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not see the importance of Christ's death and resurrection in justifying man-is set at nought by them because they oppose a formal notion of justification to the truth of the word revealing Himself in the conscience of man. I contended that this idea of the union of each man's spirit with Christ, is grounded upon a deeper truth which has reference to mankind; and that this truth is imperfectly shadowed forth in your doctrine of an universal saving light—is utterly destroyed by their notion of a Redemption effected for particular individuals, not for the race. I maintained that this idea of an atonement for mankind as the establishment of a communion between God and His creatures in the person of a Mediator, necessarily involved the idea of a Father, Son, and Spirit,—their distinct personality—their essential and absolute unity. This idea, I shewed you, had by your friends been converted into a mere spiritual conception-had by the Dissenters been converted into a mere notion or dogma; retaining a real and precious meaning so long as it was connected with the personal life of him who believed it, but always in danger of losing its reality-of being held, not as an eternal and glorious truth, but as an opinion which must be acquiesed in lest he should suffer from the want of it. From all these premises, this conclusion seemed to follow, that a church, based upon the acknowledgement of a Trinity, and of an atonement for mankind, is the true foundation for the per

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sonal life of each man,-the only reconciliation between spiritual principles and outward facts,between the truths which are presented to man by God and the heart which receives those truths from God,-between our private and our social relations, between both and our relations to God. Hence arose the inquiry, Is there such a church? If there be, what are the signs of its existence, and on what grounds has it pleased God to constitute it, by what instruments to uphold it? We are thus led to the subject which I proposed to consider in my present Letter.

The ground upon which Fox and Barclay rejected Baptism and the Lord's Supper was this: That Christ came to establish a spiritual kingdom, and that in the idea of a spiritual kingdom is involved the abolition of all ritual observances. For, a while they say the Apostles were permitted to indulge their Jewish notions; the light had dawned upon the world, but it had not yet perfectly risen. On some it shone brighter than on others; the Apostle of the Gentiles rejoiced that he had only baptized two Corinthian families, and evidently intended to intimate, that the followers of Apollos and Cephas, who probably exalted these formal acts very highly, were in a low spiritual state. But when the Jewish polity, according to the Divine purpose, passed away, the only plea for such institutions ceased; a new era began, or ought to have begun; and it was the sin and carnality of the church, which still kept it in bon

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dage to the elements of the world. These notions, or some such as these, are, you know, part of the faith of your childhood; they grow with your growth, and strengthen with your strength; they cannot, I conceive, be wrenched out of your minds, without peril to much that is most precious in them. It is easy to tell you that you ought to pay a literal obedience to the commandments of Christ; to say that his words are very express ; to show that you have resorted to methods of explaining these away, which you would not like to apply to any ordinary document containing the wishes and injunctions of a friend. It is easy to do this; the argument has been tried with you again and again: but in general it has not succeeded. I am not sure that it ought to have succeeded; I am not sure that those with whom it does succeed are really the most submissive to Christ, or the most ready to follow him whithersoever he goeth. Why so? Because this reverence for the commands of Christ, if it be the result of anything but a superstitious fear, must be grounded upon a feeling that you are connected with him, that he is your Lord and your friend. But if through education, or whatever other circumstances, you have been led to think that the notion of Christ as the Lord and friend of your spirits, is inseparably connected with that other notion of his delivering you from bondage to formal and external precepts,-I am mightily afraid that these exhortations, reasonable as they seem, reasonable as, I conceive, in one sense they are,

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-may overturn the very principle and life of that obedience which they seek to promote. For my own part, if I succeeded in upsetting any of the arguments, — sophistical as I deem them, by which you uphold your disbelief in the sacraments, until I had first detached that disbelief from all the truths with which it is intertwined, I should regard my triumph with sorrow and humiliation; I should believe that for the sake of my logic, I might have gone far to destroy some brother for whom Christ died, by weakening feelings which God had implanted and carefully nourished within him, for the very purpose of guiding him to the knowledge of himself. On the other hand, if I shall be permitted to show you, that these truths stand firm without the denial which accompanies them, nay, will never stand firm till it be removed,-I am in no fear of your texts and arguments. No dialectician will be needed to explode them; they will drop off as easily and as completely as the hard skin of the chrysalis from the living and ascending butterfly.

I take my stand, then, on the very ground on which your teachers have taken theirs. I say Christ did come to set up a universal spiritual kingdom, that he did come to deal with men as spiritual, and not as fleshly creatures; that he completely accomplished these purposes; and that a church which does not stand upon the fact that these are his purposes, and that he did accomplish them, has no foundation, and when

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the rains descend and the winds blow, must be shaken and must fall. By this test I claim, that the church to which I belong shall be compared with all existing sects, your own included. To this test I bring the ordinance,-I do not yet call it by what I conceive its only fitting name, the Sacrament of Baptism,-and I affirm, that because you have neglected this ordinance, your witness for a spiritual kingdom has been a feeble and ineffectual witness. Again, that for want of the belief in an established spiritual kingdom, the notion of Baptism which prevails among the sects, and among those Churchmen who are willing to account themselves members of a sect, is a confused and carnal notion.

You will scarcely be surprised at the first of these allegations, strange as it may appear; for you will remember that in my first Letter, I distinctly maintained that Barclay's idea of an Universal Light, though most sound and true, was in fact the idea of an elder dispensation; and that in striving to substitute that idea for its fulfiment in a personal incarnation and atonement, he was throwing us back upon that dispensation,-converting us into Jews, without giving us the law, and the sacrifices, and the covenant, by which the faith of a Jew in a brighter and better era was kept alive. Of course, this language is not to be taken without some qualification. I do not mean that it was possible for a good and wise man like Barclay, not to see many truths far more clearly than the best and wisest Jew could have seen them. In