upon that item of your committee's report which recommends my withdrawal from the ministry of the Presbyterian church. I thus put myself in your hands, and shall regard your decision as making plain to me the path of duty in the matter. If with any fair degree of unanimity you shall say that you do not believe it consistent in me any longer to hold the place of an accredited minister of this church, I shall at once place my resignation in your hands. I must ask you, however, to take this responsibility, because it would be wrong for me, in the position which I have taken, and which I believe was assumed in obedience to a divine call, to withdraw without such action on your part. I have throughout acted on the view that our church is not a mere association, but a part of the living body of Christ, and that if any one of us become convinced that there is anything wrong in either its constitution or its doctrine, our vows of fealty to it bind us to point out the error and to seek its correction. And therefore I cannot escape my obligations to the church in which God has set me as a member, responsible in my measure for the welfare of the whole, unless you in this way discharge me from them.

But before you decide the question now submitted, permit me again to call your attention to the fact that the personal issue involved is of very small importance compared with the issues which relate to the church at large. I have called in question the correctness of that interpretation of Scripture, put in our Standards, which represents God as having no other end in raising to another life the immense mass of the human race consigned to death and hell for their sins, but to judge and sentence them again to a deeper death and hell, to suffer "most grievous and unspeakable torments, without intermission, with the devil and his angels in hell-fire forever." The point I have raised against this teaching is that it strips resurrection, which is confessedly due to the redeeming work of Christ, of every redemptive and beneficent feature, and converts this provision of another life to the human race into an unutterable curse to all but the elect. The report of your committee affirms that this objection to the Standards is without Scripture warrant. It

virtually endorses and affirms the formulas just quoted. I beseech you, brethren, consider well before, by your vote, you confirm that part of the report. Your responsibilities before God and man in this matter are no less than mine. Are you prepared to say that the Standards have made no mistake at this point, and that the conception of resurrection as a gracious intervention which I have traced through Scripture, and in the light of which I have insisted our authorized teaching ought to be recast, is without foundation in the word of God?

But the question you are to decide is no less important in its relation to the constitution of the Church and the right of private judgment under it. So far as I am aware, this is the first time in the history of our Church that one of its ministers has openly called in question its authorized statements upon an important point of doctrine, and connected therewith an effort to induce the church to revise them. Other instances of difference have occurred, in which the dissentient has assumed that the church is in bondage to an inexorable system, which will not admit of any change, and so has withdrawn from it. In other cases, the effort has been to prove that the Standards are flexible enough to admit the variation. In this instance there is no such attempt. There is the open affirmation that the framers of our Standards at this point erred, and that it is our duty to correct them. And this duty is the more strongly urged, because the church tacitly admits that they erred, inasmuch as these statements are seldom avowed in her pulpits, nor is the impression made upon her hearers that she earnestly believes them. The question, therefore, which you are now asked to decide is unique in our history. Believing as I do, that our church is in an uncandid position before God and man, and that, too, at a point of the most momentous human interest, you are asked to say whether, in seeking to correct this, I have been wrong, and have violated my ordination vows. Moreover, the issue involves the question as to which is master among us, the church or the confession. Is the Presbyterian church a mere voluntary society of Christians, formed to defend and perpetuate a certain system of doctrine, with no room for growth in the knowledge of God

