no authoritative training, no outward society propagated from the Apostles' times, to anchor by. He should have been taught from childhood to revere the Apostles' and Nicene Creed. His mind, as it expanded, should have run out into all the ramifications of that Catholic, all-embracing faith, and felt how widely it reached out, both into the external world of Society, and inwardly, into all the deepest mysteries of the being of man. But, instead of that great and ever-expanding knowledge, that deep arraying of himself, according to a rule so wide, that simplicity of faith, that is at once so lofty and so true, his rule has been this," Look inwardly and see how you feel,-what your emotions are, how your heart,—that uncertain, vain, deceitful, wavering heart-is toward God." Instead of the anchor passing downward from the ship, through the tossing waves, and biting into the solid globe itself, it is to take its hold inside the ship, with nothing outward to hold on by. Hence all this Religion, without a Church, is floating, at sea, uncertain; where it is to drift to no man knows.

Again: we are here, the representatives in this New World of that old Anglican Church, which retained the Church in its Apostolic entireness, which opened the Bible to the Englishspeaking races, and gave the word of Holy Writ, to speak to man in a language as grand as that which the old Hebrew prophets spake in,-that dear old National State Church, which felt the faults of the Continental Reform and avoided them, and the errors and corruptions of Rome, and avoided them also, and retained the diverse and opposite goods that both had kept.

And nobly did our first great standard-bearer express that great fact, when he raised the banner, inscribed, "Evangelical Truth and Apostolic Order." Every doctrine concerning the Atonement and Sacrifice of our Blessed Lord, every doctrine as to the depravation and inability of man's nature, and his need of the grace of the Holy Ghost, every doctrine concerning the Justification of man by no merits of his own, but by a living internal faith in our Lord; all these doctrines, which Rome had made null without denying, and which Luther and Calvin and the Puritans had exaggerated and caricatured, are with us, in

their sober, Scriptural shape, as they were with our Mother Church of England. They exist with us, as with her, in a moderate, constitutional, proportionate way, written in our Prayer Books, taught by our Clergy, prayed, day after day, by our people.

Again with us, there is the doctrine and the fact of the Church; no abstraction, no mere idea, no nonentity, as Calvinists and Methodists imagine, but the doctrine and the fact of a true, living, and visible Society, propagated from age to age by the Apostolic Ministry. Its divinely commissioned Ministry, its supernatural blessings, its Sacraments, which are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual graces, its glorious destiny, its claims for universal acceptance; all these, exaggerated and perverted as they were by Rome, scorned and rejected by the Continental Reformers, we have and hold; and we hold them sincerely, as perfectly and entirely consistent and coördinate with the other class, the Evangelic Doctrines cast away by Rome. We retain these last, along with the Apostolic Order and the Apostolic Faith, rejected by the Continental Reform, and its representatives in the United States.

Those representatives are here, in the shape of all the multiform Calvinistic and Arminian Sects. We are here, also, with our Apostolic Order and Evangelical Truth.

And Rome is here also, with that man-made organization of hers, which seemed to the English Pamphleteer "the perfection of Human wisdom," the perfection, we call it, of human craftiness. But still she is here, with that man-made machinery for working upon the world, which she has found so efficient in Europe, her Jesuits, her Confessional, her Celibate Clergy, her constant interference with, and bargain and sale in politics,―her great drag-net, cast forth for power, for gold, and for the inheritance of widows and orphans, and weak and devotional men and women.

Again, we know, that, under the guidance of the Almighty, our first Statesmen took, not of their own will, but by the Providence of God, the right position as to the Church and the State. They left the individual man perfectly free before the Law, as to his Religion and its support. They abolished

all State Establishments. Before the law, then, every Church is free to propagate its doctrines, every Sect, every opinion. The Mufti of Constantinople has a perfect right to send in Mohammedan Missionaries to Boston, the Dalai Lama of Thibet to Concord, in the same State, the Brahmins of Hindustan, the Schaman of North Asia. Even the Fetish Priest of Africa can preach Mumbo Jumbo here, if he wishes, and have perfect and entire freedom in so doing. The road, then, is open, legally, to Rome, the Anti-Christian and Idolatrous corruption of the Holy Catholic Church. It is open to us, the so-called Protestant Episcopal, or really American Catholic Church, to convert the world that is here.

