Excerpt from The Church of England, a Goodly Heritage: Sermon Preached at the Weymouth Church Congress, 1905

And therefore it is that I would start this Congress with the note of the same intense loyalty which the ancient Jew felt for the Church to which he belonged and for the country which he loved so well; as he looked round upon what some might have considered the barren hills of Palestine, and thought over the long history of his chosen race and the good band of his God upon him, he cried aloud in love and gratitude, The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground; yea, I have a goodly heritage. To answer, then, the question of my friend the working-man, I am happy in the Church of England - in the first place, because I know it to be soundly and profoundly Catholic. If the Nag's Head fable has long been the scoff of his torians, so also has the unguarded assertion that the delivery of the instruments formed the essence of an Ordination, and, therefore, one of the most certain facts of history is that the ancient Church of England is a true branch of the Holy Catholic Church. Speaking, then, as a member of the Congress rather than as a Bishop, I am happy in the Church of England because in it I can look back through an unbroken history to the time of Christ Himself, and can rejoice in the validity of its Orders, and the security of its Sacraments, and the purity of its Creed. And, therefore, I put aside with decision the suggestion that, to be a Catholic, I must be in communion with the Bishop of Rome, and pray to be preserved from - what to me would be - the supreme disloyalty of denying my Orders, and repudiating the validity of the communions which have fed me from my boy hood until this day.

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