[The following paper, printed now more than eight-and-thirty years ago, speaks for itself. It was sent privately to the Archbishop and Clergy, having been written some time before it was printed, and withheld, from anxiety as to the justness of the step; the course of the Archbishop and Clergy, with which I had from circumstances nothing personally to do, having greatly tried my spirit, and I was about twenty-six years old at the utmost, when it was written. I may mention that just at that time the Roman Catholics were becoming Protestants at the rate of 600 to 800 a week. The Archbishop (Magee) imposed, within the limits of his jurisdiction, the oaths of allegiance and supremacy; and the work everywhere instantly ceased. I remember Mr. R. Daly, since a prelate of the Establishment, saying to me after receiving it, You ought to become a Dissenter. I said, No; you have got into the wrong, and you want to put me there -- but that you will not do. I attach no importance to the paper, which I have never read since, but as the first germing of truth which has since developed itself in the Church of God. It is published therefore just as it was first printed. All the actors are passed, everything is changed, so that there is no indiscretion in publishing it now.]
My Lord and brethren,
I submit to you the following thoughts, occasioned originally by the Metropolitan Charge and Clerical Petition; but suppressed hitherto, from anxiety to take no step which I could not maturely judge to be taken according to the will of God. I do not publish them, because my object was to bring before the minds of those concerned the view which pressed upon my own, and by no means to make the world a judge of the conduct of Christ's ministers, which it is not, unless they err from their principles; and if they do, it would be my part, while I might state my mind to them, to cover the fault as it regards the world, where I supposed there was a fault committed. This feeling has guided my conduct on the occasion, and I cannot but feel happy at the delay, as it has given the opportunity of bringing forward some other things, which will, I think, assist in determining the true character of the views from which they originate. If there should be anything harsh in the expression, I beseech your forgiveness, and that you
+Dublin, 1827; not published.
will attribute it to the anxiety of a mind actuated only by the desire that the conduct of those he loves and looks up to should be free, even from the imputation of error. I send it to the Archbishop, not presumptuously, but with the respect due to his station and office, and with the earnest trust he will weigh the matter fully: and I send it to the Clergy, because, by their petition they seem to have recognised and taken advantage of the supposed support claimed in the Charge; and I earnestly commend it to their attention, not suggesting any particular thing (which I do not feel to be my part), but calling their minds to weigh the place they stand in themselves.
I have long felt deeply anxious on the subject, and it seems to me that a sincere and deep interest in the work of the Spirit of God which is going on in this country, and a consciousness that (while the Spirit of God distributes to every man severally as He will, and my prayers are offered up that He may do so freely and abundantly) the ministers of the Established Church have many of them been partakers of His energies, and acted in the furtherance of them, call for an inquiry into the principles contained in this Charge. No man whose mind has been informed on these subjects can doubt (and least of all those to whom I address myself, who have themselves borne witness to it by their heartfelt interest in its progress; nay, the world, which can know nothing of the real work, has been compelled to own in its effects) the manifestation of the power of the Divine Spirit which has begun a work in this country, which I fully hope will not end in it, and is of no country, but of the power of that kingdom which shall fill the whole earth. Under these circumstances all who enter into the work of God, as ministers in the power of the same Spirit, are urgently called upon to recognise their just place, to consider, as far at least as their own conduct is concerned, what the order of the operation is, that they may follow in simplicity, and unhindered by any inconsistency of personal or assumed character, the guidance and workings of the Eternal Spirit. They are bound to hold themselves (I speak this not as urging a claim, but expressing the assumed conviction of their own minds) as servants of Jesus Christ, and who therefore cannot consistently yet please men. They will feel it their faithful and zealous concern, therefore, as far as in them lies, in order that they may be the servants of all men to their eternal welfare, to be free from all men, not to be "the servants of men" as in the world, that
they may minister, preaching not themselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and themselves the servants of such as have ears to hear for His sake. With this view they are called (I do humbly suggest to them) to owe no man anything; called therefore with jealousy to judge, authorised by their obligation to their one Master who has an undivided claim to their service, anything that would prejudice that claim and the consistency of their own conduct with the blessed work which in His grace He has committed them to do: and I do persuade myself, that they have too deep an interest in the work and reign of Him who redeemed them, not to consider with attention any suggestion which reaches them relative to the interests of His name, and the free course of His word to souls. These considerations weigh with me to induce the communication of the following thoughts. The Charge and Petition appear to the public, with the sanction of their names; and bound as I must be to suppose, that this must carry to the world a representation of their sentiments, which they might find difficulty in gainsaying, I am emboldened to bring these documents under the maturer consideration of those who are disposed to avow, however humbly as individuals yet openly as servants, their identification with the interests of the Son of God, who loved them and gave Himself for them. I do feel, if they assume such an office and character, they are bound to approve themselves in it throughout, in that world where they must have every motive and all their conduct canvassed, and where the honour of their Master's name, the name of the Lord, who gave Himself for the church, that He might present it to Himself a glorious church, without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, will be charged in their persons, with every even error of theirs, while they will be used as proofs against them, that they cannot be the ministers of God, seeing they are in such and such things contrary to the character imprinted on the ministry by their Master, and thus their ministry hindered as towards those who might receive it, and who, in fact for the most part, judge by such very means. I am indeed persuaded that it has pleased God too decidedly (and I have entire faith in the continuance of it) to manifest His power to shew forth the character of those who are His, to suffer the work itself to be countervailed by any particular act, though inconsistent. But I am equally persuaded that this work will be carried on by the maintenance of that same sincerity of service, ministering the truth in love,
which the Lord has ever used for its promotion, and that those who look for a part in the heavenly work, who look to be owned as labourers with Him in that day, so that he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together, must look for it in the consistency of their own labour with the spirit and judgment and actual work of Him with whom they seek to rejoice. Impossible that they can gather the fruit of His blessed suffering and divine labour, so as to be glorified with Him by the display of it as the fruit of the travail of His soul, but as His labourers as working in conformity with the spirit in which He wrought. I turn from this, which I speak as the undoubted sentiment of those who are engaged in the work and labour of love, to consider the consistency of certain views and acts with these acknowledged principles; if they be acknowledged, they are unquestionably paramount to all motives, and we are able and bound to judge all acts by them, so as to regulate our own conduct with certainty before God: itself a matter of solid comfort to those who find their exercise in proving what the good and acceptable and perfect will of God is. And surely it does become those who, under the influence of the sense of God's mercies of which they have been made partakers, are disposed to present their bodies a living sacrifice, and not to be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of their minds, if in anything they may have seemed to have acquiesced in conformity to that which crucified the Lord of glory, to let judgment have its free course in their own minds, lest they be further entangled in error, lest the clearness and decision of their moral judgment, on which under God their efficient service, to say the least, in the work of God so much depends, should be impaired.
To apply myself then to that which has given occasion to the expression of these thoughts. We have the following public acts -- a Charge from the Metropolitan, stating the ground on which the Church stands, and then Petitions forwarded by the instrumentality of the hierarchy, seeking the exercise of civil authority for the protection of that Church as a body in this country. To these I beg attention. It is to be remarked that the Charge is stated to be published at the request of the Clergy, and the Petition is signed by a numerous body of them to say the least, and ostensibly is the act of them as a body interested in the cause of true religion in this country. As there are, thank God! many in the orders of the Church of
Ireland who are zealous ministers of divine truth, and as they might seem included in the above general body, it is to them particularly that I address myself. I am not going to discuss the merits of the Archbishop's Charge at all. I purposely decline it. My business is with the principles contained and expounded in it. It amounts to a claim on behalf of the Established Church to protection from the civil Sovereign, founded on these two positions -- that the civil Sovereign is bound and has accordingly the right to choose the best religion for his people, and that the Established Church has every character on which such a choice ought to depend; but, in doing this, the Charge gives a statement of the foundation, nature, and office of the Church, in the principles of which no clergyman zealous in his office as a minister of the Church of Christ, could, I submit, acquiesce.
What is the Church of Christ in its purpose and perfection? And our Lord has taught us to ascribe whatever is inconsistent with this to the hand of an enemy. It is a congregation of souls redeemed out of 'this naughty world' by God manifest in the flesh, a people purified to Himself by Christ, purified in the heart by faith, knit together, by the bond of this common faith in Him, to Him their Head sitting at the right hand of the Father, having consequently their conversation (commonwealth) in heaven, from whence they look for the Saviour, the Lord of glory; Philippians 3:20. As a body, therefore, they belong to heaven; there is their portion in the restitution of all things, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. On earth they are, as a people, necessarily subordinate; they are nothing and nobody; their King is in heaven, their interests and constitution heavenly. "My kingdom is not of this world: if it were, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews." As such, consequently, they have no power. The result is, that they are formed into a spiritual community; they are raised, by their Head and centre and source of hope and object of allegiance being in heaven, to be heavenly. They are delivered in spirit out of this present evil world, and become heavenly, spiritual, in their connections, interests, thoughts, and prospects; while their habits on earth are those, by necessary consequence, of pilgrims and strangers, adorning (by consistent humility, gentleness, patience, and kindness) the grace of which they have been made partakers, through
faith which works by love, while they avow and are in their own persons witnesses of the divine dominion. Their personal and common delights are correspondent, and their activities flow from this spring and have their motive and their order in the interests of this kingdom of divine love and grace.
What is the Papacy? Satan's fiction to answer to all this. While men are kept down in the lowest desires of a depraved world, in the bondage of the corrupt affections of a nature alienated from the gift of God, it presents a head on earth, earthly in his interests and in his objects, knitting together in a body, not a people separated out of the world to spiritual objects, but one tied by the closest interests to maintain his earthly supremacy, and with it their own importance upon earth, and in an earthly way; and by this universal and astonishing scheme of antichristianity, which is antitheism, precluding the application of the divine word, the instrument of divine sovereignty, to the souls of men. In short, the system of Popery I look upon as an entire counterpart of the Christian scheme, set up by Satan on the decay of faith to hold its place, uniting men to an earthly head and to each other by those interests from which Christianity delivers, and keeping the world in bondage, instead of leading men to heavenly things out of those interests, to be humbled in the presence of the world's dominion. The members of the papal system will accordingly be found, in their interests, objects, and activities, such as would result from such a system. We know, blessed be God! that, in result, the kingdom of His Son will be glorified in the splendour of its great Head, and the destruction of that antichristian counterpart, by which Satan has deceived the nations under the pretence of Christianity.
Further, what is the ministry of the Church of Christ? They are as ambassadors in Christ's stead, beseeching men to be reconciled to God, and ministering that grace and truth of which the fulness is in Him, according to the wisdom given unto them, gathering that very congregation of souls of which I have spoken, and edifying them when gathered. They are even in the language of an office, which, in its main purport, looked to all being outwardly, at least, within its own cure, "on the one hand, to teach, premonish, to feed, and provide for the Lord's family; on the other, to seek for Christ's sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for His children who are in the midst of this naughty world, that they might be saved through
Christ for ever." Their ministry is coextensive with their Master's grace; their testimony with His claim of dominion over the souls of men. I am not now speaking of the order of its exercise, as between two or more working within their own rule; but as regards the nature of the duty of all, the place which they all occupy as ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God, there is a solemn obligation on them as ministers of Christ; and if there be anything in their present position, or the exigency of the season, which would imprint a special, I do not say an exclusive character, on their office, it is the renewed manifestation of the gospel of Him, whose Spirit and word have commission to the ends of the earth This, while it constitutes their office, constitutes their obligation, gives a decided, formal principle of action, more or less developed, according to the measure of faith. In the execution of this office of ministering the word of grace and truth, they are met by the great system which Satan has raised to blind men's hearts, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine into them. They, therefore, find themselves in collision with the Papacy, as a system of darkness, in collision with its influence on the souls of men; and it becomes their business in consequence to contend against its delusion, and expose the artifices of Satan, by which souls are kept from coming to God by Jesus Christ; and in this they are the ministers of Christ, working in His spiritual strength to the fulfilment of the purposes of His grace.
What then does this Charge propose as the position of the Clergy? It views the Papacy, in its practical operation, exercising that intruding spirit, and proposing that claim, however modified or concealed for the sake of expediency, which necessarily flows from the character which it assumes as holding the authority of Christ, the Pope gerere personam Christi (seeking to impersonate Christ), while it is altogether earthly, and I cannot avoid saying, the instrument and plan of Satan, exercising dominion here by his delusions -- here, the only place where by his delusions he can, under a false name, wear the robe of authority, which he once openly exercised in the plenitude of heathen mythology. It views the Papacy, I say, making inroads by this power in its earthly shape, and calling by seducing arts the kingdom which has been delivered from its direct authority, again to give his power to it. It views it in its results as affecting the State as proposing a dominion
inconsistent with the supremacy of the civil Sovereign. To what does it lead the Clergy thereupon? It holds them up to public view in their relation to the State, as formed upon principles which make them useful to the State, subservient to its purposes, in resisting subjection to this renewed satanic dominion over the world. If counselling the State, this might be all well; if it were a speech in parliament, it might have its place; on temporal grounds its arguments might be strong, why the State should uphold the interests of the Established Church. With this I have nothing to do. It presents itself as specifically calling on the Clergy to recognise their own due position. It is on this ground I enter on the consideration of it. And what place does it give them? The result of the whole is this -- they are harmonised with the State and subservient to its supremacy for the effectuation of its moral government in order to the happiness of the subject people; and it is its adequacy to this, as being loyal, social, Protestant, etc., which is proposed as its claim on the Sovereign for his support, while it is (being thus embodied with the State) harmless, as not affecting any independent authority. In result, in order to its claim of support, it must be subservient to the interests of the civil Sovereign, its movements and conduct must be governed by the interests of the Sovereign to this extent; in a word, the Clergy in their office become "instituted orders of the State," and the ecclesiastical supremacy is made to consist, not only in the Sovereign's duty, and therefore right, to choose what he deems a true religion for his people, and thereon be a judge of faith so far, but further, in having the ordering of the ministration under his control, and being the head of discipline. In one sense the former part of this may be true, but, on the principles of the Charge, is a mere substitution of the civil Sovereign for the Pope, such as Henry VIII introduced, and which made the German Protestants refuse to ally themselves with him. And in truth he is an illustration of the words of the Charge; he threw off the supremacy of the Pope in the assertion of his own supremacy as Sovereign, and chose what he deemed to be a true religion for his people.
I quote one passage: "The Sovereign cannot prescribe in favour of a system that maintains a spiritual supremacy independent of civil government," pages 29, 30. There is a spiritual supremacy independent of civil government, the spiritual supremacy of Christ, of which the Clergy are ministers
-- not an earthly dominion, but the very contrary. But when our Lord was brought before Pilate and charged with being a king, He did not affirm the harmlessness of His religion, by stating its amalgamation of interests with the State, or that it was merely "another aspect of the same body," but unqualifiedly assented to the position, "witnessed a good confession," that it was a kingdom, but not of this world.
The statement of the Charge is in plain hostility to the view and judgment of our Lord, when Satan was endeavouring to bring Him into jeopardy by the very imputation.+ But the Scripture is as plain as possible; it presents God claiming in the Person of the Son the homage of spiritual faith. So that, "he that believeth not should be damned," for he rejects divine authority claiming obedience to the faith. It presents civil Sovereigns instituted for the purpose of controlling outward evil, to use its own words, "for the punishment of evil-doers, and for the praise of them that do well" -- so that they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation, for they resist the same divine authority. And thus viewed, there is no possibility of collision; for the ministers who claim obedience to the faith from all nations are the ministers of the same authority, and whose business is the claim of subjection to that authority from which the other flows. Neither God, I speak with reverence, nor His Spirit in His ministers, is divided against Himself, and he who denies the authority of the Sovereign in the things which belong to Caesar cannot be speaking by the Spirit of that God who gave the Sovereign that authority, or He would be divided against Himself. The truth is, the apprehension of the heavenly kingdom perfectly clears the whole matter -- it has no right place in the world but tribulation and trial, or its casual rest is of the supreme mercy.
+Wetstein mentions a hymn,
But to give up the rightful dominion of the Son of God, in order to avoid the imputation of seeking civil power, or rather to preserve ourselves from the inroads of one who seeks it on apostate grounds, is surely inconsistent, I do not mean in intention but in fact, with fidelity to the glory of the great Head of the Church, humbled for our sakes, and resulting (where taken as a principle of conduct) either in opposition, however mitigated or modified, or at least in the dread of the spiritual energies by which that kingdom of eternal blessing is maintained and promoted. Does not the system of Christian faith "assume the inherent right to establish itself in every country?" Is it not, by authority more than human, "essentially supreme in spiritual matters over all?" Are not both "prince and people bound to submit to its mandates, as to the great Head of the Christian Church?" And are not "they who refuse to do so rebels against a rightful sovereignty?" Are not all in truth and reality the subjects of its sway, whether they will acknowledge it or not? And am I, because Satan has imitated this in an apostate earthly dominion carried on under its name, to give this up (could Satan wish better? and to dwindle Christianity into a system harmonised with a particular community, for the purposes of its moral happiness? Is not the great authority of Christian faith as much relinquished by this as by anything else? It is surely, for this is the result -- a strange way of opposing Satan's wiles, to give up the claim and possession by which alone he can be overcome. The apostate dominion of the Papacy is not to be met therefore on the part of the Clergy, by calling the aid of the State to resist its temporal dominion, but by their overcoming the strong man armed as the active, forward ministers of Him who is stronger than he; not by waiting till they are attacked, as if their interests were the thing in question; but now that God has been pleased to shed+ forth His Spirit, in their due places ministering the spiritual sword, by which they are called upon to deliver poor fellow-sinners from thraldom, going, and actively opening men's eyes, and turning them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive the remission of sins, and an inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith in the Lord of glory. If this be not the place of the Clergy, what place have they? If they are not bound to establish Christianity wherever the Lord opens a
+I do not alter anything, though the expression is incorrect.
door, what are they for? Or, are we to rest in that position which Dean Tillotson, on reflection, wept over, "that no man has a right to establish Christianity in any country, without the consent of the civil government, except he had miracles to support him?" This, I really think to be the genuine result of the principles of the Charge, and indeed to flow from the right of a Sovereign to choose the religion he deems best, in the sense the Charge gives it: in one sense I have said it is his duty. My meaning is this -- where the divine authority promulgates the faith of Christ, i.e., reveals the Son of God, a submission to Him is an obligation resulting as necessarily as that of obedience to God generally revealed, and the Monarch, or civil Sovereign, is as much bound to recognise it as the dominion of God Himself; and thus, if this be called a duty to choose a religion, he certainly has his choice, being founded on a proposal of obedience to faith in God, similar to that on which the salvation of an individual depends; but all this is a consistent assertion of the dominion of Christ, not an escape from it. But I have said, that the placing the Church in this relinquishment of the high calling of God does practically tend to stop its active exertions; indeed, it has no pretence for it else. They may be ministers of moral order, as they have been too often degraded to; but their active, zealous exertions, as Christian ministers, would be intolerable, if Christ had not committed such a ministry to them. It is true, it is brought to soul as an offer of grace, because God is not only supreme, but supreme love; but while they, in their conduct, neither against the law of the Jews, nor the temple, nor yet against Caesar, offend anything at all, they bear a direct authoritative message from God, to every one who has a conscience by which he is subject to God. They may, in consequence, be brought to suffer from those who reject their Master, and the divine authority; they may shew their innocence when called to answer thereupon as troublers of the common peace; but this done, their proper vindication is, when He shall appear for whose name they have suffered: here they appear but as doing well and suffering for it.
But what is the result of such a position as to the Clergy? They confine themselves within the bounds of social order whose interests they support. They protest against the encroachments of the adverse powers, which would upset the system to which they are attached, and themselves along with
it, if it had its way; but there they stop. They cannot honestly attack Satan's kingdom; for to do that, and then cry out because they are abused by his agents, seems to me unworthy conduct, inconsistent with the honour of, and their integrity to, Him (an integrity manifested by conformity flowing from the influence of His Spirit) who was hated, persecuted, spoken all manner of evil against, for the very same reason. It may be the interest of a body who are maintaining worldly order to keep up their worldly credit, in order to that general influence which will cement society, and which is exactly the office which the Charge proposes to the Clergy. But, with this in view, it is manifest they must let Satan alone; for do they expect to attack him, and him to hold his tongue, and leave them in credit, if he can help it, and suffer the prey to be snatched out of his hands? It is therefore expressly the business of a minister of God the Saviour to approve himself such, in honour and dishonour, evil report and good report, whether Christ, or they, for His sake, be blasphemed on the enemy's part, or on the believer's part be glorified; and it seems to be a direct flight from following Christ in this, to claim a refuge from the persecution and dishonour which attend His name; and this is the result (O consider it! brethren) of attaching yourselves to a system, to which worldly credit is necessary, in order to maintain its influence, or whose members at least identify themselves with the honour and security of the world. A civil Sovereign may indeed afford a refuge in such a case, but it can be only by the desertion of that reproach which will ever attend the name of Christ when it is brought into the trial of the enemy. I cast no reproach on those who look for it, who do not (let me be forgiven for so speaking) see it with the eye of faith: ill would it become me, and most far from my feeling to do so. I only entreat those who believe, who in principle do judge with me, who esteem the reproach of Christ, who look to the ministry of His kingdom, and speak the words of His blessed grace, or those who may be willing to weigh them, to weigh these things. I write for them. I have, I trust under the guidance of the Spirit, discussed these principles merely as they affect their conduct; but I say, it does suppose (I mean, recourse to the civil Sovereign for protection as a body; for remonstrance against the unjust exercise of the magistratorial power is another thing), that they confine themselves to a ministry of moral order, which will be found never
to go beyond this world, or to be of faith, of real subjection to Christ; as contrasted to seeking a people for Christ from the dominion of Satan, as Christ's servants.
And here I am led to the Petition, which, as well as the Charge, bears me out; the latter calling it "manly protests," which is exactly the limits of self-defence as a national, and therefore earthly constituted body; the former, by suggesting, as the very ground of the application for protection, their "confining themselves to the quiet discharge of their proper duties." The language of the Petition bears out, in a way I had not myself previously adverted to, the view I had taken of the principles of the Charge to be accurate. It shews that the petitioning Clergy, "influenced by a love of peace, and by a desire of avoiding even the appearance of political discussion, have been hitherto withheld from approaching your Honourable House, against the hostility and calumny with which they and their religion have been, for a length of time, systematically assailed, under the pretence of seeking civil and religious liberty, but with the real design of obtaining powers subversive of both, and with the hope of overturning the established religion, by the defamation of its Clergy, and the misrepresentation of their faith. While any doubt could remain that such designs and such hopes existed, your Petitioners were desirous, though exposed to daily vexations, and insults, and injuries, to submit in silence, and endeavour, by the quiet discharge of their proper duties, to soften the violence of their enemies, although they had but too good reason to be convinced, that these their enemies were such from being enemies to their Church."
This is clearly a Petition for protection against defamation of the Clergy, as tending to destroy the Establishment; laying as a ground for it their having confined themselves to the quiet discharge of their proper duties. Either this means their duties as members of the Establishment, which in fact it does mean, and then the result, especially when we join it with the Charge, is to confine the whole energy of the Clergy by the measure of its consistency with their relation to the State; or else leaving it open to the Clergy to use their utmost endeavours for the conversion of souls to God from blindness and error, and then, when interfered with, which we may admit, it appeals for protection from this, on this ground, that they were only quietly discharging their proper duties in their volunteer
efforts in the cause of delivering men from antichristian darkness. Surely they ought to count the cost before they engage in such an enterprise, and not, when they begin to feel the brunt of the enemies' violence, to apply to extrinsic aid, alleging they were only quietly discharging their proper duties. I entreat those who value the representation which God gives in the scripture, of the state, refuge, and resources of His Church and people, as owned by Him, to compare that (I could not bring myself to do it) with the position here given them. I do own, when I consider this whole matter, and the bearing of scripture upon it, connected with circumstances on which I will not venture to touch, I could weep at men whom I love and respect, having unwittingly put their hands to this Petition.
In short, I do feel that ministers of God are called upon to entertain the question -- is it our duty or calling, according to the gift bestowed upon us, to enter into conflict with the power of darkness? or do we believe that the Roman Catholic system in this country is a manifestation of it? If they do, let them fairly look to it; and count whether with ten thousand they are able to meet him that cometh against them with twenty thousand; or else let them send embassies of peace: if not, let them hold themselves to their own flocks, and instruct them as well as they can, if they are allowed by God to do so; but the fact is, that they have come forward -- rather let us say, that God has manifested His light in the world, and I do feel something of the applicability of that sentence, "He that is not with me is against me." But if this be so, surely their place is the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ -- their business, to endure hardness as good soldiers of His. This patience is one of the characteristics of His servants, a necessary one in the conflict with darkness. One peculiar snare stands in their way in the present times, by which Satan would mix and so destroy the proper character of this work, one which his own subtlety has provided -- this is that, having mixed Roman Catholic interests with this world and so given other men an interest in this world against them in preserving their freedom, he has added a political question to the religious one: from this snare in its broad lines the Clergy have kept themselves free. I propose to them, whether in a weaker shape apparently, though in my mind a worse one, as affirming themselves as a body acting on their own interests, and claiming alliance with
the State to support them, such a claim of protection be not the same; that is, whether it leave them at perfect liberty to pursue, according to the wisdom of God, the guidance of the Spirit, in the energies that are mercifully exhibiting in this now highly favoured country. As far as my recollection goes, they will find nothing scriptural to bear them out. The ministers of Christ go on steadily then in their own course, as bearing God's commission, and suffer with Him, whom they have no reason to expect to be above finding their solace in sympathy with Him and one another, and the consciousness that herein they were partakers of the sufferings of Christ, and workers together even with God. Why should my beloved and honoured brethren (actuated, I fear not to say, by the same spirit) choose a lower place, choose not to have the fellowship of His sufferings? I know they would not -- I persuade myself, at least, they will listen with candour to a very obscure brother, in suggesting the inconsistency of the principles I have been considering with this willingness, and the simplicity of faith in Him. The instances of remonstrance in Scripture are where one commissioned with the civil sword has exceeded his power by injustice against an innocent person, who bore the spiritual commission of the same master -- a marked confirmation of, and not an exception to, the principles I have suggested.
Let me be permitted to recur to the general grounds on which I have gone -- that the Papacy is the organised system of Satan for keeping men's souls, where the light of Christianity had entered, as far as he possibly can, under the same bondage in which he held them under heathenism. I shall not enlarge upon this view, though full of interest, as I feel at liberty to use it as true -- that it is a part of this scheme to hold nations in subjection to it. There may be therefore a twofold opposition to it; one, of the civil Sovereigns to the claim of supremacy in any shape; the other, the ministration of the word, which is God's instrument in pulling down the strongholds of Satan; but it is impossible for the minister of the latter to claim the protection of the former, on the ground of his interest in supporting him, and remain the unshackled servant of Jesus Christ.
I respectfully suggest, therefore, the double ground of the present wisdom of faith, and the consideration of the principles on which these things rest, as both leading to the conclusion, that those who have the cause of God at heart should, while
they fulfil the duty in which God has cast them, unless called specially to any peculiar work, keep themselves unequivocally free to minister His grace, according as God shall give them opportunity and strength. Surely God calls them to it, calls them by the work that He has wrought, to be exceedingly wise, lest they should in any way put a hindrance to themselves. They may be sure that Satan will try every method to divert the matter from the application of that word, which goes forth with power to the very foundation and heart of his kingdom. I do earnestly and affectionately call upon the servants of God, trusting they will not count me presumptuous, that whenever they are not simply ministering the word, under the guidance of the Spirit of wisdom, they should, as specially bound by His peculiar grace to us at present, weigh the bearings of every act with patience and wisdom. That they have done so in many instances, I doubt not. It becomes members of the Establishment, to whom Christ and the interests of His people are the centre and rule of affection and judgment, to exercise discerning wisdom on this side as well as others; because on this side, however advantageous to the Church as against evil, under divine Providence, they are in connection with, or at least brought where there may a claim on them be made by, what has no common principle of action. And especially now that so many who so long sat in darkness are coming forward to see what these new doctrines are, is it incumbent on them to present themselves as ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. I have stated the principles on which my views of the whole case are founded, to which, though I believe them just, I attach no great importance; and I have ventured -- what is much nearer to my heart -- to urge the present work of faith, not as though I were an adviser (for I know how many are every way before me in the Lord), but as one, however unworthy, who has obtained like precious faith with them, and therefore enters into all the interests which they are desirous of promoting. If I have erred in any matter of judgment, I am willing to be corrected; and I can only trust, that as I have undertaken it with the single desire of ministering to the strength of those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, if it conduce to this end, I shall feel deeply the gainer: to their love I beg to commend myself, perfectly, as I trust, united with them, striving together for the faith of that blessed Gospel which has been committed to us.
