IN CHRIST ALL SHALL BE MADE ALIVE
A Sermon Delivered by JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY, At Devonshire Meetinghouse, March,
1833.
Addresses Delivered by Messrs. Allen, Bates, Gurney, Tuke, Wheeler; Mrs. Braithwaite,
Grubb, Jones, and Ministers, of the Society of Friends. London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co.,
1834, pages 71-95.
This is The Quaker Homiletics Online Anthology, Part 3: The 19th Century.
"As in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive," and I think this memorable portion of
holy writ affords one out of numerous examples of the extent and variety of divine truth, often
couched by the pen of inspiration in a very few words; and I know of nothing that would more
tend to the welfare and peace of every individual present, than to be brought to a full
apprehension, and a vital experience of the truth of these words, "as in Adam all died, so in Christ
shall all be made alive;" and I have often longed for myself, and for my fellow professors of the
ever blessed truth, and especially for the members of this Society, that we might all be brought to
a deeper sense of the death which pervades our species through the sin of Adam. I believe it must
be admitted that the apostle has some allusion here to natural things, for there is reason to believe,
that had it not been for sin, even natural death would not have come into the world; and we
die--we moulder in the dust--we are committed to the silent grave as the children of a sinful
parent, and as those who have sinned ourselves, and are in every point of view worthy of death. I
wish we were all sensible how worthy we are of death: I wish we might remember, that even
when the mourners go about the streets, when we lose the joy of our hearts, and the delight of our
eyes, when our own strength withers, and we descend to the chambers of darkness, that these are
tokens, these are proofs that we are a fallen, sinful race. But, my beloved friends, there is a death
of a deeper kind, there is a darkness more black, more impenetrable, than that of the grave; there
is a destruction infinitely more formidable, than that of the body; there is the death of that which
in one sense can never die; there is the separation of the soul of man from the source and spring of
life; and we are dead, my brethren, we are the children of wrath by nature, even as others; we are
separated from our God, not by the sin of Adam verily, not by the imputation of the fault of
another, but by the awful consequence of the sin of our first parent, traced as it is in the depravity
and corruption of our nature, and finding its way into our own selves; now friends, we do not
want the sin of another to aggravate our condemnation; there is not one of us in this large
assembly who is not condemned for his own sins, by the sentence of the eternal, immutable law of
God, and I wish we were more alive to the fact, for many of us conduct ourselves very differently
from condemned criminals, dependant on the pure mercy of our sovereign Lord God. And what is
mercy, my dear brethren? I believe there are those who have very meagre apprehensions of the
meaning of this word; they mistake it for kindness and love in a general point of view; but mercy
is the love which acquits the criminal; mercy is the love which obliterates all our transgressions,
through the blood of the everlasting covenant; mercy is the love which delivers us from the bitter
pains of eternal death, and bestows upon us in great loving kindness the glorious gift of
everlasting life; my beloved friends, where is our humiliation before the Lord? where are our
mouths in the dust? where is our contrition? where is the breaking to pieces of the rock work of
our hearts? "The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell his dream, and he that hath my word, let
him speak my word faithfully;" God forbid that the poor servant should not speak it faithfully;
"what is the chaff to the wheat," my brethren, "is not my word," saith the Lord, "as a fire, and as a
hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?" and I do believe that we stand in peculiar need of
coming under the immediate influence of that word from heaven which is quick and powerful,
sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing asunder, for there are many among us who are
taking up a false rest, moving on the surface of things, well satisfied with the system to which they
are attached, and in which they have been educated; and all the while, while they are making a
pretty good profession, they are slumbering the slumbers of death; they are sleeping the sleep of
the grave. "I passed by the vineyard of the sluggard, and by the field of him which hath no
understanding, and it was all grown over with weeds, and nettles covered the face thereof, and the
stone wall thereof was broken down:" now friends, we may think that we are surrounding
ourselves with a stone wall very well cemented, and good is the masonry thereof, and the mortar
with which it is cemented has a fair appearance; but all the while it totters, it breaks, it is falling,
and the enemy passes and re-passes, and robs us of the precious love of truth, the spring of our
