204 LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE [1785 



I have already observed * that a reh'gious consociation, calHng 

 itself the Reformed Episcopal ChurcJi, upon its first departure from 

 the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, adopted 

 temporarily as its liturgy the Proposed Book of 1785. It made 

 omissions from it; which, if not made, would have struck a fatal 

 blow to some of the new sect's grounds of schism, and it made 

 at once an announcement of its purpose to subject the book to 

 revision fti its portions left ; a revision to be made in accordance 

 with certain principles which the "General Council" of the sece- 

 ders set forth, and which, in fact, were at variance not only with the 

 spirit of the Proposed Book, but with some of its letter also.f This 

 schismatical party soon found that the Proposed Book — which 

 indeed itself declared in terms, that it was "far" from the inten- 

 tion of the Church which promulged it to depart from the Church 

 of England any further than local circumstances required — could 

 not be managed by them at all ; and sailing on the broad and un- 

 charted sea of their own ignorance, audacity and error, before 

 long threw the Proposed Book bodily overboard. Disregarding, 

 however, the fact that no point of doctrine in the Church of Eng- 

 land was denied by the new book, they have sought, by praising 

 it, to convey the idea that the book justified their schism ; and 

 during the time that their conventicles did use it, they spoke of it 

 — as they have also done since — by way of giving to it a weight 

 which they could not give to it themselves, as "Bishop White s 

 Prayer Book;"| a mode of speaking of it which I have already 



* Supra. 



f See the edition of the Proposed Book reprinted in 1873, under the authority of 

 George David Cummins. The Order for the Visitation of the Sick which is found in 

 the original Proposed Book is wholly omitted from the reprint; and if the ideas of the 

 so-called Reformed Church were well based were omitted with reason, since that order 

 retains the English rubric directing that the sick person shall be "moved," i. c, shall 

 be recommended, urged or prevailed on, " to make a special confession of his sins, if 

 he feel his conscience troubles him with any weighty matter," after which confession a 

 declaration of absolution is to be made to him. 



\ Bi.shop Nicholson, in his " Reasons why I became a Reformed Episcopalian," says, 

 in speaking (p. 26) of the service book of the new sect : 



" It is in most things essentially the same as that known as Bishop White's Prayer 

 Book, in the making of which were associated with the Bishop such men as Wharton, 

 and Smith, and Provost, and Washington, and Jay." 



Was ignorance ever more audacious than this ? As will sufficiently appear hereafter, 

 Dr. White never cordially liked the new book. Washington had nothing under heaven 

 to do with it, and Mr. Jay no more. Jay was not a member of the Convention of 

 Sept. 1785, which made the book, any more than was Washington. 



