_Phil._ embarrasses himself and his readers in this development of Protestant principles. His own view of the task before him requires that he should separate himself from the consideration of any particular church, and lay aside all partisanship--plausible or not plausible. It is his own overture that warrants us in expecting this. And yet, before we have travelled three measured inches, he is found entangling himself with Church of Englandism. Let me not be misunderstood, as though, borrowing a Bentham word, I were therefore a Jerry Benthamite: I, that may describe myself generally as _Philo-Phil._, am not less a son of the 'Reformed Anglican Church' than _Phil._ Consequently, it is not likely that, in any vindication of that church, simply _as_ such, and separately for itself, I should be the man to find grounds of exception. Loving most of what _Phil._ loves, loving _Phil._ himself, and hating (I grieve to say), with a theological hatred, whatever _Phil._ hates, why should I demur at this particular point to a course of argument that travels in the line of my own partialities? And yet I _do_ demur. Having been promised a philosophic defence of the principles concerned in the great European schism of the sixteenth century, suddenly we find ourselves collapsing from that altitude of speculation into a defence of one individual church. Nobody would complain of _Phil._ if, _after_ having deduced philosophically the principles upon which all Protestant separation from Rome should revolve, he had gone forward to show, that in some one of the Protestant churches, more than in others, these principles had been asserted with peculiar strength, or carried through with special consistency, or associated pre-eminently with the other graces of a Christian church, such as a ritual more impressive to the heart of man, or a polity more symmetrical with the structure of English society. Once having unfolded from philosophic grounds the primary conditions of a pure scriptural church, _Phil._ might then, without blame, have turned sharp round upon us, saying, such being the conditions under which the great idea of a true Christian church must be _constructed_, I now go on to show that the Church of England has conformed to those conditions more faithfully than any other. But to entangle the pure outlines of the idealizing mind with the practical forms of any militant church, embarrassed (as we know all churches to have been) by preoccupations of judgment, derived from feuds too local and interests too political, moving too (as we know all churches to have moved) in a spirit of compromise, occasionally from mere necessities of position; this is in the result to injure the object of the writer doubly: first, as leaving an impression of partisanship the reader is mistrustful from the first, as against a judge that, in reality, is an advocate; second, without reference to the effect upon the reader, directly