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Quakers you should not,-that a spirit of restless excitement is one of our saddest religious characteristics. If we lookat the symptoms of this disease in individuals, we find violent convictions of an evil nature, alternating with a lazy subjection to it; the sudden discovery that the past life has been selfish, leading to acts not less selfish in their object, and scarcely more benevolent in their effects; an apparent warfare with the world around; a real entertainment of some of its worst tendencies; to sum up all, a fever in the heart, a confusion in the understanding, an irregular and inconsistent practice. I will not go farther; I will not ask how often utter indifference or complete infidelity is the reaction from these religious fits; I could say some awful words on that subject, but the hint is sufficient. If, again, we look at the society of which these individuals form the elements, we shall find by what a number of stimulants this temper is created; how much religious machinery is at work to produce benevolent or religious impressions, or to keep them alive; how little, in directing the movements of the machinery, I do not say the more delicate tastes and apprehensions of the spiritual man, on whom it is meant to act, are heeded; but how constantly even that sense of straightforward honesty, which used to be thought an essential part of the Christian character, is insulted and outraged. It seems to be considered the all and all of religion, to produce a tremendous startling effect; and how long that effect shall last, or by what means it shall be

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OPPOSED TO SACRAMENTS.

produced, or how much it shall tend to the glory of God, are questions not worthy of a moment's consideration.

Now that feelings such as these should be much at war with the idea and principle of ordinances, that their very name should be irksome, as implying something regular, appointed, and, therefore, according to modern notions, unspiritual; will not, I think, surprise you. I want no better testimony to their preciousness than the fact, that they worry and torment this temper of our age, and give birth to passinos which are just able to find a decent vent in warnings against the danger of Popery, the horror of substituting the form for the spirit, the delusion into which persons may be led by mistaking sacraments for faith and holiness. To the mere arguments contained in such solemn sentences, it is sufficient to answer, that Popery is a horrible evil which we are most anxious to avert, and which we believe is rushing in upon us by means of religious meetings and revival schemes, and whatever else excites religious anxieties and cravings, and does not satisfy them,-for, that of such anxieties and cravings, dishonest priest-craft in every age has availed itself, and will undoubtedly avail itself again. But of the temper of mind which such warnings imply, we offer ordinances, and especially the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper as the only remedy; for not only does the idea of a settled state, established by baptism, wherein this other sacrament is to preserve us, by continued new supplies of

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life, remove that notion of getting ourselves into some state by self-willed exertions, which is the parent of all restlessness, not only does the idea of communion with God, as the end of all Christianity, set aside those selfish ends and principles, which this excitable religion affirms and sanctions,—not only does it give a new view to our conflict with the world, showing that it is to be carried on day by day, in our own hearts, with the principles, and habits, and maxims of the world, and especially with that, its most prevalent tendency, the wish to choose paths and courses of action, instead of entering into those prescribed by God; not only in all these ways does it combat our worst tempers, and tend to cultivate a serene and a Christian habit of self-denying action or suffering, but also it satisfies most remarkably the very cravings which seem to oppose it. The feeling of the necessity of society to keep alive our religious dispositions, here acquires its strict and highest interpretation; that feeling of a warfare against principalities and powers is here defended, and placed on its stable ground; that feeling in the heart, that faith and charity should live together; that what we receive, we should impart, hath here been asserted and vindicated from generation to genegeneration. A person, then, feeling his lot cast in this age, and considering, first, how it may derive the full benefit from those lessons which God is imparting to it, and how it may hinder these lessons from being turned to the devil's use, will, in this

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DIVISIONS OF OPINION.

Sacrament find exactly that which he desires, to secure the blessings, and avert the danger.

II. That feelings, such as I have described, should produce more conflicts of opinion than have existed in any former age, a wise man could have conjectured. A mind disorderly and tumultuous will needs lay eager hold of one portion of truth, and as readily insult what to him, in his ignorance, seems to oppose it. And thus, out of the very heat of that furnace which should seem to make reasoning and speculation impossible, shall come forth more various, unhewn masses of dogmatism, than the most scholastic and speculative period hath ever originated. That these divisions should set at naught the idea of a universal fellowship, and should convert this Sacrament into the mere symbol of party-life, is a fact which, however fearful, is nowise surprising. Yet, as I ventured to hold, (with some diffidence, because it is scarcely safe even to think how past evils, which God hath permitted, for greater good, might have been averted), that one of our great controversies,—that which is in some measure the centre of all protestant controversies, might never have arisen, had the communion been regarded more as the centre of Christianity; so I am, with much greater boldness, ready to maintain, that the course which that controversy, and others have taken in later days, proves conclusively, that in this Sacrament they may find, and here only can find, their adjustment. The Calvinistic system, as I have shown you, began in the honest

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desire to protest against the naturalism of Popery, to assert a spiritual principle of man, and that with this, and this only, God can hold converse. Hence the denial of the patristic doctrine of the baptised church, as chosen of God, to be the receivers and witnesses of his grace; hence the magnifying of individual election; hence the assertion of the fall, and not the Incarnation, as the ground of divinity. In the next age, I remarked, the controversy took a new form. There arose two sects, not one asserting the Catholic principle, and one the Calvinistic, in which case our articles could have offered them reconciliation; but both alike renouncing the Catholic principle, and debating whether the individual man is chosen to salvation by a mere decree of God; or whether his own will originates the acts and means which tend to his salvation. In this century the word Salvation begins to lose the meaning which it had in Calvin's mind. It is no longer identical with deliverance from sin and admission to holiness, as I conceive it always seemed to him; it begins to be used like an algebraic symbol, without much recollection of its meaning. And, therefore, this stage of Calvinism prepares the way for a third, in which the existence of a will, or spiritual principle, in man, is entirely denied; in which man is supposed to be moved as a log of wood or a stone is moved. This is Edwards's Calvinism. Can there be anything more directly opposed to the Calvinism of Calvin himself? And yet the progress from one view to the other has been so gradual, I might add so inevitable, that few persons