of his works I have always considered as one of the blots (alas! there are too many) of the biography of the Church of England; a self-conceited, coarse-minded, persecuting, vulgar priest, and (by way of ‘anti-climax’) one of the first corrupters of and epigrammatizers of our English prose style.  It is not true, that Sir Thomas Brown was the prototype of Dr. Johnson, who imitated him only as far as Sir T. B. resembles the majority of his predecessors; that is, in the pedantic preference of Latin derivations to Saxon words of the very same force.  In the balance and construction of his periods Dr. Johnson has followed Hall, as any intelligent reader will discover by an attentive comparison.

P. 158.

Yea, will some man say, “But that which marreth all is the opinion of merit and satisfaction.”  Indeed that is the School doctrine, but the conscience enlightened to know itself, will easily act that part of the Publican, ’who smote his breast, and said, God be merciful to me a sinner’.

Alas! so far from this being the case with ninety nine out of one hundred in Spain, Italy, Sicily, and Roman Catholic Germany, it is the Gospel tenets that are the true School doctrine, that is confined to books and closets of the learned among them.

P. 161.

And the like may be conceived here, since, especially, the idolatry practised under the obedience of mystical Babylon is rather in false and will-worship of the true God, and rather commended as profitable than enjoined as absolutely necessary, and the corruptions there maintained are rather in a superfluous addition than retraction in any thing necessary to salvation.

This good man’s charity jarring with his love and tender recollections of Father Paul, Fulgentio, and the Venetian divines, has led him to a far, far too palliative statement of Roman idolatry.  Not what the Pope has yet ventured to thunder forth from his Anti-Sinai, but what he and his satellites, the Regulars, enforce to the preclusion of all true worship, in the actual practice, life-long, of an immense majority in Spain, Italy, Bavaria, Austria, &c. &c.—­this must determine the point.  What they are themselves,—­not what they would persuade Protestants is their essentials or Faith,—­this is the main thing.

P. 164.

I answer, under correction of better judgments, they have the ministry of reconciliation by the communion which is given at their Ordination, being the same which our Saviour left in his Church:—­’whose sins ye remit, they are remitted, whose sins ye retain, they are retained’.

Could Bishop Bedell believe that the mere will of a priest could have any effect on the everlasting weal or woe of a Christian!  Even to the immediate disciples and Apostles could the text (if indeed it