early an age they are entrapped into subscription, they all deserve our sincere sympathy and very ample allowance, as long as they are pleading for the rights of conscience: only when they become overbearing, dictatorial, proud of their chains, and desirous of ejecting others, does it seem right to press them with the topic of inconsistency. There in, besides, in the ministry of the Established Church a sprinkling of original minds, who cannot be included in either of the two great divisions; and from these _à priori_ one might have hoped much good to the Church. But such persons no sooner speak out, than the two hostile parties hush their strife, in order the more effectually to overwhelm with just and unjust imputations those who dare to utter truth that has not yet been consecrated by Act of Parliament or by Church Councils. Among those who have subscribed, to attack others is easy, to defend oneself most arduous. Recrimination is the only powerful weapon; and noble minds are ashamed to use this. No hope, therefore, shows itself of Reform from within.--For myself, I feel that nothing saved me from the infinite distresses which I should have encountered, had I become a minister of the Episcopal Church, but the very unusual prematureness of my religious development.