After all, what am I contending for? That those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, the desire of whose heart is to fulfil the ministry which they have received, to testify the Gospel of the grace of God, and who will feel that conformity to their Master will be the order in which this testimony will be effectual, should not be precluded from such little share of the fellowship of His sufferings as may reach them in their present circumstances, and may stamp them with the Christian character. To my mind, and I suppose to theirs on consideration, the judgment of faith is clear on the subject; and I would solemnly and anxiously urge upon them, that the adoption of the principles contained in the Charge and Petition (for they will be found one thing on consideration of them together) will preclude them from coming forward on Christian ground, and having their proper share in using this blessed opportunity for the delivering souls -- I might justly say the world -- from the power of darkness, and setting up the kingdom of the Son of God, as far as it is permitted to us to do it before His appearing, on its own stable and sure foundation of faith in the Lord of glory.
I will conclude with one remark. I think it will be found that practically a right faith mainly consists in seeing the glory of Christ in His humiliation -- I mean, that by which a redeemed soul lives in the flesh. The Church has its being and character in this faith -- "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." he formed it that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing -- not to the world. Glory in the world is essentially contrary to faith. This latter character of glory in the world is the character stamped on the Papacy: they even avow and affirm it: their glorying is in their shame, minding earthly things: they evidence themselves in consequence to be Satan's church, whose theatre is the world. The very essence of the grounds they take is setting aside faith. They make the Church, make faith, unnecessary. They will have the inheritance, like their elder brethren, the Jews, after the flesh, which is not God's way -- now more deeply culpable in it, for that the nature of the inheritance is declared. But with what comfort or consistency can we, in the sight of God, when we have been delivered from this terrible delusion, oppose its progress, or pretend to deliver others from it, while we in another shape are seeking, in the least degree, the objects
which are not of faith, which give the character we reprobate in them, or seek refuge from the accompaniments of faith? Our reliance, then, brethren, must be on the promises; and the consistent exhortation from God to us is, "Thou standest by faith: be not high-minded, but fear." There is a constant tendency to depart from this principle: it is not a principle of ease till the time of our rest comes, when the hope of faith shall appear. If the kings of the earth shall take us up, we may thank God for the goodness of His providence; but let us not attach ourselves to them, or fall into their principles, but let us be peculiarly watchful that it leave us what it found us-an humble, holy, self-denying people, trusting in the name of the Lord; still (while we own and accept the present blessing, as honouring our Master's name as well as comforting us) living on what is our sole strength, the faith of the Son of God.
Affectionate confidence, mixed with fear, has made me bold to offer these thoughts to my brethren. I remain their affectionate brother and servant in the Lord.
POSTSCRIPT. -- The following circumstances seem to me connected with the above considerations, and will assist in conveying my views.
The oath of supremacy is proposed by the Archbishop to the converts, which, instead of opening the door of Christ to the soul in bondage, makes the admission into the Establishment a necessary condition: and I would suggest, that such a measure is exceedingly analogous to the conduct which created such difficulty at Antioch, on the admission of the Gentiles, and puts a stumbling-block in the way of a weak believer. I own myself unable to understand the fitness and still less the necessity of such a step. It is a closing of the door of Christ against weak souls; and is, on the principles of the Charge, a pledge on the part of the convert to the religion which the civil Sovereign may choose for his people. While it is on the part of the Clergy a natural consequence of the Charge and Petition; for if they propose themselves as candidates for the favour of the civil government, in order to obtain its protection, and then seek for its aid in the character in which they have proposed themselves, it is at once their interest, and I must add, their obligation to support its interests in their ministry, and bind others to the same system: but how will this consist with their duty to Christ, and the souls which He has purchased with His own blood, and gathering them for Him? Further,
the admission is "into the true Catholic Church, established in these realms." This ends in the same thing; for, instead of bringing them to graft them into the vine, the liberty and security of Christ, to pledge their souls to that which (if the civil Sovereign should choose wrong) would be Popery, and is in fact a denial of union with Christ being the vital principle and bond of the true Church, that general assembly and Church of the first-born whose names are written in heaven, which is the true Church, the fulness of Him, that filleth all in all. Here is true catholicity, and to affirm it of anything else is Popery, however modified: and Protestantism is the manifestation of faith in the word, when Satan has hidden the true Church, the assembly of believers, in a system of this world; and such a system, in a modified shape, is that maintained in the Charge.
The sermon of the Archbishop, as reported, speaks of "the scriptures as rightly interpreted": this, I conceive, is an unperceived acquiescence in Popery; for if there be an interpreter, he must, if anything, be an authorised one; which is Popery. The assertion of an interpreter is exactly contrary to the testimony of the Spirit, manifested in scripture and asserted by Protestantism, that the Scriptures are able to make wise unto salvation through faith; and to give light and understanding to the simple; so that men thereby become wiser than their teachers. But it will be said, You discard a ministry. God forbid. I look upon it as so much as is committed by the Holy Ghost of the offices of the Redeemer to men; but the system against which I remonstrate puts them in the wrong place. That of which they have a portion is all revealed to faith by the same Spirit in the Scriptures. Their order is, therefore, whether in their evangelical or episcopal characters, the representatives of the Apostle of our profession and Bishop of our souls, to preach the truth of Christ, according to their proportion of faith; and then those who have the Scriptures, and receive the word, will search whether these things are so, and become wise unto salvation. In their episcopal character they will guide the conduct of believers, who will again find their assurance and security in the Scriptures, which make the man of God perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
"That they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may be one in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." -- John 17:21.
"And ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their Lord," Luke 12:36.
The writer of these pages (he trusts, not the author of them) would add whatever God might afford him in ministering to the progress of the Church through the various exercises to which its faith is exposed. He cannot doubt that much of the moral truth on which the following considerations depend has been realised in the minds of believers, of students of the divine word; but he has felt in the little communion, though great intercourse, which such have with each other, that the expression of these thoughts might, by the blessing of God, direct the attention of believers to, and more explicitly manifest to the Church from the divine word, its just objects; and consequently, by their reception, determine its character and conduct; ensuring, under God's blessing, more consistency of operation; stablish, strengthen, settle it in its own hopes, and make it exhibit with more clearness and power the grace of God to the world; lead believers to more explicit reliance on the operations of the divine Spirit, and to look less to the plans of men and human co-operations, or what will be found in the end to be human interests. While the aims and purposes of believers are very mixed in their nature, and fall far below the standard for which God has gathered them, and which He proposes as the influential object of their faith and consequently motive of their conduct, division, and sectarianism are, even in the mercy of God's providence, the necessary result, whether it assume the character of Establishment or of Dissent. I am supposing here, of course, that the great truths of the gospel are the professed faith of the churches, as they are in all the genuine Protestant churches. For the just consequence of the reception of gospel facts by faith and its end in man is the purification of the desires in love -- a life to Him who died for us and rose again, a life of hope in His glory. To suppose therefore unity where the life of the Church falls entirely short
+Dublin, 1828.
of the just consequences of its faith, is to suppose that the Spirit of God would acquiesce in the moral inconsistency of degenerate man, and that God would be satisfied that His Church should sink below the glory of its great Head, without even a testimony that He was dishonoured by it. In truth it has never been so: judgments from without for a good while marked His displeasure while it was sinking, and when it was utterly sunk in apostasy, He raised His witnesses, who should sigh and cry for the abominations that were done in it; who, in much darkness of spiritual understanding, bore testimony against the moral corruption that had overwhelmed the Church; and who, in the acknowledgment of the redemption by the Lord Jesus out of this present evil world, testified the apostasy of the professing church. When it pleased God to raise this testimony into the place of public sanction, while doctrinal truth (we may believe) was fully developed for the foundation and edification of the faith of believers, it by no means followed that the Church thereupon emerged wholly in spirit and power from the depression, and assumed the character which it has in the purpose of its Author, and became an adequate and distinctive witness of His thoughts to the world. Such indeed, however blessed, as we are all bound most thankfully to acknowledge the Reformation to have been, was not the case: it was much and manifestly mixed with human agency. And though the exhibition of the word, as that on which the soul could rest itself, was graciously afforded, still there was much of the old system which remained in the constitution of the churches, and which was in no way the result of the development of the mind of Christ, by setting up the light and authority of the word. This gave to the state and practice of the Church (whatever the excellence of individuals may have been) a character which many discerned to be short of that which was acceptable to God: and the authority of the word having been recognised as the basis of the Reformation, many sought to follow it, as they supposed, more perfectly. Hence arose all the branches of Nonconformity and Dissent, which prevailed when the Spirit of God was poured out, in proportion to the secularity or alienation from God of the body publicly recognised as the Church. For it must be observed that, since the time when Popery prevailed over the nations till lately, among those who have taken a share in the revival of religion, that has in general been called
the Church which has been received as such by the rulers of this world, not those who were delivered from the power of darkness, and translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son; who were come to the "general assembly and church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven." These observations are in some measure applicable to all the great national Protestant bodies since the outward form and constitution became so prominent a matter, which was not the case originally while deliverance from Babylon was in question.
From all this has flowed an anomalous and trying consequence; namely, that the true Church of God has no avowed communion at all. There are, I suppose, none of its members who would not now acknowledge, that individuals of the children of God are to be found in all the different denominations, who profess the same pure faith; but where is their bond of union? It is not that unbelieving professors are mixed with the people of God in their communion, but that the bond of communion is not the unity of the people of God, but really (in point of fact) their differences.
The bonds of nominal union are such as separate the children of God from each other; so that, instead of (itself an imperfect state) unbelievers being found mixed up with them, the people of God are found as individuals, among bodies of professing Christians, joined in communion upon other and different grounds; not in fact as the people of God at all. The truth of this, I think, cannot be denied, and surely it is a very extraordinary state for the Church to be in. I think the study of the history of the Church (bearing in mind what the true Church of God is) will enable us to account for it. Such is not my present purpose, as writing merely on the principle of that inquiring, strengthening character, in which they that feared the Lord spake often one to another. But it must surely form a practical matter of great importance to the judgment of those who, loving Jerusalem -- "it pitieth them to see her in the dust" -- those who "wait for the consolation of Israel." I do believe, indeed, that there will be a gradual development of the people of God, by a separation from the world of which many of them perhaps now think little. The Lord will be present with His people in the hour of their temptation, and hide them secretly in the tabernacle of His presence; but it is not my purpose to follow presumptuously my own thoughts about this. We may remark that the people
of God have found, since the increased outpouring of His Spirit,+ a sort of remedy for this disunion (manifestly an imperfect, though not an untrue one), in the Bible Society, and in Missionary exertions; which gave -- the one, a sort of vague unity in the common acknowledgment of the word, which, if investigated, will be found to have partially inherent in it, though not recognised in its power, the germ of true unity -- the other, an unity of desire and action, which tended in thought towards that kingdom, the want of the power of which was felt. And in this they found some relief for that sense of want, which the workings of the divine Spirit had produced in them.
From the state of things of which I have spoken have resulted other efforts, either of the energies of knowledge, or the desires of spiritual life, exercising themselves, often to the peril of the individual, in (as it is conceived) mistaken efforts at producing a separation or reunion of believers, by taking a ground of their separation quite distinct from ordinary dissent as much as from Establishment. The spirit and desire in which much of this was carried on, was, doubtless, in many instances the genuine cravings of a mind actuated by the Spirit of God; but it has often been defective, in not practically waiting upon His will; and though doubtless affording a part of that testimony to what the Church was, which was consistent with the infirmity of our nature and the actual position of the Church, yet, even when of the highest order, it has failed for the reason mentioned, as in fact it ran before the general progress of the divine counsels. But those strivings of the Spirit in us (for such I believe them to be) are surely deserving of the serious attention of the people of God. This painful sense of our immense distance from that genuine exhibition of the purpose of God in His church, this looking after His power and glory, ought to lead us to thankfulness that He still thus deals with us, and to receive it as a pledge of that faithfulness which shall make the people of God, in due time, shine in the glory of the Lord. It should lead us also assiduously to seek what is the mind of Christ as to the path of believers in the present day; that it may be, though not exactly according to their own desires, yet perfectly according to what His present will concerning them is. We know that it was the purpose of God in Christ to gather in one all things in heaven and on
+I leave this and other incorrect expressions unchanged.
earth; reconciled unto Himself in Him; and that the church should be, though necessarily imperfect in His absence, yet by the energy of the Spirit the witness of this on earth, by gathering the children of God which were scattered abroad. Believers know that all who are born of the Spirit have substantial unity of mind, so as to know each other, and love each other, as brethren. But this is not all, even if it were fulfilled in practice, which it is not; for they were so to be all one, as that the world might know that Jesus was sent of God: in this we must all confess our sad failure. I shall not attempt so much to propose measures here for the children of God, as to establish healthful principles: for it is manifest to me, that it must flow from the growing influence of the Spirit of God and His unseen teaching; but we may observe what are positive hindrances, and in what that union consisted.
In the first place, it is not a formal union of the outward professing bodies that is desirable; indeed it is surprising that reflecting Protestants should desire it: far from doing good, I conceive it would be impossible that such a body could be at all recognised as the church of God. It would be a counterpart to Romish unity; we should have the life of the church and the power of the word lost, and the unity of spiritual life utterly excluded. Whatever plans may be in the order of Providence, we can only act upon the principles of grace; and true unity is the unity of the Spirit, and it must be wrought by the operation of the Spirit. In the great darkness of the Church hitherto, outward division has been a main support, not only of zeal (as is very generally admitted), but also of the authority of the word, which is instrumentally the life of the church; and the Reformation consisted not, as has been commonly said, in the institution of a pure form of church, but in setting up the word, and the great Christian foundation and corner stone of "Justification by faith," in which believers might find life. But further, if the view that has been taken of the state of the church be correct, we may adjudge that he is an enemy to the work of the Spirit of God who seeks the interests of any particular denomination; and that those who believe in "the power and coming of the Lord Jesus Christ" ought carefully to keep from such a spirit; for it is drawing back the church to a state occasioned by ignorance and non-subjection to the word, and making a duty of its worst and antichristian results. This is a most subtle and prevailing
mental disease, "he followeth not us," even when men are really Christians. Let the people of God see if they be not hindering the manifestation of the 'church by this spirit. I believe there is scarcely a public act of Christian men (at any rate of the higher orders, or of those who are active in the nominal churches), which is not infected with this; but its tendency is manifestly hostile to the spiritual interests of the people of God, and the manifestation of the glory of Christ. Christians are little aware how this prevails in their minds; how they seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ; and how it dries up the springs of grace and spiritual communion; how it precludes that order to which blessing is attached-the gathering together in the Lord's name. No meeting, which is not framed to embrace all the children of God in the full basis of the kingdom of the Son, can find the fulness of blessing, because it does not contemplate it -- because its faith does not embrace it.
Where two or three are gathered together in His name, His name is recorded there for blessing; because they are met in the fulness of the power of the unchangeable interests of that everlasting kingdom in which it has pleased the glorious Jehovah to glorify Himself, and to make His name and saving health known in the Person of the Son, by the power of the Spirit. In the name of Christ, therefore, they enter (in whatever measure of faith) into the full counsels of God, and are "fellow-workers under God." Thus whatever they ask is done, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. But the very foundation on which these promises rest is broken up, and its consistency destroyed, by bonds of communion not formed on the scope of the purposes of God in Christ. I say not, indeed, that they may not find a feeble measure of spiritual food; which, though generally partial in its character, may be suited to strengthen their personal hope of eternal life. But the glory of the Lord is very near the believing soul, and, in proportion as we seek it, will personal blessing be found. It puts me in mind indeed (as all doubtless have some separate portion of the form of the church) of those who parted the Saviour's garments among them; while that inner vest, which could not be rended, which was inseparably one in its nature, was cast lots for whose it should be; but in the meanwhile, the name of Him, the presence of the power of whose life would unite them all in appropriate order, is left exposed and
dishonoured. Indeed, I fear that these have fallen too much into the hands of those who care not for Him, and that the Lord will never clothe Himself with them again, viewed in their present state. Indeed, it could not be when He appears in His glory. I say it not in presumption or dislike (for the reproach of it is a grievous burden, it is an humbling, most afflicting thought): but that second temple, which had been raised by the mercy of God after the long Babylonish captivity, we have learned to trust in too much as "the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these"; we have been haughty because of the Lord's holy mountain; we have looked at it as adorned with goodly stones and gifts; and have ceased to look to the Lord of the temple -- have ceased almost to walk by faith, or to have communion in the hope of the return of the messenger of the covenant to be the glory of this latter house. The unclean spirit of idolatry may have been purged out; but the great question still remains, Is there the effectual presence of the Spirit of the Lord, or is it merely empty, swept and garnished? If we have been at all blessed, are we not disregarding Him from whom it came, by pride, and self-complacency, and seeking to turn it to our own, instead of going on to His, glory? Let us then pass, brethren beloved of the Lord -- ye who love Him in sincerity, and would rejoice in His voice -- to the practical exigency of our present situation. Let us weigh His mind concerning us. The Lord has made known His purposes in Him, and how those purposes are effected. "He hath made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself, that in the dispensation of the fulness of times, he should gather together in one all things in Christ, whether they be things in heaven, or things on earth, even in him, in whom we also have received an inheritance" -- in one and in Christ. In Him alone therefore can we find this unity; but the blessed word (who can be thankful enough for it? will inform us further. It is as to its earthly members "gathering together in one, the children of God who are scattered abroad." And how is this? "That one man should die for them." As our Lord in the vision of the fruit of the travail of His soul declares, "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will drawn all men unto me: this he said signifying what death he should die." It is then Christ who will draw -- will draw to Himself (and nothing short of or less than this can produce unity, "He that gathereth not
with him, scattereth"); and draw to Himself by being lifted up from the earth. In a word, we find His death is the centre of communion till His coming again, and in this rests the whole power of truth. Accordingly, the outward symbol and instrument of unity is the partaking of the Lord's supper -- for we being many are one "bread, one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread." And what does Paul declare to be the true intent and testimony of that rite? That whensoever "ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come." Here then are found the character and life of the church, that into which it is called, that in which the truth of its existence subsists, and in which alone is true unity. It is showing forth the Lord's death, by the efficiency of which they were gathered, and which is the fruitful seed of the Lord's own glory; which is indeed the gathering of His body, "the fulness of him that filleth all in all"; and shewing it forth in the assurance of His coming, "when he shall come to be glorified in his saints and to be admired in all them that believe." Accordingly the essence and substance of unity, which will appear in glory at His coming, is conformity to His death, by which that glory was all wrought. And it will be found in result, that conformity to His death will be our frame for glory with Him at His appearing; as the apostle desires, "that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable to his death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." Have we faith in these things? How shall we shew it? By acting on these directions of our Lord, which are founded on His divine knowledge of the objects of faith. What follows upon our Lord's declaration, in the view of His glory, that it must be by His death?" He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world, shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve me let him follow me, and where I am, there shall also my servant be; if any man serve me, him will my Father honour." The servant is he who is to be honoured. If we would be servants, we must be so in following Him who died for us. And in following Him, our honour will be to be with Him in "his glory, and the glory of his Father, and of the holy angels."
It is matter of great thankfulness that, notwithstanding the scattering of the church, by its becoming of this world as a body, and its most imperfect revival by the discovery of the
free hope of glory, believers have a way before them marked in the word; that, if we are not given to see as yet the glory of the children of God, the path of that glory in the wilderness should be revealed to us. We are assured, in doctrine, that the death of the Lord, in whom the free gift came, is the sole foundation on which a soul is built for eternal glory. In truth it is only to believers in this that I address myself. Our duty as believers is to be witnesses of what we believe. "Ye," says the God of the Jews by the prophet Isaiah, "are my witnesses," in His challenge to the false gods; and as Christ is the faithful and true Witness, such ought the church to be. "Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, that ye may shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light." Of what then is the church to be a witness -- against the idolatrous glory of the world? Even of that glory into which Christ has risen, by their practical conformity to His death; of their true belief in the cross, by their being crucified to the world, and the world to them. Unity, the unity of the church, to which "the Lord added daily such as should be saved" (the saved+), was when none said anything was his own, and "their conversation was in heaven"; for they could not be divided in the common hope of that. It knit men's hearts together by necessity. The Spirit of God has left it upon record, that division began about the goods of the church, even in their best use, on the part of those interested in them; for there could be division, there could be selfish interests. Am I desiring believers to correct the churches? I am beseeching them to correct themselves, by living up, in some measure, to the hope of their calling. I beseech them to shew their faith in the death of the Lord Jesus, and their boast in the glorious assurance which they have obtained by it, by conformity to it -- to shew their faith in His coming, and practically to look for it by a life suitable to desires fixed upon it. Let them testify against the secularity and blindness of the church; but let them be consistent in their own conduct. "Let your moderation be known to all men."
While the spirit of the world prevails (and how much it prevails, I am persuaded few believers are at all aware) spiritual union cannot subsist. Few believers are at all aware how the spirit which gradually opened the door to the dominion of apostasy, still sheds its wasting and baneful influence over the
+I believe the Authorised Version right; Acts 2:47.
professing church. They think, because they were delivered from its secular dominion, that they are free from the practical spirit which gave rise to it; and because God has wrought much deliverance, therefore they are to be content. Nothing could be a testimony of a greater alienation of the mind from the Spirit of promise, which, having the prize of the high calling of God set before it, ever presses towards it, ever seeks conformity to death, that it may attain to the resurrection of the dead. It waits for the Lord, and, beholding His glory in unveiled face, is "changed into the same image, from glory to glory." For, let us ask, is the church of God as believers would have it? Do we not believe that it was, as a body, utterly departed from Him? Is it restored so that He would be glorified in it at His appearing? Is the union of believers such as He marks to be their peculiar characteristic? Are there not unremoved hindrances? Is there not a practical spirit of worldliness in essential variance with the true termini of the gospel -- the death and coming again of the Lord Jesus as Saviour? Can believers say they act on the precept of their moderation being known unto all men? I do believe that God is working, by means and in ways little thought of, in preparing the way of the Lord, and making His paths straight -- doing by a mixture of providence and testimony the work of Elias. I am persuaded that He will put men to shame exactly in the things in which they have boasted. I am persuaded that He will stain the pride of human glory, "and the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of man shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day; for the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up, and he shall be brought low; and upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan, and upon all the high mountains, and upon all the hills that are lifted up, and upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall, and upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures. And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of man shall be made low; and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day, and the idols he shall utterly abolish; and they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which
they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats; to go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth."
But there is a practical part for believers to act. They can lay their hand upon many things in themselves practically inconsistent with the power of that day -- things which shew that their hope is not in it -- conformity to the world, which shews that the cross has not its proper glory in their eyes. These things let them weigh. These are but desultory suggestions; but are they the testimony of the Spirit or not? Let them be tried by the word. Let the almighty doctrine of the cross be testified to all men, and let the eye of the believer be directed to the coming of the Lord. But let us not defraud our souls of all the glory which accompanied that hope, by setting our affections on things which will be proved to have had their origin in this world, and to end in it. Will they abide His coming?
Further, unity is the glory of the church; but unity to secure and promote our own interests is not the unity of the church, but confederacy and denial of the nature and hope of the church. Unity, that is of the church, is the unity of the Spirit, and can only be in the things of the Spirit, and therefore can only be perfected in spiritual persons. It is indeed the essential character of the church, and this strongly testifies to the believer its present state. But, I ask, if the professing church seeks worldly interests, and if the Spirit of God be amongst us, will it then be the minister of unity in such pursuits as these? If the various professing churches seek it, each for itself, no answer need be given. But if they unite in seeking a common interest, let us not be deceived; it is no better, if it be not the work of the Lord. There are two things which we have to consider. First, Are our objects in our work exclusively the Lord's objects, and no other? If they have not been such in bodies separate from each other, they will not be in any union of them together. Let the Lord's people weigh this. Secondly, let our conduct be the witness of our objects. If we are not living in the power of the Lord's kingdom, we certainly shall not be consistent in seeking its ends. Let it enter our minds, while we are all thinking what good thing we may do to inherit eternal life, to sell all that we have, take up our cross, and follow Christ. Does not this go very close to the hearts of many?
Let us bear in mind then strongly the following truths -- that what are called communions are (as to the mind of the Lord about His church) disunion; and, in fact, a disavowal of Christ and the word. "Are ye not carnal, and walk as men?" "Is Christ divided?" Is He not, as far as our disobedient hearts are concerned? I ask believers, "whereas there is among you envying and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?"
Yea, there is no professed unity among you at all. So far as men pride themselves on being Established, Presbyterian, Baptist, Independent, or anything else, they are antichristian. How then are we to be united? I answer, it must be the work of the Spirit of God. Do you follow the testimony of that Spirit in the word as is practically applicable to your consciences, lest that day take you unawares?" Whereunto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing." "And if in anything ye be otherwise (that is, differently) minded, God shall reveal this also unto you," and shew us the right path. Let us rest on this promise of Him who cannot lie. Let the strong bear the infirmity of the weak, and not please themselves. Professed churches (especially those established) have sinned greatly in insisting on things indifferent and hindering the union of believers, and this charge rests heavily on the hierarchies of the several churches. Certainly order is necessary; but where they said, 'the things are indifferent and nothing in themselves: therefore you must use them for our pleasure's sake,' the word of the Spirit of Christ says, 'they are indifferent: therefore we will yield to your weakness, and not offend a brother for whom Christ died.' Paul would have eaten no meat while the world endured, if it had hurt the conscience of a weak brother, though the weak brother was in the wrong. And why insisted on? Because they gave distinction and place in the world. If the pride of authority and the pride of separation were dissolved (neither of which are of the Spirit of Christ), and the word of the Lord taken as the sole practical guide, and sought to be acted up to by believers, we shall be spared much judgment, though we shall not perhaps find altogether the glory of the Lord, and many a poor believer, on whom the eye of the Lord is set for blessing, would find comfort and rest. Yet to such I say, Fear not, you know in whom you have believed, and if judgments do come, dearest brethren, you may lift up your
heads, "for your redemption draweth nigh." But for the churches (if yet the Lord might have mercy, for sanction them in their present state He cannot, as they must own), let them judge themselves by the word. Let believers remove the hindrances to the Lord's glory, which their own inconsistencies present, and by which they are joined to the world, and their judgments perverted. Let them commune one with another, seeking His will from the word, and see if a blessing do not attend it; at any rate it will attend themselves; they will meet the Lord as those that have waited for Him, and can rejoice unfeignedly in His salvation. Let them begin by studying the twelfth chapter of the epistle to the Romans, if they think they are partakers of the unspeakable redemption wrought by the cross.
Let me ask the professing churches, in all love, one question. They have often professed to the Roman Catholics, and truly too, their unity in doctrinal faith, why then is there not an actual unity? If they see error in each other, ought they not to be humbled for each other? Why not, as far as was attained, mind the same rule, speak the same thing; and if in anything there was diversity of mind (instead of disputing on the footing of ignorance), wait in prayer, that God might reveal this also unto them. Ought not those who love the Lord amongst them, to see if they could not discern a cause? Yet I well know that, till the spirit of the world be purged from amongst them, unity cannot be, nor believers find safe rest. I fear lest it should be by the "spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning." The children of God can but follow one thing -- the glory of the Lord's name, and that according to the way marked in the word; if the professing church be proud of itself, and neglect this, they have nothing else left, but as He, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, "suffered without the gate, to go forth to him without the camp, bearing his reproach." It were well to weigh deeply the second and third chapters of Zephaniah. What is going on in England at this moment -- a moment of anxiety and distress of judgment among her political and thinking men? Why, we see the Dissenting churches using the advocacy of actual unbelievers, and the Established church, of practical unbelievers (I say it in no scorn to them), to obtain a share in, or keep to themselves the secular advantages and honours of that world out of which the Lord came to redeem us. Is this like His peculiar people?
