However, you are not a mere individual; from early youth you have devoted yourself to the Established Church, and after between forty and fifty years of unremitting labor in its service, your roots and your branches stretch out through every portion of its large territory. You, more than any one else alive, have been the present and untiring agent by whom a great work has been effected in it; and, far more than is usual, you have received in your lifetime, as well as merited, the confidence of your brethren. You cannot speak merely for yourself; your antecedents, your existing influence, are a pledge to us that what you may determine will be the determination of a multitude. Numbers, too, for whom you cannot properly be said to speak, will be moved by your authority or your arguments; and numbers, again, who are of a school more recent than your own, and who are only not your followers because they have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their spokesman. There is no one anywhere--among ourselves, in your own body, or, I suppose, in the Greek Church--who can affect so vast a circle of men, so virtuous, so able, so learned, so zealous, as come, more or less, under your influence; and I cannot pay them all a greater compliment, than to tell them they ought all to be Catholics, nor do them a more affectionate service than to pray that they may one day become such. Nor can I address myself to an act more pleasing, as I trust, to the Divine Lord of the church, and more loyal and dutiful to his Vicar on earth, than to attempt, however, feebly, to promote so great a consummation. {47}