27
that the circumstances which caused the separation were not in you, but in your ancestors, both of England and Italy, who, by their ungodly lives and unjust claims, brought about an unhappy quarrel."
Most assuredly I cannot retract this; for it is an historical truth. It is no doctrine, or opinion, but a dry fact which no one can by any possibility change. If the memorialists mean that they are glad of the disruption between the Churches of England and of Rome; then I must tell them that they are violating our Blessed Lord's dearest and most divine wish, that all Christians might be one, and if they would not go against our Lord, then they must as I say, "weep over the separation and deplore it as a fault and a sin." I did not say where the sin was; but I left it to be charitably taken on both sides; saying "our ancestors both in England and Italy." Both: and I cannot but repeat, that in the sense of breaking our Blessed Lord's most intimate prayer, rending His Body in twain, dividing and separating from each other as we did,—somewhere or other there was a sin, the effects of which to this day we have never recovered. Many of our greatest and ablest Bishops[1] and Divines have judged the party adding to the Faith, to be intrinsically that guilty of the sin of schism, and with them I am content to abide, to deplore, to weep, and to pray, that in His good time, the unity of the Church may be restored. The "ungodly lives" of which I spoke, were in such men as Henry VIII., and those who seized upon the spoils of the Church in that infamous reign: the "unjust claims" of which I spoke, were the claims of the Church of Rome in exacting supremacy over England, contrary to the Canons and Councils of Universal Christendom.
So much then for the actual words cited by the memorialists. I have hitherto merely taken the words given by themselves. But my brethren, what will you think, when you learn that the memorialists have quite
- ↑ Laud, Bramhall, Hooker, Usher, &c. &c, see the passage quoted before from Bramhall.