What have I to do with these things? Nothing. But as there are brethren connected both with one and the other, every one who thinks of it has to testify with his whole strength, that somehow or other he may keep himself clear of it, that he be not ashamed in the day of the Lord's coming. And many whom the people of God have trusted in, and relied upon, as they that have understanding, go on in the train; and the simple, as they that followed Absalom, go after them, not knowing whither they are going.
We may well believe what this advocacy is. But what a substitute for leaning on the Lord Jehovah the Saviour for the spiritual prosperity of His own people, as their servants in prayer and ministry for His name's sake: while, as we might well suppose, their advocates use them but as the instruments of their own party purposes. But such alliances cannot prosper. But what are the people of the Lord to do? Let them wait upon the Lord, and wait according to the teaching of His Spirit, and in conformity to the image, by the life of the Spirit, of His Son. Let them go their way forth by the footsteps of the flock, if they would know where the good Shepherd feeds His flock at noon. Let them be followers of them who, through faith and patience inherit the promises, remembering the word: "Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples. And I will wait upon the Lord that hideth his face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for him." And if the way seem dark amongst them, let them recollect the word of Isaiah: "Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness and has no light? Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God."
If I be asked again what have I to do with them; I can only answer, that I earnestly care for them: for the Dissenters for their integrity of conscience, and often deep apprehensions of the mind of Christ; and for the church, if it were but for the memory of those men, who, however they may have been outwardly entangled with what was not of their own spirit and failed in freeing themselves from it, seem to have inwardly drunk more deeply of the Spirit of Him who called them, than any since the days of the apostles; men in whose communion I thankfully delight myself, whom I delight to honour. But are there none to call in mind the spirit they were of? We have many advantages which they had not. O that God may
put the presence+ of His Spirit in many to work the work while it is called today: that He may take away the spirit of slumber from them that sleep, and lead in His own path -- the narrow but blessed path which leadeth unto life -- the path in which the Lord of glory trod -- those whom He has awakened, that they may walk in the light of the Lord.
But if any one will say, if you see these things, what are you doing yourself? I can only deeply acknowledge the strange and infinite shortcomings, and sorrow and mourn over them; I acknowledge the weakness of my faith, but I earnestly seek for direction. And let me add, when so many who ought to guide go their own way, those who would have gladly followed are made slow and feeble lest they should in any wise err from the straight path, and hinder their service though their souls might be safe. But I would solemnly repeat what I said before -- the unity of the church cannot possibly be found till the common object of those who are members of it is the glory of the Lord, who is the Author and finisher of its faith: a glory which is to be made known in its brightness at His appearing, when the fashion of this world shall pass away, and therefore acted up to and entered upon in spirit when we are planted together in the likeness of His death. Because unity can, in the nature of things, be there only; unless the Spirit of God who brings His people together, gather them for purposes not of God, and the counsels of God in Christ come to nought. The Lord Himself says, "That they all may be one; as thou Father art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them, that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me."
O that the church would weigh this word, and see if their present state do not preclude necessarily their shining in the glory of the Lord, or of fulfilling that purpose for which they were called. And I ask them, do they at all look for or desire this? or are they content to sit down and say, that His promise is come utterly to an end for evermore? Surely if we cannot say, "Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee," we should say, "Awake, awake, put
+More correctly power. Perhaps a misprint in the original.
on thy strength, arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, as in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab and wounded the dragon?" Surely the eye hath not seen nor ear heard what He prepareth for him that waiteth for Him. Will He give His glory to one division or another? Or where will He find a place for it to rest upon amongst us? Or is it that finding the life of your hand, therefore you are not grieved? Yet will He surely gather His people and they shall be ashamed.
I have gone beyond my original intention in this paper; if I have in anything gone beyond the measure of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, I shall thankfully accept reproof, and pray God to make it forgotten.
[It is necessary to give a brief account of the following tract, which is now published for the first time. It was intended to be published at the time; but the printer and publisher shewed it privately to some of the influential clergy before it was published, and I was surrounded and entreated not to publish it (I cannot really, at this distance of time, say by whom), and gave way. We can all understand (at least, any who have had deep convictions on points which affect the whole standing of the church of God) how (however deep internal convictions of any such truths may be) a serious and conscientious mind may hesitate as to putting forth what may shock the feelings of many godly persons, and violates established order; and in such matters all ought to be not only conscientious but serious, have the fear of God, and not merely an opinion on that which may work deeply in the minds of any, and affect so sacred a thing, the only sacred thing in the world, as the church of God. It never therefore appeared. Nor do I, though it may appear to be weakness in myself, regret it at the hands of Him who makes all things work together for good to them that love Him. I have a deep, abiding conviction that the building up of good can alone give lasting blessing, not the attacking evil. I would press It on every one who seeks good. I had not the most distant feeling of enmity against any, nor against the Establishment; I loved it still, I looked at it as a barrier against Popery. When I left it, I published the tract on "The Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ." Every one knows, and for myself it is a matter of profound sorrow, and a sign of approaching judgment, that it has ceased to be such a barrier, and, for many, has been the road into it, and that infidel principles have been judicially pronounced to be fully admissible in it. Christians are thrown (where Paul originally threw them when warning them of the perilous times of the last days) on the word of God, and knowing of whom they have learned anything; as to which we have this word of the Apostle John, "He that is of God heareth us" -- not tradition, not the fathers in numberless folios, but "us" -- not development nor decrees of violent and clashing councils, but "that which was from the beginning," and, I add, the infallible faithfulness of an ascended Lord. But we are thus cast on great principles, I mean scriptural principles and truth. Of thus the presence of the Holy Ghost is a cardinal one. I may add as that which led to this (I mean as to the truth itself in my own soul), that, after I had been converted six or seven years, I learned by divine teaching what the Lord says in John 14, "In that day ye shall know ... that ye are in me, and I in you" -- that I was one with Christ before God, and I found peace, and I have never, with many shortcomings, lost it since The same truth brought me out of the Establishment. I saw that the true church was composed of those who were thus united to Christ; I may add, it led me to wait for God's Son from heaven; for if I was sitting in heavenly places in Him, what was I waiting for but that He should come and take me there? The infinite love of God flowed early into my soul
in this process which the Lord was carrying on. Previously I had had, from the first, the deepest possible convictions of sin, and had known and after some years taught that Christ alone could fill up that abyss, but not that He had. I had passed in the deepest way, fasting (a thing which, I believe, if spiritually used, may be most useful), but then in a legal spirit, and in an elaborate system of devotedness, sacraments, and church-going, through what is now called Puseyism; but had found that Christ and not that could give peace, but had not found it; I sought it, looked for the proofs of regeneration in myself, which can never give peace, rested in hope in Christ's work, but not in faith, till I found it, as I have stated, when laid by for some time by what is called accident, from outward labour. The presence of the Spirit of God, the promised Comforter, had then become a deep conviction of my soul from scripture. This soon after applied itself to ministry. I said to myself, if Paul came here, he could not preach, he has no letters of orders; if the bitterest opponent of his doctrine came who had, he would, according to the system, be entitled. It is not a wicked man slipping in (that may happen anywhere) -- it is the system itself. The system is wrong. It substitutes man for God. True ministry is the gift and the power of God's Spirit, not man's appointment. I state merely the great principle. This principle, with a process and with a delay the details of which I cannot recall and which are immaterial, was under deep pressure of conscience, the source and origin, as a principle, of the following tract (printed, I suppose, now seven-and-thirty years ago). There will be found immaturity in it in expression. The sin against the Holy Ghost, though universally used, is not a scriptural expression. Every sin a Christian commits is a sin against the Holy Ghost; for the Holy Ghost dwells in him, and he grieves that Holy One by whom he is sealed to the day of redemption But the principle is one of deep importance, one on which the status of the church and the Christian depends -- the security of the one, as well as that by which he is responsible and judged in his walk, and the ground of judgment of the other. I did not save myself in any way by not publishing it. It was soon bruited about, and of course held, that I charged each clergyman with the sin against the Holy Ghost, which the tract itself entirely disclaims. It is a question of the dispensational standing of the church in the world -- a statement that that depends wholly on the power and presence of the Holy Ghost, and that the notion of a clergyman contradicts His title and power, on which the standing of the church down here depends. It is the habitation of God through the Spirit. Scripture is clear, that if the Gentiles do not abide in God's goodness, they will be cut off like the Jews. It equally predicts a falling away, which is not continuing in God's goodness. I believe these times are hasting greatly. I add, that there may be no mistake, that I have an absolute confidence in the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus, the great Head of the Church, that what He builds will endure and be translated to heaven, when God judges the corrupt and evil system (which He as certainly will do) which bears His name, and Christ Himself becomes in glory the blessed witness of His unchangeable faithfulness and love. The doctrine of the church as the house of God (Ephesians 2, and 2 Timothy) became developed in my mind much later; and I add here, that I believe the confounding the church, as man built it,
as committed to his responsibility (1 Corinthians 3), resulting in the great house, with Christ's building (though the former be God's building responsibly in the world), and attributing the privileges of the body to all that are in the house, is the origin of the corruption, which has defiled, and for which God will judge the guilty, professing body With His sorest judgment. The tract is given as it was printed at first. As I have spoken of myself (always a hazardous thing), I add that at the same period in which I was brought to liberty and to believe, with divinely given faith, in the presence of the Holy Spirit, I passed through the deepest possible exercise as to the authority of the word: whether if the world and the Church (that is, as an external thing, for it yet had certain traditional power over me as such) disappeared and were annihilated, and the word of God alone remained as an invisible thread over the abyss, my soul would trust in it. After deep exercise of soul I was brought by grace to feel I could entirely. I never found it fail me since. I have often failed; but I never found it failed me. I have added this, not, I trust, to speak of myself -- an unpleasant and unsatisfactory, a dangerous thing -- nor do I speak of any vision, but because, having spoken of the presence of the Holy Ghost, if I had not brought in this as to the word, the statement would have been seriously incomplete. In these days especially. when the authority of His written word is called in question on every side, it became important to state this part also of the history.]
In the statement which I make here, I make no rash or hasty expression of feeling, but what I believe the Lord would press upon the minds of Christians, and that which they must receive: that, the converse of which He might bear with in practice, while it did not interfere with and oppose the purposes of His grace, winking at the ignorance, but cannot when it does.
The statement which I make is this, that I believe the notion of a Clergyman to be the sin against the Holy Ghost in this dispensation. I am not talking of individuals wilfully committing it, but that the thing itself is such as regards this dispensation, and must result in its destruction: the substitution of something for the power and presence of that holy, blessed, and blessing Spirit, by which this dispensation is characterised, and by which the unrenewedness of man, and the authority of man, holds the place which alone that blessed Spirit has power and title to fill, as that other Comforter which should abide for ever.
If the notion of a Clergyman has had the effect of the substitution of anything which is of man, and therefore subject to Satan, in the place and prerogative of that blessed Spirit exercising the vicarship of Christ in the world, it is clear, that however the providence of God may have overruled it, in the
ignorance which He could wink at, it does, when stood upon and rested in against the presence and work of the Spirit, become direct sin against Him -- pure, dreadful, and destructive evil -- the very cause of destruction to the church. I must be observed here to say nothing whatever against offices in the church of Christ, and the exercise of authority in them, whether episcopal or evangelical in character. It were a vain and unnecessary work here to prove the recognition of that on which scripture is so plain. But they are spoken of in Scripture as gifts derived from on high: "He gave some apostles" (Ephesians 4:5, 7, 11); so in 1 Corinthians 12, they are known only as gifts. My objection to the notion of a Clergyman is, that it substitutes something in the place of all these, which cannot be said to be of God at all, and is not found in Scripture. Now, I believe the whole principle of this to be contained in this dispensation in the word clergyman, and that this is the necessary root of that denial of the Holy Ghost which must, from the nature of the dispensation, end in its dissolution.
I am quite aware that people will say, that this is not the sin against the Holy Ghost, that it may amount to resisting the Holy Ghost, but sin against the Holy Ghost is quite another thing. It is not so much another thing as people suppose. At any rate the cause of the destruction of the Jewish system was this very thing: "Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, so do ye." And I am perfectly satisfied, however this dispensation may be prolonged in order to the gathering of souls out of the world, of God's elect, it has sealed its destruction in the rejection and resistance of the Spirit of God. But I go a great deal farther, and I affirm, though that were sin enough, that the notion of a Clergyman puts the dispensation specifically in the position of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and that every Clergyman is contributing to this. The sin against the Holy Ghost was the ascribing to the power of evil that which came from the Holy Ghost: and such is the direct operation of the idea of a Clergyman. It charges the testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ, which the Spirit gives by the mouth of those whom He chooses,+ whom they are pleased to call laymen, and the righteousness of conduct which flows from the reception of that testimony, with disorder and schism. Now, God is not the author of confusion or disorder, nor of
+I beg to say here, I do not allude to any modern assumption of the possession of extraordinary spiritual gifts.
schism, but the enemy of souls is; and to charge the plain testimony which the Holy Ghost gives concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, and the effects which it produces, with disorder and schism, is to charge the work of God with being evil, and from the evil one. But if clergymen have the exclusive privilege of preaching, teaching, and ministering communion, which they claim, and which is the very sense and meaning of their distinctive title, then must it be all evil. That is, the notion of a Clergyman necessarily involves the charge of evil on the work of the Holy Ghost, and therefore, I say, that the notion of a Clergyman involves the dispensation, where insisted upon, in the sin against the Holy Ghost.
Sinners are converted to God, souls called out of darkness, the truth preached with energy and love to souls, with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, in the constraint and constancy (in whatever weakness) of the Redeemer's love: men are gathered from evil and wickedness (for I will put the fullest case my adversaries could wish) into the communion of the Lord's love, to bear witness to their sole dependence on His dying love; and this is producing confusion and schism -- of which God is not the author, but Satan -- because they are not, nor are brought together by, clergymen! What is this but to charge the work of divine grace with proceeding from, and having the character of, the author of evil, which is blasphemy? and this is the immediate and direct effect, the necessary effect, of the notion -- the exclusive notion of a Clergyman.
And this is a thing of very common operation where a number of unconverted clergymen are; and how common this is, yea, how it is the case in a large majority of instances, is well known. There all the operations of God's Spirit are charged with confusion and schism; and therefore I affirm, that the idea of a Clergyman, that is, of a humanly appointed office, taking the place and assuming the authority of the Spirit of God, necessarily involves (in its condemnation of what the Holy Ghost does do) in the sin against the Holy Ghost: and I defy any one to shew how it can be otherwise. Those who would most oppose that which I am now writing, would admit, that not half a dozen, or possibly none, of the Bishops are of God's appointing; and this is the case with the highest churchman, in consequence of their being appointed simply by the King's Letters Patent.+ And yet all those who charge the
+This is the case in Ireland, where this tract was written.
efforts of others with schism and confusion, derive all their authority and distinction from those who, they admit, are not appointed by God at all; and yet charge them with schism, because they act on the same notion, and do not, therefore, look to that authority, while the effect of the authority thus ungodlily recognised is necessarily to throw those whom God does appoint into the position of schism and disorder. The notion of a Clergyman consists in acknowledging that, as the source of authority, which, they admit, is not appointed by God at all.
Let any layman ask a conscientious clergyman, who is converted to God, whether he believes the mass of the bishops are appointed by God? He must say, No; and yet he has no other authority whatever, as a clergyman; and condemns others solely by virtue of his possessing this assumed authority, which, he admits, is not of God, but by virtue of which he calls the Spirit's operations in and by others disorder and schism.
But are there no clergymen Christians? Doubtless, there are. And they are all trying to do in spite of the Bishops what they condemn others for doing; and are forced into the position, by being clergymen, of resisting God or the bishops they derive their authority from.
They cannot deny that the work going on in the country is from God, though it be not by clergymen; but they condemn it as evil, and therein sin against the Holy Ghost -- and do so as clergymen: and their only ground of so charging it is this notion of a Clergyman. And now let us cast our eyes round every place, and see what is the position and character which this name occupies. I affirm that it comes from God in nowise An ungodly man, be he a very hater of God, can confer it the same as the most godly, were he in such an office; the most ungodly man can be it as well as the most godly; and the most ungodly man can receive it, honour it, and attach all its value to it as much as the godly. Can this be the case with anything spiritual which comes from God? I affirm that it cannot: that it is quite otherwise with spiritual authority, which it most assumes to be like.
Nay, much more, you will find the value and estimation of a clergyman as such (I am not speaking of individual grace) to be precisely in proportion to the blindness, darkness, and ignorance of the person who may have it; I appeal to any one for the truth of this.
Now, the deference and obedience to a spiritual pastor will be just in proportion to the right feeling -- to the holiness of mind of the Christian; but in the same proportion will his idea of a clergyman be weakened, and will he judge according to what they are, if they assume any office circumstantially connected with the name. The value attached to it is a purely worldly thing: a thing of this world, with the pretence of religion in its external character, which is just the destruction of the church -- the essential characteristic of apostasy.
Let us consider it in its actual operation. If we go to India, the difficulty to be got over, the persons to be soothed and won, so that the gospel should not be hindered, are the clergy; I speak of nominal Christianity in India, as on the Malabar Coast and their Catanars. Go to Armenia; the difficulty would arise from precisely the same quarter. Carry the gospel in its power, where would difficulty be anticipated? -- from what quarter? From the clergy. At best, they must be conciliated. Go to Egypt amongst the Copts: the same thing just is true. Go to the churches in Palestine, and wherever the Armenian Church is spread, the facts are the same. I do not say, they may not in any case be conciliated; but that the opposition to the truth, when it exists, arises from them. Go to the Greek Church: it is precisely the same. Their Papas, or Priests, the ministers and sustainers of all the corruption and evil of the church, are the great hindrance to all missionary and spiritual exertion. Their churches are fallen; therefore they proportionately estimate the clergy, and they do not the gospel. But the opposers and hinderers, the persons whose influence is dreaded, are the clergy.
Let us look now at the great western body, which is called the church, the Christendom of the world -- the vine of the Christian profession. Whence is the difficulty in preaching the gospel? Where is the grand barrier of opposition to Christ in His gospel? It is at once known and felt. The word would be echoed by every one familiar with the subject. But surely we are not to identify the wilful resisters of the truth with those who preach and forward it. In this point they are identified, they are both clergy, they have both precisely the same title; if a Protestant clergyman has title to this, or whatever title to respect he has, the Roman Catholic priest has the same. I am not talking of mine or any one's estimation of it, but of facts. And this is so much the case that a priest joining the Established
church, whatever his motive might be, acquaintance with or ignorance of the truth, would be at once a clergyman of the Establishment. His clerical character existed before and his person merely was transferred from one to the other. Nothing could more clearly mark the identity of the two characters. Their title the same confessedly, the same by the acknowledgment that the title which they insist on distinctively is the same as, and no other than as, it is derived from those whose apostasy and opposition to the truth is the ground of judgment on the vine of the earth, the nominal church of God. If I am bound to acknowledge the one, I am bound to acknowledge the other in the same title and office. They are their own witnesses that there is no difference between them in title as clergymen. Whether the ministry of the priests come from God "their mission" they may determine.
But, that we may let no part of the world escape our notice, turn to Protestant Germany. Who are the hindrances, the bars to the gospel -- to truth there finding its way among the people? The clergy. Consult any missionary reports, or Continental reports, or Jewish reports, or a Home Mission Society: and the clergy will be universally found to be the hindrances to the propagation of the truth.
But it will be said, do you mean to class the efforts of the clergy in Ireland with all this? Look at the Home Mission. My most sorrowful answer is, The Home Mission is the fullest and darkest evidence of the truth of what I argue. Of all things it has shewn the character of clergymen in the darkest colours. For I am not denying or questioning that there may be individual clergymen Christians, but pleading that the notion of a clergyman is great hindrance to truth. So far as the clergy, as individuals, have broken through the trammels of their character and done the things for which they are excommunicated by their own canons, they are blessed and have influence. But the evil clings to them with a tenacity which no circumstances remedy, and which shews the power of darkness working in it, and herein shews so darkly the force of this notion.
A clergyman began, from circumstances it is not necessary here to mention, what is called the Home Mission. The Bishops and other clergy opposed it, as naturally they must, on the principles of the Established Church, though it is hard to say what that is now. The consequence was that, though
crowds went to hear the gospel (which I believe they preached very faithfully) at their lips, they stopped.
As clergymen they acquiesced in the barrier which as clergymen others put to the gospel of salvation. Subsequently it was carried on by the instrumentality of laymen, chiefly under the direction of one clergyman who disregarded all the ties which were imposed on him as such. The laymen, of course, were under none. The consequence was, the system became established in spite of the weak resources from which it was, humanly speaking, supplied. But the Lord did not allow it to fail, but the clergy would not work with them. Why? They were clergymen: though they owned them Christians, thought they preached the truth, and most of them thought they ought to preach -- but they were not clergymen. However, being established -- in fact as it touched their importance as clergymen that the work of evangelising the country should be carried on entirely by others -- the clergy took it up. Would they work with the laymen? No, they were clergymen. They turned them all out to labour alone, to give up God's work, or be stamped with schism where they might. They cared for none of these things so that they preserved their character as clergy; and to such a length was this carried, that on one of the Missions, having sent out two clergymen unfit for the purpose -- not consistent men, so that the hearers complained -- and foreseeing of course that failure one time would occasion non-attendance the next, they agreed to send an empty car to dismiss the congregations when they could not get a clergyman, rather than associate themselves with godly laymen or allow them even to supply their place as deputies on such a work, counting an empty car a better instrument for God's work than a man full of the Holy Ghost, provided he were not a clergyman. These are the reasons, without enlarging further on them as affecting the general principle, which make me feel that the Home Mission puts the character of clergymen in darker instead of brighter characters. They broke every solemn obligation of diocesan control, and excluded every one else because they were clergymen, simply to preserve their own importance as such, just as they had given up the work of the Mission before on the same account till forced into it. Now if the notion of a clergyman can have such power over godly men, we do but see, in a far stronger light than anything else could put it, the horrible nature of the thing itself, and its
influence over the mind. The evil it has produced in forcing schism by rejecting laymen is incalculable, while its influence in blinding the conscience is almost unintelligible to those who are not involved in it. But the evil seems to me hopeless but in the full recognition that the title and the acknowledgment is a great and horrid sin -- the substituting something in the place of God's Spirit which accredits a man, an ungodly man, with the title of rejecting and denying the Holy Ghost, and which therefore impliedly does so, whether in authority or not -- not an office, but an order of worldly respect and on which every false religion is founded and its influence proportionate to the darkness in which those subject to it are laying. Any one may see that it is not office, for a man may have no office at all and yet be a clergyman just as much all the time. He may spend all his time shooting or hunting or farming, have no service in the church and yet be just a clergyman, and this is constantly the case. I believe the notion of a clergyman has been the great hindrance to truth in the country. But the effects can, I believe, only be met by the conviction and perception that it is in this dispensation the sin against the Holy Ghost.
One question may remain, why press such a point now? I answer; first, because it is truth. God's truth is always profitable, and the testimony kept up by it in the world. But further, because these things have been brought to such a pass by the prevalency of this very notion that nothing remains but to rescue the saints out of its effects before the tide of Papal power which is founded on it, set in its full and subduing strength. Men must rest on the Lord or sink into it. If the notion of a clergyman be anything but evil, dissociation from it is but schism and evil. But if the work of the Holy Ghost be not evil, then is that which assumes to condemn it, and charge evil upon it, most evil of all things; and that is the position in which every clergyman stands by virtue of his title, and which is involved in the very notion of a clergyman: the essence of its name, the sign and distinctive name of apostasy and rebellion against God. I fully believe, if the clergy of this country had acquiesced in laymen's acting with them, or if they would have acted with laymen, all the successional respect which is connected with the name they would have preserved, and prevented any division and difficulty; but they declined this, and declined it because they were laymen, and threw the whole matter, whether men would or
not, into the question what is a clergyman? Was the Holy Ghost confined to them? If not, were they doing right in prescribing their own narrow channel to the fulness of refreshing which flowed from Him? And, if not, what are they? in what position are they? and in what putting the dispensation, by thus opposing and vilifying with the name of schism the operations of the Holy Ghost Himself? I believe the name has brought hopeless destruction on the whole dispensation. What is the complaint of a well-known signature, H., in the "Christian Journal"? In seeking the assistance of clergy for the Home Mission the answer continually was -- admission of the necessity and evil, but that they were not accountable for it! Why? They were in their post as clergymen. God might have given them the gifts of evangelists. Souls might be, as far as means went, perishing, but they were not accountable, not their brother's keeper, and why? They were established clergymen in their parishes, and they were not accountable for it.
What is the answer of a poor Papist to the efforts of a godly layman (though God I believe is blessing laymen far more amongst them than clergy now)? The clergy of the two religions is enough: what business have these to speak? Who really encourage and sanction this as far as they can? The clergy -- thus being the grand barrier to God's truth. Turn which way you will, this is the notion that meets you, as the barrier to God's truth and work, by whomsoever carried on.
And let us for a moment look at what the word means, and we shall very remarkably find the same great characteristic mark of apostasy upon it: the substitution of a privileged order whom man owned for the Church which God owned, and the consequent depression of the Church and the despisal of the Holy Ghost in it, or blasphemy against it. What does clergy mean? It means in scripture the elect body, or rather bodies, of believers, as God's heritage, as contrasted with those who were instructors, or had spiritual oversight over them; and it is used in the place where the apostle warns such against ever assuming the place in which -- in much worse than which -- the ministers have now put themselves; for they are not merely lords over, but the whole cleroi themselves. The present use of the word is precisely the sign of the substitution of ministers in the place of the Church of God: as men are accustomed to
speak of "going into the church." Now, all this is of the essence of apostasy: power attached to ministry, and its becoming the church in the eye of the world, so that the world can save itself the trouble of being religious by throwing it on the clergy, and so the church and the world be all one thing, and irreligious people do for the church as laity, because religion is the clergy's business, and, if theirs, nobody's (for they do not want it for irreligious laymen); and thus that which has the name of the church, being really the world, serves to exclude and set aside the operations of the Spirit of God in His children as schism and evil; and who is to decide? The church; but they are the world: and will the world ever receive the Spirit of God? It cannot. What then? They hold themselves, of course, the church; they have the clergy, which is God's church in their estimation; and the Spirit of God and His work is voted schismatic. Such is the real and simple meaning of the word clergy so used. But to produce the passage in Scripture -- "Be not lords," says Peter, "over God's heritage," to the elders or instructors. That is, over God's Clergy -- to give it in its English form of letters, cleroi. The bodies of Christian believers were called God's "lots" (the meaning of the original word cleros) answering to Deuteronomy 9:29. Now the clergy have assumed to themselves to be God's lot only, but the only use of clergy in Scripture is, as applied to the laity if you please, contrasted with ministers: charging these to assume no lordship. Now, the substitution of the clergy for the church is the very moral power of apostasy. But this is contained, indelibly contained, in the very word in its present use, be they Roman Catholics or Protestants: that is, we find the assumption of clericalism, the secret love of many a fair-held name, to be really, in its character and operation, the sin against the Holy Ghost, and the formal character of the apostasy. How often have we heard from the mouth of a minister or clergyman -- "My flock," as if it were a virtue, so to think: while it is a shocking blasphemy in fact -- I do not say wilfully so -- which an apostle would never for a moment have thought of daring to utter or assuming to himself. It was God's flock which they might be given to oversee -- Christ's sheep which they might be entrusted with a portion of, a (cleros) lot, to feed and guide. To call them their sheep, or their flock, was to put themselves in the place of God or His Christ; but they do so because they are clergy: they count it
their title as clergy -- they would be as gods. Will they say that they are God in the face of them that slay them?
