Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/101

Rh is, to get up actions at law against us, on the complaint of simple women, disorderly persons, whom they have perverted. Another, to expose the Christian profession to scorn, by permitting the younger persons among them to run irreverently about all the streets:" i.e., as it should seem, from one conventicle to another.…"And while they thus set themselves against the Divinity of the of, of course they shrink not from uttering unseemly rudenesses against us. Nay, they disdain to compare themselves even with any of the ancients, or to be put on a level with those, whom we from children have reverenced as our guides. As to their fellow-servants of this time, in whatever country or Church, they do not consider a single one to have attained any measure of true wisdom: calling themselves the only wise, the only disdainers of worldly wealth, the only discoverers of doctrinal truth; to themselves, they say, alone are revealed things which in their nature never could have come into the mind of any other under the sun."

Such were the original Arians, the first powerful impugners of the Divinity of ; such their conduct towards their Bishops, and their reverence for Apostolical authority. The list of examples might be greatly enlarged; but it is time to go on to more modern times, and see what the result has been, where that was done, (I do not say from motives like theirs,) which Novatian and Arius clearly would have done if they had dared.

The largest experiments yet made in the world on the doctrinal result of dispensing with episcopal succession, are the Lutheran Churches of North Germany, the Presbyterian or Reformed Churches of Switzerland, Holland and Scotland, with their offshoots in France, Germany, England and Ireland, and the Congregational or Independent Churches, in this island, and in America. I am not now going to dispute the necessity of what was done at the Reformation, (although it would be wrong to allow such necessity, without proof quite overwhelming) but simply to state, as matter of fact, what has ensued in each instance in regard of the great doctrine of our Incarnation.