SECESSION JUSTIFIED: OR, A Brief Narrative OF EVENTS AND INQUIRIES WHICH LED THE AUTHOR TO WITHDRAW FROM THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. BY PHILALETHES. LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO. STATIONERS' COURT. 1839. INTRODUCTION. IF when the word CHURCH is used, we could bring ourselves to think more of the general assembly of the faithful, and less of sects, and denominations, and human institutions, there would be little occasion of rivalry or contention. And if questions involving the highest interests of man, could be kept from being agitated, shelter might be afforded a little longer to the timorous and the hypocritical. But we live amidst a mighty conflict of opinions, in an age in which it is no longer permitted us to retire behind a cold and selfish neutrality-an age long foreseen by those who were observant of the times, and which has at length imposed on every man the necessity and the duty of surmounting his timidity or his scruples, and of speaking out. But in the hands of Him by whom the waves are stayed, and who can make even the wrath of man to praise Him, good will assuredly be brought out of this marshalling of opinions; error will be chased away, and truth every where inaugurated in its place, with a power and a speed unknown and unconformable to the cold and stagnant religionism of some past days. Would that this desirable end could be effected without the strife of party, which seems to threaten the extinction of all Christian feeling amongst us. But however desirable this may be, and although God might so will it if he thought proper, yet we shall find, that such a mode of procedure is not consonant with the history of his dealings with lukewarm or relapsing churches: they have all either been given over to destruction or decay, or have been purged as by fire. The abuses and the errors of ages, cemented as they are sure to be by the apathy of formal religion, like fragments of rock embedded in the polar iceberg, would remain frost-bound for ever, did not the warmth of controversy, like the solstitial sun in his appointed season, penetrate the mass, and loosen and shiver and prostrate them to the earth. To pretend that there are no errors and no abuses in the church, is just the blindness that conducts both leader and led to the ditch-the demented infatuation which has ever been noted as the sure precursor of a downfall. That there is much of this fatal blindness, in many cases it is to be feared, wilful; in more, unconscious and habitual, cannot be denied. A natural disinclination to disturb the ease of settled opinions, and to encounter the labour of inquiry; the sensitiveness of false pride, ever alive to the gentlest touches of admonition or reproof; a morbid jealousy of innovation; the fear of the possible discovery, that in a case of admitted importance we may have been in error,—all these, strengthened perhaps, by the bands of station, of party, of interest, and of hereditary and educational prepossession, conspire to obstruct the sight, and to deepen the shade, which obtruding rays of light have to penetrate. The writer is not advocating hasty and ill-digested changes of opinion; to such, he certainly may be allowed to say, that he has given no countenance by his own example. But let not the indolent or the bigoted take shelter under this admission. If it is better to be an |