History of the Church of God

From the Creation to A.D. 1885

Sylvester Hassell

Cushing Biggs Hassell

Akai Tsurugi (akaitsurugi.org)

1886-01-01

CC BY-SA 4.0

History of the Church of God

1. Preface.

2. Table of Contents.

3. Introduction.

4. Chapter I. The Creation.

1. The Church of God.

5. Chapter II. From the Fall of Man to the Death of Abraham.

6. Chapter III. From Isaac to the Death of Joshua.

7. Chapter IV. From the Conquest of Canaan to the Babylonish Captivity.

8. Chapter V. The Babylonish Captivity and the Restoration to Canaan.

9. Chapter VI. From the Restoration of the Jews to the Coming of Christ.

10. Chapter VII. The Ministry of Christ and His Apostles.—The Gospels and the Epistles.

11. Chapter VIII. The Destruction of Jerusalem—The Three Periods of the Apostolic Age—The Book of Revelation.

1. First Period of the Apostolic Age—Peter.

2. Second Period of the Apostolic Age—Paul.

3. Third Period of Apostolic Age—John the Apostle and Prophet.

4. The Revelation.

12. Chapter IX. Characteristics of the Apostolic Church.

1. Twelve Marks of the Apostolic Church.

13. Chapter X. The Doctrine of Grace, and Missions.

14. Chapter XI. Second, Third and Fourth Centuries.

1. Trajan to Pliny.

15. Chapter XII. Fifth and Sixth Centuries.

16. Chapter XIII. Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Centuries.

17. Chapter XIV. Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.

18. Chapter XV. Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.

19. Chapter XVI. Sixteenth Century.

20. Chapter XVII. Seventeenth Century.

21. Chapter XVIII. Eighteenth Century.

22. Chapter XIX. Nineteenth Century.

23. Chapter XX. Kehukee Association from 1765 to 1802.

1. History of the Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association, and of the Primitive Baptists of America.

2. To the Judicious and Impartial Reader.

3. A Confession of Faith.

4. Church Covenant

5. Articles of Faith.

6. Rules of Decorum for the Association.

7. Preamble.

24. Chapter XXI. Kehukee Association from 1803 to 1833.

25. Chapter XXII. Modern Religious Inventions.

26. Chapter XXIII. Kehukee Association from 1834 to 1885.

27. Chapter XXIV. Queries.

28. Chapter XXV. A Church—Education—Itinerancy—Romanizing of Protestants—Societies—Sunday Schools—Persecution—Feet-Washing.

29. Chapter XXVI. History of the Churches Composing the Kehukee Association in 1885.

30. Chapter XXVII. Predestinarian Baptists of Canada and the United States.

1. First: The Covenanted Baptists of Canada.

2. Articles of Faith.

3. Primitive Baptists in the United States.

31. Appendix.

1. Life of Elder C. B. Hassell.

2. Autobiography of Elder Gilbert Beebe.

3. Elder Gilbert Beebe’s Editorial on Ecclesiastical History and Church Creeds.

4. Predestination.

5. Absolute Predestination of All Things.

6. The Celestial Railroad.

7. Final Notice.

8. Biography of Elder Sylvester Hassell.

9. Biography of Mrs. M. M. Hassell.

1. Title Page

2. Cover

3. Table of Contents

HISTORY

OF

THE CHURCH OF GOD,

FROM THE CREATION TO A. D. 1885;

INCLUDING ESPECIALLY

THE HISTORY OF THE KEHUKEE PRIMITIVE BAPTIST ASSOCIATION.

BY
ELDER CUSHING BIGGS HASSELL.

REVISED AND COMPLETED BY
ELDER SYLVESTER HASSELL.

PREPARED AT THE REQUEST OF THE KEHUKEE BAPTIST ASSOCIATION.

"The truth of the Lord endureth forever."—Psalm cxvii.2.
"Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls."—Jeremiah vi.16.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven."—Matthew v.3.
"Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."—Matthew xvi.18.
"It was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints."—Jude 3.

GILBERT BEEBE'S SONS, PUBLISHERS,
"Signs of the Times" Office,
MIDDLETOWN, ORANGE COUNTY, NEW YORK.

Footsteps of the Flock.

"Search the Scriptures."—John v.39.
"To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."—Isaiah viii.20.
"The footsteps of the flock."—Canticles i.8.
Genesis iii.15,21; iv.4,25,26; v.24; vi.8,9; xii.1-3; xv.6; xxxii.24-32; Deuteronomy xxxii.9,10; xxxiii.29; Ruth i.16,17; 1 Kings xix.18; Job i.21; xix.25,26; Psalms i.1-3; viii.2; xxxii.5; xxxiv.1,18,19; xl.1-3; xlii.2; lxxxlii.3; cii.17; ciii.1-5; cvii.1-32; cx.3; cxi.9,10; cxv.1,9-15; cxxi.1-8; cxxii.1-9; cxxv.1,2; cxxvi.1-6; cxxx.1-8; cxxxiii.1-3; cxxxviii.1-8; cxlv.1-21; Isaiah xxxiii.20; xli.17-20; xlv.17-19,22-25; liii; liv; lv; lvii.15; lxi.1-3,10,11; Jeremiah xvii.5-8; xxxi.3,8,9,31-37; Ezekiel xxxvi 25-27; Daniel i.8; iii.18; vi.10; Jonah ii.9; Habakkuk iii.17,18; Zephaniah iii.12; Zechariah xii.10-14; xiii.1,7-9; Malachi iii.16-18; iv.2.
Matthew v.3-12,43-48; vi.6; vii.12,14,24,25; xi.25-30; xxv.40; xxviii.18-20; Luke xii.32; xviii.14; John i.12,13; iii.3,5,7,8; iv.24; v.25; vi.37; viii.32; x.11,26-28; xi.25-27; xiii.35; xiv.15-17; xvi.13,14; xviii.36; Acts ii.41,42; v.29; viii.36-38; xvi.31-34; xvii.11; xix.1-5; xx.33,34; xxiv.11-16; xxvi.13,19; xxviii.22; Romans iii.19,20,27,31; v.19,21; viii.14,15,28-39; xi.2-7; 1 Corinthians i.26-31; xiii.4-13; 2 Corinthians iii.7,8; vi.16,18; Galatians i.6-12; ii.19-21; iii.10-13,17,18,24,25; v.1-6; Ephesians i.3-23; ii.1-22; iv.1-32; Philippians i.6,29; ii.12,13; iii.3-15; Colossians i.18; ii.6-23; iii.1-17; 2 Timothy i.9,10; iii.12; Titus ii.11-14; Hebrews iv.3,9,10; vi.9-20; viii.7-12; x.5-25,33,39; xi.1-40; xii.6-11,18-24; xiii.9; James i.27; ii.5,26; 1 Peter i.1-9; ii.5,9; iv.12-14; 1 John i.5-10; iii.14; iv.7; v.1-5; Revelation v.9; vii.13-17; xv.2,3; xxi.1-7.

Special Notice to Every Reader.

This book will be found benevolently iconoclastic,—seeking, with the Divine help, to deliver the people of God, for their good and His glory, from every form of idolatry, and thus to promote the pure, spiritual and acceptable worship of the Most High.—Exodus xx.3; 1 John v.21; Matthew xv.9; John iv.24.

Every doctrine defended by the Authors of this volume, and by all orthodox Old School or Primitive Baptists everywhere, is in perfect and Divine harmony with such gracious Scriptures as the following: Psalm cvii.; Isaiah lv.; Matthew v.3-12; xi.28-30; Revelation xxii.17.

Summary of Church History in Three Passages of Scripture.

“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds ; who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.”—Hebrews i.1-3.

By faith “the elders obtained a good report;” ” choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.” “Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.” “And others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; of whom the world was not worthy: they wandered in deserts, and mountains, and dens and caves of the earth.”—Hebrews xi.2,25,26,33,34,36-38.

“When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. * * * And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”—Matthew xxv.31,32,46.

The Edification of the Body of Christ.

“And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ: that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; but speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.”—Ephesians iv.11-16.

Preface.

A hundred or a thousand years hence the good or the evil opinions of human beings with reference to this book will not be of the slightest importance to me; while I shall be wholly interested in the approval or the disapproval of God. And, by reason of the entire uncertainty of the continuance of this mortal life, such may become the state of my feelings at any moment. Such indeed have been my feelings, I believe, to a great extent, in the preparation of this volume:

For the Preface, Introduction, and General History of the Church, no one but myself is responsible; while of the Kehukee and Primitive Baptist History in the latter part of this work, with very little exception, my father is the sole author.

It was the intention of the early members of the Kehukee Baptist Association to have its history written up and published at the close of each generation. The Association was organized A.D. 1765. The first history was written by Elders Lemuel Burkitt and Jesse Read, and published in 1803. The second history was written by Elder Joseph Biggs, and published in 1834. And my father, Elder Cushing Biggs Hassell, was in 1876 appointed by the Association to prepare the third history of the body, as well as a sketch of the History of the Church from the creation. After having written nearly all the Kehukee and special Primitive Baptist History, and the history of the Church from B.C. 4004 to A.D. 350, he passed from the scene of his earthly labors, April 11, 1880. I was appointed by the Association in October, 1880, to complete the work. Upon the examination of my father’s manuscript I found that the General History of the Church needed considerable and laborious revision, which he designed, but did not live to accomplish. I have made this revision to the best of my ability, and I have also brought forward the history from A.D. 350 to A.D. 1885.

My father traveled and preached extensively among the Old School or Primitive Baptists of nearly all parts of the United States from 1840 to 1880, and was cordially received by them everywhere; and if any one understood their views he must have done so. He was, and I am, the Moderator of the Kehukee, the oldest Primitive Baptist Association in America; and, while this book does not profess to be the organ of the Primitive Baptists, still I am satisfied that the views of my father and myself on spiritual subjects are, in general, substantially the same as those of the great majority of our brethren. In regard to the religious innovations of post-apostolic times, with reference both to doctrine and to practice, the words of the Lord in Proverbs 22:28, Jeremiah 1:17-19, 6:16, and Jude 3, have been especially and deeply impressed upon our minds.

For about two years I earnestly endeavored, by private correspondence and notices in our religious periodicals, to obtain complete lists of all the Old School or Primitive Baptist Churches and Elders in the United States; but so very few responded that the list is entirely too defective to be published. I have inserted in the history of the eighteenth century a list of all our churches of which I have been able to get any account, formed during that century. At the close of the Kehukee History is given the list of our associations in the United States, very much as left by my father.

The most eminent of modern church historians have zealously devoted from thirty to fifty years to the accomplishment of their labors. The present work has occupied the careful attention of my father and myself about nine years, he having employed upon it about three-and-a-half, and I about five-and-a-half years. As we have had comparatively so short a period for the survey of the history of the church for nearly six thousand years, we have been absolutely compelled to avail ourselves extensively of the best results of investigations made by other men, indicating our indebtedness by quotation marks, and frequently giving the authors’ names. We have aimed, not at a vain show of originality, but at utility; and we have freely laid under contribution the best stores of religious knowledge on earth. It would require not only great intellectual and spiritual ability, but a long lifetime spent diligently in the great libraries of Europe, to write the history of the church as it ought to be, but never has been written. My father and I have, in general, at points where the truth is assailed, purposely used the very language and the reluctant admissions of such as occupy the highest positions among the enemies of the truth, so as effectually to silence the gainsayings of those who defend error with less information and less ability. We have dwelt sorrowfully, but emphatically and solemnly, upon the extravagant Pharisaism and the extraordinary religious superficiality of the nineteenth century. The world presses into the nominal church, multitudes compass sea and land to make proselytes, while the unfelt horror of spiritual death reigns throughout almost the entire extent of the civilized as well as the uncivilized populations of the globe. But while gross darkness covers the rich, proud and corrupt Egypt of the world, as of old, the few poor, humble and despised Israel of God are blessed with divine light in their dwellings; and, to the spiritual mind, it is intensely interesting and edifying to observe the providential course and circumstances of that heavenly light as it comes down to us through the historical wilderness of the ages. Straight and narrow, high and holy, spiritual and divine is the mysterious path along which patriarchs and prophets, apostles and martyrs, and all the dear people of God have been led by the Spirit and providence of the Most High. The infallible Scriptures, illuminated by the Divine Spirit in our hearts, alone can enable us to discover that heavenly path, and to walk therein, and find rest to our souls.

As is well known by those best acquainted with my conduct in accepting and carrying on the difficult and onerous task of revising and completing this work, and in arranging for its publication, I have not been influenced by motives of worldly gain, but, as I trust, by a desire to promote the cause of truth, even at a great sacrifice of my temporal interests; and I hope that I have been divinely enabled in the compilation of the history, to rise above worldly considerations, and, in the solemn light of eternity and the consciousness of my great responsibility, to set forth what I believe to be the truth. I have not tried to write a popular or salable book. I seek neither the ephemeral applause nor the perishing riches of men; and I hope that the fear of God has been implanted in my heart, and delivered me from the fear of the face of clay soon to moulder into dust. I have not written for the purpose of either pleasing or displeasing men; but I have endeavored, like an impartial witness, to state plainly, calmly and essentially “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” whether men like it or not. If the truth please them, I shall be glad, for nothing else can make them free; if it displease them, I am not responsible. For the truth, however distasteful, I am not responsible; but for accurately reporting what I am satisfied is the truth, I am responsible to God. While it is impossible, as Macaulay says, for history to give the whole truth, the best historians exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole, and seek to discover and explain the principles interpenetrating and underlying the facts. Such has been my view of the true province and object of history; and this ideal I have endeavored, as best I could, to exemplify in the present work.

I have labored to set forth the truth in creation, in history, and in Scripture. There is but one God, and He is equally the God of nature, of providence, and of grace, as everywhere recognized by the sacred writers.; and it is disloyalty to Him to deny or contemn His work in either of these great domains. May He always, preserve me and my readers from such irreverence.

I lay no claim to inspiration or infallibility. I believe the Old and New Testament Scriptures to be absolutely the only inspired and infallible book in human literature; such is the fundamental doctrine of the Baptist Church and of the Protestant Reformation. By this divine standard I desire the present volume and every other creatural work to be finally tested—to be accepted if and when in accordance, and rejected if and when not in accordance, with the standard. “The best of the interpretations of the Bible are but the interpretations of fallible men.” The right and duty of private judgment in the interpretation of the Scriptures is also a fundamental Baptist and Protestant doctrine; such right I not only claim for myself, but I willingly allow to every other human being—only let each one remember and admit that no person and no set of persons now on earth are infallible. Papacy is equally offensive to reason and to faith. He who claims infallibility for himself or for any other man since the Apostolic Age, ceases to that extent to be a Baptist, or a Protestant, or a follower of Christ, and renounces those precious principles of religious liberty, in defense of which have flowed rivers of the best blood on earth. A proper knowledge of genuine church history delivers us from the tyranny of both ancient and modern popes of every name, and directs us to the Bible as the only authoritative standard of faith and practice. Old School, Primitive, or Bible Baptists, should be the last people in the world to have a pope or popes among them. No book, no pamphlet, no periodical, no document of any kind, must be taken as a substitute for the Bible; and no author, no editor, no preacher, no teacher, no writer, and no body of men must be substituted for Christ, who is the only Prophet, Priest, and King of His people.

The great importance of church history is shown by the fact that it occupies two-thirds of the Bible. It has been called “the backbone and storehouse of theology, and the best commentary of christianity itself. Next to the Holy Scriptures, which are themselves chiefly a history and depository of divine revelation, there is no stronger proof of the continual presence of Christ with his people, no more thorough vindication of christianity, no richer source of spiritual wisdom and experience, no deeper incentive to virtue and piety, than the history of Christ’s kingdom, as sublimely indicated by the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews.”—Prof. P. Schaff.[1] The history of the past gives us a more correct knowledge of the present, and a more correct judgment as to the future. The history of the people of God “eminently illustrates the laws of the divine administration, evinces the truth of prophecy by showing its fulfillment, and, in due subordination to the study of the Scriptures and of our own hearts, furnishes the best school of human nature, although commonly postponed to that of frivolous society and superficial worldly wisdom. It tends to elevate and enlarge our views beyond the petty bounds of personal, sectarian and local interests; to discourage bigotry, and moderate controversial bitterness, without impairing our attachment to the truth itself; and to suppress crude innovations and absurdities, both in theory and in practice, by showing that the same, in substance if not in form, have been canvassed and exploded centuries ago.”—Prof. J.A. Alexander.

A feature distinguishing Christianity from all other religions is its unique historical character—the religion and history being inseparably and supernaturally blended during a period of 4,100 years; the very facts themselves being parables and symbols illustrating spiritual and eternal truths. In the midst of a depraved polytheistic world the God of the Universe, the God of History, the God of Grace, preserved for forty centuries the pure faith and worship of Himself, in the lines of Seth and Shem and Abraham, until, in accordance with His repeated promises and types recorded in the Old Testament Scriptures, He manifested His great and glorious salvation in the spotless life and atoning death and triumphant resurrection and ascension of His incarnate Son; and then, in accordance with His purposes and declarations from the beginning, He dispersed the descendants of Abraham, with their ancient prophetic Scriptures, and sent his servants with the Scriptures of the New Testament, showing the fulfillment of the Old, among all the Gentile nations of the earth, and to the latter also mercifully displayed His spiritual, holy and everlasting salvation. “Holy men of God foresaw and foretold that the Gentile nations would come to worship the God of Judah, the Jehovah of Zion, at a period when nothing in the possible horizon of the times could have afforded the faintest indication of the wonderful future. To their minds the future was not as it is to other men, for they spoke of the coming ages just as the ages indeed have come.”

“Christ,” says Prof. H.B. Smith, “is the center of God’s revelation and of man’s redemption; of Christian doctrine and of Christian history; of Christian sects and of each believer’s faith; yea, of the very history of this our earth, Jesus Christ is the full, the radiant, the only center—fitted to be such because He is the God-man and the Redeemer. Christ is the center of the Christian system, and the doctrine respecting Christ in the heart of Christian theology. Christianity gives us all that philosophy aims after, and in a more perfect form; it also gives us more than philosophy can give; and this more that it gives is what man most needs, and what reason alone could never divine. And therefore we conclude that it is not within the scope of the human mind to conceive a system more complete, richer in all blessings. The highest ideas and ends which reason can propound are really embraced, the deepest wants which man can know are truly satisfied, the sharpest antagonisms which the mind can propose are declared to be reconciled in the ideas, the means, and the ends which are contained in that revelation which centers in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.”

May the God of all grace vouchsafe to bestow His all-important blessing upon these pages. Without Him neither writers nor readers can do anything acceptable in His holy sight. To his merciful, righteous and sovereign will, would I desire to commit myself, my labors, my natural and spiritual kindred, and all my fellow-creatures, both for time and for eternity. Sylvester Hassell. Wilson, N.C., February, 1886.

1. To such of my readers as may desire to pursue the study of church history, since the coming of Christ, beyond the limits of the present volume I believe that I am doing a real service to say that the most recent, accurate, impartial, thorough and satisfactory works on the subject with which I am familiar are the following by Prof. Philip Schaff, of New York: “History of the Christian Church” (4 volumes already published, A.D. 1-1073—to be followed by, others); “The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes” (3 vols.): and the “Schaff‑Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge” (3 vols.). As of especial interest and value to all loving students of the New Testament, I take sincere pleasure in recommending the first volume of his “History of the Christian Church,” entitled “Apostolic Christianity A.D. 1‑100,” which may be purchased separately for $4, from the publishers, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. For a study of the original authorities, J.C.L. Gieseler’s Church History, in 8 vols., is indispensable to those acquainted with ancient and foreign languages.
These commendatory remarks are made after a careful study of the best church histories published in Europe and America; and, like all similar remarks in the present volume are entirely unsolicited on the part of the authors of the works recommended.

Table of Contents.

PREFACE.

The great object of the present volume the promotion of the cause of truth—Circumstances of its compilation—The best stores of religious knowledge, with proper acknowledgment, freely laid under contribution—The extraordinary Phariseeism and religious superficiality of the nineteenth century—The unique path of the church of God—The authors of this work lay no claim to inspiration or infallibility—The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments the only inspired and infallible works in all literature—The Baptist and Protestant and Bible doctrine of the inalienable right and duty of private judgment in the interpretation of the Scriptures—Papacy equally offensive to reason and to faith—There must be no Popes among Bible Baptists—Value of church history—Christianity, above all others, a historical religion—Its acts symbolical of spiritual and eternal truths—Christ its center and substance—Invocation of the all important divine blessing upon these pages.

INTRODUCTION.

Incomparable character and value of the Bible—The utter failure of all the attempts of criticism, science and philosophy to invalidate a single one of its statements—The objections of its enemies carnal and theoretical, and abundantly refuted by more competent authorities—The designedly rudimentary, preparatory and typical nature of the Old Testament or evening dispensation, the introduction to the spiritual, final, New Testament or morning dispensation of the militant church—The Hebrew Scriptures utterly distinct in tone and essence, spirit and monotheism, from those of heathen antiquity—Monotheism and expiatory sacrifice parts of the primitive religion, but entirely corrupted among all ancient peoples except the Hebrews—Christ the substance and the chief witness of the truth of the Old as well as of the New Testament—The dissolution of the fundamental hypotheses of the Tubingen criticism—Not Paul, but Jesus, the author of Christianity—The gospels, as well as the epistles, written in the first century—The dates and characteristics of each gospel—The authenticity and the transcendent spirituality and importance of the gospel of John—Bible miracles the divine credentials of inspired teachers—The silliness of the so-called Apocryphal “Gospels”—No history more certainly true than the Acts of the Apostles—All the real discoveries of science corroborate and illustrate the truth of the sacred Scriptures, while demonstrating the falsity of all heathen religions—Prof. Arnold Guyot’s dying testimony to the perfect truth of the Mosaic record of creation—Man knows not even the alphabet of the volume of Natures whose Author is God—Man’s science never to be substituted for God’s revelation—The universe presupposes the existence of an eternal, infinite and holy creative Spirit—Utter irrationality, morality, inconsistency, senility and unscientific character of materialistic, agnostic, atheistic, chance evolution—Godless human philosophy a wilderness of darkness—Summary of the religious history of the Hamitic, Japhetic and Shemitic races—The decrease of vital and increase of formal godliness in the latter days, foretold in the Scriptures—The Obscure Age, A. D. 70-100, the dark, impenetrable gulf in which Divine Providence forever buried all claims to a merely material succession of churches or ministers—A spiritual succession found in most of the centuries of the Christian era—The spiritual marks of God’s people by which they may be traced through the ages—The principles which they have generally professed—The unspeakable solemnity of human life.

CHAPTER I. THE CREATION.

Seal of God upon the Bible—The Divine Trinity—Perfect harmony of the scriptural and the scientific accounts of creation—Inadequacy of evolution—Biogenesis—Vanity and folly of Pan-Gnostic agnosticism—Professors Dawson, Dana, Guyot and Kerr—Modesty of true science—Mosaic record—Assyriology—Existence, character and names of God—Jehovah, the unchangeable God of the covenant, and His church—Bara and Asah—Origin of sin and Satan—Language of the Bible phenomenal—The two methods of reconciling Genesis and Geology—Work of each creative day—The ever-living God the only Author of life—Essential distinction between man and all other earthly creatures—The latter earth-born and earth-bound; but man animated by the breath of God, and created for eternity—Man has but two constituent elements, soul and body—No human being knows whether creationism or traducianism is true—Unity and recentness of the human race—Science shows that the gulf between man and the ape widens as we ascend to their origin—Chronology—Samaritan Pentateuch—Septuagint version of the Old Testament—God, the Author of nature and the Bible—Spiritual meaning of the first and second chapters of Genesis—The Sabbath—Symbolical use of numbers in Scripture—Respects in which man was made in the image of God—Formation of Eve—Marriage.

CHAPTER II. FROM THE FALL OF MAN TO THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM.

Garden of Eden—The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—The mysterious principle of representation—The law—The tempter—The transgression—Nature of sin—The penalties—The sword-like flame and the cherubim—The promise—The seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent—The final triumph of Christ and His people—Intermarriage of Sethites and Cainites—Consequent increase of depravity—God’s warnings—The ark—The flood—Comparison of the antediluvian and the present times—God’s covenant with Noah—Flesh allowed for food, but blood forbidden—Murder prohibited—Power of inflicting death given the civil magistrate—Noah’s three sons—The history of their descendants for all time prophetically given by Noah—Confusion of tongues at Babel—Consequent dispersion of mankind over the earth—Shortening of human life—Job—His time, country and trials—Abraham—His family, and call, and change of location and of name—Melchizedek—Polygamy—Ishmael—Circumcision—Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—The great trial of Abraham’s faith—Sarah’s death—Abraham s character and death.

CHAPTER III. FROM ISAAC TO THE DEATH OF JOSHUA.

Isaac and his two sons—Jacob—His dream‑Significance of dreams—Jacob’s marriage and twelve sons—His wrestle with the angel of God—Peace with Esau—His settlement first at Shechem and then at Bethel—Isaac’s death—Joseph—A forcible type of Christ—Sold into Egypt—God prospers him—Makes him ruler over Egypt—Joseph settles his kindred in Goshen—Wonderful Increase of the Israelites—Jacob’s dying prophecy of Christ—Moses—His spiritual training in the desert—His call—Plagues upon the Egyptians—Paschal supper—Departure of the Israelites from Egypt—Destruction of Pharaoh and his host—Elim—Manna—Water from the rock—Battle with Amalek—Giving of the law at Sinai—Golden calf—Wilderness wanderings—The tabernacle—Its furniture and spiritual meaning—The sacrifices and their spiritual meaning—The day of atonement—The three annual festivals—The marvelous correspondence of types and antitypes—The specialty and ceremonial efficacy of every Levitical atonement annihilates the Arminian idea of the indefinite and conditional nature of Christ’s atonement—Number of men of war—Aaron’s death—Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, defeated, and their country occupied by Israel—Balak and Balaam—Death of Moses—Joshua succeeds him—Spiritual meaning of wilderness sojourn—Fall of Jericho and Ai—The Gibeonites—Slaughter of the Amorites—Standing still of the sum and moon—The Israelites chosen of God to execute His righteous judgments on the wicked Canaanites—The most of Canaan subdued by Joshua—His farewell exhortation and death.

CHAPTER IV. FROM THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN TO THE BABYLONISH CAPTIVITY.

Canaan—Its extent, peculiar situation, boundaries and unrivaled excellence—Declension and oppression of Israel—The fifteen judges—Ruth and Boaz—The ark of the Covenant—The prophets and the prophecies of Scripture—The fulfillment of these predictions proves the divine inspiration of the Bible, and the foreknowledge and predestination of God—Sons of the prophets; they could not be made prophets by their teachers—The Theocracy—Saul—Ishbosheth—David—His enemies, sins, repentance and forgiveness—Solomon—The temple; its spiritual meaning—Revolt of the ten tribes under Jeroboam—Idolatry and sad declension of Israel—The ten tribes carried into captivity in Assyria—Heathen settlement of Samaria—Peculiarity of the Samaritans—Rehoboam’s reign over Judah—Invasion of Shishak, king of Egypt—Abijah—Righteous reigns of Asa and Jeboshaphat—Wicked reign and wretched end of Jehoram—Ahaziah—Usurpation of Athaliah—,Jehoiada, the High Priest—Joash—Murder of Zechariah, the High Priest—Amaziah—Jonah—Uzziah’s long reign—The prophets Zechariah, Joel, Isaiah, Hosea and Amos—Jotham’s reign—The abominable idolatry of king Ahaz—The righteous reign of Hezekiah—Exceedingly wicked reign of Manasseh—His captivity and repentance—Amon—Josiah, the last pious king of Judah—The prophets Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk—Jehoahaz—Jehoiakim—Babylonish captivity of Judah—Daniel and his three companions—Jehoiachim—Ezekiel and Mordecai—Zedekiah, the nineteenth and last king of Judah—The Governor Gedaliah—Johanan carries Jeremiah down to Egypt, where the prophet dies—Duration of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah—A summary of their spiritual history—True Israelites—The Lamentations of Jeremiah—The desolation of Israel—Reflections—As the kings, so the people—Necessity of the prophetic order Books of the Old Testament thus far written.

CHAPTER V. THE BABYLONISH CAPTIVITY AND THE RESTORATION TO CANAAN.

The land of Judah enjoys her Sabbaths—The ten lost tribes—Nebuchadnezzar—Judah and Israel reunited in captivity—Daniel and his three friends—Life and prophecies of Ezekiel—Daniel resembles Joseph—His characteristics—Authenticity of the book of Daniel—The prophet was sustained by divine faith—In his second and seventh chapters he predicts the four great world-kingdoms, to be followed by Christ’s kingdom—We live under the divisions of the fourth universal empire—The fiery furnace—Nebuchadnezzar humbled and changed by the almighty power of God—Evil-Merodach—Belshazzar—Handwriting on the wall—Awful doom of the impenitent sinner—Faithfulness of Daniel—God’s servants are not covetous—Isaiah’s wonderful prophecies, one hundred and seventy-four years beforehand, in regard to the details of the fall of Babylon—Darius the Median—Cyrus the Persian—Daniel’s fearless devotion to his God—Similar steadfast adherence of Bible Baptists to God—Gabriel’s revelations to Daniel, in the ninth chapter—The Messiah to come in seventy weeks (from the command to restore Jerusalem), to suffer for others, make an end of sin, and bring in everlasting righteousness; and then. the Jewish State-Church, with its capital city, to be destroyed—Exact fulfillment of the Prophecy in Jesus of Nazareth—Remarkable confession of the Jewish chief Rabbi, Simon Luzzato—Sir Isaac Newton’s view—Christ refers Daniel’s “abomination of desolation” to the Roman conquest of Jerusalem—Deliverance of all the Christians from the unexampled horrors of the final siege, In accordance with Christ’s admonition to them—So at last all God’s people will be saved, while all His enemies will be destroyed—The Messiah universally expected on earth during the first century of the Christian era—After Daniel’s humble confession of sin, Christ is revealed to him—Events predicted in the eighth, eleventh and twelfth chapters of Daniel—Antiochus IV., Epiphanes, the Old Testament antichrist, the product of the highest ancient civilization; a type of the New Testament antichrist of the last days, who will be a product of the highest modern civilization—Signs of these times—We are verging on the period of the last great apostasy—Time dissolves and eternity opens in the last chapter of Daniel—The Jews cured of material idolatry by the Babylonish captivity—Dealings of God with the heathen—The king’s heart in the hands or the Lord—The Medo-Persian kings, Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes, order the return of the Jews to Jerusalem—Some of all the tribes, but chiefly members of the tribes of Judah, Benjamin and Levi, return—Rebuilding of the temple under Zerubbabel—Haggai’s prophecy of the coming of the Desire of all nations to the second Temple, fulfilled in Christ—Esther—Ezra and Nehemiah—Illumination of the opening and the closing pages of the Old Testament with the light of the Sun of Righteousness—The Apocrypha—Josephus—Ezekiel’s three great overturnings, after which He should come whose right it was to reign—Spirituality of God’s worship.

CHAPTER VI. FROM THE RESTORATION OF THE JEWS TO THE COMING OF CHRIST.

The Jews under the Greco-Macedonian empire—Visit of Alexander the Great to Jerusalem—Palestine a province of the Greco-Egyptian kingdom—The High Priest Onias—Simon the Just—Eleazar—Ptolemy Philadelphus—The Septuagint, or Greek Old Testament—Antiochus IV., Epiphanes, of Syria, attempts to destroy the people and the worship of God—His horrible end—Revolt of the Maccabees against Syrian tyranny and blasphemy—Chasidim and Zadikim; Sadducees and Pharisees—The Asmonean Princes—The Essenes—Pompey captures Jerusalem and enters the Holy of Holies—Establishes five Sanhedrims—Antipater appointed by Julius Caesar procurator of Judea, B.C. 47—His son, Herod the Great, made Governor of Galilee and Coele-Syria—Obtains the favor of Mark Antony—Contest between Antigonus and Hyrcanus—Herod flees to Masada, to Egypt, and to Rome—Made by Antony and Octavius king of Judea, 40 B.C.—Attacks Jerusalem, and is defeated—Marries Mariamne, granddaughter both of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus—Jerusalem taken—Herod installed king of Judea, B.C. 37—Upheld by Rome—Adorns the second temple—His great jealousy and cruelty—An inhuman monster—Murders many of his own family, and the infants of Bethlehem—His terrible illness and death—Work of sin and of grace under the old dispensation—Wars and idolatry—Human depravity—Faith and suffering of God’s people—The Old Testament Canon—In the Old Testament the New is concealed, and in the New the Old is revealed—The Old the type, the New the antitype—Pre-ordained connection between the two—The Old the shadowy, and the New the clear, revelation of the same great essential truths: the holiness of God, the heinousness of sin, and the only method of God’s spiritual and eternal salvation—The law our pedagogue to bring us to Christ—Its imperfect, preparatory and onerous nature—Its outward ordinances carnalized by national Israel—God destroys the outward by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar—Preparation for the introduction of a spiritual kingdom on earth—The gospel of realities supersedes forever the gospel of shadows: the spiritual takes the place of the material—The spiritual church of Christ the true theocracy: an organized community of kings and priests, subject, in religious matters, to no earthly potentate or aristocracy—False typology—Judaizing errors of Romanists and Protestants: hierarchism, formalism, traditionalism, sacerdotalism and sacramentalism—Unscriptural perversion of the doctrine of personal, unconditional, eternal election—All the Old Testament Messianic prophecies perfectly fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth.

CHAPTER VII. THE MINISTRY OF CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES—THE GOSPELS AND THE EPISTLES.

The New Testament—Rise of the Sun of Righteousness—Mission of the angel Gabriel to Mary—Birth of Jesus—Adoration of the shepherds—Exact date of Christ’s birth—Born in the fullness of the time during a period of universal peace—Jesus, at the age of twelve, disputes in the temple with the doctors of the law—Baptized, at the age of thirty, by John the Baptist in the Jordan—Approving presence of the Father and the Spirit—The ministry of John the Baptist—Christ sends out the twelve Apostles and seventy disciples to preach—The numbers gathered in by them but few—The Apostles are the spiritual judges of Israel, and have no successors, except their own inspired writings—The marvelous life and teachings and sufferings of Christ—His incomparable perfections—Why He chose poor and illiterate Apostles—His death, resurrection and ascension—Necessity of His sufferings—The supernatural darkness at His death—The same body was crucified, raised again, and glorified—The doctrine of Christ—The judicial law designed for the special government of the ancient Hebrew nation—The ceremonial law a prefiguration of Christ, and fulfilled and ended in Him—The moral law perfectly kept by Him for His people, in whose hearts He graciously writes the same holy law—The entire eternal salvation of the church based upon the perfect righteousness of Christ—The Day of Pentecost—The first church in Jerusalem a Baptist Church of baptized believers—Each primitive church a little Republic—Diligence and success of the Apostles in preaching the word—God still able to convert sinners—Appointment of seven deacons at Jerusalem—Martyrdom of Stephen—Philip preaches in Samaria and to the eunuch—The two classes of conversion illustrated by that of Saul of Tarsus and that of Cornelius the centurion—Both the effect of sovereign and efficacious grace—All true conversions are miracles—The most devout saved only by Christ’s atonement—All true devotion the work of God’s Spirit—Remarks on the Gospels and the Epistles—Christianity, as established by Christ, perfect.

CHAPTER VIII. THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM—THE THREE PERIODS OF THE APOSTOLIC AGE—THE BOOK OF REVELATION.

Nero’s persecution of Christians—The destruction of Jerusalem—The awful calamities of the Jews, as predicted by Moses and Christ—The escape of the Christians from Jerusalem to Pella, in accordance with Christ’s warning direction—Dispersion of the Jews over all the world, according to the predictions of Moses, and their continued distinctiveness as a people, to prove to the world the truth of the Old Testament, and for the fulfillment of prophecies still future—They are to return to the Lord in the latter days—Persecution of the Christians under Domitian—Death of John, the last Apostle—The spiritual nature of Christ’s kingdom—The Petrine, Pauline and Johannine periods of the apostolic age—Lives, labors and teachings of Peter, Paul and John—James the Lord’s brother, aid the Apostle James—Gnostic—The Revelation, or Apocalypse—Date and contents of the book—The seven churches of Asia—The destruction of Jerusalem a prophetic miniature of the destruction of the world—The Apocalypse gives the general principles of the Divine government—The preterist, futurist and historical schools of interpretation—The book of the coming of Christ—Intended to console God’s people under their great trials, with the certain prospect of final victory—The prophecies are both historical and spiritual—Zoon and therion—The Dragon, Beast and False Prophet form the hellish Anti-Trinity—The first beast a persecuting world-power—The second beast, or False Prophet, or Mystery Babylon, a more oppressive pseudo-religious power—The mark in the right hand and forehead—The number 666—The destruction of all the enemies of God’s people—The time unknown to creatures—The Millennium—The final apostasy—The second personal coming of Christ—The general resurrection and final judgment—The mercy of God glorified in the everlasting salvation of His people, and His justice vindicated in the everlasting punishment of the wicked—Union of Christ and His church.

CHAPTER IX. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH.

Twelve characteristics of the apostolic church of the first century, with a history of the observance and the perversions of these features in succeeding ages—The apostolic age pre-eminently the age of the Holy Spirit, and the standard of all succeeding ages in doctrine and discipline—Twelve marks of the apostolic church: 1. A regenerate church membership—History of the unscriptural Catholic practice of infant baptism, the principle of which involves the horrible doctrine of the everlasting damnation of all unbaptized children who die in infancy. 2. The baptism (by which, of course, is meant the immersion-the word “baptism” means nothing else) of believers in water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost—History of the unscriptural Roman Catholic substitute of sprinkling or pouring for baptism—Man has no right to change the perfect ordinances of God—Bapto, baptizo, louo, nipto, rantizo, cheo and katharizo, as used in the New Testament—Tabal and machats, as used in the Old Testament—The Greek preposition en—Baptism not intended to represent the mysterious mode of the communication of the Spirit, but a burial and resurrection with Christ—Much water—The large baptisteries of the early centuries—The most of the apostolic expressions regarding baptism set aside by sprinkling or pouring—The origin of the Baptists, says Mosheim, hidden in the remote depths of antiquity. 3. The frequent observance, by baptized and orderly-walking believers, of the Lord’s Supper; the bread representing the broken body, and the wine the shed blood of their precious Redeemer—The spiritual origin and nourishment of the Divine life—The Lord’s Supper a symbolic ordinance, and not a sacrament or seal of salvation, or effective means of grace—History of the idolatrous, doctrine—Open and close communion. 4. The maintenance of strict discipline—Gibbon’s testimony to the pure and austere morals of the early Christians—Ananias and Sapphire—The Corinthian offender excluded, and after repentance restored by the church—The brethren took part with the Apostles and Elders in the conference at Jerusalem—Hymeneus and Alexander excluded for denying the doctrine of the resurrection—Need of genuine brotherly love for the prevention and cure of offenses—Different treatment of private or personal and public or moral offenses—Necessity of a tender, faithful, scriptural discipline in the churches. 6. The independent or congregational polity or government of each local church, subject only to the Headship of Christ—Kakal and ecclesia—The local church the highest and last ecclesiastical authority on earth, according to the teaching of Christ—Ecclesiastical monarchies and oligarchies of worldly and unscriptural origin—Each true scriptural church, in its independence, a breakwater against the countless tides of error, strife and corruption—These churches are united not by mechanical, but by spiritual bonds, and have always corresponded with each other, on terms of perfect equality, by brotherly letters and messengers—No New Testament authority for an organic union of churches, or for the legislative or disciplinary powers of Associations, Synods, Councils, Conferences or Conventions—The apostolic church not a copy of the humanly invented Jewish synagogue, and not governed by Elders—All Christ’s people are kings and priests, and He is their only Master. 6 The complete separation of Church an State—Emancipation from the unscriptural traditions and commandments of men—The typical Jewish Church-State power superseded by the unworldly, spiritual church of the New Testament—The alliance of “Church” and State, since the coming of Christ, always productive of corruption and persecution—Fifty millions of human beings murdered by Papal Rome, armed with the sword of the civil magistrate; the same power of life and death still claimed by the Pope—The principle of the union of “Church” and State adopted by Protestants, but always repudiated by Baptists—The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding Congress to make any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, adopted mainly through Baptist influence—Washington’s, Locke’s, Newton’s and Story’s testimonies to the Baptists as the friends of liberty—The peculiar and inestimable privilege of religious liberty enjoyed by the people of the United States. 7. The general poverty, illiteracy, obscurity, and afflicted and persecuted condition of the members—The Old Testament Prophets, John the Baptist, Christ and His Apostles and the primitive disciples, and the people of God during the last eighteen centuries. 8. The fraternal equality of the ministry as well as of the membership—Only two classes of church officers, Bishops, or Elders, or Pastors, and Deacons—The Apostles were extraordinary foundation officers, princes sitting upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, and are, in their writings, their own perpetual successors—The utter baselessness of all claims to a material succession from the Apostles—All scholars admit that, in the New Testament, the terms Bishop, and Presbyter or Elder, and Pastor, designate the same class of church officers—In the second century the Bishop simply the presiding officer among the Presbyters of a church, the Pastor of a single congregation—Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, A.D. 248-258, the father of Diocesan Episcopacy, and of Romanism—Leo I., A.D. 440-461, the first Pope, in the teal sense of the word—The False Decretals of the ninth century—Brief History of Papal encroachments—The Apostles were clothed with humility—Ordination-So-called “confirmation”—The class or official distinction between teaching and ruling Elders not in the New Testament, but invented by Calvin in the third edition of his Institutes—Deacons—Evangelists. 9. A humble, God-called and God-qualified ministry, mostly destitute of human training—The foolish things of the world chosen of God to confound the wise, that the glory may be His—Paul, when called to the service of Christ, conferred not with flesh and blood, and was made by God an able minister of the New Testament, not of the letter, which killeth, but of the Spirit, which giveth life—Sons or companies of the Prophets—The history of Theological Seminaries—Spurgeon’s experience—The learned religionists of Judea crucified Christ—Ministers should search the Scriptures in humble dependence upon God for enlightenment. 10. An unsalaried ministry, helped by the voluntary contributions of their churches, but also laboring more or less for their own support; freely receiving of God, and freely giving of their spiritual things to their brethren, while the latter also freely ministered of their carnal substance to them—The true ministry are not hirelings, preaching for filthy lucre’s sake—The noble, self‑denying, Christ-like example of Paul—Salaries attract unqualified men into the ministry—Unstipulated voluntary contributions to the ministry practiced for the first three centuries. 11. The sending forth of the ministry by the Holy Spirit, and their going forth, whithersoever the Lord directed, in simple dependence upon Him, to preach the gospel to every creature, and to shepherd the lambs and sheep of Christ—The twelve Apostles and seventy Disciples—The gospel, and not the preaching of it, the power of God unto salvation to believers—No man able to do the quickening work of the Divine Spirit—The Apostles went forth as directed, not by man, but by the Spirit, who alone knows where His elect and redeemed people are—And, as directed by Christ, when they were persecuted in one city they fled to another, and thus they traversed the Roman Empire—The true ministry, since the apostolic age, have gone forth in the same manner. 12. Separation from all worldly, men-made, money-based religious organizations, corruptly uniting believers and unbelievers, for the avowed object of converting the world—Ancient Israel forbidden to confederate with the heathen nations for any purpose—The church the only society organized or authorized by Christ and His Apostles, and perfectly adapted for all the purposes of God toward spiritual Israel—The especial corruption of professedly religious organizations based upon money, the god of this world, and the love of which is a root or all evil—All these modern human inventions and institutions utterly unknown in the apostolic and primitive churches—Not by worldly might and power, but by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts, did the word of God, in the first century, grow mightily and prevail—No religious institutions of men found in the New Testament, and all to be rejected.

CHAPTER X. THE DOCTRINE OF GRACE, AND MISSIONS.

History of the doctrine of grace, and of scriptural and unscriptural missions—Bible Baptists not fatalists, or rationalists, but scriptural predestinarians—The Greek Arminian anthropology the doctrine of the dead Greek Catholic “Church,” and, since the sixth century, of the Roman Catholic “Church”—The first Protestant reformers decidedly rejected this false doctrine, but retained many Romish unscriptural traditions—Baptists have no succession from Rome, and are the only thorough-going, consistent antagonists of Romanism—The Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, Calvinistic Methodist and Wesleyan Methodist communions—Superior moral results of Bible predestinarianism—The almost total departure of Protestants and New School Baptists from this doctrine during the last hundred years, and the sad moral results—The nineteenth century preeminently the century of religious profession and pride—Vice and crime increasing with the increase of religious profession, at least in the United States—Modern evangelization—The prevalence of Arminianism among the most of the anti-Romanists of the Dark Ages, and among the early Baptists of modern times—The first Predestinarian Baptist Church formed in 1633, in London—The most of Baptists since that time have professed predestinarianism—All are Arminians by nature—Babes in Christ need grace to establish them in the doctrine of God our Savior—All human authority fallible and imperfect—The Scriptures the only infallible authority—The soundness of the devout and learned English Baptist ministers, John Skepp, John Brine and John Gill, of the eighteenth century—Covert Arminianism of Andrew Fuller—Long and bitter controversy—Prevalence of Fullerism, and consequent large ingathering of goats into the “sheepfold”—The first Baptist Missionary Society—Modern missioners unlike the Apostles and primitive ministers, have more faith in men and human learning and money than in God—Modern missionary methods derived, not from the New Testament, but from the Roman Catholics especially the Jesuits, the most zealous and successful men-made Missionaries in the world—Such methods no sign of spiritual life—Remarkable and candid admissions of Mr. W.F. Bainbridge, a “Missionary Baptist” preacher, who has recently visited a thousand Protestant mission stations—More than two-thirds of the “Christian Church” practically anti-missionary—Miserably small annual contributions of the advocates of Foreign Missions, averaging less than three cents apiece—Prayer needed as well as money—“Missionary” criticism of Paul’s methods—Christ’s example—The heathens more honest than professing Christians—The warlike and self-aggrandizing course of Protestant England Partial material resemblance of the nineteenth to the first century; God’s purposes of grace—Infidelity disseminated by professing Christians in Japan, China and India—Salaries and qualifications of foreign missionaries—There should be less reliance on means and methods, and more on God—Number and cost of heathen converts—Time needed to convert the world—Testimony of the greatest of Southern Baptist Missionaries to the scripturalness of Primitive Baptist principles who, though stigmatized as anti-missionaries, are the most active, self-denying, scriptural home missionaries in the United States, traveling tens and hundreds of thousands of miles without Missionary Boards or Funds, as directed by the Spirit and providence of God, as did the Apostles and the ministers of all the early centuries—Far more than human means or money the world needs a Pentecostal baptism of God’s Holy Spirit—Unscripturalness of modern “Missions,” and scripturalness of Primitive Baptist position.

CHAPTER XI. SECOND, THIRD AND FOURTH CENTURIES.

Second Century. The age of inspiration and infallible teaching ended—The ten great persecutions—Letters of Pliny and Trajan—Pliny’s testimony to the excellent character of the Christians—The infidel Celsus a prototype of the infidels of the nineteenth century—The Pagans persecuted Christians because the latter, maintaining the exclusive truth of their own religion, would not worship the Pagan idols—Primitive Baptists of today are exactly like the Christians of the second century in non‑fellowshipping the worshipers of idols—Establishment of the first Theological Seminary, at Alexandria, Egypt, A.D. 180—Its gross corruption of Christian doctrine—Neo-Platonism—Gnosticism—Origen—Plotinus—Tertullian—Montanists—Church at Pella—Ebionites or Nazarenes—Christians persecuted as atheists, and as the causes of public calamities—Ignatius—Irenaeus—Condition and manners of the Christians of the second century—Gibbon’s testimony—No infant baptism—The churches were Baptist. Third Century. Rapid growth of errors in faith and practice—Persecution of faithful Christians—Episcopal aggrandizement—Birth of Roman Catholicism—Sabellianism—Manichaeism—Porphyry historical record of an infant baptism in the first three centuries. Fourth Century. The tenth, last and greatest persecution of Christians by Pagan Rome, under Diocletian and Galerius—Accession of Constantine—His nominal “conversion” to Christianity—He patronizes Catholics, and persecutes Donatists and others—The Arian controversy—Council of Nicaea—The seven so-called Ecumenical Councils—Constantine unites “Church” and State—He inaugurates the corrupting and unscriptural practice of paying regular salaries to ministers, thus making them hirelings—Controversial bitterness—Unfathomable depths of the Godhead—Enormities of Roman Catholicism—Baptism of unconverted youths—Tertullian, Novatian, and their followers—The Donatists—Julian the apostate—The Circumcelliones—Constantine establishes Sunday as a partial day of rest—With the people of God during the first three centuries, all times and places sacred—Origin of the Catholic “Forms of Prayer,” pictures in houses of worship, clerical celibacy, and funeral sermons—Council of Constantinople—The first legal shedding of blood for “heresy”—Increasing corruption with the increasing profession, without the possession, of Christianity.

