Mass in an Episcopal edifice; but for this, as Father Agapius was ordained by a Bishop, he has no regret. He plants himself on several canons, the most essential passages of which, as far as his reasoning is concerned, are the following:-"No man shall be accounted or taken to be a lawful Bishop, Priest, or Deacon in this Church, or suffered to execute any of the said functions, except he be called, tried, examined, and admitted thereto, according to the form hereafter following, or hath had Episcopal consecration or ordination." "No person shall be permitted to officiate in any congregation of this Church, without his first providing the evidence of his being a minister thereof," &c. "Every minister shall, before all sermons and lectures, and on all other occasions of public worship, use the Book of Common Prayer, and in performing such service, no other prayers shall be read than those prescribed by the said book."

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The first-taking the Respondents in the order in which they stand in the pamphlet before us-to open his batteries on the Bishop's admonitory epistle, is Dr. Tyng. He begins by saying, that as the canons only authorize the Bishop to deliver charges to his clergy, and send pastoral letters to his people, and as Bishop Potter's letter is neither the one or the other, it can only have the force of a personal communication. The main facts on which the Bishop animadverts in his reproof, are "the use of extemporaneous prayer, and the union with other denominations of Christians in religious worship." Dr. Tyng plainly implies that the Bishop has played into the hands of a High Church faction, and turned against his friends, to whom he owes his election to office. He characterizes the letter as follows:

"It opposes with admonitions, perhaps with threats, of needless severity, a general tendency and spirit of our time, which is not only in itself harmless and entirely tolerable, but is, in its purpose and desire, manifestly in the line of divine truth and example, adapted to edify rather than to destroy the best interests of the Gospel and the Church of God. It throws your influence and yourself on the side of an exclusiveness of partisan judgment and action, which I am sure is not the spirit of the New Testament; which can never be acceptable or welcomed in the Christianity of our land; and which, in its relations to our own Church, can only tend, as it has always tended, to retard its growth, to limit its influence, to discredit its character, and make it unpopular and repulsive in the apprehension of the people whom it seeks to gather and to bless." pp. 4, 5.

Dr. Tyng refuses to govern his conduct by the doctrines of the letter. First, he takes up the history of the claims which are press

ed in this document. He shows that the High Church scheme propounded by Bishop Potter, was not recognized by previous Bishops-White, Madison, Bass, Provost, or Moore, but began with Hobart; that Bishop Griswold and Bishop Moore, of Virginia, contemporaries of Hobart, were opponents of that scheme; that Hobart himself never ventured "to carry out the practical logic of his principles." Secondly, he refers to circumstances in his own. personal history. In the diocese of Massachusetts, under Bishop. Griswold, in the diocese of Pennsylvania, under Bishops White and Henry Onderdonk, in the diocese of New York, under Wainwright, he had enjoyed full liberty to engage in occasional acts of fellowship with other religious denominations. In Maryland alone, under a Bishop of the Hobart stamp, an unsuccessful effort had been made to abridge this freedom. "I am compelled," he says, "to look back upon my whole career and say, Neither the spotless Griswold, nor the patriarchal White, nor the intelligent and logical Onderdonk, nor the generous and open-hearted Wainwright, ever denounced or reproved me; but justified and encouraged me with paternal and brotherly support. If I have been wrong in my principles or conduct, they were eminently so. If they have been just, and been justified, then have the principles of my ministry been canonical and correct; and I have 'ministered the discipline of Christ as this Church hath received the same.' You leave me no other resource in earthly determination, than to throw myself back upon this whole complete career of ministry, and to avow its rectitude, in the theories of its guidance, and in the facts which have distinguished it; and to commit myself for the future to my Master and His Church, while I say, humbly but solemnly, I can do no otherwise in time to come." pp. 14, 15.

