THERE are questions which are in their very nature absurd, as involving in themselves self-contradiction. They suppose a thing and its essential properties to be and not to be at one and the self-same moment, which is, of course, obviously impossible. In themselves, to a sound mind, they can never therefore be of interest. In the connection in which they are used, they are, however, often deeply interesting, whether as connected with the presenter or with the serious entertainer of them and their circumstances, or with the truth which they may involve. They often, I believe, mark an undetected, and therefore unjudged, presence of the power of Satan, where intellectuality is boasted in; though sometimes they are found in connection with extreme imbecility of mind; for extremes meet. In the presence of God, no sound healthful mind could entertain them.
I give as instances of what I mean, such questions as “Do I exist?” — “Oh, my Father, am I thy child?”—as on the mind or lip of an individual; or as a question entertained by the church, “Is the body separated unto Christ by the Holy Ghost competent for acts of discipline?” The question, in each of the several cases, contains the expressed uncertainty of the existence of that which it also affirms positively to exist. “Do I exist?” is, in my saying it, a proof I do exist; in the form in which I speak it, it is the professed uncertainty of whether or no I do exist. So, “Oh, my Father, am I thy child?” supposes I know I am a child, and yet do not know I am a child of Him whom I call my Father. And for the church to say, Are we competent for discipline? is really the question, Are we the church? for it is the being of the body separated by the presence of the Spirit of Christ unto God which constitutes the church; and where the Holy Ghost is, clearly He is able for all things, and if holy will not brook the sanction of any iniquity.
Such are the thoughts which the perusal of the two letters has awakened.
The writer informs us on the back of the title-page, that, “They are given to the church (i.e. a question whether she exists), not as containing conclusions, but as suggesting some thoughts... which may be for blessing.”
The writer must excuse me if I put it to his conscience, how far he would be justified in saying, “I have come to no conclusion.” The conclusion, that the ruin of the church hinders the saints down here acting in discipline, and that all they can do now is to leave cases of evil to “Jerusalem which is above” the mother of us all, and to God that is there—would be rejected at once by nine out of ten simple Christians, because it obviously involves the question of the surrender of association with God and of individual holiness. In the suggestions of the Letters, this does not lie obviously on the surface, but is most surely involved, though covered over. Hence the simple may be induced to examine the suggestions which the writer made upwards of a year ago, who would reject at once the conclusion. And what is the blessing which the writer hopes may be gained? Is it the arriving upon one or other of the two desirable points between which, as in a dilemma, his own mind was fixed when he wrote the Letters. Hear his own modest statement in the last sentence. To these things, “I have found no satisfactory answer, unless it be answer to say that the consequence of such views must be extremities for which we are not prepared: on the one hand, a submission to Popery; on the other, an entire giving up of anything like a visible body of any sort.”
Now I do not think it will be to the praise before God of him who, having so written to a friend upwards of a year ago, puts forth at such a time as this, in the penny form, his such suggestions: “Let the church of Christ listen to my suggestions, which (have been for a year on my mind and) may convince her that the alternative before her is ‘Rome’ (that is unity in unholiness), or ‘dismemberment.’” Either He is not the Holy Ghost or He is not with us. Let the reader mark what a day of trouble it is; let him weigh the blessed terminus of the author’s thinkings with the two-fold provision for rest; and then let him say whether such a tract was worth sending out or worth reading.
The fallacy of the reasoning used I shall endeavor to show elsewhere.
G. V. W.
April 14, 1849.