I have the utmost affection and value for many of the individuals among the body designated as clergy; and many doubtless there are unknown to me. But this is not an individual question, but one affecting the divine glory and the whole order of the church; one which is the necessary result of its departure from God, and the form into which that departure was matured and has developed itself; and its present practical result is, that the things by which the Spirit of God would bless the world or them in it is charged, by virtue of this name, with being that of which Satan is the immediate author; and thus the name and title of the body become the concentration of that which, by its denial of the Holy Ghost and gratuitous blasphemy against Him, brings destruction, necessary destruction, on all to which it is attached.
How this came to be so is plain enough, without wearying any one with a parade of learning. The Church had confessedly apostatised, and the structure of the apostasy, that wherein it consisted, remained precisely what it was when the truth came in, with this single difference -- that the king took the place of the Pope in the appointment of persons to offices in the church, and the control of its arrangements. The church, originally, sunk gradually into worldliness, until it embraced the world, and the world became its head. The world could not manage spiritual office: it could manage formal, local authority; it arranged these authorities, and did so. For a length of time, in the prevalence of ignorance and superstition, the nominal offices of the church had more power than secular strength; when this ceased to be the case, civil power reassumed the supremacy, but the structure remained the same: governing, contending, or governed, the same thing remained. The world, in authority, arranged geographical secular power -- leaving its influence over superstitious feelings to be what it might -- so that it might be an available instrument in its hand to manage the world in its mass, not in Christ's to minister to and guide the church. Whether the Establishment has sufficient of this influence to be of any use to the State, is exactly the question agitated at this moment. But what has the church of God to do with this? I cannot see. It is merely a compound
of secular influence and remaining superstition, by virtue of which the church is bound up with the world, and all its real energies cramped. This system, or structure, goes by the name of clergy, whether it be the Pope, or from the Pope down to the lowest curate, who may be entitled, by virtue of it, to hold a place in the world which otherwise he may not have had; or if a Christian, to labour in some field where his labours may be ill-employed, and his usefulness thrown away; but the church is lost in it. I admit, as fully as any one can do, that many of the clergy are most valuable men. They may have eminent gifts for various offices, which the exigency of the times may require; but the effect of this system, by which they form part of this great worldly structure, is to deprive them of the opportunity to stir up, or to bar the exercise of, whatever gifts God may have made them partakers of.
The operation of the Reformation was to introduce a statement of individual faith, and to break off, generally, all without the limits of the Roman Empire, from the immediate power of Rome and Popery. It in no way separated the church from the world, but the contrary; and, while it changed the relations, left the principle of the structure just where it was. The King's Arms took the place, in the rood-loft, of the image of Christ. Christ and His Spirit ruled in neither case, save in honour. I verily believe, that the principle of a clergyman, as it is part and parcel of the structure of Popery, will reintroduce the power of Popery as far as the name of religion remains; for as it hangs on the doctrine and principle of succession, not on the presence of the Spirit, there is no ground on which a Protestant minister, as a clergyman, can prove his title, which does not validate the title of the Pope and his followers more even than his own. His happening to have right doctrine does not make him a clergyman; his having false doctrine does not make him not one. The layman or dissenting minister, who holds the same doctrinal truth, is not a clergyman. The popish priest, who conforms to the Church of England, is not ordained to become so: he has that already which makes him a clergyman. Nay, in point of fact, the truth was not preached in the Church of England for the greater period of its distinct existence; and in the vast majority of instances the clergy still do not preach the truth; and the rest of the body would not allow them to be Christians at all.
Is it not manifest that the term clergyman, of such amazing
influence on the minds of men, is the distinctive title of that association which has grown up from the decay of the church, and now forms the common though varied ground of its association with the world, and a hindrance to cramp the operation of God's Spirit; the cementing title of that vine of the earth, which is cast into the wine-press of the wrath of God; and which charges evil upon the operations of the Spirit of God, as rebellion to its authority, not acting within its limits, or in conformity to its secular arrangements and appropriations of service, appropriations of territory formed neither by, nor with reference to, the Church of God at all; and when the Spirit of God operates by individuals within its limits (for God chooses whom He chooses), making them at once schismatics from their brethren, who do not comply with their geography, or acknowledge authority which they pretend to reverence (because it is of the system) but really despise, and violate at the same time all the arrangements, for the sake of which they are rejecting their godly and faithful brethren? If it were not for this term clergy, the link and bond of the great evil of the earth, and of pernicious influence over the minds of men, where would be the occasion of schism, save in that which is ever to be subdued? Or where would be the opportunity to charge the fruits of God's Spirit upon the author of confusion? Or what else is it that consummates the occasion of judgment to the system (of which it has taken the place of the energy and spirit), and always opposed the blessing? Has there, I will ask, ever been an opposition to, and hindrance of, the truths of God, of which the clergy have not been the human authors, and in which they have not been the real and active agents?
The clergy, then, is the specific title which identifies the church and the world, not God and the Church; and as the world necessarily denies, rejects, and will blaspheme the Holy Ghost, because it is the world, and cannot receive it, the tendency of this name is solely to involve the church, corporately, in the same thing, and is to be viewed as the grand evil, the destroying evil, of the day. What is the remedy? The recognition of God's Spirit where it is -- personally seeking for that holiness and subjection of spirit which will discern, own, and bow to its guidance and direction, and hail its blessing as the hand of God, wherever it operates, in the measure and way it does so -- that other Comforter sent to abide with us, whatever
else did, for ever; and working in obedience, that we may possess its joy -- boldness, as against all that grieves it, against joining the world, which cannot own or receive it, or denying the truth, of which it is the witness. The Lord give us to discern things that differ, and to separate the precious from the vile.
God is accustomed to act, in His government of mankind, often by ordinary principles, though He be independent of them; that is, He acts upon men by that which ordinarily influences them, the springs of which are in His power. No person can be insensible to the extremely important crisis in which we are now placed in Ireland, and that there are most important agencies at work in the country. The old system is broken up. The demand for the testimony of the gospel is manifest, and, while it is to an extent which surprises even those most accustomed to desultory labour, has forced itself on the consciences of the most reluctant, upon those who have for years resisted anything out of the established track. That which is to be remarked in it, and which shews the hand of God, is the anxiety, on the part of unconverted people, for ministry of the word and opportunities of religious information. It is manifest this must be from God; and I think experience will shew that it is a common accompanying sign of a work of God; as its suitableness is obvious.
It appears to my mind, that the position and worldliness of the church (i.e. the establishment), when the crisis for that purpose came, disqualified it for being an agent of the gospel in the country, and converting it to the faith of God; and in that crisis they, in point of fact, failed. This is matter of history. Further, the system on which it was established disqualified it for such exertions as were alone competent to meet such a crisis. The system was episcopal and parochial; but the energy which would carry a powerful principle into operation, which forms its agents and cannot find them in the passions of men, cannot be, and never was, parochial. The energy which is competent to work, and because it is competent to work, necessarily overpasses the prescribed limits, and trespasses upon the limits of others, and the system is violated, In the circumstances in which the work of God is placed in this country, this might be proved with stronger reason; but I have purposely confined myself to the general principle. Episcopal and parochial labour, in its sound state, is the supervision of those who have already been brought within the pale
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of Christian care, as having Christian principles, though it may be accompanied by doing "the work of an evangelist." Missionary work, in its ordinary sense, assumes a contrary state; that is, the necessity of a general preaching of the gospel, because men are not as yet brought under the influence of Christian principles, and in order, under grace, to their being so brought. The recognition of local episcopal and parochial authority, as such, on the part of the Home Mission, is simply denying its first principle, and destroying itself. It assumes that its objects are not really the subjects of that. It assumes a great deal more; but I am content to rest here for the present.
It has never been carried on, as it never could be, on this principle of episcopal and parochial arrangement. In the detail of practice (which, however, is comparatively immaterial), it would be absolutely prevented from operation in the places where, and, in one sense, where alone, it was really wanted.
I will suppose a diocese where the Home Mission is refused admittance. What is the assumption of the Home Mission? that the state of the diocese is perfect, and does not need its care? Is it not rather, at bottom, that there is the special want of the energy of Christian principle, connected with the sense of the deep necessity of the people, which missionary zeal supposes; that is, a state of things which specially calls for the agency which they are assuming to themselves. If they acknowledge the episcopal and parochial system, it is the only place where they cannot act. In a word, the Home Mission its existence because the episcopal and parochial system, at present established, fails for the Christian purposes of the country. It acts, and must act, in defiance of the system which confines the labour of the minister within an allotted sphere, and subjects him to the authority of the bishop of the diocese, within which that sphere is situated. It is, in a word, a set of individuals acting on their own authority, if they be right, in undoubted obedience to God -- but their own as regards men -- in going or sending others to preach and admonish, without reference to the authority of the nominal system into which the country is divided.
Their duty to God in this is admitted; and the admission of the episcopal and parochial system in such a work becomes a dereliction of their duty to God in subservience to men. I do not mean the territorial division, though that will be found to fall before it, but the principle of the system.
Another most important principle developed by the Home Mission is this, that men have their place and agency in the system and the country by virtue, not of their official situations, but of the gifts which God has given them. This is a most important principle in the difference between Babylon and the divine economy. The vehicle of the office may be used as at present, but the principle on which the Missions proceed, and by which, as thus volunteering, they will be judged, is the competency of the individuals, the gifts of God's Spirit which they may have.
There is another point at present of importance. The clergy have taken up the Missions at present. They have taken them up to the exclusion of laymen: their conduct has been marked in this respect. The Missions had been carried on, and were established, through the labours of laymen, while the clergy in a great measure refused to act because it was irregular. I believe those most conversant in them will admit that they could not, in point of fact, have been carried on without. The effect of this exclusion I am not concerned to state now; for I believe the results of what is going on are but in their infancy: but it has this immediate effect. During the working of the laymen, it was merely an unofficial preaching of the Gospel, as God gave men ability where there was necessity and God gave opportunity; and, clergymen being engaged in it too, it merely became a common work of necessity and love. Now that the clergy have excluded them, it becomes a deliberate rejection by them, the clergy, in their official character, of the control of the diocesan over his own diocese; its management in the spiritual energies of Christianity is assumed by other hands. The clergy themselves are setting aside the episcopal constitution, as at present subsisting, and acting not only in independence but in defiance of it. The fact is, the system, as it stands at present, is extinct. I do not mean by this that episcopacy is therefore extinct; but that the authority and control of the present system is gone. The clergy have taken upon themselves the exclusive responsibility of acting in defiance of it. They cannot go back. They have been thrust forward, by the demand which has been raised of God for efficient ministry, to act in defiance of that system. They are now thrown upon this: either to work on in spite of the episcopal parochial system, though using it where it may favour them, and to treat it as non-existent or hostile; or to
throw up the character of being the ministry of the country. I regret that there was not sufficient of God's Spirit among them to own the labours of the laymen, who had in many instances gone before them. I sorrow for it for their own sakes; but I rejoice that they have made themselves the practical actors, in defiance of an authority whose sanction for so acting they would have others seek.
That laymen, as they are called, should have been recognised by the churches as devoted to the work, may be in given instances unobjectionable or desirable; but why they should seek the sanction of an authority in order to preach in defiance or violation of that authority, and for the purpose of doing so, the clergy may but I cannot explain. If they do not purpose to violate it, they are subjecting themselves to the restraint of an authority, the operation of which has been the occasion of the necessity of their so preaching at all; and this, if the responsibility is on them to preach, it is wickedness to do. The clergy, as if they had the residue of the Spirit, are acting themselves in defiance of the authority of the bishops -- honourably, no doubt, if they have hindered the preaching of the gospel. That is, they have determined to carry, or are carrying, the Mission through the various parts of Ireland, without reference to, or in spite of, the prohibition of various bishops. But they will not hear of a person, not ordained by those bishops, preaching, or being allowed to go on the Mission. Now I do not see the consistency of receiving authority, or licence to preach, from a bishop, with the view of exercising that privilege in defiance of the authority which gave it. I trust there are many laymen too honest to act so: but one cannot be insensible to the effects, that the clergy, while thus excluding them (unless they can claim for themselves the whole residue of the Spirit), are necessarily raising up a system of dissent -- the greatest evil which, I believe, could now affect Ireland. I do not mean dissent from a set of formularies, but the schism, or dissent, in result, of one part of the Christians in the country from the other at a time when God is strongly working in the country. This is the guilt which will be on the heads of the clergy, if they are not careful in their conduct.
If on the other hand, this anomalous body of the Home Mission refrain from those places where the ordinary authorities forbid them, it is plain their assumption of the evangelisation of the country is in result an idle pretence, and schism is yet
more sure. It is quite clear that laymen whom God may call to the office of preaching, as they will not be permitted so, cannot righteously act with such a system; nor will men easily understand the righteousness of a self-instituted body, which, while it assumes to be everything, fails in the most important part of its work, whilst it discredits everything else which God accredits. In fact, I can conceive of nothing more wicked than discrediting, as far as they can, the preaching of laymen and then stopping short from the work of God for fear they should be discredited themselves. Nor can laymen, if they be either righteous or wise, fill up such a gap; that is, with any set purpose. They must do it, either as sanctioning the unrighteousness of the clergy, who perhaps might wish to be done by others what they would not do themselves, or else it must be done in the spirit of an opposition system, which, if the wilfulness of the clergy leave it possible, is altogether to be deprecated. I do trust, as at present constituted, the laymen will hold themselves altogether aloof from the Home Mission. If it act in despite of the bishops, it is acting unrighteously as being made up exclusively of clergy; if it desist wherever the bishops or clergy oppose, it is disgraceful to assume the authority it does. And it becomes clear that the laymen had better employ themselves distinctly without those trammels; and let the clergy of the Home Mission employ themselves in their local circles, building again the things they destroy. In any case, the essential character which the Home Mission has assumed in its clerical shape is schism -- acting independently of the bishops, whom it professes to recognise, when they let it pass; and respecting them only when they are doing wrong, in their judgment; and despising and excluding the laity, who may be led of God's Spirit, where they think they are doing right.
But further, it is beyond all controversy that the Bishops have been opposing and oppose the preaching of the gospel out of the system of parochial arrangements. It is equally clear that the efficient agency of the testimony of the word is now carried on on a system independent of, and consequently acting in opposition to, or neglect of, their authority. Of this the clergy have made themselves the exclusive instruments -- how righteously others must judge. It is equally clear that, assuming this ministry to be successful, where sufficient local pastorship does not exist, or where the enquiries and spiritual anxieties raised by the reception of the word have cultivated
the sense of a necessity for communion which is not met by any existing local provision, the necessity of pastoral care provided by the Mission, and the probable formation of local bodies in whatever shape, at once arises. Hence, we have, either the pastoral care of the Mission districts assumed by the Mission as a necessary obligation, or else the formation of local bodies on principles not contemplated by it at all. The assumption of this pastoral care, further, definitely shews the importance of the position assumed by the members of the Home Mission, and at once shews the total impossibility of its being carried on in subservience to, or consideration of, the subsisting episcopal and parochial arrangements. It is possible that some of its members may think it right to have the sheep of Christ under those who are not really pastors. They may think so; but, to say the least, they will find few to agree with them. But if not, being clergymen tied to a system, they must be as insufficient for the pastoral care as for the evangelical work, if obedient to the system they profess to maintain; or else, while they have rejected the laymen as irregular, prove that it was merely to be more irregular themselves, and assume all the power into their own hands. And, the fact is, very abundant signs have been afforded of such a design on the part of those who call themselves by the odd name of the Subordinate Clergy. I cannot believe this, or anything of the kind, to be of God. That the bishops should stop the course of this testimony is impossible; that they should do it no Christian, who feels the present necessity, could wish. The utmost they could do would be to throw it into others hands in the shape of opposition to the Church, and probably to drive many godly men out of their system. The duty of faithful ministers of the gospel to undertake it, and carry it on, is an obligation which directly flows from their being ministers of the gospel. "To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin" -- a duty which may be strengthened, but never can be weakened by the fact of an ungodly man hindering, so that that hindrance should be reckoned a reason for not attempting it. If men were honest they would see the incompatibility of avowedly maintaining an existing system, and assuming a part which, if carried into effect, must make a breach, and in point of fact, does make a breach in that system every step that is effectually taken. But their present position is that they have preferred associations with ungodly pastors who oppose them
to associations with godly laymen, the members of Christ, though these laymen were to act simply the part they were acting themselves, and that, indeed, in subservience to them, and unobjectionably as regards their superiors.
I will add, the desire for preaching is by no means the only characteristic of the present day. There are two others equally marked. And they are the desire, the appetite for scriptural information; and the desire amongst Christians for that which is little or not at all found in existing systems, and that is, communion with one another. The extent of the latter is, of course more confined, but not less decided; and, perhaps, its operation more remarkable. Further, I might add, that the necessity for discipline is growingly felt amongst all those who are exercised in Christian service, whether clergy or laity. In scriptural information the laity, and those who sit loose to the system, are by no means behind the clergy. If I were to draw a comparison, I should say they were rather before them in it. It is by no means the whole of Christianity to have extensive scriptural information. But the desire for it exists, and, I repeat, those conversant with the state of things in Ireland will by no means find the clergy the most informed in Scripture. In saying this, I beg most anxiously to be understood not to desire (God forbid that I should) to depreciate what God's Spirit has done in, and given to, the clergy. I believe God has in many instances much blessed them, looking at them individually. But, in point of fact, it is apparent to many that their extent of scriptural information is by no means such as to make them exclusively the instructors of the laity (if they force the line to be drawn, though I trust the laymen would ever recognise whatever God's Spirit had given to any, and be ready to learn from any), nor to meet the demand for scriptural information which exists, and which, though liable to abuse, like everything else, is surely of God, and the abuse of which can only be met by greater scriptural depth and knowledge.
As to the other point, less extensively and openly developed, scarcely less so indeed now, but equally really existing, and a more powerful principle than any by far, and that is, the desire of the saints for communion, it is obvious that the clergy must be greatly hindered in meeting any such desire. The position in which the laity stand with them is merely as recipients, that is, as clergy and laity. It is obvious that this position,
which may have its value in its place, does not meet the desire for communion. These things, moreover, are recognised in the Scriptures, and those scriptures form a warrant in which the mind may rest, perhaps not always wisely in looking for them; and God, having left the record of them there, has proved His will that they should be the order of blessing.
But the clergy have excluded the laity from the office of preaching, that is, they will not preach with them. In the claim of communion and fellowship, which will be found to militate strongly against their official position, the laity, of course, will bear the largest though not the exclusive share; for it is a desire and a principle felt or recognised by many of the clergy. In acquaintance with the Scriptures, as we have said, there is as great an appetite, and, as I have remarked, I believe as much progress, at the least, made by them as by the clergy. As to preaching, the laity have long been occupied with it, and in many instances as successfully at least as any of the clergy. I despise no solemn designation, if the church be competent to it, to any office. But I hold that the Scriptures recognise the laity, if they are to be so called, preaching, and that the Lord was with them in it. And I think the clergy would have very great difficulty in shewing from Scripture any appointment or ordination to such preaching as is contemplated in missionary labour.
"They that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word"; and those who were scattered abroad were all except the apostles. "And the hand of the Lord," we are told, "was with them, and a great number believed, and turned to the Lord." I am not, here, one way or other, discussing the value of episcopal ordination; but I regret the unseasonable effort of many to exclude those whose labours Scripture distinctly recognises, and necessarily thereby to induce schism in the church.
One great evil hitherto has been the dissociation of nominal office from the power of the Spirit. This is denied by no spiritual person. The Spirit has been poured out+ in efficient service on many not officially employed. The clergy are setting themselves to exclude these: they are standing on office
+This expression I should not now use; but I prefer leaving the tract as it is, as a memorial of what was passing more than thirty years ago, and has so much stronger an application now. Certainly moderation was not wanting.
against the title and competency to act of those who have the Spirit without office; and this in a service in which they are acting in defiance or disregard of the office and authority of those from whom all their own official distinction flows. For, if not so acting, the official distinction is simply a direct hindrance, so far disqualifying them or the office they have exclusively assumed to themselves. And in thus standing on office against the operation of the Spirit, where there is not nominal office, they identify themselves with ungodliness, refusing to associate themselves with godly men in works, which the majority of them think they are entitled to undertake with godly men, who are working with God's Spirit. This is an ominous position in which to put the name and character of the clergy.
Let us put a case: here is a parish, in which a person, not sent of God, is, in office, pastor or clergyman; a person whom God has qualified for the service, and called, is there, or goes there, and he works. He cannot be in the office owned by man, because he, who has been put in by those men whom the Home Mission recognise as having authority there, is already in the office. He whom God has sent is irregular: he who, deriving from human authority, excludes the person whom God has sent, is regular. The business of the Home Mission, in its present form, is to meet the case of this ungodly man; but they own him, giving up the place, and disown the layman, who is excluded from office by virtue of the system they uphold, but is acting in the energy of the Spirit virtually in it, to meet the difficulty which the ungodliness of the system has raised. The question has been raised; they have raised it between office and energy; that is, between the most ungodly thing in the world, and the rejected and grieved Spirit; and, as far as they can go in this act, they have associated with the ungodly pastor and rejected the Spirit. If they say, Why not take office? he cannot; first, because some one is in it already; and next, because they have so vitiated the source, that many conscientious men cannot, whatever the clergy may do, identify themselves with it. Under these circumstances, they forcibly draw the question into light; by discrediting the layman as much as possible, who is doing the work of God by His Spirit as well as he can -- the work they are doing themselves -- and by accrediting the office in the ungodly shape in which it thus presents itself.
We put another case, one not so uncommon. A large tract of country is destitute of the gospel. A layman goes, preaches there, and is blessed -- gathers out of darkness into light many souls. The district is already full of clergy, who are not shepherds. What is the layman to do? leave them for Socinians or enthusiasts to catch, or unheeded altogether? There is no godly righteousness in this. But the man is made, if he be faithful, a schismatic in spite of himself by a system which sanctions, or has sanctioned, the idle shepherds by whom he is surrounded. Which would the Home Mission recognise? It would recognise those idle shepherds, and it would not recognise the faithful man of God. But it has placed itself in a position in which it must be wrong either way; for if it did not own those shepherds, it would be acting in dereliction of its own responsibilities as churchmen; and the truth is, that, while they assume to be lords over God's heritage, or, as the original is, over God's clergy, they are in a position in which, though individually blessed in preaching, they must act unrighteously. They have assumed evangelism, and, obeying the prohibitions of the bishops and clergy, they turn aside from the most important points of their duty. They are clergy, and, persisting against these prohibitions, they are acting unrighteously, and in disobedience, in inconsistency with the character they are specifically assuming to maintain; while they reject the laymen, who, if it was right for them to preach at all, were violating no authority, breaking through no prescribed limits. Own the Spirit, and there was no unrighteousness, but blessing. Hold by the office distinctively, and they are inconsistent and irregular, or inefficient. Personal duty they might have pleaded: official regularity it is monstrous to allege.
There is in nothing human such a concatenation of liberty and authority, as the work of God exhibits -- by individual competency and general subjection, all flowing from the presence and work of the Spirit. The contrast of these things, which God had so harmonisedly blended -- of the office and the Spirit -- has made the office dead and imperious (a missionary acts by the Spirit, not by office), and puts the actings of the Spirit out of the association of subjection, unless by individual wisdom, and has done more to disunite than any other possible step. But there are those, I trust, of larger hearts and more anxious thoughts, than those who would exclude others by
their official dignity; and who will recognise that which is of God, though despising+ themselves, with more liberty and faithfulness than some who would pull down the restraint of offices in their own estimation higher, that they might have liberty for themselves, but hold to the importance of their own, and deny that liberty to those they count below them. But we are told that the Church will be reformed. But what is that reform they ostentatiously speak of? Simply human arrangements -- the assumption of power of the visible Church into their own hands. It is not a reference to the Spirit; it is not a call to prayer; it is not a looking to the Holy Ghost, however we may have grieved it, to set Christ's house in order; but a petition to the State, that it may throw them off, confessing they are controlled by and under its authority, and still dependent upon its choice whether they should be or not; not as a question of their sin and righteousness: declaring the evil, but sanctioning in principle its continuance. If they are bound to Christ, why look to the State to free them, unless they love it still? Why not act on the principle of separation, as responsible to Him?
Proposing next that they should have the election of bishops themselves, willing, perhaps, some of them, to divide it with the Crown, by naming three, that the Crown may choose one, thereby thrusting out the principle of the Spirit's guidance, while they assume control to themselves. Proposing that each diocese should meet, arrange each its own plans, and then bring them together to a common meeting, to settle how it should be. Settle for whom? The Crown, laity, Christians, and all: the holding of the present bishops made untenable, and their own created ones uncertain! Such would be the result of their plans differing in various circumstances, but all having this character of throwing the elective power into their own hands, as those capable of managing it, and excluding others, save as coalescing with them, but none of them referring or looking to the presence, power, and operation of the Spirit of God. Let any one only examine the plans of church reform, which have been circulated from time to time latterly, in Cork in the "Christian Journal," in Dublin, and see if they are not all of the character I have stated; if they are not all based upon the proposed competency of those who are included in
+That is, I apprehend, owning the Mission-work of the clergy though these, by reason of their official position, despise them.
them, and, not caring for others, not referring it to the Holy Ghost as the only competent Spirit of energy to the church; and, in fact, resulting in the assumption of power, by those who hold the middle offices of the Established church, and nothing else: a mere human plan and arrangement.
And the clergy and Home Mission are greatly mistaken if they think that it is only laymen or disinterested persons who feel these things. Many of the most spiritual and upright of the clergy, as well as some of those called high churchmen, are just as decided on the point. They may be individually better than their superiors; but I do not see what great liberty of the Spirit or comfort of the faith there would be. I do not see the righteousness of the effort on the part of the "subordinate clergy."
The Spirit of God is at work in the country. The clergy feel that there has been long a hindrance in the higher offices the established system, and in the lower in association with them.
This Spirit shews itself, as so working, in three great channels: the necessity of preaching, the desire for scriptural information, and the desire for fellowship and communion.
The attempt to confine it to the middle officers of the church, who yet throw aside the upper, is futile, a resisting of the Spirit of God, a Babel work. It is working in other channels; and those who hold the middle offices are acting by virtue of those principles which would throw down their own exclusiveness system. Pride is shewn in non-subjection to the Spirit, which is God acting whether in office or in testimony.
It is a comfort, at any rate, to laymen that, while their ministry was simply of willing unpretending service, of spiritual vice in either case, the missionary ministry of the clergy is despite of the authority of those whom they recognise as having it; and the trying and odious though necessary office resisting that authority has been assumed by those who have been so long strenuously maintaining it, and the laity are free.
While the clergy were content, the laymen acted (I rejoice that they did) as willing and unpretending assistants to those who had the service for them to do, as well as preached by themselves. There was no jealousy of the clergy. They owned the gift that was in them, men from habit disposed to count them their superiors, more practised, and those around them accustomed for the most part to honour the office, so that they
came in but as assistants; though the opportunity was given for the exercise of their gifts, so that there should be no schism in the body. The work would have been one. The clergy have thought right to reject them and disown their gifts. In them the evil that results must now rest.
I will add here a very few remarks on a subject connected with this, though not nominally yet immediately in the practical question, as all who are conversant in the working of principles in the country must know. Attention has been frequently drawn to changes in the liturgy. The effort, I am convinced, is a mistake. Any objection to the liturgy is not, in the mass of Christian people who feel it, from cavils at particular objectionable circumstances in it. It is, though there are many things doubtless which offend the knowledge or distress the consciences of many children of God, a much deeper principle; the desire of communion -- not objecting to the liturgy, but the want of a communion in something flowing from the Spirit of God present and acting among those engaged in such common service.
