[2084] heart, feels the call rather to mingle with men, than to retire and seek by himself. You speak of men going up to worship by ‘households,’ &c. Were the actual family the intellectual family, this might be; but as social life now is, how can it? Do we not constantly see the child, born in the flesh to one father, choose in the spirit another? No doubt this is wrong, since the sign does not stand for the thing signified, but it is one feature of the time. How will it end? Can families worship together till it does end?
I have let myself be cheated out of my Sunday, by going to hear Mr.——. As he began by reading the first chapter of Isaiah, and the fourth of John's Epistle, I made mental comments with pure delight. ‘Bring no more vain oblations.’ ‘Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.’ ‘We know that we dwell in Him, and He in us, because he hath given us of the Spirit.’ Then pealed the organ, full of solemn assurance. But straightway uprose the preacher to deny mysteries, to deny the second birth, to deny influx, and to renounce the sovereign gift of insight, for the sake of what he deemed a ‘ rational’ exercise of will. As he spoke I could not choose but deny him all through, and could scarce refrain from rising to expound, in the light of my own faith, the words of those wiser Jews which had been read. Was it not a sin to exchange friendly greeting as we parted, and yet tell him no word of what was in my mind? Still I saw why he looked at things as he did. The old religionists did talk about ‘grace, conversion,’ and the like, technically, without striving to enter into the
