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FROM

WILLIAM III. TO VICTORIA.

BY THE

REV. A. H. HORE, M.A.

TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD.

VOLUME I.

Parker and Co.

OXFORD, AND 6 SOUTHAMPTON-STREET,

STRAND, LONDON.

M DCCC LXXXVI

[merged small][graphic][subsumed][subsumed]

G.L. Dir

Thornton

12.23.54

90416

PREFACE.

THIS book is offered as a contribution to the cause of Church Defence. It commences with the time when by the Act of Toleration the Nonconformists began to be relieved from the intolerant laws imposed by the State; it ends with the time when they find themselves on a political a political equality with

the Church. It commences with the time when religious Nonconformists thought that there ought to be a National Church, and sought to be comprehended (on their own terms) within its pale; it ends with the time when a small, but compact and somewhat noisy, band of political Dissenters teach that there ought not to be a National Church, and strive to compass its destruction.

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For two hundred years-the period which this work embraces-successive governments have, with few intermissions, vied with each other in favouring the Dissenters to the prejudice of the Church. Not only has the State

freed them from civil disabilities, but it has left them all their old rights, whilst releasing them from their duties; it has relieved them from the payment of Church-rates, it has allowed them to perform their marriages in their own chapels, and to bury their dead in the consecrated burial-grounds of the Church, and it has admitted them, at the Universities, to Fellowships and Headships, which were founded by Churchmen for teaching the religion of the Church of England. And yet at the very time when they have got all that they could reasonably have desired, and more than they had a right to expect, nothing short of the destruction of the Church will satisfy them.

The history of the Church of England is the history of England in a sense which does not apply to any other Institution in the country, and the Church has been for centuries England's strength. During a period of more than twelve hundred years the Church of England has preserved its identity, and during that time England has advanced from a group of small and divided kingdoms into a vast empire, on which the sun never sets, in every quarter of the globe; and love for their country demands

from Englishmen a love for their Church. But of late years a society has arisen bearing the specious but misleading title of "The Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control," the members of which, no doubt through unacquaintance with Church History, sow misstatements broadcast over the land, with the view of educating people, who know no better, to their opinions, and inducing them to return members to Parliament who will vote for the Disestablishment and Disendowment, in other words, for the political destruction, of the Church of England.

These Liberationists, as they call themselves, profess to object on principle to established and endowed Churches, unmindful of the fact that Nonconformity is just as much established as the Church, and that (as the Church never was) Nonconformity has been endowed by the State. Although numbering in their ranks unbelievers and atheists, they profess to be the friends of religion, and say that established Churches are contrary to Scripture; a strange assertion when God Himself sanctioned the

See vol. i. p. 80.

See vol. i. p. 414.

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