It was Christ who affianced you, who received your plighted faith and pledged you his. The depths of your moral being--that sacred part which in noble souls feels instinctively a repugnance to error--the Word consecrated to himself, and like a chaste virgin he reserved it for the skies! "_Virginem_ castam exhibere Christo." [Footnote 67] [Footnote 67: 2 Corinthians xi. 2.] {190} Christian by baptism, you were also one by the gospel. The Bible was the book of your infancy; and therein you have lisped at once the secrets of this divine faith, which is of all time because it comes from eternity, and the accents of that Anglo-Saxon tongue which is of all lands because it prevails over the globe in civilizing it. Without doubt the principle of private judgment, so-called--the principle under which you have formerly lived--is the source of numberless errors; but again, let us render thanks to God, besides the Protestant principle, with the Protestants themselves there is the Christian principle. Besides private judgment, there is the action of that supernatural grace received in baptism, and the mysterious sense, of which Saint Paul speaks, "We have the mind of Christ," [Footnote 68] and of which Saint John said, "Ye have unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things." [Footnote 69] When we have read together that Scripture which has separated our ancestors, I was agreeably surprised to find that we understood its every page in the same sense, and consequently in reading it alone, and out of the Church, you have not read it without the spirit of the Church. [Footnote 68: "Nos autem sensum Christi habemus." (i Cor. ii. 16.)] [Footnote 69: "Sed vos unctionem habetis a Sancto, et nostis omnia. ... Et non necesse habetis ut aliquis doceat vos: sed sicut unctio ejus docet vos de omnibus, et verum est, et non est mendacium." (i John ii. 20, 27.)] Again, my child: with Baptism and the Holy Scriptures, with the sacrament and the book, you had prayer; that interior, invisible, ineffable, and withal common property; that language pre-eminently of the soul to God, and of God to the soul; that personal and direct communion of the humblest Christian with his Father in heaven.