nce between the Episcopalian and Presbyterian clergy. He was
willing to sacrifice non-essentials to peace; but personal disputations
were more apt to confirm than to remove prejudices. One party would be
too querulous, the other too tenacious. Personal considerations would
mix in the dispute; difficulties would be started; objections raised,
when none, in fact, existed; and, in the heat of debate, real
improvements would be rejected, which, in the calm seclusion of the
closet, would be allowed to be important. Declaimers, conscious of their
own powers, would seek distinction rather by acuteness and
fastidiousness than by candour and placability. The enemies of the
Church would argue rather with a view to her destruction than to her
purification; and, on the other hand, her friends would gloss over her
imperfections through fear that her opponents had some latent hostility,
which the least concession on their part would bring to maturity.

He reminded Barton that as a body the Dissenters could not complain at
their being expelled from the situations in which they were placed by an
unlawful and usurped authority. He trusted that wise and moderate men
would, by conformity, avoid this evil, and prefer the true praise of
sacrificing their scruples at the shrine of peace and unity, to the
false glory of courting reputation, by first exciting and then enduring
persecution. He spoke of schism as an evil the most afflictive; the most
opposite to the spirit of the Gospel, and to the commands of its Divine
Founder, and as the greatest impediment to its universal promulgation.
He exhorted Barton to use his influence with his friends, persuading
them to acquire the only triumph over the church in their power, by
renouncing their own prejudices, when they could not make their
opponents subdue theirs, and thus prove themselves to be the truest
disciples of the Prince of Peace. "Let the contest," said he, "be only
which shall serve our common master best, by leading a life of
unpretending holiness. Schism does infinitely more harm by the enmity it
engenders, than it does good by the zeal it kindles. Controversial
ardour is rather the death than the life of piety."

Mr. Barton replied, that he was become much more sensible of the evils
attendant on a separating humour, on the gathering of parties and
forming sects from the church; their effects had proved them to be
mischiefs. He confessed that until he had imbibed prejudices against th