CHAPTER XII. FIFTH AND SIXTH CENTURIES.

Fifth Century. Characteristics—Increasing idolatry and corruption—Barbarian invasions—Professing civilized “Christians” more corrupt than barbarian heathens—Increase of formalism—“Pillar saints”—Worship of the elements of the communion, “saints,” and relics—The Augustinian, Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian controversies in regard to sin and grace—Arminianism—Consistency, scripturalness, and the admirable moral results of the Pauline or Augustinian or Calvinistic doctrine of salvation by grace alone—Life a clear, indivisible, Divine gift, totally distinct from death—Spiritual life is eternal life—Christ Himself is the Life of His people—God’s Spirit works in His children all their holy willing and doing, all their repentance, faith, lone and obedience—He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life—Science Illustrates and confirms this doctrine—Augustine’s sacramentalism and persecution of the Donatists—The imperfection of human knowledge—Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon—Nestorianism—Eutychianism—Foundation of the Greek Catholic oligarchy and of the Roman Catholic monarchy—John Chrysostom—Jerome—The British and Irish churches—“Christmas” established. Sixth Century. Characteristics—Increasing superstition, idolatry and corruption—Pretended conversion of northern barbarians—Monophysite controversies—Fifth General Council, at Constantinople—Justinian—His conquests, laws and buildings—He requires all infants to be baptized, and persecutes “heretics” and Pagans—The people of God flee to deserts and mountains, especially in northern Italy, southern France and northern Spain—The titles “Pope,” “Universal Bishop” and “Sovereign Pontiff”—Gregory I. sends “missionaries” to convert England—Corrupting compromises—Yule and Easter—Papal Rome imitates imperial Rome—The Welsh Christians refuse alliance with Rome—The so-called Culdees essentially Roman Catholics Benedictines—The birth of Christ made a chronological epoch.

CHAPTER XIII. SEVENTH, EIGHTH, NINTH, TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES.

Characteristics of the Middle or Dark Ages: Traditionalism, superstition, salvation by works, vice and crime. Seventh Century. Thousands of Welsh Christians slain by heathen Saxons instigated by Roman Catholics—The Church of England, the daughter of the Church of Rome, founded by Theodore, the Popish Archbishop of Canterbury—The Monothelitic controversy—The Sixth General Council, at Constantinople—The Quinisextan Council of Constantinople the perpetual apple of discord between the Greek and Roman Catholic communions—Roman Catholic persecution of the Jews in Spain—Rise, progress and character of Mohammedanism—The Paulicians, and the Catholic persecutions of them. Eighth Century. Repulse of Mohammedans by Charles Martel—Foundation of the temporal power of the Pope of Rome—Severance of Roman and Greek Catholic communions—Charlemagne Baptism or death offered to the barbarians—Boniface, the Roman Catholic “Apostle” of Germany—Ecclesiastical alliance of Rome, France, Germany and England—Iconoclastic controversy—John of Damascus—Corrupt Catholic doctrines and practices. Ninth Century. Increase of ignorance, idolatry, superstition and corruption—Continuance of nominal conversion, or civilization, of barbarians—Division of the empire of Charlemagne—The Forged Papal Decrees, the foundation of Papal supremacy over the national “churches”—The Papal Pornocracy—Increase of monasticism, priestly celibacy and corruption—Final establishment of image-worship among the Greek Catholics—Increase of relic-worship—Transubstantiation—The Northmen—Great persecution of the Paulicians by the Greek Catholics—Gottschalk’s doctrine of double predestination—John Scotus Erigena—Claudius of Turin advocates a pure spiritual Christianity, and was probably the forerunner of the Waldenses. Tenth Century. Midnight of the Dark Ages—Politics, religion and morals all adrift—Ignorance, vice and crime almost universal throughout “Christendom,” while Arabic literature flourished in Mohammedan Spain—The so‑called “Holy Roman Empire” revived—Continuance of the Roman Catholic “conversion” of barbarians—Great wealth and corruption of the “clergy”—The first Roman Catholic “baptism of a bell” and “canonization of a saint”—Multiplication of false relics—Increased dependence on works and increased corruption—End of the world expected A.D. 1000—Almost universal consternation and demoralization—The Paulicians spread over Europe. Eleventh Century. But little light visible in the thick darkness—Building of castles and Gothic cathedrals—Anselm—The Scholastic Theology—Berengar of Tours—Transubstantiation and consubstantiation—Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas—Final rupture of Roman and Greek Catholic communions—Popes Sylvester II., Nicholas II. and Gregory VII.—The latter enforces priestly celibacy, and inaugurates the Controversy of Investitures—He humiliates the German Emperor, Henry IV., at Canossa—The great era of Papal Rome, 1050-1299 A.D.—Ubiquitous and tremendous dominion of Roman Catholicism—Religious Orders, Purgatory, Abbeys, Cathedrals, Universities, Confessional, Inquisition, Excommunication and Interdict—The Crusades—The Cathari.

CHAPTER XIV. TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES.

Twelfth Century. Increase of Roman Catholic wealth: superstition, corruption, and “conversions” by fire and sword—Second and Third Crusades—The doctrine of the “Immaculate Conception” of Mary—The seven Roman Catholic “Sacraments”—Bishops only Vicars of the Pope—Tithes—Withholding cup from the “laity”—Supremacy of tradition—Thomas A. Beckett—First persecution, in England, for “heresy”—The Anti-sacerdotalists—Petrobrusians, Henricians, Arnoldists, Albigenses and Waldenses were predecessors of the Baptists. Thirteenth Century. Culmination of Papal power, pretension. and Theology—Fourth Crusade—Latin conquest and loss of Constantinople—Children’s Crusade—Filth, Sixth and Seventh Crusades—Roman Catholic Crusades against the Moors in Spain, and against Prussia and the Albigenses—Franciscans and Dominicans, Roman Catholic “missionaries”—Hundreds of religious institutions founded by Roman Catholicism—The Inquisition—Works of supererogation—Sale of indulgences to sin— “Laymen” prohibited from possessing or reading the Bible, and from discussing doctrine—Penance by flagellation—Magna Charta—House of Commons—Pragmatic sanction—Gallican liberties—Unprecedented pretension and fall of Pope Boniface VIII.—The Pantheistic “Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit”—Bible Baptists are Pauline Antinomians—The Waldenses.

CHAPTER XV. FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES.

Fourteenth Century. The “Babylonish Captivity” of the Papacy—Profligacy and extortion of the Popes—John XXII.—The Fratricelli-Knight Templars—The great Western Schism; the head of Antichrist cloven in twain—Sale of “church” offices, and of pardons for sins—Multiplication of “Jubilees”—All the commandments condensed into one “Give Gold”—Rienzi—Revival of Pagan literature and profligacy—The Black Death—Roman Catholic persecution of Jews—The Poles compelled to submit to baptism—The first Roman Catholic legalization of sprinkling or pouring for baptism—The Lollards—Milicz, Conrad and Matthias—Thomas Bradwardine, the highest of supralapsarian predestinarians—John Wycliffe, “the Morning Star of the Reformation”—First translation of the entire Scriptures into English. Fifteenth Century. Greatest corruption in doctrine and practice—Providential preparation for the Protestant Reformation—The General Councils of Pisa, Constance and Basel—John XXIII., “the Incarnate Devil”—Martin V.—Eugenius IV.—Felix V.—The three councils showed the necessity of the reformation, or rather regeneration, of Roman Catholicism, but they utterly failed to effect such renovation—Nicholas V. designs the “Vatican” and “St. Peter’s”—The Humanists—Pagan Popes—Sixtus IV.—Innocent VIII.—Alexander VI., the wickedest of all the Popes—Caesar Borgia—Machiavelli—Rome the centre of the rottenness of the world—First English statute for burning “heretics,” remaining in force 276 years—William Sautre the first person burned—John Badby the second person burned—Death the penalty for reading the scriptures in the mother tongue—Persecution of the Lollards, or Wycliffites—They flee into other countries—Secret worship—Execution of Sir John Oldcastle—Burning of Hus and Jerome of Prague—Roman Catholic crusade against the Bohemians—Resistance of the latter—Calixtines and Taborites—The Bohemian Brethren—Feudal and priestly oppression of the poor—Dreadful persecution of the Waldenses by the Roman Catholics—Savonarola—The Spanish Inquisition—Persecution of the Jews, Moors and Morescoes in Spain—Invention of printing—Discovery of America and of a marine route to India—Mosheim’s, and Ypeig and Dermont’s testimonies to the antiquity and scripturalness of the Baptists—The long night of the Dark Ages drawing to a close.

CHAPTER XVI. SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

The sixteenth century; next to the first century, the richest and deepest in church history—The century of the early stormy morning—Building of “St. Peters” by the sale of indulgences to sin—Augustinianism of all genuine and successful church reformation—Martin Luther’s trumpet-blast of the sovereignty of Divine grace, and justification by faith alone—Counter-blast of Rome—Reformed Inquisition—Jesuits—Council of Trent—Protestant and Catholic persecutions of “Ana”-Baptists—Excesses at Munster—Popes Julius II. and Leo X.—Cost of “St. Peter’s”—Tetzel—A price for every sin, past or future—Life of Luther—His Pauline experience—His ninety-five Theses—Protestant Reformation begun—Contest between the Pope and Luther—Diet of Worms—Luther under the ban of the Empire—Ten generations involved in revolution—Luther at the Wartburg—Translates the New Testament into German, and afterward the Old Testament—During the first period of his Christian life he came near being a Baptist, but gradually inclined to sacramentalism—Recalled to Wittenberg by the excesses of some reformers—The Peasants’ war—Luther’s wrong course—Thomas Munzer—The “Ana”-Baptists not responsible for the Peasants’ war—Luther marries a former nun—His controversy with Erasmus on the Freedom of the Will—President Edwards on the Will—Luther’s errors and death—Long religious wars between Roman Catholics and Protestants—Philip Melanchthon—Three great principles of the Protestant Reformation—Charles V.—Formula of Concord—Ulrich Zw1ugli—His controversy with Luther at Marburg—John Ecolampadius—Henry Bullinger—Oswald Myconius—William Farel—John Calvin, the ablest theologian of the Reformation—His conversion, and “Institutes of the Christian Religion”—His invention of the Presbyterian Church polity—His grossly antichristian severity—Servetus—Bolsec—Calvin’s sincerity, unworldliness and death—His Hebrew spirit—His doctrine of Predestination—The Reformation an Augustinian reaction from Romanist Semi-Pelagianism and idolatry—Calvin recast Augustinianism in its Protestant form—God’s permissive decree of sin—Supralapsarianism never incorporated in any church Confession of Faith—Predestinarianism in accordance with the stern facts: the two-edged sword of Divine Justice—The sharp point being the Eternal Decree, and the two keen edges, Free Grace and Salvation by Faith—Unequalled moral effects of this doctrine—Calvin’s errors—Beza—The Satanic and unrivalled antichristianity of Roman Catholicism—Intolerance of Protestants—Birth of the Lutheran, Episcopalian and Presbyterian “Churches”—Macaulay on “Apostolical Succession”—Henry VIII.—Edward VI.—The thirty-nine Articles—Bloody Mary—Elizabeth—Spanish Armada—Wealth of the “Church of England”—The “Ana”-Baptists and Mennonites—Munzer, Hoffman, Matthiesen and Bockhold—Munster—The true Baptists—Their poverty, peacefulness, ministry and persecutions—Hubmaier—Menno Simons—Earliest Baptist Confessions of Faith—The persecuting Protestants were Predestinarians, while the persecuted Baptists of this century were Arminians, but the latter strenuously maintained the spirituality of the church—The principles and practices of the Bohemians and Waldenses corrupted by the Protestants.

CHAPTER XVII. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Continued storm and persecution—The Thirty Years’ War in Germany—The Puritan Revolution in England—Cromwell—Stuarts restored—Revolution of 1688—Religions toleration—Turks repulsed—Secularization of politics—Expulsion of Huguenots from France—The King James version of the Bible—Independents, Baptists and Friends—Westminster Confession of Faith—Expulsion of Jesuits from Japan—The pretended “conversions” of heathen in the East Indies by the Dutch—John Eliot—“Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England”—“Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge”—Rapid growth of Arminianism—Rise of modern philosophy, latitudinarianism, rationalism and pantheism—James Arminius—Original Arminian creed—Many Arminians became Pelagians and Arians—Characteristics of modern philosophy—Blaise Pascal—Milton, Newton, Locks, Grotius and Leibnitz—Truth mutilated between Christ’s first and second comings—Synod of Dort—Persecution of Arminians—The Jesuits—The first Missionary Board (the “Propaganda”) established by Pope Gregory XV. in 1622—The first Missionary College established by Pope Urban VIII. in 1627—Roman Catholic persecutions of Protestants and Waldenses—The “Church of England” the servile and efficient agent of tyranny—The Independents—Pilgrim fathers—Puritans—The “Church of England” in the American colonies—Persecutions of Scotch Covenanters, Quakers and Baptists—The last man burned in England for his religion, Edward Wightman, a Baptist—Imprisonment substituted for burning—Act of Uniformity—Conventicle Act—Five-Mile Act—Second Conventicle Act—Severe persecution of Dissenters in England, and in Massachusetts and Virginian—Baptist Churches, principles, practices and ministers—Laying of hands on all baptized believers—Roger Williams—Feet-Washing—John Bunyan—William Kiffin—Judge Jeffries—Benjamin Leach—Hanserd Knollys.

CHAPTER XVIII. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Lurid calm followed by rationalistic storm—Arianism, Pelagianism, philosophism, materialism and atheism—Moral chaos—Voltaire—Bolingbroke—Frederic the Great—Deism—Rationalism—French Revolution—Immanuel Kant—Writings of Butler, Lardner, Paley and Watson—Dead formalism—Moral essays for sermons—Suppression of Jesuits—General religious toleration, with occasional persecution of Dissenters—“Hyper‑Calvinism”—Andrew Fuller’s “Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation”—Pietism—Moravianism—Methodism—Swedenborgianism—Shakers—Sandemanians—Modern Protestant Missions—The Missionary Societies of Protestantism a substitute for the Religious Orders of Roman Catholicism—Sunday Schools—Extermination of Jesuits in China—The German Rationalists, Ernesti, Michaelis and Semler—Anglicanism in England and America—Romaine—Toplady—John Newton—Cowper—Milner‑Richard and Rowland Hill—Thomas Scott—My own first hope in Christ—Speculative and practical Antinomians—Apostolic proportion of doctrinal preaching—John Wesley—Charles Wesley—Congregationalists—Isaac Watts—Philip Doddridge—Matthew Henry—Presbyterians—Jonathan Edwards—George Whitefield—Wide-spread predestinarian revival in America—Three-fourths of the American churches predestinarian in 1776—Another predestinarian revival—Peculiarities of American Church History—The American Baptist Churches—Welsh Tract Church—Hopewell—Kingwood—Kehukee—Southampton—Bryan’s—Elders Ambrose and Thomas P. Dudley—Primitive Baptist Associations—Two causes of Baptist success: a spiritual membership and a spiritual ministry—The Bible their sole authority—The doctrinal belief of the Philadelphia Association—The Trinity Freeness of God’s grace—The fall of man—God not the author or approver of sin—Effectual calling—Condemnation of the doctrine of universal atonement, and of the use of distilled liquors as a beverage—Difference between legal and gospel repentance—Warning against the new system of divinity—Condemnation of Universalism—Final perseverance of the saints—Difference between the law and the gospel—The Lord’s Day—Modern Protestant Missions admitted to have been derived from Papal Rome—Gill’s Commentary on the Bible recommended by the Philadelphia Association in 1807—The qualifications of a gospel minister—Reading sermons not preaching—Apostolical character of the first propagation of the gospel in America—Persecutions of Baptists and Quakers in Virginia and Massachusetts—God’s methods of spreading His gospel exactly the same in the eighteenth century as in the first century, and why not the same in the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER XIX. NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Day advancing, but abounding ungodliness and impending judgments—Almost universal skepticism—Man his own god—A spiritual worship of the true God stigmatized as behind the times—Faith and reverence needed—The most composite and heterogeneous of all the centuries—Political, social, industrial, scientific, moral and religious features—Effects of alcohol—Blasphemous culmination of Roman Catholicism—Some of God’s people even yet in Rome—Sunday Schools—Protracted meetings—Theological Seminaries—Hireling shepherds—All the commandments, as in the Dark Ages, reduced to one, “Give Gold”—Assyriology and Egyptology—Lutheran and Anglican “churches”—Religious unions and societies—Home and Foreign “Missions”—Growing infidelity—A very small remnant according to the election of grace—More than fifty “isms”—Midnight storm of atheistic materialism—Internationalism—The gospel of Christ the only remedy—The Laodicean age—The three downward steps of Modern Advanced Thought—Old Catholics—Reformed Episcopalians—Scottish “Free Church”—Old and New School Presbyterians—Northern and Southern Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists—Old and New School Baptists—Unitarians—Universalists—Literal as well as spiritual truth of Scripture—Tennyson—Pantheism and atheism—Schleiermacher—Atheistic Agnosticism—Strauss—Renan—J.S. Mill—Carlyle—Herbert Spencer—“Church of England”—Five minute sermons—Tractarianism—Ritualism—Broad-churchism—Privy Council—Evangelical Alliance—Unionistic spirit—Almost universal Arminianism—The piping times of peace—Juvenile discipleship—“Church” entertainments—The Mixed Multitude—The “Church” courting the World—Departure from primitive purity of doctrine and practice—“Modern Christianity a Civilized Heathenism”—Mediaeval architecture—Catholic and Protestant Missions—Self-supporting, industrial and medical Missions—China Inland Mission—Ministers with whom preaching is a money-making business exert but little influence for good upon the heathen—The advocates of modern Missions contribute, on an average, but three cents apiece per year to save a thousand million perishing heathen souls—The peculiar spiritual blessings of the Anglo-Saxon race—“Christian Connection”—“Disciples of Christ”—Plymouth Brethren—Winebrennerians—Mormons—Second Adventists—Irvingites—Modern moneyed Missions—Spiritualists—Modern socialism—Wm. Huntington—Robert Hall—Richard Watson—English Evangelicals—John Newton—Richard Cecil—Thomas Scott—Comparative conservatism of Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists—230 new translations of the Bible—Anglo-American Revision—King James’s Version—Geneva Bible—Recent changes in original text, conjectural, premature, and the most of them unnecessary, inexpedient and worthless—English Strict Baptists—Wm. Gadsby—J.C. Philpot—The Old School or Primitive Baptists in the United States—John Leland—Wilson Thompson—Two-Seedism—Charge of Arianism—Charge of lack of benevolence—Quality of membership more important than quantity—Age of works and Missions and infidelity—Religious statistics of the world—Number of Bibles in the world—Progress of morality—Increase of crime and of religious profession in the United States since 1850—Divinity and omnipotence of Christ—His gospel the power of God unto salvation—Indispensable need of the Holy Ghost—Science a child: Revelation the perfect man—Corrupting idolatry of money—Need of the grand old Calvinistic truths of the Reformation—Scriptural predestination and election—God’s permission, foreknowledge and overruling of sin—Unworldliness and unselfishness of true religion—Apostolic faith and practice of Old School or Primitive Baptists—“Rock of Ages”.

CHAPTER XX. KEHUKEE ASSOCIATION FROM 1765 TO 1802.

Adherence to the faith once delivered to the saints—Black-Rockism and Kehukeeism—Object of the present History to show who are the true Primitive Baptists—The four oldest Baptist Associations in America—The seven churches first composing the Kehukee Association—At first General and then Particular Baptists—Paul Palmer—Elders Vanhorn and Miller—The Bible the only infallible standard of faith and practice—The old London Confession of Faith, of 1689—Church Covenant and Rules of Decorum—Early ministers—Regular and Separate Baptists—United Baptists—Ten churches; 1,581 members—Articles of Faith adopted in 1777, and still maintained—Two sessions per year—No session in 1780 and 1781, on account of the Revolutionary War—Rules of Decorum for the Association—The Association only a collection of churches, and an advisory council, having no power to govern the churches—The church the highest ecclesiastical power on earth—Associations convenient methods of brotherly correspondence and intercourse—The Bible the Baptist Confession of Faith—Creeds convenient summaries to explain views to others—Why Bible Baptists believe and love their Articles of Faith—Queries received and answered—Four annual “General Conferences”—Four annual “Occasional Associations”—Elder John Leland present in 1785—Petition against an alliance of Church and State—Qualifications, license and ordination of a gospel, minister—Certificate of ordination—Frequenting Masonic Lodges, disorder—Two sessions per year—Not contributing to the support of the ministry, covetousness—Elder Isaac Backus present in 1789—Union between Regulars and Separates completed—Constitution of the Kehukee Association—Minutes first printed in 1789; 61 churches, 3,344 members—First Circular Letter written in 1790—Itinerant preaching—Virginia Portsmouth Association set off in 1790; Neuse Association, in 1793—Monthly prayer-meetings for a revival of religion—Plans for itinerant preaching abandoned—Extensive revivals of religion in 1801-3—Zeal not according to knowledge—Union Meetings—Their object and constitution.

CHAPTER XXI. KEHUKEE ASSOCIATION FROM 1803 TO 1833.

1,200 Baptist Churches in the United States, with more than 100,000 members—The Query on Missions, submitted by Elder Martin Ross, the source of divisions and animosities from 1803 to 1827—Committee appointed—The new Missionary scheme partially and feebly adopted—Missionary Convention at Cashie M.H.—Chowan Association set off in 1805—Relations of the Virginia Portsmouth, the Neuse and the Chowan Associations to the Kehukee—“Meeting of General Correspondence,” in 1811—Constitution of said “Meeting” disapproved by the Kehukee Association—Changes proposed—Report of the Philadelphia Board of Baptist Foreign Missions received in 1815—No more funds to be sent by the Kehukee Association to the “General Meeting”—Delegates to said “Meeting” discontinued in 1816—Baptist Board of Foreign Missions born in 1814—Circular Address of the Baptist “General Convention”—Second rebuke to members visiting Masonic Lodges—Declaration of the Reformed Baptist Churches of N.C., in 1826—Remarkable session of 1827—Unanimous and cordial rejection of all money-based religious institutions—Black Rock—Country Line Association—Elder Joshua Lawrence—Departure of New School Baptists from apostolic doctrine and practice—Decision of 1827 reaffirmed in 1828 and 1829—Elder C. B. Hassell—Correspondence discontinued with the Neuse and Chowan and taken up with the Little River and Nauhunty Associations—Elder Joseph Biggs appointed to write the continuation of the Kehukee History from 1803—Tar River Association.

CHAPTER XXII. MODERN RELIGIOUS INVENTIONS.

Causes of the division among the Baptists in the nineteenth century—False doctrine led to false practices—Confidence lost in God and placed on man—Phariseeism and persecution—Portsmouth, Chowan. Neuse and Tar River Associations—Sharp contention—Recent attempts of the New School to prove themselves Old School Baptists—New Pseudo-Religious Institutions have divided the Baptists—Arminianism of Missionary Baptists—Fusion with other societies and the world—Modern Missionism not conceived in North Carolina till 1803—So-called “Missionaries” in disorder, and excluded from the fellowship of the true church—David Benedict’s “Fifty Years Among the Baptists”—His unimpeachable testimony to the novelty of the entire Missionary machinery among Baptists—Almost incredible changes, he says, among the Baptists in his day—Springing up of Mission, Mite, Tract and Bible Societies, Sunday Schools, Theological Colleges, Written Sermons, Delicate and Salaried Ministers, Excited Meetings, Efforts for Large Numerical Gains in Membership, and Frequent Changes of Ministers—No money-collecting agents in the whole Baptist field fifty years ago, says Benedict in 1860—A broad distinction then between the church and the world—Baptists did not go to law with one another—They were familiar with the. Scriptures—Pews free—Associations the only large meetings—No money-hunting agents at Associations—Non-intercourse with Pedobaptist—An uneducated ministry—Conversion of Adoniran Judson and Luther Rice to Baptist sentiments—“Baptist Triennial Convention”—“Primitive” as far back as 1814—Missionary dissensions, avarice and ambition—Fullerite Arminianism—The old Baptist divines strong Calvinists—Charges of fatalism on the one hand, and of salvation by works on the other—Fullerite changes in style of preaching—Lowering of the standard of orthodoxy—Ministerial manners and eloquence more regarded now than doctrine—Contrast of the Old-Fashioned and the New—Fashioned Baptists, as described by David Benedict—The terms “Brother” and “Sister” formerly much used among Baptists—Ministers were called “Elders”—So-called “revivals” few and far between—New measures of recent times—Rising for prayers—Protracted meetings—Popular revival ministers—Converts by wholesale—Great changes in Associations—Money qualification for membership in Missionary Conventions—Formerly Baptists contended for a God-called and God-qualified ministry—Recent and secular origin of Sunday Schools, since made an engine of priestcraft—Adoniram Judson’s “Golden Calf”.

CHAPTER XXIII. KEHUKEE ASSOCIATION FROM 1834 TO 1885.

A resolution in 1840 not to countenance “Missionary” preachers—Almost a famine from storms in eastern N.C. in 1842, but the Association well accommodated—Elder James Osbourn, of Baltimore, being solicited, issues a Hymn Book—Elder Joshua Lawrence—Elder Joseph Biggs—Circular Letter on Ministerial Support—Last Circular Letter, by appointment, written in 1846—The “Primitive Baptist” periodical—Petition, Memorial and Remonstrance to the Legislature of N.C. and to the Congress of the U.S. against the incorporation of Religious Societies, and against paid chaplaincies in the Army and Navy and Congress—Elder Wilson Thompson’s Address to the Regular Baptists in the U.S., appended to the Minutes of 1850—Elder W. Thompson visits the Association in 1852—Voluntary Circular Letter of Elder R. D. Hart in 1854—Elder Thomas Biggs—Elder C. B. Hassell first chosen Moderator in 1857—Elder John Stadler—The question of continuing the Kehukee History brought up in 1860, and referred to the churches—The war between the States—Primitive Baptists not at all divided by the war—Elder William Hyman—Elder R C. Leachman—Centennial Meeting of Kehukee Association in 1865—The church of Christ not divided—In 1872 a standing committee appointed to arrange for preaching—In 1873 from 10,000 to 13,000 persons estimated to be present at Cross Roads—The resumption of the Kehukee History again considered in 1875—In 1876 Elder C. B. Hassell appointed to write the ancient history of the church, and bring down the Kehukee History to date; the book to contain some 600 pages, and to cost not more than $2—Subscription papers ordered to be distributed—Elder John Stamper—Great labor in writing a conscientious history of thousands of years—Elder S. Hassell appointed in 1880 to complete the History—The Association instruct Elder S. Hassell in 1881 to call upon such subscribers as were willing to prepay the price of the book to secure its publication—Elders C.B. Hassell. J.W. Purvis, C.T. Crank and Gilbert Beebe—Elder Clayton Moors—The 120th Annual Session of the Kehukee Association in 1885 at Beargrass—Isaiah 1:9 the subject of the Introductory Sermon—The History to be printed, Providence permitting, in 1886—Separate Associations for White and Colored churches—41 churches, 1,891 members, 32 Elders and 4 Licentiates—Elders R. H. Harriss and R. Tucker.

CHAPTER XXIV. QUERIES.

1. Presbyterian baptism—2. Difference in judgment about water-baptism—3. Suspicion of fault in a member—4. Proofs of true ministry—5. Marriage of servants—6 Breaking marriage of servants—7. Worldly evidence against a member—8. Feet‑Washing—9. Causes of a civil nature—10. Suspension from communion—11. Publication of excommunication—12. Support of the ministry—13. Rending one’s self from the church—14. Voluntary absence from communion—15. Christian marriages—16. Attendance of servants on family worship—17. Restoration of Deacon to office—18. Trial of gifts—19. Receiving members excluded from other churches at a distance—20. Essentials of communion—21. Right of pastor to dismission—22. Unanimity in call to pastorate—23. Right of women to speak in conference—24. Administration of Lord’s Supper to one person alone—25. Frequenting Masonic Lodges—26. Corroboration of worldly evidence—27. A Presbytery—28. Covetousness in neglecting the support of the ministry—29. Work of the Deacon—30. Right of pastorless churches to receive and exclude members—31. “Christening” children—32. Respective duties of ministers and churches—33. Testimony of but one witness against a member—34. Family worship—35. Ordination of Deacons—36. Missions—37. The bringing up of children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord—38. Arminianism—39. Letters. without delegates, to the Association—40. Publishing the religious appointments of other denominations—41 Attending the preaching of excluded persons—42. Letters of dismission—43. Course in regard to unedifying ministers—44. Members not in fellowship—45. Race-paths and five batteries—46. Withdrawal from a church—47. Inviting ministers of other denominations to occupy our pulpits—48. Administration of Lord’s Supper by one not an ordained minister—49. Reception of members by a church having no male members—50. Receiving a member on an experience written by a “Missionary”.

CHAPTER XXV. A CHURCH—EDUCATION—ITINERANCY—ROMANIZING OF PROTESTANTS—SOCIETIES—SUNDAY SCHOOLS—PERSECUTION—FEET-WASHING.

Essentials of a church—Reception of members—Number of members—Meetings for business and worship—Articles of faith—Education—Theological Schools—Itinerancy, scriptural and unscriptural—Abominations of some “Modern Missions”—Reversal of the gospel rule—Making a trade of religion—Ministerial aggrandizement—Mystery Babylon and her daughters—Secret Societies—Moral Reform Societies— “Sabbath” Schools—Persecution—Feet-Washing among Primitive Baptists.

CHAPTER XXVI. CHURCHES COMPOSING THE KEHUKEE ASSOCIATION.

Beargrass—Bethlehem, in Tyrrell Co.—Bethlehem, Pasquotank Co.—Beaverdam—Briery Swamp (Grindell Creek)—Castalia—Conoho—Conetoe—Concord—Coinjock—Cross Roads—Daniel’s—Deep Creek—Elim—Falls of Tar River—Flat Swamp—Flatty Creek—Great Swamp—Hickory Rock—Hopeland—Jamesville (Picot)—Kehukee—Lawrence’s—Lebanon—Morattock—North Creek—Peach Tree—Providence—Pungo—Rocky Swamp—Sandy Grove—Sappony—Skewarkey—South Mattamuskeet—South Quay—Sparta—Smithwick’s Creek—Spring Green—Tarborough—White Plains—William’s.

CHAPTER XXVII. PREDESTINARIAN BAPTISTS OF CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES.

Covenanted Baptists of Canada—Primitive Baptists in the United States—Alabama—Arkansas—California—Delaware—Florida—Georgia—Illinois—Indiana—Iowa—Kansas—Kentucky—Louisiana—Maine—Massachusetts—Maryland—Mississippi—Missouri—New Jersey—New York—North Carolina—Ohio—Oregon—Pennsylvania—South Carolina—Tennessee—Texas—Virginia—West Virginia—Wisconsin.

APPENDIX.

Life of Elder C. B. Hassell—Autobiography of Elder Gilbert Beebe—Elder G. Beebe’s Editorial on “Ecclesiastical History and Church Creeds”—Absolute Predestination of All Things—The Celestial Railroad.

Introduction.

The Bible is of incomparably more value than all the literature of the world. Composed of sixty-six books, which are not literally, but spiritually united, written in all the forms of literary composition, during a period of at least sixteen centuries, by about forty inspired authors, in all the ranks of society, from the highest to the lowest, in Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Babylon, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, indited in three languages, Hebrew, Chaldee and Greek, and translated into about three hundred languages, it unfolds the history of the world and of the church from the beginning to the end of time, contains “the spiritual biography of every human heart,” authoritatively declares the character of God and of His salvation, and portrays the opposite conditions of the two divisions of the human race in eternity. It is of equal interest and profit “to king and beggar, to philosopher and child.”

During the eighteen centuries that have elapsed since the close of the Scripture canon, not a single statement of the written word of God has been disproved by any human discovery. All the attempts of scoffers and critics and historians and scientists and philosophers to throw discredit upon the inspired volume have only rebounded upon themselves, and illustrated the impiety, virulence, ignorance, shallowness, and conceitedness of their authors. Next after the assaults of the first three centuries upon the Christian Church, the most vigorous, learned, and persistent efforts to undermine the religion of the Bible have been made by some votaries of (1) Criticism, (2) Science, and (3) Philosophy during the last hundred years. Led on by the enmity of the unrenewed and unspiritual mind against God, and by the strategy of the prince of the power of the air, these assailants of divine revelation have left the solid ground-work of facts, and pretentiously soared into the aerial regions of speculation and conjecture, and, by the ordination of the Most High, they have become so bereft of that common sense or reason which they idolize, as to suppose themselves able by their unsubstantial gossamer theories to overturn the everlasting foundations of the Zion of our God. Eliminate the guess-work from their baseless fabrics, and all their splendid structures are at once reduced to airy nothingness. “The path of every possible hostile theory has been pursued to its utmost limit and has returned upon itself.” The conjectures have been changed as often as the seasons, and are either admitted to be mere assumptions, or have been abandoned by their authors or their successors. Along all the lines of intellectual skepticism a disastrous retreat is sounding. As in ancient times, so now, a few men raised by God to occupy the very highest eminences of human thought have become valiant champions for the truth of the Scriptures, and are gifted with wisdom to rout the armies of the aliens. We know, however, from the Scriptures, that these broken hosts will be rallied by the arch-enemy again, but that their final overthrow by the power of God will be signal and complete.

1. Criticism.—“Niebuhr, the founder of modern historical criticism, recognized the atheistic unbelief of his day as a species of demoniacal frenzy.”

As the evening precedes the morning in each of the six creative days, so the Old Testament, the evening dispensation of the world, preceded the New Testament, the morning dispensation. Malachi, the last Old Testament prophet, expressly predicts, in his last chapter, the rising of the Sun of Righteousness with healing in his wings. Four hundred years afterwards that blessed and glorious Sun did arise in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Son of God, and usher in the heavenly morning of the Gospel Day. Let it never be forgotten, however, that the Old Testament was the first or evening dispensation—shadowy, rudimentary, introductory, insufficient, imperfect, external, local, formal, temporal, typical and prophetic, though, with interruptions, continually rising in inwardness and spirituality, the feeble light of God’s revelation gradually increasing from the protevangelium in Eden to the perfect day. In the dim light of the old economy, men could not see clearly—“it was difficult to discriminate between evil persons and evil principles—there was much prevalence of personal revenge, a kind of wild justice less evil than torpidity of conscience—prudential motives and temporal rewards were prominent—the dispensation was, not wholly, but predominantly a system of law and justice, and achieved its triumph in demonstrating (as God had designed) its own failure, and in thus preparing the way for a better, a higher, a brighter, a perfect and a final dispensation.” Under the inscrutable ordination of the Most High, the nocturnal heavens of the ancient heathen world were enshrouded in black and heavy clouds—the obscure rays of nature and providence, to their sin-blinded, proud, foolish, and idolatrous minds (Rom. 1:20-32) became almost totally eclipsed—and pandemonium reigned throughout Gentile civilization. But, in the land of God’s chosen people, under divine ordination, the clouds were more or less rolled away, and the moon and stars appeared and poured down their heavenly light; the types and prophecies fragmentarily yet multifariously declared to spiritual Israel the nature of God and His salvation, and the old patriarchs and elders walked haltingly, yet trustingly, with God, feeling themselves to be strangers and pilgrims on earth, and looking for a better, even a heavenly country. Gradually the ceremonial law was distinguished from and subordinated to the moral law; mere formalism in religion was denounced in the most scathing terms; the necessity of a hearty spiritual worship of God was tremendously emphasized; and the poor, humble and needy soul was directed to the Holy One of Israel as the Lord his Righteousness, his Redeemer, his Strength, and his Salvation, who was to be manifested in human flesh, and smitten by the sword of divine justice for the transgressions of His covenant people, make an end of their sins, make reconciliation for their iniquities, and bring in for them an everlasting righteousness, and then to re-ascend, as the King of glory, to His eternal throne; and, in unchanging faithfulness, as time rolled on, to gather around Him all the jewels of His mercy in that blessed land whose walls are salvation and whose gates are praise; where the Lord shall be their everlasting light, and the days of their mourning shall be ended. “The unrivaled loftiness, authority, directness, and pungency of the Old Testament Prophets, as well as of the New Testament Apostles, strikes the spiritual mind as a voice from within the veil.”

The religious books of the ancient Hebrews are utterly distinct in their tone and essence, their spirit and monotheism, from those of all other ancient peoples. The religions of the most cultivated ancient heathens, the Egyptians and the Greeks, degenerated into the most multitudinous and debasing polytheism, the Egyptians deifying brutes, and the Greeks making gods of such crimes as drunkenness, fraud, sensuality, and murder. The Decalogue is, on the other hand, the moral core of the Hebrew Scriptures which represent God as the High and Holy One that inhabiteth eternity. The freshly exhumed and deciphered monuments of ancient Assyria and Egypt are furnished daily corroboration of the historical truth of the Old Testament Scriptures. The original Iranian or Persian religion of dualism, teaching that there were two original, uncreated, creative spirits, one good and the other evil, approached more nearly, both in theory and in purity, to the Hebrew monotheism, but it became mixed and corrupted with Magism, or the worship of the elements. “Monotheism and expiatory sacrifice,” says Prof. George Rawlinson, of Oxford University, “were parts of the primitive religion, and except among the Hebrews, these principles were everywhere variously corrupted through the manifold and multiform deterioration of human nature in different races and places.” “All the founders of the false religions of the world,” says the Duke of Argyle in his magnificent work on the “Unity of Nature,” “were themselves nothing but Reformers; and the reforms they instituted have themselves all more or less again yielded to new developments of decay. From Brahminical Pantheism Buddhistic Atheism was an extreme revolt; but the latter has become equally idolatrous and degraded. Scholars who have begun their search into the origin of religion in the full acceptance of what may be called the savage theory of the origin of man—who, captivated by a plausible generalization, have taken it for granted that the farther we go back in time the more certainly do we find all religion assuming one or other of the gross and idolatrous forms which have been indiscriminately grouped under the designation of Fetishism—have been driven from this belief by discovering to their surprise that facts do not support the theory. They have found on the contrary, that up to the farthest limits which are reached by records which are properly historical, and far beyond those limits to the remotest distance which is attained by evidence founded on the analysis of human speech, the religious conceptions of men are seen, as we go back in time, to have been not coarser and coarser, but simpler, purer, higher—so that the very oldest conceptions of the divine Being of which we have any certain evidence are the simplest and the best of all—the very oldest Egyptian and Hindoo compositions speaking of God in the sublime language which forms the opening of the Lord’s Prayer; and it has been ascertained that, to some extent, these pure, primitive, monotheistic conceptions still survive even among the degraded and idolatrous tribes of Africa.”

Herbert Spencer, of England, the chief human god of nineteenth century infidelity, the impersonation of the most horrible blasphemy of the God of the Bible, the man who pretends to be the most earnest and successful of all seekers after truth, in his last book, entitled “Ecclesiastical Institutions,” published in 1886, wherein he professes to derive the religion of mankind from dreams and ghosts, shows an utter ignorance or a willful suppression of the fact of the primitive monotheism of the human race—a fact now thoroughly established and admitted by the ablest scholars in the world—a fact which completely undermines and annihilates the very foundation of all his false theory of the evolution of religion.

The composition of the New Testament in the first century of the Christian era inevitably implies not only the pre-existence of the Old Testament for hundreds of years before that time, but the reverent belief of Christ and His Apostles in the divine inspiration of the Old Testament. Christ is both the main substance and the chief witness and guarantor of the truth of the Old Testament Scriptures. Believers before the flood dimly beheld Him as the suffering but victorious seed of the woman. Abraham rejoicingly saw Him as his own seed in whom all the families of the earth were to be blessed. Jacob viewed Him as the descendant of his son Judah, the Shiloh, unto whom the gathering of the people should be. Moses saw Him as the Prophet whom the Lord God would raise up like unto him, from among his brethren, to whom they were to give ear. Job, in the depth of his affliction, beheld Him as his Divine Redeemer, who should stand at the latter day upon the earth. David saw Him as his own Son and the Son of God, the anointed King of Zion, yet agonizing before God, and pierced in His hands and feet by the assembly of the wicked, and going down into the dust of death, but not seeing corruption, and rising from all the humiliation of His earthly life, and passing, as the King of Glory, within the everlasting gates, and sitting down on the right hand of God, the almighty and gentle Shepherd of Israel, ruling in the midst of His enemies, making His people willing in the day of His power, making them lie down in green pastures, leading them beside the still waters, restoring their souls, leading them in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake, accompanying them all the days of their lives with His goodness and mercy, giving them the victory over every foe, even death, and making them dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Isaiah beheld Him as Immanuel, God with us, a child born, a son given, whose name was Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father and the Prince of Peace, the sure foundation-stone laid in Zion, tried and precious, and as the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, bruised for our iniquities and healing us with His stripes. Jeremiah saw Him as the Lord our Righteousness. Ezekiel beheld Him as a man and yet as the Lord, of a bright, fiery appearance, seated upon a sapphire throne, and encircled with a rainbow. Daniel saw Him as a little stone cut out of the mountain, breaking in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold of Nebuchadnezzar’s image, and as the Son of man coming with the clouds of heaven to the Ancient of days, and acquiring universal and everlasting dominion, and as Messiah the Prince, who should come to the holy city, and be cut off but not for Himself, and should make an end of sins, and bring in an everlasting righteousness, and seal up the vision and prophecy, a short time before the destruction of the city and sanctuary. Micah beheld Him as the Ruler of Israel, whose goings forth had been from everlasting, coming out of Bethlehem-Ephratah. Haggai saw Him as the Desire of all nations, coming to the second temple, and filling it with greater spiritual glory than the first temple, and in that place giving peace. Zechariah saw Him as the King of Zion, just and having salvation, lowly, and riding upon a colt the foal of an ass into Jerusalem, betrayed for thirty pieces of silver, pierced by the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but bringing them to mourn with a great and solitary mourning for Him, and opening to them a fountain for sin and for uncleanness—as the Shepherd of God, a man, and yet the equal of the Lord of hosts, smitten by the sword of God, who them turns his hand of mercy upon the little ones. And Malachi beheld Him as the Messenger of the covenant, the Lord suddenly coming to His temple, and purifying the sons of Levi as gold and silver in the furnace, that they might offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness, and as the Sun of Righteousness arising, unto all that fear His name, with healing in His wings. And Jesus always refers, in the most reverential manner, to the Hebrew Scriptures as the infallible, the literally and perfectly true testimony of God. The same books of the Old Testament that we now receive were then received by the Jews and by Christ as canonical and inspired. Christ, in His sayings recorded in the New Testament, alludes to every period of the Old Dispensation. “He speaks of the creation of man, the institution of marriage, the death of Abel, the flood in the days of Noah, the destruction of Sodom, the history of Abraham, the appearance of God in the burning bush, the manna in the wilderness, the miracle of the brazen serpent, the wanderings of David, the glory of Solomon, the ministry of Elijah and Elisha, the sign of Jonah, and the martyrdom of Zechariah—events which embrace the whole range of the Jewish record.” Whatever, therefore, may be said by self-constituted, pretentious, ungodly and ignorant critics in regard to what they presume to call the incredible myths of the Bible, the children of God may be as perfectly assured of the literal truth of every word of the Old Testament, as well as of the New Testament, as if every word had been written by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

“The Fourfold Gospel is the central portion of divine revelation. Into it, as a reservoir, all the foregoing revelations pour their full tide; and out of it, as a fountain, flow all subsequent revelations. The genuineness of the Four Gospels is attested by a mass of evidence, external and internal, altogether unparalleled and quite overpowering. No work of classical antiquity, even the most undoubted, is half so well attested, or can lay claim, one might say, to a tithe of the evidence which the Gospels possess. Every ancient writer referring to the Gospels possessed all four of them. Their genuineness and apostolic authority are attested by the evidence, in the second century, of Papias, Irenaeus, the author of the Muratorian Fragment, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen, who expressly name them; and by the evidence of the Syriac and the old Latin versions of them; and by the evidence, in the latter part of the first century and in the second century, of Clement of Rome, Barnabas, Ignatius, Polycarp, the author of the Epistle to Diognetus and Justin Martyr, who quote from or refer to them; by the Jewish Greek in which they are written, and which could have been written only in the first century; by the accurate and numerous incidental allusions which they make to the geography and topography of Palestine; the mixed political condition of the people, their manners and customs, religious principles, observances and prejudices, and the sects and parties into which they were divided; by the great number of undesigned coincidences between them; by the altogether unprecedented character of Christ, as the Divine and suffering Savior of men from sin, which they describe, and which no human mind could ever have imagined unless it had been a reality; by the fact that, outside of the Christ whom they portray, there is no harbor of refuge for the tossed and weary soul; and by their fresh and undying vigor triumphantly surviving every form of antagonism for eighteen centuries.”—David Brown, in Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Bible Commentary.

It seems certain that at least the Four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen Epistles of Paul, the first Epistle of Peter, and the first Epistle of John, were in general public use in the churches after the middle of the second century.

The fundamental hypotheses of the (German) Tubingen criticism—the most respectable and formidable critical assault ever made upon the New Testament—have entirely dissolved under later and more careful researchers, so that the members of that theological school have fled to secular fields. The composition of all the four gospels, as well as of the epistles, must be referred to the first century, to eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of the life of Christ; not Paul, but Jesus, was the author of Christianity, and there were no radically antagonistic Pauline and Petrine parties in the Apostolic Church.

In his “Beginnings of Christianity,” Prof. G. P. Fisher, of Yale College, clearly points out three unmistakable “water-marks of age” in the New Testament writings, proving that they were composed in the first century of the Christian era: 1st. The Apostles’ fleshly expectation of the speedy coming of Christ in final judgment upon the world. 2nd. The entire absence of any distinction between the terms presbyter (or elder) and bishop (or overseer)—such distinction arising early in the second century; and 3rd. The New Testament allusions to only two formidable perversions of Christianity, the Judaizing and the Gnostic, both of which developed into open heresy in the second century.

As admitted by the highest legal authorities, thoroughly trained in examining evidence, the few trifling variations (apparent but not real contradictions) of the evangelists confirm, instead of weakening, their testimony, by proving them to have been independent witnesses, between whom there was no collusion. “More formal analytical biographies could not possibly have equaled the four gospels in presenting an authentic and vivid portraiture of Christ; the authors are lost in the subject; they attempt no studied delineation of Jesus, but allow Him, in all their narratives, to stand in the foreground, and speak and act for Himself.” This is of course the very next thing to the reader’s living on earth when Christ was in the flesh, and actually hearing His words and seeing His deeds.

