th, before that backsliding
towards the "beggarly rudiments" of an effete and idolatrous
sacerdotalism which has, even now, provided us with the saddest
spectacle which has been offered to the eyes of Englishmen in this
generation. A high court of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, with a host
of great lawyers in battle array, is and, for Heaven knows how long,
will be, occupied with these very questions of "washing of cups and
pots and brazen vessels," which the Master, whose professed
representatives are rending the Church over these squabbles, had in
his mind when, as we are told, he uttered the scathing rebuke:--

Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
This people honoureth me with their lips,
But their heart is far from me.
But in vain do they worship me,
Teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men.
(Mark vii. 6-7.)

Men who can be absorbed in bickerings over miserable disputes of this
kind can have but little sympathy with the old evangelical doctrine of
the "open Bible," or anything but a grave misgiving of the results of
diligent reading of the Bible, without the help of ecclesiastical
spectacles, by the mass of the people. Greatly to the surprise of many
of my friends, I have always advocated the reading of the Bible, and
the diffusion of the study of that most remarkable collection of books
among the people. Its teachings are so infinitely superior to those of
the sects, who are just as busy now as the Pharisees were eighteen
hundred years ago, in smothering them under "the precepts of men"; it
is so certain, to my mind, that the Bible contains within itself the
refutation of nine-tenths of the mixture of sophistical metaphysics
and old-world superstition which has been piled round it by the
so-called Christians of later times; it is so clear that the only
immediate and ready antidote to the poison which has been mixed with
Christianity, to the intoxication and delusion of mankind, lies in
copious draughts from the undefiled spring, that I exercise the right
and duty of free judgment on the part of every man, mainly for the
purpose of inducing other laymen to follow my example. If the New
Testament is translated into Zulu by Protestant missionaries, it must
be assumed that a Zulu convert is competent to draw from its contents
all the truths which it is necessary for him to believe. I trust that
I may, without