our acceptance with God, will be found but in the pages of the historian, when tracing the fruits of that lamented apostacy which early overtook Christendom." Ibid. p. 333.
By these extracts we may perceive, that Elias Hicks and his adherents deny the propitiatory sacrifice of our blessed Saviour upon the cross for the sins of the whole world, and consider that a willingness to be saved through such a medium, is in direct opposition to every principle of justice and honesty, of mercy and love, and betrays a poor selfish disposition, unworthy of notice,—that whatever redemption was effected by those sufferings, it was only an outward redemption, and confined exclusively to the legal sins of the Jews; and in their opinion the sacrifice of the will, is the only atonement for all sins now committed—that nothing can atone for sin, but that which induced us to sin. This doctrine is contrary to the Holy Scriptures.—We believe that nothing man can do, or suffer, will atone for, or cancel his sins. They are remitted by the mercy of God, through Christ Jesus our Lord, for the sake of the sufferings and death of Christ, and it is the power and efficacy of that propitiatory offering, upon faith and repentance, that justifies both Jews and Gentiles from the sins that are past.
Not only do the Separatists deny the universal efficacy of the offering of our Lord, and term the imputation of his righteousness, as the ground of our acceptance, a pernicious and absurd idea, but they appear to rejoice in the hope that the doctrine will be discarded, as the fruit of the apostacy from the Christian faith. Believing as we do, that it is only as we come to be divested of our own righteousness, and of
