However unfeignedly one may rejoice in the prosperity of Christians, wherever they may be placed, as we clearly ought, and as I trust I do; however much we may desire the influence of Christian truth over the youths of a country, in contrast with the infidelity and popery now so influential and popular, and this is assuredly near my heart; yet in the volcanic heavings of the present day, when Christian bodies are so much mixed up with the world, and when, even among Christian professors, man and man's advancement are so displacing Christ, it is well to learn how to separate the precious from the vile, to learn what is the path in which the patient Christian should walk, and how far what is held out to us as good is good according to God.
The paper I am now reviewing affords me an opportunity of examining principles whose activity I have seen displayed in other countries, and whose working it is of moment to inquire into, as very prevalent in the present day, and at the same time of investigating the claims of a system free from the grosser elements of ecclesiastical corruption, and hence not infrequently affording a kind of asylum and resting-place for those whose consciences make it impossible for them to remain in what is in its fundamental principles popish, if not Roman, but who at the same time have not faith to walk on the water to meet Christ, if they cannot remain in the ship. It cannot be for a moment supposed that the working or success of the system I refer to in so distant a land can be an object of jealousy, or that there I can have any motive of attack, save as that system embodies principles which have their importance everywhere, and in these days especially come home to every conscience. It is with this view that I take up this paper. It is as able a presentation of the system, in a brief compass, as I am acquainted with, and presents Presbyterianism in its fairest colors, and says as much for it as can well be said. As a general maintenance of the gospel and protestant truth against allied Popery and infidelity, the system may have its value; and I can wish it success as a providential instrument. I believe that in the colonies Presbyterianism is the body which makes some counterpoise to Romanism and its infidel power and allies. The Episcopal body, having its distinctive importance from an ecclesiastical constitution analogous to Romanism, and not from truth of doctrine, forms none; or allies itself with the Popish influence, though only for its own objects. I should therefore not write in the spirit of attack, but I shall discuss freely the pretensions and principles of the system advocated in the Moderator's speech to the General Assembly of New South Wales.
There are some general principles more important to me than the ecclesiastical ones, which are taken for granted in the speech, but which I cannot pass over, as they are the key to a large movement among Christian men now, and involve most serious questions, trying to the heart even when they are clearly resolved to spiritual understanding and conscience by scripture. To a very great extent these have no more to do with Presbyterianism than with other denominations. They involve the mixture of the Church and the world. The true character of Christianity is in question in them. I am not here to call in question any needed improvement or culture when the will of God has placed us in the path of such culture. If it be an end, it is evil, it is not Christ. If it be a means of doing God's will, it may be a dangerous path, and is so; but it has its place, and if it be to be done, it should, as everything else, be done well; not in the case of a Christian, I repeat, as an object—Christ only can be rightly that—the one motive for everything; but, as in everything we do according to His will, and to serve Him, we should do it diligently and well, heartily as unto the Lord. Thank God, we can! All these things are apt to become objects: faith looks beyond them and uses them as means when called for. A man in laboring for his children may work beautifully; but that is a different thing from having beautiful work artistically as his object. The question here is, Are we called by a heavenly calling, as a new creation belonging to heaven, though obliged to be pilgrims for awhile on earth? Are death and resurrection the basis of Christian life, or the improvement of the old man as an object in and of this world, because we are still of it?
The discourse of the Moderator does not take up the improvement of natural talents for needed service in this pilgrimage, but connects it with the Church—makes it (as is so largely done in these days, more especially in new countries) a part of Christian life. Progress in the world, intellectual advancement, is a part, a large part, of Christian acting. The spirit of the age is to characterize Christianity if Christ even lie as a germ at the bottom.
I quote the passage as expressive of the system: —
“Young Men's Mutual Improvement Societies—now happily connected with almost every congregation in the city—have also formed a union for prosecuting their intellectual and Christian advancement, and for cherishing that esprit de corps which young men of a church like ours—so rich with historic memories and apostolic glories—should always realize. It is interesting and refreshing to mark these hopeful phases of young life in the Church; and it would be well if Fathers and Brethren gave their encouragement and aid to associations so calculated to maintain the doctrine and order of our ancestral church in this new land.”
