to each of us, what exceeding presumption would they breed!  If all things in us and about us are now of God, what room can there be for sin?  If God hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, what room can there be for fear or for danger?  And thus, while we say we are quoting and believing the word of God, we do in fact turn it into a lie; we make it assert a falsehood as to our past state, and a falsehood as to our future state; we make it say, that our old nature is passed away, when it is not; that we have got a new nature when we have not; that we are reconciled to God, and therefore in safety, when we are, in fact, in the extremest danger.

But it is easy to see that we have no right to apply to ourselves words written by St. Paul eighteen hundred years ago, and applied by him to other persons.  I go, then, farther; and I say, that if every member of the church of Corinth, to which they were written, had applied them to himself in the manner which I have shown above, the words would in many instances have been perverted no less, and would have been made to state what was false, and not what was true.  And the same may be said of many other passages of St. Paul’s Epistles, which, having been similarly misinterpreted, have furnished matter for endless controversies, and on which opposite theories of doctrine have been fondly raised, each of them alike unchristian and untrue.

Thus our present position is this:—­that oftentimes by taking the representations of Scripture as true in fact, whether of ourselves or of others, we come to conclusions at once false and mischievous; being, as the case may be, either presumptuous, or fearful, or uncharitable, and claiming for each of these faults the sanction of the word of God.

A similar mistake in interpreting human compositions, has led to faults of another kind.  Assuming as before, in interpreting St. Paul’s words, that the language of our Liturgy is meant to describe, as a matter of fact, the actual feelings and condition of those who use it, or for whom it is used; and seeing manifestly that these feelings and condition do not agree with the words; we do not here, as with the Scripture, do violence to our common sense and conscience, by insisting upon it that we agree with the words, but we find fault with the words as being at variance with the matter of fact.  Some say that the language of the General Confession is too strong a statement of sin; that the language of the Communion Service, of the Baptismal Service, and above all, of the Burial Service, is too full of encouragement and of assurance; that men are not all so bad as to require the one, ’nor so good as to deserve the other; that in both cases it should be lowered, to agree with the actual condition of those who use it.

Now it is worthy of notice, at any rate, that the self-same rule of interpretation applied to the Scripture and the Liturgy is found to suit with neither.  We adhere positively to our rule:  and thus, as we hold the words of Scripture sacred, we force common sense and conscience to make the facts agree with them; but not having the same respect for the words of the Liturgy, we complain of them as faulty and requiring alteration, because they do not agree with the facts.