hope, our peace, our virtue, our immortality. Alas, for such a condition!--"I know thy works that
thou hast a name to live, but art dead; be watchful and strengthen the things which are ready to
die, lest I come and take thy candlestick out of its place, except thou repent." I have been
baptized, according to my measure, into a sense of the sin of this people; I have also been
brought, in some sense, under a sense of my own sins, and I have cause to be humbled and broken
before the Lord; and, if I am emboldened to stand before you this day, my brethren, it is in no
other character than that of a brand plucked out of the fire; but friends, we are a sinful people; we
do not indeed, want the sin of Adam to aggravate our transgression; the corrupt root which we
derive from Adam, has been fruitful enough, without any imputed sin; all the covetousness of the
Lord's professing Church, all the devotion of their hearts to the things of this world, all our
ungodly attempts to serve God and Mammon too. O how unsightly is the combination, how
abominable in the sight of Him who is of purer eyes than to behold evil; and then, friends, there is
sinfulness in the very silence of this people; Satan mocks us, my dear brethren, he turns our very
light into darkness, and if the light which is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness; and if,
under our good profession of quietness and silence, we are subsiding into the depth of our own
corruption, what will become of us; if we are departing in spirit from the fountain of living waters;
if our stillness is the stillness of death, and if our silence is the silence of the grave, what will
become of us my beloved friends? I believe there never was a time, when true godly silence was
more precious to the Lord's exercised children than it is now; may we cleave to it; may we
remember our testimony to it; may it never be broken in our public assemblies, except under the
immediate influence of the Lord's anointing: but, friends, what think you of the silence of Lazarus
when he was dead, and buried, and putrid? was there a good savour there? What were the words
of Martha? Homely words, but I dare not withhold them--"Lord, by this time he stinketh, for he
hath been dead four days:" and there are those, even in this assembly, who have long been very
sick, and their sickness hath increased upon them, and they may now be compared to the dead; to
the buried; to those who are in the process of their last decay; and they afford a practical
exemplification of the awful truth, that in Adam all die. But, my beloved young friends, ye
ingenuous ones, ye amiable ones, who have been favoured with a guarded and religious
education, ye who have some fleeting desires in your minds after holiness and heaven, do not
deceive yourselves I beseech you; while you continue in your unregenerate nature, your are dead
in trespasses and sins; you are with all your amiability, and all your steadiness, the children of
wrath even as others. I dare not flatter you, I love you too dearly; I long, I pray for your
salvation; I want you to be humbled, broken to pieces, brought into the valley of tears, made
sensible of your own sinfulness, of your death, of your loss, of your liability to ruin by nature. O
friends, what can be more miserable than the standard of the world on the subject of morality? the
world has no notion of tru~ virtue; ye proud and airy speculators, whoever your are, who set out
on your system-making on a wrong foundation, and pretend that man is virtuous by nature, what
does your virtue come to ? What is the virtue of the philosophy of this world, is there any thing of
God in it? Nay, there is nothing of God in it; we are an ungodly race my dear brethren, we are
departed from God; his love, his fear are (sic) not in us; by what do we judge of the value of an
action, my dear-brethren ? It is allowed on all hands that the motive makes the action good; and
what is your motive ye moralists of the world--you are so besotted by a false philosophy, what is
the spring of your actions? Pride, alas for the motive! And what ought to be the spring of your
actions? The love of God. And never will you be brought home to the right motives, or to true
virtue, until you come home to God by him, "who is the way, the truth, and the life;" "for no man
cometh unto the Father but by me," said Jesus; but let no one suppose that we would depreciate a
guarded education, a moral or steady life. O no ye beloved young friends, we can rejoice in your
moral, and amiable, and steady conversation; we believe that you have often been visited by the
day spring from on high; we believe that the Lord is at work in your hearts, but you are not
regenerate; you cannot be born again until you make the unconditional surrender; it is no time for
any of you to delay and trifle with eternal things, much less to play with edge tools; or to throw
yourselves in the way of temptation; now is your time to become decided in your religious course;
now is your time to give up all for Christ; now is your time to surrender without conditions, that