We do not believe that this mass of Sects, without a Church, without a Faith, without any mutual harmony or cohesion, can remain so as to be forever as they are. We do not believe it, neither does the Church of Rome,-neither, in a measure, do they themselves. They may wander to and fro, they may now argue that the present is the normal and natural state of Christianity; now lament over their failures in doctrine, their want of union, their want of success. Again; they may exult over some little relative progress, the conversion of five sinners, while five thousand professors are sliding into Pantheism; or the union of twenty antagonist Clergymen for a day or two in a year. They may totter to and fro in this way, and not clearly know what the result is to be.

But we know it,—we and Rome. This it is a disintegration of all their Sects, their organizations, their doctrines, their practices into sheer and total individualism. Their solid rock agglutination, being dissolved, is to be reduced to a mass of shifting grains of sand. Hence we know, as does Rome, that here there will be, first, an universal infidelity, or indifferentism, and then an universal Church, an universal Religion. We know this, both of us. The result is to be, finally, an American Catholic Church, or an American Roman Catholic Church; an universal Church on our principles, or those of Rome.

Let us not deceive ourselves. The only future for Religion in this Republic is this. The same principles, which in and

from the era of Hildebrand, (1079,) got possession of the Latin Church in Europe, and have been the cause of corruption of morals, and perversion of doctrine to the European nations, and then of internal strife, desolation, slaughter, massacre, and finally, of iron-hoofed, irremovable despotism; these principles, in the shape of Ultramontane Romanism, are to get the universal control of this country, with the same results, or else we, the American Catholic Church, are to lift ourselves up to the grandeur of our Mission, and to know, that being the Church of God, while Romanism, here as everywhere, is a schism and a corruption, we are to cast away all sect feeling, all of this little, paltry meanness, which sees ourselves as merely the greatest of the Protestant denominations; and to see, that we are to expand and be the Church, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, over this great land; if we can only open our eyes to see, our hearts and hands to pursue the course which God has placed open before us.

The practical conclusion, then, of this paper, for the Bishops, the Clergy, the Laity of the Church, is this. Here are two Churches, each with an Apostolic Ministry, in competition for this Nation. The one, corrupt in doctrine, in practice, in discipline; the other, pure in all these, with the Bible in her hand and the Truth, as it is Jesus Christ, clearly preached. We, the last, acknowledge the Orders, and the Sacraments of the first. Now, through thoughtlessness or carelessness, we have placed our true descended and valid Episcopacy, in a situation which impedes our progress, causes trouble and confusion, is an obstacle in the way of all, Bishops, Clergy, and Laity, hindering our action and the development of our work in this land. The advantage of the See Bishoprick we have seen in all these ways. Now, for those that love the Church and desire its progress and further growth, until the vine taken out of Egypt, and planted here, cover the whole land; for those, too, that see the evils of the Roman system, the great matter to be considered is this.-Of all these advantages we have deprived ourselves. All of them are we content that the Roman Catholic Church should possess, until, by long possession, by use, by habit, by custom, by that easy acquiescence in estab

lished facts, which belong to the human Constitution, the Roman Catholic Church, with its Bishops in every City of the land, small and great, using skilfully and persistently all these advantages, which we could so easily enjoy and do so slackly surrender, shall be accounted, and finally come to be the Church in this land? To that result, unquestionably, our position, as having Bishops Territorial, and their position as having 'See Bishopricks,' tends, and must, in the course of time, if unchanged, arrive.

Whereas, the restoration of the See Bishoprick places us at once in our true position in reference to this land; and to that false Church here existing schismatically, it says, 'the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church' is not the Roman. We, with the Creeds, the Bible, the Sacraments, the Doctrines of the Primitive Church, we are the Church of Christ. 'In this city,' it says, the Bishop, who is Roman, the Church, which is Roman, is not the Catholic Bishop and Church, but the Bishop, the Clergy and the Laity, who are American at once and Catholic.

There is no doubt, to our mind, that the 'See' position of our Bishops is the only one which can give fair play and a distinct status to our Church, as the sole efficient antagonist of Rome in this land. The only position it is, which can bring before the minds of the masses, practically and clearly, the question of the Church, as it is, between the pure Church and the corrupt one. We have fought in behalf of the idea, and the fact of the Episcopate and the Apostolic Succession, now for seventy-five years against inorganized dissent. Now comes the greater struggle against a Church having both these, and yet corrupt, in all things wherein the true gold can be debased with alloy. We see no way whereby to all the people of this land the differences may be shown, except that in every City of our land, wherein the alien Bishop has intruded, and the alien Church, with its medieval corruptions of faith and practice and tradition, the American Bishop should stand up himself, his Clergy and his Laity, showing to the eyes of all men the pure gold where the others display only a metal debased and alloyed.