Sacrament on his knees, received from his
pliant Bishops his title of most religious King. Calamy, when a lad,
wondered why the old ministers who led peaceable lives, and always prayed
for the King, were persecuted, and in our day the feeling of wonder still
exists.

There have been times when the religious life of England has been utterly
divorced from the Church. Such were the times when George II. said all
the Bishops were infidels; such were the times when the clergy read to
their congregations the Book of Sports, enforcing on their hearers
dancing, jumping, archery, Whitsun ales, May-poles, and Morrice dances on
a Sunday; such were the times when the Methodists were expelled Oxford,
and when old John Newton wrote, that besides himself, there were only two
pious clergymen in London. It is impossible to overrate the obligations
of this country to Dissent. It saved England from Popery. It laid the
foundation of the mightiest republic the world has yet seen. It crushed
the despotism of the Stuarts, while the Church was indecently declaring
that a royal proclamation had the force of law. It gave us civil and
religious liberty; the wonderful change for the better which within the
last thirty years has come over the Church life of this country is due to
the fact that, rivalling the Establishment in zeal and good works, has
been an ever-growing, intelligent, and educated Dissent.

What are the doctrines of orthodox Dissenters? I reply, as regards
Baptists and Congregationalists, they are very much the same. The real
question at issue, whether adults or infants are the proper subjects of
baptism, and whether the rite should be administered by baptism or
immersion, really being but of little more importance than that of the
Big Endians and the Little Endians of Gulliver. The Congregational Union
issue a statement called "The Principles of Religion," which they
publish, not as a bond of union or as a series of articles to be
subscribed to, but as a summary of what is commonly believed amongst
them. In this document they state they believe the Scriptures of the Old
Testament as received by the Jews, and the books of the New Testament as
received by the Primitive Christians from the Evangelists and Apostles,
to be divinely inspired and of divine authority; they believe in one God
as revealed in the Scriptures as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; in the
fall of man; in the existence in man of "a fatal inclination to mora