together, privilege and responsibility in the inquiry about truth but the intoxication of suddenly and often violently recovered privilege greatly enfeebled the impression of responsibility which ought to have attended and chastened it. Free assent came to be considered not only as the condition of adequate religion in a rational being, but as the arbiter and criterion of truth and thus the throne of authority being set up within each individual breast, we have deprived the Church of her prerogative, and therein ourselves of some of our substantial advantages.

43. But in honesty I must also allude to another reason why the doctrine of the Church has been nearly erased, with many of us, not indeed from our creed, but from our practical apprehensions of religion-it is, the spirituality of that doctrine. As our hearts are set upon the world, and upon the fulfilment of our natural wills, we are much indisposed to hear of the world to come, and of the fulfilment of the Divine will as our own appropriate business. In these terms, however, it may be said, is a mere statement of the general truth, that the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God-and it may be asked, what is its special operation in depressing the doctrine of the Church?

I answer, this. If I individualise my religion, if in modern language I place the account only between God and my conscience, free from all inspection and controul, I manifestly rid myself of a host of troublesome remembrancers, whose admonitions I cannot disprove and will not obey. I shall have thus succeeded

in removing, in rendering wholly nugatory, so far as I am concerned, all that might have had an entrance to my soul with authority, and might thus have wounded me and dispelled my spiritual torpor. There surely can be no doubt that a view of the Church not as a voluntary combination but as one preordered for us, and entailing obligations and even having parental claims upon us, should naturally tend to disturb the fatal ease of a deluded conscience fortified within its own fancied independence, and should bring near and obtrude upon us the idea that there is a God in the world whose will asserts audibly in the Church its title to be preferred to our own.

44. Let us exemplify familiarly. A man notorious for neglect of the poor, is exceedingly averse to becoming a member of a society, which has their benefit for its object. A man whose mind is disinclined to politics when proposed as an incidental topic of conversation, recoils with tenfold horror from an invitation to enrol his name in a political association. Why? because in each of these cases the association with others would be a force, a distinct additional force, propelling us towards an object which we had felt to be unattractive. It would add to the existing religious obligation to relieve the poor, a public pledge in acknowledgment of it: it would bring the opinions of our fellow men to bear strongly upon our conduct, it would rivet their eyes by the glaring contrast between profession and practice. It would practically invest them with an authority over us which they had not

before, calling them in as auxiliaries to the law of God, a visible power to aid the invisible, and calculated to operate with so much the greater force, as it was our own voluntary act which called it into being.

45. Shall we then wonder if the soul which dreads religion and would flee from it, which has not yet thoroughly suborned its natural witnesses within the breast but yet has imposed upon them a partial silence, and lulled them into a temporary slumber, if such a soul, feeling that its peace depends on the prolongation of that lethargy, should shun with watchfulness those sounds by which it might be dissipated? In that sad position, a position occupied, alas! by how many myriads, every moment of inaction is a step towards the consummation of the triumph of Satan. God has a claim to our whole existence. Every act which is performed in a state of mind not recognising that claim, is in truth an act of rebellion against the Almighty, and assuredly goes to form the habit of alienation within us as every year during which an usurper continues to occupy his throne, diminishes the probability of the restoration of the legitimate possessor. Give therefore time to the Evil One, and you give him all he requires.

If then we get rid of the notion of a Church, and shut up the affair of our religion within our own bosoms-if the ministers of the Church dare not interfere-and if there be nothing in the decent usages of society to awaken unpleasant recollections-soon in the darkness and coldness of the silent breast does religion

surrender all its vital powers. So the great object of a man who knows he is living in sin usually is, not to profess irreligion, but simply to claim independence in respect of his religion. This is enough for this purpose. But the more he is compelled (whether by law or opinion) to associate with others, and to feel his association with others, in matters of religion, the more likely is he to be awakened to a sense of his danger : because then there is a power independent of himself and yet strongly operative upon him, which he can neither bribe nor stifle into silence.

Such a power exists in the full, public, general acknowledgment of the Church as a religious society, and in a faithful carrying out of that idea into the functions of our life.

46. Let us now consider both the duty and the advantages, of endeavouring, in all sobriety, to revive and realize that conception of the Church which pervades the works of the Apostles, and according to which we should contemplate her as our mother in the faith, from whom by Divine dispensation we received spiritual life, and from whose ordinances, together with the Word which she has preserved for us, and attested to us, we are still to gain our progressive growth in spiritual stature during the period of that childhood which we spend upon earth. Only be it observed that by her ordinances we do not mean only those which are public, but such also as, being private in their nature, belong to us as members in particular of the body; each member having functions primarily referable to

itself, as well as others that more immediately regard the body at large.

47. Now, in the first place, we cannot doubt, that if the will of God do indeed enjoin us to think, feel and act, less as individuals and more as members of a body than we now do, there must be advantages attending the fulfilment of that will. The fact of its enunciation is enough to satisfy every Christian mind. Yet it is permitted to our infirmity to trace out into particulars, the wisdom of the Divine dispensations, that we may husband every resource against our manifold temptations, and may stand armed at all points. Only let us not imagine when we have specified this and that use of some one of the ordinances of God, that we have exhausted the subject, that we have stated the whole amount of its capacity to justify His command. On the contrary, it is a point of duty to remember that besides the results perceptible to us, there probably are far more and more weighty consequences which we do not apprehend; and the best method of summing up these is, always to fall back on the Divine command, as being the most cogent and legitimate of all motives to its own fulfilment, and as indicating an obligation which is paramount to any view of advantage or incon

venience.

48. And this appears to be the place for observing that the distinction between acting, feeling, thinking, as individuals, and discharging those functions as members of an organised and permanent and authori