cannot give. What we want, is to be brought into a point of view, in which the fair and illuminated side of each doctrine, and not its dark side, may be presented to us. When we have been familiarized to its beauty, its deformity will be far more disagreeable and appalling to us, than it ever can be while we are perpetually conversing with it alone.

How easy it is to misrepresent this desire, and to give it the most odious character, I am well aware. By the very slight and moderate injustice of representing the student as one who wishes to place himself above all sects and parties, that from a calm elevation he may behold their errors, and smile at them with the complacency of the great Epicurean poet, and not as one who wishes to place himself where he may receive the light from them all, because he feels. himself so dark and ignorant, that he cannot spare one ray of it, he may very plausibly be described as the most self-conceited of human creatures. It will be seen

from the third of these letters, that the

Author is not unprepared for such imputations, and that he has taken some pains to examine how far they are reasonable. Merely on his own account, it would have been absurd to interrupt the discussion of the subject for the sake of repelling charges against the writer; but, seeing that his whole purpose was to discover a method which may assist himself and his readers in examining the question of the church, and in studying the theories of those who have written ably and profoundly upon it, it was essential that he should not be supposed to have adopted a false method at the very outset of his work. It was needful for him to prove, that he was not putting himself in the place of a teacher, but of a learner; was not assuming to be wiser than his neighbours, but was anxious to sit at their feet; was not angry with them for anything which they presumed to teach him, but only because, instead of taking the vocation of teachers, they formed themselves into a police to hinder the entrance of all wisdom but their own. I have not

a

complained of the antiquarian theologians, because they reverence that which is past; but because they are cold and discouraging in their treatment of the desires which men feel in the present day, and cheerless respecting the future. I have not complained of those who look with admiration upon the present age, because they think that God has a great work for it to do, and has endowed it with gifts suitable to that end; but because, by rejecting the wisdom of former ages, and making light of men's pantings after something better than the routine of things around them, they forget their function, and make abortive their gifts. I have not complained of those whose eyes are wearily watching for the morning, because their hopes are too bright and gorgeous; but because they will not acknowledge that the day which they long for is already risen, and will be seen whenever it please God to disperse the mists and fogs by which the eyes of men have been hindered from discovering it. To shew that the half-scholastic, half-popular de

crees by which the realm of theological thought has been portioned out into the two provinces of Doctrine and Discipline, and practical Christianity into the two provinces of the Inward or Spiritual, and the Formal or Ecclesiastical, rest on no adequate foundation, of authority or of reason; that we must go back to the old principle of the church being a Kingdom, and steadily keep that principle in sight, in all our studies respecting it-that the Gospel is indeed the revelation of a kingdom within us, a kingdom, of which the heart and spirit of man can alone take cognizance, and yet of a kingdom which ruleth over all, and to which all other kingdoms, even now, are reluctantly doing homage, while they most struggle to resist it-that the outward badges of this kingdom are not inconsistent with its spiritual character, but uphold that character, which would perish so soon as they were removed that this universal kingdom or church is not the adversary of national order and family life, but is the sustainer

and consummation of them both-that this church is not the adversary of man's reason and will, but is the appointed trainer of them both, for a state and a knowledge which, without her, they could never acquire; that she forgets her commission and underrates her powers, when she strives to crush them, and not rather to bring them forth, and give them the highest developement of which they are capable; and that they sink into a low, grovelling, despicable condition, when they refuse her guidance, and do not aspire after the glory to which she promises to lead them this I thought not a needless undertaking in these days, and yet one in which a person who is himself only seeking for knowledge and light, might be profitable to others; because he who is willing to state his own difficulties, and sympathize with ours, is sometimes better able to help us, than those who are so much above us to be surprised at our ignorance, and impatient of our dulness.

3. Though it is impossible to convince all