“Party violence, we are sorry to say, appears not to have diminished since we last wrote; on the contrary, the tendency of things at present is evidently towards a more decided separation between the two great bodies into which the population of Ireland is divided. This is a melancholy fact; we only state it without entering into the question of its immediate cause. We can hardly conceive any country worse circumstanced in this respect than Ireland. The frame of society is just kept from coming to pieces, and that merely by the action of an external force. Such is our view of the subject, that we do not know what is to keep any person who loves peace in Ireland, except utter necessity or a sense of duty.” What! when such immense improvement has taken place in twenty years? These are stubborn facts. As to the common sense, which would argue from it, that the amazing influential spread of religion which has taken place will mend the world, I leave it to the editor of the “Christian Journal.” It seems to me very uncommon sense. I have but turned the journal round; both are its statements as to this country: one side “stubborn facts,” the other the “editor's arguments,” or “common sense,” I suppose I should call it, who thinks the improvement immense and progressive. We are apt to think that the ripening of the wheat may be accompanied by the ripening of the tares, and will not turn them into wheat, but leave the field just what it was, only more manifested and ready to be cut down (but perhaps we are very foolish and the editor very wise); and that the frame of society, being only kept from coming to pieces merely by the action of an external force, is a very plain sign of the universal and happy effect of religion in the country at present. Perhaps it is wrong to say it is growing worse and worse, as the editor of the last page can hardly conceive any country worse circumstanced. We fear he has much sorrow to learn, and we doubt not much joy, for we trust the church may be as much improved as the evil of the world will be magnified; but the closing page of the Journal is a sufficient answer to all the words of the leading article on the subject. This country, at least, which has been so much blessed, is growing worse; just as we expect, just so it has happened.
The fact is that the effect of the “Christian Journal,” and of all who hold its views and seek to put off the consideration of the growing evil and sorrow of the world and approaching judgments, is to daub up hollow walls and corrupt systems with untempered mortar, and they cannot bear to have it detected; the “Christian Journal” is merely an effort and an instrument to do this. It is taken in hand by those who know that things are not getting better, but who would wish to hide the fact that they are getting worse, who, to keep the place they have clung to, and the value of their judgment for a moment, are seeking to hide from others the impending ruin they see well themselves. But their “separating brethren” have no hostility to them, though they see the evil coming; they are guided by moral reasons, and not by that reason, which must be therefore everlastingly stable, when all that may be attempted to be supported by the efforts of man shall have passed away frittered in his hand. They believe that the “Christian Journal” is doing great sin in beguiling souls, and alienating them, through ignorance, from very important truths, amusing them with toys and plans, while judgment is crowding around them, and filled often with as much nonsense and what is merely human as any other thing going. They believe indeed (though they give little credit to much of the religion that is going) that the saints are ripening for separation to God; they believe for the same reason the tares are doing so too, and the hope of turning tares into wheat they believe to be just the folly of the editor of the “Christian Journal.” When many were called in the days of the apostles, how would modern calculators of results have concluded, that the nation would have been blessed and brought in! What did it prove to those who knew the truth? That the nation was going to be judged! The judgment of human experience is the judgment of folly, but human experience is the wisdom of man set up as an idol by the name of common sense. This it is the editor of the “Christian Journal” worships. The abounding of testimony and evil together are the sure sign of judgment, if scripture wisdom is to be taken as guide.
The last point I shall notice is that which brings the question to issue.