the Lord may make of you what he pleases, that you may be born again of the Spirit, and live
everlastingly; but alas, alas for those even among the younger classes who have followed the
multitude to do evil. There are more than a few such I greatly fear, even in this goodly assembly,
whom one might suppose to be all virtuous, but the Spirit doth testify that this is not true: there
are those who have followed the devices and desires of their own hearts, until they have become
the very slaves of Satan, and how have they fallen! O the deep instructiveness of their history; first
they have given way in some very little things; they have grieved the unflattering witness for the
truth in their own bosoms, respecting some of those things which the world calls matters of
indifference, and thus a small aperture has been made in the wall round about them, and the
enemy has made it by degrees larger and larger; first there was room for the little foxes just to
pass through the aperture and spoil the tender grapes, and now there is room for the ravenous,
and deadly, and noisome beasts of the forest to pass, and re-pass just as they please;" O tell it not
in Gath, my brethren, and publish not our shame in the streets of Askelon," and yet we must be
faithful; and we never can rise until we fall, for Christ our Saviour is set for the falling and the
rising again of many in Israel, and a little hope arises with me that this will be a favoured day of
self condemnation; we do not want to judge one another my dear brethren, we want to condemn
every one himself, we want to come under that law of the Spirit of light in Christ Jesus which will
first condemn us, then wound us, then slay us, and then bury us with Christ in baptism; and then
raise us again and put a new life into us that we may arise and shine, both as individuals and as a
people, in the strength and beauty of primitive Christianity. And my beloved friends, there are sins
of mind, I was about to say of the intellect, which have done desperate mischief within our
borders; we do not distinguish things aright, we misapply our powers, we are for ever prone
under the influence of the corruption of our hearts to call good evil and evil good; to put sweet
for bitter, and bitter for sweet; let not my beloved young friends suppose for a moment, that some
of us who are exercised for their welfare would discourage them in their intellectual pursuits; O
no, we delight in their forming a refined and virtuous taste; we glory in their zeal for the
acquirement of useful knowledge; we knew the plain principle of our holy religion that it is our
bounden duty to make the very best of all our powers for the glory of God and for the welfare of
man, and woe unto those who under the false pretence of their inability are taking their talent and
wrapping it in a napkin and burying it in the earth; they may call their master a hard master, and
they go the way to work to find him hard in the day of judgment, for the Lord is a just God, and
the eternal rule of right will never bend in the smallest degree, in the hand of omnipotent holiness;
but, my beloved friends, are there not those who think that they can obtain divine knowledge by
the mere application of their natural powers; are there not those who are prone to make
themselves wise above that which is written, and to build systems of their own contrivance like
those Babel builders in days of old, hoping to scale the heavens by the strength of their own
wisdom, and it will end in their eternal confusion; yes, my dear friends, the intellect and reason of
man have their proper province, even in religion; let us never depreciate their value, no, my
beloved friends, it is our duty to bring these things to bear, and for the highest of purposes: would
to God that the patient, deliberate, pious, and careful examination of the holy scriptures did more
abound among us, that we might be more like those noble Bereans, who searched the scriptures,
that they might know whether these things are so, yea or nay; and let me tell my dear young
friends, that whether we plead for the great fundamental doctrines of the gospel, or for those
Christian testimonies which, as a people, we believe to rest on that foundation; we are bold, as
our forefathers were before us, to make our honest appeal to the inspired records, and we are
willing that our sentiments and our practice should stand or fall by this test:--but, beloved friends,
when we bring our natural powers into their right office, in daily reading, and meditating on holy
writ; are we to forget, shall we for a moment forget, that the very ground, and spring, and root, of
the authority of scripture is immediately from revelation:--shall we for a moment forget, that it is
the lion of the tribe of Judah, who alone holds the key of David, and opens and no man shutteth,
and shutteth and no man openeth. Ah, my friends, let us endeavour to gather our minds into deep
dependance on the power of a risen Saviour, and on the guidance of his Holy Spirit; that the Spirit
of truth himself may take of the things of Christ, and open them to our understandings, and apply
them to our hearts. There is the animal faculty and there is the rational faculty-in man, and woe
