ss
and our judge that we are? Are we so engaged upon that inward work, and
so succeeding in it, that we can read our most prejudiced newspaper with
the same mind and spirit, with the same profit and progress, with which
we read our Bible? A good man, a humble man, a man acutely sensible of
his ill-conditions, will look on every day as lost or won according as he
has lost or won in this inward war. If his partialities are dropping off
his mind; if his prejudices are melting; if he can read books and papers
with pleasure and instruction that once filled him with dark passions and
angry outbursts; if his Calvinism lets him read Thomas A Kempis and
Jeremy Taylor and William Law; if his High-Churchism lets him delight to
worship God in an Independent or a Presbyterian church; if his
Free-Churchism permits him to see the Establishment reviving, and his
State-Churchism admits that the Free Churches have more to say to him
than he had at one time thought; if his Toryism lets him take in a
Radical paper, and his Radicalism a Unionist paper--then let him thank
God, for God is in all that though he knew it not. And when he counts up
his incalculable benefits at each return of the Lord's table, let him
count up as not the least of them an open mind and a well-conditioned
heart, an unprejudiced mind, and an impartial heart.

7. And now, to conclude: Take old, angry, ill-conditioned Prejudice, his
daily prayer: 'My Adorable God and Creator! Thy Holy Church is by the
wickedness of men divided into various communions, all hating,
condemning, and endeavouring to destroy one another. I made none of
these divisions, nor am I any longer a defender of them. I wish
everything removed out of every communion that hinders the Common Unity.
The wranglings and disputings of whole churches and nations have so
confounded all things that I have no ability to make a true and just
judgment of the matters between them. If I knew that any one of these
communions was alone acceptable to Thee, I would do or suffer anything to
make myself a member of it. For, my Good God, I desire nothing so much
as to know and to love Thee, and to worship Thee in the most acceptable
manner. And as I humbly presume that Thou wouldst not suffer Thy Church
to be thus universally divided, if no divided portion could offer any
worship acceptable unto Thee; and as I have no knowledge of what is
absolutely best in these divided parts, nor any ability to put an end to