The latest and ablest scholars place the four gospels in the following chronological order of composition: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John; Mark and Matthew having been written before A.D. 70, Luke before A.D. 80, and John before A.D. 100. “They are plain, unadorned reports of facts in the life of Christ, impressed by a fourfold repetition; especially the great facts of the death and resurrection of Christ are rehearsed to us four times in the minuteness of circumstantial detail. The sense of reality revives within us in reading the gospels, which furnish an effectual antidote against abstraction and speculation. The gospels give us four aspects of Christ, though but one portrait; in Matthew He is, predominantly, the Royal Lawgiver; in Mark, the Mighty Worker; in Luke, the Friend of man; in John, the Son of God. Matthew, the Hebrew gospel, is the true commencement of the New Testament; it represents Jesus as the son of David, the son of Abraham, and continually refers to the fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures. Mark, Peter’s gospel, represents Jesus, as Peter said to Cornelius, as anointed with the Holy Ghost and power, going about doing good and healing all oppressed with the devil; it is the gospel of action—rapid, vigorous and vivid. Luke, Paul’s gospel, presents Jesus, not as the son of Abraham only, but as the son of Adam; it seems broader in its human sympathy, and is pre-eminently a gospel for the Gentiles—the gospel of the Son of Man, its key-note being mercy; the gospel for women, dwelling upon Elizabeth, the Virgin Mary, Anna, Martha and her sister Mary, and the female disciples who ministered to Christ and His Apostles; the gospel for children, dwelling upon the birth and youth of John the Baptist and of Jesus; and the gospel of sacred poetry, the first two chapters being a paradise of fragrant flowers, where the air is resonant with the sweet melodies of heavenly gladness and thanksgiving; the gospel of Luke, says the infidel Renan, is the most beautiful book in the world.”—T.D. Bernard.

The gospel of John dwells especially upon the divine and eternal glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Because of this fact, and of its recording the astounding miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus, and on account of its containing several long spiritual discourses of Christ, the especial malevolence of modern skeptics has been most learnedly and laboriously attempted to relegate its composition to the latter part of the second century and to some unknown and unreliable author. But critics have been forced to retreat from A.D. 170 to about A.D. 100, as the time when it was known and used by the church—that is, to the lifetime, if not of John himself, of many of his friends, upon whom such a work, if spurious, could not have been imposed. The internal proof of its authenticity is stronger than that of any classical work of antiquity. Its general structure and contents furnish a convincing argument for its strict historical truth. It contains more touches of an eye-witness than any other of the gospels; it is more observant of chronological order, and, confessedly, the most valuable for consultation in the scientific construction of the Savior’s history. It alone gives an adequate explanation of the manner and time in which Christ’s death was brought about (by His raising Lazarus from the dead, near Jerusalem, after the latter had been dead four days, and thus presenting the strongest proof of His own divinity, and offending the Jewish rulers more than ever before). Even Baur, the founder of the Tubingen school, admits that the author of the fourth gospel was a man of remarkable mind, of an elevated spirit, and penetrated with a warm adoring faith in Christ as the Son of God, and the Savior of the world, and he compares him with the Apostle Paul. Surely such a man could not have fabricated a life of his Master. Baur and Keim give the gospel of John the highest praise as a philosophy of religion. “Going from the first to the second century,” says Professor Fisher, “is passing into a far different atmosphere, descending from the heights of inspiration to the level of ordinary and often feeble thinking, so that setting a work like the fourth gospel in the second century is a literary anachronism.” No man but the Apostle John could have written it. “If he did not write it,” says Neander, “then its authorship is the greatest of enigmas.” “Through the Fourth Gospel, while the Apostle John is never mentioned by name, there moves an unnamed, veiled form, which sometimes comes forward, yet without the veil being entirely lifted; the author must have well known who this person was, and he must have been the person himself, whom it was the whole joy of his life to know that Jesus loved, but who modestly and delicately suppresses his own name.” The authenticity of this Gospel was abundantly acknowledged in the second century, and was not disputed till the nineteenth century; the first epistle of John is remarkably similar, and must have been by the same author. The most radical critics admit that the Apocalypse or Revelation was written by the Apostle John; and they maintain that the Fourth Gospel is so much purer, calmer, and more grammatical Greek, that it could not have had the same author. But the latest and profoundest scholars believe that the Apocalypse was written by John, as Boanerges, a son of thunder, about A.D. 69, after the Neronian persecution (Rev. 6:9-11), and amid the terrible and portentous events just before the destruction of Jerusalem (Rev. 11:1-14); and that the Fourth Gospel was written by him some twenty or thirty years afterwards, when he had been residing many years in the Grecian cities of Asia Minor, and had acquired a much freer use of the Greek language, and when he was in extreme old age, and, with memory refreshed by the Divine Spirit, according to Christ’s latest promises, he was occupied with tranquil and delightful reminiscences of his beloved Lord. Similarly, Paul’s Thessalonian Epistles, which are eschatological, like the Apocalypse, and are, in our New Testament, appropriately the last in order of his epistles to seven churches, were written first. The Apocalypse was, expecting the gospel and epistles of John, and possibly the gospel of Luke and the Acts, the last written of all the books of the New Testament. The John of the Apocalypse and of the Fourth Gospel differ no more than the Socrates of Xenophon and of Plato. John was the first and last of the glorious company of the Apostles, the chosen one of the chosen three of the chosen twelve, the bosom friend of Jesus, the protector of His widowed mother, the survivor of all the Apostles, and Apostle of love, which is the greatest of Christian virtues. “He was pre-eminently qualified to give to the church the inside view of that most wonderful person that ever walked on earth. In his early life he had absorbed the deepest words of his Master, and treasured them in a faithful heart; in extreme old age, yet with the fire and vigor of manhood, he reproduced them under the influence of the Holy Spirit, who dwelt in him and led him into the unerring truth.” “John’s Gospel,” says Prof. Philip Schaff, in his most valuable “History of the Christian Church,” is the golden sunset of the age of inspiration, and sheds its lustre into the second and all the succeeding centuries of the church. It is as simple as a child and sublime as a seraph, gentle as a lamb and bold as an eagle, deep as the sea and high as the heavens—the most original, the most important, and the most influential book in all literature. It lifts the veil from the Holy of Holies, and reveals the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. It unites in harmony the deepest knowledge and the purest love of Christ. While pure Greek in vocabulary and grammar, it is thoroughly Hebrew in temper and spirit, even more so than any other book, and can be almost literally translated into Hebrew without losing its force or beauty. It has the childlike simplicity, the artlessness, the imaginativeness, the directness, the circumstantiality and the rhythmical parallelism which characterize the writings of the Old Testament. The sentences are short and weighty, co-ordinated, not subordinated. There are no involved periods, no connecting links, no logical argumentation, but a succession of self-evident truths declared as from immediate intuition. There breathes through this book an air of calmness and serenity, of peace and repose, that seems to come from the eternal mansions of heaven.”

The first century of the Christian era was, above all others in human history, the age of miracles. Many miracles are recorded in the Old Testament, but many more, performed by Christ and His Apostles, are recorded in the New. The denial of the possibility of a miracle or the supernatural in the universe, is a sheer assumption or arrogation of omniscience, and the equivalent of atheism. Science does not know what either matter or force is, and is therefore incompetent to deny what Omnipotence can effect with or upon them. The will of man may change the combinations of natural lays to accomplish its purposes; much more may the Divine will. The high and worthy object of the miracles recorded in the Bible was to testify to the divine commission of those inspired teachers who wrought them. As to even the New Testament miracles being myths, as imagined by Strauss, whose theory would annihilate all history, later and deeper historical research has shown that the first century of the Christian era, when Christ and His Apostles lived on earth and the New Testament was composed, was the most critical and skeptical age of the world up to the sixteenth century after Christ—the age of Tacitus, the most philosophical uninspired historian that ever lived—the period of the old age and decline of the ancient world, when childish stories were not believed.

“No other gospels than our four canonical ones were accepted by the church teachers and the great body of Christian people in the second century; the silliness and clumsiness of the so-called apocryphal gospels, which deal mainly with the mother, the nativity and the infancy of Jesus, set off the perfection of the true gospels.”

The numberless undesigned coincidences in the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul’s epistles, as shown in Paley’s “Horeae Paulinae,” afford an unanswerable argument for the genuineness both of the Acts and of those epistles. No ancient history has so many surprising internal proofs of having been written by a careful and accurate contemporary author as the Acts of the Apostles. Even Baur admitted the genuineness of Paul’s four epistles, to the Romans, the Corinthians and the Galatians; and his successors have admitted the genuineness of several others of Paul’s epistles.

2. Science.—If it was not below the dignity of God to do His wonderful works in nature as well as in grace, certainly it cannot be below the dignity of even His most intelligent and holy creatures to investigate such works in order to see in them the reflection of their Creator’s glory. The Scriptures make numerous allusions to the works of God in nature, and refer to the kingdom of nature as an image or type of the kingdom of grace. No discovery of science invalidates, but all corroborate and illustrate the truth of the sacred Scriptures. While the faith of God’s elect does not and should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God, it is well enough, in order to help dissipate the vaporings of carnal reason, to know that in the Bodleian Library at Oxford is deposited a manifesto, drawn up and signed at the meeting of the British Scientific Association in 1865, by 617 scientific men, including some of the very highest eminence, declaring their belief in the truth of the Holy Scriptures and the harmony of the Scriptures with all the natural sciences. The most eminent professors in the Universities of Halle, Bonn and Berlin have taken an emphatic stand for the truth of the Bible against German rationalism and infidelity. While the utter falsity of all heathen religions is demonstrated by the absolute monstrosity of their cosmogonies or accounts of creation, the wonderful coincidence of the order of fifteen creative events in Genesis and in science furnishes, according to the law of permutations, 1,307,674,368,000 probabilities that God made a special revelation to Moses of the facts which the latter records, against only one probability that He did not make such revelation.

Prof. Arnold Guyot, of Princeton College, who has had no superior as a scientist in America, says in his last work (published in 1884) on “Creation, or the Biblical Cosmogony in the Light of Modern Science:” “The conclusions of the so-called modern, higher criticism, whose object is to shake the faith in the authenticity of the book of Genesis, have often been fully refuted by more competent men than their authors. The best explanation which science is now able to give of the creation of the universe and the earth, is also that which best explains, in all its details, the first chapter of Genesis, and does it justice. Whatever modifications in our present view of the development of the universe and the globe may be expected from new discoveries, the prominent features of this vast picture will remain, and these only are delineated in the admirable account of Genesis. The same divine hand which lifted, for Daniel and Isaiah, the veil which covered the tableau of the time to come, unveiled to the eyes of the author of Genesis, by a series of graphic visions and pictures, the earliest ages of creation. Thus, Moses was the prophet of the past, as Daniel and Isaiah and many others were the prophets of the future.” Scientists, like the founders of the pagan religions, make constant mistakes even in their own chosen and limited departments of investigation; but the inspired writers of the Bible never make any mistakes in either natural or spiritual matters. Science simply measures the conditions of natural phenomena, and differs, not in kind, but only in degree, from every man’s knowledge, and does not at all solve the mystery of our relationship to the unseen and eternal. “These scientific individuals,” says Thomas Carlyle in his “Sartor Resartus,” “have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some handbreadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore. Man knows not the Alphabet of the Volume of Nature, whose Author and Writer is God. This fair Universe is in very deed the star-domed City of God; and through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is the time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.”

Science goes quite beyond its province in attempting to explain the first origin or the final destiny of things, and destroys itself in substituting vain imagination for sober truth. Such a course marks the decay of the truly scientific spirit. Even Darwin admits that the actual transmutation of one species into another is not historical, but only inferential. The science of today, like the science of past ages, furnishes not the slightest evidence of the self-origination and self-maintenance of the universe independently of God. The drapery or setting of the supernatural in Scripture, the correctness of the numberless allusions to geography, chronology, history, literature, law and government, customs and manners, is receiving stronger confirmation every day by scientific research; and no skeptic has ever been able to satisfy himself, much less any one else, in his impossible attempt to dissever the natural from the supernatural in Scripture. “The time over which scientific observations can travel,” says Mr. C.H. Spurgeon in his “Clew of the Maze,” “even if it be extended into ages, is but as a watch in the night compared with the eternity of God; and the range of human observation is but as a drop of the bucket compared with the circle of the heavens; and therefore it may turn out, in a thousand instances, that there are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamed of in the most accurate philosophy of scientists. If it ever comes to a matter of decision whether we shall believe God’s revelation or man’s science, we shall unhesitatingly cry,”‘Let God be true, and every man a liar.’”

3. Philosophy.—The greatest supernatural event recorded in Scripture is the creation of the universe. As Immanuel Kant, the profoundest of German philosophers, demonstrates in his “Critique of Pure Reason,” the universe pre-supposes, for both its origin and continuance, and almighty, intelligent, righteous, infinite, eternal Spirit, whose purposes embrace and provide for all events, and who is Himself a Person, and who may receive personal worship and affection, and reveal Himself to His creatures by personal manifestations. Every man of common sense, whether ancient or modern, heathen or Christian, sees design in nature. It would be far more reasonable to consider a watch an accidental coming together of pieces of metal than to regard the human body or the solar system or the universe as accidental. The vigintillions of probabilities against the fortuitous meeting of all the molecules in all the organs of all the creatures on the earth make it as certain as mathematics can make it that these creatures were brought into being by a wise and powerful Creator. A materialistic, pantheistic, atheistic or agnostic theory of the spontaneous evolution of all things out of nothing—a theory ignoring common sense, hypostasizing logical abstractions into real agents, obliterating all the distinction between Creator and creature, force and law, mind and matter, life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, right and wrong, good and evil— instead of illuminating, intensifies the darkness which envelops the Great First Cause, by substituting a mysterious, uncaused, omnific stardust for God. A system of godless evolution is but a mass of unproved and unprovable assumptions, and is rejected by very many most eminent scientists as a bundle of romantic dreams. As ably shown by President Noah Porter, of Yale College, this theory destroys conscience, degrades man, strangles science, subjects all things to blind chance, makes the educated more selfish and the uneducated more discontented, is pretentious, dogmatic, specious, sophistical, incoherent and immoral; is not practically believed by those who maintain it, and who thus only amuse themselves with ingenious and frivolous speculations, brilliant but shallow kaleidoscopic fancies; and, finally, as plainly set forth by President J.W. Dawson, of Montreal University, it commits theoretical suicide, disproving itself, by exhibiting, in its present nominal acceptance, not a progression, but a retrogression to the crudest and most uncritical human cosmogonies found in ancient heathen philosophy and poetry, seeking to string all our vast stores of knowledge upon the thread of an antiquated hypothesis, and indicating, if it were really believed, that the human mind has fallen into a state of senility, and in its dotage mistakes for science the imaginations which were the dreams of its youth. Agnostic or chance evolution rests on two subordinate hypotheses, equally unverified and unverifiable—spontaneous generation (pronounced even by Darwin absolutely inconceivable, and by Huxley and Tyndall altogether unproved), and transmutation of species (pronounced by the profound biologist Mivart irrational and puerile). It is impossible to prove the physical descent of species from each other. The unity between them is not material but immaterial—the unity of plan in the mind of the Creator. Dr. Beale, the foremost microscopist of the English-speaking world, declares that Huxley’s protoplasmic theories are in flagrant contradiction with the facts; that no one has proved or can prove that life and mind are in any way related to chemistry and mechanics. The able and learned English scientist, Dr. Elam, says: “That such verbal hocus-pocus should be received as science will one day be regarded as evidence of the low state of intelligence in the nineteenth century.” “If man is a materialist,” says Professor Tholuck, “we Germans think he is not educated.”

“The assumption of atoms,” says the distinguished philosopher, Sir William Thomson, “can explain no property of body which has not previously been attributed to the atoms themselves.” Says Prof. J.C. Maxwell, of Cambridge University, England: “No theory of evolution can be found to account for the similarity of the molecules throughout all time, and throughout the whole region of the stellar universe; for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction (so far as human observation extends). The exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent, and proves that matter must have been created. The molecules of matter continue this day as they were created, perfect in number, and measure, and weight; and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are the essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created not only the heavens and the earth, but the materials out of which heaven and earth consist.” “Such is the true outcome of the deepest, the most exact, and the most recent science of our age. A grander utterance has not come from the mind of a philosopher since the days when Newton concluded his Principia by his immortal scholium on the majestic personality of the Creator and Lord of the Universe.” “How came the atoms or molecules to be what they are? Who preserves to them their absolute identity, notwithstanding their infinite variety? Who endowed them with their inalienable properties? This and every other fact in nature must previously have been a thought of God. Nature is full of plan, and yet she plans not; she is only plastic to a plan. Morphology and teleology are but revelations of plan, and, as such, have guided to the most splendid of scientific discoveries. Where science assumes a use, religion affirms an author. The prints of divine forethought are scattered over the face of universal nature, and the convictions of a Great First Cause which they engender, are ploughed into the very subsoil of the human mind.”—S. Wainwright.

“The process of the negative philosophy,” says the Duke of Argyll, “systematically suppress more than one-half of the facts of nature; and as systematically they silence more than one-half of the faculties of man. Moreover, the faculties which they especially try to silence are the very highest faculties of discernment which nature gives to us. In the physical sciences, we know what results would follow from such methods of treatment; every fact has to be carefully kept and weighed, and even then our results are imperfect. Yet in the far more difficult work of interpreting the vast system of nature, with all its immeasurable wealth of mind, the agnostic philosophy deliberately sets aside everything that is kindred with the highest parts of our own moral and intellectual structure. These are all absolutely excluded from the meanings and the sequences—from the anticipations and the analogies of creation. To those who have grasped the great doctrine of the unity of nature, and have sounded the depth of its meaning and the sweep of its applications, this method of inquiry will appear self-condemned.”

“Men of science,” says Mr. Charles Kingsley, “are finding more and more—below their facts, below all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show—a something nameless, invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve—the mysterious and truly miraculous element in nature which is always escaping them, though they cannot escape it— that of which it was written of old, ‘Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee from Thy Spirit?’” In the modern doctrine of the conservation of energy, and the convertibility of forces, science insists, with increasing emphasis, that all kinds of force are but forms or manifestations of some one central force, issuing from some one fountain-head of power. Sir John Herschel has not hesitated to say that it is but reasonable to regard the force of gravitation as the direct or indirect result of a consciousness or a will existing somewhere. Such an omnipresent and omnific will is required much more to account for the world of mind than even the world of matter. In his masterly discourse, “As Regards Protoplasm,” bristling in fact and crushing in argument, Dr. J.H. Stirling, of Edinburgh, finely and axiomatically remarks: “This universe is not an accidental cavity, into which an accidental dust has been accidentally swept into heaps for the accidental evolution of the majestic spectacle of organic and inorganic life. That majestic spectacle is a spectacle as plainly for the eye of reason as any diagram of mathematics. That majestic spectacle could have been constructed, was constructed, only in reason, for reason, and by reason.”

The entire agnostic literature is, but a demonstration of the truth of the Apostle Paul’s declaration, that “The world by wisdom knows not God,” and that “The natural man cannot know the things of the Spirit of God, for they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 1:21; 2:14). A godless human philosophy is a wilderness, in which “the pupil’s hold the sieves while their masters milk the he goats,” and which ends in darkness and death and nihilism. We need the light of heaven to shine in this darkness, and direct our footsteps to a “land of rest, with green fields and living rivers.”—J. McCosh. “It is true,” says Francis Bacon, “that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.”

“The evidences of the truthfulness of the Bible are written where its enemies can never destroy them—in the very framework of the universe; in the earth and in the sky; in the stones and in the stars; in the experiences of millions of human hearts, and in all the records of human history.”—G.S. Bailey.

President J.W. Dawson, in his “Origin of the World,” presents the following learned summary of the religious history of the human race:

“The Turanian or Hamitic races (including the Mongolians of Northern Asia, the American Indians, and the oldest historical populations of Western Asia and of Europe), are remarkable for their permanent and stationary forms of civilization or barbarism, and for the languages least developed in grammatical structure. These people had and still have traditions of the creation and early history of man similar to those in the earlier Biblical books; but the connection of their religions with that of the Bible breaks off from the time of Abraham; and the earlier portions of revelation which they possessed became disintegrated into a polytheism which takes very largely the form of animism, or of attributing some special spiritual indwelling to all natural objects, and also that of worship of ancestors and heroes. The portion of primitive theological belief to which they have clung most persistently is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which in all their religious beliefs occupies a prominent place, and has always been connected with special attention to rites of sepulture and monuments to the dead. Their version of the revelation of creation appears most distinctly in the sacred book of the Quiches of Central America, and in the creation myths of the Mexicans, Iroquois, Algonquins, and other North American tribes; and it has been handed down to us through the Semitic Assyrians from the ancient Chaldaeo-Turanian population of the valley of the Euphrates.

“The Aryan or Japhetic races (including the Hindoos, Persians, Medes, Scythians, Thracians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons and Slavonians—the modern Europeans, in general, and their descendants), have been remarkable for their changeable and versatile character. Their religious ideas in primitive times appear to have been not dissimilar from those of the Turanians; and the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Scandinavians and Celts have all gone some length in developing and modifying these, apparently by purely human imaginative and intellectual materials. But all these developments were defective in a moral point of view, and had lost the stability and rational basis which proceed from monotheism. Hence they have given way before other and higher faiths; and at this day the more advanced nations of the Aryan or Japhetic stock have adopted the Semitic faith; and, as Noah long ago predicted, ‘dwell in the tents of Shem.’ No indigenous account of the genesis of things remains among the Aryan races, with the exception of that in the Avesta, and in some ancient Hindoo hymns, and these are merely variations of the Turanian or Semitic cosmogony. God has given to the Aryans no special revelations of His will, and they would have been left to grope for themselves along the paths of science and philosophy, but for the advent, among them of the prophets of ‘Jehovah, the God of Shem!’

“It is to (the Hebrew branch of) the Semitic race that God has been most liberal in his gift of inspiration. Gathering up and treasuring the old common inheritance of religion, and eliminating from it the accretions of superstition, the children of Abraham at one time stood alone, or almost alone, as adherents of a belief in one God the Creator. Their theology was added to from age to age by a succession of prophets, all working in one line of development, till it culminated in the appearance of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to expand itself over the other races. Among them it has undergone two remarkable phases of retrograde development—the one in Mohammedanism, which carries it back to a resemblance to its own earlier patriarchal stage, the other in Roman and Greek ecclesiasticism, which have taken it back to the Levitical system, along with a strong color of paganism. Still its original documents survive, and retain their hold on large portions of the more enlightened Aryan nations, while through their means these documents have entered on a new career of conquest among the Semites and Turanians. They are, however, it must be admitted, among the Aryan races of Europe, growing in a somewhat uncongenial soil; partly because of the materialistic organization of these races, and partly because of the abundant remains of heathenism which still linger among them; and it is possible that they may not realize their full triumphs over humanity till the Semitic races return to the position of Abraham, and erect again in the world the standard of monotheistic faith, under the auspices of a purified Christianity” (Rom. 11:12-15).

It is a mournful prediction of the inspired writers that, in the latter days, formal godliness should increase, while vital godliness should decline; and yet the entire New Testament is a fervent protestation against the bondage of forms as a species of self-righteousness, and a declaration of the all-sufficiency of Christ and the essential spirituality of His religion. To represent our acceptance with God as conditioned upon human works, either apart from or along with faith, Paul regarded as a fatal error, as a dishonor to Christ, because setting the ground of salvation, either in whole or in part, outside of Christ; it would imply that man might truly believe in Christ and still be in his sins and unsaved; it would imply that the work of redemption was not finished by Jesus on the cross. “The false Jewish theory of the law as a source of life and salvation, is deeply imbedded in every natural heart; and, therefore, to combat this fundamental, universal and capital error, God raised up His most eminent Apostle, who was designedly born out of due time, and who did not even know Christ after the flesh, but only was Him in glory, that he might give the church the highest spiritual instruction—who had full experience, in his own heart and life, of the false Judaistic theory—and who was suddenly converted to the gospel that he might teach, with the greatest distinctness, the contrast between salvation sought by law through works, and salvation found by grace through faith, and the mighty change in the world within when the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus makes a man free from the law of sin and death.”—T.D. Bernard, in “The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament.”

“A believing and attentive reader of the New Testament could not have expected that the history of the church after the close of the Scripture canon would have been essentially different from what it has been. The closing words of Paul, Peter, Jude and John forbode direful tribulation for the people of God; the distant hills are black with the gathering multitudes of Apollyon’s forces; and the last exhortations of those faithful soldiers, as they are about to fall at their posts, call on their comrades and those who are to follow them to endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints, to be faithful unto death.” Opposed and persecuted by the world and its religions, they have, like the prophets and Apostles of old, been slandered, reviled, tortured, put to death, with every imaginable device of cruelty; the survivors have wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, in deserts and mountains and dens and caves of the earth, destitute, afflicted, tormented. But by heaven-born and heaven-bound faith they endured, as seeing Him who is invisible, and choosing rather to suffer affliction in the service of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, having respect unto the recompense of the reward. Thus has the Most High never left Himself without a witness on the earth.

The period of the history of the church of God from the creation to A.D. 100 is not only more than two-thirds of the entire period from the creation to the present time, but it is incomparably the most important part of church history; because we have the infallible light of the Holy Scriptures to guide us during that period, pointing out, without any mistake, the path of the true servants of God, their labors and sufferings, their errors and chastisements, their repentance and salvation. During the remaining period, from A.D. 100 to 1885, I have earnestly endeavored, in tracing the footsteps of the flock of Christ, to be entirely guided, not by the unscriptural writings and opinions of fallible men, but by the light of Divine revelation. The humanly ascribed titles of spiritual father, confessor, doctor, rabbi, pope, cardinal, archdeacon, archbishop, reverend, etc., which are utterly out of place, and unscriptural, and worthless in the kingdom of God, have exercised no influence in the composition of this volume. The tracing of God’s spiritual or hidden people through the wilderness of the eighteen centuries since the apostolic age is of course a most difficult undertaking; and I do not suppose, neither do I claim, that I have made absolutely no mistakes in this delicate and important delineation. The Scriptures mentioned under “Footsteps of the Flock,” before the Preface, have been, with the aid of the Divine Spirit, as I hope, my chief guide. As for a nominal, natural, outward, or mechanical succession, the God of providence and grace, eighteen centuries ago, forever buried all such claims in the dark, impenetrable gulf of the seculum obscurum, or obscure age, immediately succeeding the death of the leading Apostles and the destruction of Jerusalem, A.D. 70, and extending to A.D. 100, as freely acknowledged by the ablest scholars of Europe; the irreconcilable inconsistencies and contradictions of the leading Roman Catholic authorities in regard to the pretended Romish succession during this period furnish a sufficient illustration of this fact. According to the entire tenor of the New Testament Scriptures, what we are to look for is, not such outward succession, but a spiritual succession of principles, of inward, vital, heartfelt religion. Names are nothing, principles are everything, in the true kingdom of God. In all ages and countries, that people who, in all spiritual matters, acknowledge Christ as their only Head and King, form a part of the true church of God. They have mostly been dissenters from “state churches” and political religions—Christ having declared that His kingdom is not of this world; and, like the prophets and Apostles and Christ Himself, and as he predicted, they have been hated, slandered and persecuted to the death by worldly religionists, not only by heathens and Mohammedans, but even far more numerously by professed Christians, both Papists and Protestants (Matthew 5:10-12; 13:34; Mark 10:30; Luke 21:12; John 5:16; 15:18-21; 16:33; Acts 7:52; 8:1; 9:5; 14:22; Gal. 4:29; 2 Cor. 4:9; 2 Tim. 3:11,12; Heb. 11:35-38; Rev. 7:14; 12:13; 13:7,15,17; 17:6; 20:4); and, instead of persecuting their enemies in return, they have returned good for evil and prayed for them (Matthew 5:44-48; Luke 23:34; Acts 7:60; Rom. 12:14,18-21; 1 Cor. 4:12; 13:4-8; 1 Pet. 2:23; 3:9). So the inoffensive lamb and dove and sheep, used in the Scriptures to represent the Son and the Spirit and the people of God, are slain and devoured by predaceous animals and birds. These persecuted people of God have had, since the first century, a variety of names, generally given them by their enemies, and derived from their location, or from some of their leading ministers, or from some doctrine or practice of theirs which distinguished them from worldly religionists. Until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, they were known as Montanists, Tertullianists, Novatians, Donatists, Paulicians, Petrobrusians, Henricians, Arnoldists, Waldenses, Albigenses, United Brethren of Bohemia, and Lollards; many of these were called by the general name of Ana-Baptists (or Re-Baptizers), because they did not acknowledge the scripturalness or validity of infant baptism, and therefore baptized (Paedobaptists said they baptized again) those who joined them on a profession of faith. While these various classes of people differed in minor particulars, and while some of them were in much darkness and error on certain points of truth, they yet held substantially to the same general doctrine and practice—insisting, above all, upon the spirituality of the church of God and her heavenly obligation to walk in humble and loving obedience to all His holy commandments, both in an individual and a church capacity, and not in obedience to the unscriptural traditions and commandments of men. For the last 365 years (since A.D. 1520) they have been called Baptists (for about the first 100 years of this period, also Ana-Baptists), because they baptized (that is, immersed in water, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost) all who, upon a credible profession of their repentance towards God and faith in Christ, desired to unite with them in a church capacity. The cardinal tenets of Bible Baptists, being also those held by the apostolic churches, as set forth in the New Testament, and those held, in the main, by the people of God in former times, are: The exclusive and supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures; the exclusive headship of Christ over His church; the three-oneness of God as Father, Son and Spirit; the total depravity of all mankind since the fall of Adam; The special and effectual electing love of God the Father, redeeming love of God the Son, and regenerating love of God the Spirit, manifested, in due time, to all the vessels of mercy; the baptism of believers, and the partaking of the Lord’s supper by those properly baptized and in gospel order; salvation by grace and faith alone; a regenerated and orderly-walking church membership; the universal priesthood and brotherhood of believers; the divine call and divine qualification and equality of the ministry, who feed and care for the flock of God among them, not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind, not as being lords over God’s heritage, but as ensamples to the flock; the independence and yet cordial brotherly association of gospel churches; the separation of the church from the world, the non-alliance of the former with the latter in any kinds of religious institutions; such corrupting associations being pointedly forbidden in both the Old and New Testament Scriptures (Ex. 12:38 with Num. 11: 4-6; Ex. 34:12-16; Deut. 7:1-11; 2 Chron. 18:1-3 with 19:2; Ezra 9:1-15; Neh. 13:1-3, 23-31; Ps. 26:4,5; 56:35-43; Isa. 8:12; Acts 8:20,21; 2 Cor. 6:14-18); the separation of church and state; the liberty of every human being, so far as other people are concerned, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience; the resurrection of the bodies both of the just and the unjust; the final and general judgment of the world by the Lord Jesus Christ; the everlasting blessedness of the righteous, and the everlasting punishment of the wicked.

In giving the history of the church since the birth of Christ I have divided the periods into centuries, the oldest, simplest, and clearest method. All methods of division are more or less arbitrary, artificial and mechanical. The modern German periodologies are endlessly diversified, inconsistent, and confused, and almost destroy any profitable comparison with each other.

As portrayed by the Scriptures of infallible truth, how unspeakably solemn is the condition of man, as he stands upon these mortal shores, before launching upon the great ocean of Eternity! As testified by the Inspired Word, he has entered upon an everlasting career, either of happiness or of misery. Beyond the portals of natural death, into which he may at any moment be ushered, his estate will be unchangeable. “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall he give in exchange for his soul?” is the momentous inquiry of God manifest in the flesh. May the Lord Jesus, by His blessed Spirit of grace, seal this most solemn question upon our hearts and upon those of our fellow-men; give us to realize the vanity of earthly things, and the supreme and transcendent importance of our spiritual and eternal interests; lead us, under a deep sense of our sinfulness, with weeping and supplication, to the throne of His mercy; enable us to count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord, and to behold Him, by an eye of faith, as pierced and dying for our sins and rising for our justification; may He shed abroad His renewing and transforming love in our hearts, and elevate our thoughts and affections above the corrupting and fading shadows of this world to the pure and enduring realities of heaven; may He create within us a desire to identify ourselves with His afflicted, lowly, despised, and persecuted church and people; enable us to adorn the doctrine of God our Savior by loving obedience to all His holy commandments, and thus prepare us for a blissful and eternal communion with Himself in the General Assembly and Church of the First-Born, who are written in heaven.

Chapter I. The Creation.

The Church of God.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”[1]

Thus God puts His seal upon the forehead of the Bible. Thus, in the volume of Inspiration, with the first breath of His mouth, He destroys forever the deadly errors of polytheism, pantheism, atheism, deism, materialism, agnosticism, accidentalism, evolutionism, positivism, naturalism, rationalism, dualism, two-seedism, fatalism, nihilism, pessimism, idolatry and superstition. This one statement of the Scriptures is of infinitely more value than all the words of all the uninspired men that ever lived. It transports us at once above all human science and tradition and philosophy, above the dark, interminable, labyrinthine wanderings of the natural mind, beyond the bounds of time to the clear divine depths of the ancient eternity. It declares to us, in language of the sublimest simplicity and truthfulness, that “In the beginning,” at a period of the distant past unknown to mortals, “God,” Elohim, the Almighty Trinity,[2] Father, Word, and Spirit, the alone Eternal, Self-Existent Being, by an act of His sovereign will, and for the manifestation of His own glory (Col. 1:16; Rev. 4:11), the highest conceivable motive, “created the heaven and the earth,” produced from non-existence the entire universe of matter and of mind (Acts 17:24). Not one atom, not one spirit, through all the infinity of space, but owes its origin to God. Atoms, to which science reduces all matter, have, with their determinate weights and volumes, all {he properties of “manufactured articles,” and cannot, therefore, be eternal and self-existent, says Sir John Herschel, the finest[3] scientific intellect of the nineteenth century. The material forces, says the learned and accurate Carpenter, must, in the ultimate resort, be an expression of will. Spirit unerringly points away from matter to a spiritual Father, God, says Dr. Emil du Bois-Reymond, the greatest[4] of living physiologists.

The ablest[5] minds have always referred the seen universe to an unseen spiritual source; and the facts of the seen universe continually direct the true scientific mind to that unseen Spirit. “Without revelation,” says Prof. Tayler Lewis, “science is a valley of dry bones, and philosophy a land of darkness.” All natural discoveries and theories, so for as eternity is concerned, have well been called “an awful nothingness.”

The spontaneous evolution of nothing into atoms, force and spirit, is the height of unscientific absurdity. “In prosecuting investigations into the origin of things,” says President McCosh, “science comes to walls of adamant, which will not fall down at its command, and which if it tries to break through, will only prostrate it, and cause it to exhibit its weakness before the world.” It cannot account for the origin of these five things: 1st, Matter with its forces; 2d, life; 3d, animal sensation or feeling; 4th, mind; 5th, conscience.

Biogenesis, or the production of life only from life, is now the accepted doctrine of science. No creature power can span that gulf of all gulfs—the mighty gulf between death and life. The answer to the riddle of life, says Tennyson, is

“Behind the veil, behind the veil.”

To get rid of the necessity of an ever-living personal God, the unbeliever is actually reduced to the supreme folly of assuming that all matter is, in some sense, alive, conscious and immortal.—Stewart and Tait’s Unseen Universe, pp. 242, 243. “Since the days of Democritus, atheism has run for shelter to the doctrine of atoms. Although the microscope has never made an approach to this mysterious domain, never having brought to light an atom, or a molecule, or even a molecular combination, yet here in this utterly unknown region, a false science pretends to find life, consciousness, memory, thought, imagination, reason, will—all that constitutes personality or individuality in our present state of being.” “Science,” says Dawson, “does not show the origin of new species, but only of new sub-species, varieties and races. The influence of a struggle for existence is greatly exaggerated by the Darwinian school; it gives chiefly depauperated and degraded forms.” The “survival of the fittest” has no other meaning than the “survival of the survivor,” and explains nothing. In seeking to trace the genesis of man, evolutionists agree that some of the indispensable links in the chain are buried beneath submerged continents. But the most recent and accurate science declares that the same gulf which is found today between man and the ape goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the first period of the age of mammals.

Darwin, the leading naturalist of Europe, though he, contrary to human experience, reason and revelation, seeks to derive all animate beings from three or four, or even one species, yet admits that God must have created the first species. Herbert Spencer, the chief infidel philosopher of this century, dares not attempt to explain, in his pretentious Biology and Psychology, the first appearance of life or of mind, and confesses that he finds, beneath all phenomena, evidence of an unknown and unknowable power.[6] In a region of thick darkness, he would kindly allow us the Athenian privilege of erecting an altar to the Great Unknown. Huxley, while acknowledging the unequalled morality of the Bible, would have the worship, at that altar, chiefly of the silent sort. And Tyndall, though pronouncing the first chapter of Genesis “a beautiful myth,” declares that “no atheistic reasoning can dislodge religion from the human heart.”

Neither of these four infidels is a geologist; and it is geology, more than any other science, that refers to the events described in the first chapter of Genesis. The three leading[7] American geologists, President J. W. Dawson, of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Professor James D. Dana, of Yale College, Connecticut, and Professor Arnold Guyot, of Princeton College, New Jersey, as well as Professor W. C. Kerr, the late learned State Geologist of North Carolina, writing in the year 1882 to the junior author of this work, avow their unshaken belief in the perfect scientific accuracy of the first chapter of Genesis.

If accurate, as undoubtedly it is, then it was a revelation from God to man, whether made first to Moses or to Adam or to Enoch; for none but God knew of these events. And this divine revelation, made at least 3,000 years before the rise of geology, stamps the whole book, of which it is the only appropriate and inseparable introduction, as divine. The manifest purpose of the Scriptures is not scientific, but much higher—it is moral and religious. “The first verse of the inspired volume places God, as the one all-sufficient Creator, on a height infinitely above every other being; and it is well fitted to remind us of our dependence on Him, of our responsibility to Him, and of our obligation to submit to His authority, and to live for His glory.”

No fact of science is opposed to any statement of the Bible; it is only the fallible, ever-changing, self-contradictory theories of some scientific men that are so opposed. Accurate observers are sometimes very inaccurate reasoners. The utter absurdity and inconsistency of some of the latest theories of scientists may be plainly seen by reference to A. Wilford Hall’s Problem of Human Life Here and Hereafter, Judge J. B. Stallo’s Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, the 38th volume of the International Scientific Series, published in 1882, and Samuel Wainwright’s Scientific Sophisms, published in 1883.

“With all their scientific attainments,” says Schellen (Spectrum Analysis, pp. 337-8), “the deepest astronomical thinkers have, in regard to the stars, the same feeling as the little child:

“‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!’”

In reference to all the most interesting and important truths of the stellar worlds, the skies are as silent to men as of old.

The theories (not the facts) of geology seem to violate the laws of logic in basing inferences upon local, partial and negative evidence, and to commit the fallacy of the vicious circle in deducing the age of strata from the age of the contained fossils, and then deducing, the age of the fossils from the age of the containing strata. And theoretical astronomy and geology are at swords’ points today in regard to both the internal fluidity and the antiquity of the earth. Geology maintains that the earth consists of a thin crust or shell full of all intensely heated molten mass; while astronomy maintains that the visible crust of the earth is only one-half as dense and solid as the interior. Geology has been insisting that the earth is at least a thousand million years old, and even now maintains that it is a hundred millions; while mathematical astronomy inexorably reduces the age of the earth to about twenty or even less than ten million years.—Encyclopedia Britannica. 9th edition, vol. 10, p. 297. Thus the uniformitarian theory, which Sir Charles Lyell spent his whole life to prove, has to be abandoned, and the announcement is made in the highest scientific circles that the whole foundation of theoretical geology must be reconstructed. With the reduction of the earth’s age, and the overthrow of uniformitarianism, the entire system of an accidental godless evolution falls to the ground. Thus Jehovah still sets the swords of the Midianites against each other, and vindicates His cause on earth.

True science is always modest. Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest[8] scientist that ever lived, said, a short time before his death, “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” He did not seem to fear that, if he had been permitted to navigate that ocean, he would have been in danger of making shipwreck of his faith. He was a firm believer in the inspiration of the Scriptures. Humboldt, the most distinguished savant of the present century, admits that the challenge of God to Job (Job 38:41) has never yet been answered. As in ancient times, man is “of yesterday, and knows nothing”(Job 8:9). “If any man think that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know”(1 Cor. 8:2). “Now we see through a glass darkly, and know” only “in part” (1 Cor. 13:12). So that humility is the cardinal virtue as well of reason as of revelation.

Moses, the meekest and greatest character in all antiquity before the coming of Christ, and a prophet like unto Christ (Num. 12:3; Deut. 18:15), was the undoubted author of the Pentateuch (including Genesis), and the lawgiver of Israel and civilization. Christ gives Moses and the other O1d Testament writers all the weight of His own divine authority (Matthew 17:3; Luke 24:44). “If they hear not Moses and the prophets,” says the glorified Abraham, “neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:31). The Bible is the great standing miracle of history.

The Mosaic narrative of creation is the oldest of human records, the original of all cosmogonies, incomparably superior to all the monstrous pagan and infidel evolutionary cosmogonies, which derive all objects from one unaided and eternal nature, while Genesis represents God as the Great First Cause and Governor of nature. “In its great antiquity, its unaccountableness, its serene truthfulness, its unapproachable sublimity, its divine majesty and ineffable holiness, the Mosaic record towers high and forever above all human productions.”

The old monumental Assyrian records, lately recovered and deciphered by G. Smith, H. Rawlinson and A. H. Sayce, while corrupted with many human and polytheistic errors, substantially confirm the Mosaic accounts of the creation, man’s original innocence, temptation, fall and curse, and his subsequent, great depravity, and the deluge; just as the leading facts of Exodus are corroborated by the monuments of Egypt.

The creation of the universe was a series of stupendous miracles or supernatural acts, surpassing and introducing all the other natural miracles of the Bible. So science finds infinite depths in nature, inexplicable mysteries or miracles everywhere. For He who hast made still upholds all things by His omnipresent and omnipotent power, and the world by wisdom knows Him not (Heb. 1:3; l Cor. 1:21). “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb. 11:3). And “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they [men] are without excuse (Rom. 1:20).”I had rather believe” says Bacon, “all the fables in the Legend, the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.” Even Cicero remarks that “those works of nature which require the minds of so many philosophers to explore them could not, have existed without some greater mind at the bottom.” The existence of God has been believed by the greatest minds that have ever appeared on earth—Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Augustine, Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Euler, Newton, Leibnitz, Shakespeare, Butler, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hall, Johnson, Kant, Napoleon, Coleridge, Davy, Chalmers, Miller, Faraday, Herschel, Guizot, Maury and Agassiz, in addition to the gifted characters mentioned in the Scriptures. It is, according to the Psalmist, only the “fool” who “says in his heart, There is no God”(Ps. 14:1). Infidelity or atheism has its seat, not so much in the head as in the heart. “The argument of Butler’s Analogy is,” says John Stuart Mill, the representative infidel of England, “from its own point of view, conclusive; the Christian religion is open to no objections, either moral or intellectual, which do not apply at least equally to the common theory of deism.” And so the leading American infidel confesses that if there be a God of nature, the God of the Bible is He. —North American Review, vol. cxxxiii, No. 2, p. 113.

Haeckel, of Germany, runs full tilt against the common sense of the whole human race in maintaining the dysteleolgy or purposefulness of all things. Countless instances of design throughout the universe demonstrate not only the existence, but the infinite power, wisdom, goodness and holiness of the supreme, designing, creative Spirit. The unity of the Great First Cause is proved by the unity of plan, purpose and result; and the omnipresence, omnipotence, immutability and perfection of God are shown by the universal operation of His unchanging laws.

Three of the leading peculiarities of the character of God, as vividly portrayed to us in the first chapter of Genesis, and also in the reminder of the Bible, are His individual personality, His infinite sovereignty, and His almighty power. Instead of an unconscious impersonal force, He is as strictly a person as was Adam. He creates, He speaks, He sees, He hears, (Ps. 94:9, 10,) He enters into a covenant with man, and punishes man for his disobedience. With no being to counsel Him, (Isa. 40:13), He creates and fashions all things, sun, moon, stars, world, plants, animals and men, according to His own will and pleasure (Rev. 4:11; Dan. 4:25; 3,5; 1 Tim. 6:1, 5; Rom. 9:15-28); and He has but to speak and it is done, to command and it stands fast (Ps. 33:9).

According to the infallible testimony of the inspired volume, God is the Most High and the Most Holy; inhabiting eternity; immeasurably transcending in rank and in moral purity all the orders of His creation, men, angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers; dwelling in light unapproachable; and reigning sovereignly and majestically over the universe forever and forevermore, through all the eternities of the eternities. “Contrasted with the living ideas of these sublime reverberations, the interminable rows of conceptionless decimals used by science, our millions and billions, are like the barren x y z of a frigid algebraic computation, as compared with the endless re-echoing of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.”

There is a deep and instructive significance in the names of God and Christ given in the Bible. I find that, of the 9,788 times that the names translated God or Lord occur in the Old Testament, Elohim (God) occurs 2,225 times, Jehovah (Lord) 6,521 times, Jehovah Elohim (Lord God) 298 times, and other[9] Hebrew names of God 744 times; and that, of the 3,232 times that the names translated God or Lord or Christ or Jesus occur in the New Testament, Theos (Elohim or God) occurs 1,277 times, Kurios (Jehovah or Lord) 691 times, Jesus (Jehovah-Savior) 709 times, Christ (Messiah or Anointed) 304 times, Jesus Christ 197 times, Christ Jesus 47 times, and other Greek names of God 7 times. Or, of the 13,020 times that the divine name occurs in the Bible, 6,521 plus 298 plus 691 plus 709 plus 197 plus 47, or 8,463 times (which is about two-thirds of all the times it occurs), it either is or contains the name Jehovah or its equivalent[10]

Elohim (Theos or God) signifies Almighty, and is the general name of God in relation to the world, as the Creator, Sustainer and Governor of all things. It occurs thirty times in the first chapter of Genesis, and is the only name of God in that chapter. It is in the plural number, the plural of majesty and the plural of essence (including Father, Word mid Spirit (Gen. 1:26; 3:22; 11:7; Matthew 28:19); and, though plural, it is, when referring to the true God, always, with the rarest exceptions, where there is a partial reference to polytheism, joined to a singular verb, showing the unity of the Godhead. So Christ is the general name of the Messiah or Mediator.

But Jehovah[11] (Kurios or Lord) signifies, according to God’s own interpretation. I Am That I Am (Exodus iii. 14), that is, the Eternal Unchangeable Being (Mal. 3:6; Jam. 1:17; Rev. 1:8), the Covenant-God (Gen. 2:16, 17; 15:18; Num. 10:33), and is the nearer, tenderer, more personal name that God bears towards all His chosen people; it occurs in the phrase Jehovah Elohim (Lord God), showing that Jehovah and Elohim are but different names of the same Being—twenty times in the second and third chapters of Genesis. So Jesus (Jehovah-Savior) is the nearer, tenderer, and more personal name of the Mediator; and, being one with Jehovah (John 10:30), He is “the same yesterday, and today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Indeed, it was the “Angel of Jehovah,” or Christ, who appeared and spoke to Moses out of the burning bush (Ex. 3:2), and in the fourteenth verse is called God, and announces as His name I Am That I Am, and who said to the Jews, “Before Abraham was, I Am” (John 8:58.)

Thus 8,463 times in the Bible is the everlasting unchangeableness of God towards His dear children affirmed even in the Divine Name; God “abideth faithful, and cannot deny Himself” (2 Tim. ii. 13.) The Moon, representing the Church, may apparently change, and is always thus changing;[12] but the Sun of Righteousness, which arises with healing in His wings upon all that fear His name (Mal. 4:2), shines with the same resplendence forever. Having loved Israel with an everlasting love, God draws her with his loving-kindness, makes an everlasting covenant with her, ordered in all things and sure, puts His fear and law in her mind and heart, forgives and forgets her sins, to the praise of His glorious grace, rejoices to do her good, and declares that with His whole heart and soul He will assuredly plant her in the heavenly Canaan (Jer. 31:3, 31-37; 32:36-41.) Well might the poet sing: —

“How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent word!
What more can He say than to you He hath said,
You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled.”

“E’en down to old age all my people shall prove
My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love;
And when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn,
Like lambs shall they still in my bosom be borne.

“The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to his foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.”

Jeremiah, the prophet of sorrow, uses this dear name of the Covenant God 728 times, which is more frequently than any other inspired writer; and the name Jehovah occurs next oftenest in the Psalms, 681 times. We are thus taught that, in our sorrows and in our devotions, we should especially address ourselves to God as the Unchangeable King of Zion, our Everlasting Father and Friend.