unto those, for there are such in this assembly, in whom the animal faculty rebels even against the
plainest dictates of common reason--and above the rational faculty there is the light of heaven,
and, woe unto those in whom the rational faculty is not subject to the light of heaven; light and
life, my dear brethren, going hand in hand, and being inseparable companions. In Him, in Jesus, in
our Saviour was light, and the light was the life of men; and, my dear friends, I have feared that
there are some among us, who would not only discard what may be called the outside of our
system, but that which belongs to the very root and ground of our religions profession--immediate
revelation: and I am bold to assert, that mankind would for ever have groped in the darkness of
the chambers of death, had it not been for immediate revelation; and I do rejoice in the glorious
truth plainly declared in scripture, respecting our Lord Jesus Christ. That was the true light which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world, and you may all come to it my dear friends, you
need not die in your sins, you need not be buried like Lazarus, in the dust of the earth, and lay
there until you are putrid; you need not do it friends; in Christ is your life, and the Redeemer of
mankind is your salvation, he is waiting to be gracious to you. O think, my beloved brethren, how
it was with the Apostle Paul, before he was an Apostle, when he breathed out threatenings and
slaughter--his very breath was like fire--he breathed out slaughter. There was a state of mind; and
he went to crush the Lord's children, and to trample them under his feet; to eat them up as a man
doth bread--and he was arrested in his course; and who was it, who stopt him in his foul and
desperate career? The Crucified one, my clear brethren; the risen, the glorified Immanuel: it was
he whose light shined round about him--so dazzling, so perfect, that his natural vision was blind;
and who said in those gentle, yet piercing accents of reproof, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
me?" And, my dear friends, I long that we may come under the influence of that light from
heaven, which will blind our natural vision; that we may be contented to abide as Saul did, in a
state of darkness for many days, in reverence, and holy patience, until the same Jesus shall wash
us from our sins in his blood, and proclaim our deliverance. What, friends, shall we, a poor,
corrupt, sinful people; shall we think lightly of the gospel of Christ; shall we clip it; shall we
narrow it up by any system of our own; shall we circumscribe God's glorious plan of
redemption?--let us die first, let us rather give up all we have. O no, friends, let us have the gospel
in its length, and breadth, and height, and depth, in all its fulness, as that light from heaven which
will manifest to us our own darkness, and our own sinfulness, will play around us with the lovely
countenance of the Holy One of Israel; then we shall see the perfect fitness of the Saviour to the
sinner; and "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." Now, my dear friends, there
are some points so very plain in reference to this subject, that one would scarcely think the
mention of them was needful, or any thing like insisting upon them, as if we did not all receive
them; but I dare not; I will not withhold the mention of them. How strange it is that under the
guidance of a spiritual religion, there should, after all, be some among us who are endeavouring to
get to heaven by their own works; what a singular fatuity is this my dear brethren, what strange
misapprehension, when we know that we are all sinners and condemned by the law to death
everlasting, when we know that had we fulfilled the whole law even then there would be no
surplus of merit, even then we should have had no claim in ourselves to the gift of a glorious
eternity; no friends, the Apostle Paul well spake when he had said "The wages of sin is death but
the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord, and therefore my beloved friends,
there is but one way for any of us whereby we can experience the redemption, forgiveness of sins,
and that is through the atoning blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the propitiation for our
sins, and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world, now the word propitiation is
synonymous in the common acceptation of it with the word atonement, and those who are
accustomed to the reading of the original text, are well aware that what is called the doctrine of
the atonement is plainly stated in scripture in terms that cannot be mistaken, under the word
propitiation; yes friends, he came from heaven in his infinite mercy and humbled him self, and
became obedient unto death, and bore the burden of all bur sins and by this most important of all
facts God has displayed for our instruction his own immutable holiness in the first place, and next
his boundless mercy, to a poor, lost, and sinful world, and I do beseech you, my dear friends, for
ever to discard all dependance on your own works as the ground of the favour of God, even your
