Α VISION OF THE CHURCH. WITH A PREFACE, NOTES, AND ILLUSTRATIONS. "Pro Ecclesiâ Dei! Pro Ecclesiâ Dei!" WHITGIFT, Archiepiscopus, moriens. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1848. TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO TRAINED HIM IN THE TRUTH, AND LIVING BY THE RULES, DEPARTED IN THE PEACE OF GOD AND OF HIS CHURCH, THIS SAD VISION IS INSCRIBED BY ONE WHO HEARS THEM, THOUGH DEAD, YET SPEAKING. PREFACE. THE following pages have been written under the strong conviction that the difficulties in which the Church of England now finds herself placed are of her own creation. And the writer prefers incurring the open charge of speaking out too boldly in a matter that so dearly concerns us all to the imputation of "just hinting a fault and hesitating dislike," and then leaving her Communion in disgust. It is very easy to speak one day of the awfulness of a Bishop's lightest words when delivered ex cathedrâ, and then on the next to quit that Bishop's flock and fellowship as if his words' weight and authority, having changed since yesterday, were thenceforward to go for nothing. It is not, however, so easy to face the feeling of seeming to oneself and others to set light by men, whose office we revere, and this too at the very time that the cause for which one would fain strive unto the death is dying away through the apathy of our spiritual rulers themselves, so that we languish under a double depression, engendered in part by the disease and in part by our own remedy. Anything, however, seems to be more dutiful to our Mother than first to deify her chief ministers and then desert her household. No, let the truth be spoken as it is felt. Had the Bishops possessed but moderate foresight, firmness, and fatherly affection for their sons and daughters in the faith; had they but |