Beloved Mother,
It is over eight years since I laid aside the gown and surplice, for conscience' sake, without seeing anything better to which I could with hearty conviction attach my self. Two-and-twenty years ago the Lord converted me in my own chamber. One of the first movements of the new life within me was the outgoing of my heart towards all who loved the Lord. I had a vivid sense of the brotherhood in Christ, which from the first over-leaped "denominational" boundaries. I felt myself "one" with all who were in Christ, and had an instinctive and painful perception of the sad divisions among the Lord's people. I sorrowed over the separations, but soon learned to acquiesce in the hopelessness of the position, but got used to it. Feeling, however, that a sectarian spirit was not the mind of Christ, I carefully avoided nourishing it in my own heart, and rejoiced in all movements, of a union character, as the nearest feasible approach towards the long-lost oneness. I was convinced that the unity advocated by Papists and High Churchmen was a sham—a unity of death and not of life—so I never felt the slightest sympathy with their thoughts or efforts.
Still I saw in the Scriptures that it was the mind of God that His Church should be one. I saw that the chief obstacle to the oneness was the differing views as to "Church government." I could not find in God's word a solid foundation for any one of the various "systems" I saw around me—nothing in any that commanded my faith, as being of God. I was long perplexed that God should have left the subject (as I thought) so much in the dark, and I finally settled down on the following conclusion.
I reasoned thus: In both Testaments there is the same Divine mind revealing itself—a mind superior to all caprice. In the Old Testament I see that Divine mind regulating human worship and service with the utmost minuteness of detail. In the New Testament I see the same mind acting under a changed dispensation, and I find apparently as studied an absence of exact prescription as there had been in the former. So, I argued, liberty must be the intention here, and unity in diversity seems to be the Divine ideal of the Church. The radical error of sectarianism I thus deemed to be the straining after a forced uniformity; and its remedy should be the recognition of mutual liberty in Christ-a communion unhindered by differences where vital truth was held, and each Church left to adapt itself to whatever it judged most suitable.
Standing on such ground, you can readily understand that I viewed all questions of "Church government" as simple matter of expediency, and, excepting that one might commend itself more than another on that score, I should have had no conscientious difficulty about fellowship with any orthodox communion. I did not quit the "Church," so-called, from any scruple as to its constitution, but on account of the doctrinal error tolerated in it.
But such view of the subject is opposite to the revealed mind of God, as I now see it in the Word, and dishonoring to Him who "is not the author of confusion." Yet I feel it still to be the only logical position if it be assumed that there must be some "system of Church organization," including an "ordained ministry."
The views which I have expressed, were the hindrance to my understanding of the Divine thought about the Church as unfolded in the New Testament; and they have been the hindrance to Protestants generally from the Reformation downward. The Reformers were godly and faithful men. They did God's work nobly up to the measure of the light they had. They did perfectly right to separate from Rome and her corruptions. Their work was of God; it was owned of God, and has been the source of incalculable blessing. But it was not perfect. A radical defect dwarfed it in its very cradle. They failed to take a true estimate of the Church's position before God, as it then stood. Never having seen it in its integrity, they failed to perceive and confess the ruin in which it lay.
I do not mean that they failed to perceive many of the errors that corrupted the Church—their perception of these was what drove them out of Popery—but that they failed to discern the true bearing of those errors on the Church's position, and, consequently, to take up the true attitude before God. They looked on them too much as the "errors of Popery." They did not perceive that the whole Church (so far as committed to man's responsibility) was involved in a common ruin; that no human power could restore It, and that we have no God-given authority to arrange or order His house as we please.
Suppose, dear mother, that when we were yet children, you had set two of us a task, and told us to have it ready against your return in an hour, and we disobeyed you and failed to do it; then you had put us in corners of the room, and told us to stand there for half-an-hour.
Suppose that both of us were sorry for our conduct, and after you had left, one said to the other, " I think we had better take up the task again and finish it against mother comes; she will be sure to be better pleased with us, and it will be more sensible than standing here doing nothing;" while the other replied, "No; we have no right to do that now; the right thing is to stay where she has put us, and where we have brought ourselves by our naughtiness, till mother tells us what to do."
Which of the two would you have commended when, on your return, you found one at work on the unfinished task, and the other in his corner? Would you not have told the former that to take up the task again was only a fresh exhibition of self-will, a renewed act of disobedience?
Well, in principle that is the mistake the Reformers made, and in which we have all been going on—the mistake has resulted in the existing confusion—doing what was right in our own eyes, instead of seeking God's mind, expressed in His Word.
