The loftier and more delicate the ideal, the greater the risk of formulating and attempting to impose it. It seems to me that our wisdom is to insist more and more boldly upon obedience to the broad plain laws of duty which all Christians recognize as laid down for us by those recorded words of our Master Himself, which are our one supreme standard; and at the same time to leave more and more scope for the working out in detail of all the lovely and harmonious yet varying results of individual faithfulness to the promptings of His Spirit in each heart. Any distinct breach of the moral law, any falling below that standard of “peaceable innocent life” which is acknowledged by all as the test of the reality of light within, may and should surely be made a matter of Church discipline—a matter, that is, in which brethren should watch over one another for good, and obedience to which must be a condition of sound fellowship. But when discipline descends to the regulation of details whose whole significance and value depend upon their being prompted by conscience, under the living and ever-present guidance of the light, then surely the human is intruding upon the province of the Divine, and we are checking and hampering and weakening that very moulding from within which it is our chief object as a Society to watch for and to yield to in all things. But while all attempts at collective self-discipline must involve a danger of hollowness, which means weakness, if not actual insincerity, it is to be remembered, on the other hand, that there is in association not only a well-known source of strength, but a very valuable shelter; a protection to right instincts of modesty. In maintaining any exceptionally high standard of action, especially in matters of detail, there is a real safety as well as comfort in united action. While we are treading in the steps of our honoured predecessors, however freely we may have chosen our path, we are not tempted to claim that we discovered it; nor need we anxiously vindicate it as though it were but the prompting of some individual scruple or preference. In the practical results of the collective exercises of a considerable body of fellow-disciples, we do, I believe, in fact find, as we might reasonably expect to find, a peculiar purity and propriety. It is not difficult to justify the wisdom by which our special testimonies have been worked out, though it is easy also to see the mischief of too rigid an enforcement of them.