Mr. and Mrs. Morgan desire to be affectionately remembered to you, and they would be highly gratified if you could make a little tour and spend a short time at Calne. There is an admirable collection of pictures at Corsham. Bowles left Bremhill (two miles from us, where he has a perfect paradise of a place) for town yesterday morning.
CCVII. TO THE REV. W. MONEY.[135]
Calne, Wednesday, 1815.
Dear Sir,—I have seldom made a greater sacrifice and gratification to prudence than in the determination most reluctantly formed, that the state of my health, which requires hourly regimen, joined with the uncertain state of the weather and the perilous consequences of my taking cold in the existing weakness of the viscera, renders it improper for me to hazard a night away from my home. No pleasure, however intellectual (and to all but intellectual pleasures I have long been dead, for surely the staving off of pain is no pleasure), could repay me even for the chance of being again unwell in any house but my own. I have a great, a gigantic effort to make, and I will go through with it or die. Gross have been the calumnies concerning me; but enough remains of truth to enforce the necessity of considering all other things as unimportant compared with the necessity of living them down. This letter is, of course, sacred to yourself, and a pledge of the high respect I entertain for your moral being; for you need not the feelings of friendship to feel as a friend toward every fellow Christian.
To turn to another subject, Mr. Bowles, I understand, is about to publish, at least is composing a reply to some answer to the “Velvet Cushion.”[136] I have seen neither work. But this I will venture to say, that if the respondents in favour of the Church take upon them to justify in the most absolute sense, as if Scripture were the subject of the controversy, every minute part of our admirable Liturgy, and liturgical and sacramental services, they will only furnish new triumph to ungenerous adversaries.
The Church of England has in the Articles solemnly declared that all Churches are fallible—and in another, to assert its absolute immaculateness, sounds to me a mere contradiction. No! I would first overthrow what can be fairly and to all men intelligibly overthrown in the adversaries’ objections (and of this kind the instances are as twenty to one). For the remainder I would talk like a special pleader, and from the defensive pass to the offensive, and then prove from St. Paul (for of the practice of the early Church even in its purest state, before the reign of Constantine, our opponents make no account) that errors in a Church that neither directly or indirectly injure morals or oppugn salvation are exercises for mutual charity, not excuses for schism. In short, is there or is there [not] such a condemnable thing as schism? In the proof of consequences of the affirmative lies, in my humble opinion, the complete confutation of the (so-called) Evangelical Dissenters.
I shall be most happy to converse with you on the subject. If Mr. Bowles were not employed on it, I should have had no objection to have reduced my many thoughts to order and have published them; but this might now seem invidious and like rivalry.
Present my best respects to Mrs. Money, and be so good as to make the fitting apologies for me to Mr. T. Methuen,[137] the man wise of heart! But an apology already exists for me in his own mind.
I remain, dear sir, respectfully your obliged