Communion with God -- Essential to Christianity

John Newton, the Puritan writer of the song Amazing Grace, wrote to a friend: "Many . . . who would not flatly contradict the apostle’s testimony in 1 John 1: 3 [i.e., that we should have fellowship with God in the Holy Spirit] attempt to evade its force by restraining it to the primitive times . . . but who can believe that the very nature and design of Christianity should alter in the course of time? And that communion with God, which was essential to it in the apostle’s days, should now be unnecessary?"

--  John Newton, “Letter IV: Communion with God,” in The Letters of John Newton, (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1960), 29.