Practical Conclusions.

I must use all brevity in stating to you, the lay members of this Society, the practical conclusions upon this subject at which I, a layman born into another Church, have arrived. They follow from the belief I hold, that the creeds of the Christian Churches, while they have been by far the most potent engine of ecclesiastical power, have also been the most dangerous and insidious enemies of the religion of Christ—(applause)—that so far as they have expressed His doctrine, they are merely an authoritative and superfluous repetition of that doctrine; while so far as they have pretended to add to it, they have either obscured or falsified it, and in either case have imposed a burden on the intellect and the conscience of the Christian world which is now becoming wholly intolerable.—(Loud applause.) If belief be not quite erroneous, it must be clear that the Churches, above all other human institutions at this day, need "the blessed amending hand" of radical reform.