These are my weighed sentiments: and fervently desiring, as I do, the perpetuity and prosperity of the established Church, zealous for its rights and dignity, preferring its forms, believing its Articles of Faith, and holding its Book of Common Prayer and its translation of the Scriptures among my highest privileges as a Christian and an Englishman, I trust that I may both entertain and avow these sentiments without forfeiting any part of my claim to the name of a faithful member of the Church of England.
June 1820.
N. B. As to Warburton's Alliance of the Church and State, I object to the title (Alliance), and to the matter and mode of the reasoning. But the inter-dependence of the Church and the State appears to me a truth of the highest practical importance. Let but the temporal powers protect the subjects in their just rights as subjects merely: and I do not know of any one point in which the Church has the right or the necessity to call in the temporal power as its ally for any purpose exclusively ecclesiastic. The right of a firm to dissolve its partnership with any one partner, breach of contract having been proved, and publicly to announce the same, is common to all men as social beings.
I spoke above of "Romanism." But call it, if you like, Laudism, or Lambethism in temporalities and ceremonials, and of Socinianism in doctrine, that is, a retaining of the word but a rejecting or interpreting away of the sense and substance of the Scriptural Mysteries. This spirit has not indeed manifested itself in the article of the Trinity, since Waterland gave the deathblow to Arianism, and so left no alternative to the Clergy, but the actual divinity or mere humanity of our Lord; and the latter would be too impudent an avowal for a public reader of our Church Liturgy: but in the articles of original sin, the necessity of regeneration, the necessity of redemption in order to the possibility of regeneration, of justification by faith, and of prevenient and auxiliary grace,—all I can say with sincerity is, that our orthodoxy seems so far in an improving state, that I can hope for the time when Churchmen will use the term Arminianism to express a habit of belief opposed not to Calvinism, or the works of Calvin, but to the Articles of our own Church, and to the doctrine in which all the first Reformers agreed.
Note—that by Latitudinarianism, I do not mean the particular tenets of the divines so called, such as Dr. H. More, Cudworth and their compeers, relative to toleration, comprehension, and the general belief that in the greater number of points then most controverted, the pious of all parties were far more nearly of the same mind than their own imperfections, and the imperfection of language allowed them to see: I mean the disposition to explain away the articles of the Church on the pretext of their inconsistency with right reason;—when in fact it was only an incongruity with a wrong understanding, the faculty which St. Paul calls
, the rules of which having been all abstracted from objects of sense, (finite in time and space,) are logically applicable to objects of the sense alone. This I have elsewhere called the spirit of Socinianism, which may work in many whose tenets are anti-Socinian.
Law is—
conclusio per regulam generis singulorum in genere isto inclusorum
. Now the extremes