ΤΟ THE REV. R. W. SIBTHORP. SIR, SOME time ago your secession from that Church of which you had long professed yourself a member, and in which you had, up to the very eve of that secession, continued to exercise ministerial functions, filled the timid with alarm, the ignorant with wonder, and those who had taken cognizance of your previous career, a career by no means as "unobtrusive" as you seem to imagine, with painful regret, to see their fears for you too fully realized. Could you have rested content to make that change in silence and privacy, there is no doubt that beyond the noisy clamour of journalists, no molestation would have been experienced by you; your case would only have continued to excite the compassion of many, and to draw forth the prayers on your behalf of not a few, in the Communion from which you had, to your own hurt, separated yourself. But you seem to have determined otherwise. No sooner have you become a deserter from the camp which had so long reckoned you as one of its soldiers, than you appear before its ramparts as an aggressor; sounding a trumpet of uncertain but shrill note, and summoning the whole host from whose ranks you have so recently withdrawn, to follow the example of your desertion. Under such circumstances it can hardly need an apology, that any soldier of that camp, to whom his allegiance, and the cause in which he bears arms, are dearer than his life, should step forth, and denounce your summons as a treasonable appeal. "Is there not a cause?" was of old the plea of a champion of God's Church; my plea for now addressing you is the same. In doing so I have no wish, as I can have no motive, to say any thing calculated to wound your feelings; at the same time I am sure you will agree with me, that a controversy such as that to which you have challenged the Anglican Church, can be conducted, profitably and faithfully, only upon one principle, the principle enunciated by the Apostle in these words: "Let God be true, and every man a liar." Upon this principle, while disclaiming all intention to say one word that shall be needlessly offensive, I must claim the privilege of using great plainness of speech in what I shall have to say. I am sorry to be compelled, at the very outset, to bring against you the heavy charge of coming before the world, in your late publication, under what is commonly termed "false pretences; and that in two ways. First, you profess to write in mere self-defence, with an anxiety that "the Spirit of truth and charity" might "guide your pen;" while in reality you make a direct aggression upon the Church whom you have already so deeply wronged by your unfaithfulness, and support your attack by charges and insinuations as far removed from the truth, as they are from that charity which "hopeth all things" and "believeth all things." Secondly, the very title of your pamphlet contains an untruth by implication; for the inquiry made of you no doubt was, “Why you had become a Roman Catholic?" whereas you publish, not an answer, but, in the true spirit of the Communion you have recently joined, some answer, to the inquiry why are you become a Catholic?""-thus assuming upon the very title-page, by a petitio principii which runs through the whole of your performance, that which you ought to have been careful, under the peculiar circumstances in which you are placed, to assert only after you had established it, in your own opinion at least, by solid argument. Of this last-named article, indeed, there is confessedly a remarkable dearth in your Letter, which amounts to no more than a discursive statement, made up partly of insinuations, partly of assertions, the former unproven, the latter unsupported; artfully so contrived that an impression shall be left on the minds of the ignorant and unwary, without leading them to scrutinize the grounds on which that impression rests, while the better informed and the wary shall be at a loss to determine what, precisely, it is that they have to grapple with. Those who, in the new position you have assumed, have a right to be "better judges than yourself" of what you ought to do, have no doubt judged wisely that to bring the points at issue between their Communion and ours into direct, open, unreserved controversy, would not be a course likely to serve their ends: but as the cause which I am advocating will be a gainer in proportion as those points are prominently brought forward, and fully discussed, I must beg leave to handle the subject in a more definite, articulate, and argumentative manner. With this view I will now state briefly the plan which I intend to pursue in examining and refuting that portion of your reasons for becoming a Roman Catholic, which you have condescended to communicate to us, inviting you at the same time, by all means to give us the whole of those reasons, if you think them tenable. From the evidence supplied by yourself I propose to show, |