The Hebrew word translated created is Bara, and occurs 45 times in the Old Testament; its Greek equivalent, Ktizo, occurs 35 times in the New Testament. Bara is the strongest word in the Hebrew language to express making out of nothing (Gesenius’ Thesaurus), and it always conveys the idea of something new. The only subject of this verb in the Bible is God; He only can create. Four times in the Old Testament (Ps. 51:10; Isa. 65:17, 18), and four times in the New Testament (Eph. 2:10; 4:24; 2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15), it denotes a spiritual creation, of which God is the author. Bara occurs in three verses of the first chapter of Genesis (verses 1, 21 and 27), in speaking of the creation of the universe, of animal life, and of man. Everywhere else in that chapter God is said to have simply made or formed (asah or yatzar) from an already created material.[13]

To account for the origin of evil, Plato imagined that evil was inherent in matter, and that matter was independent of God, and therefore eternal, and not created; the most of the false philosophical religions are thus dualistic. But the first verse of Genesis tells us that God created all things; and the third chapter of Genesis implies that evil or sin originated from the ungodly exercise of creaturely free-will. Sin is not all attribute of matter, but of spirit. The most holy God is not in any sense its cause or author (Gen. 18:25; Job 15:15; Ps. 145:17; Hab. 1:13; 1 John 1:5)—such a thought were the most awful blasphemy. Man’s body, as created, was very good (Gen. 1:31) and not sinful. Christ’s body was never the seat of sin (Luke 1:35; Heb. 7:26); and the glorified bodies of the saints shall be free from sin (Rom. 6:7; 12; 1 Cor. 15:42; Phil. 3:21; Rev. 21:4, 27).

God is the only eternal Being revealed to us in the Scriptures (Gen. 1:1; Deut. 33:27; Isa. 57:15; Rom. 1:20; 1 Tim. 1:17; 6:16). Angels, as well as men and animals, are His creatures (Ps. 104:4; Heb. 1:6, 7; Rev. 22:8, 9); and all God’s creatures were “very good” when He made them (Gen. 1:31). When and where angels were created, has not been revealed to us. Some of them, the non-elect (1 Tim. 5:21), kept not their first estate, but sinned, and left their own habitation[14] and are now reserved by God in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day (2 Pet. 2: 4; Jude 6). There is, therefore, no redemption or salvation for them. Our Lord speaks of them as “the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). We learn from Paul that pride was the condemnation of the devil (1 Tim. 3:6). Left to his own free will, instead of worshiping, he rebelled against the Son of God (Heb. 1:6; Matthew 4:9). In the form of a serpent he tempted Eve (Gen. 3:1-7, 14, 15); and he is the prince of darkness (Eph. 6:2), the god of this world (2 Cor. iv. 4), the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience (Eph. 2:2), who deceiveth the whole world (Rev. 12:9); is the everlasting enemy of Christ and His people, as shown by his names, Satan (adversary) and Devil (accuser), and as proved by all the Scriptures; and he will finally be bruised forever under the feet of Christ and His church (Gen. 3:15; Rom. 21:20), cast into the bottomless pit (Rev. 20:2, 3), and consigned to everlasting fire (Matthew 25:41).

In the first chapter of Genesis, and elsewhere, when speaking of natural things, the language of the Bible is simple and phenomenal, or according to the first appearances of things to our senses (Heb. 11:3). It is the language of common life, for all seeing eyes and all conceiving minds of all countries and ages. Scientific language, which, however, is also phenomenal, is a little further removed from the senses; but, as human science advances, has to be perpetually corrected; and, in our present state, can never reach the ultimate fact, and would have been unintelligible for thousands of years; it is, therefore, entirely unsuitable to Scripture.

While the general agreement of the Mosaic record of creation and geology is very apparent—first, light and moisture as prerequisites of vegetation, then the latter as the antecedent food of animals, then animals in an ascending gradation, and lastly man as the superior being for whom the earth had been made and furnished; still, as geological knowledge is yet very imperfect, no detailed adjustment of the two accounts thus far made is entirely satisfactory. There are two leading methods of reconciliation.

The first method considers that there was a long period, ending with a chaotic catastrophe, between the first and second verses of Genesis, and buries all the past geological ages in that vacuum, and maintains that Moses simply describes the creation of the present species of plants and animals—his object not being to give a full scientific account of the earth, but only to describe briefly the creation of the objects contemporaneous with man, and then enter upon the religious history of man. It is claimed by most Bible scholars that this method is the least objectionable and most respectable.

The second method of reconciling Genesis and geology considers the creative days coincident with the geological eras, and is preferred by Christian scientists and some eminent scriptural students. These harmonists maintain that the word yom, translated day (very much like the English word day), is the most common Hebrew word for an indefinite period—as in the phrases, day of God’s wrath, day of His power, day of calamity, day of salvation, etc.; that it has three different meanings in the Mosaic account of creation—in chapter 1, verses 5 and 14, meaning first the period of light, and then the period of light and darkness, and in chapter ii., verse 4, meaning the whole creative week; that the first six days are God’s days of work, and the seventh His day of rest, which is not yet ended (Heb. 3 and 4); that the evening of the first day seems to have been the past eternity of darkness, while the morning of the seventh divine day, or Sabbath, has scarcely yet dawned upon the world, God still rested or ceasing from creation, but carrying on His Sabbath Day’s work of redemption; that God is eternal, and His days are long; that, “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years” (2 Pet. 3:8); that in the 90th Psalm, which was written by Moses, the author of Genesis, the inspired penman, just after speaking of the creation of the earth, declares that “a thousand years in God’s sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” that the days and weeks of prophecy (in Daniel and Revelation) are vast and extraordinary periods like those of creation; that the ineffable character of the creative days was asserted by early Christian writers long before geology was thought of; that there is no mention of a sun to divide the creative days until the fourth day, so that the last three, like the first three, must have been, not sun-divided, but God-divided days; that the language of the fourth commandment (Ex. 20:11) is but the repetition of the language of Genesis, and throws no light upon the meaning besides implying that man’s Sabbath should be like God’s, one-seventh of his week or working-time; and that, while God is almighty and could, therefore, have created all things instantaneously, He did not choose to do so, but took six days for the work, and those days, in accordance with the general vastness of the whole subject, may have been vast periods, in accordance with the indications of the fossiliferous rocky crust of the earth twenty miles in thickness, made by God, and full of the remains of long since extinct plants and animals. The latest and ablest writers of this class[15] consider the first and second creative days coincident with the azoic (lifeless) period of geology; the third and fourth creative days with the eozoic (dawn-life) period, the age of primitive plants; the fifth day coincident with the palaeozoic (ancient-life) and Mesozoic (middle-life) periods, the ages of mollusks, fishes, reptiles and birds; the sixth day, the Cenozoic (recent-life) period (or tertiary and quaternary), the age of mammals, including, at the close, the creation of man; the seventh day, the period of human history; and the eighth day, the period of the new heavens and new earth, the Sabbath or rest that remains to the people of God.

After Moses tells us that In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, he says: —And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Both in Scripture and in science, the earth is, of all worlds, the most important to us now, and therefore more is said about it than about any other. When first made the earth was a desolate, uninhabited and dark vaporous or aeriform or mass; and so would it have remained forever but for the omnipotent outgoing of God’s light-and-life-creating Spirit (Job 26:18; Ps. 104:30). That Spirit moved (or lovingly, cherishingly, vivifyingly hovered, brooded, throbbed) over the dark, dead, chaotic mass, and quickened and energized it. And God said, let there be light; and there was light. God’s Spirit and word cooperate in the work. Light is the immediate result of molecular activity, and is one of the most mysterious and glorious works of creation. Science does not yet know what light is. The prevailing undulatory theory is but a revival of the old Aristotelian notion, and even now in the so-called broad light of most the twentieth century of the Christian era, makes the most inadmissible demands upon our credulity in asking its to believe in the existence of an adamantine solid, called luminiferous ether, pervading all space and matter, and exerting upon each square inch a pressure of seventeen million million pounds (Stallo’s Modern Physics, pp. 115, 116). Persons who can believe such insane imaginations have no right to ridicule the faith of those who accept the truths of God’s written revelation. The Hebrew word Aur, translated light includes light, heat, and electricity, the three prime forces of matter. “Throughout the Scriptures light is not only good, but an emblem of a higher good—spiritual enlightenment.” God divided the light from the darkness, and called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and the evening and the morning were the first day. Darkness having preceded the light, evening is mentioned before morning. According to the divine arrangement, gravitation now began to act, so that the rotary motion of the earth around its axis was begun, and that part of the earth turned toward the source of light (perhaps the nebulous mass afterwards concentrated into the sun) had day, and, as the earth continued to rotate, a few hours afterwards the same part had darkness.[16] In Deuteronomy 4:19, and 17:3, the sun and moon and stars are called “the host of heaven.” These bodies are, therefore, included in the term “heaven” in the first verse of Genesis; and from the fact that heaven is mentioned first, as well as from Job 38:4-7, we infer that the sun and moon and stars were “created” before the earth, although not “made” or completed, and fitted for their proper functions, until the fourth day. This view is confirmed by the use of Bara (create) in the first verse, but of Asah (make or form) in the sixteenth verse. It is the opinion of the most of scientific men, as expressed in the nebular hypothesis, that the entire solar system was at first one incandescent mass, which by rotation threw off rings that formed planets and satellites; and the latter, being smaller, became cool and opaque, while the central mass remained hot and luminous, and was gradually condensed into the sun. The thick waters (verse second) or watery or nebulous clouds or photosphere around the earth at that early period, such as are still around the distant major planets of the solar system, made the space near the earth barely translucent to the feeble light of the unformed or uncondensed sun—that space not becoming transparent to the solar light, or the earth not sufficiently cooling and its photosphere not disappearing, and the heavenly bodies not becoming visible in the firmament, until the work of the second and third days was finished, and the sun and moon were completed on the fourth day.

On the second day God made the firmament, and divided the waters above from the waters below, and called the firmament heaven. Rakia, translated firmament (from raka, to spread out), signifies, not solidity[17] but an expanse—the atmosphere—in which fowls fly (verse 20). The earth being still intensely heated, the lower strata of air became warmer and lighter than the upper, and continually ascended, and, becoming cooler, deposited their invisible vapor in the form of visible mist or cloud, while between these clouds and the surface of the earth there was a stratum of clear air; and the earth radiating its heat into space, and cooling, and crusting over, much of the moisture was deposited, in the form of water, on its solid surface. Some think that the work of the second day was the individualizing of the earth, or the making it an independent sphere, by separating it from the general mass of the solar system. Many able physicists believe that the ether supposed to fill the interplanetary spaces is merely an excessive expansion and attenuation of the atmospheres and aqueous vapors of the planets.

On the third day God collected the waters previously covering the surface of the globe into seas, and made the dry land or earth appear, and caused the earth to bring forth vegetation. From Job 38:7 and Psalm 104:6-9, as well as from science, we infer that, by the action of subterraneous forces, God uplifted the lower sedimentary (Azoic) rocks where He designed to make continents, and depressed them into vast hollows where He designed to make oceans and seas, and the water all over the earth ran into these basins, while the dry land was left to itself. Then God caused the earth to bring forth grasses, herbs, and trees[18]—the three divisions of the vegetable kingdom—each species distinct from its kind, and having its seed in itself for future propagation. The language of Moses here is in strict accordance with scientific facts, though opposed to the evolutionary theories of a false science (1 Tim. 6:20). According to all human observation, each species of vegetable (as well as of animal) life is distinct—is “permanently reproductive, variable within narrow limits, but incapable of permanent intermixture with other species.” We learn from Genesis 2:4, 5, that God, the author of life, created the life of each vegetable before it was in the earth.[19] All life comes directly from Him in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:25, 28). Science sustains Moses in representing plants to have been created before animals. For the lowest stratified rocks contain large quantities of organic limestone and graphite-carbon, results of plant life; the cooling earth was at first more fitted for plants than animals; vegetation was needed to rid the atmosphere of an excess of carbonic acid, and supply its place with oxygen for animals; and vegetation is the necessary food of animals. (Dana’s Manual of Geology).

On the fourth day God is said by Moses, not to have “created” (Bara), but to have “made” (Asah), that is, formed and prepared, the sun, moon and stars, for two great purposes—to give light and to divide time. He “created” (Bara) the heaven, or heavenly bodies, “in the beginning;” but they were not completed for their present functions till the fourth day, at which time the atmosphere was so purified as to be transparent, or the photosphere of the earth almost disappeared, and the sun and moon and stars were clearly visible in the sky. The word “made” is supplied before “the stars;” and the reference seems parenthetical. Why this work was postponed to the fourth day, we do not know, says Prof. Taylor Lewis any more than why Christ’s advent was postponed to the fourth millennium of man’s history, or why so large a part of the earth is even now a desert or a watery waste, and still a moral chaos. The light of the solar system is not even yet wholly concentrated into the sun, but much of it streams out, in his chromosphere and then in his corona, nearly two millions of miles from his surface. Not only were the heavenly bodies intended by the Creator to give us light, but to be our standard measures of time, dividing it into days and months and seasons[20] and years, a most important use for all the duties and relations of life. Moses dwells more upon the formation of the heavenly bodies than of any other object besides man—probably to teach us that, although the sun, moon and stars are the most splendid objects that we behold, still they are not gods to be worshiped (Deut. 4:19 and 17:3), but are the creatures, like all other things, of the great invisible God, who made them, in part, at least, for the benefit of man, and who absolutely controls them according to His sovereign will and pleasure. In the language of the Psalmist, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork.” (Ps. 19:1). “They continue this day according to His ordinances; for all are His servants” (Ps. 119:91). The heavenly bodies were made by God for “signs” also. In their steadfast and permanent radiance, they are glorious emblems of the permanence and steadfastness of their Creator’s grace towards all His covenant people (Jer. 31:35-37; Ps. 72:5; 84:11; 89:36, 37; Isa. 60:20; Mal. 4:2; Matthew 8:43; 2 Cor. 4:6; Rev. 1:16).

On the fifth day God caused the waters to bring forth fish and reptiles, and formed out of the ground (Gen. 2:19) fouls to fly in the open heaven—these being the lower forms of animal life. “Moving creature is more properly rendered, in the margin,”creeping” creature, or reptile; and “let fowl fly above the earth” is the more correct marginal rendering (in verse 20). For the second time in this chapter, the word “created” (Bara) is used, and now in reference to the great forms of animal life, such as the huge saurian reptiles, especially the crocodile. (Here rendered “whales,” but elsewhere, in the Old Testament, rendered “serpents,” “dragons,” and meaning crocodile in at least two passages (Ezek. 29:3 and 32:2). Moses was familiar with the degrading Egyptian worship of the crocodile, and therefore here takes especial occasion to declare that this animal, instead of being a god, is, like all other great animal monsters, but “an humble creature” of the true God. From a critical examination of the language of Moses, and from scientific knowledge, President Dawson concludes that “the prolific animals of the fifth day’s creation belonged to the three Cuvierian sub-kingdoms of the Radiate, Articulata and Mollusca, and to the classes of fish and reptiles[21] among the vertebrata.” Birds also were then first created. Their numerous footsteps and skeletons are first found in the Oolitic and Wealden rocks of the reptilian age, or mesozoic period. The miraculous accuracy of Moses may be clearly seen by a comparison of his narrative, at this point, with the latest works on geology. Only the God who created birds could have inspired Moses to tell exactly when they were created. “The Creator, on the fifth day, recognizes the introduction of sentient, animal life by blessing this new work of his hands.” During the period of the fifth day, “in the warm and moist atmosphere, overcharged with carbonic acid gas, humble cryptogams attained to the size of stately forest trees, and luxuriant ferns and kindred plants, being slowly submerged by oscillations of the land and covered with deposits of mud and sand, were transformed into coal; and thus the land being repeatedly and slowly raised and submerged, and numerous other similar forests growing and being carbonized, the vast, coal-beds so precious to civilized man were formed. In this manner, also, the carbonic acid gas of the atmosphere was fixed in the coal-beds, and the oxygen was returned to the atmosphere for the furtherance of animal life.”

On the sixth day God caused the earth to bring forth the land animals, especially the herbivorous and carnivorous mammalia, or quadrupeds, a higher order of animals than those made on the fifth day; and afterwards, on the same (sixth) day, He created (Bara) man in His own image, and made him, under the Supreme Lawgiver, the delegated ruler of this lower world. In the tertiary rocks of the cenozoic period we see the gigantic skeletons of megatheria, mammoths, mastodons and elephantine marsupials; and then, in the post-tertiary or quaternary rocks of the same period, with no chaotic upheaval, it being still the sixth day, we find the remains of men. Thus again is Moses supported by the facts of geology.

Vegetation and all the inferior animals were “brought forth” by the word of God “from the earth” or “the waters” (Gen. 1:11, 12, 20, 21, 24, 25; 2:19); so that, when they die, not only their body but their life or spirit returns to its earthly origin (Eccl. 3:21). But, though God formed man’s body from the dust of the ground, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul (Gen. 2:7). This makes an ineffaceable distinction between man and all other earthly creatures; the Almighty and Everlasting Father of spirits directly breathed into man a higher life or spirit; and, though the body, according to the penalty of the violated law of God, returns to the dust, his spirit, at death, return unto God who gave it (Eccl. 22:7; Luke 3:38).[22]

The everlasting duration of the human spirit (which is hereafter to inhabit the resurrection body, Job 19:25-27; Ps. 49:15; Isa. 26:19; Dan. 22:1-3; Matthew 5:29; 10:28; 27:52, 53; John 5:28, 29; Acts 2:25-34; 13:34; Rom. 8:11, 22, 23; Phil. 3:20, 21; 1 Thess. 4:13-17; 1 Cor. 15:12-57) is also to be inferred from the fact that man was “created” (Bara, indicating something new) in God’s image, as well as from his reason, conscience, religious sentiment, hopes, intuitions and aspirations, and especially from God’s covenant :with man, which raised him above the physical world, and brought him nigh to God (Gen. 2:16, 17; Matthew 22:31, 32). The fact of man’s great superiority to all other earthly creatures is to be inferred also from the divine deliberation—Let us make men (Gen. 1:26). The plural number here is thought by some to be the plural of majesty or dignity; by the Jews it is thought to refer to God’s addressing the angels as His companions, or the earth as being the source of man’s body, while God gave him His Spirit; but, by most of Christian scholars, it is thought to denote the deliberation of the Divine Trinity (see Gen. 3:22; 11:7).[23]

God created but one pair of human beings, and the Bible everywhere implies but one human species (Gen. 1:27; 2:7, 8, 15, 18, 21-24; Deut. 32:8; Matthew 19:4; Acts 17:26; Rom. 5:14, 19; 1 Cor. 15:22). And so the entire drift of present science tends to establish the unity of the human race, and the perfect truthfulness of the scriptural doctrine. The confusion of tongues at Babel (Gen. 11:1-9), the consequent dispersion of men all over the earth, differences of climate, soil, exposure, food, habits and surroundings, continued for hundreds and thousands of years, have produced the differences between the varieties of the human race.[24] The close affinities, physical, mental and moral, of all the human family; the fertile inter-marriages of all the varieties of the race; and the fact that greater differences have occurred in the same species of domestic animals than exist between the different varieties of mankind, confirm the unity of the human race. As may be seen by an observant traveler, passing from district to district, and from country to country, there are, between all the divergences, innumerable and almost indistinguishable blendings. All mankind are descendants of Adam; all sinned and fell in him; all are conscious of their accountability to a higher power; and, as sung by the church in glory (Rev. 5:9), some have been redeemed by Christ “out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”

The most recent and careful investigations also prove that the great antiquity (from twenty to a hundred thousand years) heretofore claimed for man by geologists, ethnologists and philologists, is not sustained by the facts any more than it is by Genesis; a few thousand years (seven or eight at the most) are all that are needed to measure man’s duration on earth, according to both the scriptural and the scientific records. That man was the last created of all earthly organized beings is the clear demonstration of geology, as much as it is of Scripture. Ussher’s chronology, which generally follows the Hebrew text, and which, by the order of the British Parliament, appears in the margin of English Bibles, reckons 4,004 years from the creation of Adam to the birth of Christ. As this system is almost universally employed in history, we use it in this work. But it is proper to state that the Scripture nowhere gives us any direct information on this subject. Any chronology of primitive times is, therefore, inferential; and there are some 200 different computations of the period between Adam and Christ, varying front 3,316 to 6,984 years. The length of the period from the creation to the flood is calculated by adding together the ages of the patriarchs at the time of the birth of their oldest, sons, or heirs; but the numbers in the Hebrew text would thus give 1,656 years; the Samaritan,[25] 1307 years; and the Septuagint, 2,262 years, for the length of this period. “Nothing in ancient manuscripts,” says Prof. G. Rawlinson, “is so liable to corruption, from mistakes of copyists, as numbers.” Letters, which were easily mistaken by copyists, were originally written for numbers. “Genealogies,” says Fausset, “are clear measures of time only when complete; but the Jewish genealogies, as published, were frequently abbreviated, the object not being chronology, but to mark ramifications of family and tribal relationship.” The word son was commonly used for descendant.

As shown by Principal Samuel Kinns, of Highbury New Park College, England, in his Harmony of the Bible with Science, the following order of fifteen creative events, as taught by science, corresponds with the order given by Moses: 1. The creation of the heavens, and heavenly bodies, before the earth. 2. The appearance of light as the divinely produced result of chemical action and nebulous condensation. 3. The formation of air and water by the combination of gases surrounding the earth. 4. After the formation of the older rocks under the water, their upheaval, in many places, above the universal sea, forming the dry land. 5. The sprouting forth of the lowest forms of vegetable life, the cryptogamous algae, lichens, fungi, ferns and mosses, propagated by spores and not by seeds—translated grass in our version. 6. The appearance of the lowest class of phaenogams, or flowering plants, called gymnosperms, from having naked seeds, such as the conifers—translated, in our version, the herb yielding seed. 7. The appearance of a higher class of phaenogams, with nut-like seeds in fleshy envelopes, found in the middle Devonian and Carboniferous strata—translated, in our version, the fruit-tree yielding fruit (the higher order of fruit trees appearing when “God planted a, garden” later on (Gen. 2:8). 8. The clearing away of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere and of the heavy vaporous clouds, and the appointment of the sun and moon for lights, signs and seasons, days and years. 9. The swarming of the waters with numerous forms of life. 10. The creation of the gigantic saurian reptiles. 11. The teaming of the earth with winged fowl. 12. The appearance of the mammoth beasts of the earth. 13. The appearance of cattle, or the domestic animals. 14. The appearance of the principal flowers, fruit-trees and cereals (Gen. 1:29)—called in Genesis 2:8, the planting of a garden. 15. The creation of man; after which God ended His work of creation, no new species of plants or animals having appeared since the creation of man.

Now the number of possible permutations in 15 is found by multiplying together the series of natural numbers from 1 to 15 inclusive, the product of which is 1,307,674,868,000; so that there may be about one-and-one-third trillion changes in the order of 15 events. And, as Moses records 15 creative events in the very same order as modern science, and that too 3,000 years before the birth of modern science, even natural reason would say that there are one-and-a-third trillion probabilities that Moses was infallibly directed in his narrative by God, to one probability that he was not so directed. With knowledge of these momentous facts, can any sane mind doubt the divine inspiration of Moses?

It should be carefully noted that in the Mosaic or inspired account of creation, God is continuously active, and does all the work. “The idea of God creating the universe as a perfect machine, acting automatically throughout the ages, according to laws established by Himself, whose government He gives up, is entirely absent,” says Prof. A. Guyot; and he declares that this representation of the continual activity of God in the creation is in perfect accord with the latest and most accurate science. See his last work, on “Creation.”

“In the Mosaic record of creation,” says Prof. James D. Dana (in his Manual of Geology, pp. 743-6), “we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed. The account recognizes in creation two great eras of three days each—an inorganic and an organic. Each of these eras opens with the appearance of light; the first, light cosmical; the second, light from the sun for the special uses of the earth. Each era ends in a day of two great works—the two shown to be distinct by being severally pronounced ‘good.’ On the third day, that closing the inorganic era, there was first the dividing of the land from the waters, and afterwards the creation of vegetation, or the institution of a kingdom of life—a work widely diverse from all that preceded it in the era. So on the sixth day, terminating the organic era, there was first the creation of mammals, and then a second far greater work, totally new in its grandest element, the creation of man.” The arrangement is then, as follows:

I. The Inorganic Era

First Day—Light cosmical.
Second Day—The earth divided from the fluid around it, or individualized.
Third Day—1. Outlining of the land and water; 2. creation of vegetation.

II. The Organic Era

Fourth Day—Light from the sun.
Fifth Day—Creation of the lower order of animals.
Sixth Day—1. Creation of mammals; 2. creation of man.

“The record in the Bible,” adds Prof. Dana, “is therefore profoundly philosophical in the scheme of creation which it presents. It is both true and divine. It is a declaration of authorship, both of creation and the Bible, on the first page of the sacred volume.”

“The natural was first, and the spiritual afterward,” says the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 15:46.) Both are the work of the same unchangeable God; and, therefore, the natural resembles, and is typical of, the spiritual (Ps. 51:10; Isa. 43:15; 60:2; 65:16, 18; Mal. 4:2; Matthew 13:1-23; Acts 26:13; Eph. 2:10; 4:24; 2 Cor. 4:6; 5:17; Gal. 6:15). The first chapter of Genesis, then, in its spiritual application, teaches us the absolute dependence of man upon the Triune God (Father, Word and Spirit) for salvation. The almighty power of the Most High must create him anew; the sovereign efficacy of the Spirit of Love must move upon his dark, disordered heart; and the all-healing beams of the Sun of Righteousness must arise upon his redeemed and penitent spirit. The divine command has gone forth (Ps. 33:9) for him to be fruitful in good works (Gen. 1:28; John 15:16); the indwelling Spirit of Christ enables him to obey from the heart (Gal. 4:6; Ps. 37:31; Jer. 31:33), and to bear—“some thirty, some sixty, and some a hundred-fold”—the fruit of “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance” (Gal. 5:22, 23). These fruits of the Spirit are not the cause, but the result of his spiritual renewal (Isa. 55:8-13); the tree having been made good, the fruit is good (Matthew 7:17). He does not depend upon any works of his own for salvations, (Matthew 25:37-39); being born of God, he believes that Jesus is the Christ (1 John. 5:1), and, believing in the finished righteousness of Christ as his own (Jer. 23:6; John 19:30), he enters into Sabbath, or rest (Heb. 4:3; Gen. 2:1-3). Being married to Christ, or alive unto God, he is dead to the law (Gen. 2:18; Rom. 7:4; Gal. 2:19); and he serves in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter (Rom. 7:6; Gal. 2:20; 2 Cor. 3:6-18), loving God because He first loved him (1 John 4:19), and loving those who bear His image (1 John 5:1), and thus truly fulfilling the law (Rom. 3:31; 13:10), and bringing forth fruit unto God (Rom. 7:4). Yet, during all the days of his earthly sojourn, while the old man abides with the new, there will be an alternation of darkness and light, of evening and morning, to keep him properly humble (Deut. 8:1-16), to remind him of ” the pit whence he was digged” (Isa. 51:1; Ps. 40:1-3) and of the divine origin of all his strength and righteousness and comfort (Isa. 45:24; 49:13). But he has been new-created in the image of the Son of God (Gen. 1:26; Rom. 8:28-39); formed from the pierced side of Christ in His death-sleep, he is united to Him by faith (Gen. 2:21-24; John 19:34; Eph. 5:23-32); and the all-giving and all-sufficient grace of the electing and justifying Father, and the dying and redeeming Son, and the quickening and sanctifying Spirit, shall abide with him through all his days and nights, his trials and changes, and shall bring him off more than conqueror at last over every creature-foe, and perfect the good work begun in him (Ps. 138:8; Phil. 1:6; Heb. 12:2; Rev. 1:8), and give him complete dominion over his redeemed body and spirit (Gen. 1:28; Rom. 8:23; Isa. 35:10; 53:11), and conform him entirely to the likeness of his Redeemer (Ps. 17:15; Phil. 3:21), and dispel forever the last shadow of darkness and sorrow (Isa. 60:18-20; Rev. 21:25), and translate him, amid the inconceivable glories of an eternal Sabbath (Gen. 2:1-3; Heb. 4:9), to the Heavenly Paradise (Gen. 2:8-10; Rev. 2:7; Matthew 25:34), where God shall dwell with him, and wipe away all tears from his eyes (Rev. 21:3, 4), banishing forever all the evils of the earthly Eden, temptation, and sin and sorrow, and death, elevating him to beauties and splendors and joys never imagined on earth (1 Cor. 2:9; Rev. 21:1-22), pouring into his soul the uncreated and unclouded brightness of the divine nature (Rev. 21:23-25), and giving him to abide eternally in the Lamb of Life, with all whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, beside the crystal River of Life, beneath the perennial Tree of Life (John 10:28; Rev. 21:27; 22:1-2), where, as a king and priest unto God and his Father, he shall reign forever and ever. (Rev. 1:6; 22:5).

What a strong consolation is afforded in these blessed and infallible promises to every poor, humble, contrite, mourning children of Adam, weary with a sense of sin, and thirsting to drink of the pure fountain of life, and to be washed from all his defilement in the cleansing blood of Christ, and made whiter than snow! It is a truth more certain than all the perceptions of sense and all the demonstrations of mathematics, that every such child of God, thus born of the Divine Spirit, and consequently exercised by spiritual desires, shall be entirely purified from sin, and shall reach eternal joys in the presence of his God and Father (Ps. 103:13-18; 144:1-31; 136:1-26; Isa. 41:10-20; 54:5-10, 17; 55:1-13; 57:15; Jer. 32:37-41; Mal. 3:6, 16-18; Matthew 5:3-6; John 4:10-14; 10:27-29; Jam. 1:17; 1 Pet. 1:1-5; Rev. 22:17).

On the seventh day, as Moses informs us (Gen. 2:1-3), God ended and rested from His work of creation, and, therefore, blessed and sanctified that day. Science confirms this statement, and declares that no new species of vegetable or animal has appeared on earth since the introduction of man. In saying that God “rested,” the historian does not mean that “the everlasting Creator” was “weary” (Isa. 40:23), but that He simply ceased from the work of the material creation on earth. That cessation, or divine Sabbath, yet continues; God still, however, carries on His Sabbath-day’s work of providence and redemption (John 5:17; Heb. 1:3). “His resources are infinite; not baffled by the fall of man, He proceeds, according to His eternal purpose, to work out the grand plan of redemption. After a dark evening and night of 4,000 years, the Sun of Righteousness at length arose, and began to dispel the gloom; but, after the lapse of nearly nineteen centuries, we still see but the gray dawn of God’s Sabbath morning, which we yet firmly believe will brighten into a glorious day that shall know no succeeding night” (Rev. 11:15; 21:25).

As man was made in the image of His Creator, he, too, was, according to the divine arrangement, to work six days, and then rest from his ordinary bodily and mental labors on the seventh day (Gen. 1:28; 2:15; Ex. 16:22-26; 20:8-11), and to “sanctify” or set apart that day from a common to a sacred use by devoting it especially to the worship of his Maker (Lev. 10:11; 19:30; 23:3; Deut. 33:10; Luke 4:16; Acts 13:14, 15, 27; 15:2l).[26] “The Sabbath was made for man,” says the Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:27); if properly observed, it would be a blessing to the whole human race. Man needs, not only the night for rest, but one-sevenths of his days also for rest. As proved by both physiology and history, this rest exercises a most beneficial influence on man’s physical, mental and moral nature. A change of employment is a rest; as God devotes His Sabbath to the work of providence and redemption, so it is a great blessing to man to have a frequently and regularly recurring day for solemn reflections upon his relations and obligations to his Creator and fellow-creatures, and upon his eternal interests. Still, “man was not made for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27); he is not to idolize the Sabbath, or observe it in the oldness of the letter, with pharisaical rigidity and hypocrisy[27] (Isa. 1:13; Matthew 12:1-14; Mark 2:23-28; Luke 13:11-17; John 7:22-24; Rom. 14:5, 6; Col. 2:16; Gal. 4:9-11). The Christian is especially to remember that the Sabbath is but a shadow or type, of which Christ is the substance (Col. 2:17; Heb. 3 and 4), who ended the work of His eternal redemption by rising from the dead on the Lord’s Day (Matthew 28:1-6; Heb. 9:12; Rev. 1:10); and as a “holy priest” should he evermore offer up to his adorable Redeemer the spiritual sacrifices of heartfelt thanksgiving and praise (1 Pet. 2:5; Ps. 103:1-5; 108:1-32; 1 Thess. 5:16-18).[28]

Christ particularly honored the first day of the week, not only by rising from the dead on that day, but also by repeatedly visiting His disciples, after His resurrection, on that day (John 20:19, 26). The Apostles, too, it would seem, habitually assembled on that day (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:1, 2; Acts 2:1.) The day of Pentecost; was the first day of the week, because it was the fiftieth day after the resurrection of Christ, which took plaice on the first day of the week. Without any formal commandment in the New Testament, but no doubt by Divine arrangement (Eph. 1:10-13), ever since the resurrection of Christ, the Christian church, delighting to honor their Lord, has observed the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, as the Sabbath, or Holy Convocation, Day of the New Dispensation;[29] but Christian forbearance on this subject is inculcated in Romans 14:5, 6, and Colossians 2:16, 17.

The division of time into weeks, even among the patriarchs, is shown by Genesis 8:10, 12; 29:27, 28.

With the Israelites, not only the seventh day, but the seventh week, and seventh month, and seventh year, and seventh septenary of years, were, by Divine appointment, peculiarly sacred (Deut. 16:9-12; Lev. 16:29-34; 25:1-55). Seven is the representative sacred number of the Scriptures, and is the symbol of Divine completeness, and marks a Divine work, in judgment, or mercy, or revelation (Gen. 4:24; 7:4; Rev. 1:4, 12, 13, 20; 2:1; 5:1, &c.)[30]

In the sacred narrative of creation, we witness the gradation from dust and grass to man. How wonderful the series! And, at each progressive step, everything is pronounced good by the beneficent Creator, as showing beauty and perfection in itself, as well as pleasure and satisfaction in His own mind.

What a spectacle then was there for angels to behold—this noble, erect, God-like being, the creature man, swaying his sceptre over this beautiful new-made world, which his Maker had given him to possess and enjoy! Compare it with the condition of things since the fall, and great will be the contrast.

As this lord of the lower creation stood forth gazing on the universe spread out before him, he contained his wife in his side and the countless billions of the human race in his loins. He named[31] the cattle and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the fields as his Maker presented them to him. Thus was his divinely given power of observation and of speech brought into exercise; and he was also taught his need of a suitable companion, which neither himself nor any of his inferior earth-derived fellow creatures could supply. They had been produced by God entirely from earthly materials; but he had been animated by the Divine Spirit and formed in the image of his Maker.

In what respect was man in the image of God, and in what respect was he not in the image of God? He could not be like Him in body, because God is a Spirit and has no body. Man’s body, though beautiful and the topmost piece of the material creation, being the sum and crown and glory of all, yet was made of the dust of the ground of pre-existing matter—was of the earth earthy, and unto dust must return. No image of God here.[32] But in his soul or spirit he could, and no doubt was, in the image of God. “His spirit, like that of the angels, was an immediate creation of God. His ‘breath of life’ was, as it appears, more than a mere quickening principle, a vital force, enabling the man as a mere animal to move and perform acts of natural life; but it embraced much more than this—even a rational, ever-enduring, and accountable spirit, now mysteriously united to his animal nature, over which it is to preside and rule. The body with all its powers and members is but the instrument of the soul, a tabernacle in which it dwells, while conversant with this lower world (Gen. 2:7; 3:19; Eccl. 12:7; Acts 7:59; Matthew 10:28). And it was in this, his soul or spiritual nature that man was made like God. God is a Spirit, and man in one sense is a spirit (Heb. 12:9, 23). Yet we do not regard this as an emanation or efflux from God Himself; it is not a part of the divine nature or essence, but is a created dependent sprit, distinct from God, yet partaking of His likeness as a spirit, in its measure.”—C. C. Jones, in “History of Church of God.”

The respects in which man was made in the image or resemblance of God were: the possession of a soul or spirit, which, by the sovereign will and sustaining power of God, was to endure forever; intelligence; self-consciousness; free will (before the fall); uprightness; and dominion over the inferior creatures.

But Adam[33] was alone: “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helpmeet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam’, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs,[34] and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.[35] Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed’ (Gen. 2:18, 21-25).

Thus was the institution of marriage ordained and carried into successful operation by the Almighty, who gave Eve to Adam for his wife. And as it was in the beginning, so it should be now and onward, to the end of time, throughout the world, one woman for one man—one man for one woman—united in the holy bonds of wedlock, at marriageable ages. “The providence of God is in harmony with His word, and this blessed arrangement since, in a most wonderful manner, He keeps up, in the natural increase of the race, the numerical equality of the sexes, at marriageable ages, and that over the whole earth and ever since its foundation; and then continually stretches out His hand against transgressors, who by multiplying wives would disturb this great law; and He subjects them to sure evils in the form of family divisions and strifes, bitter wrath and cruel revenge, diseases, sudden and shameful deaths, ungoverned and wicked offspring, decayed fortunes, and various other judgments” (Gen. 4:23, 24; 16:1-16; 30:1-27; 37:1-36; 29:1-38; and chapters 6, 7, etc.

“The design of marriage is to promote the comfort and happiness of mankind, the legitimate propagation of our species, the perpetuation of a virtuous, honorable seed in the church, and purity of life and manners on the earth.” —C. C. Jones. This law was frequently violated in the patriarchal and Mosaic dispensations, and during the Christian dispensation it has been set at naught by Roman Catholics, Mohammedans and Mormons; but our Lord Jesus Christ strictly enjoins its observance, and points to the first couple as an example for all future generations (Matthew 19:3-9). They who violate this law must receive the penalty due to their crimes.

1. The leading Scriptures referring to the Creation are: (Job .38-41; Ps. 8, 19, 104: Prov. 7:22-31: Isa. 11:12-31; John 3:1-10; Col. 1:16, 17: Heb. 1:2, 3: 11:3). The following Scriptures tell us what God did before the Creation: (Matthew 25:34; Eph. 1:4; 2 Tim. 1:9).

2. Trinitarianism is essentially distinct from Tritheism, the first affirming the Three-Oneness of God, and the second declaring that there are Three Gods. No Christian can be a Tritheist. The Oneness of God is the most certain fact and the most prominent article of revelation in all the book of Scripture and the book of Nature; yet the Three-fold nature of this Oneness—the Trinity or Three-Oneness of God—is the second most prominent and important fact revealed in the Scriptures. It would be of no consequence to me that the great body of God’s people from the beginning of the Christian era have held this doctrine, that all the oldest Baptist Confessions of Faith declare a belief in the Trinity of God, that ninety-nine-hundredths of the Primitive Baptists in the United States believe it or even that my father believed it—if I did not think the doctrine to be unmistakably taught in the Scriptures. The doctrine of the Trinity is obscurely revealed from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Malachi, and it is clearly revealed from the first of Matthew to the last of Revelation. It underlies and penetrates the whole of Christian experience from its beginning in the past eternity to its consummation in the eternity to come. The entire cause of the poor sinner’s salvation is the electing love of God the rather, the redeeming love of God the Son, and the regenerating love of God the Spirit. Thirty times in the first chapter of Genesis—twenty-two hundred times in the Old Testament—is the plurality of the divine nature declared by the use of the word Elohim (which literally means The Mighty Ones) as the name of God (Elohim being the plural form of El, The Mighty One—not the dual form, meaning but two or a pair, but plural, and the simplest plural oneness that is not two-fold is three-fold), and in all these instances, where Elohim, referring to God, is the subject of a verb, or where a pronoun is used in reference to Elohim (except rarely, when there is an allusion to polytheism), the verb and pronoun are in the singular number, proving the unity or oneness of the Divine Plurality, as is also proved by the plural noun Elohim being combined with the singular noun Jehovah (the two names together being translated Lord God), twenty times in the second and third chapters of Genesis, and nearly three hundred times in the Old Testament. The plural unity of the divine nature is further shown by Genesis 1:26; 3:22; 11:7; Isaiah 6:3, 8; Numbers 6:24, 26, compared with 2 Corinthians 13:14; Exodus 3:2, 6; Psalms 2; 45:6, 7: 110; Isaiah 9:6, Jeremiah 23:6; Zechariah 12:10: 13:7: Malachi 3:1-4, compared with Matthew 3:11-12; Genesis 1:2; 6:3; Psalms 104:30; 139:7; Job 26:13; Isaiah 48:16; Matthew 1:18-25; 3:13-17; 28:19; John 15:26; 1 John 5:7; Revelation 1:5, 6, 10; 22:1, 3, 17. It is not strictly Scriptural language to say that there are three persons in the Godhead, although the primitive meaning of the term person is character, and it seems to me being “wise above what is written” to say that the Three-Oneness of God Is a Three-Oneness, not of inward nature, but only of outward manifestation. God is unchangeably the same in both time and eternity. Christ says that there is an otherness as well as a oneness in the Godhead (John 14:9, 16, 28); and, unless this language of Christ be true, I fail utterly to see how there can be a real Father, a real Son and a real Spirit proceeding from Father and Son; how the Father could send the Son and the Spirit into the world; how the Son could pray to the Father and be answered by the Father; how Christ could use the pronoun “I” in reference to Himself, and “Thou” in reference to the Father, and “He” in reference to the Spirit; how, while Jesus was being baptized in Jordan, the Spirit descended as a dove upon Him, and the Father spoke to Him from heaven; how Christ could require His disciples to baptize believers in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit: and how, after He re-ascended to glory, He could sit down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. These facts thoroughly satisfy my mind that there is an eternal Threeness as well as an eternal Oneness in the divine nature—that there is something resembling a personal distinction between Father and Son and Spirit, while the distinction is not the same as that generally understood between persons, because Father and Son and Spirit are one. The nature of the Divine Being is the deepest mystery all the universe, and it eminently becomes all finite, fallible, and fallen creatures like ourselves, not to speculate upon the existence of the incomprehensible God—much less to persecute other mortals who cannot exactly pronounce our own favorite shibboleths on this unfathomable subject; but to receive with childlike meekness and faith all that is revealed in the Scriptures in reference to God, our Heavenly Father, our Elder Brother, and our Blessed Comforter. We cannot understand how the Lord Jesus Christ can be at the same time, perfect man and perfect God; yet we believe in this duality of His nature. We cannot understand, though we are quite conscious of the two fold elements of our own nature, soul and body. In our present state, we understand nothing perfectly— we only know in part; but this does not prevent our believing thousands of facts, all of which are perfectly understood. We no more understand the eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience of God than we understand the Trinity of His being: but still we believe all these to be attributes of the Most High. “The doctrine of the Trinity,” says Prof. Philip Schaff, the most accurate and reliable of uninspired church historians, “has been looked upon in all ages as the sacred symbol and the fundamental doctrine of the Christian church, with the denial of which the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the divine character of the work of redemption and sanctification, fall to the ground. It distinguishes in the one and indivisible essence of God three hypostases or persons; at the same time allowing for the insufficiency of all human conception and words to describe such an unfathomable mystery. Sabellius is by far the most original, profound and ingenious of the ante-Nicene Unitarians, and his system the most plausible rival of orthodox Trinitarianism (it is also the least objectionable form of Unitarianism.) It revives from time to time in various modifications. It differs from the orthodox standard mainly in denying the trinity of essence and the permanence of the trinity of manifestation; making Father, Son and Holy Ghost only temporary phenomena, which fulfill their mission and return into the abstract monad.” A very few of our highly esteemed ministers and brethren seem to favor something like this view: but I do not believe that it is the view of one in a hundred of the Primitive Baptists in the United States.

3. In all things, Christ must have the preeminence (Col. 1:18).

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Nineteenth-century Agnosticism (or religious know-nothingism) was first suggested in the antinomies of Kant, and was first taught in England by two ardent philosophic theists, Hamilton and Mansel, in the ethical spirit of Kant, but, as President Porter well remarks, has been travestied, materialized and demoralized by Spencer. Agnostic philosophy has as much reason to pronounce the mind of man unknown and unknowable because it cannot be discovered by scientific instruments, as to pronounce God unknown and unknowable because He cannot be so discovered. A real, an intelligent, and a morally-governed universe points unmistakably to a real, an intelligent and a moral Creator and Governor. A child may know something truly of God, but an angel cannot know Him fully. “They who know the least of him,” admirably remarks President McCosh, “have in this the most valuable of all knowledge; they who know the most know but little after all of his glorious perfections.” In the hands of a few inaccurate, dogmatic and unreliable leaders, and their weak, ignorant and credulous followers, Agnosticism (know-nothingism) has turned into Gnosticism, or Pan-Gnosticism (know-all-ism), whose arrogant pretensions to omniscience are, in the minds of all thinking men, as ridiculous as they are incredible.

7. In all things, Christ must have the pre-eminence (Col. 1:18).

8. Ibid.

9. Three of the other oldest divine names in Genesis are El Olam (the Eternal), El Shaddai (the Omnipresent), and El Elioun (the Most High), corresponding to time, space and decree.

10. The theories of the various authors of Genesis, as based on the use of the two names, Elohim and Jehovah, are full of self-contradiction, absurdity and impossibility. —McCaul in Aids to Faith, pp. 220-8: Lange’s Genesis, pp. 105-9.

11. This incommunicable name of the God of Israel the Jews feared to pronounce, and called it simply “the name,” or “the name of four letters” (yodh he vav he), “the great and terrible name,” “the peculiar name,” “the separate name,” and shem hammephorash, “the name revealed.” In reading, they always substituted for it the word Adonai, Lord.

12. Notwithstanding the Moon’s phases, or changes of appearance, caused by her roundness, opacity derivation of all her light from the Sun, and her monthly rotation upon her axis, she is probably the most fixed, unchanging conservative body in nature—so should the church be; notwithstanding her frequent changes of frames and feelings, still her doctrine and practice and devotion to the cause of God should be absolutely unchangeable. While the Sun causes the purifying currents of the air, the Moon is the chief cause of the tidal ocean waves which constantly cleanse the inpouring rivers of their pollutions. This office of an ever-active sanitary commission is one of the most important functions that the Moon subserves towards the earth—so the church, like the salt of the earth, should keep her garments unspotted from the world and thus exercise a salutary influence upon those without. Her light, which all comes from the Sun of Righteousness, should shine in the night of the world, so that men may see her good works, anal glorify her Father in heaven.

13. The phrase “created and made” (Bara and Asah) in Genesis 2:3, proves conclusively that these words do not mean the same thing. The literal rendering of the Hebrew, as given in the margin, is “created to make,” that is, produced out of nothing (Bara) in order to form or fashion or prepare (Asah).

14. The word “heaven,” in Luke 10:18 and Revelation 12:7, is believed by the best scholars to refer, not to the glorified state, but to the church militant.

15. See Guyot’s Creation, Dana’s Dana’s of Geology, Dawson’s Origin of the World, and Taylor Lewis’s Six Days of Creation.

16. Some suppose that the light of the first three days was entirely cosmical or worldly, the result and sign of terrestrial chemical action, the earth being, during the most of that time, intensely heated and self-luminous; and that, by the alternation of darkness and light on those days, the sacred historian, speaking anticipatively, means that that rotation of the earth on its axis was then carried on, which after the appearance of the sun on the fourth day produced the alternation of night and day.

17. The phenomenal appropriateness of even the old Greek and Latin translations of rakia (stereoma, and firmamentum, something firm or solid), from which our English word firmament is derived, is finely illustrated by the following passage in Prof. Tyndall’s address before the British Association. August, 1868: “The blue of the sky is as uniform and coherent as if it formed the surface of the most close-grained solid; a marble dome would not exhibit a stricter continuity.”

18. The word deshe, translated grass in our version, literally means sproutage, and is believed to denote the lowest order of the vegetable kingdom, cryptogams, or flowerless plants, which produce minute spores instead of seeds—such as seaweeds, fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns, etc. The word esebh, rendered herb, denotes the higher order of plants called phaenogams, prorogated by seeds; and this order includes fruit-trees, which were created last.