Dr. Tyng then proceeds to examine and confute Bishop Potter's strict construction of the laws of his Church. We quote:

"This High Church interpretation of doctrine, sacraments, and discipline, this Church had never received; neither had the Lord commanded it, in any information then given to me, nor in any further information which I have since been able to acquire. I regard it as a new doctrine, unawares brought in, to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, and to bring us again into bondage," to which I must say: We can give place by subjection, no, not for an hour, that the truth of the Gospel may continue' in the Church.

"This new scheme of excluding and unchurching all non-Episcopal divines, 'excluding ministers and licentiates of non-Episcopal bodies, not only from ad. ministering the sacraments, but also from teaching within her fold, holding them to be incompetent,' I do not believe the Lord hath commanded,' or that it is 'ac

cording to the commandment of God;' and I certainly know that this Church hath not received the same,' but has rejected it, and resisted it, and renounced it, always, on every occasion on which individual persons in the church have attempted to enforce it, or assume it, as the doctrine and teaching of the Church.

"The English Church at the Reformation certainly did not receive it. The divines of the Continental Reformation were freely acknowledged, consulted, referred to, and invited to teach and minister in her universities, and among her people. Neither Cranmer, nor Parker, nor Whitgift, her first eminent and her abiding authoritative leaders, taught the excluding principles of this scheme. Bancroft was, perhaps, its originator in the English Church. At least, I have not been able to find a trace of it in the authorities of the English Church before him.

"The Church of England did not receive this interpretation, when she sent Hall, and Davenant, and Carleton, to take counsel with the Synod of Dort, an assembly of Presbyterian divines, on terms of perfect equality and unrestricted freedom.

"The English Church did not receive this scheme, when the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, the very Society which has been always counted the pattern and model of orthodoxy in the Church, commissioned Lutheran ministers, without Episcopal ordination, as competent to be the missionaries and representatives of this Church, in the introduction of the Gospel into India.

The English Church did not receive this scheme when, subsequently, the Church Missionary Society employed similar ministers and missionaries to propagate the Gospel in Africa and the East.

"The English Church has never received this scheme, from the Reformation down to this day. Its introduction has always been opposed and contended with, as a novelty which the Church had never received. The character of the Archbishops of Canterbury in the whole line of their testimony from the Reformation, has been the solemn witness and token of the oppposite decision. From Cranmer down to Sumner, they have transmitted no such scheme to their successors. The only conspicuous name among them adopting the scheme is the ill-fated Laud. While all whose names have given honor to their station, like those whom I have mentioned, and Wake, and Moore, and Tenison, and Tillotson, and Seeker, and others like them, have presented no such doctrine as the doctrine of the Church over which they so honorably presided.

"The American Church did not receive this interpretation in her settlement of doctrine. Her opposing stand is as notorious as any fact in past human history. In the preface to her Prayer-Book, the key to its interpretation, she says: This Church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England, on any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship, or further than local circumstances require.' Her first generation of Bishops did not adopt it, nor transmit it. The great body of her ministers and people never have adopted it. The Church in the Eastern Diocese, comprising the five New England States, in which I was ordained, had never received it. It was never, as a scheme of doctrine, delivered to me. I have not received it in the Church or from the Church. I have always considered it as among the 'erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God's Word,' which I promised, the Lord being my helper,' 'with all

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faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church.' And I have always endeavored, in fulfillment of my promise, with 'faithful diligence always to minister the doctrines and sacraments, and the discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded, and as this Church hath received the same,' but not as Archbishops Bancroft, or Laud, or Bishop Hobart, have assumed to be its infallible interpreters."

These facts are highly important, and deserve to be universally understood. The bigotry that unchurches all other religious denominations, and prates about the "sects," is a novelty and innovation unknown to the great Anglican Reformers, and dating from the worst days of English tyranny when the Stuarts were trying to trample down all liberty. "Antiquity," the great idol of the High Church party, is just what their boastful pretensions lack. As to the meaning of the canons, Dr. Tyng asserts that the " OCcasional ministering, or speaking or preaching," in Episcopal churches is not "officiating," within the meaning of the law; and he makes good his interpretation by an appeal to usage. Even laymen have been invited to speak in their churches by bishops, and have been authorized to read the whole liturgy. The canon was originally designed to guard against impostors. It is afterwards, in this pamphlet, shown that the canon, which Bishop Potter cites, equally forbids the "officiating" of episcopally ordained ministers not belonging to the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States. As concerns the use of the Prayer-Book, Dr. Tyng thus replies to the solemn observations of the Bishop:

"I doubt if there be a single minister of the Church who has ever carried out this literal application of the canon, according to its strict interpretation.

