This cause was continually operating upon their students and younger ministers during the latter half of the last century. It was suspended first by the missionary spirit, which called forth a high degree of enthusiasm, and gave that feeling its most useful direction, and secondly by the revival of political Puritanism, as soon as the successors of the Parliamentary Divines thought themselves strong enough to act as a party in the state, and declare war against the Establishment. But as in that time, so in a greater degree at present, the floating population who by no fault of their own are extra-parochial as to all purposes of church-worship and religious instruction, are as much endangered by facility of change, as the students used to be by their boasted liberty of choice. Sectarian history might supply numerous examples; one may be related here for the extraordinary way in which it terminated. I know not from what community of Christians the hero of the tale strayed over to the Methodists, but he enjoyed for awhile the dream of perfection, and the privilege of assurance as one of their members. When this excitement had spent itself, he sought for quietness among the Quakers, _thee'd_ his neighbour, wore drab, and would not have pulled off his hat to the king. After awhile, from considering, with them, that baptism was a beggarly element, he passed to the opposite extreme; it was not enough for him to have been sprinkled in his infancy, he must be dipt over head and ears in the water, and up he rose, rejoicing as he shook his dripping locks, that he was now a Baptist. His zeal then took another direction; he had a strong desire to convert the lost sheep of Israel; and off he set from a remote part of the country to engage in single controversy with a learned Rabbi in one of the Midland counties. Tell it not in Duke's-Place! Publish it not in the Magazine of the Society for converting the Jews!—The Rabbi converted him: and if the victor in the dispute had thought proper to take the _spolia opima_ which were fairly lost, the vanquished would have paid the penalty, as he conceived himself in honour and in conscience bound. He returned home glorying in his defeat, a Jew in every thing but parentage and the outward and visible sign. The sons of the synagogue are not ambitious of making converts, and they did not chuse to adopt him by performing the initiating rites. He obtained it however from a Christian surgeon, who after many refusals, was induced at length in humanity to oblige him, lest, as he solemnly declared he would, he should perform it upon himself.