10 and by one people only, is laid aside, as swaddling clothes. We drop the primer for the book of principles. “ Ye are called unto liberty.” In the New Testament we find only a few statutes, but a great many deep, broad, divine, prolific principles, suited to the enlightenment, salvation and liberation of mankind. And we earnestly contend for this faith once delivered to the saints. We draw from the fountain and not from human cisterns. Man’s soul, born for growth, needs, with the Holy Spirit, but few statutes and symbols, full of life-germs, to start it out on its career of progress, and plume its powers for freedom. Alas that many churches stretch converts on their dogmatic racks, and complete the unnatural torture and despotism by nailing them to the church platform with thirty-nine or ninety-nine bolt-headed articles of creed, as if Christ needed their help in legislation. We hold rather that a church is like a nursery and school, where souls may grow, first by milk, afterwards by meat, upward toward manhood, to ever-widening freedom, and to world-wide reach of activities. Churches should foster souls and not fetter’ them. We contend for New Testament statutes and New Testament liberties. Wherein we are free, we gladly grant to all perfect liberty. We are free in forms of worship, in dress, in style, in language, in places of worship. If any wish to write and read their prayers, to bow or stand, to dress in a Roman shirt, to worship in a cruciform meeting-house, let them have their liberty; but when they say wre must do as they do, or as their church does, when they lay down, a dictum or edict from prelacy, episcopacy or papacy, then we object and protest. If a man wants a liturgy or ritual, let him compose it and use it himself, for then it will
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