person can enjoy the life which is hid in Christ, who is our life, nor bring forth the living fruits of that life, unless he adhere to him. Hence apostacy from him is death to the individual. This is sin unto death. For him that wilfully and wittingly renounces Jesus as his Lord, there remains no sacrifice for sin, there remains nothing but the fearful expectation of certain and irremediable destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.

But there is a declension or an apostacy from the institution of Jesus Christ, where there is acknowledgment of its authority, and no personal renunciation of Jesus. This falling off, this waxing lukewarm, this indifference to the excellency and purity of the Christian institution, is intolerable in the estimation of the King "I will spue thee out of my mouth," is the promise of the Faithful and True Witness, to those who become cold in their attachment and lukewarm in their adherence to his person and cause. "Remember whence you are fallen, and reform, or else I will come to you quickly and will remove your candlestick out of its place unless you reform."

Concerning apostacies we may learn their nature and consequences from a strict regard to those leading apostacies to which we have alluded. Concerning reformations and returnings to God, we have abundant information in those preached in past ages; indeed, in all reforms proclaimed in both the Testaments. But in these reformations the following characteristics deserve attention :

First. They are all personal. Though the nation of the Jews, as such, apostatized, yet reformation could not be effected by the government without the people, nor by the people without the government, nor by the people but in their individual character. Reformation of manners, of government, or of religion in its integral character, must necessarily be composed of units. When the

persons composing a family, a congregation, or a nation, reform— then there is a family, or congregational or a national reformation. But reformation is always, and must necessarily be, a personal thing.

Second. In every reformation there are promises tendered on condition of | it. These are motives to obedience; and these, too, serve as motives to enforce it. Something is always gained by reformation, and something is always lost in consequence of not reforming.

Third. There is only one "reformation unto life;" and they who comply with it, obtain remission and life; and they who disdain or reject it, incur eternal separation from God.

Fourth. But there is a reformation of manners which is announced to those who have obeyed the gospel, and which becomes indispensable when they have in any wise fallen off from the purity of the gospel institution. This is the point to which all that precedes is preliminary.

Now it so happens in the very genius of this institution, that none can enjoy it who do not carry out to the full, the reformation which it contemplates and enforces. Hence the partial and limited enjoyments of Christianity which are found among those who do not embrace and fully carry out the principles of reformation propounded by the great Reformer and Saviour of men.

It is almost universally acknowledged that Christians, as we call them, among us, do not enjoy the same confidence in God, the same clear and unfaltering hope in the Saviour, the same joy unspeakable and full of glory, which characterized the profession of those who first received Jesus into their confidence as the Great Apostle of Jehovah—the Messiah of four thousand years' expectation.

The reason is, they do not so fully and unreservedly give themselves up to be guided by him in everything. The same causes must produce the

same effects, moral as well as natural. Let professors make the same unconditional surrender of themselves to the Lord Jesus which they did who first trusted in him as the Only Begotten of the Father, full of favor and truth, and their hearts will exult like theirs; their joy will be as complete, because their lives will be as pure.

But the sects cannot enjoy the salvation of God, because in every sect there must be something antiChristian; for the fact that there is a single human institution incorporated with the Divine, is that which gives to any community its name, its sectarian designation, when compared with the institution of Jesus Christ. And this, though it be but a unit, is a worm at the root of the Christian enjoyment.

The envies, the jealousies, the hopes and the fears, the likings and the dislikings which grow out of a sectarian peculiarity, like a cancer, vexes and torments the whole body in which it is found; and this afflicts every spirit which composes the mystical body of Christ. There must be schisms and all their hateful train where such institutions are enthroned in the minds of the people, where it is in conjunction with all the Apostles' doctrine.

A return to the whole institution in principle and practice, in sentiment "and behaviour-we say, "the whole institution," without addition or subtraction, and without any new modification is indispensable to the restoration of that holy spirit which filled the first saints with righteousness, peace, and joy. We must have the same religion, if we would have the same fruits which adorned and blessed the ancient disciples.

