Part 11.
We are now come to the second part of my task; a reply, not to your apology for the Establishment, but to your strictures on the “Brethren” so called. Whether you have adhered to Scripture in attacking us, any more than to the Prayer-Book in defending your own position, rains to be shown.
Some six and thirty or more years ago, a few Christians were led to feel much the worldly, and abnormal state of Christendom. One of them was of Romanist parentage, the others were Anglicans. They prayed, they mourned over the low condition of themselves and their brethren at large, they searched the Word of God. They knew it was evil to worship God unscriptnrally; they saw it was right to meet and break bread, as disciples of the Lord and in dependence on the Holy Ghost. Pretending to nothing of their own, in conscious feebleness, but most happy in the discovery of their liberty in Christ to remember Him and build up each other, they welcomed in His name every saint, joining with them in any service where it could be with a good conscience, but refusing to own whatever they believed to be contrary to Scripture. On one ex-clergyman (who above the rest realized the present ruin of the christian profession, and was led out into much prayer, fasting, and humiliation about it before God,) special honor was put of the Lord; for He was pleased through him to rive, from the Scriptures, the mystery of Christ and the Church, the true character of our hope in the Lord’s coming, the personal presence and operations of the Holy Ghost in the Church and the Christian, with a vast body of corollaries dependent on those grand truths, which reacted on the gospel itself and set the salvation of God in a far clearer light.
Thus, much I may say the more freely, inasmuch as I had not the honor of being a pioneer in the holy testimony of that early hour. But I do not feel at liberty to speak of the practical effects of what, I am assured, was the Holy Ghost’s action on their souls and of many more who were attracted by degrees in England and abroad, as well as in Ireland.
Their position was this: ― instead of making a Church, they owned the members of the Church of God, wherever they might be. They did not essay to form a perfect Church of their own; but they sought into that which God’s Word reveals about His Church, and to this perfect revelation, this only, they clave. They found it spoke, of a body on earth, Christ’s body, its members one with Christ and with one another by virtue of the Holy Ghost’s presence in them. They believe that, scattered as the members are, and grieved as the Spirit is, He is still here to guide the assembly; and that this assembly of God, the Church, is still here to be guided, and that, according to the Saviour’s promise, two or three gathered to His name might count on His presence in their midst. Why not act upon it? They believed that nationalism and dissent are unknown to Scripture and contrary to its plain principles and injunctions. Why act with either? The one makes its basis broader, the other narrower than Scripture warrants: The “Brethren” saw clearly that the Scriptural ground is that of Christ’s body — in its separation from the world, essentially different from a national system; and in its unity, just as essentially opposed to dissenting sects, formed on points of difference, which sever, instead of uniting, tte saints of God. They did not organize a new system with, its peculiar laws and regulations; they commended to each: other the Word of God alone. What Christian could question that rule of faith and standard of practice? They did not call or choose their own ministers, but trusted the Holy Ghost to raise up and send whom He would. Who can gainsay the ministers whom the Lord sends?
Can you tell me of any saints of God, since the Church departed from its scriptural ground, who ever before saw, or assembled on, this basis Do you know of any save “Brethren” who are simply, thoroughly acting on it now? Is it not large enough to admit every saint who walks as each, without imposing a single condition which he does not own? Is it not exclusive enough to keep off all who ate believed on adequate evidence to be yet in the flesh? Does it not leave room for the Holy Ghost to exercise all His rights in the Church of God? Does, it not maintain, in deed and in truth, the authority of the entire Word of God, without one human tradition to burden or stumble the conscience? And is not this, then, the only ground entitled to claim the ear of every saint of God? I read of that basis, and no other, for the Church of God in. Scripture; I see that basis, and no other, taken among “Brethren,” and among “Brethren” only. Try, if you please, and face the truth of Scripture and of the facts. You have only as yet assailed a shadow of your own making; and even in this you have fallen into palpable, surprising errors, as I forced to prove.
