the doctrine may be firmly and permanently hers-to address herself to the securing of a basis for her own futurity, not in the doctrine, which may exist alone and be dead, but in that emotion of Charity which will never die. How to secure this in her members, say you? If it is necessary for her to seek such security beyond her effort to attain it, and if she can attain it, and if any one but God can make assurance sure in this, then let her present members themselves earnestly cultivate the doctrine as a living fact, let this be efficiently taught as the only foundation of the Church, and if any requisite still remain, let her doctrinal Declaration give place to the expression of desire for that living Charity; but your doctrinal Declaration, brethren, will never be anything else than the dead sign of a lifeless Faith. And no wonder that being but words itself it should bring you no other security than words: no wonder, when it is form instead of substanceletter instead of spirit-Faith instead of Charity. Declaration! why, in the name of all that is new with us, do we not step forth among the Churches with our Declaration new also, and let them read that our basis of unionthe basis of union for all the future-is no longer the painted image of a Declaration of Faith, but the one vital substance of the Church's life, bearing the only fitting title for the New Church's creed-The Declaration of Charity! Why should you busy yourselves making a Declaration of Faith? Is it because the Old Church has done it before you, and you must needs be infected with the contagion of her example? Keep your faith for your private teaching, and make it the instrument of so securing your Charity; but, in God's name, if you have come to profess Charity, and that only, as the world's cure, why not profess it and leave the professions of doctrine and faith to the Dragon who has built His Church upon them? You are the servants of God, and you are sealed in your foreheads and in your handswith what? The seal of the living God-the distinguishing mark of Charity? How can that be, when this thing with which you come to the forefront bears no such inscription? Why have you overlaid that heavenly distinction by this earthly fabrication you call a Declaration of Faith? Granted that it is every word of it true, your truths are not wanted here at all they have their own place; keep them there. We want to see your forehead, with the distinguishing mark before all the world with which the Lamb Himself has distinguished you the seal of Charity. Why have you overlaid that with professions of faith?

But your Declaration of Charity would be nothing more than a Declaration of Faith in another guise! Would it? That idea only shows how steeped to the lips you are in the notion that your distinguishing mark must be a faith of some sort; also, I suppose those heavenly societies that will not even name the name of faith are still making a declaration of it when they name and act out their principle of Charity? Surely you may see that the difference between the denominations is precisely this of a declaration of a different faith from their fellows: are you no other than they? But one would have thought that there was a conclusive difference between yourselves and the whole of them in that you were, or professed to be, embodiments of a totally different principle. All I contend for is, then, that if you must make a declaration at all, you should tell out that vital difference clearly and vividly-that your declaration should consist, not of a statement of beliefs of any kind, which could not constitute the essential but only the formal difference between you and them, but should actually be a declaration of that itself upon which the Church of the Lord truly is, and ever must be, based.

But your Declaration of Faith is also to secure unanimity among your own members by claiming the adhesion of candidates to it; in other words, your declaration is put forward for the purpcses of a test. Now, to my

C

thinking, that is a degradation of the constituent element of the Church, an infidelity pure and simple, and a mean and ignoble attempt against the magnanimity of New Church freedom. I am not merely using strong words: my words are calculated for exactness, whether they give expression to wisdom or folly; nor, for my own sake, should I care to write a syllable on the subject beyond what that last sentence contains.

