The past policy of our church.

was followed next by the Pelagian, and Arian, and Arminian heresies.

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For many years, our own church has rested from these collisions and alternations of ultra zeal. United by the comprehensive, cordial subscription to the doctrines of our Confession, as containing the tem of doctrines taught in the holy scriptures,' implying a bona fide agreement in the fundamental doctrines, as they have been brought out in the controversies of the church, and expounded in opposition to Arian, and Unitarian, and Papal, and Pelagian errors, but never intended or understood as expressing an exact agreement in speculations or language on any subject. On the contrary, those who framed the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, and those who adopted them as the bond of union to our church, differed in speculation and phraseology on some of the same points that the sons of the church differ about now; but never, till recently, have they been made the ground of formal accusations of heresy, and regular ecclesiastical animadversion. And now the question cannot be, whether one side or the other shall be expelled from the church, as hypocrites and heretics. We came in on both sides with the knowledge of these circumstantial varieties of opinion and language, and in every form of recognition were made welcome, and assured of the protection of the church; and on neither side can we be stigmatized or expelled, without a breach of covenant and the action and injustice of ex post facto laws.

The only question is, whether we will dissolve

The past terms of subscription.

partnership; or attempt its continuance upon the new conditions of exact agreement in speculation and language on every subject, as well as on fundamental doctrine. Whether the exposition of the Confession which I have given, on the subject of the natural ability of man, as a free agent, and his moral inability, as a totally depraved sinner; of original sin, as including federal liability to the curse of the law, and as operating to the production of actual sin, not by force upon the will, or any absolute necessity of nature determining it to evil, but by an effectual, universal bias to actual sin; and of regeneration as a change of character, produced not by omnipotent action alone, but by the immediate and infallible influence, of God's word and Spirit: whether the exposition of these doctrines, sustained by the language of the Confession, and corroborated by unbroken exposition from the primitive church to this day-confirmed in the line of the most approved Presbyterian expositors, Calvin, Turretin, and Witherspoon, and the great balance of biblical critics and expositors, shall be reversed and stigmatized as heresy; and the imprimatur of the church be given to the doctrine that man possesses no ability of any kind to obey the gospel-that original sin forces and determines the will to actual sin, by an absolute necessity of nature-that adult total depravity is involuntary, and the result of a constitution acting by the power of a natural and necessary cause-and that regeneration is a change of the natural constitution, by the direct omnipotence of the

The consequences of change.

Spirit, without any influential agency of the word of God. Such an exposition, the church, if it seem good to her, has the power of making; but not the right of giving to her exposition a retrospective action, to affect character and ecclesiastical standing, and vested rights.

But the time hastens, as it would seem, when our church must decide, whether the examples of past abortive effort for exact identity in speculation and language, with all their mournful consequences, shall be for our warning, or for our example, and whether the coming fifty years shall be years of schism, and impotency, and confusion worse confounded; or whether, like a band of brothers, we shall move on under the same auspices which hitherto have concentrated in our church the energies of the East, and the West, and the North, and the South, till our victorious efforts, with those of other denominations, who love our common Lord, shall, under his guidance and power, terminate in the universal victories of the latter day. And never was there a moment when a little panic of alarm, or impatience of feeling may turn for good or for evil, the lifegiving or destroying waters of such a flood down through distant generations.

The consequences of new and more restricted terms of communion are too legible in past experience, and too manifest to unerring anticipation, to need labored exposition or fervent expostulation. And nothing assuredly could precipitate our beloved church upon the disastrous alternative, but such an

The facilities of concord.

abandonment of heaven as we do not believe in; and such a consequent infatuation of alarm and violence of passion, as would disregard alike both argument and expostulation, and with closed eye and deafened ear rush upon distruction. An event which we cheeringly believe his mercy will avert.

The means of our preservation are obvious and easy.

There will be, in a church so extensive as our own, unavoidably some diversities of doctrinal phraseology in our communications-theological provincialisms of men alike warmhearted in their belief in the doctrinal and experimental views of our standards. These, as they pass from one department of the church to another, we must not attempt to compel by force to change the dialect by which, from maternal lips, the truth was breathed into their infant minds, and made effectual in their conversion, and made sacred by the association of theological instruction.

Such sudden unclothings of thought, for new and unaccustomed habiliments, are impossible. And yet, patience and kindness on the part of the presbyteries and fathers of the church, will easily secure to all the purposes of edification-an assimilation which years of discourtesy and contention cannot compel.

We ought, indeed, to speak the same things; but this means not the same words, but the same doctrines. Our Confession and Catechisms were intended as concise definitions, and not as furnishing the entire vocabulary of words, in which their doctrines shall be

The facilities of concord.

preached. The Bible, itself, does not confine us to its own phraseology; otherwise all exposition and preaching would be superseded by the simple reading of the Bible. And yet, where the terms of the Confession are grateful, and the language of a strange dialect the occasion of misconception and fear, I would not purposely offend or fail to edify, by finding out acceptable words; but, as Paul would do, become all things to all men, that if possible I might save some. Much less would I speak slightly of our creeds, and the phrases which time and association had rendered dear to the people of God. But I should expect, in return, in my own congregation, the same liberty of speech which I accorded to others, and the same deference of courtesy to familiar phrases, and cherished associations which I practised; and with a conciliatory spirit, and a small share of common sense and good manners, the church from end to end might be quiet from all agitation on the subject.

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