It is impossible to imagine anything more clearly connecting the Church of God and the world, intellectual improvement and grace, the Church and ancestral descent, in one single idea and category of thought. Improvement Societies and scriptural faith and polity in one common thought as if young men's improvement and spiritual life were identical objects, and the unconverted and the converted could pursue them together; for the association and the object of the association is common to all. And the ancestral church, in the judgment of its highest authority, is to be sustained in faith and polity, not by grace and the Holy Ghost, but by the enlightenment of the young in the creed and history of the ancestral church, and by their intellectual improvement and their esprit de corps. Indeed, the intellectual improvement comes first; the rest is a fair cover to it. Is this the character of Christianity as the word of God presents it, that for which the blessed Son of God gave Himself on the cross? I will speak of the Presbyterian system in a moment. But this is a more serious thing. It uses the natural influence exercised, by an ancestral church, to cultivate the spirit of the world and the esprit de corps.
It connects the thought of the Church with the world, and not with God, and Christianity with intellectual improvement, not with Christ and the path which He trod. The principle I refer to is just this: the world, and its objects and spirit, are accepted; and it is sought to Christianize it in form and moral influences. Deliverance from it to be the servant of Christ, by the power of the Spirit of God, is not thought of. It is not the details of the system I am concerned with—they may vary; it is the system and its principle. It reduces Christianity to a worldly level to bring the world under its influence. Its fairest form is when it seeks in large terms to provide a shelter for young men, separated, when beginning life, from their families and home influences (an object full of interest), but it works this by engaging Christians in objects and pursuits adapted to unconverted young men, and wholly foreign to Christ and the spirit of the Christian. Intellectual and Christian advancement are put together with intellect first; and wherever Christ is not all, other things will be always first. It runs to seed in a thousand shapes. Christianity is held to be gloomy, if Christians cannot dance and go to the theater, which is approved by ministers held in reputation for piety, with reserve of gross immorality; unconverted young men are taken to teach in Sunday schools; and what is really gambling and levity of the most objectionable character goes on in “churches” ancestral or others, in order to make money, to have a fine building and an eloquent and intellectual minister, who will bring a crowd. Hired professional singers entertain the congregation; and if the choir be composed of young people, it is the occasion of levity, into the details of which there is no need I should enter here. No one acquainted with churches in the Colonies (some, at any rate; I do not profess to know Australia) and the United States, but knows perfectly well the state of things I refer to, and the practical effect of intellectual improvement in the young, and the mixture of Christianity and the world connected with it. I dare say the degree of evil may differ, and there are, of course, exceptions; but that of which I speak is sufficiently universal to be characteristic of the state of things. Every one knows that theater—going and dancing is the common practice of professing Christians in the States; and if they would tell it, they know a great deal more. Is this the just effect of the death of Christ and the power of the Spirit of God?
But my business is with the principle. Mutual Improvement Societies, for intellectual and Christian advancement, are calculated to maintain the doctrine and order of the “ancestral church.” is that the Church of God? Is the Church of God an ancestral one? Judaism was an ancestral religion; they were beloved for the fathers' sake, as they are still. But can a trace be found in the New Testament, in connection with the Church, of an esprit de corps connected with an ancestral church, a church “rich with historic memories?” I understand it in a worldly or patriotic system; but the Church of God is the body of Christ—baptized into one body by one Spirit. With the thought given of the Church of God in scripture, no one thought given here can coalesce. If it be said, We do not pretend it is the Church of God; then it is something substituted for it, which is to engage the affections and activities of all under its influence, forming an esprit de corps to the exclusion of that which is the true Church of God. It is “our church,” “our ancestral church,” which is to absorb the energies and affections of the heart, not the Church of God: and I must add, of the natural heart, not the affections of the new man by the Spirit, because it is the body of Christ, composed of the members of His body so dear to Him. It is an esprit de corps, not the Spirit of God which is to govern; human and historic attachments, not divine affections and Christ Himself.
