Dr. Stiggins:
this great principle—dogma (which is of the letter) is of no consequence. The ethic of a nation is its life, says Dr. Forrest, contrasting America with Spain, the rich and prosperous country with the poor; and Mr. Kelly says the same thing in other words when he told the young ministers that dogma to be tolerated must be practical. The age in which men squabbled about the Homoousion and the Filioque clause is gone for ever; and we should receive the Pelagians and the Albigenses to-day with the open arms of Christian fellowship. No, it is not the letter of the Old Book which we revere with such intensity; it is the exquisite spirit which exhales from those wondrous leaves, the spirit which has banished all ugly words and ugly things such as heresy and schism from our hearts and our lives, which makes us One in a sense which the world cannot understand.
And I would have you note that even in the early days of Puritanism this great truth was not without its witnesses. Martin Luther himself, the chief of all
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