460 LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE [1803 



In this day, accepting, as tests, the standards of ordinary- 

 conversation, I am unable to say what high-churchmen and 

 what low-churchmen are. Indeed, if I had not certain old- 

 fashioned, but, as I think, very good charts, on which the "main 

 channel " and all important soundings are marked, I should 

 be unable to tell where, ecclesiastically, I am sailing — indeed, 

 whether to quicksands or the port. It is a good while, in the 

 political world, since I have found any body of men, large er.ough 

 to be called a party, in which I am willing to class myself I 

 begin of late to fear that I shall be in the same condition in mat- 

 ters far more important. 



Until, therefore, my inquiring friends define for me their terms 

 a little better than they do, they must excuse my not answering 

 very categorically their inquiries. 



On certain subjects, which some persons consider as distin- 

 guishing the degrees of ecclesiastical altitude, and which, if they 

 do not distinguish them in essence, are often more or less 

 identified with them, we need not attempt to " locate " Dr. Smith ; 

 for he has sufficiently " located " himself That he abhorred all 

 irregularities in the performance of divine service, the use of ex- 

 tempore prayers there — declaiming against any of the church's 

 doctrines, as Regeneration (in the sense in which the church uses 

 the term) — that there was not in him the least tincture of Metho- 

 dism or Calvinism ; all this can be inferred from the way in which 

 he speaks of the Rev. Mr. Macclanechan, the founder of St. Paul's 

 Church, Philadelphia. He is describing this reverend gentleman 

 to the Archbishop of Canterbury: 



With a huge stature and voice more than stentorian, he started up 

 before his sermon ; and, instead of using any of the exeellent forms pro- 

 vided in otir Liturgy, or a form in the nature and substance of that 

 enjoined by the 55th Canon, he addressed the Majesty of Heaven with a 

 long catalogue of epithets, such as "sin-pardoning, all-seeing, heart- 

 searehing, reiji-ttying God. ' ' IVe thank thee that we are all here to-day, 

 and not in hell. Such an unusual manner in our church sufficiently 

 fixed my attention, which was exercised by a strange extempore rhapsody 

 of more than twenty minutes, and afterwards a sermon of about sixty- 

 eight minutes more. I have heard him again and again, and still we 

 have the same wild, incoherent rhapsodies of which I can give no ac- 

 count other than that they consist of a continual ringing of the changes 

 upon the words "Regeneration," "Instantaneous conversion," "Im- 



