s not this a time of strange providences? is it not our safest
course, without looking to consequences, to do simply _what we think
right_ day by day? shall we not be sure to go wrong, if we attempt to
trace by anticipation the course of divine Providence?

"Has not all our misery, as a Church, arisen from people being afraid
to look difficulties in the face? They have palliated acts, when they
should have denounced them. There is that good fellow, Worcester
Palmer, can whitewash the Ecclesiastical Commission and the Jerusalem
Bishopric. And what is the consequence? that our Church has, through
centuries, ever been sinking lower and lower, till good part of its
pretensions and professions is a mere sham, though it be a duty to
make the best of what we have received. Yet, though bound to make the
best of other men's shams, let us not incur any of our own. The
truest friends of our Church are they, who say boldly when her
rulers are going wrong, and the consequences; and (to speak
catachrestically) _they_ are most likely to die in the Church, who
are, under these black circumstances, most prepared to leave it.

"And I will add, that, considering the traces of God's grace which
surround us, I am very sanguine, or rather confident (if it is right
so to speak), that our prayers and our alms will come up as a
memorial before God, and that all this miserable confusion tends to
good.

"Let us not then be anxious, and anticipate differences in prospect,
when we agree in the present.

"P.S. I think, when friends [_i.e._ the extreme party] get over their
first unsettlement of mind and consequent vague apprehensions, which
the new attitude of the Bishops, and our feelings upon it, have
brought about, they will get contented and satisfied. They will see
that they exaggerated things.... Of course it would have been wrong
to anticipate what one's feelings would be under such a painful
contingency as the Bishops' charging as they have done--so it seems
to me nobody's fault. Nor is it wonderful that others" [moderate men]
"are startled" [_i.e._ at my Protest, etc. etc.]; "yet they should
recollect that the more implicit the reverence one pays to a Bishop,
the more keen will be one's perception of heresy in him. The cord is
binding and compelling, till it snaps.

"Men of reflection would have seen this, if they had looked that way.
Last spring, a very high churchman talked to me of resisting my
Bishop, of asking him for the Canons