It is a mistake in the origin of distaste for the liturgy, in the great body of those who throw it up now, to suppose that it would be in the slightest degree affected by any particular changes in its structure. I do confess that I doubt whether there be in the church a competency to make any beneficial change. I believe the notion of what a church is to be very much lower than at the time the present prayer-book was compiled. I doubt that there is equal piety in the church; and I am sure too, it would be opening the door to alterations whose sole object was to pander to the infidelity of the day. But that which is now working is the desire of something else, a desire shewing itself in other ways than that. Men who do not feel this are mostly content with the liturgy as it is. They like it. They are used to it. A few of the clergy may be glad of change in services which affect them particularly, but the change will be unperceived by the mass of churchgoers, while their reverence for it will be gone. As to the others it will merely come to the mind as evidence that those who have made the change do not understand the real thing they seek. Such a change will be wholly short of the principle which is at work upon the subject. On the whole the great point is that the Spirit of God is at work. It is the presence and power of the Spirit which will have power: and the only wisdom of the
believer is such a recognition of the Spirit -- wherever and however it is working in the service of God and the gospel, for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, and evidencing therein love to Him, His gospel, God and His grace, more than to anything else, shall not raise questions which all the wisdom of the clergy Ireland never could answer, but, on the contrary, will enable them to resist (and be borne out by God in it, because integrity of purpose they shall be enabled to detect and be justified in resisting) that which is the will of the flesh, and not the unity of grace and the Spirit. The clergy have refused so recognise it in the laity. Let the layman, as I would beseech them in the Lord's name -- no man ever lost in God's work anything by humbling himself, or dealing gently with a brother -- be wiser. Let them own whatever of God's Spirit there is in the clergy, and let the rest pass. The clergy may feel assured that these are times in which he who acts with the simplest purpose, and with most of the Spirit, will in result carry the work of God with him; for it is a day in which God is separating realities from forms, as that which can alone stand the universal dislocation which every institution is undergoing, and which the Spirit of God shall and can alone go through unscathed, and those that are led by it unmarred and unhurt.
To resume the whole. The Spirit of God is poured out+ on laymen and on the clergy. The clergy, by virtue of their office, exclude laymen from any portion of the work which they are carrying on, while their work at the same time sets aside episcopal control. What can we think of this? It is not the first time that the clergy have sought to confine, to their own narrow channels, the working of the Spirit of God, and so grieved and hindered the work. And, since they have thus raised the question, What is a clergyman? there are fifty-six persons ordained at once, as we have known instances. For what? Elders? No, not one probably of the number having any one qualification for the office. Indeed, though God may raise them up, in the arrangements of the church (that is, the Establishment), there could not be any such thing as ordinary elders, nor is there indeed of deacons, in the scriptural sense of the word. No. What then? All alike are ordained. Some,
+I again notice this traditional expression which is incorrect. The spirit of God works especially in given times and places; it was poured out at Pentecost.
perhaps, ungodly men, it may be, without any call into the church of God at all, not Christians -- whose only office is to make it wrong for any one who has the Spirit to work where they are at all; some godly men, and so to be honoured, but who have no gift for any special office; others who, we will suppose, may be eminently gifted as evangelists, but who, very likely, are sent where there is no opportunity for the exercise of their gift at all, or subject to one who would restrain it. but all are alike and equally clergymen. And what is that, then? What office is it in the church? The great secret of wisdom, in such a time as this, nay, always, is to recognise the spirit, by its moral evidence, wherever it is found -- office, practically when you can. This will set aside the semblance of the flesh, take away its false claim of liberty, and give might to the controlling power of the Spirit, as well as liberty to its energy.
The spiritual clergy are conscious that resistance of nominal office to the Spirit of God is a sin; that it is their duty to act in spite of it. They act by their spirituality, not by their official character. Ought not laymen to do the same? If they say, Let them; then are they the willing authors of schism, maintaining, within a certain limit, their own importance. this is the thing to be dreaded. The authority of the bishops they cannot set up; they neglect it. They know that they are a hindrance; their estimate of them is that they are a difficulty to be got over. And what do we see? A minister of state, a layman -- God forbid that I should justify the act -- saying that he has anxiously considered the necessities of the Irish Church, and he thinks that it can spare twelve bishops. Is it not ridiculous to talk after this of the importance and necessity, the heavenly-derived character of episcopal control? I speak of it as it at present exists. If the Irish bishops had immediately consecrated bishops to the vacant sees, then one might have marvelled at the coolness of the wrong, but the system would have been, so far, however inconsistent, morally if not secularly independent. But they have not done so: and what can we think? I cannot say what I think. They are not in power and strength; and if God has laid His hand upon them, I will not now lay mine. This fact is the evidence, not the principle, of their system; and if they are in sorrow by it, one need not meddle with them there. The clergy may take occasion, by their depression, to set themselves up, perhaps to coin new
rivals, and discredit their old masters; but do they think there are none who can judge them in this? I speak not of them all. but I repeat it, I rejoice that the conflict with authority is exclusively assumed by the clergy. Be it the laymen's part to keep clear, to obey what they own, and to act for the Lord as God shall give them opportunity.
Let the clergy do their duty in the work of the Mission, if the Lord lead them to it; but certainly they are doing it in the way most obnoxious to the authority set over them on one side, and carefully rejecting the work of the Spirit in others, upon the assumption of their office, whereby alone they can act effectually the part they are assuming exclusively to themselves. I pray God they may not so grieve the Spirit as to drive Him away, as they have often done before. I persuade myself fully they cannot now; yea, they shall not. There is one only remedy for their conduct, that I know; and that is not minding it. While, as I trust, every layman will fully honour whatever the Lord has given them of His Spirit, be it pastoral or evangelical, in practical authority, or in witness of the truth; for surely shall His offices for the church be brought out in substance for the profit of the church. I could add much more, as to the special circumstances of the country, both of present good, and probable evil; but I refrain. May the lord pour down His Spirit+ abundantly in this country, to bring out the good in the holy order, that shall give all His people just refreshing, and perfect them for that which it is his portion to give them, and give it them for His name and glory's sake, with their blessing; and to Him shall be all the glory.
[I have been struck with this paper as applicable to the present time, as many an one will see. The result of the course the clergy took at that time, through the intervention of Mr. Frederick Fitzwilliam Trench, was that the Home mission came to an end. When I recently answered his pamphlet, I had totally forgotten the existence of this paper. Thirty-three years have not altered the principles it contains, though it has ripened many an one then at work, and I may detect some inaccuracies of expression. I have not altered a word in the tract, save two which were merely grammatical errors or errors of the press.]
+See previous notes.
"They that were scattered abroad went everywhere, preaching the word." -- Acts 8:4.
That "the word of the Lord may have free course," is a matter which few will deny to be of ultimate concern to the glory of God, though it be one which has in many ways been let and hindered by human perverseness: and in nothing more than by confining the preaching of the gospel within arbitrary limits of place and person, prescribed by man, but sanctioned in no way by Scripture. To a single mind which has known the value of God's love, and which views things in the light in which they are put by that blessed knowledge, it would not seem that, in the midst of a world lying under condemnation, yet visited by this love, aught beyond spiritual qualification was needed for any one to declare, to those whom he sees around him ready to perish, the remedy, namely, that Jesus has died for sinners. Man has been pleased to set up restrictions; but the point with the disciple is to know whether the Lord has done so, and what is the warrant for precluding any from full liberty of preaching to whom He has given His spirit for the purpose: seeing that, if it has been so given, there is infinite loss in the hindrance, and the Spirit of God is grieved. The same faithfulness to Christ, which will yield unqualified obedience to every jot and every tittle of His commands, will also lead us to search out every hindrance to his service, in order to its removal from ourselves or others. the present question is one of deep importance; for it is evident that, if the restrictions be not verily and indeed ordered by the Lord Himself or by His apostles, it comes to this, that in upholding them, on the one hand, there is a loss of much comfort and edification to the church by confining to the ministry of the one that which should flow from the Spirit in many; and, on the other, the gospel which was "to be preached to every creature" under heaven, is bound and fettered, and multitudes are shut out from the springs of life for want of the invitation which should be upon the lips of all, who themselves have drunk of the living waters.
The point to be proved, by those who were opposed to the unrestricted preaching of the word, is this -- either, that none
who are not in prescribed office have the Spirit of God in testimony, or that, having it, the sanction of man is necessary for its exercise. I do not purpose here a general investigation of the principles of the subject, but merely to inquire whether any of the church of God are not entitled to preach if the Lord give them opportunity, or whether there be any human sanction needful for their doing so. The following considerations are intended, by the Lord's help, to maintain that it is not needed; and that no such sanction can be proved to be necessary from Scripture; and that no such sanction was therein afforded. The question is, not whether all Christians are individually qualified, but whether they are disqualified unless they are -- what is commonly called -- ordained.+ I say commonly, because the word as used in Scripture, does not in the original convey what it does to an English ear at present. I affirm that no such ordination was a qualification to preach in the days of scriptural statement. I do not despise order; I to not despise pastoral care, but love it where it really exists, as that which savours, in its place, of the sweetest of God's services: seeing that, though it may be exercised sometimes in a manner not to our present taste or thought, a good shepherd will seek the scattered sheep. But I confine myself to a simple question -- the assertion that none of the Lord's people ought to preach without episcopal or other analogous appointment. the thing here maintained in few words is, that they are entitled. The scripture proves that they did so; that they were justified in doing so, God blessing them therein; and that the principles of Scripture require it, assuming, of course, here that they are qualified by God. For the question here is not competency to act, but title to act if competent. Neither do I despise herein (God forbid that I should do so) the holy setting apart, according to godliness, to any office, such as are competent, by those who have authority to do so. But this is entirely another question.
Let us then try the question by the light which the word affords upon the subject. There are only two cases upon which the question can arise -- namely, as to speaking in the
+The modern distinction between laity and clergy is not acknowledged here in any way whatever, as being totally unwarranted by scripture, and productive of the most disastrous effects in setting up a division between office and energy: that is, in accrediting an ungodly minister because ordained, and rejecting the man who has the Spirit of God, because of his not having passed through a system of human requirement.
church, or out of the church: amongst the "congregation of faithful men" for their common profit and building up in the faith; or as evangelists declaring to the world, wheresoever God may direct them, the message of that "grace which has appeared unto all men." If these are admitted, all anomalous cases will be readily agreed in.
First, then, as to the speaking of Christians in the church. and here I remark that the directions in 1 Corinthians 14 are entirely inconsistent with the necessity of ordination to speak. there is a line drawn there, but it is not between ordained or unordained. "Let your women keep silence in the churches"; a direction which never could have place, were the speaking confined to a definitely ordained person, but takes quite another ground; and which implies directly, not that it is right for every man to speak, but that there is preclusion of none, because of their not being in any stated office. Women were the precluded class; there the line was drawn. If men had not the gift of speaking, of course they would be silent, if they followed the directions there given. The apostle says, "every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation." Does he then say none ought to speak but one ordained? No. "Let all things be done unto edifying." That is the grand secret, the grand rule: in a tongue, by two or at the most by three, and by course, and interpret; prophets, let them speak two or three, etc. "For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted ... " "for God ... " etc. "Let your women keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience." We have, then, distinction, not of ordained and unordained, but of those, who from their character -- women -- are not permitted to speak, and the rest are; being also directed in what order to do so, and the ground of distinction stated. and this is God's plan of decency and order.
For the rest, they were all to speak, that all might learn, and all be comforted. Not all to speak at once, not all to speak every day, but all as God led them, according to the order there laid down, and as God was pleased to give them ability for the edifying of the church. I apply all this simply and exclusively to the question of Christians in general, having God's Spirit, using their respective gifts; and I assert that
there was no such principle recognised as that they should not, but the contrary.
It may and will be said by many, that these were the times of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit. But the Spirit of God does not justify breaking through His own order by systematic rules: it would be most mischievous to say that He did. But the case, let it be observed, was not one of the prerogative of spiritual gifts, but of order; for women had spiritual gifts, as we read elsewhere, and directions are given for their exercise; but they were not to use them in the church, because it was out of order -- not comely. At the same time there was no hint that any or all the men were not, but the contrary, because it was not out of order. Aptness to teach may be a very important qualification for a bishop, but it cannot be said, from scripture, to be disorderly for any member of the body to speak in the church, if God had given him ability. Besides, though these extraordinary gifts may have ceased, I by no means admit that the ordinary gifts of believers, for the edification of the church, have ceased. On the contrary, I believe they are the instruments, the only real instruments of edification; nor do I see why, on principle, they should not be exercised in the church, or why the church has not a title to the edification derived from them. If the presence of the indwelling Spirit be in the church, it has that which renders it substantially competent to its own edification, and to worship God "in spirit and in truth." If it be not there, nothing else can be recognised, and is a church no longer; for no makeshift is warranted by scripture in default of the original constitutive character and endowments of a dispensation.
But in thus upholding the common title of the saints, it may be supposed by some that the argument will be at once met by referring to the orderly way in which Christ originally gave in his church, "some apostles; and some, prophets; and some, pastors and teachers," etc. Now, unless one man centres all these offices in one person, by virtue of ordination, the objection will not apply, but on the contrary brings its own refutation. for we read, some had one service, some another -- the head, Christ, "from whom the whole body, fitly framed together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love." We
read also that the members are set in the body, one the eye, the other the foot, the other the ear, that there "might be no schism in the body."
And it is a thought which might well commend itself to our minds, that if we have indeed lost many and ornamental members, it is no reason why we should summarily cut off the rest -- the word of wisdom or the word of knowledge, and the like, of which there is assuredly some measure yet remaining in the church. But if the attempt should be made to close the enquiry, by silencing all discussion with the startling assertion that it is useless, for the Spirit of God is utterly and altogether gone out of the Church; it at once brings on the question, If so, what are we, and where are we? The church of God without the Spirit? Verily, if He be not there, all union between Christ and His members is cut off, and the promise, "I am with you always, even unto the end of the world," is of none effect.+ But the word of God shall stand. "The world indeed cannot receive the Spirit of truth, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him," but let the disciples of Jesus know that He is with them; and that "wheresoever two or three are gathered together in his name," He is in their midst, His Spirit is with them for instruction and blessing. is this correct?
Thus far then, as to the first case of speaking in the church. I advocate no system. I mourn over the departure of many of the comely parts or part, however, on which God set comeliness. These passages of the word I take as scriptural evidence that the confining of the edification of the church to nominal office alone has not the Scriptures to rest upon. I speak not here of elders, or their value, or the contrary; observing only that grace and scriptural qualities alone should be our standard of valuation; and that, in the arrangements of the Holy Ghost, it is only the gift of God which gives any title to service in the
+Let the following words of the apostle be considered by those who, in common with the Roman Catholics, maintain this promise to be verified in what they term "apostolic succession"; "For I know this, that after my departure shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock; also, of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them," Acts 20. Such was Paul's view of apostolic succession, and one which, in principle, applied to the whole church, as it sank down together, after the decease of the apostles.
church, or to its claims; nominal office merely, as such, having no claim upon any one. I speak merely of the one point -- the wrongness of a Christian speaking in the church as such. One point, and that a most important one, in this part of the subject remains to be noticed. If we are reminded of the dangers arising from all teaching, it is admitted at once; for it is evident that here, if anywhere, mischief would spring up. But looking to Scripture, we are warned against it, not upon the ground of its bang wrong as regards office, not because of its effect merely on others, but warning against it is given, as being one of the things in which, as evil will more or less have a tendency to shew itself, so the remedy is applied to the spirit from whence it flows. "My brethren, be not many teachers, for so shall ye heap to yourselves greater condemnation." But again, the warning itself shews that there was no such restriction of office as is now supposed, for thus it would have been -- you have no business to preach at all, for you are not ordained. But no, the correction was turned to moral profit, not to formal distinction of pre-eminent office.
But the question becomes more important when considered in the second case, namely, as to speaking out of the church, because it forbids the preaching of the gospel by a vast number of persons who may have faithfully borne it to others. Let us inquire into the scriptural facts. In the first place, then, all the Christians preached. "They that were scattered abroad, went every where preaching the word" (Acts 8:4); and those who were scattered were all, except the apostles. Some critics have endeavoured to elude this plain passage, by saying that it is only speaking, which one not in office may do. But a reference to the original at once disproves the assertion. It is "evangelising the word": and we read elsewhere that "the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord," Acts 11:19-21. Now, unless all the church were ordained (I think they are, to preach as far they have ability), here is the simplest case possible, the case in point. The first general preaching of the gospel which the Lord blest beyond the walls of Jerusalem knew no distinction between ordained and unordained. It had not entered into their minds then, that they who knew the glory of Christ were not to speak of it, where and how God enabled them. "And the hand of the Lord was with them." Paul preached without any other mission than seeing the glory of the Lord
and His word -- in a synagogue, too -- and boasts of it.+ And he gives his reason for Christians preaching elsewhere -- "as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak," 2 Corinthians 4. Apollos preached; "he spake and taught diligently the things of the Lord; and of him it is said that, when Paul would have sent him from Ephesus to Corinth, he would not go. Yet, so far from being ordained before beginning to preach, he knew only the baptism of John. And Aquila and Priscilla "took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly." And then, continuing his labours as before, "he helped them much which had believed"; and "mightily convinced the Jews, and that publicly, shewing by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ." Again, at Rome, many of the brethren, waxing bold by Paul's bonds, preached the word without fear. And here let it be added, for the sake of those who have doubts, respecting the passage, that the Greek word is 'heralds'; which shews the character of the work. The same habits of wandering preaching we find in the second and third epistles of John guarded, not by ordination, but by doctrine. Nor in truth, is there such a thing mentioned in Scripture, as ordaining to preach the gospel. We have seen that Paul preached before he went out on his work from Antioch. Now if any plead his being set apart there, still the question is not met; for, as before stated, I reason not against such setting apart, if done as there by the Holy Ghost, but against the assertion that Christians, as such, are incompetent to preach. But the case alleged, if it prove anything as to the question at issue, proves that the power of ordaining, as well as of preaching, was not specially connected with office -- and nothing more. The only other passage (which, though not commonly quoted, seems to me nearer the purpose) is the apostle's command, "the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also," 2 Timothy 2:2. But the thing committed here was the doctrine, and proved tradition, if anything -- not ordination, for it does not appear that they were ordained for the purpose.
+It is instructive to observe, that even in the Jewish worship there was far greater liberty of speech permitted than in the straitened systems of the present day. "Ye men and brethren, if ye have any word of exhortation for the people, say on." There was an expectation and practice of mutual edification in their congregations, of which, in the present day, little or nothing is known.
I have now produced ample evidence from Scripture to a fair mind. My object has been simply to shew the general liberty of Christian men to speak, whether in or out of the church, according to the several gifts which God may bestow upon than, without having need of the seal of human authority; and I say that the contrary assertion is a novelty in Christianity. I have abstained from diffusive discussions upon what has led to it, or the principles which are involved in it. I put the scriptural fact to any one's conscience; and I call upon any one to produce any scripture, positively, or on principle, forbidding to Christians the liberty of preaching, or requiring episcopal or other analogous ordination for the purpose.
And here I will advert to that which is commonly adduced upon the subject -- the case of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. It is remarkable that those who rest upon it should pass by a case immediately preceding, bearing upon this immediate subject; that of Eldad and Medad prophesying in the camp, though they had not come up to the door of the tabernacle, because the Spirit rested upon them. "Would God," said the meek man of God, "that all the Lord's people were Prophets, and that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them." That which was here typically proposed, the pouring out of the Spirit upon all, was in principle fulfilled in the Christian dispensation. Then, subsequently, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram acted not under the influence and energy of the Spirit in testifying to the people, but would have assumed authority -- the kingship of Moses, and the priesthood of Aaron. This was their fault, which very outrage is committed by those who attempt to defend themselves by urging the case before us: seeing that they are taking to themselves that kingship and priesthood which are Christ's alone, and setting up themselves as the only legitimate channels of blessing; and usurping His authority again on the other hand by excluding those who have the Spirit of God from exercising that which they have by the authority of God Himself.+ These things here spoken of were typical of our dispensation, as also the apostle states; and the conclusion is, that they make universal preaching desirable,
+Above all, is the exclusion of any who have the Spirit a grievous inconsistency in those who profess to own its influence, and to be guided by it; whatever excuse there may be for those who, being practically ignorant of its teaching, do throughout uniformly acknowledge the form without the power; for such are at least consistent.
and the assumption of priesthood a sin. To the same purpose is the argument of the apostle applied (Hebrews 5), the exclusion from the office of priesthood, save by such call as Christ had; in which, in one sense, all believers are partakers -- in another sense, He is alone, unaccompanied in the holy place. In a word, the claim of unrestricted liberty of preaching by Christians is right. The assumption of priesthood by any, save as all believers are priests, is wrong. This is the dispensation of the out-pouring of the Spirit here, qualifying, for preaching, any who can do so; in a word -- for speaking of Jesus (for the distinction made between speaking and preaching is quite unsustainable by Scripture, as any one may see if he takes the trouble), and that in which Christ alone exercises the priesthood within the veil in the presence of God for us.
This, then, is the force of these passages. The type of the pouring out of the Spirit in the camp with the gracious wish of Moses is the characteristic, the essential distinction of Christianity. Accordingly we find its primary presentation in the world, to be the Spirit poured out on the hundred and twenty who were assembled together, who therefore began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance. And Peter, standing up, explains to the Jews that they were not drunk, but it was the thing spoken of by Joel -- the undistinguished pouring out of the Spirit upon men of all classes -- servants and handmaidens, their sons and their daughters prophesying -- the pouring out of the Spirit upon all flesh. This was the characteristic of its agency, and this we have seen acted upon in the subsequent history; to deny this, is to mistake the power of the dispensation, and, I will add, to lose it. And what is the consequence? Irregular action goes on, and cannot be restrained, for kingly power cannot be assumed to such purpose, or they are taking the part of Dathan and Abiram; but the power of the Spirit, in which God would give competency to restrain evil, has been slighted; and nominal office, which has been relied on, affords no remedy, unless the rights which the Roman Catholic system has assumed be attached to it, which is the assumption of power not given to the church at all. It is not for me to assert what is the evil of the present day; I am sure it is not the overflowing boldness of testimony against evil; and if evil exist, the remedy is not in seeking to hinder or to reject (for hindered, it surely will not, and cannot be) the title of preaching the
word which the Spirit of the Lord gives to whomsoever He listeth, but the cordial co-operation of those who hold the truth, by which the common energy (and common energy is infinite energy in this matter) may be exercised against all who do not hold the truth, and for the "seeking out of Christ's sheep in the midst of this naughty world."
One important advantage flowing from taking God's order instead of man's is at once seen; men will have their place and agency, whether within or without the assembly of the faithful, by virtue, not of nominal official situations formerly set up, but of the gifts which God has given them: a most important principle in the difference between Babylon and the divine economy. In truth, there are few things more important to remember, and especially in the present state of things, when human prescription regulates everything in matters of religion, that for anything but grace to be our criterion of station in the church (save in the awful responsibility of the individual, "these sinners against their own soul") -- must be wrong. In the last dispensation there was externally appointed order independent of qualification; in the present, the manifold grace and gifts of God in His church are the only means of adjusting and blending in true harmony the various parts and offices of the body of Christ.
With regard to one part of the work -- evangelising, it is clear that a large portion of those who preach officially are incapacitated for it by their own act, as being shut up within restricted limits, and universally without any reference whatever to their individual qualifications, whether teachers, pastors, or evangelists, etc., or the particular necessities of the station in which they are to labour. To such it must be obvious, that the deficiency cannot be otherwise supplied than by those who may be willing to allow God to appoint the field of their operations, and to do the work of the Lord wheresoever they shall be led by Him to labour for His name's sake (3 John 7), and who will be owned by Him, though a Diotrephes may reject them. Nothing argues greater want of submission to Christ -- greater proof of preference of man's authority to the Lord's, than for any to discredit the free and unrestrained bearing forth of the gospel of the grace of God, who have placed themselves in circumstances where they are obliged to stop short of the work, for fear they should be discredited themselves; a work which they cannot do -- which they have
themselves put it out of their power to do, at least, without utter inconsistency; for in so doing, they would be acting in defiance of the authority which has placed them in their prescribed position. Such is their situation that, in following the leading of the Spirit of God in their work, they would in most cases, act unrighteously, for it would be against the authority which they recognise and act under.
Take a case, by no means uncommon, which illustrates the dilemma in which they place themselves. A large tract of the country is destitute of the gospel. One, in whose heart God has put the desire and whose mouth He has opened to speak of His love, goes, preaches there, and is blessed; gathers, out of darkness into light, many souls. The district is already full of persons professing to hold office in the church of Christ, but who are not shepherds. What is the labourer to do? -- leave them for Socinians or enthusiasts to catch, or unheeded altogether? There is no godly righteousness in this. But it becomes a matter of faithfulness to Christ that he should preach to those who are ready to perish; yea, it is a necessity occasioned by the systems which sanction or have sanctioned the idle shepherds by whom he is surrounded. Now, which must an authorised minister, even though a Christian, recognise? He must recognise those idle shepherds, and he cannot recognise the faithful man of God; that is, he must associate himself with ungodliness because it is in nominal office, and not with the Spirit of God because out of it. But he has placed himself in a position in which he must be wrong either way; for if he did not own those shepherds, he would be acting in dereliction of his own responsibilities to the system to whose authority he has voluntarily submitted himself. Hence, also, the answer to the question, "Why not take the nominal office?" Because the source is so vitiated, that many conscientious men cannot identify themselves with it; and (a consideration which, to one who habitually waits on the Lord, is of no small moment) that the work and the scene of his operations are not regulated by the Lord's guidance, and the varied exigencies of His service, exigencies which can be met only by entire and unfettered looking to the Spirit of the Lord, which is the Spirit of true order, for doing the Lord's work according to His own time, place, and purpose -- considerations without which His servants are but busy-bodies (busy out of place, 2 Thessalonians 3:11) whatever may be the apparent result of their
labours, and which in many instances amount to the acquirement of a positive disability to fulfil the office to which God may have appointed the individual, as in the case of an evangelist.
I would make one further observation, suggested by the present question. In observing the infinity of contending interests with which the church is now filled, "the wars and fightings" amongst brethren -- the restlessness of those who are spending their power and spirituality in defending one human system against another -- the inquiry solemnly forces itself upon us whilst witnessing the surrounding scene of excitement, For what are we to contend? The apostle has answered the question, "Contend earnestly for the faith which was once delivered to the saints." Let the inquiry then be calmly proposed to all our minds, For what are we contending? If it be for anything of secondary derivation, God cannot own it: the contention is for our own, and not for the things of Christ: for nothing since delivered is of His Spirit.
The preceding considerations tend to shew that opinions, supported by ever so fair an appearance of antiquity, are worthless -- are deeply injurious to the glory of God, unless based upon His word. The end in view will have been fully answered if but one servant of Christ should be added to that field of labour; or the doubts removed from the mind of but one brother who hesitates to acknowledge, as his fellow-workers, those who have been called by the same Spirit. And let it be observed that in this, as in all things, the liberty of the believer is not the spirit of insubordination, but of entire subjection to the Spirit and the church of God, wheresoever they may be found; not the spirit of enthusiasm, but of a sound mind -- of a mind at one with God, which alone gives righteous judgment. And let the people of God be waiting upon Him for His guidance. It is a time in which those who act with the simplest purpose will carry the work with them (for it is a day in which God is separating realities from forms), as that which can alone stand the universal dislocation which every institution is undergoing, and which the Spirit of God shall, and can, alone go through unscathed, and they that are led by Him unmarred and unhurt.
May God work abundantly by His Spirit, and fill His labourers with it! "The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest."
"God is not the author of confusion," 1 Corinthians 14.
To treat with apparent lightness of spirit anything that concerns the church of God I hold to be a great sin; and though there are a few occasions, very few, and those not connected with the humiliation of Jesus, in which the folly of evil may be brought before the eyes of the many,+ yet my present subject, although absurd to the moral mind, leads me to no such feelings, nor do I desire to treat it in any such spirit. Looking upon it as a matter wherein the Holy Ghost is grieved and dishonoured, if I speak under the influence of that Spirit, I shall feel grieved also: and such is my feeling whilst observing how much of that which wears the fairest appearance, and ranks highest in ordinary estimation -- nay, which is considered as the very triumph of Christian skill, and perfection of ecclesiastical arrangement, is actually at utter variance with the mind of God, and consequently with essential beauty and truth, which are only expressions of that mind.