19. Sir Wm. Thomson and Prof. Helmholtz, seeking, to account for the origin of the first vegetable seeds on the earth, suppose that they dropped from some passing meteor or comet, just as though their origin on such a body did not need to be accounted for.

20. There was no change of seasons on the earth till the sun appeared and produced such change on the fourth day. Before that period there was a very warm and moist but equable temperature over the whole globe; either because the internal heat of the earth was then greater near the surface, or because the dense aqueous vapors around the earth better retained the heat of the uncondensed nebulous mass which was afterwards made into the sun. Such a climate was exactly adapted to the production of the abundant, gigantic and pulpy vegetation, the ferns and lycopodiums, chiefly characterizing the carboniferous period, similar to the present climate and flora of some of the islands of the tropics, where it rains 300 days in the year. When the sun blazed forth in all his glory on the fourth day, and began the change of seasons, there was a great increase of ligneous or woody tissue in vegetation or shown by the fossil plants of the Permian system.

21. The Elasmosaurus and the Edestosaurus of Kansas attained the length of sixty to eighty feet and more: while the Hadrosaurus of New Jersey stood erect from twenty to twenty-five feet high, and the Atlantosaurus of Colorado reached the height of from sixty to eighty feet. The expanded wings of the bat-like Pterodactyls measured twenty-five feet from tip to tip. (See Prof. A. Guyot’s “Creation.”)

22. Dichotomy maintains that human nature has only two distinct substances or elements—body and soul or spirit. Trichotomy maintains that there are in man three elements, body, soul, and spirit, In the account of man’s creation (Gen. 2:7) and of man’s death (Eccl. 12:7) only two principles are mentioned—that which is called soul in Genesis being called spirit in Ecclesiastes. See also 2 Cor. 5:1-8: Phil. 1:23, 24; Acts 7:59. The Hebrew and Greek terms, in the Scriptures, translated soul, spirit, mind, heart, and life, are often used interchangeably, and denote the immaterial principal that man derived directly from God, each of these terms, however, being frequently employed to denote a particular aspect or function or attribute of that principle. The Greek and Roman philosophers taught that man had three constituent elements: and, in conformity with the usage of his contemporaries, Paul says “spirit, soul and body,” to express the whole of man’s nature (1 Thess. 5:23). In Hebrews 4:12, the term “heart” includes the two terms “soul and spirit,” the lower and higher faculties of the mind. In Luke 1:46 47, soul and spirit are the same principle.
As to the origin of the souls of Adam’s posterity, it should forever abase the pride of human philosophy that it is unable to solve this first and nearest mystery of man’s existence—it cannot tell whether each soul is derived by direct creation from God, or by traduction from parents according to divine arrangement.
The claims of materialistic phrenology have long since been exploded by the scientists of Europe. The quality is far more important than the quantity of brain; and there has never been a satisfactory division of the faculties of the human mind, much less an exact localization and mapping of them upon the surface of the brain.

23. Mr. Charles Darwin’s “Chain of Man’s Descent from the Ascidian” (a very small, transparent pocket-shaped, marine animal, without head or backbone, or organs of sense, or locomotion, or distinction of sex) is one of the finest products of the modern brilliant scientific imagination, and, to any person of common sense, is as incredible as the Metamorphosis of Ovid. The so-called “chain” is a concatenation of conjectural nonentities, of airy nothings, based, not upon knowledge, but, confessedly, upon want of knowledge. Such philosophizing is a substitution of Nescience for Science. The backbone, the breast and the human brain are insurmountable barriers in the way of selective development, and demonstrate elective design. Mr. A. R. Wallace, “the independent originator and by far the best expounder of the theory of Natural Selection, differs altogether front Mr. Darwin on the question of the origin of man. For the creation of man, as he is, Mr. Wallace postulates the necessity of the intervention of an eternal will, as well for man’s body as for his soul, as shown by the latent capacities of even the savage hand, voice, brain, and conscience.” Prof. S. G. Mivart, the profoundly learned and critical biologist, declares, in his “Lessons from Nature,” that “Mr. Darwin, in his Descent of Man, has utterly failed in the only part of his work which is really important: and if his failure should lead to an increase of philosophic culture on the part of physicists, we may therein find some consolation for the injurious effects which his work in likely to produce on too many of our half-educated classes. Man differs far more from an elephant or a gorilla than do these from the dust of the earth on which they tread.” Even Prof. Huxley admits that “the divergence of man from the are is immeasurable and practically infinite.” Dr. Emil Du Bois-Reymond, professor of physiology in the greatest German university, that of Berlin, perpetual secretary of the Berlin Academy of Science, and the ablest biologist now living, declares that Haeckel’s ’“Human Genealogical Tree” (pretending to trace man by twenty-two steps to the supposed unicellular Monera, imagined to be the base of the animal kingdom) “is as authentic in the eyes of a naturalist as are the pedigrees (from God, and Goddesses) of the Homeric, heroes in the eyes of an historian.” Thus the highest living scientific authority emphatically decides that the “scientific” pagan mythology of the nineteenth century is as false and incredible as the Latin Greek mythology of three thousand years ago. The average cranial capacity of Europeans of the Stone Age has been found to have been actually greater than that of the now living Europeans. The brain of the apes most like man does not amount to quite a third of the brain of the lowest races of men.

24. Dr. J. W. Draper (in his Human Physiology, pp. 586-591) attributes the dark color of the negro skin to the torpidity of the liver, in hot climates, failing to eliminate from the blood a degenerating haematin, which is rich in iron, and depositing this dark matter in the pigment-cells of the skin. The prognathous form of the negro skull he ascribes to the same cause, as well as to his savage and degraded condition in Africa. The black coloring matter underlying the cuticle preserves the surface of the skin from being blistered by the sun; and the thick woolly hair was designed by Providence to protect his brain from the fierce rays of the tropics. It is asserted that negro youths have made extraordinary attainments in the languages and mathematics at college in both hemispheres. About a thousand years intervene between the deluge and the earliest representation of negro features upon the monuments of Egypt.

25. The Samaritan Pentateuch is a translation of the books of Moses into the Samaritan dialect (a compound of the Hebrew, Chaldee and Syrian made probably about 700 B. C.
The Septuagint is the most ancient and celebrated version of the entire Old Testament Scriptures; it is a translation into Greek made by the Jews in Alexandria about 280 B. C. and so called either from its 72 translators, or the 73 members of the Sanhedrin that sanctioned it. In the declining state of the Hebrew tongue, about the time of Christ, the Septuagint version was in common use among the Jews, and from it were taken the most of the Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament, which was written in Greek.

26. Servants and domestic, animals were also to be allowed to rest (Ex. 20:10; Deut. 5:14). Only the covetous and carnal were impatient of the Sabbath restraints (Amos 8:4-52). Works of necessity and mercy and religious service were in full accordance with the spirit and design of the Sabbath day (Matthew 12:1-13: Luke 14:5).

27. The formalistic, self-righteous Pharisees, substituting an ostentatious ritualism for spiritual piety, held to a multitude of so-called traditions of the elders, which they pretended to have derived, by oral transmission, from Moses himself, and to which they attributed a higher authority than even to the written law. They resolved all religion into manifold and burdensome law. “Upon the single topic of the observance of the Sabbath, their Mishna (or second law) contains thirty-nine general rules, under each of which are numerous subordinate precepts, each with specified exceptions. Their labyrinth of casuistry, like that of the Roman Catholic Jesuits, was an instrument for evading moral obligations, and for committing iniquity under the apparent sanction of law.”—G. P. Fisher. “After the exile and in the hands of the Pharisees the Sabbath became a legal bondage rather than a privilege and benediction. Christ, as the Lord of the Sabbath, opposed this mechanical ceremonialism, and restored the true spirit and benevolent aim of the institution. When the slavish, superstitious, and self-righteous sabbatarianism of the Pharisees crept into the Galatian churches and was made a condition of justification, Paul rebuked it as a relapse into Judaism. In the gospel dispensation the Sabbath is not a legal ceremonial bondage, but rather a precious gift of grace, a’ privilege, a holy rest in God in the midst of the unrest of the world, a day of spiritual refreshing in communion with God and in the fellowship of the saints, a foretaste and pledge of the never-ending Sabbath in Heaven. The due observance of it in England, Scotland and America is, under God, a safeguard of public morality and religion, a bulwark against infidelity, and a source of immeasurable blessing to the church, the state, and the family.” —P. Schaff. It must be stated, however, that in no passage of the New Testament is the first day of the week called the Sabbath.

28. Neither the New Testament nor the literature of the early centuries mention any explicit appointment of the first day of the week as a day of Christian worship, or of the Lord’s Day, or Sunday, as a substitute for Saturday, the Old Testament Sabbath enjoined in the Decalogue But the New Testament, shows that the special, religious commemoration of the Lord’s Day was a spontaneous exhibition of Christian feeling that sprang up under the eye of the Apostles, and with their approval. Any formal decree abolishing the old, and substituting a new Sabbath would only have offended the weak Jewish Christians. The Sabbath and marriage were instituted by God Himself in Paradise, not for the Jews only, but for the whole human race. The penalty of death for the violation of the Sabbath was not threatened at its institution in Eden, nor even written in the Decalogue, or moral law, on the tables of stone: but it was a peculiar feature of the Hebrew judicial or civil law (Ex. 31:14; Num. 15:31-36), typifying the spiritual death of those who, while professing to have entered into the true Sabbath or rest by believing in the finished redemption of Christ, yet, really depend upon their own works for salvation (Heb. 3, 4). The Sabbath was instituted by God to commemorate both His first or natural and His second or spiritual creation (Gen. 2:3: Ex. 20:11: Deut. 5:15): to remind men of Him, their Creator and Redeemer: to turn their thoughts from the seen and temporal to the unseen and spiritual: to afford time for religious instruction and for the public and special worship of God: to give recuperative rest to sinful, toiling humanity; to be a type of that rest which remains for the people of God; and to be a sign of the covenant between God and His people (Ex. 31:13, 16, 17: Ezek. 20:12). It is thought that nine-tenths of the people derive the greater part of their religious knowledge from the services of the sanctuary.
The Roman Emperor Constantine, 321 A. D., made Sunday a lethal holiday, allowing only necessary agricultural labors on that day. Leo VI., about 900 A. D., repealed the agricultural exemption, thus thoroughly establishing Sunday as a day of rest. Alfred the Great, about the same time, forbade work, trade and legal proceedings on Sunday in England. “Calvin’s View of the fourth commandment was stricter than Luther’s, Knox’s view stricter than Calvin’s, and the Puritan view stricter than Knox’s. The Puritan practice in Scotland and New England often runs into Judaizing excesses. About the year 1600, a strong Sabbath movement traveled from England to Scotland, and from both of these countries to North America, the chief impulse being given in 1595 by a book entitled The Sabbath of the Old and New Testament, written by Nicholas Bound, a learned Puritan clergyman of Suffolk. Archbishop Whitgift and Chief Justice Popham attempted to suppress the book, but in vain—considering the Puritan Sabbath theory a cunningly concealed attack on the ‘Church of England,’ by substituting the Jewish Sabbath for the Christian Sunday and all the ’ Church’ festivals. At last King James I. brought his royal authority to bear against the Puritan Sabbatarianism, and issued his famous ‘Book of Sports’ in 1618, afterwards republished by his son, Charles I., with the advice of Archbishop Laud, in 1633. This curious production formally authorizes and commends the desecration of the evening of the Lord’s Day by dancing, leaping, fencing and other ‘lawful recreations,’ on condition of observing the earlier part of the day by strict outward conformity to the worship of the ‘Church of England.’ The court set the example of desecration by balls, masquerades and plays on Sunday evening; the rustics repaired from the houses of worship to the ale-house or the village-green to dance around the May-pole and to shoot at the mark. To complete the folly, King James ordered the book to be read in every parish ‘church,’ and threatened clergymen who refused to do so with severe punishment. King Charles repeated the order. The people not conforming with the King’s decree were to leave the country. The popular conscience revolted against such an odious and despotic law, and Charles and Laud, for this among other causes, were overwhelmed in common ruin. The Puritan Sabbath theory triumphed throughout the British Isles and the American colonies, the citizens of which countries have never been willing to exchange it for the laxity of Sunday observance on the Continent of Europe, with its disastrous effects upon the attendance at public worship and the morals of the people.” The Sabbatic view of Sunday is incorporated in the Presbyterian, the Congregational and the Baptist Articles of Faith. In 1678, under Charles II., all labor or business, except works of necessity or charity, were forbidden by a statute which may be regarded as the foundation of all the present law on the subject in England and the United States.
“The Old School Baptists”says Elder S H. Durand of Pennsylvania, in the “Signs of the Times,” “do not observe the first day of the week as the Jewish Sabbath, for Christ and his Apostles gave no such command; but they refrain, on that day, from all works excerpt those of necessity, for these three reasons: 1st, the law of our country forbids unnecessary work on that day, and we are commanded to obey the higher powers (Rom. 13:1-5): 2, it is the day universally appointed for religious meetings, and it is a good thing that we can have one day in the week for the public worship of God without distraction Item business: and 3d, the Apostles and early disciples appear to have met regularly on the first day of the week, though they also met on other days and from day to day. When the child of God believes on the I oral Jesus Christ, he ceases from his own works, as God did from his, and enters into rest, and all the remainder of his life is really God’s holy Sabbath with him, and all the days and nights of the week he should not (to his own works or speak his own words (Isa. 58:13, 14).”
The phrase, “Lord’s day,” occurs only once in the Bible—in Revelation 1:10: but the same Greek adjective for Lord’s, kuriakos, occurs in 1 Corinthians 11:10, applied to “the Lord’s supper,” a literal as well as a spiritual feast: and the phrase, “the Lord’s Day,” is used to designate the first day of the week by the following writers of the second century: Barnabas, Ignatius, Irenseus, Justin Martyr, Melito, Dionysius of Corinth, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian.

29. At first, both days were kept: the Apostles, like Christ, worshiped with the Jews in their synagogues on the seventh day, until the Jews persecuted and prevented them (Matthew 12:9; 13:54; Luke 4:16, 44; Acts 13:5, 14-52; 14:1-7; 17:1-9, 17; 18:4).

30. Numbers in Scripture often have a symbolical rather than a mere arithmetical value. The half of seven, which is three-and-a-half (time, times, and a half, three days and a half, three yours and a half, forty-two months, 1,260 days or years), is the symbol of human agency or evil cut short, the time of the church’s pilgrimage and persecution (Dan. 7:25: Matthew 24:22; Jam. 5:17; Rev. 11:2, 3, 9: 12:6). Two denotes intensification, requital in full, and testimony (Gen. 41:32; Job 42:10: Rev. 11:8). Three is, like seven, a Divine number (Matthew 28:19; Gen. 18:2, 13: 1 Sam. 3:4, 6, 8; Rev. 4:8). Four symbolizes world-wide extension (Dan. 2:40: 7:2: Rev. 7:1). Eight is the sign of a new era and life, after seven has been completed (Gen. 7:7; 17:12: Ex. 12:30: Lev. 14:10). Ten represents perfected universality (Gen. 14:20: Ex. 34:28; Matthew 25:l; Luke 17:12). Five, the half of ten, is the penal number (Lev. 5:16: Num. 18:6). Ten raised to the third power, which is 1,000, represents the world pervaded by the Divine (Rev. 20:2-4, 7). Seventy; the product of seven and ten, represents the people of God in worldly captivity or wandering, when their sorrows are multiplied (Gen. 46:27; Ex. 15:27. 24:1: Jer. 25:11). Twelve is the church number (Gen. 49:28: Matthew 10:2; Jam. 1:1: Rev. 21:12, 14). Twelve squared and multiplied by 1,000, the symbol of the world divinely perfected, gives 144,000, the number of sealed Israelites (Rev. 7:4; Eph, 4:30). Twenty-four represents the elders of the Old and New Testaments combined (Rev. 4:4: Gen. 35:22; Luke 6:13. Six, the half of twelve, is the world kingdom broken, or the world given over to Judgment (Rev. 6:12-17; 9:13-21; 16:12-16): it is next to the sacred seven, but can never reach it. Six raised from units to tens and hundreds (666), the number of the beast (Rev. 13:18), shows that, notwithstanding, his progression to higher powers, he can only rise to greater ripeness for judgment. Forty symbolizes trial, chastisement and humiliation (Gen. 7:4; Deut. 8:2; Jonah 3:4; Matthew 4:2)—Fausset’s Bible Cyclopedia.

31. The first names given to animals were not arbitrary, but were either imitations of their peculiar utterances, or significant of their peculiar qualities or uses.

32. It is clear from the Scriptures that man’s bodily form is similar to the form of the spiritual bodies of Christ, of the angels, and of glorified saints (Gen. 18; Josh. 5:13:15: Judges 13:6, 16, 22: Dan. 3:25; 9:21; Luke 9:30, 31; Rev. 22:8, 9). The microscope reveals millions of natural objects invisible to our naked eyes; air, and other gases, though material, are invisible to us; even so spiritual forms are real and shall be visible to us whom our eyes are opened (2 Kings 6:17).

33. The word Adam in Hebrew means red earth; the form is the same in all numbers, so that the original signifies either man or men—either the first man or all mankind contained seminally and representatively in him.

34. Tsela, here translated rib, generally means aide, and is here rendered by the. Septuagint pleura, a piece of his side. The females of the lower animals were altogether separate in their formation from the males; but woman was formed out of man, to teach us the closeness, tenderness, and indissolubility of the marriage bond, and of the spiritual union of Christ and the church (Gen. 2:14; Matthew 19:3-6; Eph. 5:23-32). Woman was not made from man’s head, to rule him, nor from his feet, to be trampled upon by him, but from his side, to be his loved and honored, loving and reverential companion (1 Cor. 11:8, 9; Eph. 5:22-83: 1 Pet. 3:1-7).

35. The Hebrew for man in the 23rd verse is ish, meaning man of earth, or husband, Adam’s designation of himself; the Hebrew for woman in that verse is isha, the feminine of ish, and therefore meaning man-ess, or female man, or wife.

Chapter II. From the Fall of Man to the Death of Abraham.

After his creation man was placed by his Maker in the beautiful and pleasant garden of Eden, or Delight (probably either in Babylonia or Armenia). He was not to live in dreamy indolence or luxurious enjoyment; but, as work of some kind is necessary for his well-being while on earth, he was placed in a garden, to dress and keep it—the easiest way of life. He was surrounded by his beneficent Creator with all the joys of an earthly paradise, with everything his heart could wish—fruits and flowers, groves and streams, inoffensive animals, perfect health of soul and body, a lovely wife, and the frequent companionship of his kind and omnipotent Maker, who delighted to minister to his happiness. But man must be taught the all-important truth that he is under obligations to, and dependent upon, his Divine, Sovereign Creator, Preserver and Benefactor.

It was the prerogative and pleasure of God to give law for the government of all things created by Him, whether in relation to the motion of the planets or the creeping of an insect, and therefore man could not be exempt from that universal rule. Adam had a law given him which he must obey or forfeit the approbation of his Maker. It was given to him before Eve was formed and presented to him as his wife; but as she was virtually in him when he received the law, it was equally binding on her. He was the head of his wife and whole human race, and represented both her and them. He was as innocent and pure as an angel in heaven, and stood forth, in the image of God, the admiration of the angelic throng as well as of the immense multitude of living creatures around him, all of which belonged to him and were obedient to his commands. In the midst or center of the garden were two peculiar trees, called “the tree of life” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” The exact species or nature of these two trees is now unknown to man. It is supposed that “the tree of life” was an evergreen tree of unremitting productiveness, the fruit of which when eaten tended to preserve the natural health and life of man forever (Gen. 3:22), and that it was a symbol or type of the true “tree of life,” or Christ, in the heavenly paradise (Rev. 2:7; 22:9). The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is thought to have been of an intoxicating, or morally poisonous nature, the prohibition of whose fruit was a mercy, as well as a test of man’s obedience and fidelity to God. In man’s unfallen and happy condition we cannot think of a more appropriate or a more benevolent test. This arrangement was the covenant of works (Hosea 6:7; Isa.1:19, 20; Rom. 10:5; Gal. 3:12).

God said to Adam this: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:16, 17). We discover the love of God to Adam in this enlarged liberty bestowed on him, and the small restraint imposed. Yet he could not willingly bear the restraint, however small. He was made able to stand, but liable to fall; and in the hour of temptation he fell, and great was that fall. This was a notable epoch in his history; it changed the whole course of his conduct, and involved himself and posterity[1] in guilt and ruin. He was assailed through the weaker vessel, his wife. It was human nature, unaided by the power of God’s grace, that was assailed and captured. This temptation was no fancy sketch, figure or allegory. It was a reality, and penned down in the Book of God by the Holy Ghost, and frequently mentioned in the sacred volume (John 8:44; 2 Cor. 11:8; 1 Tim. 2:14; Rev. 12:9; Rom. 5:12-19; 16:20).

“Now the serpent[2] was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise [see 1 John 2:16], she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Gen. 3:1-6). Thus we see that the citadel was stormed and carried. Man was left to his own free choice to partake or not. No grace was there—no power of God to restrain him, and he fell an easy prey to the wiles of Satan. “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And He said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee .that thou shouldest not eat ? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.[3] And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat, all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shalt bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field: in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:1-19).

Thus we have the fall of man depicted, his arraignment and condemnation. God drove him out of the garden; and to prevent his returning to it, and eating of the tree of life, and living forever, God placed at the east of the garden cherubim[4] and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life (Gen. 3:24). Man could corrupt or destroy himself, but could not purify his own heart or restore himself to the favor and image of God. That had to be done by another.

God had already provided a ransom, and makes it known. “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Here is a promise of Christ, a Savior, “the seed of the woman,” who was to bruise the head of Satan, while Satan could only bruise the heel of Christ. Christ is the seed of the woman, and his elect children are his seed. The seed of the devil are his angels and wicked men who die without repentance; the term seed here being understood, not in a physical, but in a spiritual sense. He is a fallen angel, and led his comrades in rebellion, and through the medium of the serpent seduced man also from his allegiance to God. The contest is to be between Satan and Christ; so that while Satan is to bruise the heel or the church of Christ, Christ is to bruise the head or the Power of Satan. Satan may annoy, but Christ overcomes, by destroying him that had the power of death (Heb. 2:14; Rom. 16:20; 1 John 3:8).

Salvation through Christ was no doubt proclaimed by the Almighty to Adam and Eve; sacrifices were ordained to typify the crucifixion of the Savior. Skins of beasts, probably slain in sacrifice, taken by God and placed around the bodies of Adam and Eve to cover their nakedness, were figurative of the righteousness of Christ, which was to be imputed and placed as a robe around all the saints of God. The system is revealed, and the warfare soon began. The offspring of Adam and Eve, having been born after the fall, of course were brought forth in a state of sin and death, so that those without faith persecuted those who had faith. The first man born was named Cain, and the second was named Abel. Each brought a sacrifice to God. Cain’s was without faith, being of the fruit of the ground. Abel’s was with faith, and was of the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof, typifying the offering of the Lamb of God in the fullness of the time (Heb. 11:4). “Cain in unbelieving self-righteousness presented, like the Pharisee in the temple (Luke 18:11), merely a pretended thank-offering, not like Abel and the publican, feeling his need of the propitiatory sacrifice appointed for sin. God had respect (first) unto Abel, and (then) to his offering (Gen. 4:4); and so our works are not accepted of God, until ourselves have been so, through faith His work of grace.”—A. R. Fausset. Abel’s offering was accepted and Cain’s rejected. This displeased Cain so that he slew his brother; and wherefore slew he him? because he was of that wicked one and his works were evil, while Abel’s were righteous (1 John 3:12). Hence began the warfare between the children of men. The enmity between the seed of Satan and the seed of the woman grows out of the very nature of Holiness and Sin. Satan and his seed or servants, being sinful, will forever hate and rebel against a holy God; and God, being immutably holy, can never tolerate, but will forever express His hatred against their sin. Satan and his seed give expression to their enmity in every form of opposition and ill-will which their ingenious wickedness can devise and their circumstances permit; and there is no work against the glory, happiness, or even the existence of God and His people, which, if unrestrained, they would not exert themselves to accomplish. Cain now stands as a representative of that portion of the human race who persecute the children of God, and Abel represents that portion who are persecuted by men, often unto death. Figuratively speaking, Cain has always been killing Abel, and Abel has all along fallen by the hands of Cain. To Eve another son was given, and she called his name Seth (appointed). “For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed, instead of Abel, whom Cain slew” (Gen. 4:25.)

From these two, therefore, we trace to some extent the divergent lines of the race—the one servants of God and the other the servants of Satan. Faith is the great distinguishing feature. “By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.” (Heb. 11:4).

The names of the chosen line from Adam to Noah are about as follows, viz.: Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah.

The names of the rejected line are about as follows, some of their names being like those of the chosen line, viz.: Cain, Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methusael, Lamech, and by Lamech’s wife Adah, Jabal and Jubal, and by his wife Zillah, Tubal-Cain.

“The resemblances in the names of the two families seems a natural consequence of the use of significant names, at a time when language acquired no great variety; and in both cases several of the names have sense natural at that age, increase and possession. The different number of generations suggests that the period between the children of Lamech and the flood was occupied with the development of the inventions ascribed to them, by their unnamed descendants. The only personal facts of their history are, the foundation by Cain of the first city, which he named after his son Enoch; the polygamy of Lamech; and the occupations of his sons, of whom Jabal was the first nomad herdsman, Jubal the inventor of musical instruments, both stringed and wind, and Tubal-Cain the first smith. The great contrast, however, between the two races, is in their social and moral condition.” “It is remarkable that corruption of religion and morals advanced most rapidly in the line of Cain, where the greatest progress had been made in art and in science; thus showing that knowledge and civilization, apart from religion, have no power to purify the heart, or to preserve society from corruption.”—W. G. Blaikie.

As the arts and sciences advanced, and population and civilization increased, wickedness also increased. The “sons of God,” the Sethite professors of religion, intermarried with the “daughters of men,” the irreligious Cainites; the selfish, worldly, licentious and warlike offspring of these wicked marriages filled the earth with profligacy and bloodshed. Enoch and Noah, and perhaps other prophets, preached righteousness, and predicted the coming terrible judgment of God upon the ungodly race, but in vain. Enoch walked with God, and, about a thousand years after the creation of Adam, was translated to heaven without dying; just as, about two thousand years afterwards, during the rampant idolatry of the kingdom of Israel, the Prophet Elijah was similarly favored—these two witnesses, before the coming of Christ, thus being divinely enabled to demonstrate to an unbelieving world the doctrine of the resurrection of the body and its existence with the soul in glory. In the same manner, the bodies of the saints who are living on the earth at the second or last personal coming of Christ, shall be changed, in a moment, without dying, from a mortal to an immortal state, and be caught up with their spirits to dwell forever with the Lord (1 Thess. 4:15-17).

The wicked race cared nothing for the solemn and faithful warnings of the prophets; and God’s Spirit in His servants would not always strive with corrupt and rebellious flesh (Neh. 9:30; Acts 7:51, 52). His sparing mercy, extended to them 120 years, was equally contemned; every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart become only evil continually. Noah was the only righteous man left, and he, being warned of God, and believing the warning, prepared an ark to the saving of his house. But the ungodly race continued eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah and his family, with two each of unclean and seven each of clean animals, entered into the ark, and the Lord shut them in, and the windows of heaven were opened, and the foundations of the great deep were broken up, and God, in awful majesty, justice and power, brought in the flood, and destroyed them all[5] (2 Pet. 3:5, 6; Job 12:15; Ps. 104:5-7).

From the period when man became a living soul to the day when the waters of the deluge began to fall on the earth, time’s duration probably numbered about 1,656 years. About 1,500 years of this time, it may be supposed, there was antagonism between the chosen people of God and the children of the wicked one,—the Spirit of God in His elect on the one side, and the spirit of the devil in his children on the other, warring against each other. The weapons of warfare, on the part of true worshipers, were not carnal, but spiritual; while those used by the enemies of God and truth were carnal and fatal to the bodies of the saints.

Witness the murder of righteous Abel, and the design no doubt to take the life of Enoch, also, who prophesied of the coming of the “Lord with ten thousand of His saints to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of their ungodly deeds, which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” But God delivered him out of their hands by translating him directly to Heaven. Truth has ever made slow progress in this world, and the antediluvian age, of all, in this respect, is the most remarkable. The number of true worshipers appeared to decrease as time rolled on, until but one man and his family were to be found on earth serving God. Methuselah, the grandfather of Noah, it is thought, died the very year of the deluge, and Lamech, the father of Noah, died five years before; so that Noah was the only patriarch left on earth, the only preacher of righteousness in the world, and the only man who with his house served God truly.

The children of God in this nineteenth century of the Christian era think that they have a hard time of it, while enduring the scoff, derisions and hatred of a gainsaying world; but what is this when compared with the cruel mockings and scourgings endured by their brethren before the flood? While we now write, the visible number of God’s people is on the increase; some few are being added to the churches. The churches are scattered over the land, but sparsely, of course, in comparison with the number of other religious organizations. There is nearly one minister for every two churches, and appointments by many are published in their periodicals for itinerant preaching, by Elders and licentiates going in almost every direction, preaching the everlasting gospel of the kingdom. Congregations to hear preaching are large and frequently come together. They are protected in their gatherings and devotional exercises by the laws of the land, so that none dare molest or make them afraid while thus worshiping—while thus defending the faith that Abel, Enoch and Noah had, and at the same time preaching Christ and him crucified as the only way of salvation.

God’s people now expect a further increase of their numbers before the day comes that shall burn as an oven, but then they had no such expectation. They were persecuted by fearful odds against them, with their numbers constantly diminishing, and every prospect before them of being overrun by an ungodly world and completely exterminated, according to all human appearances. Yet they boldly fought on, believed in and feared God, daily making their altars smoke with the victims offered up as typical of the great offering afterward to be made by the Lamb of God for the sins of His people; and counted not their lives dear unto themselves, so that they might finish their course with joy and gain the approbation of their God.

These were thought to be very stubborn people, no doubt, by their enemies, and to be worthy of death for their stern and uncompromising spirit. Do we see anything like it in the world now? Can we not readily find a people now who are equally stubborn, equally inflexible, equally steadfast and immovable on the foundation which God has laid in Zion? a people who would yield their lives rather than yield their faith, and will have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness?

Look at the Baptists of the present day and see if they can respond to the call, or if the measure will fit them. (Rev. 11:1, 2). We do not mean Baptists merely, so called, for their name is legion; but we mean genuine Bible Baptists, those called “Primitive” or “Predestinarian,” by way of distinction from others, and “Hardshells” by way of reproach. These people, who are opposed and abused by all other sects and societies in the world—these who have been hunted in dens and caves of the earth by Mystery Babylon and her daughters for centuries past, and put to death for their faith in Christ, and have only had a respite of about one hundred years from the tyranny of the magistrate and religious despotism. And we ask these people to read carefully and see if they cannot find the counterpart of their own history in the lives of their brethren before the flood. When they look at them and see their unpopularity, their firm faith, their peculiarity, their steadfastness to the end, notwithstanding that nearly the combined world was against them, do they not see themselves reflected as in a mirror, and feel willing to call them brethren? God’s people must be the same in all ages, for He never had but one way of saving them. There has never been but one Savior for them. All are saved by grace, through faith, and that not of themselves, it is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8).

And again, if the truth of God made such slow progress among the antediluvians, coming immediately from Adam and the patriarchs, is it any wonder that it did not make a greater progress under the Mosaic dispensation, or that it does not now under the Christian dispensation?

If success and numbers prove the truth of a creed or party, then the antediluvians who killed the patriarchs and filled the earth with violence, had the best of the argument; and so had the 850 prophets of Baal in the days of Elijah; and so had the whole nation of Israel, also, in his day, as against the seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to the image of Baal; and so had the Jews when they crucified the Savior; and so had the Gentiles when they destroyed Christians by thousands; and so has Rome now, as against the balance of what is called Christendom; and so has the pagan world as against the rest of mankind; and last, though not of least importance to us, so have the so-called Missionaries, as against the Primitive Baptists of the United States; the former are twenty times as numerous. But if numbers and success do not prove the truth and justice of any cause whatever, but rather the contrary, in all the history of the Adamic race, then we may expect to find the minority in the right in all ages of the world, especially in religious matters. Such was the case before the flood, all must agree; such was the case under the legal dispensation, and such is the case under the new dispensation, according to the language of our blessed Savior Himself, who says there are few that be saved: “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” etc., etc. (Matthew 7:14; Luke 12:32).[6]

Another reflection arises here, which is this: If God Almighty destroyed the old world with a flood as a punishment for the crimes of its inhabitants, and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone for the crimes of their inhabitants, and Jerusalem and the nationality of the Hebrews as a punishment for their crimes, what will He burn up this world for in the last great day? Will it be because earth’s inhabitants will have become so civil, so truthful, so honest, so upright, so loving, so tender-hearted, so unselfish, so Christianized, so evangelized, that the Lord must forsooth send down fire and burn up their beautiful dwelling place? Or will it be because men will wax worse and worse, iniquity abound more and more, generation after generation become deeper and deeper steeped in sin as the ages roll on, until every principle of morality, justice, judgment and equity be swept away from the minds of men, and cruelty, rapine and murder cover the earth, so as to induce the Almighty to purify it with fire, cause time to cease, and appropriate the planet to some other use?

It was crime that caused the destruction of the old world, the cities of the plain, and the Hebrew nationality; and by a parity of reasoning we may safely conclude that crime will be the cause of the final conflagration and the destruction of this mundane system.

The rain poured down forty days (forty being the number significant of judgment), and the whole known or visible world was covered, and every living creature that had existed on the dry land died. After one hundred and fifty days the waters abated, and the ark rested “upon the mountains of Ararat,” or “the hills of Armenia,” as otherwise rendered; and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains (or hills) were seen. Forty days afterward Noah, to ascertain the state of the earth, opened the window of the ark and sent forth a raven, which went to and fro, satisfied to feed on the floating carcasses, and never reentering the ark—“emblem of the restless carnal mind.” Then he sent forth a dove, which, finding no rest for the sole of her foot, returned into the ark—“emblem of the soul drawn from the world by Christ to Himself.” Seven days afterward he sends out the dove again, and, as a sign that even the low trees were uncovered, she returns with a fresh olive leaf, the olive being a tree which can live under a flood better than most trees—“emblem of the Spirit of peace, the earnest of the saints’ inheritance.” Sent forth again, after seven days, the dove returns no more” emblem of the new heavens and earth which shall be after the fiery deluge, when the ark of the church to separate us from the world shall be needed no more.” One year after he entered the ark Noah, on the first day of the first month, removed the covering of the ark, and saw that the earth was dry; and on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, at God’s command, he and his family and all the living creatures went forth from the ark. Building an altar unto the Lord, he made burnt offerings of every clean beast and fowl, as a sacrifice of thanksgiving and consecration to God; and the Lord graciously accepted the offering, and promised that He would no more curse the ground for man’s sake, “for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth;” neither would He again smite every living thing, as He had done, but that, “while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, Summer and Winter, and day and night, shall not cease.” God blessed Noah, and gave him and his posterity the right to eat animal as well as vegetable food; and as a token of His covenant with all flesh, that he would no more destroy the earth with a watery flood, He appoints the rainbow in the cloud—this beautiful and universally visible phenomenon being a most appropriate sign of His natural mercy to all His creatures on earth; clearly indicating the early cessation of rain because, in order to its formation, the clouds must be broken and the sun must be shining through them. Of the same absolute unconditional nature as this natural covenant with Noah and all flesh, God declares His new covenant with spiritual Israel to be (Isa. 54:4-10, 17; Jer. 31:31-37).[7]

God gave Noah three new precepts—the abstinence from blood as a food (the blood being the life, and being typical of the cleansing efficacy of the shed blood of Christ), the prohibition of murder (on the grounds that man was made in the image of God, and that all men are brothers), and the recognition of the civil authority (“he that sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed”).

From the flood to the calling of Abraham was about 400 years, and during this period idolatry arose and then increased greatly. “Noah lived 350 years after the flood, and died at the age of 950; just half-way according to the common chronology between the creation and the Christian era. He survived the fifth and sixth of his descendants, Peleg and Reu; he was 128 years contemporary with Terah, the father of Abraham; and died only two years before the birth of Abraham himself (A.M. 2006; B.C. 1998). Looking back we find that he was born only 126 years after the death of Adam, and 14 years after that of Seth. He was contemporary with Enos for 84 years, and with the remaining six antediluvian patriarchs (except Enoch) for centuries. We give these computations, not as a matter of curiosity, but to show by how few steps, and yet by how many contemporary teachers, the traditions of primeval history may have been handed down—from Adam to Noah, and from Noah to Abraham, and we might add, from Abraham to Moses.”—Old Testament History, by Wm. Smith.[8]

The world was to some extent divided between Noah’s three sons, so that we may in general reckon Asia to Shem, Africa to Ham, and Europe to Japheth[9] though of course there was some crossing of these lines by each.

The greatest saints, while on earth, are sinners; and the inspired writers are terribly faithful in recording the vices, as well as the virtues, of Scripture characters. Noah planted a vineyard and became intoxicated with the fruit of the vine, and, while in this condition, Ham discovered his nakedness and reported it to his other brothers in an improper spirit—without sorrow and without respect either to his person or character. “Shem and Japheth” upon this report “took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger[10] son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant” (Gen. 9:20-27). The curse did not fall upon Ham directly, but what is often the sorest point with a father, he was cursed in his youngest son. In the brief language of Noah, as recorded, Ham’s other sons are not mentioned; Canaan is thought to be especially named, because of the future historical relations between the Canaanites and Israelites. But the other sons of Ham (Gen. 10:6-14) may also have been indirectly intended. Egypt and Babylon, as well as Canaan, were settled by Hamite races, which at first were the most brilliant and civilized, but, because of their irreligion and profligacy, became the most degraded. In saying, “Blessed be the Lord God of Shem,” Noah pronounces the highest possible blessing upon Shem, as he thus declares the Lord God peculiarly the God of Shem; this language was especially verified in the descendants of Shem—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their posterity, the Israelites. Japheth was, by his expansive energy and God’s providence, to overpass his own bounds (Europe) and dwell in the tents of Shem, as the ancient Greek and Roman, and the modern European and American nationalities, exemplify. And gradually Japheth was to dwell in Shem’s tents spiritually, that is, he should be brought to believe in and worship the God of Shem.

By Japheth’s dwelling in the tents of Shem, it seems also implied that they should be more confederate, more social, more upon an equality as a class of human beings with each other than with Ham, while he should be servant to both, and sometimes his descendants should actually become servants to others of his descendants, thereby filling the lowest station—“a servant of servants.”

The prophecy of Noah has been fulfilled in the destruction and final subjugation and enslavement of the Canaanites, by the descendants of Shem, the children of Israel; in the subjugation and enslavement of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians by the Greeks and Romans, the descendants of Japheth; in the subjugation of the Egyptians and Ethiopians; in the enslavement of Africans in almost all ages of the world, even down to the present day, and their miserable enslavement of each other.” What a wonderful prophetic summary, in three short verses, of the history of the world! Who but an omniscient and omnipotent God could have inspired such a prediction?

The genealogical[11] line of the Messiah extends from Noah to Shem, Shem to Arphaxad, Arphaxad to Salah, Salah to Eber, Eber to Peleg, Peleg to Reu, Reu to Serug, Serug to Nahor, Nahor to Terah, and Terah to Abram. “The footsteps of the flock” are very difficult to trace along this period of 400 years. The knowledge and true worship of God seem to have been pretty much confined to the patriarchs, while nearly all their descendants were enveloped in darkness. Indeed, some of the patriarchs themselves appear to have been tainted with idolatry. About 100 years after the flood the town of Babel was commenced by the wicked descendants of Noah in opposition to God’s will and to the building of His spiritual kingdom. They were of one language and of one purpose, and that was to defy God and make a tower high enough to reach heaven, to make to themselves a name and build a city that would concentrate the people and rule the world. This same sort of enterprise has been undertaken by others since on nearly the same spot, but all has proved a failure. The language of the first builders was confounded[12] and they ceased to build; God dispersed them. He has also dispersed their successors, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon. God came down and confounded their schemes.

The great length of life, and the great distance of death, seemed to make the antediluvians more reckless and corrupt; and therefore, after the flood, it pleased the Lord gradually to shorten human life from little less than a thousand to less than a hundred years. All men have a natural sense of dependence on a higher power, and therefore have some sort of religion; but the natural heart of fallen man recoils from the perfect purity of the true God and a spiritual worship of Him, and “devises means and mediators of its own for approaching the Most High, paying adoration to the sun, moon and stars, and others of His works, even animals and stones; making images to represent His attributes and worshiping them; asking beings inferior to God but superior to himself to intercede with God on his behalf; and, when most dark and degraded, resorting to magical charms and similar devices as means of obtaining the favor of the powers above. Thus, wherever men went, they forsook the pure worship of the true God, as it had been practiced by Noah, and instituted religious and idolatrous rites and practices of their own.”—W. G. Blaikie.

One bright streak penetrates this gloom from the flood to Abraham, and that is the experience of the patriarch Job.[13] He is thought to have been a descendant of Aram, son of Shem (Genesis 10:22, 23). He was a patriarch, a prophet, a man of God, a perfect man, one that feared God and eschewed evil, and one whose experience and writings have been interesting and profitable to the people of God in every generation since his day, and will be to the end of the world. He lived in the land of Uz, perhaps that portion of country occupied by Uz, the son of Aram (Gen. 10:23). It no doubt included the land of Edom, and was a vast country at one time, stretching far into Arabia and the East. Hence Job is called one of “the sons of the East,” His book is one of the oldest of the inspired writings, having been written probably long before Moses was born, and wonderfully preserved, so as to be placed in the sacred canon. It was probably written by Job himself, with the exception of the last line, which mentions his death; that of course was added by the hand of a friend. Job was a real, not an imaginary, person. So the book declares, and God honors him by associating his name with that of Noah and Daniel (Ezek. 14:14-20). The Apostle James mentions him as an example of patience (Jam. 5:11). The extreme antiquity of the book of Job (as evinced by internal evidence), its compact, powerful and majestic style, and its solemn, profound and sublime conceptions, demonstrate the high intellectuality of primeval man. The leading object of the book seems to proclaim the sovereignty and infinite power, wisdom, righteousness, faithfulness and mercy of God, and the purity and omnipotence of His grace in the hearts of His people, causing them to serve Him freely from love of His adorable character, and to triumph at last over all their enemies.

“The patience and the final perseverance of the saints, notwithstanding temporary distrust under Satan’s persecutions, which entailed loss of family, friends, possessions and bodily health, are illustrated in Job’s history. God’s people serve Him for His own sake, not merely for the temporary reward which His service may bring; they serve Him even in overwhelming trial. Herein is Job an imperfect type of Christ. Job’s chief agony was, not so much his accumulated losses and sufferings, not even his being misunderstood by friends, but that God hid His face from him, as these calamities too truly seemed to prove (Job 23:3-9). Yet conscience told him he was no hypocrite, nay, though God was slaying him, he still trusted in God (Job 23:10-15; compare Abraham, 22:19).”—Fausset.

“Job’s chief error was his undue self-justification, which he at last utterly renounced.” This book shows its author to have been a believer in a Savior to come, and to have been in possession of the gifts, graces and qualifications of the Holy Spirit, such as characterize the people of God now, and have characterized them in all ages of the world. His social and private virtues all bespeak him the child of God, and the church of God at this day would fellowship such an individual and give him freely all the privileges and immunities that appertain to the heirs of promise.

He was afflicted not as a punishment for his sins so much as for the trial of his faith—for his own good in the end, and for a pattern of patience and resignation that should encourage all the suffering saints of God, to the end of time.

“Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning Providence
He hides a smiling face.

“Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan God’s work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.”[14]

About midway between the creation of Adam and the advent of the Messiah, about 2000 A.M. and 2000 B. C., a man was born in Ur of the Chaldees, in Mesopotamia, whose name first was Abram, and afterwards, at the ratification of God’s covenant with him by circumcision (Gen. 17:1-14), changed to Abraham. This man was chosen and called of God, and set up as the head of a family and progenitor of a nation, that should continue to exist for 2000 years[15] and become one highly favored of the Lord, and be greatly distinguished by spiritual blessings from all the other nations of the earth. In this family the true knowledge and worship of God were to be preserved in the midst of the rapidly increasing idolatry of the world, and the church of God was to be manifested and be taken care of until the Messiah appeared, upon whose death the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile was to be broken down, and then the blessings of salvation were to be extended to all nations, and the church of God be seen among every kindred and tribe of men.

The call of Abram was by virtue of the sovereign, gracious Will of God,[16] not at all dependent upon any human means or measures, and is a fit type of God’s call to every man in nature’s night, from darkness to light, and from the bondage of sin and Satan into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. The first call of Abram moved the family with him; for his father Terah and others accompanied him part of the way. The first stopping place was at Haran, called in the New Testament Charran, east of the Euphrates, “the flood” which divided the old home of the family from the new land of promise. Here Terah died. Here it is thought Nahor remained. Haran, the oldest son, had died, and Abram and Nahor had married his daughters, Sarai and Milcah. At the second call of Abraham he crosses “the flood” (the river Euphrates) with his family and his nephew Lot and his family, Lot being a son of Haran and a brother of Abram’s wife. Abram was now about seventy-five years old, having been born about two years after the death of Noah. “His father Terah was the ninth of the patriarchs from Shem and the nineteenth from Adam (inclusive). At the age of seventy (B. C. 2056) Terah begat three sons, Abram, Nahor and Haran. This is the order of dignity; as when we read of Shem, Ham and Japheth; but there is no doubt that Haran was the oldest and Abram the youngest of the three. The name Abram signifies father of elevation, i.e., exalted father, which was prophetic of his calling to be the ancestor of a race chosen for an exalted destiny, while the name Abraham, into which it was afterwards changed, signifies father of a multitude. Abram’s future abode was described by Jehovah simply as ‘a land that I will show thee;’ and so ‘he went out not knowing whither he went.’ This was the first great proof of that unwavering faith, which added to his two other names of father the title, ‘Father of the faithful.’ God’s promise to him runs thus; ‘I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing [to others]: and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed’ (Gen. 12:2, 3). The last words already involve the crowning blessings of the old covenant, the promise of the Messiah, and that to the Gentiles, all families of the earth.”—Smith.

Abram leaves Haran, as it is said: “So Abram departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him; and Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed out of Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran: and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came” (Gen. 12:4, 5).

Abram crossed the “Great River” (Euphrates), and passing through the great Syrian desert (as we suppose), reached at length the city of Damascus and tarried there awhile. There he added to his family that faithful steward of his house, Eliezer, who was a native of the place. Quitting Damascus, he enters the holy land, and finds a resting place in the valley of Shethem or Sichem, the first in the promised land. Here he built an altar, and here God again appeared to him, with the promise of giving his seed that goodly land. Nine times did God appear to him who was called “the friend of God.”

Abram next halted between Bethel and Ai. This was a delightful mountain region, but was scant of pasture for his cattle. He therefore kept moving southward till the presence of famine drove him out of the promised land into Egypt. Here he fared well; but, for fear of losing his life, he called Sarai his sister, which she was indeed, according to the Hebrew and other languages, wherein a niece is called a sister, but was untrue in fact, and a misrepresentation to Pharaoh, who at first took her to be an unmarried woman.[17] Abram left Egypt “very rich in cattle, in silver and in gold,” and traveled back through the south of Palestine to his old encampment near Bethel.

He now soon experienced the inconvenience of having too much property. His herdsmen and those of Lot disagreed, and, in order to keep peace, a separation was agreed on, Abram giving to Lot the choice of direction, in the true spirit of brotherly kindness; and Lot chose the rich plains of the Jordan about Sodom, “well watered everywhere, as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt,” which they had lately quitted.

