Page:Theological essays (IA theologicalessay00maurrich).pdf/17
In connexion with this subject, I shall allude to an event of which it would be affectation to suppose that the readers of this book are altogether ignorant. Most of them will have heard that the publication of it has led to my expulsion from a College connected with the Church of England. The inference has been readily drawn, that I shall now feel the position which I have taken up as a defender of the Church and its formularies to be untenable, that I must have learnt in myself how galling that yoke is which I have wished that other men should endure.
I do not know whether I shall be suspected by some of a base motive for what I am going to say; but I know that there are those who will believe that I am speaking solemnly, deliberately, as in the presence of God. I affirm, then, that during the thirteen years which I passed in that College, I never was restrained from uttering one word which I thought it would be good or right to utter before my Class, by the obligation under which I had laid myself to teach according to the formularies of the Church of England; that I should have suppressed, in obedience to what have been called my "sectarian timidities," many words which I did utter, if those formularies had not given me boldness, had not raised me to a higher point of view than my own, had not warned me against the peril and guilt of accepting the opinions of the age as my guides. I declare that if I have ever been able to see any method in history, civil or ecclesiastical, or to make my pupils see it, the Bible and these formularies have shown me that method. I declare further, that if I have been able to teach my