You allude, first of all, to a tract written by Mr. Darby in view of the Evangelical Alliance. The title (“Separation from Evil, God’s Principle of Unity”) you have impeached — I hope, because you did not understand it. “First,” you say, “separation from anything never can be a principle of unity; a common rejection of any error or errors does not afford a center of union to those who mutually reject these errors.” (p. 8.) Hence it is transparent that you confound the principle of unity with its centre. Had you read the tract with average care, the oversight could hardly have been made; for the writer has distinguished each element of unity with his usual precision. If “separation from evil is of God,” as you do and must allow in the same page, if holiness be inseparable from His nature and all His other dealings, does a Christian want proof that God does not abandon His own moral character in the unity He forms and recognizes among His saints? On what possible principle save that of holiness (which is but another way of expressing separation from evil, where evil exists) could God carry out unity here below? You are surely not prepared to assert that He sanctions a unity which must exclude—Himself, unless iniquity can have fellowship with Him. The truth is, that you, probably misled by Groves’ Memoir, have fallen into the blunder of understanding “center of union,” where Mr. D. meant and wrote accurately, “principle of unity.” But even here you are wrong again; for the true center of union is neither “love,” as you say, nor “life,” as Groves says, but Christ Himself — Christ dead, risen, and glorified at the right hand of God, the chief corner-stone of God’s house, the head of the Church which is His body. I should be ashamed to cite texts of Scripture in proof of the truth that Christ is the center of God’s unity, any more than for the other truth that holiness is its necessary principle.
But if separation from evil be the only principle on which the unity of a holy God can be conceived to be, carried out in an evil world, and if He has sent down the Holy Ghost to be the efficient agent of it, uniting us to Christ on high, I need not occupy myself with your next error, the imputing of “sad consequences” to a holy principle. It is false that the maintenance of unity according to holiness “leads to separation between true brethren.” It does suppose the judgment, in the power of the Spirit and by the Word, of those who sin; but this is a blessed, not a sad, consequence, and the direct command of God. “Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened.” Separation from evil is here most unquestionably laid down as God’s principle of unity: and in holiness is that unity to be guarded practically at any cost. Otherwise all degenerates into the mystery of iniquity, and a form of godliness denying the power. “From such,” says the Spirit of God, “turn away.”
Much which you urge in pages 8-14 is not to me the evidence of a peaceful heart. The tone in which you resent anyone’s thinking your course not quite consistent, somewhat betrays that spirit of judgment of which you accuse others, to say the least, much too broadly. He that is conscious of doing the will of God, can afford to go calmly forward in the path of Christ, undisturbed by the censoriousness of men. But I have generally found that “he who did his neighbor wrong” is the first to complain, “who made thee a ruler and a judge over us?”
If I do not mistake your allusions, you blame the discipline we have pursued as to Bethesda. Now I freely acknowledge the shortcoming of the “Brethren” and my own. But I am thoroughly satisfied it is of God that we should not have, communion with a congregation which deliberately received the intelligent partisans of a blasphemer against Christ. If you suppose that a believer, or a company of believers, can receive, or bid God speed to, such as bring not the doctrine of Christ but of a false Christ; that they can justify that reception when they know the depth of the evil involved, without becoming partakers of their evil deeds, I wholly dissent from you, and believe that the course adopted from 2 John is one of real love and holiness, and that neutrality in such a case would be the gravest sin and the foulest wrong to the Son of God. Have you not ventured to give an opinion on a matter of the most serious import, which you are not in a position to judge?
You refer to such passages as Isaiah 1:16, 1716Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; 17Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:16‑17); 2 Tim. 11:19; and 2 Cor. 6:16-1816And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 17Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, 18And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. (2 Corinthians 6:16‑18), “and others, which teach, it is said, that the saints of God should separate themselves from the professing Church, because of the evil and ruin which indeed we all sorrowfully feel to be there.” (p. 10.)
But who has said that saints “should separate themselves from the professing Church?” We have not left the pressing Church at all. We found some things we used to do were evil, and we ceased to do them; we learned there were other things it was well to do, and these we are now learning to do. Are we mistaken in either? Is it possible you are under the impression that to separate from the Establishment, or from Dissent, is to separate from the professing Church? To meet as “Brethren” do, in the Lord’s name, is not in the least degree to separate from that Church, but to do what every disciple ought to do in it. Nobody does or can separate from the professing Church, except an open apostate.
