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 no one was Lord or Teacher, but one was our Teacher, even Christ:  that as long as we had no earthly bribes to tempt men to join us, there was not much cause to fear false brethren; for if we were heavenly minded, and these were earthly, they would soon dislike and shun us.  Why should we need to sit in judgment and excommunicate them, except in the case of publicly scandalous conduct?

It is true, that I fully believed certain intellectual convictions to be essential to genuine spirituality:  for instance, if I had heard that a person unknown to me did not believe in the Atonement of Christ, I should have inferred that he had no spiritual life.  But if the person had come under my direct knowledge, my theory was, on no account to reject him on a question of Creed, but in any case to receive all those whom Christ had received, all on whom the Spirit of God had come down, just as the Church at Jerusalem did in regard to admitting the Gentiles, Acts xi. 18.  Nevertheless, was not this perhaps a theory pleasant to talk of, but too good for practice?  I could not tell; for it had never been so severely tried.  I remembered, however, that when I had thought it right to be baptized as an adult, (regarding my baptism as an infant to have been a mischievous fraud,) the sole confession of faith which I made, or would endure, at a time when my “orthodoxy” was unimpeached, was:  “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God:"[2] to deny which, and claim to be acknowledged as within the pale of the Christian Church, seemed to be an absurdity.  On the whole, therefore, it did not appear to me that this Church-theory had been hollow-hearted with me nor unscriptural, nor in any way unpractical; but that others were still infected with the leaven of creeds and formal tests, with which they reproached the old Church.

Were there, then, no other hearts than mine, aching under miserable bigotry, and refreshed only when they tasted in others the true fruits of the Spirit,—­“love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, fidelity, meekness, self-control?”—­To imagine this was to suppose myself a man supernaturally favoured, an angel upon earth.  I knew there must be thousands in this very point more true-hearted than I:  nay, such still might some be, whose names I went over with myself:  but I had no heart for more experiments.  When such a man as he, the only mortal to whom I had looked up as to an apostle, had unhesitatingly, unrelentingly, and without one mark that his conscience was not on his side, flung away all his own precepts, his own theories, his own magnificent rebukes of Formalism and human Authority, and had made himself the slave and me the victim of those old and ever-living tyrants,—­whom henceforth could I trust?  The resolution then rose in me, to love all good men from a distance, but never again to count on permanent friendship with any one who was not himself cast out as a heretic.