Reform movements have, from the first, proceeded on the principle that there existed authority competent to this, though their promoters have differed widely as to where such authority was vested. Some have thought they found it in civil rulers, some in bishops, some in synods or presbyteries, others in the congregation or in their individual selves. But whatever shape the ideas have taken, the underlying principle has been that whatever of Church order existed under the apostles might be restored by us; hence each has built according to his own plan rather than confessing the ruin, and turning to God and His Word.
A false start brings a bootless journey. An unsound foundation makes a rickety building. Once off the track there is no getting on it again, till you know you are off it, and where and how. Failure and ruin have overtaken the present dispensation, just as in those that preceded it; and God's children will hardly discern the pathway of duty through the ruin, till they understand something of its nature and extent.
We must see what the Word of God and the facts of the case teach us about it.
I will touch on just one or two of the more prominent features of the ruin.
As one casts the eye over Christendom—what professes the name of Christ—one is at once struck by the number of " Churches " into which it is divided, not in the sense of local assemblies of one great body, but independent bodies fenced off from each other by carefully-guarded boundaries, and oftentimes pitted against each other. There is indeed occasional over-leaping of the boundaries. Now and then a minister of one denomination will invite one of another sect to fill his pulpit or minister to his flock on an occasion, or will place himself alongside others on the platform of a Bible Society meeting or in the congress of an Evangelical Alliance; but such fitful efforts at union only serve to indicate that there is an inner consciousness in Christian souls that the divisions are wrong, and that things are out of joint.
The contrast between the Christendom of the nineteenth century and the Church of apostolic days is as marked as it is humiliating. The sacred writers picture to us a single united body in the midst of the world—one Church, one only. There were, indeed, local assemblies or churches, as demanded by the necessity of the case—perhaps more than one in a city, where numbers compelled—but all were in full communion, every part with every other part. There was mutual dependence, mutual co-operation, and one common name including all—"the Church of God." They knew no other, they sought no other, they needed no other. Having no separate interests, no separate organizations, no separate corporate entity, they needed no distinctive "denominational" names. Ministering brethren were seen moving to and fro among the local churches in perfect freedom, and, where they came, they ministered, not by courtesy or on sufferance, but as a matter of course. The germs of evil were there, it is true; the tendency to names and sects cropped up in Corinth; but apostolic authority was still in acknowledged vigor, and the plague stayed for a time. Whatever inward contentions there may have been, the Church of God remained a unity till the close of the Scripture canon.
Look again at ministry as it now exists. How painful it is to see many who, professing to be ministers of Christ, are unconverted men yea, alas, teachers of deadly error, down to open infidelity! A man-made ministry has superseded a ministry in the power of the Holy Ghost; and fearful indeed have been the consequences. How dreadful the picture of congregations consigned to the care of men who either poison them with false doctrine or starve them through ignorance of the truth! True it is that some Protestant denominations have sought to correct this horrible abuse, and with a measure of success; but, alas, one sees even these tending again towards the same old evil, as the inevitable consequence of seeking to reform abuses on merely human authority and grounds, instead of recurring at once and alone to those of God.
I will instance but one fact in evidence of the doctrinal confusion and its long and universal prevalence. The so-called Apostles' Creed is the oldest and most generally accepted ecclesiastical document that exists. Yet its very first article ascribes creation to God the Father, and to Him alone, whilst Scripture invariably ascribes it to the Son, and in part at least to the Spirit, unless it be in general to God as such. Viewed with the fact that there is not in that creed a single ascription of Godhead to either the Son or Holy Spirit, it is susceptible of serious misconstruction.
We need not wonder, therefore, at the early introduction of Arianism into the Church, and that the Nicene and Athanasian creeds were needed to undo the mischief the other had laid the foundation for. I do not mean that such was the intention of it; but it is a speaking fact that the very first known attempt made by man to improve on the divinely-appointed standard of doctrine, should have resulted in a creed whose very first article is a contradiction of the written Word, and to which even a Unitarian might subscribe.
And who shall say that the confusion that we see is according to the mind of God—the thing intended by Him? And if not according to His mind, what else is it but failure—ruin—sin? Is it not time for us to be asking if there be not a divine path—a path which God would have His children take in the midst of it all? Thank God there is; I have found it at last by His grace, a path so simple and easy, so sure and so blessed; such a rest in the midst of the turmoil—a rest in God—that I long for you and all I love to share it with me. I pray that He may help me to set it clearly and simply before you; and for you to discover it in His word, and receive it to His glory. Meanwhile I commend you to His love and grace.