with Christianity? If so, as Baxter held, the representatives (King,
Lords, and Commons,) are or may be representatives of the whole people
as Christians as well as civil subjects;--and their voice will then be
the voice of the Church, which every individual, as an individual,
themselves as individuals, and, 'a fortiori', the officers and
administrators appointed by them, are bound to obey at the risk of
excommunication, against which there would be no appeal, but to the
heavenly Caesar, the Lord and Head of the universal Church. But whether
as the accredited representatives and plenipotentiaries of the national
Church, they can avail themselves of their conjoint but distinct
character, as temporal legislators, to superadd corporal or civil
penalties to the spiritual sentence in points peculiar to Christianity,
as heretical opinions, Church ceremonies, and the like, thus destroying
'discipline', even as wood is destroyed by combination with fire;--this
is a new and difficult question, which yet Baxter and the Presbyterian
divines, and the Puritans of that age in general, not only answered
affirmatively, but most zealously, not to say furiously, affirmed with
anathemas to the assertors of the negative, and spiritual threats to the
magistrates neglecting to interpose the temporal sword. In this respect
the present Dissenters have the advantage over their earlier
predecessors; but on the other hand they utterly evacuate the Scriptural
commands against schism; take away all sense and significance from the
article respecting the Catholic Church; and in consequence degrade the
discipline itself into mere club-regulations or the by-laws of different
lodges;--that very discipline, the capability of exercising which in its
own specific nature without superinduction of a destructive and
transmutual opposite, is the fairest and firmest support of their cause.

20th October, 1829.

Ib. p. 401.

That sententially it must be done by the Pastor or Governor of that
particular Church, which the person is to be admitted into, or cast
out of.

This most arbitrary appropriation of the words of Christ, and of the
apostles, John and Paul, by the Clergy to themselves exclusively, is the
[Greek: proton pseudos], the fatal error which has practically excluded
Church discipline from among Protestants in all free countries. That it
is retained, and an efficient power, among the Quakers, and only in that
Sect, who act collectively as