in this country, we ought most seriously to remember, that the Lutherans hold a doctrine which is equally repugnant with the tenets of the Church of Rome, to the evidence of sight and touch, and equally irreconcileable, as we think, to the authority of Scripture. The Lutherans maintain that there is a real corporeal presence of Christ; and this presence, according to them, consists, not in a change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, but by the immediate and essential union of that body and that blood with the bread and wine. The material elements, say they, are not destroyed, as the Romanists suppose them to be, but they remain in their original substance; and, at the same time, other substances are joined to them-the substance of the real body and the substance of the real blood of Jesus Christ. We are accustomed to hear a different, and, as I believe, a more rational and a more scriptural interpretation of Christ's words, and in this sound faith we have been educated, and I trust we shall continue to live, and shall die. But, while the Lutherans dissent from us nearly to the same extent with the Romanists, and while they maintain an opinion which seems to us incredible, are we accustomed to enlarge triumphantly and invidiously upon their mistakes? Do we accuse them of voluntary endeavours to corrupt Christianity? Do we load them with loud and vehement imputations of superstition, idolatry, and even blasphemy? Do we accuse them of inconsistency or insincerity, in not opposing, so far as we do, the tenets of the Church of

Rome? Happily, say I, for the Christian world, we do not; and with this plain fact before us, we ought to exercise the same justice and the same candour towards the Romanists. We ought to do so, as men who know the imperfection and fallibility of our common nature. We ought to do so, as Christians, who are peculiarly bounden to the duty of charity in our judgments upon the motives, and conduct of all communities and all individuals, professing themselves the members of Christ's universal Church.

Possible then it is, that the difference of treatment which we show to the Romanists and Lutherans respectively, has arisen from difference in their relative situations towards ourselves. The fact to which I advert deserves examination. The Lutherans have, in England, not been numerous. They have not possessed among us any property as an ecclesiastical body. They have not aimed at any spiritual authority in this kingdom. They have not interfered secretly or openly with its political concerns. To this negative merit they have added the positive praise of active, faithful, intrepid co-operation in the general defence and diffusion of Protestantism. Hence, perhaps, the great teachers of the English Church have treated the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation with lenity, while the doctrine of transubstantiation, as maintained by the Romanists, has again and again been the subject of contemptuous derision, tragical complaint, and declamatory accusation.

The Romanists, on the contrary, were once very

numerous. They had the support of individuals who commanded respect from the amplitude of their wealth, and the antiquity of their descent. They were occasionally seduced and irritated by emissaries, sometimes accredited, and sometimes not accredited by the Court of Rome. Their hopes, their fears, their partialitics, and their antipathies were called into action by all the ingenuity of preachers, and all the activity of zealots. Thus, in our conflicts with Romanists, politics in various degrees, and in several reigns, have been blended with theology; and theology took much of its colouring not only from controversial rivalry, but from disappointed ambition and mortified pride. Disputes upon ecclesiastical power were closely connected with struggles for temporal power. The members of the Church of Rome were desirous to recover, and the advocates of the English Church were equally desirous to retain, a very considerable portion of wealth, as well as of influence upon the consciences of their adherents. The freedom of the English constitution would in all probability have been endangered by the re-establishment of Popery. The succession to the throne was, in several instances, dependent on the issue of the contest; and from all these important causes the passions, both of Romish and Protestant ecclesiastics were violently inflamed. Hence they controverted premises; they evaded objections; and pressed against each other invidious consequences. Hence the jealousies and aversions thus stirred up, led both parties to think and speak reproachfully of each other upon doctrinal topics.

Both were unacquainted with the principles of genuine toleration; both had recourse to the utmost severity for the chastisement of what they called heresy; and, adverting to some recent occurrences in this kingdom, I venture to add, that, with the page of history before them, the successors of both would do well to abstain from invective, because the predecessors of both are exposed to retaliation. The records of these troublous times furnish us with few precedents for lenity; and so far as they are examples of rigour, the imitation of them would be restrained by the powerful, and the defence of them would be reprobated by the wise and good.

Happily, the evils,which more than once threatened us in the government both of Church and state, as it is now administered, can scarcely be said to exist; or at least they can be found only by the peering eyes of a polemic in their scattered, decayed, and smothered elements. The claims of an English sovereign to his throne, and his supremacy in ecclesiastical matters, as recognized by the laws, are delineated intelligibly-they are fixed, we trust, immoveably, and the usefulness of that supremacy is seen to consist, not so much in any immediate energies of it when employed by the sovereign, as in the avoidance of those mischiefs which might arise, if it were possessed and exercised by interested, bigoted, or exasperated individuals-by clerical convocations, where members become tumultuous by the contagion of sympathy, or by assemblies entirely laic, which might one day be tranquil and friendly, turbulent and hostile the next, and on

the third, intent upon confiscation as well as oppression. The improvement of the age in criticism, science, and enlarged views of our social rights and social interests, leave far less room for the minds of men to be hood-winked by priests or inflamed by disputants. The Romanists moreover distinguish more accurately and more temperately than did their forefathers between the spiritual and temporal dominion of the venerable personage, who presides over the Church of Rome-they have acquired the power of reconciling their principles as religionists to their reputation, interests, and duties as subjectsinstead of favouring, or even listening to those justifications of regicides, which in France produced a Raviliac, and which, in the reign of Elizabeth, were disseminated among our forefathers by wily confessors and mischievous pamphleteers, our contemporaries have consigned them to other classes of men, who, within our own memory, approved themselves adepts in the practice; and I mean royal assassins of royal relatives, discontented nobles, and unprincipled courts of judicature, countenanced by the acclamations of an infuriate rabble. In the absence of political provocations, the animosities of both parties have, by these means, been gradually mitigated. Our legislature wisely and virtuously has in part availed itself of the progressive change. Lenity has not weakened the security of the Church; the success of the experiment will lead, I hope, to an extension of the same goodly expedients; and for all these reasons it is not only weak, but wicked, in Protestants and Romanists, to cherish the same