UNJUST TO MANKIND. 155 often shown to your fellow-men of every colour and kind, can I help feeling that you have defrauded them of a witness more important than warm clothing, or healthy prisons, or the right to receive wages - the witness, I mean, that God has sent his Son to enfranchise mankind ; that, as a Father, he had yearned over his children, and sought them when they were lost ; that the Holy Dove is brooding continually over them. For, do not imagine that any words in which human art, or even Divine Wisdom, speaks to man, carry these truths home with such a power and witness to their hearts, as a sign which it requires no learning to interpret ; which speaks alike to rich and poor, old and young, in every nation and kindred under heaven. Oh, surely, if your charity is so warm, and tender, and universal, as on some occasions you have shown it to be-the thought, how many sick and lonely men and women, in obscure corners of the the earth, apart from human teaching and human fellowship, have remembered the name which they received in childhood, and, too ignorant to understand any thing else, have yet apprehended this truth, that a fellowship had been established between them and the invisible worldthat a Father, Son, and Spirit were watching over them in love, have believed this, and by this belief have entered into that repose of childlike confidence, to which the most learned theologian, the most experienced Christian soldier, must be brought, if he would share their joys-the reflection how many who had strayed into the 156 DESIRE FOR UNIVERSAL FELLOWSHIP. ways of evil-had forgotten every fatherly* instruction, every word of peace and life that they had ever listened to, may have been struck by the recollection of that sign and that name, and have returned to Him who was the guide of their youth, saying, "Father, I have sinned;" not to speak of the silent influence which it may have had among Pagan nations in counteracting many a Christian blasphemy,—such thoughts will lead you to consider that the pride which tempted your fathers to reject this ordinance, because, forsooth, they had all the fruits and blessings of it in their hearts, is a black and grievous stain upon their philanthrophy. Nor dare I suppress my conviction, that however for a time God may have averted the calamity from you, the hour is rapidly approaching when you will feel, that, by this rejection, they were injuring their own posterity even more than they were testifying their want of sympathy with the human race. A thousand indications prove, that a crisis is approaching, when the question, whether there is a universal society or no, in which men may claim fellowship with each other, will be debated, not between schoolmen and theologians, but by labourers and handicraftsmen in every part of the world. Schemes of universal government, fellowships cemented upon principles inconsistent with national society, subversive of family life, are arising all around us. This craving in men's hearts cannot be stifled, it must be satisfied. The question is, how shall it be satisfied? By polities based on universal selfishness, carrying in themselves the elements of their own WHO CAN SATISFY IT. 157 destruction; or by a polity based on love, wherein all its members are bound together in one head. Such a polity your fathers tried to set up. Where is it? What is become of it? What satisfaction does it offer to the anxious hearts and spirits of men? At the very moment it is wanted, it is crumbling in pieces. It rested on human faith, with the loss of human faith it perishes. Such a polity, we say, is the universal church of the living God; the kingdom of heaven set up on earth; a kingdom which has lasted in despite of human ignorance, crime, unbelief; a kingdom which shall last until it has subdued them all under its feet. But to see this kingdom, to enter into its principles, to partake in its sorrows, to share its triumphs, to be able to discover it when it pleases God that kings should be its nursing fathers, and queens its nursing mothers; that it should be surrounded with power, and honour, and glory, claiming the whole earth and the fulness thereof for its Lord; to know it, too, when it is in abjectness and poverty; when its ordinances are despised, its existence questioned; when kings of the earth are sending presents one to another, because they think that the witness against their crimes is at an end, this is the gift for which, above all others, we ought to long and pray. I cannot think that it is a gift which those will receive, who glorify their own graces and spiritual attainments—who will not take the blessings of God's kingdom as little children,-who will not uphold and prize the witness of God's free love. Let us be sure, my dear friend, of the ends 158 RIGHT ENDS AND RIGHT MEANS. which we propose to ourselves; then we may hope to understand the means by which we are to seek them. Whatever may have been the case in former days, he is a foolish politician and a bad calculator, who in this day seeks for honour and respectability, and the esteem of the world, by bearing witness for the name of God, and defending his ordinances. If you seek these ends, I own, without a moment's hesitation, that the argument which a celebrated dissenting minister addressed to his own flock, is applicable also to you: "If you did not join the church in its high and palmy state, will you join it now, when even its admirers and patrons are forsaking it?" If, on the other hand, you desire to be witnesses for that spiritual and universal kingdom, of which your early friends delighted to speak, to spread it among men, to enter into the mysteries and truths upon which it is grounded, you cannot too quickly submit yourselves to God's laws, however simple or insignificant in human estimation, and thus resume the position which your fathers not in wilful obstinacy, but with much ignorance and precipitancy, abandoned. NOTE TO PAGE 99. I RATHER fear that in the text of this Letter, I may have led the reader to think that I object to Dr. Pusey's theory of repentance chiefly because it presents the Gospel in so cheerless and hopeless an aspect to men. But this is not the view of his doctrine which is most distressing to myself and to very many whom, with reason, Dr. Pusey would be far more grieved to offend. The light in which it exhibits the character of God, as willing the death of the sinner, as hardly persuaded to set him free (though the freedom he seeks is from Sin) — the utterly selfish character which it imparts to penitence and prayer, the encouragement which it gives to the notion that we are not to seek for union with a Being of perfect purity and love, from whom by our impurity and lovelessness we have been separated, but by great efforts to alter the feelings and disposition of God towards us, are far more shocking to our minds than the consequences which we believe must follow from the doctrine, though we do not deny that those consequences seem to us to be nowhere so accurately described as in the article on Predestination; -if generally received, "it would thrust men into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation." being our feelings, it would be rank cowardice to be deterred by the most unfeigned respect and admiration for the recent reviver of this tenet, or by our belief that he and his fellow-labourers are intended to confer great blessings on the church, or by our conviction that their hearts are probably far freer than our own from all the evil which we think is involved in the notion, from expressing, at every fitting opportunity, our intense dislike to this part of their system. These If we wished for a strong practical protest against it, |