of the earth, and the special favourites of heaven; whose company (though oftentimes they were considerably my inferiors either in rank or in knowledge and cultivation) I would have chosen in preference to that of nobles; whom I loved solely because I thought them to love God, and of whom I asked nothing, but that they would admit me as the meanest and most frail of disciples.  My heart was ready to break:  I wished for a woman’s soul, that I might weep in floods.  Oh, Dogma!  Dogma! how dost them trample under foot love, truth, conscience, justice!  Was ever a Moloch worse than thou?  Burn me at the stake; then Christ will receive me, and saints beyond the grave will love me, though the saints here know me not But now I am alone in the world:  I can trust no one.  The new acquaintances who barely tolerate me, and old friends whom reports have not reached, (if such there be,) may turn against me with animosity to-morrow, as those have done from whom I could least have imagined it.  Where is union? where is the Church, which was to convert the heathen?

This was not my only reason, yet it was soon a sufficient and at last an overwhelming reason, against returning to the East.  The pertinacity of the attacks made on me, and on all who dared to hold by me in a 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