In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

C. SHERMAN, PRINTER,

19 St. James Street.

PREFACE.

THE American Editor of this valuable work begs leave to state that it was undertaken with strict reference to the wants of American churchmen. In pursuance of this object, he has left out many articles which relate to the peculiar ecclesiastical laws and institutions of the Church of England; many articles purely architectural in their details; several on the more abstruse and mooted points of theology; and he has modified and amended others, by the introduction of much new matter, relating to the American branch of the Holy Catholic Church, in all those points where we canonically, rubrically, and politically differ from the Church of England.

The Editor firmly believes that, while under his revision it has lost none of its real value as an English work, it has gained something in its better adaptation to the American Church, and the ecclesiastical peculiarities which pertain to the noble daughter of a more noble and venerable mother.

Dr. Hook says, "This edition," the sixth (of which this is a reprint) "has been enlarged by an addition of more than one hundred articles, the authorities are quoted upon which the statements are made in the more important articles, and, where it has been possible, the ipsissima verba of the authors referred to, have been given." Dr. Hook also adds :-"The circumstances of the Church of England have changed considerably from what they were when the Church Dictionary was first published. At that time the Protestantism of the Church of England was universally recognised, and the fear was lest her pretensions to Catholicity should be ignored. But now an affectation of repudiating our Protestantism is prevalent, while by ignorant or designing men Protestantism is misrepresented as the antithesis, not, as is the case, to Romanism, but to Catholicism; at the same time, Catholicism is confounded with Romanism, primitive truth with medieval error, and the theology of the Schools with that of the Fathers while, therefore, the articles bearing on the Catholicity, orthodoxy, and primitive character of the Church of England are retained, the articles relating to the heresies and peculiarities of the Church of Rome have been expanded; and strong as they were in former editions in condemnation of the papal system, they have been rendered more useful, under the present exigencies of the Church, by a reference to the decisions of the so-called Council of Trent, so as to enable the reader to see what the peculiar tenets of that corrupt portion of the Christian world really are."