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are combining on all sides against her, it is highly desirable that she should derive all possible benefit from the associated labours of her friends; and it would be an event most beneficial, most desirable, could some regular channel of communication be opened between the zealous members of your Church and ours.

"On this subject I believe my excellent friend, Mr. Norris, of Hackney, has already addressed you; and I hope you will allow an humble individual like myself to add, that I shall be most happy in any way to further so good a work.

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Humbly praying that the great Head of the Church may pour down his blessings upon you, and all whom he has called to bear rule in his spiritual kingdom, in every quarter,

"Believe me, Right Rev. Sir,

"Your very faithful and humble servant,

"J. H. SPREY."

In 1819, when the temporary connexion of Bishop Hobart with the Church in Connecticut ceased, by the election of a person to the Episcopate of that diocese, he received the following letter of thanks from the Convention, for his disinterested and faithful services.

"To the Right Rev. John Henry Hobart, D. D. Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of New-York.

"RIGHT REV. AND DEAR SIR,

"We have the honour to tender you the thanks of the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal

Church in the Diocese of Connecticut, for those temporary services which are this day terminated by the consecration of the Rev. Dr. Brownell to the Episcopate of this Diocese.

"In performing this duty, you will permit us to express the high sense entertained by the Convention, by ourselves, and by the Church generally, of the distinguished benefits which have resulted from your provisional connection with the diocese. When we reflect on the sacrifices which you made, and the labours which you incurred, in adding the care of the Church in this state to the arduous duties which devolved on you, in the large and extensive diocese of New-York; when we consider that the sacrifice was made, and these labours undertaken, without any view to pecuniary compensation; and when we call to mind the eminent services which you have rendered, the new impulse which your visitations have given to our zeal, and the general success which has attended the exercise of your Episcopal functions-we feel bound to offer to the Great Head of the Church and Supreme Disposer of all things, our sincere and heartfelt acknowledgment of the distinguished blessings which he has been pleased to confer upon us, through the medium of your services. We shall ever cherish a grateful recollection of these services. And although we are no longer connected by official ties, we indulge a hope, that there may be no diminution of the friendship and affection which have grown out of your occasional visitations among us.

"Accept, Right Rev. and dear Sir, from ourselves personally, and from the body in whose behalf we

address you, the assurances of our highest respect; and permit us to add, that it is with sentiments of the most cordial esteem, that we bid you an affectionate farewell.

"HARRY CROSWELL, "NATHAN SMITH,

"S. W. JOHNSON."

From the Rev. H. H. Norris to Bishop Hobart.

"RIGHT REV. AND DEAR SIR,

"I have now before me two obliging letters of yours, written within two days of a year after each other; the former conveyed to England by Mr. Berrian, and the latter by Mr. Lawrence. Mr. Berrian has probably told you that he put the letter, of which he was the bearer, into the post at Liverpool, and (I conclude) never came to London,* so that I was disappointed of the pleasure I anxiously looked forward to, of giving you a sample, through him, how cordially you would be welcomed if your great engagements on the American Continent would admit of your visiting this country. The same fatality has hitherto attended your second confidential representative. He forwarded the case of books to Hackney, and announced by letter his having despatched it; and I had the mortification to learn by it, that I had actually been at Liverpool at the time he was addressing me from thence. ***. The books with which you have favoured me, in

I called on Mr. Norris, but he was at that time, I believe, absent on his usual summer's excursion.

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some measure conveyed the information which I looked for from your own pen, and they may be pleaded with unanswerable evidence as an excuse for your not using it more punctually to your correspondents. I rejoice to see the Church of Christ, with no other aid but its own spiritual energies, so efficiently answering all those great purposes for which it was constituted by its Divine Founder. I survey, with especial delight, the American edition of our Family Bible made your own by the additional notes interspersed among those of the English edition. You have done us the honour of making no erasures, but need not, I think, have been so scrupulous. The work is equally capable of improvement by omission as well as insertion. It commenced upon the spur of the occasion, and circumstances did not allow of that extensive research and deliberation which, had the completeness of the work been the only object in view, ought to have been a previous labour, before the compilation had been entered upon. ***. I hope you will be more copious in your additional notes when you come to the Gospels, as there I think we are particularly scanty and superficial. Some of the old English divines might be well exchanged for the modern. I rejoice to see also that you have bodies of young men incorporated in your religious societies, and that in these societies the genuine Christian principles are so well defined and supported, that your Church is spreading together with the spread of your population, and that so much zeal is called forth in the prosecution of all these important objects; but, above all, I rejoice in your Convention,

and in the wisdom which governs all its deliberations.

"You will expect to hear from me what our present circumstances and exertions are. Alas! our great grievance is, that we have not, like you, a Convention. Our Convocation is only the pageantry of what formerly so materially contributed to the purity and consolidation of the Church. ***. Our newspaper details of the last year, read at the distance you read them, and without that practical knowledge which a residence amongst us only can afford, must convey to you frightful ideas of the state of our country, as well religious as political. I would not be understood as intending altogether to dispel those ideas, but only to qualify them with others calculated to throw in gleams of hope into the gloominess of your almost necessary conclusions. It is probably true that infidelity has been most extensively propagated, and with too abundant success among the lower orders, especially in our thickly peopled manufacturing districts; and that they have been bereft of all hopes and fears of an hereafter, that they might be let loose from all moral restraint, and be prepared for those desperate acts of violence which their seducers must find hands to perpetrate. But there is amongst us what has been very happily described as the quiet good sense of Englishmen, which, without showing itself, still retains a mighty influence, and diffuses its correctives in streams as copious and as diffusive in their currents as those in which the poison flows.

"Our Society for Promoting Christian F

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