“If we were asked to state the cause which operates more generally perhaps than any other in producing divisions in the present day, we would say it arose from a diseased mind, or a certain morbid sensitiveness of the conscience in one speck, to the exhaustion of all sensibility in a far larger portion—sensitiveness about corruptions to be deplored, doubtless, and remedied, and insensibility to the great dishonor done to God, and the widely extended injury done to souls, by divisions among Christians. Yes, I say unaccountable insensibility of conscience to such passages as that to the Corinthians, I beseech you by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions amongst you, but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment;' or as that to the Philippians, ‘Whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing.'“
We shall have to see where the unaccountable insensibility lies—where the guilt of division. In the first place, as to morbid conscience, the editor is simply sanctioning sin against Christ in sanctioning sin against a weak conscience. That there are many things that affect weak consciences, worse than eating herbs, is confessed; nay, it is now the fashion to confess that there are gross corruptions in the system of the Establishment—. abominations is the usual word. Now morbid consciences are ill at ease about these. Well, of course they are removed, and the weak conscience is left unoffended; “straight paths made for their feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way,” but that it rather might be healed, and these strong wise men bear their infirmities and remove the difficulties? Not the least. The morbid consciences may go and get comfort where they can, not with these; they may be shocked if they stay, and reproached if they go: what do the strong ones care for that? They have got the world with them, and morbid consciences may comfort themselves where they can. They are Christ's sheep; but what do these shepherds care for that? They have disabled themselves from, or are unwilling to seek, their good, and they may go and get comfort by the road side. Who would trouble themselves with morbid consciences, save to reproach them, if they act on them, which they are bound to do unless they commit sin? In thus doing what offends the weak conscience, they are confessedly sinning against Christ; and in order to gain the world's help, they have sold or given up to the world the deposit of Christ with them, of acting upon the necessary exigencies of the church; they confess they have done so; they have petitioned the State to get leave to amend themselves—the open confession that they have sold their Christian power of fulfilling a direct known duty in the church of God. The “separating brethren” feel this, and they leave the evil, which the clergy confess they cannot amend; but these things which morbid consciences are uneasy about were the subject of the greatest uneasiness, and were entirely objected to by the English Reformers at the Reformation, and were imposed by the Queen against their wishes, and in spite of the earnest entreaty and remonstrance of many, I might almost say all, of them. The Queen wished to win the Papists, and loved her supremacy, and she insisted on them.
It is often said, can you not acquiesce in what these saints shed their blood for? My answer is, they shed their blood for no such thing, but remonstrated against these things, and secular authority alone enforced them. It is but an example, how the piety of good men becomes continuing sanction for any evil they continue in, and so the snare of Satan; as the piety of Fenelon, Pascal, Arnauld, and De Sacy, is used as authority for continuance in the Roman Catholic Church system. And, what is more, the editor's friend, Baxter, in his day (having in vain endeavored to get them altered, much as he disliked separation and thought it an evil to separate), did separate, when these things were enforced by an Act of Parliament, and with him between 1,500 and 2,000 godly ministers, who all left their cures rather than acquiesce in the things, dissatisfaction at which is now sneered at as the sign of a morbid conscience. I do not doubt that the editor and his friends are much better and wiser than these men, these separatists, whose piety however they are generally content to feed on and to minister to the present food of the church. But how comes it, if this same Baxter was so averse to separation, he felt it necessary to separate, when these things which constitute the uniformity of the English Establishment were imposed?
Or will the editor allow me to ask, is it honest to adduce Baxter as an enemy to separation in his day, when Baxter did actually separate because the things objected to now were insisted on? The editor should remember that the English Establishment had ceased to be “a hierarchy inconsistent with the progress of the gospel” when Baxter objected to separation; but when it was, he separated from it—got (I suppose) a morbid conscience, along with the hundreds of fellow-ministers for which they were fools enough, many of them, to beg their bread with their families. Morbid consciences are very troublesome things sometimes—easy consciences very seldom: there is a day coming in which they may be more occasion of sorrow.
The editor is probably also ignorant, that the imposition of the same things in Scotland produced sadder effects even in many morbid consciences there. These, morbid as they were, were more constant and more valuable to many there than their lives; and the beauties of the English Establishment liturgy were enlivened and exalted by the blood of martyrs, and the torment of the iron boot, on those whose consciences preferred temporal death to the imposition of that they believed to be evil. The prayer book has been the occasion, and its ministers the instruments, of other blood of martyrs than it is perhaps aware of, or accustomed to boast. But what is that to the editor, or the rest of the body here? They have not morbid consciences; they acknowledge it is full of abominations, but no giving up livings, or iron boots for them; they will protest and stay in them, and blame those who leave them for making divisions. No wonder their consciences are really ill at ease, and they dread a testimony to it, and the editor knows it.
I cannot help thinking, and my experience has led me to the same conclusion, that if there were a little more morbidness or (if I may be allowed to change the expression) activity in the consciences of some brethren who do not separate, it would have been no harm. And I cannot help thinking, that the force the State put on the consciences of all the early reformers, and the surrender of beloved flocks by 1500 and upwards of the godliest ministers that ever breathed, and the surrender of their lives, and the endurance of torments by the saints of Scotland, might have called for something more than the reproach of morbid conscience from anything but the English Establishment. “But the unjust knoweth no shame.” The infection has certainly not reached them. But perhaps some modern Baxter may reform all this, and it shall shine in spotless purity, such as shall satisfy his mind, if not God's; and some pious and acute prebendary, who can give good thoughts in bad times in these days, acquiesce in the reformation and its arrangements, results which he may regret, but which he cannot control. We would only hint, for we do not judge (we acknowledge) of the future from the past, of which we are very ignorant, but from the word of God, which is very sure but only remind (as an argumentum ad hominem) Christians that do, that this reformation of Baxter's of old, godly though he was and disliking separation, lasted ten years, and then everything became worse than before, and he was obliged to separate; nor could in these days (we would suggest) any modern prebendary, when the ten years were closed, feel so sure of recovering his prebend, as the pious and acute Thomas Fuller. For they are, we will agree, evil days; they will hardly afford (may we prophesy?) in any such sense mixed contemplations in better times: we did once to such an one, and the things have not been untrue, though despised.
