_Rusticus_, is the religion of divine love, the true church of God, where the life of God is found, and lived, and to which your friend _Humanus_ is called by us. We direct him to nothing but the inward life of Christ, to the working of the Holy Spirit of God, which alone can deliver him from the evil that is in his own nature, and give him a power to become a Son of God. _Rusticus._ My neighbour has infinite reason to thank you, for this lovely draught you have given of the spirit of religion. But pray let us now hear, how we are to enter into this love, or rather what God has done to introduce us into it. _Theophilus._ The beginning of this redeeming love of God, is in _that Immanuel_, or God with us, given to the first _Adam_, as the _seed of the woman_, which in him, and his posterity, should bruise the head and overcome the life of the serpent. This is love indeed, because it is universal, and reaches from the first to the last man. Miserably as mankind are divided, and all at war with one another, every one _appropriating_ God to themselves, yet they all have but one God, who is the Spirit of all, the life of all, and the lover of all. Men may divide themselves, to have God to themselves; they may hate and persecute one another for God’s sake; but this is a blessed truth, that God with an unalterable meekness, sweetness, patience, and good-will towards all, waits for all, calls them all, redeems them all, and comprehends all in the outstretched arms of his ♦catholic love. Ask not therefore how we shall enter into this religion of salvation; we have not far to go to find it. It is every man’s own treasure; it is a root of heaven, a seed of God, sown into our souls; and, like a small grain of mustard-seed, has a power of growing to be a tree of life. Here my friend, you should once for all, observe, _where_ and _what_ the true nature of religion is, its place is within; its work and effect is _within_: its glory, its life, its perfection, is all within; it is the raising a new life and new love in us. This was the spiritual nature of religion in its beginning, and this is its _whole nature_ to the end of time; it is nothing else but the power, and life, and Spirit of God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creating and reviving life in the fallen soul, and driving all its evil out of it. ♦ “catholick” replaced with “catholic”