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of rationalism, and you deny a fact,—a fact which we believe, and Churchmen down to the age of Locke have also believed, to be involved in all Scripture. Put aside the fact of rationalism, and you leave it in all its infidel power, a mighty antiChristian principle; acknowledge its truth, and show, that without a revelation, and your revelation, the truth becomes a lie, and you have taken out its sting, you have made it a minister of the sanctuary. So again they say, So again they say, If you affirm a particular doctrine, (respecting repentance, for instance), to be inconsistent with the revealed character of God, you are profane; all you have to do is to ascertain whether such and such is his plan and decree; you are presumptuous, and almost blasphemous if you look beyond this. Here, we reply in like manner,-Our course is not a profane one, it is the only deliverance from profaneness. We do not say so, because some of the highest men in the English Church held this opinion; we do not say so, because it was the doctrine of Smith, and More, and Whichcot, and Worthington, and Cudworth, and Norris, and Leighton; all of whom consider the character of God as the centre of divinity; using it as a test whereby the nature of all opinions was to be tried; accounting every wrong apprehension of it as the source of profaneness, urging the continual contemplation of the ineffable charity, and the perfect, absolute love, as the only way to holiness. We do not rest upon human judgments, although to be profane with such men were no very

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hard sentence; but we have better witness than theirs. To be very jealous for the name of the Lord of Hosts; to hate every false god, because he had not the signs of truth, and love, and purity, was the characteristic of every saint in the Old Testament; to declare that name, in its fulness and simplicity, after the darkness had passed, and the true light had shined, was reserved as the most glorious privilege for the most aged and perfect saint of the New. And what strange language is this, to tell us that God hath provided a way of salvation, and that we are to walk in it, in the hopes of at last attaining eternal life; but that we are not in anywise to inquire respecting his character, when he himself gives us to understand that salvation is the deliverance from the sin, of which the cause at once and the penalty, is ignorance of him, and that this is eternal life to know him, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

It was absolutely necessary that I should have discussed all those points, but especially this last, before I entered upon the subject of the Eucharist. Were it true that men must be commanded to submit to the church, before they are told any thing of its meaning and its principle, it would be utterly improper in me to address you upon the Sacraments at all. And this much I freely concede, that if I proposed to explain this Sacrament in the ordinary sense which we give to the word ' explain,' I should be undertaking a very dangerous as well as very foolish task. It is my very

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HOW FAR TO BE EXPLAINED.

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earnest desire not to do this; but, in the first place, to make you feel how and why this Sacrament is above explanation; and, secondly, how and why the heart of man loves it and longs after it, and cannot be satisfied without it, although it be above explanation. Now this paradox, for a paradox it is, and must be to the carnal heart, I propose to prove to you by the simple evidence of history. I am not about to produce any new facts, those which I shall notice are familiar to every ordinary reader,-neither shall I, out of these facts, form any theory; I shall merely endeavour so to set them before you, that they will explain themselves. As we proceed, you will see how the principles which I have been discussing in this letter, help to make the facts intelligible, and how the facts in turn illustrate the principles. Believing, as I do most firmly, and as I hope to convince you, that I am about to enter upon a deep, and holy, and awful subject, I must needs desire to be preserved from making any careless step, to be endued with a reverent spirit,—never to forget that I am speaking of a mystery, and yet never to forget that there is now no veil over the face of God's ministers; that the awfulness and dignity of our station consists in our being invited, with open face, to behold his glory, that we may be changed into his image; and that the more deep and awful our impressions of the mystery are, the less we shall affect any needless concealment, the more we shall be taught to use all plainness of speech.

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QUAKER VIEWS.

This idea of a kingdom or state, though clearly recognised by your friends, as it must in some way be recognised by all men, (for the notion of a new and Christian life, without the acknowledgment of some state, with which that life is in agreement, is, whatever persons may fancy, too great a contradiction, to be practically admitted into any system,) is not, however, the subject on which they dwell with most interest and affection. They have seen, most rightly, that the condescension of God, was not merely something for the contemplation and wonder of angels, but that it had a mighty object in reference to men. The Creator stoops to the creature, that he may raise up the creature to fellowship with the Creator. The Holy One enters into all the miseries and sorrows incident to the unholy and fallen race which He had formed, that He may lift them to the contemplation and participation of his own essential holiness, and purity, and glory. This process has occupied a much larger share of your attention than the other; and, the connection of the two is precisely the subject on which your writers are most obscure and unsatisfactory. I hinted in my last letter, that in their description of the struggles and conflicts through which man comes to realize the glory which is intended for him, they led us back to the period of an earlier dispensation, and bore little witness to that mighty interference of the Father and Lord of Man, to seek that which was lost; without which, it seemed to me, that the other truth, important

THEIR STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS.

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as it is, loses its proper foundation and its great comfort. Nevertheless, the accounts in the writings of your friends, of their struggles after light-of their baffled hopes and bitter disappointments of their discoveries that they must submit to a power above them, in order to rise above the opposition of the carnal nature-their repeated assertion of the necessity of self-sacrifice in order to victory-of the Cross as the way to the crown,

-seem to me so profoundly interesting and real, that I cannot read the criticisms and censures of your modern Seceding Friends upon them, without some uncomfortable, and, I fear, some uncharitable feelings. In time I am able to suppress all such emotions, by reflecting that these critics, though they may be attacking that which, in itself, is very good, are conscious of a deficiency in such statements, which is to them of the most practical importance. Putting myself in their position, I feel that I could be as harsh and as bitter as they are. My wish, therefore, is not to complain of them, but to show them how they may gain a position, which will enable them to feel exactly what the truth of these views is; feel why they have been unable to give peace and satisfaction to their consciences; feel how they may be able to reconcile these positions with those which they have newly embraced, and henceforth hold them more strongly than they were held by those who first asserted them; yet in perfect and living harmony with all that they have seemed to contradict. The Sacrament of Baptism, considered

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