Essays Chiefly On Questions Of Church And State

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ancient precedent, through action and reaction of two mighty principles, each as distinct now as when they were brought face to face in King and Baron, Cavalier and Roundhead, Jacobite and Orangeman. Our universities are constructed, at least nominally, on the combination of two opposite institutions? the collegiate and the professorial. Our political constitution is worked for the most part by the union of a theory and practice utterly at variance with each other. Our judicial courts, civil and ecclesiastical, vie with each other in the mass of irreconcilable doctrines which are involved in almost every turn of their most solemn forms. Such considerations, even if not strictly applicable to the case in question, yet tend to indicate the inconsistency of reproaching the recent Judgment, or the Church of England, for the very qualities which, in the rest of our national institutions, we honour with the highest commendation, and which, in our general history, have led to such beneficial results. The wisest Germans feel, that to unsettle the equal relations established between the Roman Catholics and Protestants at the Peace of Westphalia, would be to undo the work which Provi- vence has wrought among them by the infallible signs of thirty years of misery and bloodshed. The wisest Englishman should feel no less, that to cast either of the existing parties out of the Church of England, is to act in despite of that Providence which, through three hundred years ot war and peace, has never allowed either of the two parties entirely to succumb to the other. ' What God has joined, let no man put asunder.' ' Happy that country,' was the expression of a European sovereign who some years past visited this island, and surveyed with delight our ancient ecclesiastical institutions?' happy tha...

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