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silence and setting at defiance the clearest and most salutary suggestions of common sense, let us beware that we are not again entangled in a yoke of bondage not less galling than that from which we have been set free. Let us look well to ourselves and our posterity, and let us be careful to preserve that liberty which our ancestors obtained for us by their wisdom, and sealed to us by their blood.

True it is that the modern fanatics profess a very sincere theological hatred for the Church of Rome, from which they differ on various points of discipline and doctrine; but they have a discipline and doctrine of their own, in many respects as burthensome, as offensive, as dogmatical, and as antiscriptural as that from which the reformation has delivered us.

I do not say that they practise ascetic mortifications in a hermitage or cloister; but they bring the gloom and austerity of a cloister into domestic life. I do not say

that

that they believe in the miracles of St. Ignatius or St. Dominic; but they believe in daily miracles performed among themselves: love in preternatural effusions of the Spirit, in hourly and especial Providences, in sudden celestial influences and impulses, in divine visitations of favour or of vengeance.-Now when pretensions to the peculiar and exclusive approbation of God are thus set up by any sect, and when the common accidents of life are interpreted into deliverances for those who belong to that sect, and judgments against those who differ from it, we surely have a decisive proof before us, that the effects of superstition on mankind are in all ages nearly the same, and that whether the subject of it be a Catholic or a Calvinist, a Pharisee or a Puritan, its tendency is equally fatal to the best interests, and the highest duties, and the noblest pursuits, and the most generous feelings, and the most enlarged conceptions of the human mind.

Again, if they do not believe in the martyrdom of St. Ursula and her 11,000 > virgins,

C. 3.

virgins, they have a host of martyrs among themselves, which may be set in triumphant array against the list of Romish Saints. The denial of any unreasonable request, or opposition to any extravagant fancy; the wishes of parents or benefactors, expressed in the mildest and kindest manner, these are construed into acts of oppression; and so infatuated are the unhappy victims of this dangerous bigotry, that they seek and court what they call persecution, and seem to claim especial merit in thwarting all the kind and affectionate offices which are tendered by those with whom they ought to be connected by the nearest and dearest ties of friendship, of gratitude, or blood.

Much, we know, has been said, and with reference to former ages, with justice said, of the tyranny of priestcraft in the Church of Rome; but much may be said also of the same tyranny and the same craft, in the great and growing sect of which I am speaking. With regard to that most formidable engine of antient ecclesiastical

tyranny,

tyranny, confession, it is actually employed and regularly systematized by these fanatical reformers; and their whole body of neophytes, is subject to the secret and arbitrary exercise of this offensive curiosity, or as I should rather call it, this dangerous and inquisitorial domination.

Again, if they do not directly claim to themselves the same infallibility, in-religious matters which was arrogated by the possessors of the Papal Chair, yet born in a Christian country, protected by a Christian government, and many of them members and even TEACHERS OF AN ESTABLISHED CHRISTIAN CHURCH, they do assume to themselves the sole and exclusive title of CHRISTIANS. Nor did the Church of Rome ever fulminate denunciations of divine vengeance more loudly, or more authoritatively, on heretics, than these men deal out damnation to all but their OWN ELECT.

US, all

Come, says the Evangelical Teacher, to
ye that travail and are heavy laden,
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and.

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and THE GOSPEL from OUR lips will refresh you. He that hath ears to hear THE GOSPEL in its primitive purity and perfection, let him hear it in our Sion. Behold, we shew you a mystery. After the first experience of the grace that cometh from thus hearing the word of God, you will no longer sleep, but you will be changed as in a moment by the mighty working of that faith which subdueth all things to itself. In the twinkling of an eye you will be raised from the death of Heathenish ignorance and antiscriptural corruption, into the life of the new creature in Christ Jesus.

When the champions of Vital Christianity are called upon to vindicate these invidious and mystical harangues, they wield, as dexterously as they can, the carnal weapons of reason, and in a tone of defiance they insist upon what has never been controverted, that the primary and established meaning of the word Evangelical is honourable. But they lose, or at least endeavour to make their hearers lose sight of the main topic which is really in dispute, whether they have themselves

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