I am sorry you find no guidance in this matter from the first two passages, for they are both full of light: that from the Old Testament, as a general principle of conduct for the individual; that from the New Testament, as expressly directing the Christian in a day of disorder such as ours. It is ridiculous to say that if a man really acts as Isaiah 1:16, 1716Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; 17Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:16‑17) directs, he can fall from one evil into a greater. For the word is, “cease to do evil” — not some one, but all evil. As long as that divine oracle is heard, evil, greater or less, is avoided. And what is this “greater evil?” “Refusing communion with those whom Jesus loves,” &c. But there, again, are you not at fault? We receive every Christian walking as such, without reference to their connection with Nationalism or Dissent; we rejoice to have communion with them, whether privately or publicly. They may join us in the worship and the supper of the Lord; they are as, free as any of us to help in thanksgiving, prayer, or a word of edification, if so led of God; and this, without stipulation either to leave their old associations or to meet only with us. Where is this done save only among “Brethren?” Were any of us, no matter how gifted of the Lord, to give out a hymn, to pray, or minister at John’s Church, when you take the sacrament, the Canons (not Scripture) would treat it as indecent and disorderly; and so would it be, as far as I am aware, in any of the Dissenting sects, except by special courtesy. With us, on the contrary, if any godly Churchman or Dissenter thought fit to come when we remember the Lord together, he would be quite in order, if he did any or all, of these things spiritually; and this, not from any mere permission on our part, but as a matter of responsibility to God and His Word. Which, then, is guilty of “the evil of refusing communion with those whom Jesus loves?” Certainly not we. If you mean that I, for one, would refuse, (not to have communion ‘]with God’s children anywhere in a holy scriptural way, but) to join in the services of the Establishment, that is a very different question and not a sin, in my judgment, but a duty to God, as I have already proved even on your own principles.
Next, 2 Tim. 2:19-2219Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity. 20But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honor, and some to dishonor. 21If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work. 22Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. (2 Timothy 2:19‑22) instructs, not so much, like 1 Tim., how to maintain order in the house of God, as how to walk when disorder reigns there. The primary comfort is the immutably sure foundation of God, its seal presenting, on the divine side, the sovereignty of the Lord who knows them that are His, and, on the human obverse, the responsibility of every one who names Christ’s name, to depart from iniquity. Here, then is the absolute obligation of the Christian to separate from evil in every shape. But we have that Which is still more precise. The Christian profession was now like “a great house,” having in it vessels, some to honor and some to dishonor. The jealousy of a saint to preserve unity might become a snare for his soul and a compromise of Christ’s moral glory. Hence the Holy Ghost gives no uncertain sound, and leaves us not to speculation or self-will, but proclaims that holiness is still the only principle on which God maintains His unity. “If a man, therefore, purge himself from these, (i.e., from the vessels to dishonor,) he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, and meet for the Master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.” You have neglected this scripture. You have allowed Satan to take advantage of your own glaring misconstruction of the parable of the tares, (of which more anon,) so as to fall into the fatal mistake that God would have us abide in fellowship with evil, practically, and in principle too, rather than break a unity which is no longer holy but an outrage on His character, as falsely pretending to be His. Important as it is to flee also, youthful lusts, worldliness’ and every other personal evil, it is not enough. We are bound not to join as Christians with those who profess the name of Christ but dishonor Him; we are bound by the Word not to have vessels to dishonor “in the same communion with us,” (p. 35,) but to purge ourselves from them, and to follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, not with the world calling itself Christian, but “with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” To walk and worship with those who are evidently of the world, and have not a pure heart wherewith to call on the. Lord, is a sin, it may be of ignorance, but without doubt a sin, which places us at variance with His Word, and proves we are so far indifferent to His glory — a sin so much the darker in proportion, to our fancied light.
In vain you plead such texts as “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged;” “Speak not evil one of another, brethren,” and the like. It is not we that judge, but the Word of the Lord, if it be rightly divided and applied. If you are at ease in your conscience, you have as little reason to feel sore, as I feel because of anything in your tract. Fully do I allow that we ought never to suspect evil nor to impute motives that are not apparent; and if any of the “Brethren” err in this way, they are as guilty as their neighbors, and indeed, more so. But all this, as far as it is true, is mere individual failure, and, alas.! too abundant everywhere. To point a controversy by means of it, evinces, I think, not a little poverty in the way of substantial scriptural argument.
2 Cor. 6:16-1816And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 17Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, 18And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. (2 Corinthians 6:16‑18), you say, (p. 11,) “teaches that the Church should come out and be separate from the world;” but this is the very thing we are doing, and the very thing the Establishment forbids your doing, since it commands “every parishioner” to communicate, and yourself to receive them at the communion. “It has nothing to do with the saints of God coming out and being separate from the professing Church, because of evil that may, have come in there. God has shown His mind and will on this latter point.” (ib.) He has indeed shown it, and it is “Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.”
