be silenced to please another? Were all the village bells to be
mute because Tribulation Wholesome and Deacon Ananias thought
them profane? Was Christmas no longer to be a day of rejoicing?
Was Passion week no longer to be a season of humiliation? These
changes, it is true, were not yet proposed. Put if,--so the High
Churchmen reasoned,--we once admit that what is harmless and
edifying is to be given up because it offends some narrow
understandings and some gloomy tempers, where are we to stop? And
is it not probable that, by thus attempting to heal one schism,
we may cause another? All those things which the Puritans regard
as the blemishes of the Church are by a large part of the
population reckoned among her attractions. May she not, in
ceasing to give scandal to a few sour precisians, cease also to
influence the hearts of many who now delight in her ordinances?
Is it not to be apprehended that, for every proselyte whom she
allures from the meeting house, ten of her old disciples may turn
away from her maimed rites and dismantled temples, and that these
new separatists may either form themselves into a sect far more
formidable than the sect which we are now seeking to conciliate,
or may, in the violence of their disgust at a cold and ignoble
worship, be tempted to join in the solemn and gorgeous idolatry
of Rome?

It is remarkable that those who held this language were by no
means disposed to contend for the doctrinal Articles of the
Church. The truth is that, from the time of James the First, that
great party which has been peculiarly zealous for the Anglican
polity and the Anglican ritual has always leaned strongly towards
Arminianism, and has therefore never been much attached to a
confession of faith framed by reformers who, on questions of