Abram removed to the oaks of Mamre, near Hebron, in the center of the hills of the south, and there built an altar. Lot’s new home brought him into trouble. The five cities and kings of the plain became involved in war with Chedorlaomer, King of Elam, who had established a strong empire in Western Asia, and thirteen years before placed these cities of the plain under tribute. They revolted, and the war was to force the payment of the tribute. The King of Elam secured the alliance of three other kings, and conquered the five kings, carrying off a great deal of booty and many captives, Lot being among the number with his goods.

Upon hearing this Abram resolved to regain possession of his nephew, and to that end made an alliance with the three uncaptured kings; and arming his servants, three hundred and eighteen in number, he overtook and punished the retiring hosts of Chedorlaomer, retook the spoils, and brought them, including Lot, to the valley again. He would receive no compensation for this outlay of time, trouble and endurance; but after giving tithes of the spoils as an offering to God, he gave the remainder to the young kings who accompanied him.

A remarkable scene occurred just here. Melchizedek, king of Salem, and priest of the Most High God, met Abram on his return from the expedition and blessed him, and Abram gave to Melchizedek tithes of all the spoil. Said this priest, who also brought forth bread and wine for the occasion, “Blessed be Abram of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth: and blessed be the Most High God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.” Here is a king and a priest not reckoned in the Hebrew or Noachian genealogy, and yet is fully accredited by Abram as a man of God, and one higher in authority than himself, who blesses Abram and receives tithes from him. Without controversy, the less is blessed by the greater.

The Holy Ghost adopts this method of presenting to us the most perfect type of the eternal priesthood of Christ. The Aaronic priesthood was insufficient, because they were not permitted to continue by reason of death; and they were ordained by the law of a carnal commandment, but this by the power of an endless life; without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life (Heb. 7). This king bears a title, which Jews in after years would recognize as designating their own sovereign, and bearing gifts which recall to Christians the Lord’s Supper. “Disappearing as suddenly as he came in, he is lost to the sacred writings for a thousand years; and then a few emphatic words, for another moment, bring him into sight as a type of the coming Lord of David. Once more, after another thousand years, the Hebrew Christians are taught to see in him a proof that it was the consistent purpose of God to abolish the Levitical priesthood.” Levi, who afterward received tithes of his brethren, paid tithes in Abraham; for he was in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him. Thus we have presented to us, apart from the Mosaic genealogy, Job among the patriarchs, Melchizedek among the priests, and subsequently Balaam among the prophets.

In order that Abram’s faith might not fail, God renewed His promises to him. He bade him look toward heaven and tell the stars, if he was able to count them, and said unto him “So shall thy seed be.” And Abram believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness (Gen. 15:5, 6).

And when he was 99 years old God renewed His covenant with him—changed his name to Abraham, because he was to be the father of many nations, and added the sign of circumcision to distinguish his male descendants from the rest of mankind. The name of Sarai (contentious) was also changed to Sarah (princess), and a son promised her, and his name Isaac also given, before he was born. Isaac signifies laughter. Abraham fell on his face and laughed when God made the promise (Gen. 17:17).

He therefore when born was appropriately called the child of promise, because born out of the regular course of nature, and born by virtue of the promise. Typical was this birth of that of our blessed Savior, and also of every child of grace who is born into the spiritual world.

Ishmael was born after the flesh, and not by promise. He was brought forth also by a bondmaid, and not by a free woman. Her child could not, therefore, either supplant or be heir with the son of the free woman. Ishmael was the product of the impatience of Sarah, who could not brook the delay in the fulfillment of God’s promise, and to hasten it, put her servant Hagar into Abraham’s bed.[18] The disappointment is well known; and the plan and result are typical of all fleshly-made professors of religion from that day to this. When born of the flesh, or of the blood, or of the will of man, however much zeal may be manifested on the occasion, a mocking Ishmaelite only will be the result (Gal. 4:22-31). Circumcision was enjoined as a rite to be imposed on all the male descendants of Abraham, when eight days Old, as well as on the servants and on all slaves when they were purchased (Gen. 17:12, 13).

Ishmael’s share in the temporal promise was confirmed by his circumcision; and the rite is still observed by the Arabs, who are his descendants.

Again God appeared to Abraham as he sat in his tent door, under the oak of Mamre. He became aware of the presence of “three men,” for such they appeared to him; and offered them that hospitality which is commemorated in the apostolic precept:”Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have often entertained angels unawares” (Heb. 13:2). “He soon learnt the dignity of his visitors, when they inquired after Sarah, and rebuked her incredulity, by repeating the promise that she should bear Abraham a son, and fixing the time for its fulfillment.” Upon their departure with their faces toward Sodom, Abraham, as “the friend of God,” brought them on their way, when the design of Sodom’s overthrow was made known to him. Two of the persons left, and with the other Abraham conversed and interceded for the salvation of Sodom, but without avail, for not even ten righteous men could be found within that devoted city. The person addressed was God, we suppose, or the Son of God veiled in assumed humanity, and the two others were angels who went down to snatch from destruction Lot and his family from the city of Sodom. Lot and his wife and two daughters are all that would leave. His wife, because she looked back, was turned to a pillar of salt; and as he and two daughters entered the city of Zoar (a little city) at sunrise on the morning of the next day, Jehovah rained down upon the cities—Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim—“brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven; and He overthrew these cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground” (Gen. 19:24, 25; compared with Deut. 29:23; Isa. 13:19; Jer. 20:16; l:40; Ezek. 16:49, 50; Hosea 11: 8; Amos 4:11; Zeph. 2:9).[19]

“The plain in which the cities stood, hitherto fruitful”as the garden of Jehovah,” became henceforth a scene of perpetual desolation. Our Lord Himself and the Apostles Peter and Jude have clearly taught the lasting lesson which is involved in the judgment; that it is a type of the final destruction by fire of a world which will have reached a wickedness like that of Sodom and Gomorrah (Luke 17:29; 2 Pet. 2:6; Jude 7). A more special warning to those who, when once separated from an ungodly world, desire to turn back, is enforced by the fate of Lot’s wife, who when she looked back from behind him, became a pillar of salt (Gen. 19:26; Luke 17:32).

“Lot himself, though saved from Sodom, fell, like Noah after the deluge, into vile intoxication, of which his own daughters took advantage to indulge the incestuous passion, from which sprang the races of Moab and Ammon (Gen. 19:30-38).”—W. Smith.

The fourth resting place of Abraham in the Holy Land was Beersheba, at the southwestern extremity of the country, so that the established formula to indicate the whole country was to say “from Dan to Beersheba.” Abimelech reigned in the valley of Gerar, and, through fear of him, Abraham practiced another deception in regard to his wife (Gen. 20).

In Beersheba Isaac was born, and the greatest trial of Abraham’s faith was made when he was called upon to offer his son Isaac in sacrifice to God as a burnt-offering. There was not the slightest hesitation, however, on the part of Abraham, in obeying this command. He took his son, then twenty-five years old, to the spot designated by the Lord, clave the wood, laid his son on the altar, and raised the knife to slay him, when he was arrested by a voice from heaven, forbidding his doing the deed.

A ram was immediately seen caught in a thicket by his horns, and him Abraham took and offered in the stead of his son.[20] Thus a burnt offering was made and Isaac set free. Isaac became a figure of the church and the ram a figure of Christ.

Abraham intended to slay his son, believing, no doubt, that God would restore him to him alive, so that he and his son could both return to the young men again whom they had left with the ass at the foot of the mountain (Gen. 22:5; Heb. 11:19).

“And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh [the Lord will provide]: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen” (Gen. 2:14).

Such a trying scene as this has never been surpassed, and to the end of time Abraham must be considered the father of the faithful; so all that do believe in Christ are reckoned the children of Abraham.

Abraham moved again to his old resting place at Hebron, and there Sarah died at the age of 127, which induced him to purchase land of the inhabitants for a burial place; for up to this time he owned no land. He bought of Ephraim, the Hittite, the cave of Machpelah (or the Double Cave), close to the oak of Mamre, with the field in which it stood, for the sum of four hundred shekels’ weight of silver, “current money with the merchant” (about two hundred and fifty dollars). “Here he buried Sarah; here he was buried by his sons Isaac and Ishmael; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; Jacob and his wife Leah, and perhaps Joseph.[21] It is said that the sepulchre still exists under the mosque of Hebron, and was first permitted to be seen by Europeans since the Crusades, when it was visited by the Prince of Wales in 1862. Hebron is held by the Muslims to be the fourth of the Holy Places; Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem being the other three.”

After the burial of Sarah, Abraham seems to have returned to his old home again, Beersheba. His next care was to procure a wife for his son Isaac. She must not come from the idolatrous and depraved Canaanites, among whom he dwelt, but must be taken from among his own family relations. Therefore, the oldest servant was sworn in the matter, and undertook the task of finding a wife for Isaac. With ten camels and divers outfits and presents he started on his journey and kept on his way, till he crossed “the flood,” the great river Euphrates, and found the city of Haran, in Mesopotamia, where Terah, Nahor, Abraham and Lot first halted after leaving Ur of the Chaldees, and where Nahor remained when Abram and Lot recommenced their journey toward the land of Canaan. God prospered the servant’s journey and search; for there at Haran he found the damsel suited to his young master in the person of Rebekah, daughter of Bethnel and granddaughter of Nahor. She was the daughter, therefore, of Isaac’s own cousin. The whole narrative, as recorded in the Bible, is very interesting, and clearly shows the hand of Providence as guiding the purpose of Abraham and directing the course of his servant from first to last.

Isaac took Rebekah into his mother’s tent, and she became his wife, and he loved her, and was comforted after his mother’s death (Gen. 24:67). Isaac was forty years old when he was married, and his residence was by the well of La-hai-roi, in the extreme south of Palestine.

After the marriage of Isaac, Abraham formed a new union with Keturah, by whom he became the father of the Keturaite Arabs. He is said to have married Keturah, but perhaps the union was only that of concubinage, as her sons had no inheritance with Isaac and were sent off eastward with presents, so as to be entirely out of Isaac’s way, as Ishmael was in the first instance. To Isaac he gave his great wealth, and then died in a good old age. He died, apparently at Beersheba, at the age of 175. His sons Isaac and Ishmael met at his funeral and buried him in the cave of Machpelah. Ishmael survived him just fifty years, and died at the age of 137.

The character of Abraham is one of the noblest in history. Modest, courteous, judicious, hospitable, generous and affectionate, full of reverence, love and submission to God, he lived a life of pre-eminent faith and prayer, and brought up his children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Yet twice, influenced by the fear of man, he denied his own wife, and he yielded to her wishes, when Isaac’s birth was delayed and he became a polygamist.

The Bible is different from all other books; it whitewashes none of its heroes, patriarchs, prophets, priests or kings, but gives an unvarnished statement of all their most important actions, whether good or bad, with the consequences, so that all may properly judge of them, and, while imitating their virtues, avoid their vices. The ancient worthies of the Old Testament, who, according to the Apostle Paul, form such a great crowd of witnesses for the truth (Heb. 11), as well as the Apostles and ministers of the New Testament, who give such honor and glory to God, were all sinners saved by grace, and liable to err either in faith or practice occasionally, during the term of their natural lives. There is no perfection in the flesh, even if it is the flesh of saints. But their sins bring sorrow to their hearts, and produce a continual repentance toward God for the same.

1. As the remedy is determined by the disease, one’s whole system of theology is decided by his view of original sin. Pelagianism (so called from Pelagius, a British monk of the fifth century), which is a form, not of Christianity, but of Rationalism. asserts that Adam’s sin injured only himself; that men are born into the world in the same unfallen state in which Adam was created; that men may, and sometimes do, live without sin: that the law is as good a system of salvation as the gospel: that men have no need of divine assistance in order to be holy: and that Christianity has no essential superiority over heathenism or natural religion. But it is the plain testimony of Scripture, as well as of all known experience and history, and it has always been the doctrine of both the Jewish and the Christian Church, that the sin and guilt of Adam were imputed to all his posterity. Adam was the natural and federal head and representative of his race. Everything said or granted or promised or threatened to him had as much reference to his posterity, as to himself. They, like him, have dominion over the lower animals: their law of marriage is like his; the penalty of transgression pronounced upon him has fallen upon them; the earth is cursed to them, as to him; they too have to earn their bread in the sweat of their face; the daughters of Eve suffer the same peculiar pains as their mother; all mankind, even unborn infants, die, and their bodies return to dust. Since the fall our first parents, all their posterity have been born outside of Eden, away from the favor of God, and with the sinful natures of the first fallen pair (Eph. 2:1-3). It seemed good (Matthew 11:26) to our wise and holy Creator that our race should have its probation or trial in Adam. Adam, when created, was surrounded with a multiplicity of the most exquisite means of innocent enjoyment: he had no natural inclination to evil; he had no known bad company; he was not a child, but a man in the maturity of his powers; he had the noblest possible motives to stand; there is absolutely no reason to believe that any one of his descendants would have done better. Had he stood, we should have enjoyed all the benefits of his obedience. Just as Christ, the second Adam, is the federal head and representative of all His people, and they are made alive and righteous by His obedience, so the first Adam was the federal head and representative of all his children, and, by his disobedience, they were all made unrighteous and spiritually dead (Rom. 5:19; 1 Cor. 15:22, 45; Eph. 2:1). The inborn depravity of human nature is proved by the early manifestation, the universality, and the incorrigibility of sin, by the abundant testimony of both the Old and New Testament Scriptures (Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Job 14:4; 25:4; Ps. 14:3; 51:5; Isaiah 1:5, 6: Jer. 17:9: Matthew 7:16-20; 15:19; John 3:6: Rom. 3:9-20, etc.) by the necessity of redemption by the death of Christ, and of regeneration by the Holy Spirit, by the experience of all Christians, by the whole course of human history, and by the universality of death. The Wesleyans, while admitting the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity, maintain that such imputation was Just in God only on condition that He should give every individual of the human family sufficient grace in Christ to enable him, if he chooses, to attain salvation—thus taking back with the left hand what they give us with the right, and making themselves semi-Pelagians, and contradicting the whole tenor of the Scriptures, which everywhere affirm or imply that God’s gift of Christ was an act of pure and unmerited mercy.
The mysterious principle of representation pervades both Scriptures and nature (Gen. 9:22, 25; 25:34, compared with Obadiah 19; Ex. 20:5; 34:6, 7; Num. 16:32, 33; Josh. 6:25; 7:24, 25; 1 Sam. 3:14; 15:2, 3; 2 Sam. 12:10; 21:1-9; 1 Kings 5:27; Jer.32:18; Matt. 23:35, etc.) The God of nature visits the crimes and vices of individuals in many ways upon their posterity. By finite minds God’s “judgments are unsearchable, and His ways past finding out” (Rom. 11:33). But, though “clouds and darkness are round about Him,” his children know that “justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne.” (Ps. 97:2). We cannot understand the doctrine of representation or imputation, any more than we can understand why an infinitely wise, powerful,, holy and benevolent Being should gave ever permitted the existence of sin and misery in the universe.

2. In the early rites, symbols and legends of all the most ancient nations is found the tradition that the serpent was somehow associated with the ruin of the human family, and that he was, when thus employed, the vehicle of the Evil Spirit. We are told in the New Testament that a legion of devils, on one occasion, entered a herd of swine (Mark 5:9-13), and that, after the last supper, Satan entered into Judas (John 13:27). So the chief of the fallen angels, who may once have been before his fall, the vicegerent of God on earth, and who is now “the prince of the power of the air.” (Eph. 2:2), hating God, and envying man’s happiness, plotted to mar this fairest object of God’s terrestrial creation. To accomplish his malignant purpose, he selects the serpent, the subtlest or craftiest of all the animal tribes, and inspires him to tempt Eve, the weaker of the human pair (2 Cor. 11:3; Rev. 7:9; 20:2).

3. We see thus the mean, selfish and ungodly tendency of sin, which is to cast the blame upon some one else, whether it be an inferior animal, or another human being, or even upon God, our Maker, who “cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man” (Jam. 1:12-15), though He tries or proves His people (Ps. 7:9; Jer. 20:12; Zech. 13:9).

4. Or, as the original Hebrew means, “At the gate of the garden God tabernacled, or set as the dwelling place of His shekinah glory, cherubim and a sword-like flame which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life.” The pointed flame, darting its resplendent beams around on every side, so as to present an effectual bar to all access by the old approach to the garden, symbolized God’s unchangeable holiness and justice; while the cherubim symbolized his mercy. The name and the cherubim at the front of Eden seem to have constituted the antediluvian local tabernacle (Gen. 4:3, 4, 14-16), and were the forerunners of the sanctuary, where the cherubim on either side of the shekinah cloud represented the meeting together of God’s mercy and Justice in man’s redemption. The cherubim, as sculptured or wrought figures in the Tabernacle or the Temple, seem to have had human forms and faces with angelic wings, representing that redeemed men are to be equal to angels (Luke 20:26); and in the visions of Isaiah, Ezekiel and John, they. are living creatures, having four or six wings apiece and having (as in Ezekiel) each four faces, or a lion, an ox, a man and an angel, or each having (as in John) only one of these faces—the four leading forms of animal life being used to represent the perfected life in glory of those redeemed from all the world (Rev. 4:7; 5:8, 9).

5. God’s purpose was to destroy the entire wicked race of man, except the family of Noah, and to show the world’s need of divine purification (Gen. 11:13; 1 Pet. 3:20, 21; John 3:5). The flood was no doubt universal, so far as the occupants of the Ark could see (Gen. vii. 19), and so far as the human race was concerned; but the word “all,” both in Scripture and in popular language, frequently means only a large part (see Gen. 41:57; Ex. 9:6, 19; Deut. 2:25; Matthew 3:5: 21:26: and Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, last edition). These and similar passages of Scripture, together with numerous scientific considerations, have led some of the ablest Bible scholars to believe that the region submerged covered only about a million square miles in Western Asia, where man first dwelt—the object of God being to destroy the corrupt human race. Reckoning 21 inches for the sacred cubit, the ark was only 525 feet long, 87 1/2 broad and 52 1/2 high, and these two-and-a-half million cubic feet could have held, it is said, only one-fourth of the clean animals alone, taking in seven of each kind. The steamship Great Eastern is one-third larger than was the Ark, but it would have been far too small to have held a million living creatures, with twelve months provisions for them, as it must have done, it is said, if the flood had been universal, and two of every unclean and seven of every clean animal had been taken on board. Besides, it is computed that it would have required three times as much water as there is on the globe to have covered the entire earth to the depth of five miles, the altitude of the highest mountains; and Moses does not tell us that any water was created for the purpose, but he does say that the material creation ceased with the creation of Adam (Gen. 2:2). Like most of the historical descriptions in Scripture, the account of the deluge is probably the truthful statement of an eye-witness, perhaps Shem, handed down to Moses. As far as his eye could reach, everything on earth was submerged beneath the waters. How forcible an emblem was the deluge of baptism (1 Pet. 3:20, 21), and the Ark an emblem of Christ (Gen. 7:23; Acts 4:12). The Assyrian Deluge Tablet, 4000 years old, but recently exhumed and deciphered, states thirty of the very same facts as are mentioned by Moses in his narrative of the deluge.
After all that may be said, we know that God is omnipotent, and that there are no physical difficulties with Him, and the deluge that He sent upon the wicked race may have been literally as well as optically universal.

6. The above argument does not prove that, in religious matters, every minority is right; but it does completely destroy, the force of every argument that bases the defense of any religious party upon the great numbers of that party.

7. Isaiah 54:7-10 was the first text ever taken by the Junior author of this work in his public ministry, December 10, 1871, at Skewarkey meeting-house, near Williamston, Martin Co., N.C.

8. Between Adam and Isaac were only two links, Methuselah and Shem. According to the Hebrew numbers, Adam and Methuselah were contemporaneous 243 years. Methuselah and Shem 98 years; and Shem and Isaac 49 years.

9. The names of Noah’s sons were prophetic. Shem signifies name or renown (the Scriptures have been given to us through the family of Shem, and Christ was of that family); Ham signifies hot or black (his descendants mainly peopled Africa); and Japheth signifies either fair or enlarged (his descendants are the white-faced Europeans, who have gone forth and established colonies in all the other grand divisions of the globe).

10. Qatan, in the twenty-fourth verse, translated “younger,” is elsewhere rendered “’youngest” (1 Sam. 16:11; 17:14), and its literal meaning is “little.” “Little son,” or “young son,” with the Jews often meant grandson: so that many scholars think that the expression here denotes Noah’s grandson, Canaan: and they suppose that Canaan first saw Noah and told his father Ham, who then told Shem and Japheth. The word Canaan means low, and denotes him and his posterity as low, morally, socially and geographically. The Canaanites mainly inhabited the Mediterranean lowlands of Palestine and the low-depressed valley of the Jordan. Like their father, they were exceedingly sensual and depraved. Sodom and Gomorrah were Canaanite cities.

11. The tenth chapter of Genesis is the most interesting and valuable ethnological record in the world. The latest and most critical scientific researches establish its entire accuracy.

12. The confusion of tongues divinely produced at Babel accounts for all the radical differences between human languages.

13. Uz, the country of Job, was probably in the middle of Northern Arabia; and the statement of Eusebius, that he lived two ages before Moses, or about the time of Isaac, some 1800 B.C., is probably as correct as can now be ascertained. It is supposed that Moses became acquainted with the book of Job during his stay in Arabia, near Horeb, and introduced it into the Hebrew canon, as calculated to teach the Israelites patience under their afflictions. Job’s disease is believed to have been elephantiasis, or black leprosy, the most loathsome and terrible of all diseases (Job 2:7, 8; 7:5, 7, 8, 13-16; 16:8; 19:17; 30:17-21, 27, 29, 30).

14. Elder Silas H. Durand, of Southampton,Penn., is the author of an admirable book called “The Trial of Job,” price $1 (A Hymn and Tune Book, by Elders S. H. Durand and P. G. Lester, may be had of Elder Durand for $1.25).

15. Though now scattered over the world, the Jews are still a separate and distinct people–living proofs, everywhere among the Gentiles, of the truth of the Old Testament—an absolutely unique feature in the history of the world, which ought to enchain the serious attention of every thinking mind; especially when this extraordinary fact was predicted by Moses 1500 years before their dispersion (Deut. 30:3).

16. “In the midst of his polytheistic kindred,” says Prof. Max Muller, the ablest living philologist, “Abraham obtained his knowledge of the true God by a special divine revelation.” So must every true child of God obtain a saving knowledge of the Most High (Matthew 11:27; 16:17; Gal. 1:12).

17. No other book is so candid and truthful as the Bible. “The faults of the most eminent saints are not glossed over; each saint not only fails at times, but is represented as failing in the very grace (for example, Abraham in faith) for which he was most noted.” This proves that all their graces were not of themselves, but were gifts of God; if He did not sustain them they failed. “It deserves to be noticed that throughout the history of the chose race, Egypt was to them the scene of spiritual danger, of covetousness and love of riches, of worldly security, of temptation to rest on an arm of flesh, on man’s own understanding, and not on God only.”–A. R. Faussett.

18. Polygamy began with the Cainites (Gen. 4:19-24), and no doubt greatly helped to bring on the fearful Judgment of the flood (Gen. vi. 1-5). It was practiced by the Hebrews until after their return from Babylon. “The desire of offspring among the Jews was associated with the hope of the promised Redeemer. This in some degree palliates, though it does not justify, the concubinage of Abraham and Jacob. The seeming laxity of morals thus tolerated is a feature in the divine plan arising from its progressive character. In the beginning, when man was sinless, God made but one woman for one man. But, when man fell, and, in the course of developing corruption, strayed more and more from the original law, God provisionally sanctioned a code which imposed some checks on the prevailing licentiousness—the very permission being a witness against the hardness of man’s heart (Matthew 19:8). Christ restored the original pure code (Matthew 19:1-9).”

19. It is believed that the wicked cities occupied a part of the site now covered by the Dead Sea There are vast quantities of sulfur and bitumen and salt, and numerous evidences of other than volcanic combustion, in and around that most mysterious body of water. The surface of the Dead Sea is 1,800 feet below the level of the Mediterranean, and its water, in the northern part, is 1,800 feet deep. It is the deepest depression on the surface of the earth: and the air above and around has a hot, steaming, stagnant, sulphurous character; neither animals nor vegetables live in the water: dead driftwood fringe the shores—apt emblems of the low morals of the corrupt inhabitants of the plain, and God’s terrible judgment upon them,—spiritual and eternal death.

20. It was then that Abraham saw Christ’s day, and was glad (John 8:56). It was Abraham’s faith, not his work, that was imputed to him for righteousness (Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:1-25); and yet that faith would not have proved its reality and vitality unless it had worked in loving obedience to God (1 Cor. 13:2: Gal. 5:6; Jam. 2:14-16).

21. “Whence came the extraordinary, passionate affection of such sensible men as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, father, son, grandson and great-grandson, for the hilly and rocky land of Canaan, inhabited by an idolatrous and most corrupt people, while all that they possessed in that land was little more than a grave? What drew Abraham to it from the fertile plain of Mesopotamia, brought him back to it from wealthy and civilized Egypt, and would not let him hear of Isaac leaving it? What made its attractions so irresistible to Jacob, bringing him back to it after long absence, in spite of his exceeding fear of Esau? What made Joseph, the great lord of Egypt, decline the honors of pyramid and mausoleum and bind his brethren so solemnly to bury his bones in the soil of Canaan? Of these strange facts no other feasible explanation can be devised than that it was the promise of God to give to them and their posterity the land of Canaan, and to cause to be born of their descendants, in that land, one in whom all the families of the earth were to be blessed.”—W. G. Blaikie.

Chapter III. From Isaac to the Death of Joshua.

About twenty years after the marriage of Isaac to Rebekah (her barrenness being removed), she brought forth twins, Esau (hairy) or Edom (red) and Jacob (the supplanter). Perhaps no twin brothers were ever more dissimilar in appearance and character than these. There was commotion in the womb, and at birth the hand of Jacob grasped the heel of the first born, Esau, denoting that craft by which he should eventually supplant his brother, and gain the birthright.[1] They were unlike each other mentally and physically. Esau was ruddy and hairy, and became a wild hunter; while Jacob was a smooth man and became a quiet denizen of the tent. These differences of character were fostered by the improper partiality of the parents, which always produces unhappiness in the family circle. “Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison; but Rebekah loved Jacob” (Gen. 25:21-28).

Esau parted with his birthright, and thereby became a “profane person,” according to the Apostle Paul (Heb. 12:16), and he was not in the regular line of succession from Abraham to Christ. On returning from hunting once, very much fatigued and quite hungry, he discovered Jacob preparing some red pottage of lentils, and quickly asked for “some of that red, red.” Being impatient for it, his brother seized on the occasion to buy his birthright, and Esau readily promised it to him for the sake of the pottage. He parted with a great deal for a very little. By right of birth he was the head of the family and entitled to be its prophet, priest and king. By birthright he was the head of the chosen family; on him devolved the blessing of Abraham, that in his seed all families of the earth should be blessed (Gen. 22:18). By “despising his birthright” he “despised” those rich provisions and great temporal and spiritual blessings which God had in store for the family of Abraham.

When the time came, therefore, for his father Isaac to impart the patriarchal blessing to his first son, Jacob,[2] at the command of Rebekah, served the savory meat to his father, and received the blessing before Esau came with his venison. Isaac was deceived, but would not recant or change his blessing, believing it to be God’s will that Jacob should have it; and Esau could not obtain it though he sought it with tears (Gen. 27:34). Isaac dwelt quietly in the land of Palestine, his life forming a great contrast to that of his father, Abraham. About Beersheba he resided mostly, and was not allowed to go down into Egypt or out of the promised land. He was much mortified at the marriage of Esau to his two Hittite wives, and favored the errand of Jacob into the land of Padan-aram (Mesopotamia) in search of a wife from among his own kindred. Many years afterward, when Jacob visited him at Hebron, he died, at the age of 180 years.

Jacob pursued his journey toward the land of Padan-aram, with staff in hand, a solitary wanderer, along the path by which Abraham had traversed Canaan. Proceeding northward he lighted on a place, the site, doubtless, of Abraham’s encampment near Bethel, twelve miles north of Jerusalem, where he found some stones which probably belonged to the altar set up by Abraham, one of which he made his pillow. Though a poor, selfish sinner and an outcast, in a “waste, howling wilderness” (Deut. 32:9, 10), a covenant-keeping God graciously visited him in a dream,[3] showed him a ladder[4] reaching from earth to Heaven, upon which the angels of God were ascending and descending, and he heard the voice of God renewing His promises of protection. Jacob concluded that place to be the house of God and the gate of Heaven. He set up his pillow for a monument, consecrating it with oil, and called the place Bethel—the house of God. He is thought at this time to have been in his seventy-seventh year. Jacob arrived at length at Padan-aram, and there the pastoral scenes are revived that were presented to Abraham’s servant when he reached there in search of a wife for Isaac.

Rachel, the daughter of his uncle Laban, comes with her sheep to the well, like her aunt Rebekah just a century before, and brings him to the house. Jacob remained with Laban twenty years—fourteen of them for his daughter Rachel, and six on wages. It cannot be said that he served a day for Leah, but she was imposed on him by the craft and deception of her father. During the second seven years Jacob had born to him, by his two[5] wives and their handmaids, eleven sons and one daughter. Ben-jamin was born on his return to Palestine, near Bethlehem, and his mother died from the effect of giving him birth, and called him Ben-oni (son of my sorrow). But his fond father changed his name to Ben-jamin (son of the right hand).

The following is a list of the twelve sons and a daughter:

“(I.) The sons of Leah: Reuben (see! a son), Simeon (hearing), Levi (joined), Judah (praise), Issachar (hire), Zebulon (dwelling).
”(II.) The sons of Rachel: Joseph (adding), Benjamin (son of the right hand).
“(III.) The sons of Bilhah, Rachel’s handmaid: Dan (judging), Naphtali (my wrestling).
”(IV.) The sons of Zilpah, Leah’s handmaid: Gad (a troop), Asher (happy). Besides Dinah (judgment), the daughter of Leah (Gen. 35:23-26).”—W. Smith.

After twenty years, absence from Canaan, and just after escaping from his avaricious father-in-law—Laban—Jacob, returning to Palestine, has to meet his dreaded brother Esau, whom he had defrauded of his birthright and his blessing. The God of Bethel comforts Jacob again with a vision of angels at Mahanaim. But Jacob learns that Esau is approaching him with four hundred men. What shall he do with his large and helpless family and flocks? Defenseless, distressed and terrified, poor Jacob betakes himself to his only possible resort, a covenant God, and utters the first recorded prayer of Scripture (Gen. 32:9-12), a prayer most remarkable for faith, fervor, humility and tenderness. Feeling unworthy of the least of all God’s manifold mercies and truth, he implores the God of the covenant to deliver him and his family from the hand of his brother Esau; and he pleads the Divine promises in his behalf. Rising up the next morning, he sends his brother a present of five hundred and fifty cattle to appease his anger; he takes his family across the brook Jabbok, and returns himself alone to the north bank of the stream. That night—the most solemn of Jacob’s life—the angel of Jehovah (Christ) appears to him in human form, and Jacob wrestles with him until the break of day, for a blessing (compare Luke 6:12).

“God frequently does not answer the prayer of His people till the last moment—till, by the very delay—strengthening the spirit of prayer, and by the continued exercise of it—their hearts are brought into such a state of submission and of faith that they become suitable recipients of the blessing.” Then, to show that the blessing is all of grace, the angel touches Jacob’s thigh and puts it out of joint, and, when the poor man is able to put forth no more strength of his own, he still hangs upon the angel with supplication and tears (Hosea 12:3, 4; Heb. 5:7); and thus “not by might or power, but by the indwelling Spirit of the Lord of hosts,” (Zech. 4:6) he prevails at last, “teaching us the irresistible might of conscious weakness, hanging on Almighty strength” (Job 23:6; Isa. 27:5; 40:29-31; 2 Cor. 12:9, 10). Jacob’s name is changed by the angel to Israel, wrestler with God, because he has been permitted by grace (Zech. 4:7) to struggle with God and prevail. He asks God’s name, and the only reply is, God “blessed him there.” Blessing is God’s name or character wherein He reveals Himself to His people (Ex. 34:5-7). Jacob called the place Peniel, the face of God. The sun arises upon him, naturally and spiritually, and he rejoices in its beams; but, stripped of vain self-confidence, he goes a poor cripple—a poor sinner saved by grace—all the remainder of his life. When Jacob meets Esau the next day, the anger of the latter is all gone, and the occasion is one of tenderness, and weeping, and love (Prov. 16:7).

Abraham bought only a burial place in Canaan; Jacob bought a dwelling-place near Shechem (or Sychar), and in his field dug a deep well, through the rocks, where Christ afterwards rested (John 4:6). He erected an altar for the worship of God, and soon after was greatly troubled because of the sins of Dinah, Simeon and Levi. By God’s direction he removed to Bethel, and there also raised an altar to God, and purged his house of idols; and God again appeared to him and renewed the covenant of promise. Soon after, he lost his beloved Rachel, and he and Esau buried their father Isaac, who died at the age of one hundred and eighty years.

The vision of Abraham, notifying him of the sojourn of his posterity in the land of Egypt four hundred years, as in a house of bondage, must be verified, and the envy of Joseph’s brethren made way for it. Joseph was the favorite son of his father, and this partiality was so clearly seen that it produced envy in the minds of his ten older brethren. This was the fault of his father, but none of Joseph’s. The character of Joseph is one of the purest in the Bible; his history one of the most interesting, and his life one of the most forcible types[6] of the Messiah. His dreams predicted the superiority of his position to theirs, and they but hated him the more for his dreams, and they resolved to kill him. On being sent by his father to see how they fared while watching their sheep, he found them at Dothan, and there they designed to destroy him, but were diverted from their purpose, and they finally sold to a company of Midianites that were passing by on their way to Egypt, bearing spices and gums from the Syrian desert. They sold him for twenty pieces of silver, and the purchasers took him into Egypt and resold him to Potiphar, captain of the king’s guard. Everything prospered in the house of Potiphar for Joseph’s sake, and his wife became so enamored with him that she assaulted his virtue, unsuccessfully, however, and then became his bitter enemy and accused him to her husband, who thrust him into prison. Things in the prison prospered under his management, and he became an interpreter of dreams. Pharaoh had dreams, and Joseph was taken to his presence to interpret them. He did so under the enlightening influence of God’s Spirit; and told the king that there would be in Egypt seven years of plenty, to be immediately followed by seven years of famine; and advised him to appoint some one to superintend the matter, and gather up in store a sufficiency during the plentiful years to support the people during the seven years of scarcity.

Pharaoh wisely concluded that he who interpreted the dreams was the most suitable person to entrust the business with, and appointed Joseph second ruler in his kingdom. He made him his vicegerent over Egypt, and gave him his own signet, the indisputable mark of royal power. Clothed with fine linen robes, wearing a collar of gold, and riding in the second royal chariot, before which the people were bidden to fall prostrate, Joseph was proclaimed, with all the ceremonies which we still see represented on the monuments, prime minister of Egypt. He was only then about thirty years old, being seventeen when sold by his brethren. “The Coptic name which Pharaoh gave him was Zaphnath-paaneah (a revealer of secrets). He also gave him for wife Asenath, the daughter of Poti-pherah, priest or prince of On (Heliopolis), who bore him two sons during the seven years of plenty. As a token of oblivion of his former life he named his elder son Manasseh (forgetting), and he called the younger son Ephraim (double fruitfulness), in grateful commemoration of his blessings. When Joseph afterward became his father’s heir, the double share of inheritance which fell to him was indicated by each of his sons ranking with the sons of Jacob as the head of a distinct tribe.”

When the years of famine set in and the corn in Canaan was exhausted, Jacob sent his ten sons down to buy corn in Egypt. Joseph spake harshly to them, but let them have the corn without charge. The second time they went he was made known to them, and they returned home with the glad tidings to their father that Joseph was alive. The incidents of these two visits are, we have thought, among the most interesting and thrilling in history; and the pathetic appeal of Judah before Joseph in behalf of Benjamin’s release is, for pathos and true merit, we think, unsurpassed by any oration ever committed to record.

At the urgent request of Joseph, Jacob and his family went down into Egypt and settled in the goodly land of Goshen. Thus we find the church in Egypt, in the year of the world 2294, B.C. 1706, to be nursed by the Almighty, and to multiply until it became a nation to vindicate its own rights and march through unfriendly nations to the promised land again.

The number is made up as follows:

I.—

The children of Leah, 32, viz.:

(1) Reuben and four sons,

5

(2) Simeon and six sons,

7

(3) Levi and three sons,

4

(4) Judah and five sons (of whom 2 were dead) and two grandsons,

6

(5) Issachar and four sons,

5

(6) Zebulon and three sons,

4

Dinah,

1

II.—

The children of Zilpah, considered as Leah's, 16, viz.:

(7) Gad and seven sons,

8

(8) Asher, four sons, one daughter, and two grandsons,

8

III.—

The children of Rachel, 14, viz.:

(9) Joseph (see below)

(10) Benjamin and ten sons,

11

IV.—

The children of Bilhah, considered as Rachel's, 7, viz.:

(11) Dan and one son,

2

(12) Naphtali and four sons,

5

Total of those that came with Jacob into Egypt,

66

To these must be added Jacob, Joseph, and two sons,

4

Total of Israel's house,

70

These are the numbers of the Hebrew text (Gen. 46; Deut. 10:22), but the Septuagint completes the genealogy by adding the children of Manasseh and Ephraim, who of course ranked with those of the sons of Jacob, namely, Machir, the son of Manasseh, and Galeed (Gilead), the son of Machir (2), Sutalaam (Shutelah) and Taam (Tathath), the sons of Ephraim, and Edom, the son of Sutalaam (3), making five in all. These five added to the seventy makes seventy-five in all, the number mentioned by Stephen in his defense before the Sanhedrim, quoting from the Septuagint—the version commonly used then, especially by the Hellenistic Jews, with whom his discussion began (Acts 7:14). Wonderful is the comparison between this handful of persons and that vast multitude who left Egypt under Moses, when the day of their bondage had ended. Moses then estimated them to be six hundred thousand men, able to bear arms, from twenty years old and upward, besides women of a corresponding age and all minors, both male and female.

Four hundred and thirty years are reckoned from the promise made to Abraham to the giving of the law at Sinai (B.C. 1921—B.C. 1491), according to the received chronology (Gal. 3:17). This period of time was about equally divided by Abraham and his descendants—say 215 years in Egypt.

From the death of Joseph to the exodus was 144 years, and we may conclude that the length of rigorous oppression was only about 100 years. Their increase in numbers was perhaps unprecedented, as it is said of them, before another king arose who knew not Joseph: “And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them” (Ex. 1:7). And when oppression came, their increase was not much retarded, but went on almost miraculously.

The patriarch Jacob dwelt in Egypt seventeen years, and then, yielding up the ghost, was gathered to his fathers, and buried by Joseph and his brethren, the elders both of Israel and Egypt and a great military retinue, in the cave of Machpelah in the land of Canaan. He lived to the age of 147 years.

Before dying, he called his sons to his bedside and told them what should befall them in the last days. He describes their characters and predicts their future tribal careers. This is a very interesting portion of Scripture, even to our dull understanding, and if we could exactly understand all that is said, it would be more so.

In the prophetic scene opened to the dying patriarch, Judah is the central figure (Gen. 49:8-12). He was to be the praise of his brethren, and the conqueror of his enemies. Jacob likens him to a lion; the standard of this tribe afterwards was a lion. Jacob adds: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” All Jewish and Christian antiquity understood this to be a prophecy of the Messiah, or Christ. Judah was to be the chief or ruling tribe (as it indeed proved to be—all the descendants of Jacob now in the world being called Jews, from Judah); and Judah was not to lose its political existence and supremacy until Shiloh, or the Peace-giver, should appear out of that tribe, and unto Him should the obedience of the nations be. “Judah never ceased to be a tribe with at least a tribal sceptre and lawgiver, Sanhedrim or Senators, until the destruction of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. The power of life and death is said to have been taken by the Roman procurators, or governors, about A.D. 30, or the time of the crucifixion of Christ (John 23:31, 32). The Idumean, Herod the Great, though appointed by the Roman Senate king of Judah, B. C. 40, ruled as a native sovereign, even rebuilding or extensively repairing and beautifying the temple, until his death, B.C. 4. A short time before his death, in the same year, Christ was born. Archelaus, Herod’s son and successor, was deposed A.D. 6. Then Rome appointed foreign procurators over Judea in the following order: Sabinus, Coponius, Ambivius, Rufus, Valerius, Grams, and Pontius Pilate. This is the first of four Old Testament prophecies of the very time of the coming of Christ, the other three being Daniel 2:44; 9:24-27; Haggai 2: 6-9.

Joseph survived his father fifty-four years; no doubt he remained in favor at the Court of Pharaoh while he lived. Before dying he took an oath of his brethren, that they would carry his bones for burial into the land of Canaan, when the Lord should visit them with deliverance. He died at the age of 110. His remains were embalmed and preserved in Egypt until the Israelites left it, and were then taken along with them and buried at last in Canaan.

When there arose a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph (Ex. 1:8), then the afflictions of the Israelites began in earnest. He was afraid of their numbers and doubted their allegiance. In case of a foreign war he apprehended they might takes sides with the enemy and thereby achieve their own independence. Said he to his people, They “are more and mightier than we.” “Let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply,” etc. (Gen. 1:9, 10). Task-masters were placed over them, heavy burdens imposed, and they were made to serve with rigor. They still increased. The king commanded the midwives to destroy their male children at birth. This command was disregarded, because the midwives feared God more than they did the king. Then he ordained that every male child should be thrown into the river, and charged all his people to carry into execution this edict. In this he overreached himself, as Satan often does; for a Hebrew child thrown into the river was instrumental in plaguing his people, leading off every Israelite from his dominions, and spoiling the glory of his empire.

“Amram, the son of Kohath, son of Levi, had espoused Jochebed, who was also of the tribe of Levi, and they had already two children, a daughter called Miriam (the same name as the Mary of the New Testament), and a son named Aaron. Another son was born soon after the king’s edict. With maternal fondness increased by the boy’s beauty, and in faith (as it seems) on a prophetic intimation of his destiny, his mother hid him for three months (Ex. 2:2). When concealment was no longer possible, Jochebed prepared a covered basket of papyrus, daubed with bitumen to make it water-tight, and placed it among the rushes on the banks of the Nile, or one of the canals, leaving Miriam to watch the result at a distance. To that very spot the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe. She saw the ark, and sent one of the maidens to fetch it. As she opened it the babe wept, and touched with pity she said, ‘This is one of the Hebrews’ children.’ At this moment Miriam came forward, and having received the princess’s permission to find a nurse, she went and fetched the child’s mother. While she reared him as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, she doubtless taught him the knowledge of the true God and the history of the chosen race. In all other respects Moses was brought up as an Egyptian prince, and ‘he was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’ Stephen adds that ‘he was mighty in words and in deeds;’ and whatever we may think of the traditions about this period of his life, it was certainly a part of his training for his great mission (Acts 7:22).”—W. Smith.

When Moses was grown he “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt” (Heb. 11:24-26).

He went out to see how his brethren were faring under their grievous oppressions. He saw an Egyptian task-master beating one of them. He slew the oppressor and hid him in the sand. The second day he went out to see them, and found two of them striving together; and said to him that did his neighbor wrong, “Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?” And he said, “Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Wilt thou kill me as thou killedst the Egyptian?” And Moses feared and said, “Surely this thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it he sought to slay Moses, but Moses fled from his face and dwelt in the land of Midian (Ex. 2:11-15). The Midianites were, no doubt, descendants of Abraham and Keturah, and at that time inhabited the desert which surrounded the head of the Red Sea. He made the acquaintance of Jethro (also called Reuel and Hobab), the priest or prince of Midian, who had seven daughters, one of whom (Zipporah) was given to Moses in marriage. Moses dwelt in Midian forty years. His life may be said to have been divided into three equal parts, viz.: 1st, forty years an Egyptian; 2nd, forty years an Arabian; and 3rd, forty years the leader of Israel; making one hundred and twenty years in all. His long and splendid human training in Egypt had not corrected his natural rashness and self-confidence; therefore God disciplines him in humility forty years in the wilderness, apart from human habitations; and, as the result of his Divine schooling, Moses becomes the most meek, patient and self-distrustful of men, feeling himself, when he was really most qualified, to be least qualified for the great work of delivering and leading Israel (Num. 12:3; Ex. 4:1-17). And so, about 1500 years afterwards, the rash and self-confident Saul of Tarsus, who was to become the great Apostle of the Gentiles, was led by the providence and Spirit of God into this same Arabian desert, far from flesh and blood, and there effectually taught, not by men, but by God, the utter insufficiency of all human learning and all legal righteousness—even the strictest obedience to the law given by Moses—and the glorious freeness and almighty power of the gospel of the Son of God (Gal. 1:1-24; Phil. 3:3-11; Rom, 1:15, 16).

At the end of forty years in the desert, God appeared to Moses in the back side of the desert, on the mountain of God, even Horeb, and there gave him an unmistakable call as the leader of His people out of Egypt. The burning bush, which was not consumed, gave him a striking figure of the afflictions of the Israelites in Egypt, and also was a forcible type of God’s people in all ages of the world. Like the thorn-bush of the desert, they are lowly and poor and naturally unattractive (Zeph. 3:12; Isa. 53:2; Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 1:27, 28); and they have been burning, and burning, and burning, under the cruel hand of oppression, throughout every dispensation to the present time, and are even yet not consumed. The promise of Christ has hitherto been fulfilled, and will be to the end of the world: “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). The flame in the bush also represents that God dwells in His people (Ex. 3:2; Zech. 2:5; Isa. 4:4; 57:15; Mal. 3:2; Matthew 3:11; Acts 2:3, 4).

God assured Moses that he had seen the afflictions of His people in Egypt, had heard their cry and had come down to deliver them. Moses pleaded his want of eloquence and his slowness of speech, and wished to be excused from making the announcement to Israel, and from appearing before Pharaoh. But Jehovah was not to be put off with excuses. Moses was the chosen vessel of God to demand the release of His people from Pharaoh, and to lead them out of Egypt, and he must obey the call. His brother Aaron was to accompany him as the more fluent speaker. The former king had died, and Moses ventured to approach his successor. But he found two obstacles in the way; first, the unwillingness of Pharaoh, and afterwards, the unwillingness of the Israelites because of their increased burdens; for, as the demands were repeated, their burdens were increased.

Pharaoh refused to let the people go three days into the wilderness and worship their God, and the Almighty began to afflict Egypt. Sometimes the heart of Pharaoh would begin to relent, but soon was hardened again, so that he would recall his promise and bid the task-masters increase their abuses of, and augment the heavy tasks imposed on, the poor afflicted people of God.

The plagues came in this order: 1. The plague of blood; 2, the plague of frogs; 3, the plague of lice; 4, the plague of flies; 5, the plague of the murrain of beasts; 6, the plague of boils and blains; 7, the plague of hail; 8, the plague of locusts; 9, the plague of darkness; and 10, the plague of slaying the first-born in every house. The last plague sufficed, and Pharaoh and his people rose up and urged the Israelites to leave their land.

The Israelites were prepared to go; having borrowed (or rather requested) what they would of the Egyptians—having killed the paschal lamb, sprinkled the lintels of their doors with its blood, and eaten its flesh as their paschal supper—with loins girded and staff in hand, they awaited the command to march. God gave the command through Moses, and His presence in the pillar of cloud to direct their course encouraged their hearts, and they moved out of the land of Goshen toward the Red Sea. It was a vast multitude, and, although so numerous, order was preserved and no stragglers left behind. Their number is estimated to have been 2,500,000. They went out on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Nisan or Abib (March to April), Which begun about the time of the vernal equinox, and which thus made the first month of the ecclesiastical year. This was the great day of the feast when the paschal supper was eaten, but the preparations had already been made by the command of God. Seven days afterwards the Israelites were to eat unleavened bread, and no leaven was to be found in their houses.

This paschal lamb typified the Savior of sinners, “the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The wrath of God passed over the houses of those whose door-posts were sprinkled with the blood of the lamb; and so does the wrath of God pass over the souls of those the door-posts of whose hearts are sprinkled with the blood of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). Says Paul to the Corinthians: “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:7, 8).