And is it not “iniquity” for one who doubts, dislikes, and disbelieves much in the Prayer-Book, to declare his unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything prescribed, sacraments, rites, ceremonies, consecrations, &c.? Do I hear some excusing themselves that they are the laity and can be silent? Hear Lord Shaftesbury at the last meeting of the Pastoral Aid Society: “I, too, have signed the Articles; I, too, am a subscriber to what is contained in the Prayer-Book, just as much as the clergy are subscribers to it; I do, as a layman, everything that the clergy do, with the exception of the administration of the sacraments, and I take my full share of responsibility along with them.” This is honest and plain-spoken; if it were felt in general by Anglican Christians, like many everywhere would cease to trifle with their conseciences and depart from that which they know to be “iniquity!” As to your notion that we apply 2 Cor. 6 to saints quitting the professing Church, it is, I repeat, all a mistake. We are quite as much in it as ever we were; only we no longer do what we have discovered to be opposed to the Word, and we are eeavouring to walk in all respects in conformity with it as a whole. Again, we must not limit the passage in 2 Cor. 6 to saints “separating from the world;” for it not only forbids peremptorily every measure of association individually and corporately, in divine things, between Christians and the worldly, (which “Brethren” hold but the Establishment denies,) but it insists, for all who are separate and in the relation of God’s sons and daughters, that they should cleanse themselves from all filthiness of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
But I must also make a remark, noticing in the next page (12) the constantly recurring illusion that it is a question of “separation from the professing Church.” You evidently mean by that phrase the Establishment and the Protestant bodies in this and other countries; though your reasoning in general assumes the narrow bounds of your own system. But what of the Greeks, Nestorians, Copts, Abyssinians, &c.? Are they separate from the professing Church? The English Dissenters ought to be, one would think, by your logic, above all others; for they certainly separated themselves from the Establishment, and are running a race of rivalry with it. They were utterly wrong, on your showing; but as far as I can make out your singularly incoherent theory, these opposing systems are not excluded from “the professing Church” any more than your own. For the Roman Catholics, however, it is plain, you have as little mercy as they have for you. Theirs are damnable heresies, say you in language as unmeasured as the decrees of Trent. (p. 12,) “Roman Catholics, &c., do not receive the Word of God!! so they are not in the kingdom of God!!!” (p. 25.) Had you qualified your sweeping charge somewhat, had you amused them of overlaying, and to an immense extent evacuating, the Word of God by their traditions, I could have gone thus far with you. But it is false ground to deny absolutely that they receive the Word of God, and, if possible, worse to affirm that they are not in the kingdom, either as wheat or as tares.
My dear brother, bear with me if I tell you, in the plainest terms, you have thoroughly not, understood the parable and this misunderstanding forms the staple of your pamphlet and has misled you to fight against as weighty a duty as any can be for a Christian.
I do not believe that you abhor the evils and errors of Romanism more than I do; but it is a calumny to say that Roman Catholics do not receive the atonement and priesthood of Christ — “not even professedly!” It is contrary to the plainest and surest facts; nay, even to your own Article 19, which owns its profession, calling it “the Church of Rome,” though of course erring both in living and ceremonies, and also in matters of faith: an article which you have solemnly pledged yourself to take literally and grammatically. Hence your own Hooker, whom you cite approvingly, writes, in this far more correctly than you, “If by external profession they be Christians, then are they of the visible Church of Christ, and Christians by external profession they are all, whose mark of recognizance hath in it those things which we have mentioned, yea, although they be impious heretics, persons excommunicable, yea, and cast out for notorious improbity.” This he says with express reference to Matt. 13. (Eccles. Pol. b. 3, § 1.) What is of more consequence, the parable is; itself against you; for the tares were the produce, not of the good seed corrupted merely, but of the evil sowing of the devil. Your denial that unconverted Roman Catholics, or heretics, are tares in the kingdom of heaven is, therefore, against the scripture commented on, not to speak of your own best divines. For there were two sorts of seeds, and not the good seed of the word only, as your reasoning supposes. Those divinely quickened in Romanism, as in Protestantism, are the fruit of the good seed; and wicked professors there, as everywhere, are set forth by the tares, the result of the enemy’s seed. Your premises and deductions are equally baseless.