"Who is there that has never read anything but the regular morning and evening prayer before sermons or lectures? Who is there that has not introduced, and seen others introduce, missionary meetings and other occasions of benevolent associations, when there were many lectures, by a few collects, variously selected and put together, instead of insisting on the whole morning or evening prayer Who is there in the ministry that ever pretended to carry out an obedience to all the rubrics of the Prayer-Book? What man, Bishop or Presbyter, has obeyed the first rubric in the office for the ministration of Private Baptism, 'The minister of every parish shall often admonish the people that they defer not the baptism of their children longer than the first cr second Sunday next after their birth?' Who is there that performs the office of Churching of Women, or obeys the rubric before that office?

"Bishops, who have no more authority in such cases than any others, have always followed in the same course, because the course is inevitable. Bishop Hobart's private prayers for funerals, for visitation of the sick and the afflicted, which are without the slightest claim to authority, and as really violations to the canons of the Church, (of which you say 'the Church leaves nothing to the fancy

or caprice of the officiating minister, will not allow her children to be disturbed in their solemn acts of worship by the intrusion of novel forms and expressions'), as any extemporaneous prayer which may be offered, are in the habitual use perhaps of half the clergy in your diocese, and they not the half to whom your present rebukes apply." pp. 20, 21.

Dr. Canfield, in his letter to the Bishop, calls attention to the circumstance that the latter habitually speaks of "the Church," although the language of the canons and the Prayer-Book is "this Church," or "our Church." The difference is not without significance. The Fathers of the English Episcopal church did not pretend that this body was "the Church." This offensive phraseology is characteristic of more modern bigotry. As if the religious body in which Dr. Potter is a clergyman were alone, in this country, entitled to the name of Church! Dr. Canfield's rejoinder to the Bishop's rigid construction of the canons is even more pointed and successful than Dr. Tyng's. The following remarks are valuable:

:

"It is manifest to every reader of the Letter, that the gravamen of the offenses complained of, consists in certain acts of ministers of our Church, from which the public might infer that the actor recognized the validity of nonEpiscopal orders. This is obviously the head and heart of the offense. It stands out boldly in all the document. This constitutes the only essential difference between the use of Trinity Chapel, by a supposed minister of the Russo-Greek Church, of which the Letter approves, and of the Ascension Church by a Presbyterian, which you condemn. (The Canon no more authorizes the presence of a minister from the English Church than it does from the Baptist or Presbytrian Churches. It makes no reference to his Episcopal or his non-Episcopal ordination). The Pastoral Letter is evidently based upon the theory, that the Canons were expressly designed to deny the validity of non-Episcopal orders, and to forbid any public acts which might appear to sanction such a doctrine. I do not question your right to draw this conclusion from them, and to hold it as a matter of private opinion, but I do respectfully protest against your attempt to enforce your inferences, in an arbitrary way, as the law of our Church. You must know that this was not the doctrine of the Reformers and Fathers of the Church of England, who framed the Articles and arranged the Prayer-Book; and that the founders of our Church in this country were far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship.'

"No historical fact is more evident' than that the Thirty-nine Articles, which are expressed in carefully selected, technical phraseology, to set forth her doctrine and principles, not only avoid taking this position, but that, in defining the visible Church, and declaring what is necessary to constitute ministerial authority, language is employed which was purposely designed to recognize the valid ity of the orders of the non-Episcopal Churches of Scotland and of the continent of Europe. Every well-informed person knows that as a consequent and consist