From "D'Aubigne's History of the Great Reformation" p. 395 .–" There are two tendencies which equally lead us into error. The one exaggerates diversity; the other exaggerates unity. The essential doctrines of salvation are the unit between these two courses. To require more than these doctrines is to infringe this diversity; to require less, is to infringe unity.

"The latter excess is that of rash and rebellious minds, who look beyond Jesus Christ to form systems and doctrines of men.

"The former exists in various exclusive sects, and particularly in that of Rome.

"The Church should reject error, and unless this be done, Christianity cannot be maintained. But if this idea " were carried to extremes, it would follow that the Church should take arms against the least deviation. . . . Faith would thus be fettered, and the feelings of Christians reduced to bondage.

" Such was not the condition of the Church in the times of real catholicity,-the catholicity of the primitive ages. It rejected the sects that attacked the fundamental truths of the gospel, but these truths once received, it left full liberty to faith. Rome soon departed from this wise course, and in proportion as the dominion and teaching of men arose in the Church, there sprang up by their side a unity of man.

"When a merely human system had been once invented, coercion increased from age to age. The Christian liberty, respected by the Catholicism of the earlier ages, was at first limited, then enslaved, and finally stifled. Conviction which, according to the laws of human nature and of the Word of God, should be freely formed in the heart and understanding of man, was imposed from without, completely formed, and symmetrically arranged by the masters of mankind. Reflection, will, feeling,-all the faculties of the human being which, subjected to the "Word and Spirit of God, should work and bear fruit freely, were deprived of their liberty, and constrained to expand in shapes that had been determined upon beforehand. . . Doubtless there still existed many souls that had been taught direct of God, but the great majority of Christians from that time received the convictions of others only. A faith peculiar to the individual was rare; it was the Reformation alone that restored this treasure to the Church.

"And yet for some time there was a space within which the human mind was permitted to move. There were certain opinions that might be received or rejected at will. But as a hostile army day by day presses closer to a besieged city, compels the garrison to move only within the narrow boundary of its ramparts, and at last forces it to surrender, so the hierarchy from age to age, and almost from year to year, contracted the space that it had temporarily granted to the human mind, until at last this space, from continued encroachments, had ceased to exist. . . . The faithful were relieved of the fatigue of examining, of reflecting, of contending. All that they had to do was to repeat the formularies they had been taught.

" From that time, if there appeared in the bosom of Roman Catholicism any one who had inherited the Catholicism of the apostolic ages, such a man, feeling his inability to expand in the bonds in which he was confined, was compelled to snap them asunder and display again to the astonished world the unfettered bearing of a Christian who acknowledges no law save that of God."