Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/40

2 order to invite an argument. I have purposely in my answers abstained from entering into the question, and confined myself to saying simply that I did not think as you did upon the matter. It would by no means have fallen in with the purpose for which I visited you on first coming to the parish, to have entered into any lengthened reasonings. My object in calling was to express my good-will towards you, and therefore to seek our points of agreement, and not our points of difference.

At the same time you are not to suppose that I at all wish to conceal my sentiments, and it is because some of you may perhaps have an erroneous impression of what my opinion is on this subject, that I now write this. My observations will be as short as I can well make them. I shall avoid as much as possible any thing like controversy, or any expressions of opinion as to the relative merits of this or that form of dissent, or any discussion of the particular Articles of Faith (so far as there may be said to be such at all) among the several persuasions around us.—Bear in mind my object is to show you that Dissent is a sin.

But before I proceed further I must make two observations, which I wish you to keep in mind, while you read these remarks, because they will remove some difficulty, which you might otherwise feel in what follows.

1. I allow there may be conscientious Dissenters, nay, I hope in charity, there are many;—but by a conscientious Dissenter I mean a man who separates himself from the Church, because he thinks he finds something in her doctrines or discipline so far contrary to scriptural truth, and the precepts of the Gospel, that by adhering to her, he would be putting an obstacle in the way of his own salvation. Other persons may think themselves conscientious Dissenters who do not go nearly so far in their condemnation of the doctrines or practice of the Church: nay, so far from it, that they would defend their Dissent upon the ground that there is no material difference between the system and teaching in the one, and the system and teaching in the other. But such men I do not call conscientious Dissenters, but careless or weak-minded persons, who cannot have thought much or seriously upon the subject, and who can hardly have read with attention what is to be found in the New Testament respecting the sin of