“This exodus or departure of the Israelites from Egypt closed the four hundred and thirty years of their pilgrimage, which began from the call of Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. Having learned the discipline of God’s chosen family, and having been welded by the hammer of affliction into a nation, they were now called forth under the prophet of Jehovah, alike from the bondage and the sensual pleasures of Egypt, to receive the laws of their new state, amid the awful solitudes of Sinai.”—W. Smith.

Pharaoh, who is a type of Satan, after being compelled to let the people go, repented of his lenity, and grieved at the loss of his slaves. That he might be entirely overthrown, he gathered six hundred of his chosen chariots and all his military array, and pursued after them. He overtook them at Pi-hahiroth, about thirty miles in a direct line from where they started. They had gone three days’ journey, and in doing so turned aside from the apparent direct course, and encamped before Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, over against Baalzephon. This apparently strange and unexpected route pleased Pharaoh well—the sea on their east, the mountains on their south and west, and the wilderness in their rear, with the pursuing army pressing on to cut off their retreat. Well might the king say, “They are entangled in the wilderness; the sea hath shut them in” (Ex. 14:3). At the command of God, Moses commanded the people to hush their murmuring—to stand still and see the salvation of God. He stretched his rod over the sea, and then urged them to go forward, when the waters divided, standing up on the right hand and on the left, and the entire host passed over dry-shod, and rested on the opposite shore. The Egyptian army, though so near them, could not trouble the hosts of Israel, because the pillar of cloud went back, and stood at the rear of the Israelite army and in front of Pharaoh’s, presenting darkness to the latter and light to the former, until the peril was over. Then the army of Pharaoh pursued along the same path in the sea, making slow progress, until their entire number was situated between the two shores; when, at the command of God, Moses again lifted up his rod over the sea, and the waters returned to their original bed, drowning every man and beast of the entire Egyptian host.

This was one of the most celebrated miracles ever performed and recorded in the history of the chosen family of God since the flood. And, like that wonderful phenomenon, the remembrance of it hath run down the generations of man among contiguous and distant nations, outside the chosen family, to the present period, as well as having been noted and extolled, in song and sermon, by Jews and Christians, through all the past ages since its occurrence, and will be to the end of time.

The Israelites, after giving thanks to God for their deliverance, took up their line of march for the mount of God. They thirsted and complained, and found the waters of Marah, which, being bitter and unpalatable, they murmured the more. These were sweetened by a tree which Moses threw into the waters, and then the people became contented.[7] But great was their delight when they reached the beautiful oasis of Elim, where there were twelve wells of water and three score and ten palm trees, the trees to afford them shelter and the wells to afford them water, as a recompense for their weary journey over thirsty land and in the heat of the sun. These were figurative of the twelve tribes and seventy elders, in the old dispensation, and the twelve apostles and seventy ministers of the gospel, in the new. Their food brought from Egypt failing them, God rained down manna from Heaven to them, which they only had to gather and eat, and this continued during their stay in the wilderness. The Sabbath may have been disregarded to some extent while they were in Egypt, and if so it was now revived and its observance enforced by the prohibition to gather any manna on that day, a double quantity being gathered on the day previous (Ex. 16:4, 35). The manna is a forcible type of Christ, who is the bread that cometh down from Heaven, of which, if a man partake, he shall never die (John 7:50). They next march to Rephidim, where they become thirsty, and break out in an angry rebellion against Moses. God commanded Moses to smite the rock in Horeb, which he did, and the waters gushed out in sufficient quantity to supply all their need. And not only so, but it continued to supply them during their journeyings in the wilderness. Hence the Apostle considers this the rock that followed them, and that it was a type of Christ (1 Cor. 10:4; Ex. 17:2-7; Ps. 78:16). It was at Rephidim that Israel fought his first great battle, and gained the victory. It was against his kinsman Amalek, a nomad tribe, descended from Eliphaz, the son of Esau. The Amalekites seem to have inhabited the southern part of Palestine and all Arabia Petrea, so as to command the routes leading from Egypt into Asia. The cause for attacking Israel is not stated; whether for plunder or hatred we cannot determine. Israel prevailed by the sign of their lawgiver holding up and having his hands held up till the evening (probably representing “the efficacy of intercessory prayer”). When his hands were up, holding the rod, Israel prevailed; and when his hands were down, Amalek prevailed. In order to victory, Moses was seated on a rock, and beside him on the mountain stood his brother Aaron, and Hur, the husband of Miriam, one on either side, supporting his hands until the going down of the sun. This battle was representative of all the others fought by them before their entrance into Canaan. For, in all the others, they sometimes lost and sometimes gained the victory, but finally gained until they crossed the Jordan in triumph. Joshua was chosen leader of the host. Moses was commanded of God to write this battle and triumph in a book and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua. “For,” said he, “I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” “And Moses built an altar, and called the name of it Jehovah-Nissi” (Jehovah is my banner), as though he had held up his God to the Amalekites when the battle was raging (Ex. 17:8-15). About this time Moses’ father-in-law Jethro visited him, and brought Moses’ wife and children to him, and advised him to share his labors with others—to ordain captains over tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands, which he did.

The Israelites next halt at the wilderness of Sinai on the first day of the third month—Sivan, June (Ex. 19:1,2), and present themselves before the Lord. God had said to Moses, “When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain” (Ex. 3:12). They had now reached the place, and they awaited in awful adoration what was to follow. Thus we behold a nation, at the foot of a mountain in a waste howling wilderness, preparing to sacrifice to and worship God! What a sublime spectacle! History furnishes no parallel. Four hundred and thirty years before, one man was called out of Ur of the Chaldees and a numerous seed promised him. Two-and-a-half millions of his posterity (large numbers having died in Canaan and Egypt in the interim) appear before Him this day, A.M. 2513, B.C. 1491. Here God was to address them from the mountain, and tell them what to do and what not to do. Here was a nation, as one man, looking up to God for direction, and promising obedience to His commands.

The lightnings and thunderings, the noise of the trumpet, the shaking of the mountain, the smoke on its crest, the voice of God addressed to them, all produced such dread and consternation that they were overwhelmed with fear; and they stood afar off beseeching Moses that they might not hear that voice again. The Ten Commandments were proclaimed by the voice of the Almighty, and then written on two tablets of stone by Him, and entrusted to the care of Moses. The first four declared the duty of the people to God, and the remaining six their duty to each other (Ex. 20:1-17). The Savior reduced them to two, and said, On these two hang all the Law and the Prophets—viz.: Love to God and love to man (Matthew 22:37-40). Moses was then taken into thick darkness on the mountain, where God spake with him so long, even forty days, imposing the observances of the judicial and ceremonial law, that the people lost their patience, and requested Aaron to make them gods to go before them, for “as for this man Moses, they wist not what had become of him.”

This was on the fortieth day of his absence. They gave their jewelry to Aaron, who threw it into the fire, and out came the likeness of a calf, the image of the Egyptian god, Apis, unto which they made an altar, before which they feasted and rose up to play, crying, “These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 32:1-6).

Moses and Joshua, coming down the mountain, saw what the people were doing, and Moses was so filled with anger that he threw down and broke[8] the two tables of stone on which God had written the Ten Commandments. He reproved Aaron and the people for this idolatrous proceeding—burnt the calf—made a powder of it—put it in water and compelled them to drink the mixture, and sent volunteers of the tribe of Levi through the camps slaying in all directions, until three thousand fell before the terrible sword in one day, as a punishment for this great transgression.

The nation of Israelites at this time contained vast numbers within its limits that were not spiritual members of the mystical body of Christ—did not belong to His spiritual kingdom—by living faith in Him as their Redeemer to come. It is true that the nation was typical of the church of God under the Christian dispensation, in many respects; yet there were those among them who were only children of the flesh and not the children of promise. “For they are not all Israel which are of Israel” (Rom. 9:6).

As a nation they were in covenant relation to God; but many among them were continually breaking the covenant and rendering themselves obnoxious to His displeasure. Their wanderings in the wilderness are typical of the peculiar experience of God’s people in their pilgrimage from bondage to rest—rest in the gospel church, and rest in Heaven, of both of which Canaan is, in some respects, a type (Heb. 3 and 4).

God gave to Moses other tables of stone, like unto the first, and required him to deposit them in the ark for safe keeping. The first represented our safety in Adam, which failed; the second represented our safety in Christ, which cannot fail.

Moses was commanded to make a tabernacle and its furniture; and he did so according to the pattern shown him in the mount. This was set up for the worship of God; in it were placed the ark of the covenant and all the vessels necessary for use in the worship of God. Aaron and his sons were anointed to the priesthood; and God manifested His approval and presence by the cloud which rested upon the tabernacle and the fire that descended from Heaven on the sacred altar. This tabernacle was to be used in all their wanderings and wars until the temple of Solomon should be built, of which this was a model, and then its contents were to be placed within that magnificent structure, and the priests find rest for the soles of their feet.

The court, or outer enclosure, of the tabernacle was surrounded by canvas screens, and enclosed a space of fifty cubits (about 75 feet) north and south, and a hundred cubits (150 feet) east and west. The entrance was at the eastern end. Between the entrance and the tabernacle proper was the brazen altar of burnt offering; and between the altar and the tabernacle was the laver, at which the priests washed their hands and feet on entering the tabernacle. At the western end of the court or enclosure was the tabernacle proper, an oblong rectangular tent-covered structure, thirty cubits long by ten broad and ten high, open at the eastern end, and divided internally into two apartments. The central ridge-pole of the tent was fifteen cubits high. The first or eastern apartment of the tabernacle was twenty cubits long, and was called the first or outer or anterior tabernacle, or the sanctuary, or the holy place; the second or western apartment was a cube of ten cubits each way, and was called the second or inner or interior tabernacle, or the oracle, or the sanctum sanctorum, or the Holy of Holies, or the Most Holy Place. Between these two apartments hung a veil of blue and purple and scarlet and white linen, the predominating color being blue. To every part of the tabernacle and its furniture was applied the holy anointing oil. On the south side of the Holy Place stood the seven-branched golden candlestick, supplied with pure olive oil every day, burning all night long, and snuffed with golden snuffers every morning, and the snuff carried off in golden dishes. Opposite the golden candlestick, on the north side of the Holy Place, stood the gold-overlaid table of show-bread, on which were twelve cakes of unleavened bread, arranged in two piles, with a golden cup of frankincense on each, and two bowls of wine between the piles, the loaves being renewed every Sabbath, and the stale loaves with the frankincense being eaten by the priests. Between the table and the candlestick, in the Holy Place, just before the veil, stood the golden altar of incense, on which incense of a peculiar, rare, and sacred composition was offered every morning and evening by the priests, the fire being always taken from the altar of burnt-offering. In the Most Holy Place, just within the veil, and in front of the altar of incense, was placed the ark of the covenant, containing the two tables of the law, the golden pot of manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and covered by the golden lid called the mercy-seat, on each end of which stood the figure of a cherub, with outstretched wings, and with faces inclined toward each other, and toward the mercy-seat. Between the cherubim, and just above the mercy-seat, was the golden cloud of the Divine Presence, called the Shekinah, (or dwelling). The cost of the tabernacle and its furniture is estimated to have been a million and a quarter of dollars. In Solomon’s temple, the general proportions of the tabernacle were doubled, the length being sixty cubits, the width twenty, and the height of the Holy Place thirty cubits, of the Most Holy Place twenty cubits, making the latter a perfect cube, as in the tabernacle; there was no window in the Most Holy Place. The estimates of the cost of Solomon’s temple range from half a billion to five billion dollars, there being such a vast quantity of gold used in its construction. It was small but very costly. The court of Solomon’s temple is thought to have been one hundred cubits north and south, and two hundred east and west. The temple of Zerubbabel was one hundred cubits long, sixty broad and sixty high; and this temple, as thoroughly repaired by Herod, had an enclosure four hundred cubits square (about a furlong square), containing three courts, those of the Gentiles, of women, and of Israelites. The dimensions of Ezekiel’s ideal (millennial) temple at Jerusalem were the same as those of Solomon’s temple; but it had an outer court measuring five hundred reeds on each of its sides; that is, about a mile square, which is larger than the entire area of ancient Jerusalem.

Some of the spiritual lessons which God teaches Israel by the tabernacle we will now endeavor briefly to indicate. The tabernacle represents Christ’s mystical body, the church, in which God dwells, and Israel draws nigh to God through atonement and regeneration, and with offerings, prayers and praises. The court represents the Jewish dispensation; the Holy Place, the Christian dispensation; the Most Holy Place, the glorified church. In the world’s great wilderness, the church is a little garden enclosed by divine grace. Its aspect is toward the rising Sun of Righteousness. Every one who enters the true church must have the saving application of the Holy Spirit, represented by the holy anointing oil, and must pass by the altar of burnt-offering, and with the eye of faith behold the Lamb of God atoning thereon for his sins; and he must be washed in the laver of His precious blood—cleansed by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost. The blood comes first, and then the water; so faith in Christ’s blood should come first, and then the water of baptism, and then admission into the church. In the midst of the spiritual darkness of this world, the child of God should let his light shine—that light proceeding entirely, not from the candlestick, but from the oil of the grace and Spirit of Christ in his heart. In order for that light to burn well, the snuffs of carnal thoughts, words and deeds will frequently have to be trimmed off with the snuffers of trial, reproof and admonition, and, so as not to defile the sanctuary, be carried off with the snuff-dishes of either repentance or church censure. Having the old leaven of malice and wickedness thus purged out, he is prepared to approach the table of the Lord, and celebrate that sacred and solemn feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, and thus from Sabbath to Sabbath have his spiritual grace renewed. Though a poor sinner, and feeling himself to be such, he is yet a priest unto God, and therefore every morning and evening, and indeed evermore, should he desire to approach the golden altar, and draw as near as he may to the blessed mercy-seat, and, through the medium of Christ’s prevailing atonement and intercession, pour out his fervent supplications and thanksgivings to the God of his salvation. His great High Priest and Mediator, after having made a real, an agonizing and an efficacious atonement for him, passed beyond the veil of the white, scarlet and purple clouds, and the blue heavens, and entered the true Holy of Holies, and there now successfully pleads the merit of His blood for every member of His mystical body. The seven branches of the candlestick represent all the different churches of Christ at different times and places, each independent of the other in its local government, but all united to one stem, Christ, and pervaded by the oil or grace of one Spirit, having one Lord, one faith and one baptism. The twelve loaves of bread represent the twelve tribes of Israel, continually shown or presented before the Lord, dedicated to Him, and accepted, with all their offerings, by Him, through the sweet frankincense of Christ’s mediation, and ever partaking of His blessings. The profusion of gold represents the preciousness, beauty, solidity and purity of the church of Christ. The perfect cube of the Holy of Holies, 10 by 10 by 10, with squares in every direction, containing the Shekinah in the midst of darkness, symbolizes the perfection, order and stability of the Divine Trinity, dwelling in inaccessible light, enveloped with impenetrable darkness. It is the parable of God’s presence and nature in creation, in providence and in grace. The cherubim represent the highest creaturely life, at once manifesting and concealing God, and glorying in loving submission to Him, and interested in His wonderful plan of redemption. The ark of the covenant is Christ Jesus, who above all others has ever kept the holy law of God, and who has kept that law for His people, so that the mercy of God covers all the violations of the law, and God always looks down upon them in mercy; and Christ also has in His hand the rod of universal and eternal power, and an everlasting sufficiency of heavenly provision for all the needs of His covenant people. The perpetual preservation of the law in this innermost shrine of the Divine worship represents the infinite and unchangeable holiness of God, also requiring perfect holiness in all those who abide in His presence. None can so abide except the living, as indicated by the blood brought annually into the Most Holy Place by the High Priest; for the blood is the life; and yet, separated from the animal, it also represents death, signifying that, in order to worship God aright, the flesh must be slain, the heart must be dead to all creature-worship, and alive unto God. The duplication of the tabernacle in Solomon’s temple represented the double emphasizing of all these momentous truths.

The priests typified all spiritual Israelites, while the High Priest typified Christ. The priests (the family of Aaron) were especially chosen of God; the peculiar property of God; holy to God; and offered gifts to God, and received gifts from God. Their ceremonial holiness was indicated by their original consecration by the holy anointing oil (representing the Holy Spirit in every believer); by their constant purification by water; by their cleanly linen robes; by the completeness of their bodily parts, and by their avoidance of bodily defilement. They were to devote themselves to the service of the Lord, and were to have no earthly inheritance, but the Lord was to be their portion, and to supply all their needs. All elect saints are priests unto God (1 Peter 2:5, 9; Rev. 1:6; 5:10), specially chosen by the Father, specially redeemed by the Son, and specially purified by the Spirit; qualified to offer up to God the acceptable sacrifices of humble, broken and thankful hearts, and to receive assurances of His pardoning love; and they should always keep their garments unspotted from the world; and feel deeply to rejoice, whatever temporal ills may betide them, that the Lord is their all-sufficient and everlasting portion.

The High Priest was anointed far more abundantly than the priests with the holy anointing oil, which was poured upon his head, so that it ran down upon his beard, and even to the skirts of his garments; just as Christ was anointed (the very name means anointed) with the Holy Spirit without measure, and this Spirit of holiness and love streams down from Him upon all, even the lowest members of His mystical body (John 3:34; Ps. 138; Matthew 9:20; John 1:16). The rich, gorgeous, variegated ephod of the High Priest, with its sky-blue robe, typified the glorious, heavenly righteousness of Christ. “The skirt of the robe was ornamented with pomegranates of blue, purple and scarlet, a small golden bell being attached between each two of the pomegranates; the bells’ sound heard from within the veil by those outside assured them that the High Priest, though out of sight, was still alive, and was ministering in their behalf acceptably before God. These sweet-sounding bells typified the gospel’s joyful sound (Ps. 89:15); and the pomegranates represented the spiritual fruits which accompany gospel preaching (Eph. 5:22, 23). On the two shoulders of the High Priest were two onyx stones engraved with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel; and on his breastplate were twelve precious stones, in four rows, also engraved with the names of the twelve tribes; just as the names of the twelve tribes are on the twelve pearl gates of the New Jerusalem, and the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb in the twelve foundations of precious stones. Thus was it forcibly declared that the weight of our salvation, if we are spiritual Israelites, rests upon the shoulders of Christ, and our names are always on His heart before God, not one name being wanting (Isa. 49:16; John 10:3; Rev. 2:17; 3:12).” If any of our readers wish to know whether their names are on the jeweled breastplate and shoulder of the antitypical High Priest, in the Lamb’s Book of Life, let them tremblingly and prayerfully read the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth verses of the third chapter of the prophecy of Malachi. In the breastplate of judgment were the Urim and Thummim (lights and perfections), by which the High Priest consulted the will of God in reference to Israel (Ex. 28:30; Lev. 8:8; Deut. 33:8). It is not known what these were. Some suppose that they were two stones, engraved with these two Divine attributes and placed in the folds of the breastplate, by gazing upon which the High Priest was absorbed in heavenly ecstatic contemplation, and enabled to declare the Divine will; others think that one of these stones taken out by him at random indicated the answer of God; others, that the High Priest heard the voice of God from within the veil; and others think that the Urim and Thummim were simply a change in the appearance of the twelve stones in the breastplate, indicating the Divine answer. After David’s time the higher revelation by prophets superseded the Urim and Thummim. Christ is the perfect revelation of God’s will. “Like the High Priest, Christ sacrificed for, prays for, blesses, instructs, oversees the service of His people in the spiritual temple, blows the gospel trumpet, and judges. Having such a ‘High Priest passed into the Heavens,’ ‘over the house of God,’ we ought to ‘hold fast our profession,’ ‘without wavering,’ ever ‘drawing near with a true heart, in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience’ (Heb. 4:14; 10:21-23).” During 1560 years, from 1491 B.C. to 70 A.D., there were seventy-six High Priests. Then, at the destruction of Jerusalem, the God of providence removes the needless type, as the God of grace had already sent the eternal antitype in the person of His Son.

As it has been well said, the key-note of the whole sacrificial system is the same—self-abdication and a sense of dependence on God. Every sacrifice was assumed to have a vital connection with the spirit of the worshiper. The offering, unless accompanied with the heart of the offerer, was rejected by God (Ps. 40:6; 1:8-15; Prov. 21:3; Isa. 1:11-15; Jer. 7:21-23; Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:7, 8; 1 Sam. 15:22; Matthew 5:23, 24). There were three kinds of offerings for the altar, in the following historical order: 1st, The burnt-offering, which, throughout Genesis, seems the only offering made by the people of God; 2nd, the meat-offering (un-bloody), or the peace-offering (bloody); and 3rd, the sin or trespass-offering (Lev. 1, 2, 3, 4). The legal or ritual order was: 1st, The sin-offering; 2nd, the burnt-offering; and 3rd, the peace-offering (Lev. 8). The idea of sacrifice was complex, involving three elements, the expiatory, the self-dedicatory, and the eucharistic. All these three ideas entered into every sacrifice; but expiation or propitiation or atonement was the predominating element in the sin or trespass-offering; and thanksgiving in the meat or peace-offering. The spiritual order corresponds to the ritual; the sin of the worshiper must first be taken away by an atonement; then he must be consecrated to God; and then he can offer up acceptable sacrifices of praise and love. The sin-offering was in part burnt upon the altar, in part given to the priests, or burnt outside the camp; the burnt-offering was wholly burnt upon the altar; the peace-offering was shared between the altar, the priests and the sacrificer. The incense offered, after sacrifice, in the Holy Place, and (on the day of atonement) in the Holy of Holies, was a symbol of the intercession of the priest (as a type of the great High Priest), accompanying and making efficacious the prayer of the people.

The same five animals that God commanded Abraham to offer in the sacrifice of the covenant (Gen. 15:9) are the five alone named in the law for sacrifice: The ox, sheep, goat, dove and pigeon (the ancient Jews kept no home-bred fowls or chickens). These animals fulfilled the three legal conditions; they were legally clean, were commonly used for food, and formed a part of the home wealth of the sacrificers, who thus offered up the support of their life for that life itself. Every sacrificial animal was to be perfect, without spot or blemish, neither diseased nor deformed; except that a victim with a disproportioned limb was allowed in a freewill peace-offering. A male animal was generally required; and the age was from a week to three years old. “Such animals only were allowed in sacrifice as are most useful and valuable to man, and such as are most domestic (or nearest to man), harmless, patient and cleanly. Neither filthy swine, nor devouring lions, nor the warlike horse, nor the subtle fox, nor the voracious dog, nor any creature that subsists on animal food, was appointed for sacrifice; but, in general, those alone which represent most aptly what Christ would be, and what His people ought to be; as the laborious, patient ox; the gentle, harmless and cleanly sheep; and the tender, loving, mourning dove; for even the useful goat was sacrificed far less frequently than sheep and oxen.”—T. Scott.

The unbloody offerings are generally acknowledged to have been expressions of dependence, thankfulness, and homage to God; but it is impossible to explain satisfactorily the bloody offerings except as originating by Divine appointment, and pointing forward to the one great spotless antitypical Victim who was to come in the fullness of time, and suffer for the sins of the spiritual Israel. Life was the divinely appointed forfeit of sin (Gen. 2:17; Ezek. 23:20; Rom. 6:23); the blood contains the life, according to both Scripture (Lev. 17:11) and science; and, therefore, for the remission of sins, the life-blood must be taken (Lev. 17:11; Heb. 9:22). But the victim must be more closely related to us than are the inferior animals; he must be, according to the first proclamation of the gospel, in Eden (Gen. 3:15), a “seed of the woman;” and yet he must be without any blemish or sin of his own, as typified by the legal sacrifices; and he must be able to bruise the head of the serpent, or conquer Satan; in other words, he must be a holy, omnipotent man, one partaking of the nature both of God and of man, the Son of God and the Son of man; in order that, in His human capacity, He may render all the active and passive obedience that the law required, even unto death; and that, in His Divine capacity, He may rise again, re-enter Heaven, and ever live to make efficacious intercession for the purchase of His blood. In the mind of every spiritual Israelite, even under the old dispensation, “the lessons conveyed in the symbols of the altar must have all converged, with more or less distinctness, towards the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8), who was to come at the appointed time, that he might fulfill all righteousness (Matthew 3:15), and realize in the eyes of men the true sin-offering, burnt-offering and peace-offering; who has now been made sin for us, though He knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 5:21); who has given Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor (Eph. 5:2); who is our peace, that He might bring us nigh by His blood (Eph. 2:18, 14); our true paschal lamb which has been slain for us (1 Cor. 5:7), to the end that by eating His flesh and drinking His blood we might have eternal life (John 6:54).”—S. Clark. The nature and effect of Christ’s atoning sacrifice was forcibly illustrated by the ritual of the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16; 23:26-32; Num. 29:7-11; Heb. 9). This was the tenth day of the seventh month (third of October), five days before the Feast of Tabernacles. It was the only day of fasting and humiliation enjoined in the law. It was a Sabbath, a day of holy convocation or assembly, on which the children of Israel were to afflict their souls, and do no manner of work, under penalty of being cut off from the Lord’s congregation. “The one absorbing thought of all was to be the great atonement by the High Priest on that day. No other priest was allowed to be in or about the sanctuary on that solemn day, teaching that his antitype, the Messiah, has a priesthood exclusively His own, and no work of another is to be added to His complete work of atonement. The High Priest bathed and dressed himself in white linen garments, symbolizing the holiness required for the admission into God’s presence—the holiness of Christ. This was the only day in the year on which the High Priest, even, entered the Holy of Holies. Taking a censer with burning coals from the brazen altar, and applying a handful of incense, he entered the Most Holy Place, where the mercy-seat became enveloped in the cloud of smoke from the incense, typifying Christ’s merits incensing our prayers, so as to make them a sweet-smelling savor to God (Rev. 8:3, 4). Then, being a sinner himself, the Jewish High Priest atoned for himself and family; the true High Priest, being sinless, has to make no atonement for himself. Afterwards the High Priest offered an atonement for Israel. This consisted of two goats, on one being written ‘For Jehovah,’ on the other ‘For Azazel’ (or ‘For Complete Removal’). The lots were cast, and one goat (that for Jehovah) was slain, and its blood was sprinkled upon and before the mercy-seat, typifying Jesus’ vicarious bearing of our sins’ penalty, death; and the other, or scape-goat, after the High Priest had laid his hands upon its head and confessed over it all the sins of Israel, was sent away by a fit man into the wilderness, a land not inhabited, and there let loose, typifying the complete removal of our sins out of sight to where no witness will rise in judgment against us, ‘as far as the east is from the west’ (Ps. 103:12), ‘Christ’s rising again for our justification’ (Rom. 4:25), so that, being dead to sin and the law, we live by union with His resurrection life, sin being utterly put away in proportion as that life works in us (John 14:19; Rom. 6; Col. 3). Death and life are marvelously united alike in Christ and His people. The same fact was symbolized by the slain bird and the bird let loose after having been dipped in the blood of the killed bird (Lev. 19:4-7). The Jewish High Priest entered the Most Holy Place once every year to repeat his typical atonement; but the true High Priest infinitely transcends the type, for He entered Heaven, the Most Holy Place, not made with hands, once for all, having ‘by one offering forever perfected them that are sanctified,’ and ‘obtained eternal redemption for us,’ so that ‘there is no more offering for sin’ (which condemns the Roman Catholic notion of the Lord’s supper being a sacrifice). After the typical High Priest’s atonement, the veil between the Holy and the Most Holy Place continued as before to preclude access to priests and people alike; but the veil was rent at Christ’s death, throwing open the holiest Heaven continually to all believers through faith in His sacrifice. The Jewish Gemara states that the High Priest tied a tongue-shaped piece of scarlet cloth on the scape-goat, and that as the goat was led away, the red cloth turned white as a token of God’s acceptance of the atonement, illustrating Isaiah 1:18, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;’ but that no such change took place for forty years before the destruction of Jerusalem—a singular testimony from Jewish authority to Christ, as He was crucified, or made the true atonement, just forty years before the destruction of the holy city; the type ceased when the antitype was realized. The day of atonement was the indispensable preparation for the joy that followed in the Feast of Tabernacles; and so we can only truly ‘joy in God’ when ‘through our Lord Jesus Christ we have received the atonement’ (Rom. 5:11).”—A. R. Fausset.

Including the Day of Atonement, the Jews, before the Babylonian captivity, had nine sacred seasons, five connected with the Sabbath—the weekly Sabbath itself, the Feast of the New Moon, the Sabbatical Month and Feast of Trumpets, the Sabbatical Year, and the Year of Jubilee; and three great annual festivals—the Passover, the Feast of Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles or Ingathering. After the captivity they had also the Feast of Purim and the Feast of Dedication.

The Weekly Sabbath was a day of rest and recreation and mercy after six days of labor, in celebration of God’s completion of creation, and also of His deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. It was a day of holy convocation; the morning and evening sacrifices were doubled; the show bread was renewed; in later times the worship of the sanctuary was enlivened by sacred music; the people consulted the prophets; and instructed their children in sacred things. After the Babylonian captivity, and in the New Testament times, the Jews had public worship in their synagogues on the Sabbath day. Christ and His Apostles occasionally attended such worship. The monthly feast of the New Moon was announced at the first sight of her new crescent by the sounding of two sacred silver trumpets; the day, though not kept as a Sabbath, had special sacrifices. The Sabbatical Month was the month of Tisri, being the seventh of the ecclesiastical, and the first of the civil year; its first day fell on a Sabbath, and this, the civil new year’s day, was ushered in by the blowing of trumpets, and was called the Feast of Trumpets. It was a holy convocation, and had special sacrifices. The tenth of this month was the great Day of Atonement; and from the fifteenth to the twenty-second of the month was the Feast of the Tabernacles. The Sabbatical Year was each seventh year; and God, the proprietor of the land, required His people not to sow the land that year, nor even to gather the spontaneous fruits, but to leave such for the poor, the slave, the stranger and the cattle, and to release all Hebrew slaves and debtors. Treble fertility in the sixth year was promised for the support of the people in the seventh, eighth and ninth years. They could in this year make their clothing, fish, hunt, take care of their bees and flocks, and repair their buildings and furniture; and, especially in the Sabbatical year, were men, women, children and strangers to be gathered and taught the law. The non-observance of the Sabbatical year was one of the chief national sins punished by the Babylonian captivity, during which the land was left desolate for seventy years, that it might enjoy its Sabbaths. The Year of Jubilee came after a Sabbatic series of Sabbatic years, and was every fiftieth or pentecostal year. It began with the great Day of Atonement, the tenth day of the seventh month (Tisri). After the sacrifices of that solemn day the trumpet of jubilee pealed forth its joyful notes, proclaiming liberty to the captive prisoner and slave, and the restoration of land to its original proprietors—a great protection to the poor, and an effectual safeguard against the accumulation of vast estates. This year completed the great Sabbatic cycle, and made all things new. It was a year of rest from labor, and of religious worship. The very existence of these Sabbatical laws, so uncommon in the world, and so irksome to the covetous nature of man, proves the reality of the miracles wrought by God through Moses; for nothing else could have made an unspiritual people willing to submit to such restraining laws. All the Sabbatical seasons typified Christ, the true rest of spiritual Israel; for He it is who, by virtue of His great atonement, has been anointed with the Spirit of the Lord, above measure, to preach the gospel to the poor, healing to the broken-hearted, deliverance to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, liberty to the bruised, and comfort to all that mourn in Zion, that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified (Isa. 61:1-3; Luke 4:16-21; Matthew 11:28-30; Heb. 4:3). Thus, by these constantly recurring seventh periods of rest, would God perpetually remind His spiritual people of their only true source of perfect rest, Christ Jesus. This glorious rest will not be fully realized by the people of God until the heavenly jubilee of the resurrection trumpet is sounded, when every redeemed man, with reunited and incorruptible soul and body, shall enter upon his eternal possession in the antitypical Canaan (Lev. 25:13; Isa. 35:10; 1 Cor. 15:58-57; 1 Thess. 4:16-18; Heb. 4:9; 1 Peter 1:1-5).

Three times every year, at the three great annual festivals, Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles, all the Hebrew males were required to appear together before the Lord, at the tabernacle or temple, and make an offering with a joyful heart. God’s object was to promote, in this way, the religious zeal and knowledge and union of His covenant people, to bring them frequently together in loving brotherly fellowship for the worship of God—the very same object that is now beautifully and pleasantly subserved by the frequent assemblies of the people of God in their quarterly, yearly, union, corresponding, and associational meetings. Devout women often attended these sacred festivals. Not only from all parts of Palestine, but, after the captivity, from all parts of the civilized world, the people of God assembled at these meetings (Acts 2:5-11). The three great annual feasts had a three-fold bearing—natural, historical and spiritual (or typical or prophetical); “the thing that hath been is that which shall be,” says Solomon (Eccl. 1:9); or, as Bacon expresses it, “All history is prophecy.”

The Passover was about the first of April, and marked the beginning of the grain harvest; the first green ears of barley were cut, a handful presented to the Lord, and others were parched and eaten by the people. It was a memorial of the nation’s birth, when the destroying angel passed over the houses of the Israelites, whose door-posts were sprinkled with the blood of the paschal lamb, while he destroyed the first-born in every Egyptian family, thus delivering the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. For each family a lamb was slain and roasted entire, and eaten, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, by the members of the family, standing, with loins girt, feet shod, and staff in hand; and if any of the lamb remained till the morning it was to be consumed with fire. The first-born thus specially delivered by the Lord were specially devoted to Him, and specially redeemed (Ex. 11:5, 7; 13:2, 13; Heb. 12:23). Christ is the true paschal lamb sacrificed for spiritual Israel (1 Cor. 5:7). By His death, and His blood being applied by the Holy Spirit to our hearts, we are delivered from ruin. In celebrating the Christian Passover, or the Lord’s Supper, we are to put away the leaven of hypocrisy and wickedness and eat the bitter herb of godly sorrow for our sins, and remember that we are pilgrims here, just ready, at any time, to depart to a better, even a heavenly country (Heb. 11:13-16). We should be devoutly thankful and consecrated to God for being specially redeemed by the precious blood of the Lamb (1 Peter 1:15-21; Rev. 5:9). The body of the paschal lamb was cooked entire, no bone being broken, to denote the completeness of the redemption of Christ, and the indissoluble oneness of His mystical body; and it was roasted, and not boiled in water and wasted, to indicate the preciousness of Christ’s salvation and of His people; and, if any remained till morning, it was consumed by purifying fire, to prevent it from seeing corruption or from being put to a common use—indicating that God’s people are never to become reprobates. In later times, the Israelites, at the Passover, sang the Hallel, or Psalms 113-118. It is believed that this was the hymn sung by Christ and His Apostles after the Supper.

The Pentecost, or Harvest Feast, or Feast of Weeks or First-Fruits, was about the last of May, fifty days or a week of weeks after the Passover, of which it was the supplement, and therefore was called by the Jews Atzereth, or the concluding assembly. As the Passover began, the Pentecost ended, the grain harvest, the wheat now being ripe, and two loaves of fine flour, were offered to the Lord, as a joyful dedication of the whole harvest to Him as the Giver—both the land and the people belonging to Him. Pentecost was a social thanksgiving feast, and the Levite, stranger, fatherless, and widow, were invited. Historically, it is believed to have been a memorial of the giving of the law from Sinai, the second great era in the history of the elect nation—the fiftieth day after the deliverance from Egypt (Ex. 12 and 19). The second chapter of Acts explains the typical significance of the Feast of Pentecost. As God descended in consuming fire on Mount Sinai to give the moral law to national Israel, so He descended in the purifying fire of the Holy Ghost upon His disciples in Jerusalem, and wrote the new law of love upon the fleshly tablets of the hearts of His covenant people (Acts 2; John 16:7-11; 2 Cor. 3; Heb. 8; Matthew 22:36-40). And, just as certainly as the Pentecost was the supplement or conclusion of the Passover, just so certainly will the Holy Ghost descend upon all the purchase of Christ’s blood, and consecrate them to the service of God (Ps. 110; 107:1-31; Isa. 35:10; 41:14-20; 53-55; 61:1-3; Jer. 31:1-9, 31-37; Ezek. 36, 37; Dan. 7:13, 14; Zech. 12:10-14; 13; Matthew 1:21; 11:27; 16:16-18; 28:18; John 1:17, 29; 5:25; 6:37, 44; 10:11, 14-16, 27-30; 17:2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 24-26; Rom. 5:19-21; 6:23; 8:29-39; 1 Cor. 1:30; 15:22, 23, 57; 2 Cor. 4:6; 5:17-21 ;. Gal. 1:4, 12, 15, 16; 2:20; 3:13, 17-29; 4:4-6; Eph. 1, 2; Phil. 1:6; 1 Thess. 5:9, 10; 2 Thess. 2:13, 14; 2 Tim. 1:9, 10; Titus 3:4-7; Heb. 1:3; 8:8-12; 9:14; 10:10, 14-18; 12:2; 13:20, 21; 1 Peter 1:1-5; 2 Peter 1:1-4; Rev. 1:5, 6; 5:9, 10; 14:1-5; 21:27). Like the sure following of the Pentecost upon the Passover, these Scriptures establish the reality and the efficacy of Christ’s atonement.

The Feast of Tabernacles, or Ingathering, was about the first of October, after the oil and wine had been gathered in; and it was a great and joyful thanksgiving for all the harvests of the year. It was also a commemoration of the time when the Israelites dwelt in tents during their passage through the wilderness, and called forth the gratitude of the people to God for their settled homes in a land of plenty. The people took boughs of palm and willows of the brook, and made temporary huts of the branches, and sat under the booths, during this festival. The weeping willow (Salix Babylonica, Ps. 137) was an emblem of sorrow; but the willow of the brook (Salix Alba), because of its vigor, was a symbol of joyful prosperity (Isa. 44:4). The palm was also an emblem of joy, because of its erect growth, its usefulness, and its rich foliage (Ps. 92:12-14; John 12:13; Rev. 7:9). In later times, at the hour of morning sacrifice, during the Feast of Tabernacles, water was drawn from the Pool of Siloam in a golden goblet, and poured into one of the two silver basins on the west side of the altar of burnt-offering, and wine into the other, while the words of Isaiah 12:3 were repeated, in commemoration of the water drawn from the rock in the desert; the choir sang the great Hallel, and waved branches of palm. It was in allusion to this ceremony that Christ stood and cried in the last day of this feast, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink” (John 7:2, 37). “Coming next day at day-break to the temple court, as they were extinguishing the artificial lights, two colossal golden candlesticks in the center of the temple court, recalling the pillar of fire in the wilderness, Jesus said, ‘I am the light of the world’ (John 8:1, 2, 12). As the sun by its natural light was eclipsing the artificial lights, so Jesus implies, I, the Sun of Righteousness, am superseding your typical light. The believer having received redemption and the Holy Ghost, waits still for his inheritance and abiding home. The Feast of Tabernacles points him to the heavenly Canaan, the everlasting inheritance, of which the Holy Spirit is the earnest (Eph. 1:18, 14; Heb. 4:9). There shall the true church ever hold with her Divine Head a Feast of Tabernacles, rejoicing in His presence, satisfied with His fullness, and her rest and pleasure will be heightened and enhanced by the remembrance of her toils and tribulations in this wilderness world forever past.”

“There was in the Three Feasts a clear prefigurement of the Three Persons of the Godhead; the Father, in the work of Creation, specially adored in the Feast of Tabernacles; the Son, in the Passover sacrifice; and the Spirit, in the Pentecostal Feast.”

The Feast of Purim, or Lots, was an annual commemoration of the deliverance of the Jews in Persia from the massacre plotted for them by Haman (see the book of Esther); it took place the last of February. The Feast of Dedication (mentioned in John 10:22) was instituted by Judas Maccabeus to commemorate the purification of the temple from the profanations to which it had been subjected by Antiochus Epiphanes (B.C. 165); it occurred about the twentieth of December.

We have thus gone through the books of Exodus and Leviticus, and found the ceremonies and institutions of the Mosaic law replete with gospel truth. To every child of God the marvelous correspondence of these manifold types and antitypes is an unanswerable demonstration of the Divine origin and the plenary inspiration of the Pentateuch. A careful perusal of the book of Leviticus will convince every unprejudiced mind that not a single atonement, redemption, intercession, or purification therein mentioned was indefinite or conditional; but every one was special and effectual—every offering and cleansing was for a particular person or persons, and it was ceremonially effective; in a ritual sense, the sin was actually forgiven, the person was clean, the property was restored. The Arminian notion, therefore, that the atonement of Christ was indefinite and conditional, is annihilated by the divinely established legal types of that atonement.

We proceed now with the historical narrative. God commanded Moses to number the men of war, and he still found the number to be about 600,000, viz.: Reuben, 46,500; Judah, 74,600; (Joseph) Ephraim, 40,509; Simeon, 59,300; Issachar, 54,400; (Joseph) Manasseh, 32,200; Gad, 45,650; Zebulon, 57,400; Benjamin, 35,400; Dan, 62,700; Asher, 41,500; Naphtali, 53,400; making all of the military array 603,550.

The tribe of Levi is omitted because of the priesthood; and the sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh are each included, which makes up the number twelve.

In order to aid Moses in the government of the people, God directed him to appoint seventy men, who should be constituted into a Senate or Sanhedrim, and whose office continued until the time of Moses’ death, after which we hear no more of it until the return from the Babylonish captivity.

The wanderings of the Israelites were singular in consequence of the many different directions which they were compelled to take before reaching the promised land. Sometimes they came very near to it, and then went directly from it. For their murmurings and faithlessness, God punished them in various ways, and kept them in the wilderness forty years. Those twenty years old and upwards who came out of Egypt died in the wilderness, save Caleb and Joshua, who were two of the twelve spies sent into Canaan and reported favorably, while the other ten, distrusting the power and faithfulness of a covenant God, were destroyed by the plague. The manna was given them until they entered the promised land, then ceased. The manna was a double miracle inasmuch as, in its falling, none came on the Sabbath, and a double quantity on the day previous; and, if gathered on any other day except the day preceding the Sabbath, it would spoil if kept over.

The time for entering the promised land approached. Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, died. Aaron was taken to the top of Mount Hor and stripped of his garments by Moses, who placed them on Aaron’s son Eleazar, and there Aaron died. The Israelites designed crossing the river Jordan into the promised land a little above the Dead Sea; and sought permission of the Amorites to pass through their country peaceably. Their king not only refused the request, but marched out all his forces to give Israel battle. He was slain, with his two sons, at Jahaz, and all his people, even to the women and children, were destroyed. Israel took possession of his land and dwelt in his cities from the Are and Arnon to the Jabbok. Thus fell Sihon, king of the Amorites. They followed up their victory by taking Jaazer, a stronghold of the Amorites in Mount Gilead; and then they crossed the Jabbok into the district of Bashan. There they encountered the giant king Og, who ruled over sixty fenced cities in the district of Argob. He was defeated at Edrei, and slain with his sons and his people, as had been done to Sihon. The whole territory of these two kings, therefore, fell into the possession of the Israelites, unexpectedly to them. They supposed their inheritance was to be on the west side of Jordan only; but, as these kings opposed their progress to the river, they were compelled to make war with them, and the result was their extermination and the addition of their territory to the land of Canaan. So goodly was this land that the tribes of Reuben and Gad and half the tribe of Manasseh applied for it as their portion of the inheritance, and Moses gave it to them. At last the Israelites made their encampment on the east side of Jordan in “the desert plains of Moab,” supposing that all opposition to their crossing the river was at an end. But there still remained work for them to do on the east side of the river. The hills of Abarim, which rose close behind them, were seen occupied by a watchful and wily enemy. “The conquest of the Amorites had roused the Moabites from their doubtful neutrality. Their king, Balak, the son of Zippor (the king who had been defeated and despoiled of part of his territory by Sihon), seeing that Israel was too strong for him in the field, made a confederacy with the sheikhs of Midian, several of whom appear to have led their Bedouin life within the territories of Moab, owing a certain allegiance to the king. The united forces encamped on the heights of Abarim; while Balak sought mightier help from another quarter. There was living at Pethor, in Mesopotamia, a prophet named Balaam, the son of Beor; one of those who still retained (some) knowledge of the true God, by whom he was favored with prophetic visions. He seems, however, to have practiced the more questionable arts of divination, and to have made gain of his supernatural knowledge. His fame was spread far and wide among the tribes of the desert. ‘I wot that he whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed’ (Num. 12:6), is the belief in which Balak grounded his invitation to Balaam to come and curse Israel, after which he hoped he might prevail against them and drive them out of the land. The message was carried by the elders, both of Moab and Midian, with the reward for his divinations in their hand. The temptation was too great for the prophet’s integrity, and ‘he forsook the right way and went astray,’ into that which the Apostle Peter calls ‘the way of Balaam, the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness’ (2 Peter 2:15). In Jude 11 Balaam is ranked with Cain and Korah as types of the wickedness of the last days. Both as a prophet, and from the fame which had spread over all the surrounding countries, he must have known that Israel were the people of God, and that he had nothing to do with the messengers of Balak. He hesitated, and was lost, but not without repeated warnings. Instead of dismissing the messengers, he invited them to remain for the night, while he consulted God. He received the plain answer: ‘Thou shalt not go with them; thou shalt not curse the people, for they are blessed;’ and in the morning he sent them away (Num. 22:1-14).

“Balak again sent more numerous and more honorable envoys, with a more pressing message, and promises of great honors and rewards. Balaam declared his inability, for all the wealth of Balak—not to entertain the proposal for a moment, but—to go beyond the word of the Lord his God, to whom he again referred the case. And this time God visited him with the severest punishment, which He reserves for the willful sinner: He ‘gave him his own desire’ (Ps. 78:29); but, while delivering him to the destruction he courted, He made him the instrument of blessing Israel in strains among the sublimest in sacred poetry. Balaam was commanded to go with the men, but—as he himself had already said—to utter only the words that God should put in his mouth; and, in all that follows, we see how vainly he strove to break through the prescribed limit and to earn the wages of his apostasy (Num. 22:15-21).

“He received one last warning in a prodigy that befell him on the road. The beast that bore him swerved twice from the way, and saved him from the uplifted sword of the Angel-Jehovah, who had come out to withstand him; and the third time, where the pass was too narrow to escape, she fell down beneath him, and, on his smiting her again, ‘the dumb ass, with man’s voice, forbade the madness of the prophet’ (2 Peter 2:16). His eyes were now opened, and he beheld the Angel, who refused the offer which he now made to turn back, and repeated the injunction to go with the men, but to speak only what He should say to him (Num. 22:22-35).

“Balak went to meet Balaam at a city on the Arnon (perhaps Aroer), and brought him to the city of Kirjath-huzoth (commonly interpreted a city of streets or of visions: it may have been a sacred city, and therefore fit for the prophet’s residence), where the king held a great feast in the prophet’s honor. On the morrow Balak and Balaam began their unhallowed ceremonies (Num. 22:41-23:26). Thrice they ascended those eminences, which were consecrated to the worship of the heathen deities (compare Deut. 12:2), as places whence the prophet might see and curse the people, and thrice did ‘Jehovah their God turn the curse into a blessing, because Jehovah loved them.’ Lest Balaam’s courage should fail him at the sight of the vast encampment surrounding the tabernacle, with its sign of Jehovah’s presence in the cloud, Balak took him first to a hill sacred to Baal, whence he could see the utmost part of the people. Here Balaam bade Balak prepare seven altars, on each of which he offered a bullock and a ram, and then retired to another hill to consult Jehovah. From His mouth the prophet received the word; and he returned to confound Balak and his princes by asking, ‘How shall I curse whom God hath not cursed? or how shall I defy whom Jehovah had not defied?’—at the same time prophesying Israel’s separation from all nations, and their countless numbers; and concluded by the oft-quoted ejaculation, ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!’

“The experiment was repeated from another eminence, ‘The field of Zophim on the top of the Pisgah,’ a more elevated point of observation, but still not commanding the great body of the camp. Here the same ceremonies were repeated, with the same result; and God’s message by the prophet declared His own eternal truth; His forgiving love to His people; His perpetual presence among them, making them proof against enchantment; and their future career of lion-like prowess against their enemies. Balak vented his disappointment in the cry, ‘Neither curse them at all, nor bless them at all ;’ but he would not give up without a last trial (Num. 23:14-26).