One could not possibly object to a Declaration of Faith in itself, and as the formula of individual conviction, but one must, as we have been doing, object to its being put forward as the distinctive Note of the Church; and one must also object, as we now do, to its being used as a sign of the validity of membership. Clearly, if Faith, or a Faith, be not the basis of the Church, neither can it be the instrument of membership: if the one thing is false, so is the other, inevitably. Your instrument of membership to be fundamental, true, and without evil consequences, must be that which constitutes the Church-must appeal to the desire to be coincident with that. But is it no degradation of the constituent element of the Church to convert it first into a Faith, and then to use that Faith as a means of discovering how many are willing publicly to pronounce the Shibboleth? Will that elemental Charity not evaporate in the process? You say that the matter is not exactly so, that that is a coarse and rabid interpretation; you object to the attribution of the epithet test to your declaration as so used, in spite of the requirement of signatures; you say that the signing the declaration is only an opportunity for those who believe to testify their belief-an opportunity which any right-minded man would gladly embrace. Very well, now tell me what you propose to do with those who may object to sign your declaration? Are you to enforce the law of the Church, or are you to forego what you have been at such pains to secure? I do not mean those who do not believe the terms of your declaration when I speak of objectors; I mean those who do believe them, but who have a conscientious objection to the introduction, into the Church especially, of those questionable modes of securing honesty so common in the world to-day-the attestations, pledges, oaths, and other forms of asseveration which are supposed to secure what the will towards righteousness cannot. You are taking great care of the evil by such a law, and they get through the hedge in spite of you: it would be a little more to the purpose of the Church's growth if you took a little care of the good now, who are standing outside there looking over your hedge and turning away saying that these people who pretend to be so much more are really no higher than others who rejoice in their ecclesiastical denominational safeguards. No, you may with smiling plausibility try to refine the term as you like, but your declaration is a test and nothing else; and I tell you that the larger wisdom as well as the keener foresight of to-day pronounces that tests are doomed. The deeper, more susceptible consciousness of the New Age is becoming aware of the degradation to truth, and especially to love and charity, from their being put to any such dubious use. If there were a genuine need for such tests, and no other modes of securing what they could secure, it is possible that the evil might be condoned; but when pure feeling shrinks from the degradation of asking from an applicant for membership his signature to what he has already in words and by his presence confessed, when the evil man will be the readiest so to ratify his profession (and would even do much more if he were asked), one sees that so painfully useless an abuse is condemned by the very fact of its exercise. Such a practice is as degrading to the administrator and to the recipient as it is to the truth itself. If it were a question of mere public business, as it is in the signing of the Conference Roll, the matter would be different somewhat. Yes, it would be different, undoubtedly: whatever it was or meant, it certainly would not be an upbuilding of the Church of God. Business is hardly the name for the sign of a soul's incorporation into the fellowship of the saints.

But this demand for signature is not only a useless, sectarian degradation of the truth, I hold it also to be an infidelity—an infidelity as manifest as that of the orthodox believer who cannot trust God not to damn him without a substitute: the one demands a substitute because he fears that God will not save him or the Church without it; the other has got rid of this infidelity only to hold its equal, that God cannot or will not see to the upbuilding of His Church without some test-interference of man's to help Him out with His work. Where does God give you this right to interfere between Him and His Church? Your province is to do your best to teach the truth, and to act upon the free results of that teaching; but this supplemental thing of yours, this bolstering up of the truth's imperfect action, is an unbelief in the genuine work the truth is capable of doing, and is therefore a plain infidelity against Him who sent the truth into the world in freedom, to do there its saving work. You are told to teach all nations, but you are nowhere told to test all nations: this is a hesitating, questioning, sceptical, infidel addition of your own, or rather, as we have said so often, an addition to the Lord's own principle handed down to you from a Church which has perverted it. Must not man co-operate with God, then, in building up the Church? Certainly, but He has nowhere told you to co-operate in such a fashion. The trust you have received, and which you think you are fulfilling by this doctrinal endeavour to keep the Church pure, was never a trust to fulfil any such function, inasmuch as it never could be yours to distinguish the pure from the impure, nor could such a method accomplish an object so unlike itself; but it was a trust to hold out the torch of truth, to attract men so within the circle of its light, and only to prohibit, or to apply your standard of practical truth or of righteous conduct, when those so drawn to your communion appeared to manifest an unfitness to be there. This is your trust, and the only form of such a power that it would be just to commit to the keeping of men, or that is in consonance with the Church which professes, in one or another sense, to include the world in its sweep. Your faithless fears lest everything shouldn't be right that wasn't hedged about with provisions, and your exaggerated sense of your own place in such guardianship, lead you to mistake your trust, which is of a much humbler character than you are inclined to believe the result is that you compel God to work beyond your ecclesiasticism in building up a Universal Church. I say again, such conduct is an infidelity.

