selves an obligation to fellowship: they oblige a candidate to join a church, and they oblige a church to admit him.

All our churches allow and employ neighbouring independent ministers to preach to them, and daily express a high and just regard for their useful labours; yet, in their opinion, these men are unbaptized; now we only ask such a toleration for members of their own congregations, as they daily exercise toward ministers of other congregations, and we urge this for the former, because by their conduct to the latter they prove, that they do not hold the want of baptism to be either a natural or a legal incapacity.

Fifthly: let us advert to the law of constitution. When the compassion of Christ induced him to descend into Judea to recover a profligate world to order, he brought along with him three sorts of excellencies; a body of perfect wisdom, an assortment of holy affections, and a set of upright actions. Some degree of each of these he imparted to his disciples, and they to others, as assisted by his divine influence. All believers, therefore, have a threefold union to Christ; an union of sentiment, for they believe what he believed and taught; an union of affection, for they love and hate what he loved and hated; what gave him pleasure gives them pleasure, and what grieved him gives them pain; and an union of practice, for they form their lives on his example. Hence arises an union to one another, as well as an union of all to Christ the head.

It is not imaginable, that any of the disciples of Christ possess these excellencies in such perfection as he possessed them; nor is it to be supposed, that all possess them in such eminent degrees as some do; however, there is a general excellence, a supreme love to truth and virtue, religious principle, if you will, in all believers, on which the christian church is constituted.

All the laws of constituting new testament churches are formed on this just notion of sacred social union, and our argument turns on the sufficiency of this general excellence, which is common to all believers, for all the ends and purposes of church fellowship.

The kingdom of Christ is an empire of truth and virtue, and it is not necessary to a residence in this kingdom that men should be perfect in either. A supreme love to truth as far as we know

and a conscientious attachment to virtue as far as we have discovered it, are high qualifications, and all-sufficient for the duties and enjoyments of church communion, Now these are always found in the persons, for whose right we are pleading. They are partakers of God's promise in Christ by the gospel; they have heard the word of truth, the gospel of their salvation; the eyes of their understanding are enlightened; they know the hope of his calling, and the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints; they have been quickened together with Christ; and are made nigh by his blood; they have access by one spirit unto the Fa

M

ther, and therefore they ought not to be accounted any more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God, and to be built upon the foundation of the apos tles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.

Persons thus qualified are equal to every duty of church fellowship, to singing, prayer, hearing and even preaching the word, receiving the Lord's supper, visiting the sick, relieving the poor, in a word, to all the duties men owe as church members to themselves, to one another, and to God.

They, who answer such descriptions, are so very like the primitive christians, that, it must be allowed, the inducement to receive them into church fellowship is exceedingly strong, so strong, that nothing short of an express prohibition seems sufficient to their exclusion.

Here is one article, it will be said, in which these believers do not answer the description of the primitive christians; they have not been baptized by iminersion: but, let it be observed, that baptism strictly sqeaking is neither repentance towards God, nor faith in our Lord Jesus Christ; it is only a profession of these graces, and church fellowship seems in the very nature of the thing to be connected with the graces, and neither with this, nor with any other peculiar mode of professing them. We are sure, the church triumphant is formed on a connection between grace and glory; a profession of grace sometimes accompanying the connection, and sometimes not, and we

are taught to pray, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Right to church fellowship either lies in grace alone, or in baptism alone, or in both united, or in something beyond them all. If it lie in grace alone, then faith in Christ and moral obedience have a merit in them, and church fellowship is a reward due to such merit. A humble christian will not allow this. If it lie in baptism alone, then an irreligious person may get himself baptized, and claim his right to church communion. If it lie in grace and baptism united, then a worse idea of merit than the former will return, for then it will follow, that baptism gives grace its value; but this is inadmissible. The truth is, right to church communion lies in that royal charter, which the clemency of God hath granted to mankind, and by which persons of certain descriptions, though imperfect in knowledge, defective in obedience, and incompassed with many infirmities, are allow ed the favour of approaching him through the merit of Jesus Christ. Title to fellowship lies in the divine charter, meetness for it in personal qualification.

This qualification, which I call grace, general excellence, religious principle, supreme love to truth and virtue, perfect in kind, imperfect in degree, is essential to church fellowship, and the law of Christ is, that his churches should be constituted, of only such persons as actually possess this real sterling goodness, which, being sufficient to

answer all the ends for which churches are constituted, ought always to be considered as a clear warrant to admit to fellowship. Of such persons the primitive churches were constituted, and nothing can be clearer, than the divine testimony, that against such as these, who bring forth the spiritual fruits of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, against such there is no law.

Finally we urge in behalf of our candidates, the law of release and deprivation. We We put these two together, because release from duty includes in it a deprivation of benefits. Jesus Christ found mankind in slavery; his gospel finds a sinner in that condition still: but he both manumits and enfranchises this slave, he frees him from bondage, and invests him with privileges and immunities. This is done in the moment of regeneration, and henceforward this man ceaseth to be a servant of men in religious matters. He ceaseth to be his own, he becomes a subject of him, who died and rose again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and the living. The highest authority binds him to duty, and endows him with privilege, and none but the highest authority can deprive him of one, or release him from the other. This undeniable fact is full to our purpose.

This argument is taken from that obligation, under which the legislator hath laid every good man, to perform the moral as well as the positive duties of church fellowship, and from which obligation neither their own imperfections, nor any church