But to conclude. As our defence against the charge of Schism rests upon the witness of the ancient Church, thus fully corroborated by the Eastern Communion, so our whole safety lies in maintaining the clear indubitable doctrine of that Church. I have avoided the whole question of _doctrine_ in these remarks, both as leading me into a wider field than that which I am obliged to traverse so cursorily at present, and as distinct from the question of Schism, though very closely connected with it. No one can deny that it is not sufficient for our safety to repel one single charge: but this charge was the most pressing, the most specious, and one which requires to be disposed of before the mind can with equanimity enter upon any other. My conclusion is, that upon the strictest Church principles,--in other words, upon those principles which all Christendom, in its undivided state, recognised for six hundred years, which may be seen in the Canons and Decrees of Ecumenical Councils, our present position is tenable at least till the convocation of a really Ecumenical Council. The Church of England has never rejected the communion of the Western, and still less that of the Eastern Church: neither has the Eastern Church pronounced against her. She has only exercised the right of being governed by her own Bishops and Metropolitans. There is, indeed, much peril of her being forced from this, her true position,--a peril lately pointed out by the author of "The real Danger of the Church of England." I need say little where he has said so much, in language so well-timed, so moderate, and from a position which cannot be misrepresented. I will only add, that I cannot conceive any course which would so thoroughly quench the awakened hopes of the Church's most faithful children, as that her rulers, which I am loth even to imagine, at a crisis like the present, should seek support, not in the rock of the ancient Church, in which Andrewes, Laud, and Ken, took refuge of old,--not in the unbroken tradition of the East and West, by which, if at all, the Church of Christ must be restored,--not in that great system which first subdued and then impregnated with fresh life the old Roman Empire, delaying a fall which nothing could avert, and which lastly built up out of these misshapen ruins all the Christian polities of Europe,--not in that time-honoured and universal fabric of doctrine to which our own Prayer-book bears witness, but in the wild, inconsistent, treacherous sympathies of a Protestantism, which the history of three hundred years in many various countries has proved to be dead to the heart's core. Farewell, indeed, to any true defence of the Church of England, any hope of her being built up once more to an Apostolical beauty and glory, of recovering her lost discipline and intercommunion with Christendom, if she is by any act of her rulers, or any decree of her own, to be mixed up with the followers of