But such a profession would make a new sect, or rather revive the old one. It must be a sect so far as all mankind do not embrace it, or so far as any sect of mankind oppose it. The whole constitution, laws, ordinances, and manners of the king

dom of Jesus Christ revived would make the people who understand, believe, and practise them so far a sect as they are opposed; but no farther. And most certainly none of the sects hitherto existing are built exclusively upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets; for even the ordinances, nay, the constitution, and the naturalization of citizens as respects this kingdom, have not as yet by any sect been so understood as they are now beginning to be understood. In a word, Christians could not, in the true sense of language, enjoy Christian religion; for it was not understood, and it is not now fully understood by any sect, or by a minority in any sect in Christendom. While Christians, so called, are warring about their opinions, and erecting exclusive establishments, and maintaining the sects and schisms which their fathers made, it is proof positive that they are estranged from the simplicity which is in Christ; that they are in Babylon, and, as they often confess, in a cloudy and dark day, in the wilderness. The whole head is sick and the heart faint, and unless a reformation, radical and co-extensive with the apostacy is effected, men may profess, but cannot enjoy, the religion of the Saviour of the world.

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But the old cry, "The temple of the Lord is with us," we have been blessed, we are his people, we are the true circumcision," blinds the eyes and hardens the hearts of many against a radical reformation. We are rich, we are full, we are honorable, &c. is the cry which prevents thousands from stooping to inquire what means the command, "I counsel you to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that you may be rich; and white raiment, that you may be clothed; and anoint your eyes with eye-salve, that you may see. Unless a distrust is created, none will examine; and therefore none will reform.

Professors need not accuse us of making a new sect, nor pretend that

they can be happy in God without a reformation as radical as that for which we contend. If the revival of the uncorrupted religion of the New Testament, free from any humanisms, make a new sect, then it will only prove that all the sects are more or less gone into the apostacy. And if it did not only prove this, it would be an argument against it. But so long as no humanism is advocated by us or made preliminary to admission into the Christian kingdom, nor enforced upon them in the kingdom, the cry of a new sect is only a calumny. And that the experience of all professors, when compared with what the New Testament exhibits, is defective, every honest man in these establishments has only to examine himself to find the proof. But it must be remembered that we plead not a reformation of systems, but a personal reformation of principle and manners, an entire submission to Jesus as the only Prophet, Priest, and King of divine authority.

And this, too, is the highest ground which can be assumed, and the only ground on which a man intelligent in the scriptures can stand approved before God, the universe, and his own conscience. None that come after us can go farther back than the day of Pentecost; none can plead for more than an unconditional surrender to Jesus and his Apostles in their official designations; none can reasonably ask less. We are confident, then, that we stand upon the only tenable ground in the universe; that we have the approbation of God, angels, and all the dead saints; and that were all the Apostles and Prophets again to revisit the earth, they would take sides with us in this controversy; and if blamed by them it would not be for the ground we have assumed, but for our failure to stand fairly upon it, or for our delinquency in not carrying it out in all its details. In case of such a rebuke from them, we would reply, "Show us our errors;

we wish to see them; our hearts are right in the matter, and we wish our efforts to correspond with them." Such confidence have we towards God in the cause we plead.

Our opponents may be sincere and honest; some of them, we doubt not, are so; but none of them have presumed to say that they can have such confidence; nay, they have said so much already of a contrary import that they cannot now say it. None of them say that things are as they ought to be in the schemes which they support. They are afraid of changing for the worse; but all admit the possibility of changing for the better. Not a man will lay his hand upon his heart and say, that before God he thinks that the present order of things is the order of things established by the Apostles. None will say that Christians are what they ought to be, under the uncorrupted institutions of Jesus Christ. They cannot, therefore, unequivocally vindicate their cause nor their course.

It is to no purpose to say that they prefer their order of things or their views and traditions to that reformation which we plead, because they do not see it fully developed, they see things only in progress, or perhaps they do not put themselves to the trouble to examine into the real merits of the cause. They must admit the ground we take is unexceptionable— it is apostolic; and our failure to exemplify it fully, is to be charged to them, in a great measure, who throw obstacles in our way, and endeavour to turn away the ears of the people from the ancient gospel and order of things. But to the Lord, and not to us, they have to account for this.

Let those who plead this cause give them no real occasion to speak reproachfully of it, or of them, and we have the approbation of our king, and shall be pleased with the measure of success which he is pleased to bestow on our efforts, which has hitherto incomparably transcended our most