and Geneva. Her doctrinal confessions and discourses, composed by
Protestants, set forth principles of theology in which Calvin or
Knox would have found scarcely a word to disapprove. Her prayers and
thanksgivings, derived from the ancient Breviaries, are very generally
such that Cardinal Fisher or Cardinal Pole might have heartily joined in
them. A controversialist who puts an Arminian sense on her Articles and
Homilies will be pronounced by candid men to be as unreasonable as a
controversialist who denies that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration
can be discovered in her Liturgy.

The Church of Rome held that episcopacy was of divine institution, and
that certain supernatural graces of a high order had been transmitted by
the imposition of hands through fifty generations, from the Eleven who
received their commission on the Galilean mount, to the bishops who
met at Trent. A large body of Protestants, on the other hand, regarded
prelacy as positively unlawful, and persuaded themselves that they
found a very different form of ecclesiastical government prescribed in
Scripture. The founders of the Anglican Church took a middle course.
They retained episcopacy; but they did not declare it to be an
institution essential to the welfare of a Christian society, or to the
efficacy of the sacraments. Cranmer, indeed, on one important occasion,
plainly avowed his conviction that, in the primitive times, there was no
distinction between bishops and priests, and that the laying on of hands
was altogether superfluous.

Among the Presbyterians the conduct of public worship is, to a great
extent, left to the minister. Their prayers, therefore, are not exactly
the same in any two assemblies on the same day, or on any two days in
the same assembly. In one parish they are fervent, eloquent, and full of
meaning. In the next parish they may be languid or absurd. The priests
of the Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, have, during many
generations, daily chanted the same ancient confessions, supplications,
and thanksgivings, in India and Lithuania, in Ireland and Peru. The
service, being in a dead language, is intelligible only to the learned;
and the great majority of the congregation may be said to assist as
spectators rather than as auditors. Here, again, the Church of England
took a middle course. She copied the Roman Catholic forms of prayer,
but translated them into the vulgar tongue, and invited the illiterate
multitude to jo