best works, even those which you may humbly hope you perform under the influence of his good
spirit; do not mistake my dear friends, the superstructure for the foundation. "Other foundation
can no man lay than that is laid, which is Christ Jesus and him crucified, and although it may be
foolishness to the Greek, and a stumbling block to the Jew, it is plain and immutable truth; and it
may truly be said to stand to reason in the best sense of the words, and nothing shall ever shake it;
and is it not wonderful that in all ages of the church, those who are brought to a deep sense of
their own sinfulness, do embrace the doctrine of a crucified Redeemer, as a poor hungry man
takes his natural food; the veil is rent for you, my beloved friends, God hath consecrated for you a
new and living way, through the veil, that is to say through the flesh of Jesus Christ, which was
broken for you on the cross, and I beseech you not to attempt to enter into the pastures of life by
any other way; believe in the Lord Jesus, humble yourselves at his feet, wash your garments by
faith in his blood; it is the ground of your acceptance, the foundation of your hope, the rock on
which your peace is built for ever; and my beloved friends, let it not be said amongst us, that this
is only the outward part of religion; I have often trembled when I have heard some make a
distinction between what they call the outward and inward parts of religion, as if we were to sit in
judgment on the plan of salvation, and on God's method of saving a fallen race, and as if we were
to set one part up above another; no friends, there is a holy harmony in the truth, and we must
accept it in all simplicity and reverence, in humiliation, in godly fear, and in humble faith, and I
trust you Will all come to be filled with that spirit which filled the apostle Paul, for after he had
been visited by that light from heaven, and had been turned from the error of his ways. For whose
glory did he live? Did he not delight to dwell on Christ crucified? Did he not delight to unfold the
riches of redeeming love? Was not the blood of the covenant precious to him beyond all words
and all conceptions? Did he not say, "The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the
Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me?" Was he not deeply sensible of the practical
bearing of the doctrine, and of its power upon the heart, when he said, "If the blood of bulls and
of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean sanctified to the purifying of the flesh,
how much more shall the blood of Jesus, who through the eternal spirit, offered himself without
spot to God, purge your conscience? " There is an inward work for you, friends, something very
different from mere externals in religion, verily; purge your conscience from dead works to serve
the living God; the blood of Jesus must be sprinkled my brethren on the heart by faith. I think
friends, by making this distinction between what we call the outward and the inward, we only
encourage a tendency common to corrupt humanity, to view these matters as matters of theory
and speculation, rather than of practice. O may we henceforth be preserved as a religious society,
from any deep or dangerous errors. O remember how it was with our honourable elder, George
Fox, when he was brought under sore baptismal conflicts, when he was laid low as a young man
before the Lord; would to God that many of our young men could be brought into the same
condition, they could be if they would: would that we might see that day, would that we might be
delivered from our superficial walk, would that we might get down into the deeps, would that we
might be baptized, would that the Lord's hand might be laid with power on our vanity, our folly,
and our pride. O friends, I believe that were we better acquainted with the experience of our
forefathers in the truth, that we should have a greater value for those testimonies which they were
led to bear in the sight of the whole world to the perfect and true spirituality of the gospel, and
how was it with this young man after he had been baptized with the baptism of suffering in so
remarkable a manner? O he became instructed in the lessons of heavenly wisdom; and I believe
there was no lesson so near his heart at that time, as the lesson of the exceeding preciousness of
the atoning blood of Jesus, and when the priest of the parish enquired of him what was the
meaning of our Lord's suffering and agony in the garden of Gethsemane, and of his words on the
cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me," he plainly answered and said, "that the
Saviour of man was then bearing on himself the weight of the sins of all mankind; now let no man
pretend to say after this, that this honoured Elder was not deeply sensible of the practical bearing
of the Christian doctrine of the atonement. Now friends it is on the heart that these things are
intended to bear, it is on the heart that the blood of Christ must be sprinkled; we must be filled
with the Saviour's love my brethren; we love him because he first loved us, Herein is love, not that
