Excerpt from A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Vol. 7 The Protestant Episcopal Church is the lineal and legitimate descendant of the Church of England. It represents in the United States of America Christianity as it is received and embodied in the Established Church of Great Britain. In doctrine, discipline, and worship it aims not to depart from its august parent further than local circumstances compel, but it claims to be supreme judge of the force of circumstances, and a supreme law in adapting itself to them. It derived its orders, it accepted its liturgy, it inherited its creeds and articles of religion, from the English Church. Yet, notwithstanding its foreign origin, it is not a foreign church. Its history is coeval with the earliest settlements of the continent, and has kept constant pace with all the varying phases of national development. In common with all the institutions in the land which claim for their permanent features a date anterior to the discovery of America, and in the same sense, this church came from abroad. Its structural features did not originate in the eighteenth century, when the nation arose, nor in the fifteenth century, when the continent was discovered. They antedated these events nearly two thousand years. But while thus transplanted, the church took early and firm root in American soil. It developed a constitution and a life essentially American and essentially its own. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.