“You believe us,” you say, “to be in the fullest sense ambassadors of Christ, charged with a message of reconciliation.” {54b} But say that you were delivering this message at the bed of a dying person, and he replied to it, yes sir, so I read in my bible. How would you lead him to believe that your ambassadorial declaration of his forgiveness, was likely to be of more avail to him, than his reading the message for himself? “Sin,” says _Hooker_, “is not helped unless it be _assured_ of pardon.” {54c} But what assurance can you give the penitent, beyond that he can read for himself, unless you have _authority_ to declare his pardon in virtue of your official character? If it be not so, the distribution of the bible may be considered as having in a great measure superseded the further necessity of a _Christian Ministry_, and rendered our Saviour’s institutions of none effect. “But why,” you ask, “_assume_ to execute our commission in terms which under any construction are presumptuous.” Under their _proper construction_ I would submit that they argue no assumption or presumption whatsoever. Let us say that you had recently been sent out as “an ambassador in the fullest sense,” to Canada, in pardoning the rebels in accordance with your instructions, and a compliance on their parts with the terms, should you have deemed it a distinction involving any important difference, implicating you in an act of presumption, or derogating any thing from the prerogative of your sovereign,—had you said, _I_ remit you your outlawry, and absolve you from all your offences. But I should much question, supposing the rebels had by some means possessed themselves of your instructions, and having ascertained from them the terms on which pardon was offered to them, whether they would have considered reading this document to each other, the same thing as having the gracious message of pardon delivered to them on _authority_. The former is the principle of sectarism. But if you believe that there is any virtue in your office, if you believe that you are empowered to declare the message of reconciliation with more effect than a layman, define your position with regard to your heavenly Master, assert your delegated authority, that of being in the “fullest sense an ambassador of Christ;” prove that it means something, or give up your claim to an empty title. If there is nothing analogous in the office, why assume to be an ambassador? or why should the Apostles have led us to infer a delegated power, by declaring themselves to be ambassadors, ministers of the gospel, and stewards of the mysteries of God? But for a weak and fallible man to assume a power in any sense, to remit or retain the sins of another, how shall we divest such a notion of presumption, or reconcile it with the enlightened and enquiring spirit of the nineteenth century?