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abandonment of any one article destroys it; but the Establishment has relinquished the power of the keys; the Church of England has renounced those miraculous gifts, as necessary now as ever, to convince the gainsayer and the infidel, to confound heresy and schism, and to ground her upon that Rock upon which Christ himself placed her, promising that " He would be with her to the end of the world," so that she should never want any of those good gifts to which she owed her birth, and by which she was maintained in her infancy; all these good gifts the Church of England had wilfully thrown away; she had renounced her birthright for that mess of pottage, state connexion, and the time had therefore arrived to renounce her.

§. 4. Tractarian Secession.

Upon these grounds many clergymen of the Oxford School went over to the Church of Rome. And it is the more important to state them clearly, because they are the basis of those identical errors which the Reformation protested against and swept away. At that period the idea of a sacrificing and mediatorial office in the priest, was substantially disavowed, and he descended into the humbler character of an appointed minister and instructor of the Christian people. The altar dwindled into a table covered with a pure white linen cloth, the elements of sacrifice into simple bread and wine; the efficacy-the real presence of the Saviour-dependent in an infinitely higher degree upon the spiritual state of the recipient than upon the hand that hallowed the sacred feast.

With the bread and wine Christ verily and indeed entered into the temple of the Christian heart, but only when swept and garnished by the besom of repentance, and not by that of sacerdotal absolution. This degradation from the potential to the merely ministerial office mortified and irritated the ambitious spirits which our Church had for a long time past nourished in her bosom, it must be confessed, with that degree of indulgence which is almost always extended to those who stand up for corporate privileges by the members of their own body. But as the views of these gentlemen expanded, dating, perhaps, from the publication of the 90th tract, that indulgence was in a great degree withdrawn. In proportion as they felt the ground slip from under them within the pale of the Establishment, their doubts increased, and their views veered naturally towards that communion which could alone lift them into a position upon a level with their spiritual pretensions. And in that communion they finally sought a refuge from disappointment and disgrace. And now, as usual in all such cases, no better way to justify their defection to themselves and their former friends could be hit upon than to second with more than ordinary zeal the efforts of their new allies for the overthrow of the principles they had betrayed and deserted.

It may be mentioned here that opportunely enough for their scheme, while the hankering after religious display and pageantry before alluded to was gaining ground, a variety of other tastes connected with medieval antiquity occupied the atten

tion of artists and tickled the fancies of amateurs and idlers of all ranks. The former plunged headlong into the mysteries of church architecture; the walls of the Royal Academy were covered with Gothic designs of all styles and periods, almost to the exclusion of every other architectural study. The table of the boudoir was garnished with illuminated missals, lives of saints, legendary stories and novels, deriving their chief interest from connexion with Romish forms and ideas, or directly recommending Romish principles and practice. In conversation the high-church tone came into vogue, and the manufacture of altar cloths and church ornaments was esteemed a fashionable occupation. To minds thus prepared it was now much easier to impart an exalted idea of the significance and importance of religious forms and ceremonies, and to connect them with the source from which they were originally derived. The Reformation was already brought into disesteem; Protestantism was loudly condemned, the name of Rome was uttered with reverence; all attacks upon her deprecated as schismatic, and every obstacle to a reunion with her cleared away, as soon as a decent opportunity could be found or created for slipping quietly through the open portals into the fold of Popery. Pope Pius IX was, chiefly by the instrumentality of the new converts, led to believe that the time for throwing them wide open had arrived; the bull "Universalis Ecclesiæ" was issued and England graciously received into the arms of the only true church.

§. 5. Movement among the Roman Catholic clergy.

Whether encouraged by these prospects, or prompted simply by a desire for an increase of personal power and dignity, or, it may well be, by an anxiety to be placed in a more favourable position to take advantage of the increase of liberalism in religion as in politics for the extension of their peculiar church principles-whatever their motive may have been, it is certain that for some years prior to this, the Roman Catholic clergy in this country expressed to the Pope a strong desire to be released from the dependent position in which they then stood, and to exchange it for that of a self-existent canonical hierarchy. Hitherto the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy had appeared among us as simple missionaries appointed by the Pope for service "in partibus hæreticorum ;" consequently with no other than a delegated office confined to the spiritual superintendence of the scattered flocks of their communion in these kingdoms. And in this light they were regarded by the legislature and the public. The bishops were liable to be shifted from one district to another by the Pope, just as an itinerant preacher of the Methodist connexion may be removed from his circuit by the fiat of the Conference; and even within that district they had no ordinary authority but what they derived from the Pope's instructions.

Their complaint, therefore, was, that in the true sense of the word, they were not really bishops; for they were provided neither with sees nor dioceses,

The common or canon law of the Roman church, as of our own, places every diocesan bishop upon an independent ground. Subject only to papal visitation, he is his own master; and every interference, except by the canonical modes and procedures is excluded.* As vicars, they held only the personal, but none of the territorial attributes of bishops. In this precise light they had been regarded in Protestant England for nearly three centuries; and under this view of their status and condition, and no other, all our legislative enactments relating to Roman Catholics had been passed. Never till now had the Bishop of Rome suffered a suspicion to get abroad that he himself contemplated them in any other light, or thought of giving them an episcopal character identical with that of the national hierarchy.

It was, therefore, in the humble garb of a Missionary communion that the Roman Catholic clergy and laity presented themselves in 1829 to the British legislature, petitioning for the restoration of their civil rights. All they asked was that a particular oath called the "Oath of Supremacy," in the form in which it stood on the Statute book, should be removed out of their way. By that oath the King was declared to be "in all causes ecclesiastical as well as civil in these his dominions supreme." To this they objected that they could not conscientiously make such a declaration; but expressed their willingness to acknowledge the temporal supremacy of the crown in the amplest terms. Without any * Dr. Ullathorne's letter, Times, 24th Oct. 1850.

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