Will this sanctify as Christian motives do? or will it give a Christian color and name to what, after all, are but carnal feelings, the rudiments of this world (only that the heart is deceived by covering them with the name of the Church), not after Christ? It may enlist clever and improved young men in the Presbyterian system, plunge Christian young men into a low kind of Christianity, and fix their hearts on objects other than Christ, under the name of intellectual improvement, sanctioning worldliness and what they can pursue in common with the world; but it will never attach the soul to Christ, never make Him all, as He is in all them that are His, will never build up God's Church, nor the individual, into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Christ died, that they which live should live not to themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again. He has called us to take up our cross and follow Him. If we would serve Him, we are to follow Him. He has purchased to Himself a peculiar people. We are not to be conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewing of our mind. If we live in the Spirit, we are to walk in the Spirit—to set our affection on things above, not on things on the earth. We belong to a new creation; not to the fashion of this world which passes away. We are dead, and our life is hid with Christ in God. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him; and the friendship of the world is enmity against God. We are to seek the victory which overcomes the world by faith. We are not our own, but bought with a price; our business is to manifest the life of Jesus in our mortal bodies, to walk as He walked. All that is in the world is not of the Father, but of the world.
Now, I ask, If that be the character of Christianity given us by the word of God (with the infinite motive of Christ's self-sacrifice for us, and the blessed object of being conformed to His image, and growing up to Him who is the head in all things, and manifesting Him, so that the Church should be the effectual epistle of Christ), is there one trace of Christ in what is encouraged in the exhortations of the Moderator of the General Assembly of New South Wales? Is that not casting Christ and His cross into the shade, to clothe with the name of Christian the spirit of the world and an esprit de corps? Is it not the sanction of worldliness to more attachment, not to Christ and His path, but to a body which the Moderator favors? It is, I know, what is current at the present day, and especially in new countries; but is it the world or the cross and Spirit of Christ, as manifested in the New Testament, and founded on the unutterable worth of the self-sacrifice of the Son of God? I repeat here, The question is, not if a Christian young man is to seek the cultivation and improvement necessary to the effectual pursuit of his providential calling, but whether Christianity and the Church, which Christ has redeemed by His precious blood, and the ministry of the Spirit, is to have for its object, not the deliverance from this present evil world (to effect which Christ gave Himself for our sins), but the urging Christian and worldly young men into pursuits which are of the world, and which worldly young men can pursue as well as Christians, and which Christians can only pursue upon motives which can govern the world as well as them? I confess, I can conceive of nothing more sad than this use of Christianity to color worldly pursuits in the unconverted, and to engage Christians in objects which continually enfeeble and adulterate their Christianity.
I turn to what is to me a comparatively immaterial object—the Presbyterian system. One system is, I believe, little better than another, and the Presbyterian is dislocated and broken to pieces like the rest. Reunion has been attempted in the Colonies, with, at any rate, partial success; and the same is attempted between the Old and New Schools in the States (that is, between the Colonistic and American branches of the Presbyterian body). But the general history of Presbyterianism has been failure, at least as much as that of other Protestant bodies. On the continent of Europe, it is the most infidel of all existing churches so called. Every one knows that it had become almost universally Socinian in England so as to be excluded by law from Lady Howley's charity. The split of Kirk and Free Church is known to all. There are at least three large Presbyterian bodies in Scotland, and the Free Kirk threatened by a disruption within itself by an attempt to unite it with one of them. All this is sad to every godly spirit, and only a part of that sorrowful disintegration which in these last days is going on in Protestantism, to the destruction even of its public testimony.
But Presbyterianism is a snare to some in the present day in this way. It is respectable as an original reformed and national body, has an historic prestige as our Moderator tells us, has had its martyrs, and it is not characterized by the gross superstitions and remains of Romanism which is now both corrupting and disrupting the English body. Hence it becomes for some a refuge from that sickly corporation, when there is not faith to follow Christ wholly. It becomes thus a part, though a somewhat wearisome part, of one's service in the present day to examine its pretensions, for which the New South Wales Moderator furnishes the occasion.
