^SS LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE [1803 



Provoost, distinctions of view better making the titles did not 

 exist. 



Bishop Hobart was called a high-churchman and denounced 

 through all his life as such, not because he held to any view of 

 the Eucharist or of the ministry, or performed any services or 

 offices of the church in a way largely different from many of his 

 brethren, but because he enforced upon his clergy strongly, and 

 often with fervor and with eloquence, that the church founded by 

 the Saviour, and which he (the bishop) considered best represented 

 in this day by the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United 

 States of America, subsisted under certain distinctive principles of 

 doctrine, ministry and worship, and not under all the shapes into 

 which fanaticism, ambition, ignorance, or interest might choose to 

 mould it. With no considerable difference of opinion from him 

 on this point, although his mode of teaching it was less fervid, 

 Bishop White was called a low one. 



In 1826-27 we had in Pennsylvania a body of clergy whose 

 views and practices were unlike those of Bishop White. He then 

 took a strong distinction, showing in his mind great differences 

 between low-churchmen and low-churchmen. There were the 

 men known in history of Eiigland as low-churchmen, Tillot- 

 son, Burnet, and some others a little higher, perhaps, though 

 not any, lower than they, which class expressed, with more 

 or less precision, the Bishop's views. But those known at the 

 date we speak of as low-churchmen in Pennsylvania — with whose 

 theological opinions, though, happily, it may be reasonably 

 hoped, not with their tempers and practices, a part of the 

 clergy, I presume, remain in line — he repelled and renounced 

 in memorable language his affiliation with. One of them, 

 in a convention of the church, where the degrees of altitude 

 were strongly marked, alluded to the Bishop himself as being 

 a low-churchman — one of their party. " The gentle old man," 

 says a narrator of the scene, "showed that, like flint, if struck hard 

 enough, he could flash fire. He rose at once, apologizing for such 

 an unusual thing on his part as interrupting a debate, but the per- 

 sonal allusion to himself must be his excuse. As the word was 

 used in England and a hundred years ago, perhaps it might not 

 be altogether incorrect to call him a low-churchman. ' But,' con- 

 tinued he, with an emphasis rare indeed as coming from his lips. 



