country, or of his own life, or by command of lawful authorities, was a criminal. There are, indeed, few deeds which are in a general way sins, which may not be committed under such circumstances as to rescue the person who did them from being on that account a sinner. There was once a nation which did not think thieving wrong: there is a nation which does not consider a parent's destroying a child, when too poor to maintain it, as a sin: and there is a class or sect in another nation who hold the same opinion as to the lives of their parents, when too old to be serviceable to themselves. You see from these illustrations that the degree of criminality attaching to a person for his actions, depends very much on the extent of knowledge he has of the nature of the act, his education, and various other circumstances. It is very difficult to weigh these exactly in estimating how far any particular person himself does wrong while he is committing a wrong act; God alone can see the heart; and, therefore, it is better to speak without immediate reference to persons, and only as to the character of the opinion or action under consideration.
With these explanations, first, on the score of conscience causing it; next, of circumstances varying the degree of criminality in different persons, I repeat Dissent is a sin, which I now go on to prove to you.
Persons dissent from the Church on account of some difference or other, this is plain; and, from what I have already said, it is also plain that I do not intend to say any thing in what follows concerning the greater differences which cause Dissent, i.e. differences which are founded upon a different interpretation of Scripture. For when a man thinks the Church unscriptural, he has a good reason for leaving it, and is (what I have called above) a conscientious Dissenter; though at the same time I am bound to say, I think his conscience a very erroneous one, which leads him to consider the Church unscriptural; and while I allow him to be conscientious in one sense of the word, yet I also think him heretical,—just as those men who (as our Lord foretold) thought, when they persecuted the Apostles, "they did God service," were wrong, not in that they obeyed their conscience, but because they had not a more enlightened conscience. "The light that is in" a merely conscientious Dissenter is (what Christ has called)
