ect of Church Doctrine, I may go a little further, and
remind you how very likely you are to discover in your rounds many
mistakes about both the doctrine and the government of the Church of
England. I have had considerable experience of such questions in the way
of private pastoral ministry; I have found pious dissenters, or
church-people whom they had influenced, fully persuaded that the Church
of England teaches unconditional regeneration in the hour of Baptism,
that she teaches at least a near approach to Transubstantiation, that
she entrusts to her priests the power of conferring or withholding the
divine forgiveness, and that, officially and in set terms, she
"unchurches" all communities not episcopally organized.[22] It is well
to be quite sure that these beliefs about the Church are mistakes,
provably such, in the light of the Prayer Book and Articles, and of
history. It has been my happiness to bring some such questioners as I
have described to "sincere and conscientious communion with" the Church
of England, in a loyalty which leaves ample room for loving sympathy
with all true Christians. And the chief means has been the production of
proof that the Church herself, as distinguished from particular teachers
and leaders in the Church, does not teach the tenets alleged.

[22] As regards the Scottish and Continental Protestant Churches it is
not too much to say that, with the very rarest exceptions, English
Church writers _of all schools_ regarded them as "Sister Churches of the
Reformation"--_till about 1830_.

DEFECTIVE VIEWS OF SIN.

But to come back to matters more primary than even these; I must remind
my younger Brother that there is, all around him, in the average circles
of even church-going people, a sorrowfully faint insight into the
sinfulness of SIN; into the terrible realities of its _guilt_ before God
(a point too often absent from even earnest modern teaching), and of its
_power_; yes, and into its true _nature_, as it comes out, not in
outbursts of word or deed, or in practices which public opinion
condemns, but in imagination, in desire, in tone. It may surprise us
(when we think how very elementary are the spiritual principles
involved), but I fear it is a fact, that sin is regarded by vast numbers
of church-people (I am not thinking at all of "the lapsed masses" now)
as a matter of little importance if it does not come out in some very
positive form. Multitudes among us are quite insensible t