In short, the explanation is as narrow and unsound as possible: on this point no Papist ever put forth worse. And why, readers may inquire, why such a departure from the sense ordinarily and rightly given to the tares? Why deny that they include “the children of the wicked one,” without restriction, within the entire range of Christendom — that is, all the wicked who are baptized and outside the heathen, Jews and Mahometans? Why are Romanists, for instance, refused a place, even as tares, in the kingdom?
The reason is obvious. You allow distinctly that the only true way of witnessing against Roman Catholicism, &c., is by immediate and entire separation.” But, then, if separation from Romanists is right, and yet they are outwardly in Christendom or the scene of the kingdom of heaven, your interpretation is ruined, and the pillar of your reasoning against the “Brethren” crumbles into dust. For if godly and ungodly Romanists are in the field of christian profession, (no less than godly and ungodly Protestants, so-called “Plymouth Brethren” and all,) it follows that we may all grow together in the field, and yet some of us may lawfully be in “separation immediate and entire” from others. If it be consistent with the Lord’s word they Protestants should have a different ecclesiastical communion from Romanists, it may be, as far as this injunction goes, equally consistent for Dissenters to be apart from the Establishment, and I add, for “Brethren” to stand aloof from all, if all have more or less deserted the scriptural ground of christian fellowship. Thus the argument, drawn from secession from Rome to seceding from every other form of iniquity, remains wholly unimpaired. Nothing can justify a Christian’s owning that to be a Church of God which is not; and that the Establishment is not God’s Church, but fundamentally different from it, flows even from what you concede to be God’s essential abiding principles for His Church — unity with all saints, and separation from the world. These are our principles, not those of the Establishment, nor of Dissent.
This, then, demonstrates how far you are entitled to speak disparagingly of the view given of the parable of the tares in the Bible Treasury for March, 1862. It is you who have wholly missed its meaning, not that paper. For what the Lord therein forbade was not the effort of His servants to make a collective testimony (p. 115) of Gods children, apart from the children of the wicked one, (which is the unity of the saints, separate from the world — the very thing you have yourself over and over confessed to be the will of God, and ever to be held fast.) He interdicted their gathering “up the tares, i.e., their forcible removal from the field, or, as I have explained it, their extermination. All hold that the enemy sowed tares among the wheat; (I never doubted nor concealed it for a moment;) nor does the reiteration of a fact which lies on the surface of the words modify my view in the slightest degree. All hold that the reason alleged by our Lord, for refusing to sanction the servants’ gathering up the tares, was lest they should root up the wheat also with them. This, too, I should have thought was too obvious to require special mention in a paper which gave only select notes of a lecture. Add these points to what was there said, expand them as you may, so that it be done truthfully, and the interpretation I have given is altogether untouched.
But your view is due to a total neglect of the Lord’s explanation, and leads you to contradict the plainest Scriptures elsewhere, as well as the principles you lay down and urge so often in your tract. I will not spend time in taking up strange statements, such as your seeming doubt whether the tares were sown in the field. “From whence then hath it tares?” I should treat with the utmost indulgence mere incidental flaws where the main thought was of God. But I am forced to express my decided judgment that you have preferred darkness to light, in this instance at least: why, the Lord will judge.
Omitting detail, then, I ask where is the evidence that the parable applies to ecclesiastical fellowship? You have taken this for granted without attempting a proof; and I altogether deny it. In fact, the beginning and middle of your tract are at open war; and one, if true, destroys the other. For, in p. 22, without the least reason given for applying the wheat—and—tare—field to the subject of church fellowship, you actually thence infer, that it would injure the saints of God, “if they attempted to separate from the children, of the devil!” In pp. 4-6, the saints were to be separated from the children of this world; it was “very plain in the Word,” “the will’ of God” and “to be held fast.” But, in pp. 21-27, “His saints are not now to attempt it.” “The Saviour forbids any separation to be made.” Is it not rather too bad, within the same sheet, to declare, with equal strength, that the same thing is, and is not, the will of the Lord? When you begin, the separation of the saints from the world is a “plain truth” of God; as you advance, the very same thing is a mere delusion of the “Brethren!” “No separation ... is the way of obedience!” (p. 27.)