But widely extended divisions amongst Christians are caused by it. Now let me ask, if there are divisions between “Israelites indeed in whom is no guile, who are more than ordinarily engaged in doing good,” and others who are continuing in connection with, and support of, “gross corruptions,” how is the division to be healed? by those who are not in the corruptions returning to them, or by those who are leaving them? But there is no need of the corruptionists joining their “separating brethren:” let them get rid of these corruptions, and division would immediately cease. Will they forgive one proposing such a remedy, or think it “proud or peevish?” They know they cannot, and therefore they rail at their “separating brethren,” as proud and peevish, and promise that at some future time they may state the grounds on which the duty of adherence to the English Establishment rests in spite of the gross corruptions. In the meanwhile prejudice has been excited against the guileless Israelites, and people maintained in connection with the corruptions, and the point is gained—it is a very hardening system.
The closing paragraph speaks with the most perfect coldness of whole districts not within the reach of a Christian minister by virtue of the system! and those who in such places, led by God's Spirit, may labor and suffer reproach, and gather out souls to Christ, and if any be wicked enough to watch over them, or seek their continued good, are to be branded as schismatics, and proud and peevish. There is certainly no morbidness in the conscience of a modern corruptionist, save that which may consist in having lost its feeling altogether—a mind, I suppose, as diseased in God's eye, as one which would refrain from eating herbs, if it thought it were a sin.
As to “unaccountable insensibility of conscience to such passages, as 'I beseech you by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment,' or as that to the Philippians, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing.'“ —as to the first we say, the English Establishment has made it impossible. She is bound up in positive error, and so most of her active ministers think: they do not believe for example in baptismal regeneration, though they sign their consent to it. As to no divisions among you—divisions among whom? among believing disciples? Does the editor of the “Christian Journal” mean at present to persuade us that the English Establishment is a body of believing disciples, among whom we make divisions by leaving it? We leave it because it is no company of believing disciples at all, but a very wicked and nefarious union between the church and the world, because its essence and essential distinction is the chief of all iniquities, the mixing the church in the world, the holding of apostate principles if not a ripened apostate state. The editor of the “Christian Journal” must know the majority of Christians in the world think the English Establishment a system of great abominations; and are apt to charge upon men, such as the editor himself, the sin of division, because they force upon the morbid consciences of weak brethren that which, by the apostle's rule, it would be a sin for them to do. The editor too knows, as to divisions, there was a time when many were willing and desirous to work with and be servants in the activities of godly members of the English Establishment, though they could not sign what they did not believe. They were all cast out as an unclean thing: what could there be but division? and who made it, unless we are to quench the Spirit of God for the fancies of the assumed functionaries of Christ?
At this time, and the writer is not unacquainted with Ireland, I do not know scarcely a single active devoted Christian layman in the English Establishment. There may be a few readers in parishes paid by clergymen, and I trust God will bless their labors, and there may be a few gentlemen patrons of religion in their neighborhood; but otherwise I do not know such a thing in existence. I did know one, as an active devoted laboring Christian layman in the English Establishment. Such as began so, and were more than ordinarily engaged in doing good, speedily left it. Of those, not in it, there are multitudes: but I suppose they are beneath the notice of those with whom it would be wrong to have them at the same table. But I can tell the editor, there was a time when many a mechanic was ordained because he would conform, and the ablest ministers in England shut out because they would not. The clergy delight, I do not doubt, the rest in their solitary self-sufficiency, and maintain their dignified association with the world; and they are welcome.
As to “whereto we have already attained walking by the same rule.” As regards other Christians, we would subject ourselves to brotherly judgment as to our failure.
