to concur in it, when he had, with the rest of the seven bishops, given the decisive impulse to the memorable change.

And what was that reformation, of which you have spoken so slightly and so coldly? It was the successful effort of the western Christians to disenthral themselves from the abuses, which in a long period of barbarism and ignorance had overlaid the church of Christ, though without the rude and illsuited protection of those very abuses religion itself might, in such a period, have perished from among them. The first endeavours of religious emancipation were necessarily incomplete, for the mental eye could not at once receive the full light of gospel truth; but after these came the reformation of England to perfect the great work, by looking with an improved and steady view to the genuine doctrine of the written word. When, therefore, I look for the illustrious men of our church, my mind is carried back with gratitude and veneration to Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, who laid down their lives within your own university, that we might enjoy the pure light of the Gospel. I may not swear by these men, as the Grecian orator swore by those who had fallen at Marathon; nor, much as I reverence their memories, do I wish that they should be exalted into saints of our church by any species of canonization; but the grateful recollection of their deaths animates my breast with a sense of the

value of the struggle in which they suffered, and with a strong persuasion that it cannot now be wrong to oppose strenuously every tendency towards an assimilation to that church, for refusing to conform to which they were contented to sacrifice their lives.

What, too, was the religious character of that revolution, which you have chosen to stigmatise as a sin? By it the church of England, which had previously undergone the two great trials probably necessary to its final stability, having been first overthrown by the sectaries, and then almost overwhelmed by the returning influence of the Romanists, was so bound up with the constitutional liberty of the people, as to become an essential and inseparable part of the government. I do not understand how this can have been a sin, unless the reformation itself was a sin, and that our fathers were bound by a religious duty to remain in immediate connexion with Rome, acquiescing in all its abuses, and assisting to transmit them unaltered to their descendants.

In one of your concluding observations, I am, indeed, happy to concur with you. "The simultaneous tendency towards a more church feeling among ourselves," you say," among bodies separated from us, or again in Germany and Denmark feeling after it (although in the absence of a church

4 66

4 Page 232.

you

system, which has been preserved to us, not knowing where to find it), the increased energy of romanism itself (at least in France and America, where it exists in its least corrupted form), all point to some further coming of the Redeemer's kingdom.. I do agree with in believing that this simultaneous tendency is discoverable in the religious circumstances of the western church; but I look to the church of England, as purified from the abuses of Rome, and so preserved among us, to be the immediate instrument of the coming change. Possessing within itself an apostolical succession of its ministers, derived to it through the catholic church, although corrupted; founding its confession of faith, not, as you represent, on the authority of the earlier church, but on the unerring testimony of the sacred writings; holding, thus, its middle station between the presumptuous excesses of dissent on the one part, and the overweening pretensions of church-authority on the other, the united church of England and Ireland will, I trust, present to the religious world that object of union, in which the dissenters of these countries, and the members of other churches not episcopal, may be brought to seek rest for their unsettled spirits, the Romanists to find all that is true and really authorised in their own church without its abuses, and irreligious and worldly men to reverence the representation of apostolic truth and worship, offered to

their acceptance by the gracious providence of God.

5

Nor would I exclude from the circumstances indicating this simultaneous tendency, that you and your friends have, as you say, struck a note, "which has vibrated through every part of the frame of our church," though I cannot acknowledge this effect as an attestation, that it "had been attuned to it by a higher unseen hand." I know that in the providential government of God, one extreme prevailing among his creatures is usually corrected by the permission of its contrary; and I can, therefore, consider the effect on which you rely, as indicating only that the church of England was prepared to receive with attention an invitation to more than the usual seriousness of devotion.

remonstrance.

Here let me conclude this solemn, but friendly, It was commenced some time ago in the cheerful and thankful enjoyment of many domestic blessings. I have since continued it in deep affliction for the loss of two of the dearest objects of my affections, anxious to make my protest against these misconceptions, as they appear to me, of the doctrine and character of the church of which I am a member, especially as they are recommended by the example and teaching of a pious and good man, whose personal qualities

5 Page 231.

!

attract to them the young and ardent among the students of a great university, while the acting ministry of the church are influenced by the authority of his name and situation.

With true respect for yourself, Sir, individually,

I have the honour to be,

Your faithful Servant,

GEORGE MILLER.

Armagh, 1st October, 1840.

THE END.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY MOYES AND BARCLAY, CASTLE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE.