been magnified, and the type has been put upon the pedestal in the place of the thing typified. The spirit has fled, and the body has been embalmed; and so baptisms and communions, confirmations and ordinations, have been deemed essential to the right ordering of the Christian Church. How absolutely foreign to the whole genius and conception of religion of all religion, especially the Christly conception of all religion are these silly yet seriously wicked controversies about bands and ribbons, candles and crosses, modes and amount of water in baptism. Here we have a great denomination of Christians, excluding the whole world from Jesus' communion, and sitting down together to remember the Master in eating bread and drinking wine, and shutting up the kingdom of heaven against all bodies which have not been, with priestly hands and charm-like words, immersed in water; and, furthermore, spending thousands of dollars yearly in printing a new Bible, all with the intent to get it to speak some other meaning into the old word "baptism," as if the kingdom of heaven could in any sense be opened or closed by water, much or little. Think of a body

of Christians, in the person of a bishop, reproving a young minister for preaching in a chapel unconsecrated by Episcopal phrases, on the ground that there was in the same town a true church which mumbling words had made holy! Think of this same sect arraigning a man for ecclesiastical trial because some word slipped his conscience in giving baptism to an infant!

You all know, as all men who know any thing of our blessed Lord know, that Jesus dwelt not on these outward and symbolic forms, but, time and time again, denounced as the enemies of both God and man all this pharisaical stuff, as offensive to righteousness of life, and as resulting in shutting the gates to God's kingdom of truth, love, and spiritual life.

Dear friends, these things are not religion: they are opposed to all right conceptions of religion; and it is high time that some body of disciples, who still have faith in Jesus Christ and his truth, should, in his sweet and divine charity, with his bold, positive, and telling terms, pronounce the old-time woe upon Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who do shut up the kingdom of God against men!

The whole tendency of dogmatic teaching has been in the same exclusive direction. It is the very essence of Calvinism to maintain that God himself has shut up his kingdom against many, if not most, of his own children, and this to redound. to his own justice and glory; and every Calvinistic Church in the land stands a monument to this partial and unchristian theory of religion.

The glory of Methodism to-day is not so much in the number of its votaries as in the historic fact that she silenced Calvinistic preaching in Calvinistic pulpits. It was the old Methodist preachers who in no rose-water words controverted the five points of Calvinism, and denied to the whole partial scheme of theology a Christian spirit and tendency. The outward result of this holy crusade against error in the name of Christ is that to-day, on all hands, Calvinists have broken faith with Calvinism. So thoroughly have they done so, that, should a man preach the teachings of the Westminster Confession in their historic sense, I verily believe there is not a Presbyterian congregation in this city that would not vote him a fit subject for an insane asylum. The schemes of

special and miraculous conversion, by which instantaneously a man's whole character is changed from a hardened sinner to a pious saint; the fearful theory of an endless hell, in which there is no quality of mercy and no meaning of reformation; the whole basis idea of substitutional religion as taught by Orthodoxy, contravening our innate and Christian ideas of morality itself, in that it teaches that God could only be merciful by being revengeful, that what God could not do as a Father, he did do as a Son; that God is both these, acting one time one dramatic part and then another,these, with all correlative doctrines which have been entailed upon the Church from the mediaval ages and priestly spirit, are still so many added bars, bolts, and locks to fasten the doors of God's kingdom against the sons of men. If a new Christ should come in the spirit of the old one, he would shock our sense of conventional propriety and charity, as Jesus did in his day, by entering our modern ecclesiastical and doctrinal structures, and pronouncing, "Woe unto you Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for

ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in." We may, moreover, say as severe and as truthful things of our church ways and methods.

Throughout the great State churches, and most of the dominant dissenting sects, the priestly relation is official, and not personal and real. A Catholic, Greek, or Anglican priest is a mere actor of religion, a performer of a part, a dispenser of fictitious grace. This is the theory of the priesthood borrowed from heathen religions, and prevalent in all the old churches of Christendom.

To come nearer home, I am persuaded that all serious men and women, who think somewhat upon the matter, are certain for themselves that our own church methods are wrong in theory, and work more and more to the separating the Church from the sympathies and support of the people. I seldom converse with any one upon these matters who does not deplore the absence of the middle and lower classes from all our Protestant Churches. The Sunday congregation has come to mean much the same thing, in some sense,