TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.
may more earnestly desire to return and be received into favour, and become a more dutiful child for the time to come.
God has infinite expedients to bring back sinners that are gone away from Him. We know how[1] the prodigal son was brought to a sense of his condition by the miseries he met with when he was from under his father's care. How David's eyes were opened by a parable[2]. How Manasseh became an instance of repentance, when in bonds[3]. And we should not despair, but be confident rather that God will bless His own institutions in the hands of us His ministers, for the good of all such persons as draw these censures upon themselves. And it will be far from being severity to them, if by these means they may be brought to a sense of their evil condition, and "their souls saved in the day of the Lord Jesus[4]."
This is the design of Church censures; and that they may have this good effect, the Apostle has given directions to all Christians[5] not to accompany with such, that they may be ashamed. And our holy Church in her Articles, as you will find it in the thirty-third Article of the Church of England, has declared in these words: That person which by open denunciation of the Church is rightly cut off from the unity of the Church, and excommunicated, ought to be taken of the whole multitude of the faithful, as a heathen and publican, until he be openly reconciled by penance, and received into the Church by a judge that hath authority thereunto.
Pursuant to which Article, the Church in the eighty-fifth Canon appoints, that all persons excommunicated, and so denounced, be kept out of the church by the churchwardens.
And in the sixty-fifth Canon directs, That all such as stand lawfully excommunicated, shall every six months be openly denounced and declared excommunicate; that others may be thereby admonished to refrain their company and society, &c.
As for any temporal penalties or incapacities which an excommunicate person may be exposed to; these do not properly belong
