Dogma! Dogma! how dost them trample
under foot love, truth, conscience, justice! Was ever a Moloch worse
than thou? Burn me at the stake; then Christ will receive me, and
saints beyond the grave will love me, though the saints here know
me not But now I am alone in the world: I can trust no one. The new
acquaintances who barely tolerate me, and old friends whom reports
have not reached, (if such there be,) may turn against me with
animosity to-morrow, as those have done from whom I could least have
imagined it. Where is union? where is the Church, which was to convert
the heathen?

This was not my only reason, yet it was soon a sufficient and at last
an overwhelming reason, against returning to the East. The pertinacity
of the attacks made on me, and on all who dared to hold by me in a
certain connexion, showed that I could no longer be anything but a
thorn in the side of my friends abroad; nay, I was unable to predict
how they themselves might change towards me. The idea of a Christian
Church propagating Christianity while divided against itself was
ridiculous. Never indeed had I had the most remote idea, that my
dear friends there had been united to me by agreement in intellectual
propositions; nor could I yet believe it. I remembered a saying of the
noble-hearted Groves: "Talk of loving me while I agree with them! Give
me men that will love me when I differ from them and contradict them:
those will be the men to build up a true Church." I asked myself,--was
I then possibly different from all? With me,--and, as I had thought,
with all my Spiritual friends,--intellectual dogma was not the test
of spirituality. A hundred times over had I heard the Irish clergyman
emphatically enunciate the contrary. Nothing was clearer in his
preaching, talking and writing, than that salvation was a present
real experienced fact; a saving of the soul from the dominion of baser
desires, and an inward union of it in love and homage to Christ, who,
as the centre of all perfection, glory, and beauty, was the revelation
of God to the heart. He who was thus saved, could not help knowing
that he was reconciled, pardoned, beloved; and therefore he rejoiced
in God his Saviour: indeed, to imagine joy without this personal
assurance and direct knowledge, was quite preposterous. But on the
other hand, the soul thus spiritually minded has a keen sense of like
qualities in others. It cannot but discern when another is tender
in conscience, disinter