and His Word? Or is it a living body—not a mere society, but a true church? I have held that it enters into the very idea of the body of Christ that it must grow out of all present ignorances and imperfections and divisions into that unity of the faith which shall be the final proof to the world of the divine mission of her Lord. Such growth requires a liberty of investigation and of prophesying-the free action of the Divine Spirit within the body-such as is impossible if the church assumes that she has nothing more to learn, and that she is already able to so map out and fence in the lines of truth that no one must dare pass beyond these limits. It is this aspect of the present case which gives it so much importance, and which has made me hesitate as to whether I ought not to insist upon getting, in some way, the judgment of the whole church upon it. Aside from the truth or falsity of the special principle in eschatology I have been urging, I have been brought reluctantly into a position which represents this most important principle, and one which seems vital to the church's future growth and welfare. You, brethren, have the rare opportunity and the solemn responsibility to decide whether this Presbyterian Church must go on forever on its present lines, or whether it shall hold itself open, in an honest way, to the larger illuminations of truth which God is giving in our day, and so grow up to its place in that larger unity of the future, which is the divine idea of its Lord. If it shall do this, there must be room made for the discussion and amendment of its Standards; there must be no slavish suppression of honest differences; no rod of terror held over the head of honest dissentients, and no such dishonor of the Holy Spirit in the church as is involved in the unwillingness to trust Him to correct the disorders and counteract the errors which may arise in the exercise of His own principle of liberty. Better a hundred fold that some heresies should be propounded than that the healthy life of the church should be repressed by the denial of that liberty of conscience and of prophesying wherewith Christ hath made us free.

It has been in the exercise of this liberty, and under a sense of a sacred obligation to my brethren in this church to which I

have given my life-work, and which I love with a true affection, that I have sought to give them the new light upon the darkest feature in God's Word which He has given me. I knew it could not, when understood, but sweeten their own lives, and brighten their labors for God and their fellow men, giving them a gospel of deeper divine love and of larger human hopes, and one far better fitted for the church's great mission work at home and abroad; a gospel needed to lift the piety of our church out of the narrow and provincial grooves in which it has been confined, and to prepare it for its place in that larger church of the future in which our Lord's last prayer for His people shall be fulfilled, "that they all may be one." And in doing this, I have seen that some one must assert for himself and for his brethren, the right to open up our system to any larger light that may be shining outside of it, and to emancipate the church from the idea that its ministers are the mere servants of the Confession and not its proper masters.

However it may seem to you, I am persuaded that in this effort I have been acting in the highest interest of the church; and that if you insist that I ought to lay down my ecclesiastical life in the struggle, God will raise up other and better leaders to carry this cause on to victory.

And now brethren I have only to say that, however you may decide this question, my personal feelings toward you and toward all by brethren in the Presbyterian church will remain unchanged. I thank you most heartily for your forbearance and courtesy in this whole matter. No service for this church has ever cost me half what this last service has. Between me and those of you who cannot regard it as a service but an injury, God must be the judge. I ask you now to separate this question from the personal interests involved, and to decide it in the court of your own consciences as before Him who holds us all to strict account, and especially when we act under the solemn responsibilities of His servants in His own house. Permit me to suggest that if the interests involved seem to you too important to be settled by a single Presbytery, our Book makes it easy to obtain a wider judgment of the church through a refer

ence to either the Synod or General Assembly for advice. It declares that to them "it belongeth ministerially to determine controversies of faith and cases of conscience."

ness.

The discussion on both sides was earnest and protracted. It is a matter of thankfulness that it was free from bitterOne brother who could not attend the meeting sent an earnest, affectionate, letter to the Presbytery pleading for toleration and against the adoption of the report. This letter was allowed to be read. Four other ministers, as highly esteemed as any in the Presbytery, one of them a Nestor among us-took the same view. One of these made an eloquent and touching appeal, not only against our withdrawal, but for the toleration of our views with which he declared himself to be in substantial accord. One of the most intelligent and godly elders declared that his heart told him we were right, and that a larger view of the truth concerning God's relation to mankind lies somewhere in the direction we had pointed out, and that he must vote no. The report, however, was finally adopted, all the others, fifty-five in all, voting for it. After which Mr. Baker arose and said that the vote had made plain to him the path of duty. He had desired to remain within the church, because he believed that God had given him a testimony to it concerning its false position in holding on to formulas of doctrine which were no longer heartily believed and preached among us. He had striven to get the Presbytery to bring the matter to the attention of the General Assembly, and to arouse the church through the press to its importance. He had not, however, assailed these traditional formulas without seeking to show just where they are wrong, namely, in their misconception of the meaning of