We can understand a person attached to a body by education (a thousand ties of imagination recalling those who have suffered in founding it, shed the luster of their faith and sorrows over what we call our church, born within its precincts, christened there, married perhaps there, parents and ancestors buried there, to whom we are attached: ties as strong as those of country or of school and college, with a halo around it of what is distant and divine). We may be very ordinary professors, but our Abrahams, and Moseses, and Davids, saints owned of God, belonged to the body to which we belong. Their good report encircles the brow of the community we personify in our imagination. Still, when we seek for the Church of God, when with the earnestness which the Spirit of God gives, with the conscience awakened, and the heart under the influence of the claims of the sacrifice of the Son of God, we seek from the word of God the Church which Christ loved, and for which He gave Himself, when we seek it in its manifestation here below where duty is, when what we owe to the cross has possession of the soul, it becomes impossible to speak or think of an ancestral church.
We want God's Church, if He has one, that in which man has to behave himself fitly, and which is the pillar and ground of the truth, the Church of the living God. It is in vain to say that this is the Church as it will be finally in glory, or the invisible Church. It was a Church where Timothy was to know how to behave himself, and where directions for elders and deacons, and admission of widows had to be given. This was not the glorified Church in heaven. If it be alleged that all this is ruined and gone, let it be acknowledged with humiliation of heart, that what God had planted so lovely has been ruined and has withered under the hand of man. Let us take the place of confession, which becomes such an acknowledgment, and not substitute some other body for it. An imitation church will not do. What is imitation of power? Clothing an unconverted man, and an improvement society, with the prestige of martyrs who suffered some centuries ago, is a very different thing from honoring unfeignedly in grace, as a Christian, those who have suffered because they belong to Christ. The whole state of feeling is different: one is grace, owning rich divine grace in others; the other is an unconverted man accrediting himself with what he has no real part in to the deceiving of his own soul.
But to pursue the main point. It is quite certain that an ancestral church has no place in scripture whatever. There is the Church the body of Christ manifested on earth (as we see in 1 Cor. 12) with its various members and gifts; and there is the house of God in which the holy Ghost dwells, and which, at any rate in its normal state, is the pillar and ground of the truth. There were local churches in the different cities, locally holding (without however any separation from the whole body of believers) the position of the Church of God there. But an ancestral church is a thing wholly unknown to scripture and destructive of every idea there given of the Church of God. It may be the Church of Scotland or of New South Wales; but it is not the Church of the living God, but something set up instead of it, and which displaces it—displaces it in the heart and affections of the saint—and is thus the contrary to sanctifying (for we are sanctified by the truth), and is an object to which the affections or really rather the passions of the unconverted can be attached, to the misleading of their souls. With such a thought the word of God has lost its authority, and the Holy Ghost its power in the heart. There cannot be a more delusive word than the word “Church,” nor a greater instance of it than the statements of the Moderator. He tells us that the word has only one meaning everywhere. Be it so. But he does not tell us what it means. It means an assembly. When the town clerk of Ephesus dismissed the assembly in Acts 19:4141And when he had thus spoken, he dismissed the assembly. (Acts 19:41)—, it is just the same word. Does that mean a church? The word means neither more nor less than an assembly. It is a mere delusion to say “church” means always the same thing. It does not in English, for a building is so called thus as to deceive many, and in the original it has nothing in itself to do with what we call church. Thus its use in Acts 7, applied to Israel, has nothing whatever to do with its habitual use in the New Testament; or rather it is exactly the opposite (save as the mere fact of its being an assembly which was true of that dismissed by the town clerk at Ephesus). The assembly in the wilderness was the nation of Israel—no Gentile had a title to approach as such. It was exclusively such. The middle wall of partition was standing; they were bound to keep it up. The essence of the Church of God is that that wall has been broken down and there is neither Jew nor Gentile. To say that it always means the same thing, and to quote Acts 7 in saying so, is not only to rest on the surface but to delude oneself if not others.
