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simply set it down, as he found it, a matter of fact; and but for your acute scent of a weak part, it might have remained unnoticed. No evil could have arisen from his simple statement of the fact. You, indeed, may possibly perplex men's minds, little prepared as they are for the discussion of the point, by confounding it with a popish superstition (which Calvin did not do), and thereby giving arms to opponents of our Church: it is ours to vindicate the early Church and our reformers.
It is, meanwhile, not a little remarkable that the main position of this tract which you have selected for censure, is precisely that incidentally, maintained by the learned Archbishop Wake, of whose soundness never was any doubt in the Church. The position was;
"that although the several liturgies have been much interpolated and in parts corrupted, much likewise has been handed down from the first uninterpolated, and that means exist for ascertaining what parts are interpolated and what pure and genuine; the pure and genuine parts being those wherein all agree."
Archbishop Wake says in like manner (Dissert, on the Apostolical Fathers, c. ix. § 20.):—
"However, since it can hardly be doubted but that those holy Apostles and Evangelists [St. Peter, St. Mark, and St. James,] did give some directions for the administration of the blessed eucharist in those Churches; it may reasonably be presumed that some of those orders are still remaining in those liturgies which have been brought down to us under their names; and that those prayers wherein they all agree, (in sense, at least, if not in words,) were first prescribed in the same, or like terms, by those Apostles and Evangelists; nor would it be difficult to make a farther proof of this conjecture from the writings of the ancient fathers, if it were needful, in this place, to insist upon it."
Nor even in these last days, has "prayer for God's departed servants" been by well-instructed writers confounded with purgatory. The following passage evidently proceeds from the heart of one, whom no one will accuse of a blind adherence to the antient Church (Short's History of English Church, § 15):
