itual one, which you have established over the consciences of mankind.

Remember, in the midst of all your luxury, and delicacy, and ostentation, what ground you stand upon. The bowels of the earth are armed against you. The shocks of earthquakes and the eruptions of volcanos, besides the common calamities of nations, are the beginnings of that day of vengeance, which will come, unless you prevent it by a speedy conversion to christianity.

Renounce, therefore, your golden keys, and your fruitful kingdoms. Throw away your fopperies, and your indulgencies, and your processions, and your canonizations. Show yourself in the nakedness of simplicity; and take the Gospel into your hand, and into your heart. Call in your emissaries, and your missionaries, from all parts of the world; and let them receive instruction, themselves, before they pretend to convert others.

Trouble the world no more with quarrels about the holy sepulchre; but believe that he is risen, who once was laid in it. Let the wood of his cross cease to be magnified to an immense bulk; and his natural body cease to be multiplied to an infinite number. Restore the heads of holy men and women to their bodies, if they can be found. the bones of the dead saints be at rest, and their blood be released from the perpetual fatigue of working wonders.

Let

your legends;

discard all your

Throw up all miracles, stated and unstated; and make over all your tricks to the jugglers of this world. Declare to the Jesuits, that their game is at an end; and restore the inquisition to hell, in which it was forged.

And, for the conclusion of this great work, celebrate an open and solemn marriage between faith and reason; proclaim an eternal friendship between piety and charity; and establish an agreement, never to be dissolved, between religion, on one side, and humanity, forbearance, and good nature, on the other.

I would not have you think, that I propose all this to your Holiness, and nothing from our own quarter. So far from it, that I am free to acknowledge, that it cannot be expected, that you should thus far recede from your present pretensions, unless others are ready to give up every thing of the same sort. and the same nature.

If your Holiness parts with infallibility, it is but equitable, that the protestant churches should part with indisputable authority. If you give up the decrees of the council of Trent; let them, in Holland, give up the synod of Dort; and others, every where, throw off all manner of human decisions, in religion. If you discard the inquisition, let them discard classes, and judicatories, and consistories, and fines, and imprisonments, and the whole train of secular artillery, and the whole armory of the weapons of this world.

If you make all your great names bow and pay homage to Christ, let them bring forth their army on the other side; and let Calvin, and Luther, and Zuinglius, and Knox, and Laud, and Baxter, and all other idols, bow down to the same Christ. Let Christians cease to be called by their names; and let them, who have one master, have but one common denomination.

And let the whole be sealed with the kiss of charity, and with all the tokens of benevolence and love.

But whether you, or they, will hear, or will forbear; whether any thing of this sort shall be done, or not done; I have delivered my own soul.

I had an impulse upon me, to say all this. I have followed that impulse; and, what I have said, I have said.

I have opened my heart to your Holiness; and you may make what use you please of it.

If you think fit to accept of my correspondence, I faithfully promise to give you, from time to time, an exact account of the state, in which we protestants are, or are like to be.

For the present, without any farther ceremony or apology, I kiss your Holiness' feet, not in a religious, but a civil manner; and am,

Your most faithful friend,

or generous adversary,

RICHARD STEELE.

SERMON

ON THE NATURE OF THE KINGDOM, OR CHURCH,

OF CHRIST.

ST JOHN Xviii. 36.

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world.

ONE of those great effects, which length of time is seen to bring along with it, is the alteration of the meaning annexed to certain sounds. The signification of a word, well known and understood by those who first made use of it, is very insensibly varied, by passing through many mouths, and by being taken and given by multitudes, in common discourse; till it often comes to stand for a complication of notions, as distant from the original intention of it, nay, as contradictory to it, as darkness is to light. The ignorance and weakness of some, and the passions and bad designs of others, are the great instruments of this evil; which, even when it seems to affect only indifferent matters, ought in reason to be opposed, as it tends, in its nature, to confound men's notions

in weightier points; but, when it hath once invaded the most sacred and important subjects, ought, in duty, to be resisted with a more open and undisguised zeal, as what toucheth the very vitals of all that is good, and is just going to take from men's eyes the boundaries of right and wrong.

The only cure for this evil, in cases of so great concern, is to have recourse to the originals of things, to the law of reason, in those points which can be traced back thither; and to the declarations of Jesus Christ and his immediate followers, in such matters as took their rise solely from those declarations. For the case is plainly this, that words and sounds have had such an effect, not upon the nature of things, which is unmoveable, but upon the minds of men in thinking of them; that the very same word remaining, which at first truly represented one certain thing, by having multitudes of new inconsistent ideas, in every age, and every year, added to it, becomes itself the greatest hindrance to the true understanding of the nature of the thing first intended by it.

For instance, religion, in St James' days, was virtue and integrity as to ourselves, and charity and beneficence to others; before God, even the father.* By degrees, it is come to signify, in most of the countries throughout the whole world, the performance of every thing almost, except virtue and

* James i. 27.