he, smiling.--"No," said I, "Mr. Dow, I am not
passive in the ordinances, any more than in regeneration; my whole soul
is active in receiving their influences. But there is something done for
us in the ordinances, as there is something done for us in regeneration,
while we actively repent and believe. Are you not so afraid of Romanism,
and of 'sacramental grace,' that you go to an opposite extreme? for it
seems to me a morbid state of feeling. I wish for no extreme unction,
but I do believe that, in being baptized, and in receiving the Lord's
Supper, something more is done for us than helping us to take up and
offer to God something on the little needle-points of our poor feelings.
I should feel, in being baptized, that God has adopted me, and not
merely I him; and, in the Lord's Supper, that it is more for Christ to
give me his body and blood, than for me to give him my poor affections."
He asked me if I had not been reading the Oxford Tracts. I told him that
I read the Oxford Tracts, and other Puseyite publications, in their day,
and that I saw through their errors, and had no sympathy with their
views.

But I told him I was satisfied that the human mind, in that
development, was craving something more supernatural in religious
ordinances, to make the impression that the hand of God is in them, and
not that we are the principal party. So, instead of taking enlightened,
spiritual views of ordinances, the Tractarians sought to improve the
quality, by multiplying the quantity, of forms; and others are following
them into the Roman Catholic church in the same way.

"There always seemed to me," she said, "to be a grain of truth in every
great error. Is it not so? Even among the Brahmins of the East, and
among savages, each superstition, and every lie, retains the fossils of
some dead truth. When a new error breaks out among us, I feel that the
human mind is tossing itself, and reaching after something beyond its
experience. It seems to me," she continued, "that, at such times, it is
good for ministers and Christians to reexamine their mode of stating the
truths of the Bible, to see how far they can properly go to meet the new
development, and, by preaching the truth better, intercept it. The cold,
barren view, which many take of ordinances, makes some people hanker
after forms and ceremonies; whereas, if we would present baptism and
the Lord's Supper as divine acts toward us, we might meet the
instinctive wants of many,