which, alas! I have been building all these years! I have been preaching
dissent instead of Christ, and there you are!--dissenters indeed--but
can I--can I call you Christians? Assuredly do I believe the form of
your church that ordained by the apostles, but woe is me for the
material whereof it is built! Were I to aid your plans with a single
penny in the hope of withdrawing one inhabitant of Glaston from the
preaching of Mr. Wingfold, a man who speaks the truth and fears nobody,
as I, alas! have feared you, because of your dullness of heart and
slowness of understanding, I should be doing the body of Christ a
grievous wrong. I have been as one beating the air in talking to you
against episcopacy when I ought to have been preaching against
dishonesty; eulogizing congregationalism, when I ought to have been
training you in the three abiding graces, and chiefly in the greatest of
them, charity. I have taken to pieces and put together for you the plan
of salvation, when I ought to have spoken only of Him who is the way and
the life. I have been losing my life, and helping you to lose yours. But
go to the abbey church, and there a man will stir you up to lay hold
upon God, will teach you to know Christ, each man for himself and not
for another. Shut up your chapel, put off your scheme for a new one, go
to the abbey church, and be filled with the finest of the wheat. Then
should this man depart, and one of the common episcopal train, whose God
is the church, and whose neighbor is the order of the priesthood, come
to take his place, and preach against dissent as I have so foolishly
preached against the church--then, and not until then, will the time be
to gather together your savings and build yourselves a house to pray in.
Then, if I am alive, as I hope I shall not be, come, and I will aid your
purpose liberally. Do not mistake me; I believe as strongly as ever I
did that the constitution of the Church of England is all wrong; that
the arrogance and assumption of her priesthood is essentially opposed to
the very idea of the kingdom of Heaven; that the Athanasian creed is