tism is indeed the gate which openeth upon this way, but it will profit us nothing to have gone through this gate, unless we walk in the way. A man who reposeth all his confidence in this initiatory mystery, by which he was grafted into the church of Christ, is like unto one who sets out to go to a great man's house, he knocketh at the porter's gate, and is admitted; but, instead of advancing forward to the house, he wandereth a while in the pleasure grounds, plucking, as he idly passeth along, the loveliest and the fairest flowers, till wearied with his ramble, and fascinated by the delights of the place, he lieth down to slumber, and perhaps awaketh no more. It was absolutely necessary for him to enter by the door, and having entered, it was requisite, if he wished to reach the termination of his journey in safety, to turn neither to the right hand nor to the left, but to keep in the direct road which the master of the house had made for the benefit of his visitors. So it is in the christian course. Baptism is not alone sufficient; whoever would arrive safely at his heavenly Father's house, must not wander from the road which he hath marked out for his children to walk in, or if in an evil hour he should stray, he must not suffer himself to be overcome of sleep, but must hasten to return. He must make use of all the helps which God hath given him, such as divine worship, the holy communion,

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frequent reading of the Scriptures, and fervent prayer for the daily renewing and co-operation of the Holy Spirit, for without this sure abiding aid, all his efforts will be fruitless, all resolutions to overcome the evil one, and to extricate himself from his toils, totally unavailing, for, as our church truly teacheth her children to confess, "there is no health in us." The chief recommendation of the Reformed Episcopal church of Great Britain is, not solely its having certain church officers, called bishops, not a form of prayer, not its music and its vestments, but because it is the church of the living God,—the pillar and ground of the truth, its clergy lawful, its whole liturgy venerable, for the most part, for its great antiquity, but still more venerable and worthy of all admiration; for, independently of the Lord's prayer repeated four times, there are, in the morning service alone, ten copious passages of the Old and New Testament read every Sunday, besides the Psalms in metre sung, and the prayers which are almost compiled verbatim from the Scriptures, and all of which are addressed to the throne of grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. This noble work, second only to the Holy Bible, is a mighty and majestic pillar of the truth, of which, by the blessing of Almighty God, it hath been the palladium; it hath preserved pure and uncorrupted in the church which useth it, the faith once delivered to the saints.

There may be, (but I trust none, or very few,) and have been, some Socinians among the clergy, but if they ever dared to preach their poisonous doctrines to their congregations, yet the people always had, and I trust ever shall have, the best of all antidotes in the prayer book. It is the prayer book, with all reverence be it spoken, which hath preserved inviolate the great doctrine of the atonement, inasmuch as it hath concentrated within its pages, that, as well as all the other essential articles of the christian faith. While such hath resulted from the use of the liturgy of the Anglican, and its kindred churches,-Rome with its mass-book, in language not generally understood, and the Scriptures only partially divulged to the laity, and the Protestant sects, with the Bible in their hands, of which every individual minister is an interpreter, and without any standard form of prayer have not all kept the faith whole and undefiled. Rome hath corrupted it, by adding to, rather than by abstracting from the faith; for she worships the trinity and believes in the atonement. Geneva hath corrupted it by abstraction, she hath expunged from her creed belief in the divinity of Christ. The German presbyterians have fallen away. The Irish presbyterians are looked upon with a jealous eye by their kindred of the Scotch establishment; and of the 260 English presbyterian congregations, 230 are said

to be Unitarian; these all have the free, unlimited, and uncontrolled use of the Scriptures, without any let or hindrance; they may read them in English, in Latin, in Greek, or Hebrew, or they may abstain from reading exactly as they please. And if "the directory for the public worship of God," usually bound up with the Confession of Faith, hath any weight, ministers who subscribe that book are bound publicly to read the Scriptures. Under the head of "public reading of the Holy Scriptures," I find this injunction, "all the Canonical books of the Old and New Testament, (but none of those which are commonly called Apocrypha), shall be publicly read in the vulgar tongue, out of the best allowed translation, distinctly that all may hear and understand. How large a portion shall be read at once is left to the wisdom of the minister; but it is convenient that ordinarily one chapter of each Testament be read at every meeting, and sometimes more, where the chapters be short, or the coherence of matter requireth it. It is requisite that all the canonical books be read over, in order that the people may be better acquainted with the whole body of the Scriptures; and ordinarily where the reading in either Testament endeth on one Lord's day, it is to be begun the next." The excellence of this command, for it begins "shall be publicly read," is indisputable, but the practice, it may be

asserted without the fear of contradiction, is not only not universally, but seldom, to read the Scriptures at all in presbyterian places of worship; so that with all the taunts thrown out against our church, that it is popish, and all the vauntings about the scriptural character of presbyterianism, we are forced to confess that even in the services of the Roman church, bad and corrupted as it is, the Word of God is more frequently and universally read, than in presbyterian places of worship, and that they, the presbyterians, actually do prefer the traditions of men to the pure and unadulterated Word of God. While our church stands proudly forward as the greatest and most scriptural church in all christendom, she dares challenge any denomination of christians in all the world to prove that their public worship is more scriptural than that of the Churches of England and Ireland, and those others which use her liturgy. The people of these churches have read to them, besides the sermons, the Word of God, unmixed, unadulterated, unalloyed by human comment. Their ministers deliver to them the Oracles of God, pure and uncorrupted as when the Holy Spirit dictated them to the inspired writers of the sacred volume. They are unchanged by the lapse of time, undeteriorated by the operation of printing, and when the minister readeth the scriptures to the peo