A SMALL MODERN CONGREGATIONALIST SCHOOL.
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
.SIR,—In the note affixed to Mr. Lyttelton's letter, you speak of the tenet that some men will "absolutely die, while others win .eternal life," as that of a " small modern Congregationalist school." It is somewhat a speciality of mine to know who maintains this tenet, publicly or privately ; and if the number of writers and speakers on any doctrine ought to determine its ecclesiastical char- acter, it is within my knowledge to say that the doctrine referred to belongs rather to your own Church than to ours. With the .exception of Mr. Dale, and four or five other persons, including myself, I do not know any Congregationalists who publicly advo- ,cate this tenet. The popular doctrine among us just now is that Propounded by Mr. Baldwin Brown, chosen as President of the Congregational Union next year, and this cannot be clearly dis- tinguished from Universalism. But the doctrine that the object of the divine Incarnation was to immortalise mankind, denying this immortality to obstinately wicked persons, is held and publicly taught, both by voice and pen, by a very large number of clergymen of the Church of England, and by a goodly array of eminent laymen, while its diffusion among other religious bodies is notorious. It relies for its defence exclusively on that .steadfast appeal to the sacred Scriptures which Mr. Lyttelton recommends, and therefore has small chance of acceptance in communities where " slavish regard to the letter " is at a minimum for the present. The circumstance that one or two of us, who have written on the subject, are Congregationalists, no more entitles the tenet to be spoken of as that of a " Congregational school," than your own apparently firm and perfect faith in the immortality of your own domestic animals entitles that speciality to be called a "small school" of the Episcopal Church.—I am, [Mr. White is evidently an imaginative man, and infers g firm faith' in a tenet from very slight traces indeed of a conjectural hope.—ED. Spectator.]
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