Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/182

 Protestants, when he denounced the Epistle of James as an "epistle of straw" because he did not agree with its doctrine, spoke in the spirit of a Free Churchman of to-day, though we may not imitate the hearty bluntness of the great Reformer. Milton, too, understood how to transcend the letter when he published his famous manifesto on Divorce, anticipating by more than two centuries the grand liberty of the United States; and even the Anglican reformers saw something of the truth when they quietly dismissed Unction as a "corrupt following of the Apostles." But while the Anglican seems to be endeavouring to bind the chains of the letter more tightly than ever about him, we have become still more free, released at last from that cramping dungeon cell of literal dogma, the spiritual type, and no doubt the efficient cause of the dungeons and racks of the Inquisition.

I have already told you that the Free Church outlook is in the first place ethical, and, in my first conversation, I shewed you that it is in America that our ethic is