Excerpt from The Commission and Consequent Duties of the Clergy: In a Series of Discourses Preached Before the University of Cambridge, in April, 1826 What from the loose writing of some of the Clergy, and the general silence of the body, upon the constitution of the Christian Church, the subject 1s so grown out of knowledge, as to have lost almost universally its influence upon the mind. Ask an ignorant man, why he separates from the Church, his answer will probably be, that he lives in a land of liberty, where he has a right to worship God in the way he thinks proper. Ask a man of reading and understanding, and he will quote respectable authority for the same opinion; whereas, both one and the other might, it is probable, have continued members of the Church, had they been taught to form a correct notion of it. But when they have been led to consider the Church, as a word of general and indiscriminate application, and religion itself as a subject of mere private opinion, independent of all authority, it is not to be expected that they should feel disposed to restrain a licence, of which, from the latitudinarian way of thinking and acting in which they have been educated, they conceive themselves born in rightful possession. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.