image and superscription of our pure and reformed Church-it illustrates, in a manner most literally and strikingly true, the actual condition of the long-lost Church of England, at the time of the Reformation-when it was not rebuilt but restored, purged, and cleansed, from those monstrous errors and incrustations which the Church of Rome, the great western tyrant, had spread over the walls of our Zion, and by her repeated encroachments had at last entombed in the very dust and depth of her own abominations.

To our Protestant and Roman Catholic brethren, we would say, in the spirit of congratulation to the one, and of solemn warning to the other—" Behold here the pattern of the altar of the Lord, which our fathers made, not for burnt-offerings nor for sacrifices; but it is a witness between us and you. God forbid that we should rebel against the Lord." Joshua xxii. 28, 29.

CHAPTER II.

"Thou son of man, show the house to the house of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities: and let them measure the pattern.

"And if they be ashamed of all that they have done, show them

the form of the house, and the fashion thereof, and the goings out thereof, and the comings in thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the laws thereof; and write it in their sight, that they may keep the whole form thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and do them."-EZEK. xliii. 10, 11.

By that pattern, then, which our fathers have left us, as a lasting testimony between Protestants and Roman Catholics, we desire to have our Church measured, and "showing" our erring Roman Catholic brethren, in the following pages, "the form of our house," and "the goings out thereof, and the comings in thereof," we will fearlessly answer that old and threadbare question, which, from the days of

Cardinal Bellarmine to the present moment, has ever been tauntingly asked, "Where was your religion before Luther?" by pointing to Perranzabuloe, and by now putting ourselves the question, "Where was that Church before its restoration?" A "latent Church," it is true-deeply "latent" in the sands of the sea-but not less. on that account a Christian Church. Therefore, the stress that Roman Catholics formerly laid on the necessity of a visibility for proving the existence of a true Church, is worth nothing-the pattern before us at once settles the question— it is better than a thousand arguments-it demonstrates, beyond all controversy, that a "Church's obscurity is never repugnant to its visibility-nor its visibility such as excludes all latency." Therefore, though the Church of England may have been "latent" for a timenay, for 400 years buried in deeper sands than

*The reader is particularly requested to peruse with attention a highly interesting letter at the end of this volume, from the Earl of Manchester to his son Walter Montague, who had embraced the Romish faith, wherein he most ably confutes this and other arguments used by the Roman Catholics of his day. The author, possessing a manuscript copy of this letter, purporting to have been communicated by the said Walter to the Earl of Leceister, had believed it to be the unpublished original; but he since finds it was printed by Dr. Hammond, in his 2nd vol. p. 700. He has, however, republished it, from a persuasion that it will not be unacceptable to the reader: being an able refutation, from a layman's pen, of some of the most plausible arguments in favor of Roman Catholicism.

Perranzabuloe-still she was a Church-still she had the "requisite lineaments of an unaccountable visibility." But it seems that our opponents have all but yielded the argument of visibility, and have broken fresh ground; and, whilst Luther and the German Reformers are still anathematized as the inventors of a new religion, and Cranmer and the members of the united Church of England and Ireland are branded with the name of schismatics, and the Reformation itself is artfully held up to the Protestant Dissenters as a precedent for that selfsame sin of schism with which they are charged by ourselves; they arrogate to themselves the credit of antiquity, and fain would persuade the world that Romanism is our elder sister by 1500 years.

Now antiquity, being justly considered "the voice and practice of men," is an argument of considerable force, and has been made, we are painfully conscious, but a too successful claptrap for enmeshing within its folds the young and ardent imaginations of such as are of a high-wrought and romantic turn of mind. Yes,

*The Roman Catholics generally assume to themselves four marks of being the true Church:-1. Unity. 2. Holiness. 3. Catholicity. 4. Apostolicity. Bellarmine records thirteen more, viz:-Antiquity-Duration-Amplitude-Succession of Bishops -agreement in doctrine with the primitive Church-Sanctity of doctrine-Efficacy of doctrine-Holiness of life-Miracles-Prophecy-Confession of adversaries-Unhappy end of enemiesTemporal felicity.

constant cry.

"the old religion, the old religion," is now the "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord," was the senseless shout of the apostate Jews of old; but the prophet pronounced them to be "lying words." We Protestants re-echo the prophet, and shall "cry aloud, and spare not," so long as we hold in our hands the Bible, the Charter of our liberty. For any thing under the name of Christianity, which that blessed book does not recognise, we reject -if not to be found in the book of the law and the testimony, it must be an invention of later date than the book itself. The additions accumulated by the Church of Rome are certainly very old, but the foundation against which she has heaped her sandy system must be older still. That foundatiou is the Bible-and the Bible is our religion. There our religion was before the days of Cranmer, of Luther, of Wickliffe! We desire not to prove our religion older than the Bible. And this is "a free challenge betwixt us. Let the elder have us both: if there be any point of our religion younger than patriarchs and prophets, Christ and his apostles, the fathers and doctors of the primitive Church, let it be accursed and condemned for an upstart: show us evidence of more credit and age, and carry it."+

* Jerem. vii. 4.

+ Bishop Hall's Serious Dissuasive from Popery, fol.

P. 544.