again the promises or tests of extent and perpetuity appear: "Thou
shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left, and thy seed shall
inherit the Gentiles"; and "My kindness shall not depart from them,
neither shall the covenant of My peace be removed." Elsewhere holiness
is mentioned: "It shall be called, The way of holiness, the unclean
shall not pass over it." One more promise shall be cited: "My Spirit
that is upon thee, and My words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not
depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed ... from
henceforth and for ever."

In the New Testament we have the same promises stated far more concisely
indeed, but, what is much more apposite than a longer description, with
the addition of the _name_ of our promised teacher: "The _Church_ of the
living God," says St. Paul, "_the pillar and ground of the truth_." The
simple question then for Private Judgment to exercise itself upon is,
what and where is the Church?

Now let it be observed how exactly this view of the province of Private
Judgment, where it is allowable, as being the discovery not of doctrine,
but of the teacher of doctrine, harmonizes both with the nature of
Religion and the state of human society as we find it. Religion is for
practice, and that immediate. Now it is much easier to form a correct
and rapid judgment of persons than of books or of doctrines. Every one,
even a child, has an impression about new faces; few persons have any
real view about new propositions. There is something in the sight of
persons or of bodies of men, which speaks to us for approval or
disapprobation with a distinctness to which pen and ink are unequal.
This is just the kind of evidence which is needed for use, in cases in
which private judgment is divinely intended to be the means of our
conversion. The multitude have neither the time, the patience, nor the
clearness and exactness of thought, for processes of investigation and
deduction. Reason is slow and abstract, cold and speculative; but man is
a being of feeling and action; he is not resolvable into a _dictum de
omni et nullo_, or a series of hypotheticals, or a critical diatribe, or
an algebraical equation. And this obvious fact does, as far as it goes,
make it probable that, if we are providentially obliged to exercise our
private judgment, the point toward which we have to direct it, is the
teacher rather than the doctrine.

In corroboration, it may be observed, that Scr