I have just received your letter, in which, as one of my constituents,
you justify your right to ask for some explanation of my alleged
assertion that the High Church Ritualists had been long in secret
combination, and were now in open confederacy with Irish Romanists for
the destruction of the union between Church and State....
You are under a misapprehension if you suppose that I intended to cast
any slur upon the High Church party. I have the highest respect for the
High Church party; I believe there is no body of men in this country to
which we have been more indebted, from the days of Queen Anne to the
days of Queen Victoria, for the maintenance of the orthodox faith, the
rights of the Crown, and the liberties of the people.
In saying this I have no wish to intimate that the obligations of
the country to the other great party in the Church are not equally
significant. I have never looked upon the existence of parties in
the Church as a calamity; I look upon them as a necessity, and as a
beneficent necessity. They are the natural and inevitable consequences
of the mild and liberal principles of our ecclesiastical polity, and of
the varying and opposite elements of the human mind and character.
When I spoke, I referred to an extreme faction in the Church, of
very modern date, that does not conceal its ambition to destroy the
connection between Church and State, and which I have reason to believe
has been for some time in secret combination, and is now in open
confederacy, with the Irish Romanists for the purpose.
The Liberation Society, with its shallow and short-sighted fanaticism,
is a mere instrument in the hands of this confederacy, and will
probably be the first victim of the spiritual despotism the Liberation
Society is now blindly working to establish.
As I hold that the dissolution of the union between Church and State
will cause permanently a greater revolution in this country than
foreign conquest, I shall use my utmost energies to defeat these fatal
machinations.
Believe me, Rev. Sir, your faithful member and servant,