we loved God but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins; thanks be
unto God for his unspeakable gift. Well ye ingenuous young persons and all of you my beloved
friends, will ye not be broken, will ye not be melted under the tidings of a Saviour's love, ye who
know very well how to be grateful to your friends when they treat you well, will ye turn your
backs on that best of friends, will you meet the greatest of all gifts, the most astonishing of all
mercies with cold hearted, impenitent ingratitude ? O no I hope better things of you my brethren,
and things which accompany salvation; I believe the glorious gospel in its simplicity, and in its
purity will not be proclaimed among us in vain; I call upon you for the surrender of your hearts,
my beloved brethren and sisters, to that Lord who in his infinite compassion bought you with his
blood; and you will soon understand that the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ without the gates
of Jerusalem, as we are accustomed to speak, is no matter of cold speculation, no matter of
religious theory alone, but that it is of all things conceivable, the most practical and the most
influential on the heart of poor, fallen, wandering, and benighted man, and how are you to prove
your love, some of you who have Christ in your mouths, some of you who delight yourselves in
the tidings of the gospel, some of you who have spoken and heard much in later times of Christ
crucified; I am glad that you know him, I delight in believing that you love him, I bless the day
when the gospel light shone on your benighted spirits; I hail the radiance which has shone athwart
your darkness from the bright beams of the Sun of Righteousness; I believe he has arisen upon
many of you with healing in his wings, but how are you to show your love, how are you to
develop your gratitude, what is to be the fruit? O friends here comes the part from which human
nature shrinks, I know who could say in days of old, "I am crucified with Christ;" are you
crucified with Christ? There is the vital question; are you made conformable to his death, do you
follow him to Calvary's mount, are you willing that your pride and your vanity, and your systems,
should be slain on his cross, will you be buried with him in-baptism, my beloved friends, will you
go down with him into the depths of the grave, will you lay there in reverent and awful patience
until Christ shall make you alive, will you in the silence of an flesh refrain from stirring up your
beloved until he please? O the depth my beloved friends of true Christian experience, and some of
you beloved friends who have thrown off the restraints of your youth, let a plain man ask you a
plain question? Did you do it for the love of Christ? Was it the love of a Saviour that constrained
you to choose that course? Was it the delusion of the world? Was it the unmortified pride of your
own hearts ? Was it your conformity to the god of this world, who would lead you first one little
gentle step in -the downward path and then another--and then another--and then another--and
then another, till you go down, and down, till nothing can arrest your progress; O I trust there are
many of you who will be arrested in your progress towards the world; I think my dear friends we
are in danger of shaking hands with the world, I wish God may be pleased to deliver us from this
vengeance; I do not desire to speak hardly of any one; there are varieties in our circumstances,
there are varieties in our conditions, great varieties, and God looketh not at the outward
appearance, God searcheth the hearts, but I am bold to express my conviction that as a religious
society, we shall never gain strength by turning our back on our Christian testimony, on the
contrary, I long that all these things may be done in the light of truth, not in dry morality, not in
hypocritical profession, but under the influence of the love of Christ, my dear brethren, that we
may arise and shine, and Zion put on her strength, even within our borders, and I believe that Zion
is putting on her strength in a very general point of -view; I believe pure truth is diffusing itself in
the world, and O that we may not be left in the rear, but I trust the time is coming when even
within our borders, Zion will put on her strength, and come to be arrayed in her beautiful
garments, and I wish I could convey to my younger brethren and sisters the deep settled
conviction of my spirit that though we may be rather dry, and rather flat, and a poor scattered
people in the estimation o£ some, they never will gain any thing by seeking out another way for
themselves; no friends let us have the glorious gospel in our own borders, let us cherish it, let us
give it room to circulate, let it have its free course, let nothing stop the tide of truth; truth shall
triumph, truth shall reign over all amongst us, away with our prejudices, away with our false
systems set up by man for himself, away with our own inventions, and let the truth, the very truth,
the whole truth, as it is in Jesus; circulate among us and reign over all. And my beloved friends,
one thing before I venture to take my seat; you know that immediate revelation is the very root
