“This (he confesses) seems to be to the purpose;” and where he confesses the least advantage on our side, the reader may swear there is somewhat more than ordinary in the matter. But he retrenches immediately, and kicks down the pail, by adding this restriction—“if there were not some circumstances and expressions very much mistaken in the representation of it.” Yet in the next line again, as if he were ashamed of his own fearfulness, he is for making a bold sally, and putting all to the push; for, “supposing the utmost to be allowed (says he) there could be no argument from hence drawn for leaving the communion of our church;” but he restrains that too with this caution—“if the bishop’s authority and example did signify any thing with her.” Thus, from yielding at first, he comes to modify his concession, and from thence to strike out magnanimously. But then he retreats again with another _if_. It is a sign he is uneasy, when he tosses and turns so often in a breath; and that he is diffident of his cause, when he shifts his plea. It is evident that the Duchess laid a great stress on these concessions: and well she might; for what a startle would it give to a doubting soul, which already had taken the alarm, to hear two bishops, whereof one was primate of all England, renouncing and condemning two of the established articles of their church? But it is well known, that those two prelates were not, nor, if they were now living, would be, the only clergymen of the church of England who are of opinion they have over-reformed themselves in casting off prayers for the dead, and consequently, the doctrine of a third place. But these are church of England men of the old stamp; betwixt whom, and the faction of this answerer, there is just as much difference as betwixt a true episcopal man and a latitudinarian; and this latter, in plain terms, is no otherwise different from a presbyterian, than by whatsoever titles and dignities he is distinguished. So that our answerer was much in the right to skip over the first half of this paragraph without answering in this place, and to gallop to the last sentence of it, which begins with Bishop Blandford’s saying,—“That if he had been bred in the communion of the Roman church, he would not change his religion:” whither, as in duty bound, I follow him. To overbalance the weight of these concessions, our author would have us think, that the subsequent words of the bishop ought to have had greater force to have kept her in the communion of the Protestant church, than the former to have drawn her from it; for the bishop comes off with this excuse,—“That being of another church, wherein he was sure were all things necessary to salvation, he thought it very ill to give that scandal, as to leave that church wherein he received his baptism.”