Page:Some Reflections on the Importance of a Religious Life.djvu/16



thus briefly glanced at some of the leading doctrines of the Gospel, I would offer a few observations more especially applicable to our own religious body.

I have long believed that it has been in the ordering of Divine Providence, that we were gathered, and have been continued as a distinct Christian community. Our early friends were enlightened by the light of Christ, to see that the apostacy from primitive Christianity had spread further than the reformers who went before them had acknowledged; and I believe that through the shinings of this light upon their understandings, they received and acted upon those views and practices of the Christian religion which distinguished them from other professors of the name of Christ, and which have ever since been maintained amongst us.

In simple dependence upon him as their leader and teacher, and in accordance with their views of the spiritual character of divine worship, given in the New Testament, they separated from others, met in silence,