As for my part, though the progress of Christians who have separated from the English Establishment has, speaking of the mass, been very marked and decided in principle and practice, certainly not less acquainted with scripture, as indeed seems to be implied in the comparison of them with the Irvingites, and confessedly more than ordinarily engaged in doing good, yet compared with the standard that is before them, they know nothing—yea, ever will it be so; and as to doing, I suppose the most of them would confess with sorrow of heart that they come altogether short. They see a standard in every sense in Jesus, and even in early Christianity, but especially in Him, which humbles them and keeps them in the dust at every step. They only pray for more of the Spirit of God to conform them as one body to Him; and may it be so with them and with others!
But, as regards the English Establishment, they confess the attainment is beyond them; they have not reached to this point in practical conduct—to wait for reasons in future to adhere to a thing, in spite of gross corruptions, where God has said “withdraw thyself from every brother that walketh disorderly.” They have not so learned Christ, and they confess that they cannot walk by this rule. It may be their weakness, but the strong should have compassion upon them and remove the difficulty. No, they have not attained to this; they have not attained to cast their conscience and the testimony of the Spirit behind their back. They know that the Lord will judge His people, and they fear His judgment more than the reproach of a morbid conscience, when they cannot do this great wickedness and sin against God. The Spirit of the living God urges them not to abide in or to bear with evil; and they do not, taking scripture as their guide, understand a Christian's adhering, it may be their folly, to gross corruptions. They leave the palm of prudence to the editor of the “Christian Journal.”
Attainment in knowledge they know little about, only that, if a man thinks he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know it. But they count a good conscience a thing for a Christian to keep, and they have been accustomed to apply the passage in Philippians to humbleness of mind as to knowledge, and not, as the editor of the “Christian Journal” has done, to a question of continuance in what they account the greatest moral evil under the sun—a system calling itself a church, but really “inconsistent with the progress of the gospel,” the continuance of the church in the world grieving the Spirit of God. If the editor does not apply his quotations to this, he is talking beside the question. His separating brethren do not separate because of attainment in knowledge, but because the light has broken in upon their souls that the system he belongs to is a system of ungodliness—to use other words, if he please, though very inadequate words, of “gross corruptions.” I say inadequate words, because corruption implies the spoiling of something good: and the English Establishment was never something good, but a modification of Popery, brought about under providence by Henry viii., and good men who held justifying truths for their own souls, and got rid of as much of Popery as the sovereign of the day allowed them.
“The Protestant church system is nothing but a continuation of the Catholic church system on a less extensive scale,” I would add, with more thorough subjection to the world. I have spoken of this upon the ground that the conscience of those who are drawn out of the English Establishment is morbid and weak, in which case it is manifest that the sin is with the English Establishment entirely; and the editor of the “Christian Journal” partaker of it, if the rule of scripture and the apostles be heeded.
But are the objections to the system merely those of weak consciences? We admit the palm of strong consciences belongs entirely to the clergy of the Established body. But there are grounds of objection, which might strike an indifferent observer of a Christian spirit, and without evil weakness of conscience, may be accounted objects of the Lord's judgment.
The first great objection I would urge against the English Establishment is that (instead of being in any sort the gathering of the children of God upon the foundation of a heavenly calling, sitting in spirit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus; being filled with His Spirit; and by the supply of His Spirit manifesting the life of Christ, and the power of His grace and presence, in the unity of His sanctified members) it is essentially, as the English Establishment, the opposite of all this: and that is, the union of the church and the world. This makes it the English Establishment: for that is the church, not which God owns, but which the world own, and of that world Satan is the prince; and the consequence is that, if men be all that God owns but not what the world owns, they are accounted schismatics and evildoers, not because they separate from Christians, but from the world presumptuously calling itself the church, and the Spirit of God and the path of Christ is blasphemed.
