Were I not convinced that it is so, God forbid that I should stand here as a vindicator of the movement. For I am persuaded that the Reformation was most righteous and necessary, and that God Himself specially wrought it for us. However gently we should always speak in controversy, however charitably we should think of and construe the acts and motives of others, we must not hide from ourselves that the unreformed Church of this country, in the sixteenth century, was in a very corrupt and ungodly state. The _form_, indeed, of all the essentials of Christianity was maintained, but it was overlaid by man’s idle, or even false traditions and man’s corrupt practices. The power of the priesthood was abused; the word of God was withheld from the people; the Holy Eucharist was mutilated and perverted from the purposes of its institution; in worship, the creature was set side by side with the Creator, if not exalted above Him; the substitution of _form_ for spirit and substance, and in many cases of a wrong form, too, was generally sanctioned and encouraged. From all this the Reformers were stirred to rescue us, and by the grace of God they did it. But theirs was no hot-headed indiscriminate work. They laboured, with all the calmness that men in their trying circumstances could command, to distinguish between right and wrong. They wished to retain all that seemed edifying, or even merely harmless, though it were of recent growth. They sought to restore all things to the primitive rule and pattern. They would have counted it sin to have rejected anything that God had suggested to His Church or that the Church in former ages had adopted. Let any one acquaint himself with the doctrine, ritual, and practice of the unreformed Church, and then compare with them the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., and he will find that there is no unnecessary deviation from them; that there is a strict maintenance of everything that it was possible to retain without fostering error or obstructing Christian edification; that the Reformers even went beyond, and revived and enforced what had been disused and forgotten—if it had early sanction—leaving nothing unrestored that had primitive authority, save only the godly discipline of Penance; and how they thought of that, how they wished to restore it, how they hoped that the time would come when it would be restored, let the Commination Office testify!