It is often thought that the complaint of the present state of the church is a wild feeling, taking the dissatisfaction of self-will for the freedom of God's Spirit, and seeking licentiousness under the name of liberty and in defiance of order. But where principles are not assumed (which is often the unsuspected foundation of many a pile of well-connected reasoning), it would not be difficult to prove that such a complaint is not necessarily fanatical or visionary, and that the plain and practical path of obedience is marked out on the other hand by nothing more than common spiritual discernment, and common honesty of heart towards God. Now it appears to me that the present circumstances of the church have destroyed order, as well as liberty, which two things, at any rate while man is a sinner, must go together; and this is shortly proved. Take, the existing state of things in its broad lines: it is not order, that all, or the majority of those called pastors, should be,
+Of which we have instances in Elijah's contention with the priests of Baal; and the more deliberate reproof of Isaiah in his comparison (of which man had forced the institution) of Jehovah the everlasting God, and the stock of a tree; and again in the exposure of popish false miracles and pretensions at the time of the Reformation, analogous in character.
instead of pastors, unconverted men. Yet this is admitted -- even by many who acquiesce in the circumstances which have of necessity produced this fruit. It cannot be called order, that they should be appointed by man (men perhaps not members of God's church) and not by God; this is not order, nor does it produce order, but dissent and schism and confusion. But this is a fact, not only in its results, but in its principles -- namely, that in what is called order, the appointment of the pastors flows from men not members of God's church at all. Succession, in whatsoever degree it may be rested upon, comes, not from Christ the minister of God's power, but from the Prime Minister. In days of infidelity or indifference it must be immediately evident to any one into what danger this at once throws the church, as far as it depends on this succession. Nor is this a speculative apprehension; for this danger is even now in full operation, and by no means a mere probability, but in fact working in its worst possible form, namely -- in shewing itself as the instrument of evil principles, not of good. Where such a fact is evident, and that on all sides, it may seem superfluous to reason on the principle of the succession itself, for we have its legitimate results before us; but as many who are children of God hold by it, and seek to defend it, it may be of some service to the truth to state it on their own principles.
The ordinary arguments against all objections are usually these: that in theory the appointers are members of the church of God, that in this view only they can look at it, and that the actual evil is no ground to go upon. But, as will be seen, Christians will often find themselves in strange situations who disregard actual evil on the assumption that the system which produces it is theoretically correct; for in this manner there may be no limit to the measure of practical wickedness which will be tolerated, while conscience satisfies itself on the plea of an abstract excellence which may turn out to be a mere shadow, or worse. Such, however, is not the path of sound and Christian principle, which at once pronounces that the actual evil is the ground to go upon. God acts upon it, even though the system may be His own, as in the case of the Jews: "thee only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore will I punish you for your iniquities": and the church is bound to act upon it, having the intelligence of God's Spirit to discern the evil. The distinctive character of
the church -- of the individual informed by the Holy Ghost, is this, "Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity"; but the argument used admits the actual evil, yet, whilst avowing the name of Christ, does not depart from it. I ask high churchmen in particular, is it not iniquity that pastors, chief pastors, should be appointed, not by the church, by Christ, but by men, be they what they may? Is not this the fact? And if so, do they then depart from it? Is it the church that appoints them? If the predicament into which they are forced by this question is sought to be evaded upon the plea that the Congé d'Elire saves them (a drowning man will catch at a straw), the answer does but further prove the iniquity of this system, from which men should not, it is said, depart; for it assumes that the persons in ecclesiastical office have the power to elect, or the argument is null, and consequently shews only the uniform betrayal of the interests of Christ by them into other hands than those of the church they are thus driven to an extremity, where choice is to be had only between two conclusions; the last of which, that is, the surrender of the power if possessed, exhibits the constant iniquity of the church: whilst, on the other hand, if not possessed, the church is proved no longer to exist in the exercise of its habitual and necessary functions. Indeed, practically, it seems most honest and simple to say that the sovereign appoints to the bishopric. In Ireland even the poor excuse of the Congé d'Elire is taken away, for the bishops are appointed by letters patent openly by the crown. I have touched on this ground, because refuge is sought in it by some who feel conscientiously upon the subject. Let us return to the plain facts of the case. The Minister of the crown appoints the pastors to the flock of Christ, but churchmen defend themselves on the plea that it is still the church that does it. the simple answer is this -- It is not so now, even in theory. No religion is necessary to the Prime Minister, nor does it practically constitute part of the theory of the state at all.+ but even on the supposition that it did, and that all the persons
+"No head of any college, nay, no three colleges possess half the ecclesiastical patronage of which I have the disposal. I have from 800 to 900 livings in my gift, and from 18 to 20 stalls in cathedrals; still I am not bound to subscribe the 39 articles -- I have never done so; I am not called upon. No test, sacramental or subscriptory, was demanded before or after my admission into office." -- Extract from Lord Brougham's speech in the House of Lords, in April, 1834.
appointing were churchmen and Christians, it is not as such that they have to act in the capacity of appointers. But supposing it still further to be so, what at best is the state of things? We have Christians and laymen (I speak upon the church theory) appointing to the highest ecclesiastical offices, the superior pastorships of the church, because they have secular office which the church, save in civil subjection, knows nothing about. Now I say, this is disorder and not order -- the real bishops of the Established Church are the king and ministers of the day -- for there cannot be a more important function of the church in its order, than the appointment of fit persons to feed the flock.
I can see nothing which seems to me Christian order in such appointments of bishops or chief pastors of God's flock; it presents nothing but immense disorder. I cannot recognise the hand of the church in the Bishop of Exeter, or the Archbishop of Armagh, though I do the church's responsibility. he may, through God's mercy, be a very good man, nay, he may have eminent qualities for the pastoral or episcopal office; but there is no order of God's church in it, but the order of the prime Minister of England, or the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who are not God's constituted officers for the appointment of the bishops of His flock in any church order. In point of fact, the necessary consequences have resulted in confusion and discord in the church of God; for while there was nominal order to which holy minds might desire to be subject, there was, at the same time, the complete amalgamation of the church and the world, which the Spirit of God loudly testified against, and holy men must separate from, and the professed church become the great author of schism.
And here we must note what is a great fallacy in the notion which the church of England desires to give respecting her own constitution. It carries a falsehood on the face of it. we are referred to the articles, or canons, and prayer-book for her constitution and order; but she has not said a word there about her constitution and order, or what she has said is false. the constitution and order of the church of England and Ireland is, that the king and his ministers, or other analogous persons, appoint to all the pastoral offices in the country. where is this stated in these fair-spoken documents? Would churchmen who hold fast by these documents state and avow this, that laymen, it may be ungodly men, should appoint to
all the pastoral offices in the country? Is this what they mean to plead as order -- church order? Yet church order it is. they state, indeed, that they only ascribe to their princes to rule with the civil sword all the estates of the realm, but they ascribe a great deal more. This was a most godly ascription; but if they have only ascribed this, their princes have ascribed a great deal more to themselves (and they have acquiesced in it, though they have not put it in the book -- though it constitutes the special difference of the system, and makes it the church, or, as some may say, not the church of England), and that is, that these individuals, who might be in excommunication, appoint nearly all the pastors in the country. I would ask if there is any order in all this? We have had an eminent instance of this system in principle and practice, when, with one fell swoop, a minister, and not the king at all, but a House of commons (and who are they in the church? struck off ten or twelve of the bishops of a country: that is, he not only is the appointer of the persons, but orders the whole internal arrangement of their superintendence, saying how much is a proper extent of episcopal care, and who shall exercise it. But the great point which strikes at the root of all the church order, and of which the documents state nothing and therefore are a false witness for the church, is, that the pastoral appointments have no connection at all with the church. The succession is from the crown, from the world and its power, not from God at all; so that the great distinctive difference of the church of England would not be found on the face of her own account of herself at all. But that distinctive difference destroys the principle of a church.
But while the church does not honestly state its character, the principle of disorder goes a great deal farther, and all real order is destroyed by the system. By virtue of this system, a number of persons are appointed as clergy or ministers of parishes. There is no reference whatever to the various offices flowing from specific gifts. The scripture indeed speaketh on this wise, "When he ascended up on high, he ... gave gifts unto men ... and he gave some apostles; and some prophets; and some evangelists; and some pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ": the beautifully ordered and united means by which the body is perfected and built up. but this is trampled under foot for a fancied succession which
is denominated clergy, a body of men not appointed to offices in the church, but to the exclusive government of a geographic district. That is, the offices of the church, the legitimate channels for the exercise of the combined gifts by which Christ ministers to its edification and the perfecting of the saints, are thrown to the winds; so that even when the clergyman happens to be a godly man, the saints, if there be such in the place, are deprived of the ministration of their offices, by which Christ has provided for their edification, by virtue of the system which calls itself order, but the principle of which is to throw the appointment of even nominal pastors out of all order into the hands of secular men. The same individual must be pastor, evangelist, teacher, and every other office necessary for the perfecting of the saints and edifying the body of Christ, or the ministry must be crippled and maimed, and the results accordant. And this is the principle of the system. Christ has ordained certain gifts for the edifying of the saints; men have ordered the placing of certain persons, who may not even be Christians, in a given place, with the sole ordering of the church in that place. The argument then is brought to this point -- either the system must assume the possession of every gift by all the individuals it pleases to appoint, and exclude all others from them, or it is proved that their system is at variance in principle with the right order of Christ's church. But they can assume no such thing, for the Spirit distributes to every man severally as He will. This is His prerogative.
The system is proved, therefore, to be at variance with the order of Christ, and that in its vital object, "the perfecting of the saints." It is at variance with the actual order in which he declares that He ministers it; for He gave some evangelists; some pastors, and teachers. But no; we must make all of them everything, or the system violates Christ's order in its very objects; and this the apostle controverts (how much more may we in these days? "Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers?" But, no; Christ gives gifts as he pleases, and man gives authority as he pleases, and then calls this order. It is the devil's order, a turning of things upside down, and exhibits a state of things justly calling forth the expression of righteous indignation no less than of godly sorrow. Surely "it is yet a little while." So that on the whole, the principle of the system is not only at variance with the derivation of grace and knowledge (seeing that the selection is
made by the crown and its ministers, not by the church of God), but also necessarily with all office in the church, by which the body should be ministered to, according to the gift which Christ had given to every man for the effectual purpose of that ministry. I speak now of the theory, passing by all charges on the state of facts in parochial ministrations, and I affirm that the theory precludes the exercise of the offices which Christ has instituted for the perfecting of the saints. a man is appointed a deacon for the purpose, perhaps, of being an evangelist, and would justly, perhaps, refuse to attend to tables. God may have called out, by the ministry of this individual, another, eminently qualified to be an elder in the church of God, for which, though gifted as an evangelist, the former may be eminently disqualified; nevertheless the same person (now translated to the order of a presbyter or priest), without the least change of gift, becomes elder there with no qualification, to the exclusion of one who is qualified, having, it may be, his usefulness as an evangelist quite destroyed by his being put in an office for which God never qualified him; but it must be so because he is the clergyman. Thus, again, we find in principle, that the offices of Christ's church, by which its order is kept, are altogether avoided by this system which is called order; yea, that the offices and the system are incompatible; for the notion of the individual who was called to it being presbyter, or of any being presbyter whom God has qualified for it, is precluded, for some one is called the clergyman of the place. Again, reverse the case: a godly man well qualified to be the pastor and edifier, it may be, of saints, a terror of the ungodly, and healer of them that are wounded, a warrior against Satan's entrance into the fold, is set in a place where, from neglect, there is scarcely any practical knowledge of Christ. God has not gifted the man as an evangelist -- what is the consequence? He has no saints to edify, and his heart is discouraged at his utter uselessness; he might have been a signal blessing to the church of God somewhere, if such a system had never existed.
But let us look a little further. One whom God has gifted as an evangelist comes in and exercises his gift in the same locality (it must not be a clergyman -- that would be disorderly, nor is evangelising properly a parochial ministration); but he is irregular. The godly pastor without any flock is a bar, on the system of the church of England, to any of God's ministry
being carried on; and if he be consistent with the system, he opposes God's ministry in the place, and while, perhaps, a real saint himself, has none of the church of God around him to which he might be useful. Thus a schism is created; or it may be, the other, qualified to be an evangelist, is constituted by the people to be a pastor, to which God never called him at all; and he who would have been a blessing to them, is despised and neglected, because of the system of the church of England, which necessarily involves the subversion of all the offices of the church of Christ. Indeed it does not proceed on the recognition of them. The country has been secularly divided into districts, and the clergy appointed, without reference to the state of the people at all, in their respective districts; the effect of which is only to place any one besides, who exercises the office which is necessary there, in the position of a schismatic. It is quite clear too, that in a vast number of instances, the appointment, being a secular interest, is made by those who have no church principles at all, for temporal reasons and motives. And if we are then told "the church is not to blame," and the question is asked, "How can the bishops help it?" I answer, not at all, and therefore the church is fundamentally wrong in principle: it avows it cannot help evil, and how could it, since the heads of it are appointed on the same principle? But supposing the bishops godly pastors of Christ's flock, and to appoint to offices, according to Christ's institution, evangelists and teachers and pastors, or to recognise any other office in the Church, they would at once be in schism as to the whole present constitution of parochial arrangement. That is, the system, if recognised, is irretrievably at variance with the admission of offices in the church of God, by which the saints are perfected, and the body edified; and the effect of it is to give the character of schism to all those who exercise the office to which God has ordained them. And this is called order (it is the most heinous and wicked disorder) in God's church. Let me be ever such an evangelist, gifted like an apostle, I am disorderly in exercising it; nor would ordination in any way mend the matter, for my exercise of the gift would be disorderly, because of a nominal pastor in a given place: all is pre occupied, and evangelising has no place, and becomes irregular.
The conclusion therefore which is forced upon our minds is, that the system is evil, not only in the disastrous results of so many being called pastors who have no pastoral qualifications
(a consequence flowing from the principle of appointment), and mischievous, not only as restraining the exercise of liberty in the people of God (a restraint indeed which is often very right if done according to godliness), but as being destructive of all offices in the church of Christ and subversive of the principle on which they rest. And, moreover, that under the parochial or rather the clerical system the offices of the church of Christ cannot be exercised, at least in order. Nor does the system of Dissenters appear in this respect at all different: they equally confound the order of the church, with the difference only of having no local limits, which so far prevents the notion of schism (a system of local limits having by the way no possible consistency or warrant from scriptural order of churches). I am not entering now on the question of diocesan episcopacy; but it is quite clear that in its origin it went by churches, not by geographical limits. That is, a bishop governed the churches in such a limit (that is, those who might be gathered out from heathenism), but that was all; and within such district all the offices above mentioned might be exercised with gladness of heart and profit to those who were gathered: but parochial clericalism cannot in any way combine with this. It is absolutely without consistency with any order in the church. An individual is appointed, at three or four and twenty, to a curacy or parish, and he alone may be the elder (an office for which it is clear he is seldom qualified), teacher, pastor, evangelist, if needed. He is the shut-door to the exercise of any office in the church, whether he himself have any gift or the contrary. If God's Spirit is to work at all, then it must be a schismatic; and this is the hateful evil and disorder of such a system -- it makes a schismatic of the Spirit of God.
The office of an evangelist is not a parochial office. It may, in given instances, be exercised within the limits of a parish, but the office knows no such limits, nor does the exercise of such an office imply qualification for being a pastor; nay, in its ordinary exercise it necessarily disqualifies for being an elder. But the notion of a clergyman, which is wholly unsupported by Scripture, summarily settles the whole question, and removes all the offices at once. For it assumes all within the limit to be Christians, and decides that the person (having the sphere of his service prescribed by men, though his ostensible commission is from the laying on of the bishop's hands) who
is thus considered as being over his flock, is to have the title to exclude the exercise of every office which he may not happen to possess; though it is evident that, even if a good man (most frequently not the case), he may be gifted for no office at all, and clearly cannot be assumed in every instance to possess them all. And now suppose the Spirit, thus grieved and dishonoured, should begin to work in sovereign mercy, will it be exclusively confined to the system which has dishonoured it, and haughtily domineered over all its order and grace? It cannot be so; it works where it may work, blowing where it lists. Some of those who, unconscious of the evil, are in the system, may be quickened into energy by its influence; and though in extreme irregularity and disorder (an evangelist exercising the office of a pastor here, and a pastor exercising the office of an evangelist there, and both unprofitably), yet in some measure they may work within their respective limits. The system however itself is unmended. Some of those who are without may be raised up into energy; they at once see that the system is essentially wrong; they wish not to be schismatics in any sort: labour they must, yea, exercise pastoral care if God has committed it to them; but these individuals with the very same class of gifts, are stamped at once Dissenters and schismatics. And what is the meaning of this, but that the system which gives the name of schism is such as to preclude the exercise of God's gifts as far as it can?
Let us suppose, for further exemplification of our argument, a large district without the gospel preached in it: an individual is raised up of God, a stranger to the place, who preaches there; a thousand souls are converted -- what is to be done? Of the number thus awakened, five are specifically gifted of God for the office of pastor, or teacher, or elder. The question at once arises, are these thousand souls to be left shepherdless, because men have chosen to appoint persons called clergymen, who turn out not to be Christians at all -- nay, who, it may be, belie the gospel of Christ? I will suppose, that to prevent heresies and confusion (a point surely of material import in these days) some or all of these five practically act as pastors. Ordained for it according to the church system they cannot be, for the clergy are there already; but the love of Christ constrains them to do the best they can for the sheep. They are at once set down as causers of division; that is, the whole church of God, as far as that place is concerned, is denounced
as schismatic. In a word, the effect of the church of England system, instead of being godly order, throws into schism, in reputation, nearly the whole church of God. And this is anything rather than an imaginary case. Afterwards it may be, a saint becomes a clergyman in the district; he draws some back to church, or is the instrument of converting others: and two systems are formed, in which saints within one and the other are thrown into opposition; and of the whole of this part of the evil the church of England system is the original cause; however it may be perpetuated by the other system which its evil may have generated. The mischievous results are endless; but while these are abundantly sufficient to act upon, the truth is that the principle of the system is irreconcilably at variance with the order, the discipline, or the efficiency of the church of God; while it excludes the recognition of all offices in the church, and infallibly perpetuates schism. And such has been its effect.
The point to which I now specifically allude is, that it has been the author of, or has at least perpetuated, the destruction of all offices in the church of God, by which the saints are to be perfected, and the body edified; which are absolutely incompatible with the notion of that scripturally unrecognised and actually undefined office -- a clergyman. By casualty, it may have happened that one gifted for office may have had a limited opportunity of its exercise; but in no case can it have been exercised according to the order of the church of God. It does not appear to me that the dissenting body has at all emerged from this snare -- office with them being equally confused.
I will now give its effects even within the system, where there are godly ministers, under circumstances in which it is practically reduced to the limit of dissent as a system -- the private choice of ministry, which is the common practice in large towns. I give it in the words of one who, being a godly high churchman, forms an unexceptionable witness to its practical effects.
"It is one of the sad consequences of our divisions and disunions, and the neglect of pastoral superintendence, that the oneness of interest, which ought to prevail among the members of one church, and especially of one flock, is very much weakened, if not lost sight of. Each man looks to his own things, his own edification, his own comfort, his own
progress, so that a kind of selfishness has sprung up in our religion itself. The injury which this has done in the church is incalculable. It leads to endless divisions. Each man is tempted to seek a ministry adapted to his own state. If he be only a little way advanced in his perception of divine truth, he will go where he can hear taught the early lessons of the school of Christ. If he be further advanced, he will go where he can hear deeper things; and the temptation arising from this to the ministry is, that it should be ever accommodated to the state of the hearer, thus checking all growth in grace, and destroying all symmetry in the body of Christ. Hence it arises that we have some congregations who are only babes in Christ, and content to remain so; and others more exclusively strong men in Christ, who, forgetting their own former weakness, are apt to be filled with self-sufficiency and pride."+
The statements I have made are neither an exposition of abuses, though abundant room might have been afforded for it, nor indefinite, though I have reasoned on the principle, because the soundness of this is alleged when abuse is admitted. I say abundant room for exposing abuse, for the computation of the most sanguine evangelical ministers is, that two-thirds of the pastors so-called of the church, are not merely without specific gifts for given office, but do not preach the gospel at all -- surely, a strange state of things, and one which flows from the system they are anxious to vindicate; whilst the perpetual use of this criterion of "preaching the gospel" shews the want of any apprehension of the difference of offices in the church, which the habits of their system have generated -- a system, I repeat it, subversive of all specific office in the church of God.
+"General Redemption and Limited Salvation," by W. Dodsworth, M.A. Mr. Dodsworth subsequently seceded to Rome. It may be remarked, that the word 'office' is used in this paper with reference to the habitual exercise of gifts, as evangelists, pastors, etc. It may be more convenient to call elders and deacons 'offices,' as distinct from gifts. Elders were locally appointed "in every city," whereas gifts were given of Christ and set in the church as members of the one body. But, as in preceding papers, I have left this as it was.
It is remarkable how the Lord, when He has led us a little way, by faith, in simplicity of dependence on Him, provides, by the intervention of His gracious loving-kindness and guidance, for the exigency of circumstances, which the failings of men produce around us; thereby teaching us to depend on Him for circumstances, as well as for ourselves; and keeping us (the great position of truth) in continual dependence, that we may, in our feebleness, learn the fulness of His resources and the faithfulness of His love. His watchful care thus keeps us leaning on it, as our only security from the power of selfishness and evil. Men, in all circumstances, shrink from the sense of dependence -- dependence upon God: it requires faith. They are willing to trust upon man present, not upon God to their eyes absent; though a thing to be learned (this is the great lesson of the Christian dispensation), the character of all sanctity; it is true of righteousness in the Christian dispensation, and of course, therefore, ever in truth; and it is true in every circumstance of individual life, and of the necessities of the church. The book of Numbers, the history of the Israelites, is a lesson of this -- a lesson of faith. We get out of Egypt, not knowing perhaps how, whither, or where we are going, only that we are leaving Egypt: but when Canaan is our constant hope, the wilderness is our constant way: whether our journey be long or short, of vigour of attainment, or of self-earned weariness of unbelief, it is still through the wilderness; and God is there with us teaching us faith, teaching us to depend upon God, where there is nothing else to depend upon. There may be green spots from Him who gives rivers in the wilderness: yea, from our own souls rivers may flow, fed from the Rock that never fails. At the commandment of the Lord we may journey; at the commandment of the Lord we may rest awhile. Manna may daily surround our camp, surely fed every morning's early dawn; but we are still in the wilderness, in entire dependence upon God, learning to enjoy, in the well taught lesson of whence the enjoyment really comes. The losing the sense of this was the very mark of guilt in the Israelites in the land. "A Syrian ready to perish" was their constant confession in their faith, when they brought the first
fruits of that good land -- a land of valleys, and watered with the dew of heaven, a land where the Lord's eyes continually were. This is our continual failing in the service of the church, failing in the sense of entire dependence. There is nothing so hard to the human heart as constant dependence. When faith fails, we constantly find out where we are: it is the wilderness or God. Nothing is so foolish as self-dependence; for, in very deed, it is God or the wilderness. Thus it is in the righteous position of the church's exigence -- apt to loathe the light food, but conducted ever of God.
But there is another state of things far worse than this, when Babylon has carried the body of the people away, that is, the reluctance of the residue to stay in dependence of faith, and their determination to go down into Egypt for help, where judgment would surely overtake them. Such is the continual tendency of the human heart: such help is the church therefore continually seeking. But the church is not of this world, even as Christ is not of this world. And how is Christ not of this world? Surely in spirit and in character He is not of it, as it is an evil world, unholy, opposite to God. When His spotless excellency passed through, it was unscathed, though passing through every scene that wearies and bows down our frail and feeble hearts. But it was with other thoughts also that Jesus was not of this world, and so said He of His disciples. He was not of it, but of heaven -- the Lord from heaven; and we are not of it, but from thence, associated with Him who was holy, harmless, undefiled, and who is now separate from sinners, made higher than the heavens, now in manifested association (that is, to faith, as the object of it there), in the accomplishment of what forms the dispensation in the heavens. The founding of the dispensation upon the accomplishment of the exaltation of its Head is of the greatest importance, because it is the ground of ascertained righteousness and its extent, and the seal of the character of the whole dispensation. It belongs, as being rejected in its Head from the world, to the heavenlies. But it is not merely as the result of the treatment of the Lord and His being glorified, that the dispensation had such a character, and held such a place: in the purpose of God it had no other place. It was the secret of God hidden from ages and generations, and formed an extraordinary break in the dispensations, to the rejection, for their unbelief, of the proper earthly people of God; a forming out of the earth, but not
for it, a body for Christ -- a heavenly people associated with Him in the glory in which He should be and should reign, when the full time was come, over the earth, in those times of restitution which should come from the presence of the Lord; a system forming no part of the earthly system, though carried on through the death of Christ in the forming of its members in it, but that, when all things are gathered together in one in Christ, in the dispensation of the fulness of times, these should be associates of His glory, in whom it and the riches of His grace should be shewn, given them in Christ Jesus before the world began, according to the gift of the Father; a purpose formed for Christ's especial and personal glory before the worlds, and kept secret till the time of His sending down the Spirit after the actual glory was accomplished, after He had entered, in risen manhood, into the glory which He had with the Father before the world was.
The church has sought to settle itself here; but it has no place on the earth. It may shew forth heavenly glory here according to that given to it; but it has no place here, but in glory with Christ in heavenly places at His appearing. We, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness by faith.
This subject, as to the special distinctness of the dispensation, has been treated of elsewhere, and therefore I do not enter into it at large here. I believe it to be the most important point for the church to consider now. Looked at as an earthly dispensation, it merely fills up, in detailed exercise of grace, the gap in the regular earthly order of God's counsels, made by the rejection of the Jews on the covenant of legal prescribed righteousness, in the refusal of the Messiah, till their reception again under the new covenant in the way of grace on their repentance; but, though making a most instructive parenthesis, it forms no part of the regular order of God's earthly plans, but is merely an interruption of them to give a fuller character . and meaning to them. As to the thing introduced, we are called to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is not the place or time of His glory: our calling therefore is not at all here; but when Christ who is our life shall appear, we also shall appear with Him in glory. Ministration upon earth is merely to this purpose. The moment there is a minding of earthly things, there is enmity to the cross of Christ; for "our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our
vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things to himself." The Jewish system was a system of derived earthly authority; and while the church was simply among them, it never lost its earthly character entirely; it was open at any time to the return of the Lord, and was formed upon the order of derivative authority from Him when He had not yet ascended into glory, though it was accompanied by the Spirit, which enabled them to testify to His ascended glory. But they were Jews; and they maintained the character of the earthly system so far as it was associated with the risen Saviour, the hope of Israel: for that which was identified with the resurrection of Christ was the "sure mercies of David."
Thus we find the Lord telling them, "But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me: and ye also shall bear witness of me, because ye have been with me from the beginning." Accordingly, we find the eleven choosing Jewishly by lot (before the descent of the Holy Ghost from heaven, the witness of the glory) one to be a witness with them of the resurrection, one who had companied with them all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among them. So, in the sermon to those who came together on hearing of the tongues, we read, "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are witnesses": and then he uses the descent of the Holy Ghost as the witness of His exaltation. Again, in the sermon in Solomon's porch. "Whom God hath raised from the dead, whereof we are witnesses," and then goes on with a sermon purely Jewish. In Acts 5:32, the double witness is directly referred to, and distinguished. So the Lord breathed the Spirit of God into His disciples, after the resurrection, saying, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost": "whose soever sins ye remit," etc. Subsequently they received the Holy Ghost, the witness of exalted glory.