But you cannot understand that your trust should go no farther than this, that it does not include your right to levy the test of a common faith; and you begin to suspect that I want everybody to be included in the Church whatever they believe. My answer is, that if I wished any such thing, I should say so; but I don't. Who does not see that our open teaching of the truths we hold is the best safeguard against those joining our communion who do not believe with us? Is it likely that Atheists, Infidels, Unitarians, Orthodox Congregationalists, or even Latitudinarian Church of England men will rush to enter our communion so long as they believe as they do and we teach as we do? Why should they come ?because they don't believe with us? Tut-the best safeguard is that men don't believe with you; and when they do they will come. Will there be any need for your test to be levied then? It might almost be that your test was the creator of the common faith, from this prevalent insistence on it, when it is in fact nothing but a dead letter-of no use to anybody. Those outside of it do not want it; those within it do not need it; to whom then is it of use? Will it serve to discover the insincerity of pretending believers? But when was it known that insincerity having gone so far as the request for admission shrank from the ultimate step of appending its signature at the end of others to some written statements which perhaps

were not even read or seen? To whom, I ask again then, is its signing of any use? Does it secure a common faith? If the faith exists, the signature is not needed; if the faith does not exist, will the signing give it or discover its absence? You want to find out whether we all have the common faith, and there is no means of finding it out, and it would be no good if you did; but it would certainly be much more to the purpose to endeavour to produce the common faith than to find out whether it exists. Tests will never secure its production, and they undoubtedly do ensure its perversion. Leave the truth free, then, to do its own work, and your trust in it will be proportionately enlarged; your bolstering shows at present how much enlarging it needs. This craving for a human ratification of what is unratifiable is manifestly a distrust of the truth you proclaim, and of the Lord who thereby leads men to good, and so Himself upbuilds His Church. From all which it follows that the large-heartedness of New Church freedom ought not to tolerate this narrow attempt against it. Freedom is a suspicious word to those who confound it with licence, but we have already rejected such an interpretation here. It is our firm conviction that those who are of the Church will believe with the Church that the Lord our God is one Lord, and that we have life through keeping His commandments; so that we are not claiming exemption in doctrine for any man. But that doctrine is received and believed before the man seeks to join the Church; and may he not well claim that that belief of his, sufficient for God, should also be sufficient for men, and his presence, and request for fellowship among those who hold it, its competent voucher and sanction? Surely any man professing to join the Church of God may claim to be believed as to his moral intention? If he may not, there is an end of all faith, and a Church is impossible; but if he may, then his request carries with it a sufficient guarantee of his radical sympathy with the objects of those whom he seeks to join. To go beyond this is to act on the unwarrantable supposition of the likelihood of the man's being an impostor; is to infringe that moral liberty which all good men claim as the sphere of their words and acts; is to reduce the Church to the level of men-made societies, such as Freemasonry and the like; is to overlook the fact of Divine Direction in the affairs of the Church; and is to interfere with that holiness of spiritual affinity that essential Charity which constitutes the Church in man, and is the individual believer's bond of relationship to his Lord. To a spiritual relationship so constituted, what says the Church? Sign!" it says— "sign! or you and your fellowship with God have no place with us." Thus does the Church confront and condemn that Divine Liberty in relation to Himself which the Lord accords to souls universally. Said I not that your petty signing may compel God to look beyond you?

66

The Church is not individual only; it is also universal; and New Church magnanimity takes thought for the world. Will it ever be possible to pass all men through this keyhole of admission ? Surely it is true that there are souls by the thousand whose inward state is that of a spiritual Charity founded on the emotion of love to the Lord and the neighbour, who in their hearts receive and believe that essential of all doctrines, yet who could not formulate their faith to save their lives. Has the New Church organization actually no place for such within its walls? They are capable of belonging to the Church, it would appear, but not to its organization. Nay, we can talk about the universality of the Church, and meditate feelingly on the place all good souls may hold there, but that, it seems, is quite a different thing from making actual provision for them in our unyielding metallic denominationalism. No, enlarging her bounds after any such fashion could never be contemplated by those whose idea of a fellowship of the saints is represented by a signature. THOMAS CHILD.

(To be continued.)

Miscellaneous.