even utterly to deny their inspiration would be less injurious than without warrant to assert it. Let us suppose that a parent is feeding a child, and before him are placed various meats of which he has no actual experience; one has the aspect of poison, and he sets it aside; of another he is doubtful whether it be nourishing and wholesome, and such as it has been recommended him to give, or whether it be void of sustenance and little able to sustain and invigorate life; were there no other he would use this in preference to none: but if there be a third whose kind he knows upon sufficient testimony to be unquestionably wholesome, does he not, as a matter of course, and as a matter of duty, having the free and perfect option, without the smallest scruple or exception, choose the food of certain and reject that of doubtful wholesomeness? And such is the analogy between ordinances certainly and historically known to be administered by Divine authority, and ordinances hypothetically conjectured to be so administered. 105. We are not then obliged by Church principles, as they have been stated, to regard men, on the simple ground that they are exercising the functions of the Christian ministry without the apostolical commission, as acting schismatically, nor the societies to which they belong, as without doubt severed from the Church, unless there be other circumstances which unfavourably modify their case. Nor does Scripture drive us to that painful resort. It tells us, indeed, of * Korah, * Numbers xvi. Dathan and Abiram, who usurping presumptuously the office of the lawful priests of God, were swallowed up for their temerity. It tells us again of the sons of Sceva,* who invoking without warrant the name of the Lord Jesus, over them that had evil spirits, were overcome by a man so afflicted, and were obliged to fly naked and wounded. But these are not the only cases recorded for our instruction. The Evangelists, St. Mark and St. Luke,† have both related the case of one who cast out devils in our Saviour's name, but who followed not with the Apostles, and whom therefore they forbade. Yet the work seems to have been accepted by our Lord, as an evidence of the man's truth; and He said, "Forbid him not; for there is no man that can do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me; for he that is not against us is on our part." But it is right to observe that whatever softening influences may be drawn from these passages, as respects the cases of those whose circumstances are in any degree analogous, it is not clear that they can have any force in justifying persons who establish a ministry not in aid of, but in rivalship and opposition to, that of the successors of the Apostles. 106. And now to sum up what has been said upon the last of the four propositions belonging to this head of charge. While Church principles take away nothing whatever from those professors of religion who repudiate the doctrine of real spiritual powers in the visible *Acts xix. 13-17. + Mark ix. 38-40. Luke x. 49, 50. Church of Christ; to those who hold that doctrine they greatly enlarge and corroborate the affirmative evidence of the blessed truth that they are in covenant with God and in union with Christ, after the manner and with all the securities which His love devised. They give to them a surer and a simpler way of access to the Redeemer, less beset with the snares of spiritual pride; they set forth with the liveliest energy the weight of their responsibility; they develop, on all sides, new and larger views of that place in which the Lord hath set their feet; they take nothing from any other man, but they make their possessors rich indeed. It is of course an important incident that they are qualified to act with proportionate power upon the neglectful, the lukewarm, and the profligate, but this is a point less applicable to the present argument. 107. Meanwhile we may, on grounds the most unequivocal and solid, rejoice to see with what warmth of sentiment every kind of protest has been entered on the part of Presbyterian and other Protestant Christians, against all real or supposed attempts to impeach the validity of their sacraments, or the formal claim of their communions to the appellation of Churches of Christ. I for one have witnessed with great delight, not indeed the ebullitions of resentment, however excusable, nor the misapprehensions and even very gross misstatements of obnoxious arguments with which such protests may, in some instances, have been accompanied, but the evidence which they afford of latent agreement with their antagonists, upon the very points where they believe themselves most to differ, of a fundamental concord which is thus shown still truly to subsist, however much impaired or hidden by those conspicuous and sometimes superficial diversities which alone meet the eye of the hasty observer. 108. For if the popular sectarian definitions of a Church and of Sacraments were correct, there would absolutely be no matter in controversy between us. Those who deny that any spiritual powers and privileges belong to the visible Church in its corporate character, need not, one should have anticipated, feel much anxiety and far less any indignation, even if it be categorically held that the religious communities into which they have formed themselves are not, in their corporate capacity, so endowed with spiritual powers and privileges. And yet those who have pushed the arguments from Catholic principles to the extremest lengths, have gone, and can go, no farther than this. No one has ever dreamed of denying those communities to be Churches in the sense in which alone they themselves, through their controversialists, hold that any body of Christians can form a Church, namely, as a spontaneous association upon the basis of belief in Christ and in the Scriptures, attended sometimes with the additional test of an experience and life conformable thereto. Such persons, whether they allow that Church government may be settled by consent, and need not rest on Divine ordinance, or whether they profess to derive it from the authority of revelation, always confine the functions of the visible Church por to what is external, and in strict consistency they ought themselves to be the first to contend for themselves that they are not Churches in the sense ascribed to the term on the other side, namely, as actual · tions of the body of Christ, depositories of His grace, and administering it to those whom they receive within their pale by the Sacrament of Baptism. But so far are they from upholding such a doctrine, that they repudiate it with warmth, and that they visit with equal reprobation the broad explicit assertion, and all reasonings however qualified and limited, which may be held or suspected to tend in the same direction. 109. Again, with regard to the sacraments of the Church. What means the denial of their validity? Those Christian bodies in this country who have renounced or lost the Apostolical succession, hold respecting the Sacraments (and their theory has not been without partial support from individual ministers at least of the Anglican communion*) that they are signs; signs alone, though beautifully significant indeed, and calculated to edify, by instructing and exciting those who receive them. But now if they be only signs, who doubts that the signs are as real in bodies which have no episcopacy or succession, as in those which have? If they be only signs, attended with that kind of effect in increasing faith and love, which belongs to their significancy and impressiveness, who doubts that an individual Christian repairing with true faith and love to a reli * See the Rev. Thomas Scott's Commentary on the Bible. John iii 3, and Titus iii. 5. |