The answer to all this is very simple, and the Lord has given it: “the field is the WORLD.” Hooker says (in the same book and section which I have already quoted) “His Church he compareth unto a field;” but he is wrong. The field is not the Church but the world. You have avoided the open statement of that error, but you have fallen into it only so much the more deeply, because unconsciously. The parable implies, that the tares were clearly seen to be tares, when fruit was brought forth, though not before. Here, then, are the tares, not merely left quietly in the world, but, on your view, known as tares in the assemblies or in the Church. In the parable, there is, of course, no question of gathering up the wheat, but only the tares, i.e., children of the wicked one, no longer hidden, but now apparent to the servants. Notwithstanding, there is no permission to deal even with the most evident or aggravated cases of evil; but, contrariwise, a decisive veto put by our Lord on every attempt to root them out. Apply this, as you do, to their growing together in the. Church, and discipline is necessarily at an end; for, as you triumphantly answer, “it is written again, let them both grow TOGETHER until the harvest?” Of all imaginable schemes of Church-fellowship, this is, I venture to say the most preposterous. ‘It is contrary to Scripture; for Paul insists that we are to judge them that are within, and that the wicked person is to be put away. It is contrary to the Rubric, which warrants the rejection of a notorious evil-doer, or scandalous person. It is contrary to your own admission that discipline should take cognizance of the ways of professors. The unvarnished, inevitable result of your interpretation of the parable is, to set aside all discipline, whether scriptural or Anglican. For who, under any circumstances, can be put out of the Church, if both good and bad are to grow together in it till the harvest or the end of the world?
But where were both sown? Even if we were not expressly informed what “the field” is, it would be a question requiring proof, and you could not be permitted to assume that the Church was meant; for the tares would have grown together with the wheat in the world, if there had been no such thing as the gathering together of the saints at all. But the. Lord’s explanation leaves your gloss without excuse: for your reasoning is really directed against His interpretation, without your knowing it, because you understand that to be the Church which He declares is “the world.” In fact, not a word is said about the Church, as such, in the parable. For the wheat are simply the genuine Christians, individually considered; and this would have been true, had there never been such a corporate institution as God’s assembly. The real question is about the field, i.e. the world, as the scene where the Lord had been sowing, and the enemy too. Hence those who apply it either to the sanctioned mixture of saints and sinners in church—communion or to the prohibition of church—discipline, have wholly, and most mischievously lost their way and are really setting their own perversion of the parable against the plainest evidence of other scriptures. My interpretation harmonizes what you dislocate, and falls in with the Word in general; for I have taught and still teach, that, comparing 1 Cor. 5. with Matt. 13., the true and twofold meaning is, (not that wicked persons are not to be put out, and that they are to be put out, which is mere nonsense, and setting Scripture against Scripture, but) that wicked persons are not to be put out of the world, while they are to be put out of the Church. If this seems unintelligible to you, it is because you have mystified yourself through confounding the two spheres. To gather up the tares means extermination, or at least violence as to the world, not excommunication from the Church. The dilemma (p. 28) is therefore imaginary. For wicked professors may doubtless exist in Christendom (i.e., the field of the kingdom) without being accredited in the assembly (i.e., the Church.)
You wonder (p. 29) at the view that rooting up the tares means killing or injuring the pseudo-Christians. Are you aware that the famous Archbishop John Chrysostom, the greatest light of the Greek Church, gives just the same in his forty-seventh Homily on Matthew? Moreover, the ablest of Protestant controversialists answers your argument, drawn from the parable by his Popish adversary, precisely as I am replying to you: “Our blessed Saviour foretold, you say, that there should be in the Church tares with choice corn. Look again, I pray, and you shall see that the field He speaks of is not the Church, but the world: and therefore neither do you obey our Saviour’s command, ‘Let both grow up till the harvest,’ who teach it to be lawful to root these tares (such are heretics) out of the world: neither do Protestants disobey it, if they eject manifest heresies and notorious sinners out of the Church.” (Religion of Protestants, ch. 5., part 1, § 57.) I had read neither the ancient nor the modern author, when I wrote the tract you refer to (p. 31) as containing substantially the same explanation which satisfies me still. If you were not convinced before, I am not without hope that enough is said now to satisfy you that, in uniting as saints, separate from the world, (of which you certainly should not complain,) we in no way transgress our Lord’s injunction in Matt. 13; for what He forbids is not such a separation, but the attempt to root or expel false professors out of Christendom, which is very far from our wish or thought. Leaving them to abide therein undisturbed, we nevertheless purge ourselves from the vessels to dishonor, and follow the will of the Lord with them that call on Him out of, a pure heart. Are you doing the same? To us both duties seem clear and consistent.
