professedly Christian Communions, primitive and modern, who have really adhered to this only Divine Standard, have avowed substantially the same views of God's own revealed Truth, which views therefore may be called the STANDARD DOCTRINES, and the sum of which is, man's TOTAL ruin by sin, and redemption in the ONE NAME of the FATHER, SON, and HOLY GHOST, by the ONE ONLY MEDIATOR, JESUS CHRIST. 4. Civil rulers and the people, to whom the Holy Scriptures are vouchsafed, are bound, if they value the favour of Almighty God, "as they have received the gift, so to minister the same as good stewards of the manifold grace of God," and consequently to use all lawful public and national means of promoting the STANDARD DOCTRINES ;-only with liberty of conscience for such persons as through something anomalous in their particular case, (how far culpable or not, God alone can judge,) differ from those doctrines ;in other words, civil rulers and their subjects are bound by all that is dear and sacred to ESTABLISH some form of the Standard Doctrines, and of those doctrines only. 5. To establish such doctrines as are held by those bodies of professed Christians, who notori ously adopt other Standards than the written Word of God, whether by taking from, or adding to, that Word, would be virtually to participate in supplanting, or disparaging its exclusively divine authority.-To establish all religious opinions would be in effect to countenance, among other fatal errors, atheism and idolatry. -To establish none, would be to put Christianity upon the same footing of contempt or indifference with infidelity and impiety.—To establish the STANDARD DOCTRINES, by giving the same national sanction to all the Standard Christian Communions, (by which are meant communions differing about Christian ordinances, but agreeing in Standard Doctrines,) would necessarily entangle the government and the country in circumstances of irretrievable complexity and disturbance; and besides, this scheme having been put to the test of experience in the North American States, has signally failed, and been abandoned by them all. 6. The only line of duty therefore in the sight of God is God's own method, as exemplified in the Old Testament, and authorized in the New; namely, to establish some one Standard Communion, possessing on the whole suitable qualifi cations, in the name, as it were, of the rest, and for the good of all ;-reserving the rights of conscience inviolate to men of other communions. 7. The Protestant Episcopal Church of England and Ireland,-besides other qualifications, such as the episcopal authority and order of its ministry and its character as "the pillar and base of the truth" in these realms,-possesses paramount claims to retain its office as the Establishment for England and Ireland, because having been already established for centuries past, it has been made a blessing to this whole nation, and a bulwark to Protestantism, and a witness for sound scriptural religion in the world at large. 8. The united Church of England and Ireland has this peculiar advantage, that the property employed in maintaining its ministrations, -with the exception of some few endowments rightly transferred from superstitious uses to the support of true religion,--originated long before the prevalent usurpations of Popery, in the donations and bequests of individuals for the purpose of promoting doctrines, conformable in the main to the STANDARD DOCTRINES of Primitive Christianity, and their modern restoration by Protestantism. The Reformation only brought back the property of the Church to the aid of those main doctrines from which it had been for a time wrested in furtherance of papal heresies. Let that property by all lawful means be rendered effective in accomplishing the sacred trusts for which it was bestowed. But to alienate it now to other than Protestant Church-purposes would be not merely to pervert the intentions of the founders, to undermine the religious Establishments of the empire, to endanger the endowments of Protestant Dissenters themselves, and to strike the first blow at the fundamental rights of property in this realm, but also in effect to renounce the guidance of Holy Scripture, and to sin with a high hand against the truth and the laws of Almighty God. CONTENTS. The Church's cry, generally considered, for permission to hold |