THE MONTHLY

CHRISTIAN SPECTATOR.

JANUARY, 1852.

BRETHREN,

Address to Dissenters,

The season suggests and justifies the freedom of direct address. On the boundary-lines of time we are wont to halt for retrospection and refreshment; and at those resting-places men speak to each other with the frankness that is born of companionship in travel. Around the camp-fire, the severity of discipline relaxes; brethren in arms canvass the chances of the campaign, the designs of the commander, and the merits of their cause. Upon the march of life there is little time for meditation or converse. We start out with convictions lively to enthusiasm, and hopes that veil all obstacles as with a gilded cloud; but, ere long, obedience takes the place of reasonthe stimulus of hope is superseded by the quiet force of habit. This is inevitable, and therefore not to be repined at-we must find its counteraction in our Sabbaths and feast-days; in the solemn anniversaries of the family, and the awakening services of the Church.

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Our first concern is with a matter capable of various expression'personal religion,' the Divine life in the soul of man,' and so onbut to express which in any form, is to state its paramount, infinite importance. There are those who scarcely admit the reality of the thing meant. They do not allow that between the best and the worst of men there exists a distinction so wide as would consist in the presence or absence of a special relationship to the Divine Being. They acknowledge the moral distinction of good and evil, and that the one or the other may preponderate in an individual character; but

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in the vast majority of human beings, they allege, there is no such decided complexion as to warrant the use of terms like these concerning them. Others, who never venture on this philosophy, would appear to regard religion-or, properly, religiousness, the subjective form of religion-as a decorous acquiescence in certain doctrines, and conformity to a conventional morality. A third class assert the reality of this special relationship, and that it originates in a sacerdotal act. We Dissenters profess, by the fact of our separation from the National Church, and our adhesion to other religious communities, to differ vitally from all of these. Our ecclesiastical polity indicates something more than a preference of one form of Church government to another— something more than an objection to liturgy, surplice, or episcopacy. It enters into our conceptions of the nature of Christianity itself. It proclaims our faith in the necessity of personal convictions, and of correspondent character, to constitute religiousness. We iterate in the ear of the world, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God;' and we deny that this being born again' is an act of unconsciousness to its subject, or is the work of any human agent. We assert, that it consists in the reception of the truth, and the exercise of its purifying influence upon the will and the affections, the habits of the inner and outer life. We affirm that every human mind is able, and therefore entitled, to form its conceptions of Divine things by direct contact with them; that no one man more than another has authority to expound them to his fellows; that to every one the revealed law of God alone is the law of life; and that obligation is laid upon all to give heed to the word spoken. Repudiating hereditary or œcumenical beliefs-affirming that neither Parliament for the nation, councils or presbyters for the Church, nor one generation for another, can rightfully prescribe what shall be believed or how worship shall be rendered-claiming for each human soul an independence of every other human soul in relation to the Highest-we nevertheless release not ourselves from spiritual obligations. On the contrary, we bind ourselves in the sight of the world to the horns of the altar. It is because we are leal to God, that we refuse to be in bondage to man. It is as the Lord's free-men that we deny the assumptions of the priest, and repel the influence of society. We profess, by our Nonconformity to prescriptive and enacted religion, that we possess, and would cherish, in our isolation or by voluntary associations, a Divine life in our hearts.

That this profession be a reality, is, then, our highest, first concern. That it is made in deliberate hypocrisy, is a supposition not, we believe, often tenable; and that need not here be entertained. But where there is no conscious deception, there may yet be a wide disparity between the inward and the outward fact. A man's life is untrue not only when he intends an imposition upon his fellows, but so soon as his convictions and emotions fall below or rise above the level of his words and deeds, and practise a deceit upon himself. When we stand up in the congregation to avow that to God we owe all, and from him deserve nothing-when we sit around the table of the Lord to com