THE PRELATES OF ENGLAND.

            Having well described the wickedness of the Pope and his Bishops, Mr. Lord proceeds to speak of the king of England’s bishops. Comparing them with the popish spirituals, he says, “They arrogated a similar right to legislate over the prerogatives and laws of God, and a similar authority over the liberties and consciences of his worshippers, and acquiesced in their assumption by the civil rulers; they were animated by an equal ambition, and guilty of an equal violation of the rights and peace of those under their sway. The pride, intolerance, and tyranny with which for ages they pursued and crushed the dissentients from their creed and rites; the malignity with which they sometimes attempt to debase the ministers of their own communion, illustrious for learning, piety, and usefulness, and swerve them from their allegiance to the Almighty; and the cruelty with which they consigned their families to disgrace and beggary, and strove to hunt them from existence, have no parallel in the history of any other Protestant nation. Large as the number is of great and good men who have held the Episcopal office in that church, vast as the myriads are who through divine grace have washed their robes under their ministry, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, and gone up from the conflicts of this stormy scene to the rest of heaven, she is yet among the guiltiest of usurpers and tyrants. Her crown is sullied, her stole is purpled with the blood of multitudes of the witnesses of God whom she has wantonly slain, and thence, like her persecuting sisters, (Scotland’s church of course among the number. —Editor) she is ere long to be struck by avenging justice from her throne.”

            History attests the truth of the above concerning the bishops of the English national church; but we are at a loss to conceive where Mr. Lord obtained his information, that vast myriads of that church had washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb under the ministry of its proud and lordly prelates, and are now in the rest of heaven. This is a piece of history we have never met with; nor have we discovered any where in scripture that those who are “defiled with women”—Revelation 14: 4—are saved in, by, or through the Harlot Churches to which they belong. This is a stretch of “charity” far beyond our limits, coming within the range neither of the faith nor hope that we enjoy.

EDITOR.