Untitled - Rore Sanctifica

Corporate Re-union. 261
English Church. In the sixteenth century
there was another movement in this same
alas ! it was a movement
Church, but then,
towards Protestantism, and that movement in
augurated a Protestant Revolution in the
o
National Church ; we know the history of that
Revolution, how small it was in its beginnings,
how it was at first persecuted, and then aided
by the State, and by the Ecclesiastical authori
ties ; how Protestant errors were broached at
Paul s Cross, and in other less eminent pulpits,
and how they gradually spread and infected the
majority of the Anglican clergy, till at length,
political circumstances favouring the current,
the severance of this great Church was at last
effected from the parent stock, and as our holy
King, St. Edward the Confessor, had foretold
on his dying bed in the Palace of Westminster
nearly five hundred years before, the
Tree" of old England "was cut down, 1
"
" Green
and
carried to the distance of three furlongs from
his own root"
But the nineteenth century was destined to
witness a second and a holier Revolution : the
same blessed monarch saw in that mystic vision
how this tree, now stripped of its leaves and
shorn of its antique glory, should one day re
turn to its original stock ; but, said St. Edward,
"it will be without the help of any man s
hand." Truly
it has been without the aid of