1803] REV. WILLIAM SMITH, D. D. 465 



her homilies, her practice for generation after generation, and by 

 an intelligent consideration of those circumstances and difficulties 

 in her history under which all were made — circumstances which 

 presuppose both knowledge and moral and intellectual faculties 

 on the part of him who is to consider them, and which are not 

 of the class of things to be measured on a two-foot rule, or counted 

 on ten fingers — that thus interpreted the Church of England is 

 just as far from the doctrines and the practices of Rome as is her 

 daughter, the church in America. 



And is not this argument from a change of rubric two-edged? 

 The English book directs that the reader of the lessons turn him- 

 self and read so as best to be heard of all. This direction is left 

 out of our rubric. Are Popish mumblings, with face averted, au- 

 thorized for us ? Again, that book declares that though the 

 elements in the Lord's Supper are to be received kneeling, no 

 adoration is intended to them, or to any corporal presence of 

 Christ's natural flesh and blood. Our book suppresses this declara- 

 tion, and makes a higher " consecration," May we adore the 

 elements and the corporal presence ? 



I advert with more interest to other things. All will agree with 

 me, I think, that the life of Dr. Smith was a well-spent life, actively 

 devoted to useful and beneficent objects. Look at the number of 

 young men whom he trained in the early provincial days to re- 

 ligion, literature, the arts and statesmanship. We cannot begin to 

 tell them; but the names of William White, Jacob Duche, John 

 Andrews, Thomas Coombe, Thomas Hopkinson, Samuel Magaw, 

 James Abercrombie, among the clergy, come to our minds, as do 

 those of Francis Hopkinson, William Paca, Richard Peters, Alex- 

 ander Wilcocks, James Tilghman, William Bingham, Benjamin 

 Chew, and many others among our men of State, our lawyers and 

 our men of worth. Look at his early patronage of Benjamin West, 

 imbuing his mind with classical taste and assisting him to the 

 means of developing his extraordinary genius. Look, too, at his 

 disinterested and kind labor in bringing the works of young 

 Godfrey before the world and those of Nathaniel Evans, all the 

 profits of which he gives to the widows and children of the clergy. 

 Look at that most beneficent institution, the corporation for the 

 relief of these widows and children of his brethren — the long, 

 laborious work chiefly of his hands — still subsisting in wealth and 

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