In truth, Protestants, as well as Romanists and early Catholics, widely departed from His mind as laid down in the parable. When such as professed to be Christ’s servants handed over reputed heretics or other spiritual offenders to be punished externally, they did precisely what is for the present forbidden. Augustine made this mistake in a measure, when he urged the authorities to chastise the factious Donatists and Gratian carried it out still more thoroughly. Well meant as this was, it was ignorance of the character which the kingdom assumes through Christ’s rejection, and during His session at God’s right hand; it was a slip into earthly righteousness, out of the patience of heavenly grace. The value of our Lord’s warning became apparent when the Waldenses, &c., were persecuted to death; for here was the extirpation of at least some wheat in the blind zeal which strove to get rid of the tares. It is not for the servants, but for the angels of the Son of man, to execute destructive judgment on mere nominal Christians. This is the point in hand: not keeping the unconverted, or purging the wicked, out of the Church, which is quite right; but the application of power to remove those accounted spurious professors of Christ from the world, which is quite wrong., In the end of the age the tares are burned and the wheat shines forth in, glory. It is all outward, judicial dealing wit the tares, (which the Lord forbids to us,) not the’ putting away of evil-doers from the assembly of the faithful (which the Holy Ghost enjoins.)
Again, it was from not seizing the truth conveyed here and elsewhere that some of the Reformers erred greatly in essaying to enforce the kingdom of God on Jewish principles. Thus, in the sixteenth century, not only were many burnt and imprisoned in England for alleged dogmatic evil, but also some flagrant cases occurred at Geneva under Calvin’s’ dictation. It is needless to enlarge on the Puritans, long after, and their excesses; or on the Scottish Presbyterians, whose desires, and deeds, with a similar end in view, are notorious. The penal statutes, till lately in force in our own country, bear witness to the same general tendency. In fact, it is the danger, not of Christians who seek by the grace of God to keep themselves separate from the world and pure, but of all who adopt the world as the ground of their ecclesiastical system, which they must next render compulsory by law: sorrowful contrast to the Spirit’s action in the Church of God!
You admit that “the parable has nothing whatever to do with Church discipline.” (p., 23.) But your application deprives discipline of its legitimate exercise, unless you can prove that neither wheat nor tares fall into sins which require exclusion. For, on the one hand, if the tares so sin and are to be put away, what becomes of your famous, argument in pp. 20-26? “Is a separation to be attempted? ‘Nay,’ saith the Master.” If, on the other hand, you confess that the exclusion of the wicked from the assembly perfectly consists with the growing together of the wheat and tares in the same field, your reasoning utterly breaks down: in this case you are forced to own the truth I am contending for.Whereas, if tares and wheat grow together in the Church, the rule would be absolute and final, that discipline can exclude neither; for both are to grow together till the harvest.
Your use of Rev. 2. and 3., (pp. 15-18, 32) is the common resource of men in your circumstances, but it is as clearly wrong as your uncommon view of the tares with its portentous consequences. And for this plain reason. The seven assemblies in Asia, spite of the evil found in nearly all, were really churches. They were gatherings of saints or of those believed to be such, separate from the world, into some of which Satan had succeeded in introducing, more or less grave evils. Now, in such a state of things, we entirely agree that separation would be schism and grievously sinful: for the entrance of evil, let it be ever so flagrant, into a scripturally-constituted assembly of saints, does not at all furnish a just cause for separating, but rather for patient prayerful looking to God for grace, wisdom, and power of the Spirit for oneself, and one’s brethren, that the unclean thing, doctrinal or practical, should be dealt with, and, if need be, the evil-doer put away according to the Word of God. The Lord did not, could not, blame His saints for continuing in these churches. On the contrary, He warned them of the evils that were there and of His judgment if they repented not. No amount of evil that may come in calls for separation, until the assembly refuses—to hear the Word of the Lord and to judge that which is offensive to Him. While the door is open for holy Scriptural discipline, a saint is bound to stay. Your fallacy, then, is in arguing from real assemblies of God to such a body as the Establishment; which, I have sufficiently shown, never was a church of God according to the sole Scriptural principle, practice, and history. What were we to do when convinced that the association, calling itself the church of England, is not, and had never been, a gathering of saints in the unity of the body, separate from the world, and subject only to the Lord by the Word and Spirit of God? How could we, how can you, plead for continuance in that which never was on the same basis as the Asiatic Churches?
