Page:A Pastoral Letter to the Parishioners of Frome.djvu/37

29 But even in the passage presented to the Bishop as amended, still there can be no idea of my meaning unless the passages preceding and subsequent be also read. The context can alone explain the text. The passage preceding is this:

"'If a man were born in England, and were to believe and abide by the tenets of the Church of Rome, in England, he would become a dissenter; and if in England he were to go and join himself to a community of men who recognised the Pope as head of the Church, or if he were to build a conventicle, and worship in it by different rites and customs from those commanded by our own Church, and do those things therein which were forbidden by our own Bishops, he would be guilty of the grievous sin of schism; he would be rending the flock of asunder; he would be harbouring and extending what is above all things offensive in the sight of, setting up altar against altar, and sowing discord and dissension where all ought to be unity and love.'—Page 138."

The passages subsequent to which I would call your attention are:

"Perhaps there is no Christian, in any country, or any Church that stands in so peculiarly happy a position as one of the Church of England."—Page 142.

"You must submit yourself as a child to his mother. You must neither hanker after the peculiar rites and ceremonies of the Church of Rome, which however beautiful to the imagination, are not primitive; nor must you dream of mere ideal notions of spiritual religion with the Independent, or Quaker, or Anabaptist, or Methodist Dissenter. You must consider yourself as blessed beyond all possible desire in your good and holy Church of England; remembering that her many defects and shortcomings are not in her theory but in her practice; not in her as she ought to be; but as she is by reason of individual delinquents and temporary accidents, which will, by prayer and perseverance, be swept away. You must not judge by individuals but by principles. You must join your hand to a great work of restoring what has been lost, and saving what remains. And for the present you must thank that your reformation was carried on, not like the Lutheran, without the Church, but with the Church; that you still have among you  holy ministers, who can trace their authority to preach and baptize and administer the Holy Eucharist, by Episcopal laying on of hands, in a direct line from the very Apostles, even as they do from ."

Again in the quotation about the Bible. It is deliberately said by the memorialists that the passage so quoted is a sentence which "heads a paragraph," by which is insinuated, that the statement conveyed