ESTABLISHED PROTESTANTISM.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR:1 SIR,—" F. W. P. B.'s " letter in your issue of July 20th is hardly fair to the memory of the great Archbishop and martyr, "the whole-hearted Catholic Laud." Both he and his sovereign, the royal martyr who followed him, avowed them- selves on the scaffold "Protestants according to the religion by law established," but that was a political and anti-Papal accident of the Church of England, not of its essence, and. moreover, innocent of the taint of Calvinism and the more modern heresies which now shelter under that vague and much-abused term. Is it likely that the man who foiled the Jesuit Fisher in a public disputation, and afterwards refused the bait or bribe of a cardinal's cap, who was as obnoxious to the Papists as he was to the Puritans, was a "Protestant" in the present spurious sense of the word P In the speech which he read on the scaffold these words also occur : " I was born in the bosom of the Church of England established by law, and in that profession I have ever since lived, and in that I come now to die."—I am, Sir, &c., R. HUTCHISON. Woodeaton Rectory, Oxford.
[We cannot publish any more letters on this subject.—ED. Spectator.]
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