THE CONSTRUCTION OF SHEEPFOLDS 563

suspicion. For I believe the Bible to have been written for simple people, and that simple people can only look at isolated texts. I think that every necessary doctrine is to be proved by positive texts, and not by subtle reasonings, of which most poor Christians are quite incapable.

This vulgar practice I think, therefore, the right one, just because it is vulgar. And I have always found the Tractarians shrink in horror from these same “Isolated Texts.”

4. Answer to your 5th Clause.

I give up my nomenclature at once, if it displeases you. I used Visible and Invisible¹ merely as convenient and generally recognised expressions for the Church in heaven and on earth-or rather for my first and second senses of the word. Had I not done so, I should have been obliged to write “Church in the first sense,” “Church in the second sense,” all through, which would have been inconvenient; but make this substitution, if you like it.

5. What follows, I do not in the least understand. I certainly never deduced invisibility from visibility. I mean, very simply, that I see a man behave decently and hear him talk like a Christian. He is to me visible and hearable an ascertainable creature-so far. His membership with Christ I cannot see: I call it therefore invisible. I never spoke of “men taken out of the condition of humanity.” I said that I could not see their hearts, and that the Lord looketh upon the heart: I meant that the Lord knoweth them that are His²-and that we don’t. What is there “accursed” in this doctrine; or what is the doctrine which you suppose me to have meant, and which you call “accursed”? I have read this indignant passage three times over, and I do not in the smallest degree understand what you are attacking. You say “you are sure that those who yield to God’s spirit only come to believe that which is as true of every publican and harlot as it is of themselves.”

That ... What?

6. Answer to your sixth Clause.

Let me restate somewhat more clearly what I said, or meant to say, of Christ’s Excommunication-and have patience with me.

I said that Christ always implied the inferiority of such; and I meant to say that He proved His infinite Mercy and the all-atoning power of His Death in the very fact of His being willing to associate with-ready to hear, and able to save-the most degraded of mankind. The whole power and beauty of His ministry depends upon the first admission, that those whom He came to save were indeed chief of sinners. I now repeat that Christ invariably implies this inferiority-

“What do ye more than others? Do not even the Publicans, whom you think such dreadful sinners, so?”³ “The publicans and harlots-believed on Him.” “Go into the Kingdom before you”-in which passages the whole force depends upon their being considered as inferior. These-Christ says-lost and sinful though they were-yet believed. Again of the Heathen, “It is not meet to take the children’s bread,” etc.⁴

¹ [See above, §§ 6, 7.]

² [1 Samuel xvi. 7; 2 Timothy ii. 19.]

³ [Matthew v. 47.]

⁴ [Matthew xxi. 31, 32, xv. 26.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]