Thus, the apostles became the heads of derivative power apparently (at any rate the existing depositaries of authority; for derivative commission was never conferred upon them), and stood before the world the founders of the church among the Jews, with commission to extend it to all nations. But the Lord, save in the testimony of apostasy by the apostle John in the Revelation, gives us no authentic account of any such
transmission of it through the world. It formed no part of the record -- nothing on which the church of God had to rest for its direction. It is remarkable, too, that the prayer of our Lord in John 17 was literally fulfilled in the Jewish church, in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, in them who were one together in the unity of those who believed on Him through their word, their separation out of the world, even to the surrender of their goods, and the witness thus afforded to it, praising God and having favour with all the people, great grace being upon them all. Here the scene all but closes; such we see not elsewhere at all. This was the church of those connected with Christ in the flesh, who had seen Him in the resurrection, and derived their authority from Him in earthly association, though endued with power from on high; ignorant of the times when the kingdom should be restored to Israel, but knowing that the heavens had received Him who was able, and was to do it; and looking for the repentance of the people that He might return.
But that people did not repent. Another witness was raised up, when this witness of His resurrection was refused and the power of the Holy Ghost in it rejected, to declare Jesus at the right hand of God; and to shew demonstratively in His power, that they were doing as their fathers had ever done -- resisting the Holy Ghost; but this was, in fact, a testimony against them for their previous rejection of the apostolic word and power recorded in the previous chapters, and it is closed by the testimony of seeing heaven now opened, launching the church into a new scene, a scene of death to itself, but into which it entered by the perception of heaven open, and Jesus seen there. With this, accordingly, Jewish testimony to it as a church closed. Jesus was not seen sitting as we see Him in spirit, but standing at once to receive His suffering church. Here the Jewish scene finally closed till they should say, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord," accomplishing this word of the Lord, and the view of Him in heaven thus opened to the church. Individuals might be converted and doubtless were; but the order of Jewish ministry ceased.
Heretofore it had been confined to Jerusalem, and in regular witness by the apostles, eye-witnesses of His resurrection to the Jews, and filling up and arranging the necessary offices, as we read in the Acts. But death and the heavenlies were now the portion of the church of God; its earthly order and
continuance gone: and (though Peter preached among the Jews, and the rest we know not from Scripture where) succession and order as to them we find not in Scripture at all. There is no authentic statement as to where any of them went, no scriptural statement at all, save that Peter continued his labours as apostle of the circumcision (the only place he holds in Scripture) and that the apostles continued at Jerusalem, as we find in the Acts and other parts of the apostolic writings. But another scene now opened. The heavenlies we have now seen as the positive known and only portion of the church; for earthlies were Jewish, and they had rejected the testimony of Christ risen and exalted by the Holy Ghost, from the apostles and Stephen. Stephen's ministry was suited to this: chosen among the Hellenists, he formed the link, having purchased to himself a good degree and great boldness to bear witness, not as an eye-witness, but by the Holy Ghost, of Christ. Accordingly this is entirely his charge, not "We cannot but speak of the things which we have seen and heard," as Peter says to the rulers, but the witness of the rejection of the Holy Ghost; of which being full, he saw Jesus in the heavenlies. Thus he formed the link between Jewish rejection and the position and state of the church which followed. And what succeeds? Not Jewish order, but sovereign grace approving itself by the energy of the Spirit.
They were all scattered abroad except the apostles, lest it should seem derived from them, "and they that were scattered abroad, went everywhere preaching the word." Who sent them? Persecution. Who enabled them? The grace and Spirit of God. And it reached the Gentiles. There was no Gentile church but by what in these days is called irregularity -- what is really the sovereignty of the grace by which any Gentile is called in the extraordinary and seemingly irregular act of God. For salvation is of the Jews: a Jewish Jesus is not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel; but a glorified Jesus doth what seemeth good unto the glory of the grace of which He is now the indiscriminate (as to men), but sure distributer. But the character of the change which took place is at once shewn by this dispersion and universal preaching wherever they went. The ordinary Christians preceded the apostles, that it might be plainly not derived from them. The whole matter then, to justify anything, was "the hand of the Lord was with them, and many believed": a very irregular
and out-of-the-way thing for human nature, but which God has ordered as the way of salvation. Thus we find, in the Jewish rejection of the apostles, the instantaneous cessation of derivative arrangement, and the whole dispensation, as carried on upon earth, assuming a new character. This was the actual breaking of the earthly order, as the former scene with Stephen was the closing of the Jewish possibility of the dispensation.
But a new scene now opens -- the regular Gentile form and order of the dispensation in the hands of the apostle Paul, the apostle of the uncircumcision, the apostle of the Gentiles. Did he then derive it from the apostles? or was he indeed a successor to our Lord by earthly appointment and derivation? No; in no wise. It was his continual boast that it was not so -- his continual conflict with Judaising teachers, what was often charged on him, as though he needed it, with which they pressed his spirit, but which he as sternly and steadily refused, withstanding them who had such authority to the face. He is the type of the dispensation. Every dispensation has its character, from the manner in which Christ is manifested and introduced in it; and its order from Him under whom it takes its rise as to ministration. God, not yet known to the church in covenant, but the same God revealed as Almighty, was the dispensation to Abraham called out to trust in Him, and gave its character to the path in which he had to walk in hope.
Christ (for now it was in covenant, revealed as Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) was that under which Moses the leader in the wilderness, and Joshua in the land, led in succession the children of Israel under the order of successional priesthood for ever.
Christ as Messiah, God manifested in the flesh, closing the age of the law, and bringing in everlasting righteousness, the head of Jewish order, was He whom they should have received; and He could give and did give His derived authority to the apostles whom He had chosen -- Christ risen, still a Jewish hope, the securer of the sure mercies of David, was He whom they had rejected, in spite of the testimony of the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. Christ glorified and supreme, the hope to every Jew scattered abroad and every Gentile sinner, the witness of sovereign grace, whatever the failure in evil. Those in whom the revelation was deposited, Abraham, Moses,
Joshua, were characteristic of the time in which the Spirit wrought by them. So of the twelve: Christ was the true Vine, not the nominal Israel, and they the branches, deriving their authority from Him as the patriarchs from Israel; the dispensation thus far taking its entire and orderly character from them. It was a Jewish, though a Christian thing. That is, it was Jewish in its present order: it began at Jerusalem; but this ceased as a line when the risen Christ was rejected. The grace of God flowed in through the sandy desert and wilderness of the world, to make green, where it flowed, what it found buried in evil in it, when no watering of the tree which He had planted could cause it to bring forth good fruit to His glory and its own profit and acceptance.
And as the Spirit went, like the wind, where it listed, every one that was born of it was, according to the measure of the grace, the witness of the grace that he had received: for God had not lit candles to put them under bushels. Paul became the head and characterising agent of the dispensation among the Gentiles, not derivative but efficient. Hence God made him so powerful and so tried against derivative mission. "I received it," says he, "not of man nor by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him up from the dead." So of the gospel which he preached: he certifies them, he was jealous of this point; he neither received it of man, neither was he taught it, but by revelation of Jesus Christ: and he gives this general character of himself, "Last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time," as an abortion (ektroma); and this character attaches to the whole dispensation, an extraordinary arrangement and provision, something born out of due time -- ektromatal -- for the time present, till the earthly system is just ready to be restored, but belonging entirely to the heavenlies, having no earthly derivation or connection in its power with the succession of that order which was first outwardly established. It derived its stream higher up from the same source, though recognising it in its place. (See Galatians 2) If it had such connection, what was all Paul's reasoning about? or why did he take such pains to prove it did not so derive itself -- or why the Spirit of God refute the notion of Paul's derivative character, when he preached the same doctrine, and held the same truths? It was the grand testimony to the break of successional authority, which was Jewish: the church, as a separate thing for glory, being now
set on this unearthly footing on its own basis of apprehension of it by the Spirit.
Accordingly, the evidence which the apostle affords of his apostolate is never derivative, or that he had authority from others; but, "If I am not an apostle unto others, doubtless I am to you: for the seal of mine apostleship are ye in the Lord": "For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel." "Since ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me, ... examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?" "Truly the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience, in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds." So his argument, as to the dispensation, is "When he ascended up on high, ... he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets," etc.
Now the twelve were apostles, and had the express name from our Lord's commission, before He ascended up on high at all. Yet they do not come into the apostle's contemplation in spirit at all -- that is, in any such character, because they did not, in that state, constitute a part of the dispensation of gift, and authority by gift, of which he was the minister and expounder. This was associated with the ascended glory of Christ -- "When he ascended up on high, he gave." Accordingly, when the apostle was called, he was called not as knowing Christ after the flesh (if he had, he would know Him no more); but as one, who as a Jew, in ignorance indeed, had consented to that very act against Stephen which shewed the rejection of the Jews; and was a killing apostle of the Sanhedrim who had been so guilty, to find any of those who called upon His name. He was identified, not with the believing, but with the unbelieving portion of the Jews, when the question was between them; and he was not a Christian at all while the church had this character. He was the witness of the calling of grace, and the perception of supreme glory. The manner of his call was declarative of both. He was in the career of opposition to Christ, and was arrested to be the witness of His glory, and of whatever should be revealed to him -- not of His earthly career; to that he had been a spiritual stranger -- not of His fellowship when risen with His brethren; from that he had been a careless outcast, or a bitter opposer to it -- but of His ascended glory.
It was not, as with the twelve, the patient tracing with slow
understanding the unfolding glory of the Man Jesus conversant among them, till they followed Him, through the apparent death of all their hopes, by the resurrection, "being seen of them forty days," into the known certainty of His exaltation to the clouds in which He should one day appear again so coming, and the witness of where He was because the Spirit had been sent down, from the Father; but the sudden and unlooked-for perception of the heavenly glory of the Lord, above the brightness of the sun, and finding that this was Jesus. That is, beginning at the glory, the heavenly glory, and aware that he saw and heard the Lord speaking from heaven, he asks and finds that this glorified One, this glorious Lord, was Jesus whom he was persecuting. Hence his mission was wholly of the glory in its source, not a witness of the suffering and a partaker of the glory to be revealed, but a witness of the glory and a partaker of the sufferings; and so ever preaching this mystery among the Gentiles "Christ in you the hope of glory."
This, then, was the calling of Paul, a sovereign calling by grace, revealing the Son in him -- one born out of due time; and this when the church was entirely heavenly, entirely underived, and necessarily rejecting derivation, or he would have denied the character of his calling, and lost the authority of his mission; for the Jewish things would have remained. It was heavenly, underivative, of grace, and by revelation, and that of the glory, and drew all its character and all its evidence from this; and this is carefully insisted on by him, and urged by the Spirit of God. The ordination of the apostle stamped the seal on the same truth. First, it was secured by the divine counsels that he should preach and testify within and without synagogues and congregations concerning the Lord Jesus. Without anything further than the calling spoken of, he preached the faith which he had once destroyed, as he himself expresses it, "As it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe and therefore speak"; as the other apostles, "We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard"
And so is the energy of the Holy Ghost ever; whether it be the sure resurrection of Jesus, the revealed glory of the Lord; or with Jeremiah, in derision daily because of his words to the people -- it "is in his heart as a burning fire shut up in his bones; he was weary with forbearing and could not." If in
liberty, there was the rejoicing as being counted worthy to suffer shame; if reluctant and tried by the iniquity in a state ready to be judged, the word of the Lord was more powerful than the fears: though on every side -- "he believed and therefore spake." The glory of the Lord must be vindicated; and it becomes a positive responsibility. Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel or under a bed, and not to be set upon a candlestick? "For there is nothing hid which shall not be manifested; neither was anything kept secret but that it shall come abroad": and it is our business to manifest it in the truth and energy of the Spirit. Therefore "if any man have ears to hear, let him hear": and "Take heed what ye hear: with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you; and to you that hear shall more be given."
Hence we also find the apostle declaring, "When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood, neither went I up to Jerusalem to them that were apostles before me, but I went into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days; but other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother." Fourteen years after, he went up, but it was by revelation; and in conference he found that those who seemed to be somewhat added nothing to him: and this was the point with him. It was no haughtiness of spirit, and he was willing to try his word by theirs; but he found they could add nothing; and they owned the grace that was in him, though he derived no authority from them, the appointed apostles of the Lord, and recognised none in them save in the sphere which God had allotted to them; and they owned the grace of God which was in him. When need was, he withstood them to the face, because they were to be blamed who were insisting upon the old ordinances. To such things he would give subjection, no, not for an hour.
And what then was his career, because of the glory revealed to him, his ordination as men speak, if he did not go up to those who were apostles before him? The energy of the Spirit, consequent on the revelation of the Lord, still held its character in securing the breaking through the apostolic succession. There was no derivative link from the Lord; there was the revelation of the Lord and mission by Him, but no human
ordination; and in this he worked long, and not only in preaching or teaching strangers, but Barnabas, having gone to Tarsus to find him, brings him to Antioch; and it came to pass that for a whole year they assembled themselves with the church and taught much people. Who settled this? Who appointed them here? Who, Paul? Who, Barnabas? The grace of the Spirit of God wrought effectually in them; and so the apostles, as we have seen, had to judge: they perceived the grace of God that was given to them, and they gave them the right hand of fellowship. But still in public mission had they no derivative authority from some human ordination? Or was not abstract apostolic mission the ground on which it rested? Long it had been so; for God was securing in every way, that human dependence, human derivation should be broken in upon; for its place was gone in the earth.
The dispensation was one born out of due time; it must prove itself by its energy from on high: so it had been proved both in preaching Christ and teaching the church. But now Barnabas and Paul were to be sent out on a definite mission, and, of course, they had derived authority now. Whence? Everything was still made to depend on the energy and calling of God. "As certain prophets and teachers were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Paul and Barnabas for the work whereunto I have called them; and when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away." Did the apostle derive his authority, his apostolic authority, from his ordination? That would be a strange assertion; and he says he had it neither of nor by man. If this had been his first going forth to preach, it would have been almost impossible to have hindered the conclusion that it had its source in this, and the apostolate would merely have been from the church at Antioch.
Therefore the Lord, to maintain the character of the dispensation, makes the apostle not confer with flesh and blood, but immediately preach on his calling, and afterwards separates him merely to the particular work to which he was called, thus securing its underivative character, and that by the direct action of the Spirit. Its value was the energy of the Spirit of God, because of the glory to be revealed, and the heavenly character of the dispensation which had its place in the glory, not here at all, and so ordered of God; otherwise apostolic authority is
derived from laymen (in modern theory, self-ordained men), and the apostle's assertion of his apostolate falsified. But it was not; it was the Holy Ghost's separation of him to Himself for the work to which the Lord had called him, not the conferring a gift, as if his apostolate depended on that mission; for this the apostle denies at large in the Epistle to the Galatians, and passes by this going forth from Antioch entirely in the account of his mission which he gives to them, and it was not the derivation of authority; for this he is equally earnest to deny.
In Paul, then, we have the founding of the service of this dispensation, resting on the fully recognised apostleship, but caused, in the way it is founded, to be entirely of a heavenly character, springing from the Lord known then in the glory, having its working and energy in the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, and breaking in upon the derivative character of the apostolate in the Jews by every careful arrangement of God; and the laying on of hands made little of as regards the apostolate, and coming not from superior derivative authority, but entirely collaterally, that every link of the sort should be broken; and, we may add, failing as to its earthly position, the moment the energy of the Spirit failed, the moment the unstained godliness which kept out evil, and left the operations of the given Spirit free, failed. Because the witness of the glory among the Gentiles was not to take the place of the glory, any more than the witness of the resurrection among the Jews was to take the place of the resurrection-glory. And it was only a witness, and therefore shewn only to the apostles and teachers among the Jews, and Paul for the Gentiles, and having been witnessed to, fails as regards holding any place here, though effectual by the Spirit to them that believe, that, abounding in hope through it, they might have an entrance into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour, when He shall be manifested as the risen and glorified One, and sorrow and trial pass away. And though the filling up, as it were, was in the ascended glory, of which Paul was the special witness (and therefore he laboured more abundantly than they all, as the full testimony was to be given to the world in him, the continuous Gentile dispensation), yet though he sustained it by the energy of the Spirit during his life, he knew well that it would end then, that is, as thus corporately held together: "I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves
shall men arise speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them."
It was not that God, in the word of His grace to which he commended them as able to build them up, would not both gather out, and sanctify souls; but he felt and well knew that Ichabod was written on the dispensation, as on every other, till He comes who could sustain it enduringly in the present power of a manifested life, Satan being bound from before Him. So it was among the Jews; the resurrection-denying Sadducees being raised against the testimony of that, as the self-righteous Pharisees against the ministry of the righteous One. So it was among the Gentiles, false teachers bringing into disrepute the energies of the Spirit of God, and thus devouring the flock, because of the feebleness of the shepherds. Oh how little does the church know the service of crying and tears, the humility of mind which accompanies the watching the fold of Christ against the inroads of the enemy -- of Satan. But it is gone. Yet there is One that is ever faithful, who, be the shepherds ever so cowardly, does not let His scattered sheep be plucked out of His hand.
To return to the subject. Let us turn to what we have afterwards, of the maintenance for a little season of the order of the church of God before the re-assertion of the human derivative claim came to take the place of the Spirit of God. Let us take a glance at another part of scripture connected with this -- laying on of hands. The priesthood of Christ is the great characteristic of this dispensation,+ hereafter in glory manifested for joy and praise, now for the intercession and gifts of grace, still the same in person. It is ministering by the Spirit below, that the saints might be a witness to the world of what the power of it is in Christ, to the Father of what He was: they are in His place before the Father and before the world. And this is what is brought out in John 17, not the thing itself till the glory comes, and Christ appears, and we appear; but a witness of it by a supply of grace from Him who will appear, the fulness of both our place before the Father, and our place before the world, being in Christ.
Hence it is Paul (the Spirit as in his ministry) who addresses the Hebrews -- not the ministry of circumcision, as speaking to them in their place, but one calling them out of that into the
+Not of the church properly so-called -- that is His body, one with Him, perfect in Him; but as a system set up on earth.
consciousness of the heavenly calling, speaking to them from the glory of the Son, sustaining them in the present failure of the dispensation in them, by the security of an enduring Melchisedec priesthood. "Wherefore," says he, "holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider Christ Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest of our profession." Such an High Priest, as was not only harmless, undefiled, but separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens, became such as these. "If he were on earth he should not be a priest." He is gone, not into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us. But this was not all; for, as we have seen, when teaching the understanding of the mystery among the Gentiles, we find this ascending up on high was leading captivity captive, and receiving gifts for men; and "He gave," etc. So we find many of the worthies said to act by faith, in Hebrews 11 (the great point then of trial to the Christian Hebrews) testified of, as led by the Spirit, in their history in the Old Testament.
But this is not the point I rest on here, but the comparative use he makes of the priesthood in his Melchisedec character with the very circumstances here spoken of. "Wherefore leaving the word of the beginning of Christ; let us," he says, "go on to perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith towards God, and of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment; and this we will do, if God permit." He then, from the fourth to the sixth, speaks of the things which are the proper portion of the church emerged out of Judaism, which was the word of the beginning of Christ -- and that failure from this new portion is irremediable after such patience of God; and in the rest speaks therefore not of the blessings of the given Spirit, save as to the danger of apostasy, but indeed, while Aaronical intercession meanwhile subsisted, of what their portion under the Melchisedec priesthood would be according to the word of the new covenant. Of this the Holy Ghost was present witness. It is not my purpose to open out this now; I refer to it to shew the contrast of what were the first principles, or the word of the beginning of Christ, and the going on to perfection -- that is, the knowledge of the priesthood of Christ, the heavenly priesthood now witnessed to us by the presence
of the Spirit. This is given in this epistle, on account of its object, merely in parenthesis, as the full Christian character of the dispensation and its danger of apostasy in chapter 6: 4-6.
But we find thereby the way in which the Jewish elements are treated, not as though they had not their place, but the place they had explained; and they are Jewish elements. These they are: the dead, we admit, will be raised; eternal judgment, or guilt, more properly, will be; repentance from dead works is acknowledged to be needful; baptisms and laying on of hands we have heard of as existing; but they constitute not the glory and power of the dispensation. The exercise of the church's mind about them proves its return to Judaizing principles. The notion of derivative authority is a positive lapse into the order of the dispensation broken in upon by God, in its losing its Jewish character, and becoming the spiritual witness of the heavenly glory and fulness of Christ. Who is Paul's successor? I have heard of the successors of Peter, the direct and remarkable witness to the character of the association with derivative authority. It is all identified in the Gentile church with Peter, who was not the apostle of the Gentiles at all. It is the Judaizing of Gentilism, and the whole structure and fabric of the professing church rests upon this. Paul, as the apostle of the uncircumcision, held the witness of the character of this dispensation. Where is his successor? Of what See was he head? Was it Rome, the source of the present derived authority? And of what character then is all this derived authority? Where is it in Scripture?
Let us see the facts a little further. It is not to be denied that Paul and the presbytery laid their hands on Timothy; and a gift was in Timothy by the laying on of Paul's hands. The same does not appear in Titus at all, neither was he circumcised, which Timothy was; and Timothy, it appears, also laid hands upon others, for he is desired to do it suddenly on no man. They were thus special temporary deputies of Paul for setting the churches in order in the things wanting, and appointing elders. That they were not permanent episcopal superintendents is clear, because when Paul passed by Ephesus, he addresses the elders or bishops there so as to demonstrate them not to be under the care of Timothy as from apostolic derived authority; and in the second epistle charges him to come to him, as he does also Titus, to come to him at Nicopolis, wanting them to be with him. They were his chosen assistants
in ordering the churches, not his successors in them, unless he himself was bishop of both. We find John subsequently exercising the care under Christ, apostolically, of the Ephesian and other churches in those parts -- quite inconsistent with the notion of Timothy's episcopacy, derived from Paul. The energy of the Spirit then, using whom it thought fit in an authority of office, we find, in the conception of the church -- derivative authority and jurisdiction nowhere. There was the conferring of gift; there was the ordering by those enabled to order; there was the appointment of elders in every city by those enabled to do so; and the committal of doctrine to faithful men; there was every care of the church; but no apostolical derivative authority, except the false derivation of Peter, who was the apostle of the circumcision, not of the uncircumcision, and whom the Scriptures only so recognise.
I would only add a few words as to the term "ordain." There is no such word in the Scriptures in the modern sense of the term. Laying on of hands, to have been used in given instances, I do not at all deny. We have seen an apostle ordained by laymen, afterwards conferring a gift by the same ordinance, and Timothy charged not to do it suddenly: but as we find the whole energy of the church continually and long carried on without reference to it, so the word translated "ordain" has never, in Scripture, any connection with laying on of hands. Used or not used, it does not so state it, fore seeing, I am persuaded, the apostasy of the latter day. In Acts 1:22, the expression is merely an insertion of the translators: see the original, where it merely is "must one of them be a witness of the resurrection." The other passages are in Acts 14:23; Titus 1:5. In the one "chose" or "selected elders"; in the latter, "appoint."
There is no evidence that Timothy was left for such purpose. The apostle states it to have been to guard doctrine, not for the purpose of appointing elders. It is a general instruction as to his conduct in the church, and it does not appear that laying on of hands was peculiar to any such office. It may have been used in it: they are never so connected in Scripture. When elders are spoken of, laying on of hands is not; when this is spoken of, they are not. It may have been used: there was no scriptural identification. Probably it had a much wider scope. It was clearly used among the Jewish Christians for sickness and miracles, and by the apostle for conferring gifts.
Further, I would remark, that while the present care of the church was exactly what would be consistent with the looking for the coming of the Lord, which possessed the mind of the apostle, the arrangement of prospective provision by derivative authority for future ages was wholly inconsistent with it. When he was passing by Ephesus, in the consciousness that his personal care was closed, he warns the elders himself on their own responsibility, although, long before, Timothy had been left to watch the place (though it would appear he did not stay there long). But the charge to Timothy was doctrine.
All present care was as to the way in which they would wait for the Lord, and committal of trust to those called and gifted, where needed. But the arrangement of derivative authority would have been positive unbelief. Accordingly we find it broken among the Jews, where it had this character, never attempted among the Gentiles where the glory was manifested; now taken nominally from Peter, when he was gone who withstood these things to the face. Our present duty is every possible care of the church as far as gathered, and of the saints, which God by His Spirit may enable us to take; using (with all diligence, humility, and energy, with crying and tears, in which we may expect to use it) whatever He gives us, to keep out Satan and feed the flock of God, where we may be, or He send us; but to lean in constant dependence on Him for the constant supply of the Spirit of His grace, as our only ground of strength; and when we fail, commend them to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build them up, and give them an inheritance among them that are sanctified. He who knows this in spirit, will well know its sorrow, and how near it draws one to God. But all this is God's provision, not for the wickedness of man, but for that failure, which in man's foolishness shall cause all to centre in the glory of the Lord.
But there is one further point, with which we must close. To the mere laying on of hands, if done spiritually, I know of no objection; but reference of the heart to derivative authority has quite another character. It is Judaizing. It is, if insisted on, the principle of apostasy, as denying the power and calling of the Holy Ghost, or His competency to send, bless, and sanctify. Wherever we return to Jewish practice as an imposed necessity, we return to the idolatry of the world. There was a special sanction of worldly elements to a given purpose; and worldly elements, and glory, and honour had their place, while
it was so ordered. The principles of the human heart which sought them were dealt with on their own ground and terms, though in God's way; because, till the rejection of Christ, man and the world were not treated with as dead in trespasses and sins, as lying in wickedness, as at enmity with God; and riches, and honours, and worldly things accompanied the love of wisdom, and human principles were dealt with. But in the rejection of Christ, the truth was brought fully out to light: the system of the world was set aside as to all its elements, as evil; God's sanction to it in any form or sort ceased. Its friendship was enmity with God. It was convinced of sin, and righteousness, set up not there but in the heavens, hid with God, revealed to faith. Judaism had been the place of righteousness, but iniquity was found in it; and, being set aside, its principles became merely the simple worldly elements, without any sanction of God at all, and with merely their own worldly character; and the return to them became apostasy, return to the mere evil world.
This is the apostle's statement, the force of which is by no means in general sufficiently estimated. Writing to the Galatians, he says, "Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service to them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe," etc. That is, Gentiles become Christians, and looking to Jewish principles, were returning to their own old Gentile state: for what else was Judaizing now? It was simply joining the world, the ungodly world, which had not the Spirit of God in it, ending in the flesh. So the apostle argues in Colossians 2:19-23, especially verse 20. Wherever, then, we turn to what is Jewish (a right thing while God's work was of this world), we have the principle of apostasy in us (these things have the rudiments of the world in them), and we shall more or less join the world, which has not the Spirit, which is at enmity with God.
And when, I would ask, has the church looked to this derivative character as essential and necessary that it has not joined the world? Receiving the principle of the world into its bosom, it soon fell into its practice; and this is the character, the form of apostasy. And the absence or subversion of justification by faith, and maintaining the doctrine of works for salvation, derived authority, and the church in the world, have
astonishingly gone together. However this may be -- I refer to it here merely as a fact -- certainly the church so fell, at first gradually. Of this we may be sure, wherever we join any Jewish principle of ordinance now, as that which is our order, or obligatory on us, we join the world in its rejected state; for these are now demonstrated the profitless elements of the world, and nothing else; and the apostasy of the church is involved in principle. With whatever patience we may bear with those subject to them while they are under them, their imposition, as though needful, is the snare of Satan leading us back whence we are delivered; for our conversation is in heaven. History will prove it as to facts, to be the apostasy of the church, though the Spirit of God can alone prove or shew the principle. I do not reject conferred authority from God where it can be shewn in the grace of its exercise: derived authority from man I believe to be most evil, and to have apostasy in its character and principles.
The preceding observations may seem protracted; yet I think the importance of the principles warrants the deepest consideration of the subject. My own mind is very clear on it in principle, though I may have much to learn in detail. I have endeavoured, under the Lord's mercy, to confine myself to the principles, to hurt no one, the matter being not of controversy, but of deep and everlasting truth. It is a remark able thing that -- while almost all the churches more or less hang on derivative authority -- where it is settled as a system, we may note, first, human derivation is its first basis as a principle; secondly, it is connected entirely with Peter, and succession from him; and in conferring the authority, it uses the words used by the Lord in conferring it on His Jewish apostles, previous to His ascension.
I propose saying a few words on the very solemn subject of the apostasy of the dispensation, suggesting the scriptural statements concerning it, rather than making any comment.
