Surely the great law of Christian love would suggest and enforce a union at least of spirit amongst Christian believers, who cannot join in the unity of the same organisation.  Inability to join in the same form of church polity and church order need not shut the door to religious sympathies and religious communion, where there are so many points of agreement and of mutual interest.  The experience of the past will tend to produce the conviction that there has too often been in our religious disputes a strong tendency in all Christian denominations to make the great principle of love, which is a principle to rule in Heaven and for eternity, actually subservient and subordinate to a system of ecclesiastical order, which, important as it is for its own purposes and objects, never can be more than a guide to the ministration of the Church on earth, and an organisation which must be in its nature confined to time.

Wherever or whenever this feeling may be called forth, it is a grievous error—­it is a very serious subject for our reflection, how far such want of sympathy and of union with those who do not belong immediately to our own church, must generate a feeling hostile to a due reception of an important article of our faith, termed in the Apostles’ Creed the COMMUNION OF SAINTS.  According to the description given by the judicious and learned Bishop Pearson, this communion or spiritual union belongs to all who are in New Testament language denominated SAINTS; by which he means all who, having been baptized in the faith, have this name by being called and baptized.  Then he states all Christian believers to have communion and fellowship with these, whether living or dead.  We should feel towards such persons (evidently, as the good Bishop implies, without reference to any particular church order) all sympathy and kindness as members of the same great spiritual family on earth, expectants of meeting in heaven in the presence of God and of the Lamb, and of joining in the worship of saints and angels round the throne.  I have no hesitation in declaring my full conviction that such expectations of future communion should supply a very powerful and sacred motive for our cultivating all spiritual union in our power with all fellow-Christians, all for whom Christ died.  It becomes a very serious subject for examination of our own hearts, how, by refusing any spiritual intercourse with Christians who are not strictly members of our own Church, we may contravene this noble doctrine of the Communion of Saints; for does not the bitterness with which sometimes we find all union with certain fellow-Christians in the Church on earth chill or check the feeling of a desire for union with the same in the Church above?  Nay, is there not matter for men’s earnest thought, how far the violent animosity displayed against the smallest approach to anything like spiritual communion with all Christians of a different Church from their own may chill the DESIRE itself for “meeting