Page:A Pastoral Letter to the Parishioners of Frome.djvu/31

23 England be the true Church in England (and you would not deny that) and the Church be one, then a man born in England, if he were to go out of her, would be guilty of schism, and from schism, as from a deadly sin, you pray, "Good, deliver us." Pursue this, and suppose you or I or any of our Bishops should become aware of a schism, or which is the same thing, that the unity of this one Church is broken; and being aware that such schism is a sin, and unity broken a violation of the chiefest prayer of our Blessed Lord, that His Church might be one;—suppose this to be the case,—would it not then be a duty to deplore the sin, wheresoever it was, and to restore such unity broken?

Well, but how can you or I, or any private individuals, know or rightly judge the time or the manner in which unity is to be restored? Must it not be the Bishops who shall so judge? Yes. Because the way of restoring unity when once broken is by a general council of Christendom, and in such a general council it would be the Bishops of the Universal Church who would have (under the special direction and power of the ) to decide what the faith of the Church should be, and to make new canons and rules of discipline, for the sake of restoration of the broken unity. This was always the way by which dissension and schism were healed in former ages, and it is the only way in which it can be healed again. But in this, we as private individuals have no voice: we can only submit to what is before us. In France, a member of the Church to what is before him in France; in Italy, a member of the Church to what is before him in Italy; in England, a member of the Church to what is before him in England; leaving it in the hands of the rulers of the Church to direct the perfect restoration of unity as God may in His own good time move men's hearts towards it.

And do you not see, my brethren, that the maintenance of such an opinion as that which is here objected to by the memorialists of your parish is just