Search -
Confessions of Faith and Formulas of Subscription
Confessions of Faith and Formulas of Subscription Author:James Cooper Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: that not only does she possess in her Prayer-Book at once " a sound rule of faith and a sober standard of feeling in matters of religion "; but has both set fort... more »h in a form so beautiful, so simple, so venerable, and so pervaded with the spirit of piety and holiness. Her Liturgy, though not faultless, is a decus et tutamen for which she may well be thankful. English Presbyterian Church. i The greater part of the eight hundred ministers who vacated the benefices of the Church of England because of the 1662 Act of Uniformity were Independents, but there were Presbyterians among them too; and after the passing of the Toleration 1689 Act these, or their successors, formed one of the " Three Denominations " which, engaging not to impugn the doctrine of the Trinity, received the recognition of the State, and were permitted to petition the Crown in a corporate capacity. But in England the Presbyterian organization had never been set up in its integrity; and laxity of discipline was speedily followed by laxity of doctrine, and this in regard to the most 1719 fundamental truths. In 1719 two Presbyterian ministers at Exeter who had adopted the Arianism then in fashion, were deprived for refusing to subscribe to the doctrine of Our Lord's Divinity; but the deadly infection spread, and at a meeting of the denomination in Salters' Hall, fifty-seven of its - clergy, out of one hundred and ten, voted against requiring from ministers any subscription at all. The leading English Presbyterian at the time, Edmund Calamy, the historian, held aloof from the Salters' Hall Conferences, thus refusing to help the cause of the Faith; yet he saw quite clearly the inconsistency of the non-subscribers, who refused " on principle " to give among themselves precisely the same kind of testimony ...« less