Page:A Pastoral Letter to the Parishioners of Frome.djvu/10

, the necessary distrust of myself which I must feel in undertaking any religious office, from the sad experience and suffering for conscience' sake which it has pleased to lay upon me in my last pastoral charge in London.

It may be well if I allude to both these topics in some short form for your present satisfaction; and I would ask you to bear with me in reading what I now shall set before you in the spirit and love of our common Redeemer.

And first, in regard to the Time; a time of more than usual division, heresy, schism, and religious bitterness.

My brethren, what aspect did your town and parish present to me at my first entrance into it some weeks since? Not indeed anything peculiar or singular, for unhappily it is very nearly the same throughout all England;—but still it was a sight which could not but affect me in the contemplation of the sphere of duty in which God had called me to minister. A Parish Church indeed, with its venerable spire and ancient records of the past, pointing to times when men were one;—but scattered along the streets, chapels of various orders and degrees of dissent and separation, pointing to the schisms of later ages when unity of the faith ceased to be an item in the Christian's Creed. I said to mvself, "Into the Parish Church I shall have to enter of necessity, but why may I not enter here? why may I not there? The worshippers on this side have no communion with the worshippers on that side;—they are called disciples of a Master in Whose teaching the corner-stone was unity, yet they cannot assemble together in one house of prayer, but cut themselves off from each other, and all have different places for worshipping their common God. Neither can you have communion with them, nor can they with you."

I am quite aware that it is impossible for the minds of a number of thoughtful, earnest, religious men, such as I have no doubt many among you are, to be