righteousness that Scripture requires you to perform, not as bestowing a right to eternal life, but as your part of the covenant of grace to which you have been admitted. Be not misled by the quoted opinions of early reformers. They depreciated not acts of piety, integrity, and social kindness, but 'masses, dirges, obsequies, rising at midnight, going barefoot, jubilees, invocation of saints, praying to images, vows of celibacy, pardons, indulgences, founding of abbeys'[2], and other supererogatory performances, by which Popery in effect invalidated the true atonement, and pretended that sinners might merit heaven. Against these vain devices of men our glorious martyrs lifted up their voices; these were the good works they decried; but when ye misapply their just anathemas, to condemn the fruits of faith acting by love, ye belie their memory, and tear asunder those strong pillars of belief and practice which support the Christian doctrine. Lamentable are the effects which schism produces. At the very beginning of our divisions the pious Jewell doubted how to address those who preferred contending for trifles to peace. He could not, he said, 'call them brethren, for then they would agree as brethren; nor Christians, for then they would love as Christians.' And now, when the miseries he saw at a distance have overwhelmed us, how shall our woes be healed? Even by promoting, as far as in us lies, that mild and candid spirit, which, when it becomes universal, will terminate our sorrows. Let us conduct our disputes with the temper of pious Hooker; and when we say to our adversaries, 'you err in your opinions,' add also, 'but be of good comfort, you have to do with a merciful God, who will make the best of that little which you hold well, and not with a captious sophister, who gathers the worst out of every thing in which you are mistaken.' It is this captious sophistry which fans disagreement till it blazes into dissension, which changes the simplicity of gospel-truth into wordy declamation; and, in zeal for the phylacteries of religion, rends its substance, which is peace. Thus is Christendom convulsed with tempests which obscure the Sun of Righteousness, and prevent its beams from warming the cold regions of heathen darkness.