ty exercising it, as the subject-matter of command, promise, duty,
privilege, or any thing else. It is but the spontaneous stirring of the
affections within, or the passive acceptance of what is offered from
without. St. Paul baptized Lydia's household also; it would seem then
that he baptized servants or slaves, who had very little power of
judging between a true religion and a false; shall we say that they,
like their mistress, accepted the Gospel on private judgment or not? Did
the thousands baptized in national conversions exercise their private
judgment or not? Do children when taught their catechism? Most persons
will reply in the negative: yet it will be difficult to separate their
case in principle from what Lydia's may have been; that is, the case of
religious persons who are advancing forward into the truth--how, they
know not. Neither the one class nor the other have undertaken to inquire
and judge, or have set about being converted, or have got their reasons
all before them and together, to discharge at an enemy or passer-by on
fit occasions. The difference between these two classes is in the state
of their hearts; the one party consist of unformed minds, or senseless
and dead, or minds under temporary excitement, who are brought over by
external or accidental influences, without any real sympathy for the
religion, which is taught them _in order_ that they may _learn_ sympathy
with it, and who, as time goes on, fall away again if they are not happy
enough to become imbued with it; and in the other party there is already
a sympathy between the external Word and the heart within. The one are
proselytized by force, authority, or their mere feelings, the others
through their habitual and abiding frame of mind and cast of opinion.
But neither can be said, in the ordinary sense of the word, to inquire,
reason, and decide about religion. And yet in a great number of these
cases,--certainly where the persons in question are come to years of
discretion and show themselves consistent in their religious profession
afterward,--they would be commonly set forth by Protestant minds as
instances of the due exercise of the right of private judgment.

Such are the greater number perhaps of converts at this day, in whatever
direction their conversion lies; and their so-called exercise of private
judgment is neither right nor wrong in itself, it is a spontaneous act
which they do not think about; if it is any thing, it is but a m