and plenipotentiaries of the national Church, they can avail themselves of their conjoint but distinct character, as temporal legislators, to superadd corporal or civil penalties to the spiritual sentence in points peculiar to Christianity, as heretical opinions, Church ceremonies, and the like, thus destroying ‘discipline’, even as wood is destroyed by combination with fire;—­this is a new and difficult question, which yet Baxter and the Presbyterian divines, and the Puritans of that age in general, not only answered affirmatively, but most zealously, not to say furiously, affirmed with anathemas to the assertors of the negative, and spiritual threats to the magistrates neglecting to interpose the temporal sword.  In this respect the present Dissenters have the advantage over their earlier predecessors; but on the other hand they utterly evacuate the Scriptural commands against schism; take away all sense and significance from the article respecting the Catholic Church; and in consequence degrade the discipline itself into mere club-regulations or the by-laws of different lodges;—­that very discipline, the capability of exercising which in its own specific nature without superinduction of a destructive and transmutual opposite, is the fairest and firmest support of their cause.

20th October, 1829.

Ib. p. 401.

  That sententially it must be done by the Pastor or Governor of that
  particular Church, which the person is to be admitted into, or cast
  out of.

This most arbitrary appropriation of the words of Christ, and of the apostles, John and Paul, by the Clergy to themselves exclusively, is the [Greek:  proton pseudos], the fatal error which has practically excluded Church discipline from among Protestants in all free countries.  That it is retained, and an efficient power, among the Quakers, and only in that Sect, who act collectively as a Church,—­who not only have no proper Clergy, but will not allow a division of majority and minority, nor a temporary president,—­seems to supply an unanswerable confirmation of this my assertion, and a strong presumption for the validity of my argument.  The Wesleyan Methodists have, I know, a discipline, and the power is in their consistory,—­a general conclave of priests cardinal since the death of Pope Wesley.  But what divisions and secessions this has given rise to; what discontents and heart-burnings it still occasions in their labouring inferior ministers, and in the classes, is no less notorious, and may authorize a belief that as the Sect increases, it will be less and less effective; nay, that it has decreased; and after all, what is it compared with the discipline of the Quakers?—­Baxter’s inconsistency on this subject would be inexplicable, did we not know his zealotry against Harrington, the Deists and the Mystics;—­so that, like an electrified pith-ball, he is for ever attracted towards their tenets concerning the pretended perfecting of spiritual sentences by the civil magistrate, but he touches only to fly off again.  “Toleration! dainty word for soul-murder!  God grant that my eye may never see a toleration!” he exclaims in his book against Harrington’s Oceana.