clare that Gospel truth is immutable and divine;
but he will avoid the presumption of supposing that all her riches are
already shed into his bosom, that her brightest light is poured upon his
feeble eye. He will rather hope that his apprehension will continually
become clearer, his powers invigorated, and his capacities enlarged,
till his views of religious truth become as unlike what they were when
first admitted, as the fair face of nature appears to the new-born
infant and to the mighty poet. He will reject, as an infringement of his
inalienable rights, every attempt to bind him down to engagements which
it may not be in his power to fulfil. He will refuse to promise that his
intellect shall remain stationary; and to permit that any individual,
any council, or any church, shall usurp that spiritual influence which
he trusts shall be immediately dispensed from the fountain of grace and
truth. Desiring wisdom, he asks of God; not profaning and annulling his
prayer by engaging to receive it only in certain measure; and if any
church on earth interfere to prescribe the measure, he rejects the
interference as unauthorized by the letter of the Gospel and condemned
by its spirit.

Christian liberty comprehends an entire freedom from restraint in the
publication of opinions. To his own master every man standeth or
falleth, not only in the formation of his opinions, but in the use he
makes of them when formed. According to his conscientiousness in seeking
for truth, and not according to the accuracy of his judgment, will he be
judged by God in forming his opinions; and when formed, he will be
responsible, not for the rectitude of his influence, but for the
rectitude of his intentions in exerting it. What a man believes to be
the truth, it is his duty to declare in the method and degree which
benevolence and prudence may point out to be the best. For what but this
do we venerate the heroic Stephen, and every other martyr who bore
witness to the truth in the early days of Christianity? Yet for what but
this have Christians been led to the stake by Christians, age after age,
under the pretended sanction of a religion of liberty and brotherly
love? For what but this have Catholics and Protestants vied with each
other in torturing in body and mind men whose conscience was omnipotent
over the love of liberty and life, and who thus showed that, whether
their intellects were or were not unfaithful, their souls were true to
God? For