certain connexion, showed that I could no longer be anything but a
thorn in the side of my friends abroad; nay, I was unable to predict
how they themselves might change towards me. The idea of a Christian
Church propagating Christianity while divided against itself was
ridiculous. Never indeed had I had the most remote idea, that my
dear friends there had been united to me by agreement in intellectual
propositions; nor could I yet believe it. I remembered a saying of the
noble-hearted Groves: "Talk of loving me while I agree with them! Give
me men that will love me when I differ from them and contradict them:
those will be the men to build up a true Church." I asked myself,--was
I then possibly different from all? With me,--and, as I had thought,
with all my Spiritual friends,--intellectual dogma was not the test
of spirituality. A hundred times over had I heard the Irish clergyman
emphatically enunciate the contrary. Nothing was clearer in his
preaching, talking and writing, than that salvation was a present
real experienced fact; a saving of the soul from the dominion of baser
desires, and an inward union of it in love and homage to Christ, who,
as the centre of all perfection, glory, and beauty, was the revelation
of God to the heart. He who was thus saved, could not help knowing
that he was reconciled, pardoned, beloved; and therefore he rejoiced
in God his Saviour: indeed, to imagine joy without this personal
assurance and direct knowledge, was quite preposterous. But on the
other hand, the soul thus spiritually minded has a keen sense of like
qualities in others. It cannot but discern when another is tender
in conscience, disinterested, forbearing, scornful of untruth and
baseness, and esteeming nothing so much as the fruits of the Spirit:
accordingly, John did not hesitate to say: "_We know_ that we have
passed from death unto life, _because_ we love the brethren." Our
doctrine certainly had been, that the Church was the assembly of the
saved, gathered by the vital attractions of God's Spirit; that in it