and ground of the scriptures themselves; it is the preparatory work also of the holy Spirit which
can alone bring us to Christ; there is no other way, all the rest is mere folly and delusion, all other
ways, however they may stand in the sight of human wisdom, will be broken and must end in
confusion. But friends, when we are brought by the Father to Christ, does the Spirit cease from
his office? Does he suspend his holy teaching? Does he then fail to guide the Lord's children? Is
there an end of his work? Is this Christianity? Is this the scriptures as you read them? I read not so
the scriptures; I read there that it is the very compact of the new covenant, and the peculiar
privilege of all true believers, that the law of their God is written on their hearts, and put into their
inward parts, and that they need not say every man to his brother, and every man to his neighbour,
Know the Lord. O my dear friends, my soul is exercised on your account; I am tired, says one of
you younger brethren, I am wearied of these prolonged silences, I go from meeting to meeting, I
repeat my attendance three times a week, I scarcely hear a word, I want to have a little more
teaching, I long for a little more ministry; and I hope the day is coming friends, if you will have
patience, when there will be more of a truly anointed ministry amongst us, and I shall hail the day;
it was so in the old days of our society, and I believe it will be so again, but don't be impatient, my
dear young friends, don't forget the peculiar privilege of true Christians, "All thy children shall be
taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children," and what was the promise of the
gospel. Now mark, my brethren, there was the promise of the old covenant, and there was the
promise of the new covenant; the promise of the old covenant was Christ, and the promise of the
new covenant, is the Spirit, it is specifically declared to be the Father's promise in the new
covenant, and Christ hath promised that he will send the Comforter to us, even the Spirit of truth,
who shall bring to our remembrance whatsoever he hath said unto us, and guide us into all truth.
Do you believe it friends?--yea, or nay. It was the profession of our ancestors, and God forbid
that it should ever cease from being our profession; we shall never prosper if we hunt after words;
we shall never prosper if we place our dependance on any thing less perfect than the Lord's own
anointing. I deeply feel the importance of the subject, I am not one of those, you will believe me,
my dear friends, who think lightly of the gospel labours of those who are not of our religious
denomination. I believe that they have often flowed from a right zeal, and are often blessed with
fruit to the giver of all grace; but of one thing, I am well persuaded, that our security and
prosperity as a religious body is intimately and inseparably connected with our maintaining our
own place in the universal church of Christ; not in the form, not in the systems, not in the
prejudices of man, not in the bitterness and narrowness, and, I may say, arrant folly of mere
sectarian views, but in the light of immortal truth, in the beauty and strength of primitive
Christianity, in the good old spirituality of the gospel of Christ, my brethren, in the old path, the
unchanging path. O we ought to be deeply humbled before our God in reverent gratitude, that he
hath been pleased to raise us up for the purpose, that we may be faithful in bearing our testimony
to the eternal rule of right. My brethren, I do believe that this is the testimony which we have to
bear as a religious society, namely, that the pure truth without addition, and without diminution,
should have its own free unrestricted course for the welfare of man and for the glory of God. We
discharge from our views, or ought to do, all mere considerations of what the world calls
expediency; and, O my beloved friends, I hope you will bear with a poor unworthy brother, as I
feel bound to say in the first place, that I never did feel my spirit more entirely bowed to the whole
of the glorious gospel of our Saviour, and the doctrine of a Crucified Immanuel, than I do at this
moment;--and, on the other hand, I never have been more constrained in my spirit to confess that
I am a Quaker--I would not lightly use the word, but I do believe it is my bounden duty, to
maintain our good old profession inviolate. I wish I could do it better; I know my own weakness;
I desire to humble myself in your presence; but I do beseech you, as you value your own immortal
souls, and your standing as a religious body, make free room for the gospel to circulate--let us
have it without clipping, without constraint, without restriction in its fulness, in its unsearchable
riches; let us have the glorious ocean of light and love overflowing the ocean of death and of
darkness: but let us not be beguiled by any of the temptations of the enemy, into a forsaking of
our own standing, of our own duty, of our own belief; let us be steadfast--immoveable; always
abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour shall not be in vain in
the Lord.