This subject has been touched upon connected with the calling of Paul, with the raising up of an extraordinary messenger of grace upon Israel's rejection of the testimony of the Holy Ghost to the exalted Jesus. I purpose to advert now to the positive scriptural evidence of the apostasy; and I will merely retrace, with some additional circumstances, the previous point, which declared its apostasy in its first or Jewish organisation. The scriptures I would now refer to are in evidence of the plain fact of direct ecclesiastical apostasy, the revealed existence of that which determined the fate of the dispensation.
The rejection of the Lord Jesus really crowned the sin of the Jewish people -- of man; but on the cross the Lord interposed by intercession, saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"; and to this expression of the gracious and blessed mind of the Lord the Holy Ghost replies, when by the mouth of Peter He says, "and now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers; repent ye therefore." That is, the Holy Ghost now bore testimony to the exaltation of Jesus to give repentance to Israel and remission of sins. Hence all the testimony of Peter is to God's exaltation of the rejected Messiah, the Son of man. This testimony, as has been long since observed, was finally rejected in the martyrdom of Stephen; and at this point the Jewish central successional order closed, and Paul, the chief volunteer and agent in carrying the active hatred of, and opposition to the testimony, into effect, is raised up to be a witness of the grace, which in long-suffering overruled it all and surpassed it all. Thus he was at once a messenger to the Gentiles of sovereign grace, and of the union of the church with Christ; and the type of the calling of a remnant of the Jews, by this sovereign grace, in the latter day: in respect of one, designating himself the chief of sinners; as regards the second, first called -- or all long-suffering in him first shewn forth. He was taken into a solitary place of sovereign grace, to
shew the glory of it to others -- the place of the union withal of the church now with Christ.
To his testimony the Jews scattered everywhere opposed themselves. They not only refused the testimony themselves, but opposed its being carried to others. Of this Bar-jesus is the remarkable expression and therefore grace here ceases, and judicial blindness is put on him for a season. As the apostle expresses it in his meet judgment on them, "forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles, that they might be saved, to fill up their sins always; for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost."+ This manifestly closed the scene, and many were the sorrowful consequences.
The actings of Satan, by the instrumentality of Jewish principles now passed away, in corrupting the church, must be familiar to any one acquainted with the perfect word of God. Human righteousness, ordinances, succession, and ceremonial observance of times, connecting spiritual religion with human imagination, form the marked characteristics of this corruption of the truth -- perverting, even in the apostle's days, whole houses. Not the only characteristics, but the chief in principle. Of other formal ones I might mention tradition and the centralisation of religion upon earth, instead of the power of the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, now associating all with heaven, Jesus bang only known there by the power of a mission not of man nor by man. But upon this I cannot enlarge here.
But while I have thus cursorily referred to the order and progress of the entire subversion of the first and earliest organisation, or proposed organisation, of the church, by the rejection of the testimony on which it was founded, I purpose going a great deal farther as to the extent of statement on this point. And while my references will be very simple, they seem to me to involve a principle of the last possible importance; and while directing the judgment through a deep sense of our present condition; to guide it into freedom, and security from the apostate snare, now widely spreading its evil force, of successional ordinances: for if the Scriptures plainly testify the apostasy of the dispensation, that which professes to provide for and secure its successional continuance must be a lie of the
+The final testimony of this judgment is Acts 28. I allude to Bar-jesus merely as the revealed expression of the ultimate ratio or occasion of it.
enemy. This is the point now before us. My evidences of it will be few and simple.
I would clear the point by a few brief explanations of what I mean; endeavouring, though it be connected with many most interesting subjects, to keep it as simple as possible. In the first place, I would remark, that the responsibility of man, or any set of men under any dispensation of God, is quite distinct from the salvation of any individuals of that dispensation. The confounding of these things renders the apprehension of the dealings of God with man impossible: either the security of the Lord's faithfulness, or the responsibility of man in and by any given economy, is lost. Adam was responsible in innocence. His individual salvation stood clearly on other ground. Noah was responsible for the ordering of his house and family (we may say, then, the world) in holy government. The failure of this, though producing most important results, has nothing to do with Noah's salvation. In a word, if God deals in a process of government here for the manifestation of His character, this and the salvation of individuals, while that process is going on, are quite distinct; though the conduct of the saved may be guided and formed by the dispensation here below.
Nay, so decided is this distinction, it is just where the dispensation entirely fails, that the faithfulness of the saved remnant is most conspicuously manifest. What judge was like Samuel, when Israel failed under that ordering of God's people and God gave them a king in His anger? Thus Israel as a whole, under the law, were put as a dispensation under the responsibility of its observance, and nationally failed, though a remnant all through were of God and saved.
Every dispensation has some special deposit, so to speak, entrusted to it, by which its fidelity is tried. And, as it seems to me, every one of them will be made good, and God glorified in them, in Jesus, on the proved failure of man in each. Thus, not to go to other examples, the law -- Israel made the golden calf. The law will be written in their hearts hereafter. The dispensation of the Holy Ghost's power, or the manifestation of Christ glorified by the Holy Ghost the Comforter, as against the world which rejected Him, has its responsibility too. It is true, effectual salvation and the grounds of it have been more plainly brought out, so that we can more easily appropriate
real and eternal privileges to those who are heirs of them; because the Holy Ghost does manifest them, and acting in power, gathers them for Christ for heavenly glory; and this was not true of what preceded it. The proper manifestation, if everything had been exactly as it ought to be, was of an elect nation, all of whom in any case were not necessarily saved; not of a church chosen in Jesus from any and every nation. That was formal and by descent, this by power. But though this be so, it does not take away from the dispensation itself (as a given sphere of the operations of God, in which all was to keep its first estate) a place of responsibility, and a deposit given to it. The greatest strength and very essence of an apostasy is to affirm of its apostate condition, in which it is; the special object of judgment, the security which belongs to the elect congregation of God. It was just the ruin of Israel: it is easier, if not more fatal, in Christianity.
Further, I would remark, that the dispensation is judged on its responsibility, while individuals may be saved by grace. I have further to add, that, however great the patience, the first departure is fatal and the ground of judgment, whatever the growth of wickedness into ripeness may be; and, lastly, that the dispensation of the profession of Christianity, or the name of Christ, stands in this condition; and that the scripture never recognises a recovering from such a state, whatever through mercy the "lengthening of tranquillity" may be; for the first failure is departure from God, and proves the existence of evil in the flesh, and the manifestation that man is in question, and that all is gone in principle. As a corroborative fact, it is solemnly interesting to see that the failure has in every instance been immediate on the responsibility's existing.
Christianity not being a system of formal enactment, and its requirements and powers only of spiritual perception, the evidence of its departure is less palpable and itself also the object of only spiritual perception. But Israel itself could say, "Wherein have we despised the Lord," and Wherein should we return? and "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these": and even disciples say, "Master, behold what goodly stones and buildings are here"; though Israel had broken the covenant and gone away backwards, and that from the beginning, and was filling up the measure of her iniquity, that all righteous blood should come upon her. I shall very briefly trace this just now.
This dealing of God being on responsibility and in justice, it is according to the professing mass (the body at large or their leaders) that the judgment takes place; the security of the saints being untouched by it. Moreover, the refuge of the saints is out of the system judged, because an untoward generation; and their place of blessing, the dispensation which supervenes on the judgment of that from which they have been delivered. I will add, that knowledge of impending judgments is always adequately afforded to the saints to flee from the wrath to come.
Let us remember that the Lord is "slow to anger"; and that in the midst of outrageous provocations, and himself the subject of much of them -- the reproaches of the Lord falling upon him -- poor Jeremiah could appeal to God how he had stood in the gap to turn away the indignation from them; till the Lord said to him, "Pray not for this people," and the indignation took its course. For intercession is always the place for him who has the mind of God to make a way for God's love, till the place for intercession is closed.
If some, attaching everything to the final salvation of the elect, say, if this be not affected by it all the rest is immaterial and curious, and they do not know anything about dispensations; I answer, that the salvation of the elect is not the great end of any Christian's thoughts, but the divine glory; and that God has been pleased to glorify Himself and display His character in these dispensations for the instruction of the church; and that if the church casts it aside, they are casting aside the instruction which God has afforded of His ways. They are making themselves wise without God, and wiser than He, for He has thought fit for His glory to instruct us in these things. I will take only one example (though there are other remarkable ones, as Noah), because we are morally set on the very same ground by Scripture, the history of Israel as the elect nation.
Israel was set at Sinai on the condition of their obedience to the law. This the apostle assures us did not touch the promise made to Abraham, etc., and that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance as to them nationally. But God glorified Himself, for all that, in all His dealings with them, and they happened to them for ensamples to us on whom the ends of the ages are come. Obedience to God according to the law was the ground they were set on. They made the golden calf.
Their apostasy was complete. Long was the patience of God -- various His dealings with them in perfect mercy; but the irremediable evil of human nature was there, and displayed itself the rather through it all until they both rejected the Son in humiliation and refused the testimony of the Holy Ghost to His exultation at the right hand of power. But then God, having thus dealt in vain by these external dealings of testimony on man, recurs to the original sin in which the apostasy was first shewn (just indeed as all the sins of the human heart, aggravated as they are, are but the evidence of its first and total departure from God). "Have ye served me, O ye house of Israel," says the Spirit in Stephen, quoting and applying a more ancient testimony, "by the space of forty years in the wilderness? yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, the star of your god Remphan, images which ye made to worship them, and I will carry you away beyond Babylon." They had consummated it towards Jesus, proving themselves irreconcilable, but the apostasy was complete in the wilderness, however "long suffering" God may have been.
"Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off," says the apostle to the Gentiles, as taking the place of the branches cut off. That is, the church, as a subject of dispensation here, is subject to the same responsibility as Israel of old: and would be cut off on its failure.
Now I shall proceed to shew from Scripture, that it is revealed that it would fail; and revealed that it has failed. It is perfectly clear that the doctrine of succession, and the maintenance of grace by succession, if this be so, is an awful departure from the truth of God, founded in falsehood and available only to prop up the character of what God judges as the worst form of evil, departure from what is good.
It is not for me to say what patience God may have, or how He may use the intercession of His people for the protracting the time of mercy; certainly He is perfect in wisdom in this.
It alters, it is manifest, the whole position of the soul to recognise that we live in an apostasy hastening to its final consummation, instead of a church or dispensation which God is sustaining by His faithfulness of grace.
First, then, it is evident that the condition of apostasy is supposed as to this dispensation in the passage cited from Romans 11, and made to depend on continuing in God's goodness. There is no promise of revival. It is purely on continuance in God's goodness; making failure, as I have said, ruinous without hope of recovery. God's goodness, in which they were placed, being departed from by man's evil, God never departs from His own goodness. It might suffice to say, that professing Christendom is anything but a continuance in the goodness in which the church was planted; nay, the true people of God have not continued in it, for had they, such a state of things never would have been; but when it comes, they suffer and are involved in it, though they began it not. God's people are scattered and worldly and divided. Compare their state with John 17 and Acts 2 and Acts 4; and the saint that loves Jesus and the church will soon recognise the sad difference.
But the testimonies are far more precise than this. First, generally, "as it was in the days of Noe and the days of Lot, so should it be in the day when the Son of man should be revealed." Clearly then there was to be an awful apostasy before the close, and the state of the apostasy was the state of the dispensation at the close. Again, "that day shall not come except there be a falling away -- the apostasy -- first." I say not yet when, but before the day come, the apostasy comes. This leaves little room for a day of blessedness between. This, to the apostle's mind, was to precede the day of the Lord, an apostasy, not a period of blessedness. If men say, "It has come," I dispute not, but I say then cutting off is the consequence, not restoration,+ as we have seen from Romans 11. And the promise of blessing and revival is unfounded, though the remnant may be revived and gathered from an evil day.
But there is more than this. "In the last days perilous times shall come, men shall be lovers of their ownselves," etc. If this passage be examined, it is a very solemn and express testimony of the Spirit of God, of the return of professed Christendom to a state such as heathenism was, as described by the Spirit in Romans 1. Here the Spirit speaks not of the heathen world, that in the last days it would be so; the Spirit had already proved it was so; but in the last days it would be so of those who had the form of godliness, but denied the power. From such they were to turn away.
+And what is succession a succession of?
Again, "ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time." And this, note, not by the moral evil of the world, but by apostasy: "they went out from us," whereby it was proved they were not of us. This proves that in John's time the apostasy had set in, whereby the Christians knew, said he, that it was the last time; not by infidelity (that might condemn individually, and believers he what they ought); but by apostasy (that proved the last time should come) -- not wicked people, but antichrists. For the Spirit spoke expressly, that in the latter times some were to depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils. Not only so. The mystery of iniquity already worked. There was a hindrance to the manifestation of the man of sin, but the principles and mystery of iniquity already worked: and it was only a hindrance which impeded the awful result, which when removed, the great agent and instrument of this crowning iniquity, everywhere manifested, was to be revealed, whom the Epiphany of the Lord's presence was to destroy.
The passages I have hitherto cited prove: --
First, the liability of the dispensation to apostasy, as Romans 11, itself sufficient to teach the result to those acquainted with human nature. Others, as 1 John 2, shew that antichrists were already come; whereby Christians knew that it was then the last time, because evil was found to have its worst form and source from the bosom of Christianity itself.
The evil itself is characterised in the two epistles to Timothy: first, as departing from the faith, but this, it must be observed, chiefly in practical points; and secondly, in the general result of a character analogous to heathenism in its moral evils, but, though the power was denied, maintaining the form of godliness. Besides these, we have the testimony from the Thessalonians, that the day of the Lord would not come without the apostasy coming first; and that the mystery of iniquity was already then at work. To these we may add the testimony of the Spirit by Peter, that scorn of the expectation of the Lord's second coming would be characteristic of the scoffers of these perilous days.
All these passages concur to shew that the result of the dispensation would be "apostasy," "perilous times," "departure from the faith"; and that the mystery of iniquity, the
principles of evil which produced this, were already at work The present effects then were different: partly a hidden spirit at work, hindered as yet, in its great public manifestation in Satanic power; partly an open apostasy, and going out from the saints -- too pure then, too assiduously watched over by apostolic vigilance and spiritual power to allow, when assuming an open form of evil, its continuance among the saints; partly, as we shall see, not by going out, but by the creeping in of corrupt men. But, however manifested in present effects, these are but the signs of a principle at work which should be consummated in the man of sin -- of a principle which involved the dispensation in apostasy and excision, whatever the gracious patience of God: a principle then operating, and thereby affording an opportunity to the apostles to forewarn the church; and by their authority enabling us to say, that the last times were then come, though there might be a prolonging of mercy.
This assertion, that the last times were then come, is of all possible importance. There was a moral departure from God in the bosom of Christianity. The effects of this might be stayed by the hand of the apostle, but forced the apostle to say the last times were come. Theologians may comment on such an expression, and say that the last times mean the times of Messiah. But then the presence of Messiah would prove that; but the proof of the last times here is that, after that, antichrists are come: they were characteristically and really the last times of the dispensation. Men had slept; the enemy had sowed tares; and it must be left as it was till judgment, as regards the place it held in the world.
It is admitted that the present effects and manifestations of the apostasy were then different in form and extent from what they will assume when judged. The apostolic energy, and spiritual life in the body of the church itself on which that energy acted, either cast out the evil or suppressed it; just as the zeal of an untainted Moses rescued Israel from the present effects of the golden calf, and destroyed the present exhibition of the apostasy. But it was not the less really come in, though the patience of God was not yet exhausted by the rejection of His Son. And the apostle was well aware, and the Holy Ghost gives us the expression of His assurance, that it was the presence of the apostolic energy which arrested its display. "I know that after my decease," is the sorrowful testimony of the parting apostle; as Peter also warned them
that false teachers would arise among them. Even in the life time of the devoted apostle, he had to say, "All seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ's": a state leaving easy room for the evil and mischief to introduce itself. While men slept, the enemy came and sowed tares.
There remains yet one passage which I have not hitherto quoted, which (as the passage of John has shewn us that the last times -- whatever their prolongation -- were already come) identifies the objects of the revelation as then existing with those who are objects of judgment at the close, on the Lord's return.
The book of Jude may be taken as the history or revelation of apostasy. The very commencement of the epistle marks the necessity which attracted the testimony of the Spirit of God. "Beloved," says the apostle, "when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you, that ye should earnestly contend for the faith once delivered unto the saints; for there are certain men crept in unawares, who were of old ordained unto this condemnation."
This is most distinct. The evil anticipated by the counsels of God had crept in by the neglect of man already in the days of the apostles. While men slept, the enemy had come and sown tares. This infected the susceptibility of the church's conscience; "though ye once knew this," says the apostle, refers to the excision of the whole body save two, in warning to them; and likens the resulting condition of the church to the angels which kept not their first estate, and to Sodom and Gomorrah. He then intimates to them the different (and, I would add, in some respects progressive) characters of the apostasy (though the entrance of the succeeding ones does not neutralise the former): natural evil and enmity, religious corruption for gain, and open hostility to the priesthood and royalty of Christ, on the part of the religious teachers of the people -- Cain, Balaam, and Core. Having thus traced the Forms and characters of the apostasy from beginning to end, the apostle gives us the all-important truth, that what had then already found its way into the church was the direct object of the judgment of Christ at His coming, as it had been prophesied from the beginning -- the consummation of iniquity, in the apostasy of the last form of God's goodness, previous
to the coming of the Son of man in glory. Enoch, we are taught by the Holy Ghost, prophesied of these, saying, Behold the Lord cometh with myriads of His saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them -- Enoch prophesied of these. Those then, to whom the prophecy of the Lord's coming to judgment applied, were already manifest. As we have said, the patience of God might be long, and has been not slack concerning His promise, but long-suffering to us-ward; but the apostasy was complete in the eye of God; Christianity had not kept its first estate.
There is another feature remarkable in this, that it was the coming in of these, not the going out, which marked the judicial object of wrath and excision. They were spots in their feasts of charity, feasting with the Christians. They exalted themselves especially (Jude 19), distinguished themselves, as the Pharisees among the Jews, but did not leave the body; they were in danger and certain ruin by being in it.
The judgment of excision then was only in prophecy; but the condition to be judged was actually in existence, so that the apostle could say Enoch prophesied of these. Their number might be different, the church might have more completely forgotten how the great body of Israel were cut off in the wilderness; but the evil was there, and the judgment already pronounced. The apostles had even told before "that there should be mockers in the last time."
The scriptures we have already cited shew, first, the warning of the possibility of failure and excision; secondly, the prophetic declaration that there would be an apostasy: and thirdly, that those positively designated from the earliest stages as the objects of judgment, as such apostasy, were, if not matured in their effects, already there; so that the ever watchful Spirit of God could descry, designate, and describe them; and evince that the mystery was already at work -- the evil to be judged already there in existence.
That which remains of God's word is the warning or the immediate threatening of excision, and the account of a far different scene. Not the Father's intercourse with His children to instruct, warn, and comfort but the revelation of subsequent evil, and the arranging government of the world in the hands of the Lamb on the throne; when the church was gone from the scene below, and could no longer be the subject of His judgment or His care.
If the testimony of the texts we have cited be such, there cannot be a more solemn consideration for God's children -- the failure from the outset, through man's folly and evil, of the economy of the church in the world. Further, the whole organisation of succession and its co-ordinate ordinances of church-maintenance take their true place. Instruments of blessing in power have become the lever of apostasy against the children of God. The doctrine of succession, and all its accompaniments, becomes the stamp and mark of recognised and sanctioned, because perpetuated, apostasy; for if the church has failed, as these texts declare, the provision of its perpetuation becomes the provision for the perpetuation of the failure, and the maintenance of the object of the Lord's sure judgment.
I press the testimony of the epistle of Jude to this point. My object here is not to shew the degree of maturity to which the apostasy may be generally or locally arrived, but the fact of its existence from the commencement in the judgment and by the revelation of God, applicable to the entire course and condition of the dispensation as a whole; and instructing us in the true character of pretension to succession and continuance.
May the Lord give eyes and ears to His children, that they may see what concerns His church as He sees it.
Communion with God -- communion with God in a new nature, being made, as the apostle teaches us, partakers of a divine nature, is both that in which eternal blessedness must have its spring, and the source of all true knowledge. Here God, through grace, can communicate with us in the intelligence of the same delights, and the communication of the same interests. The ultimate provision made for this is the incarnation; and the Lord instructs in grace (renewed in knowledge after the image of Him who created us) in all those elements of the knowledge of good and evil, by which the value and excellence and the divine provision of the Lord Jesus are apprehended and adequately esteemed, at least in principle and desire. We learn it humbly by the necessity of evil in us: but we learn it holily, because we know the extent of the evil only by the infiniteness of the good: so only indeed can it be known; so has God blessedly provided for the knowledge of it for good. Thus He knows it. Thus those that are made partakers of the divine nature know it in their measure. This, however, we have to learn in its details, in the various dispensations which led to or have followed the revelation of the incarnate Son in whom all the fulness was pleased to dwell -- the obedient man, God manifested, the suffering Saviour, the exalted Righteous One; many, many principles brought out in the exhibition of weakness and apparent exhibitions of divine power, having no settled rule, but all finding their solution in the sufferings and revelation of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.
The detail of the history connected with these dispensations brings out many most interesting displays, both of the principles and patience of God's dealings with the evil and failure of man; and of the workings by which He formed faith on His own thus developed perfections. But the dispensations themselves all declare some leading principle or interference of God, some condition in which He has placed man, principles which in themselves are everlastingly sanctioned of God, but in the course of those dispensations placed responsibly in the hands of man for the display and discovery of what he was, and the bringing in their infallible establishment in Him to whom the glory of them all rightly belonged. It is not my
intention to enter into any great detail, but to shew simply how, in every instance, there was total and immediate failure as regarded man, however the patience of God might tolerate and carry on by grace the dispensation in which man has thus failed in the outset; and further, that there is no instance of the restoration of a dispensation afforded us, though there might be partial revivals of it through faith.
The paradisaical state cannot properly perhaps be called a dispensation in this sense of the word; but as regards the universal failure of man, it is a most important instance. It is too plain, too sadly known, to require much proof in detail, important as shewing that no condition of man set him free from the prevailing art of the great adversary. When he was innocent and untainted, surrounded by every mercy, and at the head of all blessing, he fell immediately. The man not deceived but led astray, the woman deceived and in the transgression, and, though this has doubtless a higher reference, yet, describes the fact and the double character of error. As it was to be shewn here in principle, that man in nature could not stand, the first thing we read is of his fall, the first act consequent upon the responsibility in which he was placed, after his being set at the head of creation, and his wife given to him; in a word, after responsibilities were established, and his glory and blessing full. Corruption, disorder, violence, were the consequences of this, until the Lord destroyed the first world created (during the time of His patience an elect seed having been preserved in testimony and patience).
Here dispensations, properly speaking, begin. On the first, Noah, I shall be very brief: restraint and godliness should have characterised it -- the government which would have repressed corruption and violence. But the first thing here found is the saved patriarch drunk, and his son shamefully mocking him, for which the curse justly descends upon him. This issued in idolatry; Joshua 24.
The first account after his call we have of faithful Abraham, which as a minuter circumstance I also pass briefly over, is Genesis 12:13, "Say, I pray thee: thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake, and my soul shall live because of thee"; and plagues because of him in whom the families of the earth were to be blessed. As regards man, under the calling of grace, we find shameful failure.
The history of the children of Israel is one scene of "a stiffnecked and rebellious people." But to take up the point of the dispensation -- obedience under the law by which life was to be: this obedience they undertook; and Moses returned to receive the various orderings of divine appointment as under it, and the two tables of testimony. But this dispensation, which met the failure of the world, which had gods many and lords many, and in form was to bring righteousness in the flesh, came to nothing in man's hand, before the order of it was brought down from the mount, or they had received in detail the record of what they had undertaken. They made, while Moses was in the mount, a golden calf, and said, "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of Egypt." The spring and foundation-stone of all the commandments and ordinances was gone. They had turned their glory into the similitude of a calf which eateth hay. The ordinance or dispensation of priesthood failed in like manner. Before Aaron and his sons had gone out from the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, because the anointing oil of the Lord was upon them, Nadab and Abihu had already offered strange fire and been consumed before the Lord. The sons had not eaten the sin offering in the holy place, and the blood of it was not brought in within the holy place, as was commanded. The Lord spared them, but the service had failed in its very outset. And the Lord also spake unto Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they offered before the Lord and died; and the Lord said unto Moses, speak unto Aaron, thy brother, that he come not at all times into the holy place within the veil. The consequence was, that the garments of glory and beauty were never worn by the high priest save at his consecration. For he was to wear them only on going into the holy place within the veil, and his going in being now only on the day of atonement, he was desired withal on that day to come in other though holy garments. Thus failed the law -- thus failed the priesthood, as all else, however God might carry it on in patience and mercy for a time, "till there was no remedy."+
The kingly dispensation failed in the same way as did the nation under the previous ordering which made way for the
+Prophecy was in fact evidence of the failure of the dispensation as well as of God's patience under it. Blessed to a remnant, it recalled to Moses and prophesied of Messiah. (See the last verses of Malachi.)
king (see Judges 2), the Lord having failed in nothing; Joshua 23:14. David and Solomon having exhibited the royalty in victory and peace, Rehoboam and Jeroboam are but the witnesses of its utter failure, patience and mercy still going on, till the provocations of Manasseh set aside all hope of recovery or way of mercy in that dispensation. The same is true of universal rule transferred to the Gentiles: Nebuchadnezzar, the golden head, sets up the golden image, persecutes the faithful, and is turned into the image of a beast for his pride.
The rejection of our blessed Lord proved that no present mercy and grace, no present interference of God in goodness here, would meet the wilful and persevering enmity of the human heart, but only shewed it in its true light. But this, never being set up as a dispensation, but only the manifestation of His Person (to faith), I pass by. The last we have to notice, in a humbled sense of sin in us, is the present, where we are apt to take our ease in the world, as necessarily secure, but which, and the sin of which, the Lord sees and recognises, takes as much notice of, though not openly, as of others -- the dispensation of the Spirit. Much has been said, with strong objection to it, as to the apostasy or failure of this dispensation.
The results are but too plain. If we believe that the exhibitions of the Spirit's power and presence, in the second and fourth chapters of Acts, were gladsome and well-pleasing to the Lord, if the blessed Spirit was right in these effects -- and who blasphemingly and in the darkness of his own soul dare to say He was not? -- then is the present picture of Christendom just as opposite as one thing well can be from another. They have not kept their first estate. The patience and mercy, and sure grace of God has still kept up a witness to Himself through the mediation of Christ, it is true. So it was in every dispensation; but this did not alter or prevent the result of the apostasy. And the facts shew us that it was ever at the outset the failure or apostasy took place; and that it was patience and grace, which bore with and carried it on, but never undid the result of the first failure. So to our shame has it been in Christianity. The state of the seven churches, I think, would shew this sufficiently to have been the case, and the way in which John was left at the close, to awaken the threats of judgment against a declining church. Where was Paul to hold all in vigour and beauty for the coming of the Lord, presenting every man perfect in Christ Jesus? He had to confess at the close of his"Veteris Ecclesiae."
"Hosris Herodes impie
Christum venire quid times?
Non eripit mortalia
Qui regna dat coelestia." Translation -- Hymn of the early Church.
"O wicked Herod, impious foe,
Why dost thou fear Christ's coming here?
He snatches not at transient thrones
Who heavenly kingdoms can confer." CONSIDERATIONS ON THE NATURE AND UNITY OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST+
THE NOTION OF A CLERGYMAN DISPENSATIONALLY THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST
THOUGHTS ON THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE HOME MISSION+
CHRISTIAN LIBERTY OF PREACHING AND TEACHING THE LORD JESUS CHRIST
PAROCHIAL ARRANGEMENT DESTRUCTIVE OF ORDER IN THE CHURCH
THE CHARACTER OF OFFICE IN THE PRESENT DISPENSATION
ON THE APOSTASY -- WHAT IS SUCCESSION A SUCCESSION OF?
THE APOSTASY OF THE SUCCESSIVE DISPENSATIONS