“Now if there ever were a Church on whom the experiment has been tried, whether it had life in it or not, the English is that one.  For three centuries it has endured all vicissitudes of fortune.  It has endured in trouble and prosperity, under seduction, and under oppression.  It has been practised upon by theorists, browbeaten by sophists, intimidated by princes, betrayed by false sons, laid waste by tyranny, corrupted by wealth, torn by schism, and persecuted by fanaticism.  Revolutions have come upon it sharply and suddenly, to and fro, hot and cold, as if to try what it was made of.

“It has been a sort of battlefield on which opposite principles have been tried.  No opinion, however extreme any way, but may be found, as the Romanists are not slow to reproach us, among its Bishops and Divines.  Yet what has been its career upon the whole?  Which way has it been moving through 300 years?  Where does it find itself at the end?  Lutherans have tended to Rationalism; Calvinists have become Socinians; but what has it become?  As far as its Formularies are concerned, it may be said all along to have grown towards a more perfect Catholicism than that with which it started at the time of its estrangement; every act, every crisis which marks its course, has been upward.

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“What a note of the Church is the mere production of a man like Butler, a pregnant fact much to be meditated on! and how strange it is, if it be as it seems to be, that the real influence of his work is only just now beginning! and who can prophesy in what it will end?  Thus our Divines grow with centuries, expanding after their death in the minds of their readers into more and more exact Catholicism as years roll on.

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“Look across the Atlantic to the daughter Churches of England in the States:  ‘Shall one that is barren bear a child in her old age?’ yet ‘the barren hath borne seven.’  Schismatic branches put out their leaves at once, in an expiring effort; our Church has waited three centuries, and then blossoms like Aaron’s rod, budding and blooming and yielding fruit, while the rest are dry.  And lastly, look at the present position of the Church at home; there, too, we shall find a note of the true City of God, the Holy Jerusalem.  She is in warfare with the world, as the Church Militant should be; she is rebuking the world, she is hated, she is pillaged by the world.

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“Much might be said on this subject.  At all times, since Christianity came into the world, an open contest has been going on between religion and irreligion; and the true Church, of course, has ever been on the religious side.  This, then, is a sure test in every age where the Christian should stand....  Now, applying this simple criterion to the public Parties of this DAY, it is very plain that the English Church is at present on God’s side, and therefore, so far, God’s Church; we are sorry to be obliged to add that there is as little doubt on which side English Romanism is.

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