These are my weighed sentiments: and fervently desiring, as I do, the
perpetuity and prosperity of the established Church, zealous for its
rights and dignity, preferring its forms, believing its Articles of
Faith, and holding its Book of Common Prayer and its translation of the
Scriptures among my highest privileges as a Christian and an Englishman,
I trust that I may both entertain and avow these sentiments without
forfeiting any part of my claim to the name of a faithful member of the
Church of England.
June 1820.
N. B. As to Warburton's Alliance of the Church and State, I object to
the title (Alliance), and to the matter and mode of the reasoning. But
the inter-dependence of the Church and the State appears to me a truth
of the highest practical importance. Let but the temporal powers protect
the subjects in their just rights as subjects merely: and I do not know
of any one point in which the Church has the right or the necessity to
call in the temporal power as its ally for any purpose exclusively
ecclesiastic. The right of a firm to dissolve its partnership with any
one partner, breach of contract having been proved, and publicly to
announce the same, is common to all men as social beings.
I spoke above of "Romanism." But call it, if you like, Laudism, or
Lambethism in temporalities and ceremonials, and of Socinianism in
doctrine, that is, a retaining of the word but a rejecting or
interpreting away of the sense and substance of the Scriptural
Mysteries.
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