My sick and weak condition makes me feel that in being baptized, and in receiving the Lord's Supper, I submit myself to God's hand of love, and take from him infinitely more than I give him."-- "O, that is rather a Romish view of ordinances," said he, smiling.--"No," said I, "Mr.Dow, I am not passive in the ordinances, any more than in regeneration; my whole soul is active in receiving their influences.

But there is something done for us in the ordinances, as there is something done for us in regeneration, while we actively repent and believe.

Are you not so afraid of Romanism, and of 'sacramental grace,' that you go to an opposite extreme?
for it seems to me a morbid state of feeling.

I wish for no extreme unction, but I do believe that, in being baptized, and in receiving the Lord's Supper, something more is done for us than helping us to take up and offer to God something on the little needle-points of our poor feelings.
I should feel, in being baptized, that God has adopted me, and not merely I him; and, in the Lord's Supper, that it is more for Christ to give me his body and blood, than for me to give him my poor affections." He asked me if I had not been reading the Oxford Tracts.

I told him that I read the Oxford Tracts, and other Puseyite publications, in their day, and that I saw through their errors, and had no sympathy with their views.
But I told him I was satisfied that the human mind, in that development, was craving something more supernatural in religious ordinances, to make the impression that the hand of God is in them, and not that we are the principal party.