BY J. J. MAURETTE,

PARISH PRIEST OF SERRE (ARRIEGE) IN 1841, A SECEDING MINISTER.

"Ye must be born again."-John iii., 7.

TRANSLATED BY THE REV. PETER FRASER, M.A.,

WITH A

PREFACE BY THE TRANSLATOR.

LONDON:

PUBLISHED BY JOHN WILLIAM PARKER, 445, WEST STRAND.

1846.

1184.

PREFACE.

Or the persons, whether in or out of the University of Oxford, who have recently seceded from the Church of their native land; and in exchange for its doctrines, or in addition to them, have adopted the tenets of a foreign Church, the Church of Rome; we, whom they have left, can only express the wish, perhaps breathe the prayer, that they may have set their own consciences at rest, during whatever may remain to them of life here on earth; and may obtain pardon, without purgatory, hereafter they are gone from us; and their places are already filled, as we trust, by men of less mystified minds, of clearer judgment, and sounder discretion. But the foreign Church must not enjoy even a temporary or an apparent triumph from the trivial accession of such men: many of its previous adherents are, it seems, disposed to consider the noisy conversion of these few, as the prelude to some approaching change, the first fruits of some new harvest of apostacy, in which the renegades from the Protestant faith are to be more and more numerous; terminating perhaps in the

A