314 SIMILAR NOTIONS IN FORMER TIMES

death and resurrection, and the casting away of selfishness is but the removal of a filthy garment, which is inconsistent with his new and glorious position, is but the deliverance from a monstrous anomaly, which hinders him from being what he is meant and created to be. It cannot be effected at once, and without many a struggle of the evil nature, and Christianity should show us how it may be effected. But still it is a natural death not an artificial death. It is the death of a plague and pest which we hate, not a tearing in pieces of our own proper being (which is the notion that so many of the mystical writers give us of this self-annihilation); it must be won surely by submission to God's plans, not by devices of our own. Here again your founder defeated, it seems to me, his own principle; he wished, I fully believe, to pay some higher honour to the sacrifice of Christ than that which is implied in the notion of its being a mere type or symbol of what is to take place in us; but he could not find his way to the expression of what he wanted. He believed the Calvinistic dogmatists around him were destroying all idea of the sacrifice required of each man, by the hard, dry language in which they asserted the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice; and he bent the staff violently the other way till it snapped. And so he might, and so have others in all ages done before him, and perhaps have been raised up for the very purpose of doing it, that they might counteract a prevalent evil; but then they did it under cover

3

NOT EQUALLY MISCHIEVOUS.

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of a church ordinance, which stood forth the
abiding witness for the truth which they dispa-
raged, the reconciliation of it with the truth
which they asserted. Fox would not have that
ordinance, and therefore his notion of a sacrifice
became the highest which you could reach; you
are taught to regard it as the highest which God
intended you to reach. Have you gained by this
belief? Are you gaining by it now? Do all the
exhortations of your older members to the young
and discontented Friends (sincere exhortations, I
believe, necessary, I doubt not), to be humble,
and sink themselves in the dust, and wait for
teaching, profit in the very least? No, you know
they do not. A feeling has arisen in their minds,
that there is some pretence and deceit in all this
language; they fancy that it does not mean what
it seems to mean,
at any rate, while they think
so, they cannot and will not wait to see whether
they are fairly dealt with or no. I have no wish
to foster this restlessness, I tremble when I see
it, I tremble lest they should part with pre-
cious truths, and learn to despise humility; but
I tell you that you cannot allay it. You have no
words with which you can charm the spirit which
has been raised among you to rest. You cannot
restore the unity which has departed from you,
you have destroyed that ordinance which is the
centre of unity, which keeps doctrines from
perpetual clashing with each other, and men from
being the slaves of doctrines.

And this is the third point on which I would

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BOND OF SOCIETY.

beseech you to consider what you have gained by defying the judgment of the Universal Church, on the great practical question. Fellowship between men, I have shown you, is the third great element in our sacramental idea. Now, no one ever asserted so solemnly as your founder, that communion between men must be spiritual; that formal bonds could never knit them together; that the Holy Spirit of love and unity, can alone make elements naturally unsociable, completely and permanently to cohere. It was a glorious proclamation. Therefore, continued Fox, we want no outward feast to bind us in one. No! but you

want external signs of dress to bind you together; you want outward formalities of conversation to bind you together. Consider-if you part with these, your wisest and most thoughtful men believe, (and believe, I am convinced, rightly), that your existence is at an end. You have parted, then, with a feast, which the church says is established by God as a bond between heaven and and earth, and between all the members of Christ here on earth; a feast which connects together the ages present with ages past; a feast, in which you cannot deny that hundreds and thousands of sincere men and women have believed that they found spiritual life and peace; you have parted with this, because it is too carnal to be a link between men who have the Spirit; and you think the fashion of a coat no unapt condition and upholder of that fellowship! I suppose you will not say,This is only our witness to the world."

You must be prepared for our answer. You must know that we should say at once, Then you would rather men of the world should infer the spiritual character of Christianity from your symbol than from ours; from a difference in vesture than from a feast, which professes to speak of a fellowship of love between a Heavenly Father and his family.' To sum up, then, the whole difference, -you assert a high spiritual life, as that which is the privilege and glory of a Christian. We bear witness that this spiritual life is not merely a name, not merely something resident in the man who enjoys it; but that it is the effect of an actual communication between God and man. You say that man must sacrifice himself in order to obtain this spiritual life, we bear witness that one who is both God and man has sacrificed himself, in order to bring God and mankind into union, and that we are privileged to partake of this sacrifice, and so to receive afresh every day the spirit which prompted that sacrifice. You say that men have fellowship one with another, when the Spirit comes upon them and quickens them; we bear witness that the Spirit of him who raised up Christ from the dead, doth dwell in all who will come and submit to him; and that this Spirit binds men to each other, by binding them first to God. Which is the fullest and more spiritual faith? — which is the most practical?

I do not touch upon other points, on which I might perhaps have some right to enlarge. You seceded, and formed yourselves into a society

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OUR OWN CONDITION.

to be witnesses against the worldly and secular spirit which you thought pervaded us. I do not ask you have you escaped it? But it is a question which it is of great importance that you should ask yourselves. You like plainness. Set the matter plainly before youselves thus :-"The great abomination of the age in which we live,- that age from which we by our habits are separated, and against which we are protesting, is its money-getting spirit. Have we expelled it from ourselves?"

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Why beholdest thou the mote?" you may be tempted to exclaim.

- I do not

I answer, look for the mote in your eyes; I exhort you to look for it in yourselves. And I most sorrowfully confess, that there is a beam in our own eyes which must needs be most frightful, because we have had such wonderful instruments for removing it which we have not used, such a glorious light continually about us, which we have excluded. But if you fancy that the deepseated corruptions which we have to deplore, are the effect of our Sacraments, and not the effect of neglecting them, I think I shall be able to show you in a few moments, that you err grievously; that our body-politic has become sick and faint, because it has invented food for itself, instead of receiving that which God has provided for it; and that if we will now repent, and receive that food as medecine, it will heal us and restore us as no nostrums of human invention ever can.

I. First, then, you will not, I think, deny-as