gh it
does us harm in a measure, at present the balance is in our favour. What
our duty would be at another time and in other circumstances, supposing,
for instance, the Establishment lost its dogmatic faith, or at least did
not preach it, is another matter altogether. In secular history we read
of hostile nations having long truces, and renewing them from time to
time, and that seems to be the position which the Catholic Church may
fairly take up at present in relation to the Anglican Establishment.

Doubtless the National Church has hitherto been a serviceable breakwater
against doctrinal errors, more fundamental than its own. How long this
will last in the years now before us, it is impossible to say, for the
Nation drags down its Church to its own level; but still the National
Church has the same sort of influence over the Nation that a periodical
has upon the party which it represents, and my own idea of a Catholic's
fitting attitude towards the National Church in this its supreme hour,
is that of assisting and sustaining it, if it be in our power, in the
interest of dogmatic truth. I should wish to avoid every thing (except
indeed under the direct call of duty, and this is a material exception,)
which went to weaken its hold upon the public mind, or to unsettle its
establishment, or to embarrass and lessen its maintenance of those great
Christian and Catholic principles and doctrines which it has up to this
time successfully preached.

NOTE F. ON PAGE 269.

THE ECONOMY.

For the Economy, considered as a rule of practice, I shall refer to what
I wrote upon it in 1830-32, in my History of the Arians. I have shown
above, pp. 26, 27, that the doctrine in question had in the early Church
a large signification, when applied to the divine ordinances: it also
had a definite application to the duties of Christians, whether clergy
or laity, in preaching, in instructing or catechizing, or in ordinary
intercourse with the world around them; and in this aspect I have here
to consider it.

As Almighty God did not all at once introduce the Gospel to the world,
and thereby gradually prepared men for its profitable reception, so,
according to the doctrine of the early Church, it was a duty, for the
sake of the heathen among whom they lived, to observe a great reserve
and caution in communicating to them the knowledge of "the whole counsel
of God." This cautious dispensation of the truth, after the manner of a
discree