Few improvements, if any, in the moral world can be novelties. They are only a return to some good old principle which the great innovator, time, or rather the great deteriorator, human corruption, hath thrown into the shade. An age there was, perhaps a better than this, when human Articles were unknown to the Church; an age also when the shortest of our Creeds sufficiently expressed the faith of a believer. It does not require learning or talent to state all this, and to beg others to recollect that, if heresies call for Articles, a folio would scarcely suffice. Simple minds may state such simple truths, and God may cause their voice to be heard.
Nor can it be justly affirmed that, to expose even in strong terms prevailing defects, is any proof of disaffection to the Church in which they exist. The writers of Scripture, although Divinely inspired, are yet a pattern to their less favoured followers. And who can peruse the writings of the Prophets and Apostles without being struck by their bold and uncompromising denunciations of the sins and errors prevailing amongst high and low, learned and ignorant, teachers and people? If it be disaffection to the Church, to describe faithfully and plainly an evil which requires a remedy, then is Isaiah to be condemned in his first chapter, and St. Paul in his most celebrated Epistles, instead of being our examples and instructors in the path of ministerial duty.
If the remarks above offered be well founded, they cannot be a matter of indifference, for they affect all to whom truth, and religion, and the credit of its ministers, and the national honour are dear: and all such might, without compromise of any principle or opinion, as the writer believes, join in an address to the following effect:—
To Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, over all persons and in all causes Ecclesiastical and Temporal within Her Dominions supreme.
We your Majesty’s faithful subjects have observed with pain the Controversies now for some time carried on with respect to the true interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and of the Subscription by law required to them and to the Book of Common Prayer; and we humbly pray your Majesty to institute such measures as to your wisdom shall seem fit, with the advice of your Majesty’s Privy Council, in order to provide a remedy for the uncertainty prevailing upon this subject.