The English Establishment is not the church of God; but the merging of disciples—of the church in its members—in a great worldly system. It is that peculiar sin, which pollutes, nullifies, and renders void the last great witness of the holiness of the Lord, previous to the coming glory: and therefore along with other similar bodies, constitutes the great final sin of the church—the substitution of the power of the world for the support of the church, in lieu of the power, presence, and Spirit of God, the consequent necessary desecration of the church, the grieving of the Spirit of God, making the church of God the sport of its enemies, and causing the weak sheep of Christ, whom the presence of the Spirit in the grace of the Lord alone could comfort and feed, to be scattered to the winds and to wander on every mountain. But they have the world, and that is the point. And here is the grand sin of the godly clergy: they are using their godliness to sustain this, and let them not say the church has not the world. I repeat it is written, “these shall hate the whore.” The system means, its name means, the union of the church and the world; that is, the union in sin of what God, has separated, the putting the church into the world which God had taken out of it, and the grieving, in consequence, of the Holy Spirit of God. And He gave Himself for our sins, as of the world, that He might deliver us out of this present evil world. The English Establishment is the putting the saints into the world again, the sanction of an unholy meretricious union with it. It buries the sanctified ones in the world and takes unsanctified ones, and alike calls them Christians, and the life and distinctive character of Christ is lost. I do not say that God's Spirit does not act in spite of it; I know it does often in the necessity of His love. I do not say that infidelity, the wickedness of the world, may not seek to pull down and deprive of its temporal goods the wickedness of the church. I do not doubt, and the word of God teaches us that such things will be: one need not be a prophet to discern it now, but the word of God teaches us the character of that which is so wronged. The spirit of the saints of God has nothing to do with either. It may wonder at, nay, be bowed in spirit at the thought that whatever had the name of the church or form it should be in such case; but it can have nothing to say to either.
The objection of the saints to the English Establishment is, that it is the union of the church and the world: that is what constitutes it the English Establishment. The necessary consequence of union with the world is grieving, resisting, and denying the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God cannot bear with the world, and the world cannot bear the Spirit of God, cannot receive it, for it seeth Him not, neither knoweth. The Spirit of God may be in individuals in the English Establishment, because in fact it is no church at all, and so far as they act from the individual indwelling of the Spirit, they may be blessed (and may they be abundantly so!), but the system is nothing else (it may sustain the flesh and so be not thought to be so) but a hindrance to them and every one else in whom the Spirit dwells, so far as it constitutes the English Establishment. It is a system which the world has prescribed to prevent hurting the feelings of the world, and disallowing all that would and must do so while on regular terms of alliance with it. Oh! it is a great sin. Hence wherever the Spirit of God acts, it is discountenanced, or, if this be feared from its power, attempted to be confined to the channel of entire dependence on the world. Its energies thus cramped and crippled within the bounds of the system, the next consequence is that, when men are not tied up in the system, they do not yield to this effect to connect them with the world and receive its sanction, and they still continue to work, and, though blessed and laboring hard in the Lord's cause by the strength and help of the Spirit of God, they are counted separatists and dividers of the church. Then Satan raises up some scheme of his own, perhaps of active labor with pretense of the word, and not connected with the church nominally, and those who have been working simply, as Christians not connected with it, are identified with this by the jealousy of those who are, and every pains taken to discredit them, and thus, by virtue of the system of the English Establishment, the Spirit of God is hindered, polluted, and mixed with the world; crippled on one side, discredited and dishonored on the other, and the sole cause and doer of all this is the English Establishment. Satan gains his point and laughs at them doing his work. It is impossible that those who are united with the world can love the unhindered working of the Spirit of God.
The editor of the “Christian Journal” has recently united himself to the worldly part of the church in hopes of doing more good, or being sustained by them, and hence these articles; for I do not doubt, nor ought I, that his original purpose was to do the Lord's work. Union with the world, the grand distinctive sin and the power of apostasy in the church, and that which is identified with it, the blaspheming and denying the Spirit of God, and refusing the word as the simple guide, is that which we object to the English Establishment: and let it leave this, all difficulty will cease. Dissenters will quarrel little (I suspect) about episcopacy, and the separatists will be forgotten, for all the saints will be separatists from the world; but while the nominal church is in it, it may be persuaded that there will be separatists from it. It however is the necessary cause of the division, and this must be while the Spirit of God is grieved and the character of Christ lost by its worldliness.
The truth is, the power of Christ's resurrection, and the presence of the Comforter is lost and unowned, and hence the evil, and thence the separation. Now it is quite true that every believer may not attain to the same apprehension of heavenly things; but originally the church held the place suited to them; and it, being heavenly, led onward the less full-grown saints, and the church as a body held the position. The stronger were a guard and help to the weak, and the Spirit was ungrieved in the church, (though individuals might be in feebleness,) and found His resting place there and the church, its comfort in His presence. Now Satan having beguiled the church, the church is in the position of earthliness, and united in system with the world; he has got it while it was in its low state, tied down by its own will first, then by actual bonds, into the unhallowed union which makes it a bar and a hindrance to the Spirit of God; and, the bonds being on it, whoever becomes really spiritual and heavenly-minded, and holds his course on, becomes a separatist from it; and it is grieved and complains of division. But this arises, not from the evil of the saint pursuing heavenly mindedness, but the helpless union of the church with the world.