| Description | Dated 30 August. Comments on CMS tract describing 'the ministerial duties of the Servants of Christ in the Church of England'; the tract confirms his earlier view that no Protestant church 'could require less from her ministers in the administration of their work' than the Church of England but the questions arise not from the matter, but the applicability and application of them, on the work of a missionary; the first and third points of the tract (King's supremacy in temporal and ecclesiastical causes and doctrine and preaching) are true of all Anglican clergy but 'as the civil code of the laws of England may not fully be applicable to the social state of the tribes of India, so the regulations of the Church seem necessarily to undergo a series of important modifications for being applicable to the moral wants of the heathen world'; the question is whether necessary modifications of church government should be made by the individual missionary or by the ecclesiastical authorities and missionary society committees; two points need to be modified 'the use of the Book of Common Prayer and the obedience to the chief ministers of the church'. |