Take the word: it includes an assembly such as Ephesus. Take the thing; and the assembly in the wilderness, and God's assembly formed consequent on Christ's death, are founded on principles diametrically opposed and destructive one of another. And the definition (“A church comprehended a society of the people of God") is as vague and incorrect as may be. A church is an assembly: what is the meaning of “comprehending a society?” An assembly means an assembly; if not actually assembled, it may be used in a general way for those who habitually assemble, but then it is the society. When we speak of the Church in its Christian sense (and that only is what we are occupied with), it is God's assembly founded on the death of Christ, and assembled by the power of the Holy Ghost, and dwelt in by Him. Christ gave Himself not for that nation only, but to gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad. This is the general idea, for it is only stated here in general.
Now the grand result will be that they will be made perfect in one in glory. That bright and blessed hope is beyond the sphere of our responsibilities, if it helps, as it blessedly does, in them. Christ will present it to Himself a glorious Church, without spot or wrinkle. This I trust Dr. Steel looks to, as I, as all saints, in whatever degree of earnestness and intelligence. It is the most blessed view of the Church; but though there might be difference on some points, as to whom “it comprehended,” I pass that question by here.
Besides this, which Christ—Christ alone—is building of living stones, and which is yet incomplete, we have the assembly on earth, and that viewed in a double character, as the body and as the house. Eph. 1 and 1 Cor. 12 view it as the body; Eph. 2, 1 Cor. 3 and 1 Tim. 3 view it as the house. Then, again, in each locality the Christians of the place were called the assembly at that place, as they were in fact. The assembly in any given house (“the church in thine house") calls really for no special notice. Anyone can understand that Christians in those days meeting in some large upper-room were the assembly in that house, if they habitually met there. There is no ecclesiastical idea, so to speak, in it. They broke bread at Jerusalem, κατ’οἶκον, at home in their houses; but there was an assembly,” the whole assembly,” all the saints in Jerusalem, as Acts 5:11; 8:111And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as heard these things. (Acts 5:11)
1And Saul was consenting unto his death. And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. (Acts 8:1); in Antioch, xiv. 27; again, Jerusalem, xv. 4-22; and so of a multitude of other places in the Acts; and the Epistles and Rev. 2; 3 show the same thing. When a country is spoken of, we find the assemblies of Galatia. It was a very simple fact: there were a number of assemblies in the country. An assembly is not simply all the Christians in the world, but all Christians viewed as assembled into one—and indeed into one body, so that if one member suffer, all suffer with it. There is unity in the pervading power of the Holy Ghost.
For a denominational body there is no room in the scriptural account of the Church or assembly, unless it be “I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas,” I of Luther, I of John Knox or Calvin. Churches are historic or ancestral (that is, not of God or scriptural). There is a great body which reaches beyond this—that of Rome, the abiding witness of the corruption and ruin of the Church or house of God placed in responsibility on earth, keeping its name and form, but in the hands of Satan and the seat of his power. The Church of England so called is not so distinctively historic. It seemed about to be so in the reign of Edward VI., but in Elizabeth's she, partly from political motives, partly from education and character, sufficiently patched it back again into Romanism to break it up now into violent parties, one clinging to the whore of Babylon, the other to what truth has survived in it, and to a large mass, by its practical incapacity to govern itself or anyone else, opening the door to latitudinarian infidelity, torturing people's hearts by vacillation between ecclesiastical millinery and adoration of the Eucharist on one side, and Colenso on the other. Thank God, there is the immutable faithfulness of Christ to trust to. He will surely have the Church to present to Himself, and we can count upon His unfailing grace now by the way. An ancestral church, with mutual improvement societies maintaining its doctrine and polity by an esprit de corps, is not the Church of God formed and maintained by the Holy Ghost and founded on the work of Christ: for him who looks for the Church of God and bows to the word it is self-condemned.
(To be continued)