This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1840. Excerpt: ... SERMON III. THE PRACTICAL REASONABLENESS OF CONFIRMATION. "Prove all things: hold fast that which is good."--1 Thbss. V. 21. It is a common and idle saying among the sectaries--perhaps to cover the obscurity and recency of their own original--that "the Church of England is the daughter of the Church of Rome." If she were so, she would be like Rachel who brought away her father's Gods, or rather she would resemble Ruth, the daughter of Moab, who left her home, and kin, and father-land, to become a citizen and worshipper of the God of Israel, and ancestral Mother of the Messiah; but the allegation is a falsity, equally disproved by the Ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal of our Apostolic, Episcopal, and Protestant Church. That we did not reject every article of doctrine, or of discipline, which the Church of Rome holds in common with the reformed Churches, was because it was the wisdom of our English Fathers, according to the grace given unto them, to separate the chaff from the wheat, and not to burn both in the fire--to reform, and not to subvert the Church--to bring the whole body of ordinances and doctrines, "to the Law and to the testimony: "--to the Law of Revelation, and to the testimony of the Church: --to establish and confirm all things that stood the test, "which were saved yet so as by fire: "--and to reject, as the convalescent limb casts off the putrefaction of disease, every excrescence of novelty and error.--In a word, it obeyed the injunction of the text--(the spirit of the passage seemed to have brooded over the solemn deliberations of the Reformers, inclining, directing, and enabling them)--" to prove all things, and then to hold fast that which was good." Among the ritual observances thus retained, because of its Scriptural proof and Eccl...