Romanist principles, telling him that he ought to submit his “proud reason” and accept the “Word of God” as infallible, even though it appear to him to contain errors.  But against the Romanist the same disputant avows Spiritualist principles, declaring that since “the Church” appears to him to be erroneous, he dares not to accept it as infallible.  What with the Romanist he before called “proud reason,” he now designates as Conscience, Understanding, and perhaps the Holy Spirit.  He refused to allow the right of the Spiritualist to urge, that the Bible contains contradictions and immoralities, and therefore cannot be received; but he claims a full right to urge that the Church has justified contradictions and immoralities, and therefore is not to be submitted to.  The perception that this position is inconsistent, and, to him who discerns the inconsistency, dishonest, is every year driving Protestants to Rome.  And in principle there are only two possible religions:  the Personal and the Corporate; the Spiritual and the External.  I do not mean to say that in Romanism there is nothing but what is Corporate and External; for that is impossible to human nature:  but that this is what the theory of their argument demands; and their doctrine of Implicit[4] (or Virtual) Faith entirely supersedes intellectual perception as well as intellectual conviction.  The theory of each church is the force which determines to what centre the whole shall gravitate.  However men may talk of spirituality, yet let them once enact that the freedom of individuals shall be absorbed in a corporate conscience, and you find that the narrowest heart and meanest intellect sets the rule of conduct for the whole body.

It has been often observed how the controversies of the Trinity and Incarnation depended on the niceties of the Greek tongue.  I do not know whether it has ever been inquired, what confusion of thought was shed over Gentile Christianity, from its very origin, by the imperfection of the New Testament Greek.  The single Greek[5] word [Greek:  pistis] needs probably three translations into our far more accurate tongue,—­viz., Belief, Trust, Faith; but especially Belief and Faith have important contrasts.  Belief is purely intellectual; Faith is properly spiritual.  Hence the endless controversy about Justification by [Greek:  pistis], which has so vexed Christians; hence the slander cast on unbelievers or misbelievers (when they can no longer be burned or exiled), as though they were faithless and infidels.

But nothing of this ought to be allowed to blind us to the truly spiritual and holy developments of historical Christianity,—­much less, make us revert to the old Paganism or Pantheism which it supplanted.—­The great doctrine on which all practical religion depends,—­the doctrine which nursed the infancy and youth of human nature,—­is, “the sympathy of God with the perfection of individual man.”  Among