1803] REV. WILLIAM SMITH, D. D. 463 



ioners the necessity of frequent communion; and, if we may argue 

 from his Preface to the Proposed Book, wished to have the daily 

 administration of it.* 



Even in his Proposed Book — made in part, but in concession to 

 prejudices — he left that ancient rubric of the Church of England 

 which declares that a sick person, when visited by the minister of 

 the parish, shall "be moved to make a special confession of his 

 sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter; " 

 and while he did not leave the specific personal absolution of the 

 English book, he put a form which can hardly be called, and is 

 nowhere in our Prayer Book called, but "a declaration of absolu- 

 tion." The Church of England calls it an "absolution." Our 

 own church abstains from saying, in terms, exactly what " Or fhis" 

 is. *But Dr. Smith nowhere ever proposed to introduce this sort 

 of thing as a common practice in the church, or to make the ex- 

 treme medicine of a burthened dying soul the common daily food 

 of him that was in no near sight of death, and every morning and 

 every evening of his life, if the clergy did their duty and had the 

 churches open, could confess his sins publicly with the rest of 

 God's penitent people, in his holy temple, and receive full comfort 

 in the priestly declaration or act which follows. 



Neither do we anywhere perceive, in that part of his writings 

 which are connected with the establishment of the church in 

 America, any such dangerous view as one which has been more 

 than adumbrated among us, that the Protestant Episcopal Church 

 in the United States of America is, in any essential respect of 

 doctrine, discipline or worship, a church different from that great 

 bulwark of Protestantism, the Church of England, and further re- 

 moved than it from Popish practices, whether complete, incomplete, 

 or inchoate, whether symbolized only or substantial, f Both in the 

 Preface, which was his entirely, to the Proposed Book — the book 

 of 1785 — and in the Preface to our Book of Common Prayer of 

 1789, which, if not his entirely, was based largely on what was 

 his, such a doctrine is repelled — repelled every way ; by the whole 

 course of the argument, which shows the propriety of occasional 

 alterations "in forms and tisages',' provided "the substance of the 

 faith is kept entire," and repelled by specific words which say, 

 that with all the alterations and amendments which have been 



*See supra, pp. 440, 1 61. f See Appendix, No. XVII. 