In few words, nationalism has no more claim than a dissenting society (less in outward form perhaps) to assume to be a Church of God as Scripture presents it. Schism is separation from the Church, not from nationalism or dissent. If they are both alien from Scripture, they have no claim upon my allegiance or yours. As Christians, we owe it to our Lord to meet according to His will, withdrawing from all that hinders it. Of the Evangelical Alliance, I need say no more than that it is a mere expedient, and does not even profess to take the ground of God’s Church, though it is an amiable institute in its way.
From Mr. Darby’s lectures on the Seven Churches you have gathered the thought, adopted by many Christians at various times, that, besides the primary application to the literal Asiatic Churches, a complete picture is furnished of the responsible professing body from John’s day till the close. Hereupon you raise the old cry that there is no direction to come out of the professing Church, but blessing promised to individuals in it. We have no thought, in fact, of separating from Christendom, in which we all are equally; and we hold strenuously, that, wherever there is an assembly of God, (i.e., formed from its origin according to His Word, and still cleaving to that ground,) its miserably low condition would not call for separation, but persevering, devoted service, and waiting on God for a remedy. But you cannot hence make out a duty of remaining in an association which, never having been a gathering of saints according to Scripture, has no just claim to a single Christian.
Moreover, the argument is singularly unhappy, if judged by that view which, to you, “appears the correct one.” For, on the protracted scheme of the Apocalyptic churches, Thyatira gives us Popery under the symbol of Jezebel; and you have yourself strongly and repeatedly insisted on the Christian’s separation from that unclean thing. If, therefore, the epistle to Thyatira forbids not to come out from this evil, the other epistle cannot be said to bind us up with evils elsewhere, when remedy is refused and the godly, if they abide, must do or sanction that which is, in their eyes, false and iniquitous. I entirely coincide with you that to stay in communion with Romish error is to lose all power for witnessing. Why should it be a virtue to stay in communion with that which we account Protestant error? In either case, it would be heartless indifference to truth and holiness. On the scheme you accept, Popery has a place in these churches, prophetically viewed quite as much as a national Establishment; and if it be right, as you own, to separate from Popery, spite of no command from the Lord to Thyatira, it cannot be wrong to separate from nationalism because of no such command to Sardis or Laodicea. That which decides its right or wrong is the answer to the question: — Is nationalism according or opposed to God’s Word about His Church? If the answer be clearly against it, would it not be well to bear in mind the maxim, “Non est faciendum malum vel minimum, ut everiiat bonum vel maximum?” But when conscience does not keep pace with knowledge, let it be ever so scanty, and when faith does not work by love to silence alike fears and cavils, farewell to a happy, thorough testimony for Christ.
As to page 32, I need hardly add that there is no analogy between the ecclesiastical evil of which you make so light and the state of things contemplated in the epistle of Jude. Nobody contends that the faithful should leave a true gathering or church of God, even if hypocrites have contrived to enter privily; on the contrary, those are bound, spite of these, to remain and build up themselves on their most holy faith. But it is never a duty to countenance the world with Christians intermixed, as God’s church, nor to maintain, under any circumstances, a known error as His truth. If you say (p. 33,) “there is no message to or promised blessing from the Lord for a separate gathering of saints who have come out from the professing Church, I reply, first, that we do not come out from the professing Church, but from certain evils in it, which is a plain and necessary duty; and that, secondly, in the Scriptures referred to, there is no message nor blessing from the Lord EXCEPT for a separate gathering of saints who have come out from the world. To recognize and act on this, is, I affirm, the path of obedience, and obligatory on all Christians. For saints involved in evil principles and practices to say either “There is no hope” or “I have not sinned,” (Jer. 2.) betrays in both cases the evil heart of unbelief, and is condemned, not justified, in the Word of God. It is to be Antinomians corporately if not individually also. “Therefore, to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” “He that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”
Yours faithfully in Christ, W. K.