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It might be held to be an adequate answer to these questions to reply that if the living Church cannot now trust herself to speak out through her formularies in her natural voice as she did venture to do in the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, it must be that she has fallen into that stage of decrepitude where the natural voice is uncertain.
The Evangelicals of the last century represented one side, but only one side, of our Church's teaching. With the spirituality and fervency of her liturgy and the 'Gospel' character of all her formularies, they were far more in harmony than the so-called 'orthodox' of their day.
We own also, as subordinate standards of faith and practice of doctrine and order, the National Covenant and Solemn League: as also the Westminster formularies, well known by their names viz., the Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, Form of Church Government, and Directory of Public Worship; as these were received respectively by the Church of Scotland in the years 1645, '47, and '48, not merely as "Doctrinal Standards," but as symbols, all of them, of Christian practice also, and as a part of the uniformity sworn to in the Solemn League.
It is a matter of perfect notoriety, that her formularies are framed in such a manner as to admit to her highest offices men who differ from each other more widely than a very high Churchman differs from a Catholic, or a very low Churchman from a Presbyterian; and that the general leaning of the Church, with respect to some important questions, has been sometimes one way and sometimes another.
Ceremonies resemble virtuous actions, and formularies are like shadows of the truth and approach, more or less, the true light.
I had a supreme confidence in our cause; we were upholding that primitive Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of the Church, and which was registered and attested in the Anglican formularies and by the Anglican divines. That ancient religion had well nigh faded away out of the land, through the political changes of the last 150 years, and it must be restored.
The women then retire to the house, and the chief lama recites liturgical passages from the formularies. Afterwards, the relatives retire, and the corpse is carried to the burning-ground by men who have the same tutelar deity as the deceased.
The two rough fellows looked at one another. The question was really a puzzler. Living their lives out on the sea, unlettered and unlearned, they had no knowledge of religious formularies. "We believe in God and Jesus Christ His Son," said Nick. "Is that so, brother?" "That is so," said Ned; "those are the names that come in the chaplain's prayers."
By degrees, so much regularity prevailed in the judicial proceedings and legal transactions, that they were regulated by established formularies; and, in addition to those provisions, every nation contained a collection of unwritten usages or customs, which had the force of law.
seems, in the judgment of many, fairly earned by the critic, whoever he may be, who ventures to suggest that in any slightest instance the language of the formularies might have been more happily phrased. But there are spots on the sun.
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