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can be abundantly proved by history. Since an Institution
must ^be necessarily made up of two elements, the divine & the human.
Men must manage it. They will modify & color & shape it
according to their own shifting & erring ideas. They will add to it,
& take from it. These variations & imperfections & abuses are
unavoidable, unless we imagine an unceasing miracle. It is
superficial to blame the church for the follies, extravagances,
bigotries, narrowness, of its mismanagers. The question will be,
does it retain those original, essential, revealed characters
or works, wh. I have named, in Spirit of the mortal defects?

So far I have said nothing of that particular Branch of
the Church on wh. you remarked. You said there is something true
& good in the Church of Rome. Certainly there is, as there is in every
Branch. It was a terrible calamity when, after six hundred
years of the Primitive System, the Division of the East & West
broke the unity, The political ambition of Roman Princes &
Captains turned the Simple Household of Christ into an
Enormous Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, quite alien fr. anything in
our Lord's word or example. In this vast combination of tyranny
& exaction, fanaticism & superstition, cruelty & falsehood, gradually
growing up & compacted, spreading with the Roman Empire all over
the world, in the name of Jesus & His Mother, mixed into a great
deal of goodness & charity & devotion all along, the Vatican
became what five centuries has shown it to be. Largely
it has extinguished liberty, & shut the Bible from the Eyes of
the people. In the Republic it is virtually despotic[?]. Yet, by the
grace of God, it has never lost those original marks of the
Body & Church of X., - Common worship, Creed, Sacraments or
Ministry, - tho' it has put into them all what I can find no
trace of in the New Testament. It has never Sundered -
as just of the Protestant demonstrations around us here, the grand
historical chain that links us with the Apostles, & it has
cherished the Essential Spirit.