Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/266

 made, and forgets the garden which God has planted. And is not this a feature of the Church which now prevails? Look at the facts. How plain is it that some deleterious principles have found a place within its pale. It is broken up into nearly a hundred different sects, in each of which is to be found a variety of differing speculations; most concur in declaring their leading doctrines to be inexplicable to reason, and all insist that intellect must be kept in subordination to faith. They all accept the Bible as the rule of faith; and yet which among them knows anything about the laws of its composition, the ground of its inspiration, or in what its holiness consists? The populace are ignorant upon those subjects, and the learned are in fierce contention respecting them. Hence, it is certain they are all destitute of that information concerning the Word which is essential to the existence of a genuine Church.

Observe, also, the fearful animosities which exist between the two great divisions of the professing Church. Protestants, seemingly forgetting their own origin, say that the Catholic dispensation is "the mother of harlots." The Catholic, in return, declares the Protestant to be antichrist; and thus, while exchanging the epithets of recrimination, they obliterate the sentiment of charity, and consign each other to the dwellings of the lost. A similar hostility exists between the Lutheran and Calvinistic branches of the Protestant Church; and a like unhappy spirit underlies every division into which it has been rent.

As before said, all the doctrines which are regarded as the essentials of the Church are asserted to be holy mysteries, if reason ventures to remove the sackcloth in which they are dressed, or to disturb the ashes in which they are imbedded. The tripersonality of the Godhead is said to be incomprehensible, also the atonement, and the means of