All this narrative, with the reflections on the facts, is admirable and worthy of Robert Southey: full of good sense and kind feeling--the wisdom of love. Ib. p. lxi. But the Sectaries had kept their countrymen from it (the Common Prayer Book), while they had the power, and Bunyan himself in his sphere laboured to dissuade them from it. Surely the fault lay in the want, or in the feeble and inconsistent manner, of determining and supporting the proper powers of the Church. In fact, the Prelates and leading divines of the Church were not only at variance with each other, but each with himself. One party, the more faithful and less modified disciples of the first Reformers, were afraid of bringing anything into even a semblance of a co-ordination with the Scriptures; and, with the _terriculum_ of Popery ever before their eyes, timidly and sparingly allowed to the Church any even subordinate power beyond that of interpreting the Scriptures; that is, of finding the ordinances of the Church implicitly contained in the ordinances of the inspired writers. But as they did not assume infallibility in their interpretations, it amounted to nothing for the consciences of such men as Bunyan and a thousand others. The opposite party, Laud, Taylor, and the rest, with a sufficient dislike of the Pope (that is, at Rome) and of the grosser theological corruptions of the Romish Church, yet in their hearts as much averse to the sentiments and proceedings of Luther, Calvin, John Knox, Zuinglius, and their fellows, and proudly conscious of their superior learning, sought to maintain their ordinances by appeals to the Fathers, to the recorded traditions and doctrine of the Catholic priesthood during the first five or six centuries, and contended for so much that virtually the Scriptures were subordinated to the Church, which yet they did not dare distinctly to say out. The result was that the Anti-Prelatists answered them in the gross by setting at nought their foundation, that is, the worth, authority and value of the Fathers. So much for their variance with each other. But each vindicator of our established Liturgy and Discipline was divided in himself: he minced this out of fear of being charged with Popery, and that he dared not affirm for fear of being charged with disloyalty to the King as the head of the Church. The distinction between the Church of which the king is the rightful head, and the Church which hath no head but Christ, never occurred either to them or to their antagonists; and as little did they succeed in appropriating to Scripture what belonged to Scripture, and to the Church what belonged to the Church. All things in which the temporal is concerned may be reduced to a pentad, namely, prothesis, thesis, antithesis, mesothesis and synthesis. So here-- 'Prothesis' Christ, the Word 'Thesis' 'Mesothesis' 'Antithesis' The Scriptures The Holy Spirit The Church