“This time he brought Balaam up to the very sanctuary of the national deity Peor, the same topmost summit—Nebo, the head of Pisgah—from which Moses soon after viewed the promised land. The seven-fold sacrifice was repeated, but Balaam laid aside his arts of divination, for he saw that it pleased Jehovah to bless Israel. His view embraced the whole camp of Israel spread out among the acacia groves by the river at his feet; it ranged over their promised possessions in the hills of Judah, Ephraim, and Gilead; and as ‘he saw Israel abiding in their tents, according to their tribes, the Spirit of God came upon him, and he took up his parable,’ the prophecy of the man whose eyes were at length opened. In the goodly array of their tents he saw the omen of destruction of the nations around: and ended, ‘Blessed is he that blesseth thee; and cursed is he that curseth thee’ (Num. 23:27-24:9). Heedless of the rage of Balak or of his cruel sarcasms, ‘I thought to promote thee to great honor; but, lo, Jehovah hath kept thee back from honor,’ Balaam declared that, before returning to his home, he must complete his prophecy of what the people should do to the heathen in the last days (Num. 24:10-14). For the fourth time he opened his mouth and proclaimed his distant vision of the ‘Star of Jacob,’ the ‘Sceptre of Israel,’ who should smite Moab—a prophecy in part fulfilled by the victories of David; but, as the titles plainly show, pointing forward to the kingdom of Messiah over the outcast branches of the chosen family. Then, as his eye ranged over the distant mountains of Serf, the home of Edom, and the table-land of the desert, over which the children of Amalek wandered, and the home of the Kenites full in his sight, among the rocks of Engedi, on the farther shores of the Dead Sea, he predicted their destruction; till the vision carried him back to the banks of his native Euphrates, and he saw the conquests of Asshur overturned by ships coming from the coasts of Chittim, the unknown lands beyond the Western Sea, and he exclaimed, ‘Alas! who shall live when God doeth this!’ And he rose up, and returned to the place assigned for his abode (Num. 24:15-25).

“Balaam remained among the Moabites and Midianites, clinging doubtless to the chance of reward; and provoked his fate by a new and more effectual plot against Israel. By his advice the people were tempted to share in the lascivious rites of Peor, and to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab (Num. 25:1-8; 21:16). The wrath of Jehovah was shown in a plague which broke out in the camp, and destroyed 24,000 men. Moses doomed all the offenders to death, and Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the high priest, set an example of zeal by transfixing with a javelin a man of Israel in the arms of a woman of Moab, whom he had brought into his tent in the face of the congregation as they wept before Jehovah. The plague was stayed, and the covenant of Jehovah was renewed with the house of Eleazar, assuring him a perpetual priesthood (Num. 25:4-15).

“For these plots against Israel, as well as for their former inhospitality, the Moabites were excluded from the congregation to the tenth generation (Deut. 21:3-16); and the Midianites were doomed to destruction (Num. 25:16-18). The execution of this sentence was the last act of the government of Moses. All the men of Midian were slain, with the princes who had been allied with Balak, and Balaam[9] died in the general slaughter. Their cities were burnt and their spoil taken, and the women who had been saved alive were slain by the command of Moses, the female children only being spared. At the same time a law was made for the equitable division of the spoil between those who went forth to battle and those who remained in the camp” (Num. 21)—W. Smith.

We have dwelt at an unusual length on this item in the Old Testament history wherein Balaam was called in by Balak to curse Israel. It is an interesting and remarkable circumstance, showing the corrupt nature of man, even of a prophet of God, and the superabounding influence of God’s Spirit over the venal propensities of His professed servants.

God told Balaam emphatically not to go to Balak—not to curse Israel, because Israel was already blessed. But his hankering after gold inclined him to go; and when he asked God the second time, He told him to go—that he might have his own way and be destroyed, literally. He compelled him, however, even against his natural will, to declare glorious things concerning Israel, and also the setting up of the gospel kingdom in the world.

Moses delivered a series of addresses to Israel, encouraging them to obedience, warning them against evils of rebellion and disobedience, and pronounced his last blessing on the twelve tribes. Joshua was consecrated by the high priest Eleazar to be the successor of Moses, and Moses was summoned away into the immediate presence of his Maker. He “went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the tip of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan, and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar. And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor; but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. And Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eye was not dim not his natural force abated” (Deut. 34:1-7.)

The secrecy of his interment, in the wisdom of God, was perhaps to prevent the Israelites from gathering his bones to keep as sacred relics, which might lead to idolatry, and also to designate the end of the legal dispensation.[10]

Joshua, as the leader of Israel, began his march from Shittim towards the Jordan, which allowed him to cross it dry shod, even as their fathers had done in crossing the Red Sea. As soon as the feet of the priests bearing the ark touched the water it abated and was piled up below and above, and they stood in the midst of the bed of the river until all the people had crossed over; then they passed to the west bank of the river and the waters returned to their original condition. The host then encamped in Gilgal, where Joshua set up twelve stones taken from the bed of the river as a memorial of the event. The Red Sea was divided to allow Israel to pass out of Egypt, and the Jordan also, to allow them to pass into Canaan, without wetting their garments or having to build bridges. It was according to Divine arrangement.

They entered Canaan on the tenth day of the first month (Nisan-April B.C. 1451: Josh. 4:19). This was the day appointed for the selection of the paschal lamb, and on the evening of the fourteenth day the people kept the Passover for the first time on the soil of their own inheritance, exactly forty years after their fathers had first kept it before leaving Egypt.

The forty years are made up about as follows:

Years.

Months.

Days.

In Egypt before the Passover,

--

--

14

From Egypt to Sinai,

--

1

16

Encampment at Sinai,

--

11

20

March to Kadesh,

--

4

10

Wandering in wilderness,

37

6

--

March from Kadesh to the plains of Moab,

--

10

--

Encampment there to tile passage of the Jordan,

--

2

Total,

40

--

--

Thus with a high hand and a stretched out arm the God of Israel had brought him out of Egypt and planted him in Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey. Wonderful must have been the change to the tribes, when contrasting their goodly heritage with the barren wilderness through which they had been wandering for such a great length of time. The manna ceased to fall, and they ate of the fruits of the earth thereafter.

To the people of God, whose citizenship is in Heaven, this world is a wilderness land. During all the weary years of their sojourn here they are poor sinners, and are visited with the rod for their transgressions. Sometimes they go, as at first, directly toward Canaan, but sometimes “toward the Egypt of the world, and sometimes toward the Sinai of legalism, Jehovah, however, still not withdrawing His pillar of cloud and fire.” The Lord is peculiarly their God all the while. When they could not deliver themselves, their covenant God delivered them from the terrible bondage of sin and Satan, and He loves them to the end. He writes His holy law upon the spiritual tablets of their hearts. He sustains their inner life with heavenly food and living water. He guides them every moment of the day and of the night. He defends them from their enemies. He teaches them their absolute dependence upon Him. He dwells above the mercy-seat for them evermore, and will never leave them nor forsake them; but will assuredly at last conduct them across the Jordan of death into the glorious land of everlasting rest. Then let them repose continual and unfaltering trust in the God of their salvation.

It is the omnipotent, eternal and unchangeable God of nature, of providence and of grace, who thus, by the events of a nation’s history, illustrates His holy and merciful dealings with His spiritual people through all the generations of the world.

Joshua was about twenty-five years (B.C. 1451-1426) in destroying and overcoming all the nations of the Canaanites and dividing their lands among the children of Israel; the number of whom, when entering Canaan, was supposed to be about equal to the number that marched out of Egypt, viz., two-and-a-half-millions. The first attack was made on Jericho, a well-fortified, populous and wealthy city that was situated in a grove of palm trees about six miles from the river Jordan, and ruled by a king.

The manner of attack was of divine arrangement. The entire host was to encompass the city seven days. For six days they were to march around it once, the chosen warriors marching in front of the ark, before which seven priests were to bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns; the rest of the people were to follow in silence, while the trumpets alone made noise, sounding a continual defiance. And on the seventh day they were to encompass it seven times, and at the end thereof to give one long, loud blast with the trumpets. All this was done according to direction; and at the close of the seventh blast on the seventh day the walls of Jericho fell down flat, and all Israel went from where each man stood directly into the city, took the spoil and destroyed the people, not one of whom escaped except Rahab the harlot and her family, who were saved alive because she, believing in the God of Israel, protected the two men sent by Joshua, previously to spy out the land. The fall of Jericho affords proof of miraculous interposition, equal to that of the plagues in Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea or Jordan, or any of the wonders in the wilderness. The city fell an easy prey to the invaders, and the curse of God rested upon it thenceforward. The city of Ai was next captured and the inhabitants destroyed, but the main camp of Joshua remained at Gilgal. These victories secured the passes of the Jordan, and gave the Israelites access to the open country in the center of Palestine. Terror had already seized the Canaanites before Joshua crossed the Jordan, but, after the fall of Jericho and Ai, all the tribes were greatly alarmed and feared annihilation. The Gibeonites alone sought protection by submission and deceit. They succeeded, and saved themselves thereby from the general overthrow, but became slaves to Israel, mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water” the remnant of their days. By reason of the oath which Joshua and the princes made to them, while under deception, their lives were spared, but they had to be kept in subjection by the public authorities; so that it became a proverb—“The Canaanite is still in the land.” This was typical of the experience of God’s spiritual Israel; by reason of indwelling sin, they have to acknowledge “the Canaanite to be still in the land.” They perpetually harassed, but never could dispossess Israel. The other kings west of Jordan formed a league to resist Joshua and punish the Gibeonites. And, as they appeared before Gibeon, Joshua attacked them, took them by surprise, and utterly routed them near Beth-horon. He pursued them down the steep from the upper to the lower Beth-horon, and, as the Canaanites fled, they were overtaken by a hail storm, which slew more than had fallen in battle. Such was the success of the Israelites that Joshua desired the day lengthened, and commanded the sun and moon to stand still, that the victory might be complete before night. The Lord granted his request, “so that the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”[11] Joshua pursued them to Makkedah, where the five kings hid themselves in a cave; he bade stones to be rolled to its mouth, and pursued his victory. Upon the return of the victorious army to Makkedah, Joshua caused the five kings to be brought out, and ordered the captains to place their feet upon their necks, as a sign that a like conquest should be gained over all their enemies; and then he slew them and hanged them on five trees till the evening. Their bodies were then taken down and thrown into the same cave, and its mouth was closed with great stones.

This great victory was followed by the conquest of the seven kings of Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Hebron and Debir. These were taken and utterly destroyed, together with all their people, and everything that had life, within their jurisdiction. Joshua again returned to his camp at Gilgal, in the valley of the Jordan.

The Israelites were the chosen instruments of God (as the waters of the flood and the fire and brimstone from Heaven had been His chosen instruments in former times) to execute His righteous vengeance upon the idolatrous and sensual Canaanitish tribes; to become themselves thoroughly convinced of the unity, spirituality and holiness of God, and to transmit this pure monotheistic faith to coming generations. The miraculous separation of the waters of the Jordan, and prostration of the walls of Jericho, and prolongation of the day at Joshua’s command, showed the world that the extirpation of the wicked Canaanites was the work of a holy and sin-avenging God, who, having mercifully sent these people such spiritual teachers and examples as Abraham and Melchizedek, and then given them a most solemn warning in His fiery overthrow of the corrupt cities of the plain, was now about to visit them with utter destruction, as He will the finally impenitent of all nations on the last day, when His people are gathered into the heavenly Canaan. The corrupting influence of the few Canaanites left in the land proves the extreme importance of the destruction of those wicked idolaters for the preservation of a true faith and a pure worship on earth. “To the doomed nations it was an act of just severity; to the world at large, of unspeakable mercy.”

Joshua next turned his attention to the nations in the northern part of Palestine, where many kings and tribes were leagued against him, whose numbers were reckoned “as the sand of the seashore for multitude,” besides chariots and horses. Josephus estimates them at 300,000 foot, 10,000 horse, and 20,000 chariots. Joshua routed this great army by the waters of Merom, and chased them as far as “great Zidon” and the valley of Mizpeh.

Joshua cut the hoof sinews of the horses and burnt the chariots, in obedience to God’s command (Josh. 11:9). He next took Hazor, putting its king and inhabitants to the sword, with some other cities of the confederates. Israel was now master of a large portion of the country. But some kings held out in their fenced cities for a number of years, and it was a long time before the land rested from war.

The result of the conquest up to this time, say B.C. 1445, was about as follows, viz.: Two kings, Sihon and Og, on the east of Jordan, and thirty-one kings on the west of that river, including the seven nations mentioned in the first promise to Abraham—the Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Hivites, Hittites, Jebusites and Perizzites (Josh. 12) “The defeat of these thirty-one kings did not involve in every case the capture of their cities. Jerusalem, for example, was not taken till after the death of Joshua (Judg. 1:8), and its citadel remained in the hands of the Jebusites till the time of David. Many other cities held out for a long time.”

And, besides these cities, there were yet whole tracts of country promised to Abraham yet unsubdued, and which were not to be included in the conquests of Joshua (Josh. 13:1). They were reserved for his successors to subdue, but Joshua included them in the division of land among the twelve tribes.

Joshua becoming old and well stricken in years, he calls the tribes together and gives them the last warning and word of encouragement. It was a solemn scene. He recounts to them much of the dealings of the Lord with them, and with their fathers before them, and urges them to obedience and the true service of God. Said he, “Be ye therefore very courageous, to keep and do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses.” And he finally ends with an appeal that strikes them forcibly: “If it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood [the Euphrates], or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:15). The people responded with a great deal of earnestness that they would serve God only and discard all idols. And they kept their word and remained faithful[12] to God during the life of Joshua, “and all the days of the elders that over lived Joshua, and which had known all the works of the Lord that He had done for Israel.” Joshua died at the age of one hundred and ten years, and was buried “in the border of his inheritance in Timnath-serah, which is in Mount Ephraim on the north side of the hill of Gaash.” “And the bones of Joseph which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem for a hundred pieces of silver [supposed to be about $62.50]; and it became the inheritance of the children of Joseph.” Eleazar also died about the same time of Joshua’s decease (Josh. 24:29-33).

1. “As Jacob took his brother by the heel in the womb (Hosea 12:3), so the spiritual Israel, every believer, having no right in himself to the inheritance, yet by faith, when being born again of the Spirit, takes hold of the bruised heel, the Divine humanity, of Christ crucified, the firstborn of many brethren.”—A. R. Fausset.

2. “Jacob’s seeking a right end by wrong means entailed upon him a lifelong retribution in kind. Instead of occupying the first place of honor in the family, he had to flee for his life; instead of a double portion, he fled with only a staff in his hand.” And, as he had deceived Isaac, so Laban deceived him in regard to Leah and his wages; and his other sons cruelly deceived him in regard to Joseph, pretending that he had been slain by wild beasts, when they had sold him into bondage.

3. Among the most insoluble mysteries, and among the strongest proofs of human ignorance, are the phenomena of dreams, hypnotism, somnambulism and insanity. This strange region is not accessible to accurate and adequate scientific observation; and therefore numerous conflicting opinions prevail in regard to it. The Scriptures, as well as physiology and psychology, prove that many, if not most, dreams have a natural origin, being due to some peculiar conditions of the body or mind (Eccl. 5:3; Isa. 29:8; Jude 8); they seem to be broken fragments of former thoughts revived, and heterogeneously brought together, well compared to “chaff” by the Lord to the prophet Jeremiah (23:28). Some think that the mind is always active, whether asleep or awake; others think that, during profound sleep, all the mental powers are dormant. It is agreed that, during dreams, the reason is nearly always, and the will is always, dormant or asleep, and the mind is therefore passive or receptive. On this account it is, as Elihu says (Job 33:15-17), that in dreams God sometimes “opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction, that He may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man.” When man’s reason and will are asleep, he can take no credit to himself for the impressions on his mind. This was to be, not only under the old, but also under the new, dispensation (Joel 2:28; Acts 2:17). And we know from the direct testimony of Scripture that some dreams, under both dispensations, have had a supernatural, a Divine, origin. God sent instructive dreams to Abimelech (Gen. 20:3), to Jacob (Gen. 28:12-15), to Laban (Gen. 31:24), to Joseph (Gen. 37:5), to Pharaoh’s butler and baker (Gen. 40:5), to Pharaoh (Gen. 41:1-32), to a Midianite (Judges 7:13), to Solomon (1 Kings 3:5), to Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2 and 4), to Daniel (7:1), to Joseph, the husband of Mary (Matthew 1:20; 2:22), to the wise men from the East (Matthew 2:12), and to Pilate’s wife (Matthew 27:19). Visions of the night are identified in the Bible with dreams (Gen. 46:2; Num. 12:6: Job 20:8; 33:14, 15; Dan. 2:28; 7:1). Not only Abraham, Jacob, Balaam, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Zechariah had visions from God, but also Peter and Cornelius (Acts 10), Paul (Acts 21:9, 10; 2 Cor. 12:1-4) and John (Rev.). It thus appears that unregenerate as well as regenerate men have had dreams and visions from God. A religion, therefore, based entirely upon dreams, is worthless. Instead of placing our chief dependence upon such uncertainties, we should remember that “we have a more sure word of prophecy [the Holy Scriptures], whereunto we do well to take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place” (2 Peter 1:19). Yet we know, from Acts 2:17, and from Christian experience, that God still comforts, warns and instructs, and humbles His people in dreams, according to His sovereign will.

4. The ladder in Jacob’s dream seems first to have represented “God’s grace and providence arranging all things for His people’s good through the ministry of angels (Gen. 32:1, 2; Heb. 1:14); but chiefly typified the Messiah through whom Heaven is opened and also joined to earth, and angels minister with ceaseless activity to Him first, then to His people (John 1:51: 14:6; Heb. 10:19, 20). Jacob, the man of guile, saw Him at a distance, at the top of the ladder; Nathanael, an Israelite without guile, saw Him near him at the bottom in His humiliation, which was the necessary first step upward to glory.”—A. R. Fausset.

5. Jacob’s polygamy was contrary to the original law of paradise (Gen. 2:23, 24: Matthew 19:5). Leah was imposed on him, when he had designed to marry Rachel only; and the maids were given him by his wives to obtain offspring. The times of ignorance, when the gospel had not yet restored the original standard, tolerated evils which would be inexcusable now. Jealousies were the result of polygamy in Jacob’s case, as was sure to happen.”—Fausset.

6. Joseph was a type of Christ in his father’s special love for him, in his being sent to his brethren, rejected by them, sold to the Gentiles, delivered to death in the sanctity of his life, in his humiliation, in his exaltation to be a prince and a savior, in the bowing down of his kindred before him, in his first speaking to them harshly to humble them but all the while loving them, and dealing kindly towards them, not taking their money for his corn, and finally settling all of them in the goodly land of Goshen, for which they paid nothing. He was a prophetic interpreter of dreams, married in a priestly family, and ruled as a king over Egypt. He was thirty years old when he entered on his public ministry. He was the first-born son of Jacob and his favorite wife, Rachel, and received a double portion of his father’s inheritance for Manasseh and Ephraim; and had from his father the blessings of the everlasting hills.

7. Even so, as it has been beautifully remarked, the bitter waters of affliction are always sweetened by casting into them the tree of the cross.

8. Typifying that the first use which man makes of God’s law is to break it.

9. From such wonderful and sad cases as those of Balaam the Prophet, Saul the King, and Judas the Apostle, we learn—not that the child of God can eternally perish (John 10:28; Rom. 8:38, 39; 1 Peter 1:1-5)—but that any amount of religion in the head, even though accompanied with high religious office, will avail us nothing without the grace of God’s love in our hearts (1 Cor. 13:1-13; Matthew 22:36-40; 1 John 3:14).

10. Like Aaron and Moses, no doubt many other subjects of grace died in the wilderness, as afterwards in the Babylonish exile. The Fact that Moses, by whom the law was given, died before reaching Canaan, typifies that the people of God will reach Heaven, not by their obedience of the law, but by the wisdom, strength and righteousness of their Divine Joshua (Jesus, or Jehovah—Savior).

11. Like Judges v. 20—“the stars in their courses fought against Sisera,” meaning that a terrific storm, as if from the stars, burst upon Sisera—so Joshua 10:12-14 is poetical and optical (being a quotation from an ancient anthology, “the book of Jasher” ), meaning that “the light of the sun and moon was supernaturally prolonged by the same laws of refraction and reflection that ordinarily cause the sun to appear above the horizon, when he is in reality below it.”—Jamieson. Pfeiffer connects the long day of Joshua and of Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:11) with the Egyptian tradition of two strange days mentioned by Herodotus, ii. 142. Compare Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 2. God may have actually stopped, for a while, the daily rotation of the earth upon its axis, and thus stopped the motion of the sun and moon in their apparent daily orbits, and He may have prevented all the natural evil consequences of such stoppage, for all things are possible to omnipotence.

12. Typifying the zeal and carefulness of the soul in its early love.

Chapter IV. From the Conquest of Canaan to the Babylonish Captivity.

The ancient Canaan was about 170 miles in length, and 40 in average breadth, covering some 7,000 square miles, about the size of Wales. The length of the country under Solomon’s dominion was about 200 miles, with a breadth of 60 miles, and an area of some 12,000 square miles.

Canaan, or Palestine, “was designed and arranged by God when He laid the foundations of the earth and divided to the nations their inheritance, to be a natural fortress for the preservation of religious truth and purity; a home in which a covenant people might be trained and educated in the household of God and directly under His eye, to be zealous of good works themselves, and to be a royal priesthood to mankind; to carry out in their history God’s promise to the founder of their race, that in Him should all the families of the earth be blessed. And therefore God surrounded it with natural fortifications, which kept it separate and secluded—even although placed in the very midst of the most concentrated populations of the world, in the very focus toward which their intercourse with one another radiated—until the objects of the hermit-training and discipline of its inhabitants were accomplished. God hedged round the vineyard in which He planted His own noble vine with tower and trench, with sea and desert, against the boar of the wood and the beast of the field. From the foul Baal and Astarte worship of Syria in the north, it was defended by the lofty mountains of Lebanon; from the degrading brute and plant idolatry of Egypt it was guarded, in the south, by a long stretch of pathless wilderness; from the Assyrian deification of lawless force, and the monstrous incarnations of the east, the deep depression of the Jordan valley, the swift, deep current of the river, and the intricate fastnesses of the arid hills and valleys beyond, formed a sufficient protection; while between the people and the baneful effects of the beautiful and captivating human apotheoses of Greece and Rome, the Great Sea rolled its wide waste of waters. This remarkable isolation of the country prevented the inhabitants from having any commercial intercourse with the outlying nation (Num. 23:9). With the single and very doubtful exception of Joppa, there was no suitable harbor in which ships could be sheltered; all the havens along the western coast being unsafe. Not a single navigable river flowed from the interior to the sea; the principal stream, the Jordan, flowing parallel with the coast, and being very rapid, crooked and broken, and so deep below the surface of the adjacent country as to be invisible and difficult of approach, and finally losing itself in an inland gulf which is as far below the level of the ocean as the mountains around it are above. Not a single one of the many cities that at different times held the rank of capital was situated on the seashore, Jerusalem being built in the wildest and most inaccessible part of the interior. All these circumstances favored the design of God, and acted in harmony with the spirit of the Jewish law, which discountenanced commerce as much as it encouraged agriculture. The Jews could not help being a nation of farmers. As a new seed of Adam, subjected to a new trial of obedience, they were placed in this new garden on Eden, to dress and keep it, in order that through their tilling of the ground the wilderness and solitary place might be made glad, and the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose. Very rich and varied were the natural resources of Canaan. No other country in the world presented, within a limited area, such diversities of soil and climate. On the one side it rose ten thousand feet above the level of the sea; on the other it sank one thousand three hundred feet below it; and between these two extremes there was the utmost variety of scenery, temperature and productions. All the seasons had their perpetual abode in this favored country. Perpetual Spring smiled on the green slopes of Galilee; Summer that knew no blight glowed on the tree-covered hills of Carmel; Autumn lingered around the corn-fields of Bethlehem and the purple vineyards of Hebron; while grim Winter sat forever on his icy throne on the brow of Lebanon, and sent his cooling breath over but dared not lift his destroying arm upon the land. Going from the north to the south was like passing through the circle of the year and the zones of the earth. In the deep trench of the Jordan there was the sweltering heat of the tropics; in the hill country of Judea the mild dews and soft air of the temperate zone; and far up the sides of Lebanon the icy rigor of the Arctic regions. Almost every species of the vegetable kingdom—forest-tree, fruit and flower, field and garden product—is found in Palestine. Containing, in ancient times, from three to six million inhabitants, it was the most fertile and highly cultivated country in the world, and amply sufficed to sustain its population without any extraneous support, without any need of commerce or merchandise. The whole landed property of the country was divided inalienably among the inhabitants in such a way as that the possession of each family was capable of yielding, in years of ordinary productiveness, not merely a comfortable, but even a luxurious maintenance. Each Israelite sat under his own vine and fig-tree, without fear of famine. The whole land was self-contained and independent, and thus its isolation from surrounding nations was still further secured. By the necessity of a careful cultivation of every inch of the soil, the Jews became distinguished above other nations for habits of industry, intelligence and economy; while their world-wide variety of soil and climate fitted them for their universal destiny.”—H. Macmillan’s Sabbath of the Fields.

Moses gives a fine description of the “pleasant,” “goodly,” “glorious land of promise” in Deuteronomy 8:7-10. And the Lord asks by the mouth of Isaiah (5:4), “What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?”

The peculiar situation and boundaries, and the wonderful and unrivalled excellences of ancient Palestine—the proofs of which excellences are even now plainly visible after eighteen centuries of war and ruin and plunder and neglect—demonstrate the eternal foreknowledge, predestination, omnipotence and special covenant love of God to Israel. They prove that the God of Israel is the God of the universe.

All types are imperfect. Canaan is a type not only of the gospel church, but also of Heaven (Heb. 3 and 4).

The descendants of Abraham are in possession of the promised land—by conquest and actual possession of a part of it, and by virtue of God’s promise claiming the whole of it, and have already divided it by lot. They are in covenant relation to God, and as such typify the church under the gospel dispensation; yet among the natural descendants of Abraham there are to be found, at all times, wicked and impenitent persons who, being only children after the flesh, persecute children of the promise and of the Spirit. It is these spiritual Israelites, therefore, who constitute the true worshipers of God, and who suffer persecution at the hands of their fleshly brethren; and also have to suffer for their brethren, who so often provoke the Most High to punish the whole people for the sins of a part. These two classes also typify the fleshly and spiritual natures in all Christians. The Israelites, notwithstanding their professions before Joshua of great faithfulness, soon forgot the God of their fathers and turned to the worship of idols; for which the Lord punished them in various ways, and especially by giving their enemies the mastery over them, and causing them often to groan under the rigid oppression of the nations around them.

During the history of the judges—about 320 years—they were much afflicted by reason of their transgressions, and had often to cry to God for mercy, who delivered them out of their distress. God raised up judges for their deliverance, but they would soon forget God and relapse into idolatry again. This sin beset them more or less until after the Babylonish captivity. The preface to the history of the judges represents the different tribes moving to acquire the possessions allotted them. Judah took the lead in this movement, accompanied by Simeon. These gained a signal victory over the Canaanites and Perizzites in Bezek, and took prisoner Adoni-bezek, a great tyrant, who was justly punished for his cruelty to others.

Judah then aided Simeon in recovering his lot. They took several cities, but could not entirely drive out the inhabitants; and the various tribes made but small headway in gaining entire possession of their inheritances. God told them, indeed, that as they had failed to keep His covenant, He would not drive out the people before them. They apparently repented, in a public demonstration, at a place which was afterward called Bochim (the weepers), which was thus named on account of their sacrifices and cries of repentance (Judg. 2:1-6).

“After this introduction we have the general summary of the vicissitudes of idolatry and repentance, servitude and deliverance, which we have already noticed. It ends with the enumeration of the heathen nations which were still left, ‘to prove Israel by them;’ a trial in which they failed, intermarrying with them, worshiping their gods, doing evil in the sight of Jehovah, forgetting their own God and serving ‘Baalim and the groves’ (Judg. 3:6, 7). These statements are illustrated by the dark records of idolatry, vice and cruelty which occupy the closing chapters of the book, and which seem to belong to the earlier part of the period of the judges. They are expressly mentioned as examples of the disorder of those days, when ‘there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes’” (Judg. 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25).

The affecting and interesting history of Ruth[1] the Moabitess occurred during the period of the judges. She became the wife of Boaz, and bore a son to him named Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David, from whom sprang Christ, the Savior of sinners; Boaz also being the son of a sinful Canaanitish woman, named Rahab, of the city of Jericho. Among the other wonderful things connected with the salvation of men is that of the condescension of our Lord to be born of such progenitors. Surely He is the friend of sinners; and His grace is able to cleanse and save the vilest, Gentile as well as Jew.

The judges in Israel were an extraordinary order of rulers, raised up in emergencies, and not contemplated or provided for in the constitution of the state.

They did not succeed each other immediately or in regular order, but were indicated by inspiration and signs, on great emergencies, which the people readily recognized, as a divine arrangement in their behalf. There were fifteen of them in all (including Abimelech, the usurper) from Othniel, Caleb’s brother, to Samuel, who was both judge and prophet, viz.: Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah, Gideon, Abimelech, Tola, Jair, Jephthah,[2] Ibzan, Elon, Abdon, Sampson, Eli,[3] and Samuel.

The period of the judges was a very chequered one, in which, down to the time of Samuel, God taught the Israelites His hatred of sin, not by prophets, but by events. When the nation fell into idolatry and immorality, He allowed their enemies to defeat and oppress them; and then, when they cried unto Him for mercy, He raised up judges to deliver them from their enemies. Thus were the people taught that the way of the transgressor is hard, but that the Divine blessing rests upon those who fear and serve the Lord.

Among the eminent saints in private life, during the ruling of the judges, we might name Manoah and his wife, Naomi, Ruth, Boaz, Elkanah, and Hannah.

During the government of the judges, a change took place in the succession of the high-priesthood. It descended from Aaron to his oldest son Eleazar, and from him down to Uzzi. After Uzzi it was transferred to the house of Aaron’s younger son Ithamar, and Eli is chosen high priest. This order remained until about eighty years after, when Solomon changed it back again to the house of Eleazar by deposing Abiathar and appointing Zadok in his stead.

The ark during the time of the judges remained at different places—a long time at Shiloh, a still longer time at Kirjath-Jearim, then at Jerusalem, and finally was deposited by Solomon in the magnificent temple which he had erected. When thus deposited, it contained nothing but the two tables of stone; the golden pot of manna and Aaron’s Rod that budded, having been lost during its capture or frequent removals. With little exception it remained in the Holy of Holies, in the temple, from its dedication B.C. 1003, to its destruction B.C. 588—a period of four hundred and fifteen years. Moses made it B.C. 1490, and it perished in Solomon’s temple B.C. 588, having been in existence nine hundred and two years! What a miraculous preservation! The second temple had no ark.

The sacred history of the four centuries from the passage of the Jordan to the reign of Saul is comprised in three short books, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and a few pages in the book of Samuel—all of which might be read in half a day! We naturally inquire, Why so short? The answer is ready. The Holy Ghost who inspired the record preserves only such incidents as will be of spiritual profit to the people of God in after times.

At the close of the period of the judges the kingly and the prophetical office was set up in Israel in regular succession. The priestly office was already established. There was a succession of prophets from Enoch, the seventh from Adam, to Moses, the great lawgiver and prophet, who died before the conquest. Among these might be named Noah, Job, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. During the period of the judges, about three hundred and sixty years (including Joshua’s leadership), there was an almost entire absence of the spirit of prophecy. But when Samuel, the child of faith and prayer, was called a lively interest was manifested in him by the people. All recognized him as a prophet of God, and honored him as such from Dan to Beersheba (1 Sam. 1-3). From him there was kept up a constant line of prophets, men inspired of God and called to the work, during the kingly reigns over Israel to their termination, and those over Judah down to the close of Malachi’s prophecy, about four hundred years B.C. These men spake as with authority from the Most High, and, as a general thing, kings, priests and people were subject to them (Jer. 1); and from Enoch to Moses, and from Samuel to Malachi, they were pious men and eminent servants of God. The chief vacancies appear to be from Moses to Samuel, and from Malachi to the coming of Christ. Some of the prophets under the kingly reigns appear on the stage, deliver their messages and retire, without any record of their names even; others chiefly in the courts of kings; others mostly intermingling with the people.

Some leave no record of their predictions or admonitions, while others, sixteen in all, have done so, and their books may be found in the canon of Scripture, viz.: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, called the four greater; and Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, called the twelve lesser prophets. They spoke the truth fearlessly, whether it offended or pleased others. This was the spirit that characterized them, “As the Lord liveth, what the Lord saith unto me, that will I speak” (1 Kings 22:14; Jer. 33:20-40). False prophets sometimes arose and occasioned great trouble. When fairly detected they were to be put to death according to law (Deut. 13), and this was the reason why Elijah had so little opposition in having four hundred of them put to death, on the memorable occasion of the sacrifice at Carmel. The people, however, were so idolatrous themselves that they would often let the false prophet escape and punish the true one.

There were “companies” or “sons” of the prophets (1 Sam. 19:19, 20; 2 Kings 2:3, 5; 4:38-41; 6:1-7), but the object and end of their associations are little known to us. They are mentioned only in the days of Samuel, David, Elijah and Elisha. They appear to have been young men who admired the prophets—sought their society—waited on them and received instruction from them in sacred music (1 Sam. 10:5; 2 Kings 3:15; 1 Chron. 25:1-7), but could not be made prophets of by their teachers. God chose whom he would and raised them to the prophetical office, without any regard to their former human training (Amos 7:14, 15; 1 Kings 19:15-21). The collections of these young men were located at different places, such as Ramah, Bethel, Jericho and Gilgal (1 Sam. 19:18-24; 2 Kings 2:1-5; 4:38; 22:14). Nothing of the kind appears in the New Testament.

From Samuel to Malachi were six hundred and fifty years, a long time for the continuation of the prophetic line set up in Samuel. What a vast volume of warnings, predictions and commands must have been poured forth by them in that period of time! Well might the apostle have said, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son” (Heb. 1:1).

The God of Israel communicated with these ancient men of God in various ways, just as it pleased the sovereign of the universe—by inward revelations, in dreams, visions, voices and by angels. And the effects upon the bodies and spirits of the prophets were sometimes remarkable (Gen. 15:12; Dan. 8:10-18; 10:1-21; Hab. 3:16; Ezek. 1:18).

“The priests were at first Israel’s teachers in God’s statutes by types, acts and words (Lev. 10:11). But when under the judges the nation repeatedly apostatized, and no longer regarded the dumb acted lessons of the ceremonial law, God sent a new order—the prophets—to witness for Him in plainer warnings.” “They were bold reformers, and reprovers of idolatry, iniquity, and hypocrisy; they called the attention of the people to the moral law, the standard of true holiness; they showed the inefficacy of ceremonial observances, without the obedience of faith and love; and they kept up and encouraged the expectation of the promised Messiah, and more fully declared the sufferings of Christ and the glory which should follow. Their claims to be considered as God’s appointed servants were demonstrated by the unimpeachable integrity of their characters, by the intrinsic excellence and tendency of their instructions, and by the disinterested zeal and undaunted fortitude with which they persevered in their great design. These were still further confirmed by the miraculous proofs which they gave of Divine support, and by the immediate completion of many smaller predictions which they uttered.” Their grandest object was to declare the spirituality of God’s religion, the necessity of repentance, and the fullness and freeness of the Divine salvation which was to be wrought out by the coming Messiah; we see the truth of this remark especially in Isaiah and in the last and greatest of the prophets before Christ, John the Baptists. The ancient Jews always acknowledged that the chief design of the prophets was to foretell the times of the Messiah. “The dress of the prophets was a hairy garment with a leathern girdle (Isa. 20:2; Zech. 13:4; Matthew 3:4); and their diet was the simplest (2 Kings 4:10, 38; 1 Kings 19:6), a virtual protest against abounding luxury.” “The absence of greater clearness in their predictions is due to God’s purpose to give light enough to guide the spiritual, to leave darkness enough to confound the carnal mind. Many of the prophecies have a temporary and local, foreshadowing their final Messianic, fulfillment. The prophets were the poets and historians of their people.”

“While it is certain that, for some two thousand or seventeen hundred years, the prophecies of the Old and New Testament Scriptures have been read in public assemblies, dispersed into several countries, translated into several languages, and quoted and commented upon by different nations, so that there is no room to suspect so much as a possibility of forgery or illusion, it is certain that we see many of these prophecies fulfilled and fulfilling at the present day. We see the descendants of Shem and Japheth ruling and enlarged in Asia, Europe and America, and the curse of servitude still attending the wretched descendants of Ham in Africa. We see the posterity of Ishmael multiplied exceedingly, and become a great nation in the Arabians; yet living like wild men, and shifting from place to place in the wilderness; their hand against every man, and every man’s hand against them; and still dwelling a free people in the presence of all their brethren and of all their enemies. We see the family of Esau totally extinct, and that of Jacob subsisting at this day; the sceptre departed from Judah, the people living nowhere in authority, everywhere in subjection, the Jews still dwelling alone among the nations. We see the Jews severely punished for their infidelity and disobedience to their great prophet like unto Moses; plucked from off their own land, and removed into all the kingdoms of the earth, oppressed and spoiled evermore, and make a proverb and a by-word among all nations; still by a constant miracle preserved everywhere as a distinct people for the demonstration among the Gentiles of the truth of the Scriptures and for the completion of other prophecies relation to them; while their great conquerors are everywhere destroyed—the Assyrian Nineveh devoured by fire and barely able to be exhumed from the rubbish of its ruins—Babylon made a desolation for ever, a possession for the bittern, and pools of water—Tyre become like the top of a rock, a place for fishers to spread their nets upon—and Egypt a base kingdom, the basest of the kingdoms, still tributary and subject to strangers. We see, of the four great empires of the world (the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Graeco-Macedonian, and the Roman) represented by the great image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the fourth and last, which was greater and more powerful than any of the former, first divided into the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and then subdivided into many smaller and weaker nations, and among them the great idolatrous apostasy of the Christian Church, in a city seated upon seven mountains, wearing out the saints of the Most High, and thinking to change times and laws, his temporal dominion now taken from him (Dan. 12:26), but still asserting his spiritual power, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, enjoining the worship of Mary and other departed saints, and opposing and exalting himself above all laws, human and divine, and sitting as God in the Church of God, proclaiming himself the infallible vicegerent of God on earth, the last Supreme Judge of the human race.”—Fausset, Scott, Gray and Newton.

Our remarks upon the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament, shown to be fulfilled in the New, are reserved for the close of the Old Testament period.

The fulfilled and fulfilling prophecies of the Scriptures peremptorily demonstrate the Divine inspiration of the Bible, and God’s absolute foreknowledge and control of all things for the salvation of His people.

Toward the close of Samuel’s life the kingly power was set up in Saul. Samuel’s sons, like those of Eli, were too unworthy to become his successors. The people demanded a king in order to be like other nations; and although forewarned of the evil consequences of a monarchy by Samuel, they disregarded all, and urged him to select a king for them. This displeased Samuel; yet God said unto him, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” “Hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them.” Samuel did so, but they disregarded his warnings and demanded a king; which God gave them in His anger, and yet did not forsake them. He directed Samuel to anoint Saul, the son of Kish, a Benjamite, to be a king over them, and to go forth as their captain to deliver them out of the hand of the Philistines, because their cry under oppression had come unto Him (1 Sam. 9:15, 16). In making up the army of Israel cavalry was forbidden, lest the kings and people should trust in horses and chariots, and exhaust their resources too rapidly by keeping up such an expensive show of formidable array, and be tempted to engage in demoralizing foreign wars. They were rather to trust in the living God, while they went forth in person to combat. The kingly power, thus set up, did not overturn the previously existing theocracy; for the king was only the servant still, or vicegerent, of God, to enforce His commands, and to be established in his authority or dethroned, as seemed good in His sight. The king’s authority extended to all temporal and spiritual affairs, and in this respect church and state were united, God, however, being admitted to be the righteous Ruler and Governor over all.

Saul, for unfaithfulness and presumptuous sins in office, was rejected from the throne, as was all his house. David, the youngest son of Jesse, was anointed and appointed to succeed Saul, and in his family it pleased God to make the kingly power hereditary. Saul came to the throne B.C. 1095, and reigned over all Israel forty years. In the battle of Gilboa he was defeated by the Philistines, and took his own life. Saul was aware of David’s having been anointed by God’s prophet to be king over Israel, yet sought often to kill David so as to defeat God’s purpose in this respect. Quite similar was the conduct of Herod about one thousand years afterwards, when, after having been specially informed that the king of the Jews was born in Bethlehem, who was to reign over the house of Jacob forever, he sent forth executioners, who slew all the male children in that vicinity from two years old and under, in order to frustrate the declared purpose of God! How unreasonable, impious and inconsistent is the unrenewed mind of man!

David was the first proclaimed king over the tribes of Judah and Benjamin at Hebron, B.C. 1055, and reigned there seven years. Ishbosheth, Saul’s son, was proclaimed king over the ten tribes at Mahanaim, and a seven years’ war ensued between him and David. David finally prevailed, and was anointed king over all Israel, B.C. 1048. This was his third anointing. The year following he made Jerusalem the capital, and reigned there thirty and three years, making forty years in all. He shortly after removed the ark from Kirjath-Jearim to Jerusalem, and purposed building a house in which to worship God; but, although this purpose was approved of God, yet he did not suffer David to carry it into execution, because he had been a man of war and had shed much blood. The work was reserved for his successor. For fifteen years after he began to reign in Jerusalem (1048 to 1033) he was almost continually engaged in war with the old enemies of Israel, such as the Edomites, the Moabites, the Amalekites, and Ammonites, the Philistines and the Assyrians; and, conquering and subduing all these nations, he pushed forward his dominion until it had included all that had been originally promised to Abraham and his seed (Gen. 15:18-21; Deut. 11:23, 24; Josh. 1:4, compared with 1 Kings 4:21-24; 2 Chron. 9:26). Of all the kings that reigned over Israel, David and Solomon only extended their jurisdiction to the utmost borders of the vast country promised originally to the Hebrews, viz.: from Egypt to the Euphrates, about fifty thousand square miles—Palestine only occupying twelve thousand square miles; and their joint reigns lasted but eighty years. Nevertheless, these two reigns constituted the golden age of the temporal grandeur and spiritual enjoyment of the chosen people.

David was said to have been a man after God’s own heart (1 Sam. 13:14); his name signifies beloved; he was a type of Christ and of the church, and his experience is that of every child of grace, more or less. Even after his regeneration he committed great sins; but God gave him great grace, superabounding over his sins (Rom. 5:20), and enabling him truly to repent (like Peter—Ps. 51; Luke 22:61, 62); God forgave him, but, to vindicate His own holiness (Lev. 10:3), and to give His servant the needed discipline (Heb. 12:5-11), He declared that the sword should never depart from his house, and he afforded him recompense in kind for his transgression (2 Sam. 12:7-14). His nature was exceedingly devotional—sometimes enthusiastic. The Psalms written by him reveal his character as a humble, penitent and devout worshiper of the Most High.

“The three most eminent men in the Hebrew annals—Moses, David and Solomon—were three of their most distinguished poets. The hymns of David excel no less in sublimity and tenderness of expression than in holiness and purity of religious sentiment. In comparison with them the sacred poetry of all other nations sinks into mediocrity. They have embodied so exquisitely the universal language of religious emotion, that (a few very fierce and vindictive passages excepted, natural in the warrior poet of a sterner age) they have entered with unquestioned propriety into the ritual of the holier and more perfect religion of Christ. The songs which cheered the solitude of the desert caves of Engedi, or resounded from the voice of the Hebrew people as they wound along the glens or the hillsides of Judea, have been repeated for ages in almost every part of the habitable world, in the remotest island of the ocean, among the forests of America and the sands of Africa. How many human hearts have they (under the application of the Spirit of God) softened, purified, exalted! of how many wretched beings have they been the secret consolation! on how many communities have they drawn down the blessings of Divine Providence, by bringing the affections into union with their devotional fervor.”—Milman.

And notwithstanding all that may be said in favor of this eminent servant of God, we should not forget that he was a man—a depraved mortal—a man of like passions with ourselves—at best a sinner saved by grace, and liable to err through the temptations of Satan, the seductions of the world, and the deceitfulness of his own heart. He did err greatly; the Lord punished him for it severely; he repented deeply, and God in mercy forgave him freely. All these things are carefully set down for warning, admonition and encouragement to spiritual Israel thenceforward to the end of time.

Solomon, the son of David, succeeded his father, and was crowned king B.C. 1014, in a time of profound peace, and equaled him in the length of his reign—forty years. He was much devoted to God in the first part of his reign. He built the temple,[4] placed the ark within it, and dedicated it.

He was seven years and a half in building it, and completed it B.C. 1004. Immense sacrifices were offered to God upon its dedication; the glory of God filled the house after the ark was carried into it, so that the priests could not minister because of the cloud; Solomon, kneeling, spread forth his hands towards Heaven, and offered the prayer of dedication; after which he dismissed the people, who returned to their homes joyful and with glad hearts (1 Kings 8:1-66). This, no doubt, was the greatest and happiest day the Hebrew nation ever witnessed. The hundreds of thousands who could not be present at the dedication considered themselves equally interested and alike participating in the joyful festivities of the occasion. Wisdom was specially given to Solomon. God asked him, before this time, what he would have, and he asked for wisdom to govern Israel well. They were God’s people—they were then a great people—and he desired wisdom to govern them well for their good and God’s glory. He did not ask for long life, or for riches or honor, but for wisdom. The Lord granted his request, and, in addition to wisdom, conferred on him riches and honor exceeding that of all other men. The temple was a small structure in comparison to many others, both ancient and modern; but it was the most costly of all, chiefly on account of the quantity of gold and silver used in its construction. In this respect it was a forcible type of the true church in all ages of the world, which, though so much smaller than the false church, is yet the most costly of all—having cost the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb slain from the foundation of the world, and being clothed with His imputed righteousness, which outshines by far all the righteousness of man.

After the dedication the Lord appeared unto Solomon again, assuring him that He had heard his prayer and had blessed the temple, and would establish his (Solomon’s) throne over Israel forever if he proved faithful; but, should he turn from the Lord and serve other gods, He would cut off Israel out of the land, and cast the house which He had hallowed out of His sight! (1 Kings 9:2-7.)

Now was the zenith of Hebrew greatness. The sun of national Israel had pierced the horizon when Abram was first called from “Ur of the Chaldees,” and had been gradually rising higher and higher—higher and higher still—for nearly a thousand years, until, at this auspicious period, he stood forth in his meridian splendor, shedding his benign rays over the beautiful land of Palestine, the garden-spot of the world, with all the tributary nations around it. Added to this was the religious character of the people; who were loud in their praises of, and faithful in adoring, the only true God. Israel in spirit was but little annoyed by Israel after the flesh: the sons of Belial shrunk back from persecuting the sons of God, and all seemed united in love, peace and prosperity—from Dan to Beersheba, and from the great river to the sea. Spiritual Israel here had rest,[5] indicative of that which remains for the people of God in Heaven, and indicative of that rest which all experience when changed from the legal to the Christian dispensation, or translated from the kingdom of Satan into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. But these halcyon days under the reign of Solomon were of short duration—God’s people must not expect a long continuance either of temporal or spiritual happiness in this poor, sinful world—both are fleeting in their character and soon pass away; but, while spiritual enjoyments are renewed from time to time until they are perfected by the transcendent glories of eternity, temporal enjoyments terminate at the grave.

Solomon transgressed the law of his God. He did not prove faithful to the end. He gave himself up to carnal pleasures. He made an affinity with Pharaoh, king of Egypt, by marrying his daughter, and took many wives from the heathen nations around him, all of which was expressly forbidden. His strange wives were idolaters, and he indulged them in idolatry. He built them high places for the worship of their deities, and joined some of them in their infamous worship. With the decline of his zeal for God and the honor of his name came a decline of his earthly greatness. God made known to him His displeasure, and notified him of the downfall of his kingdom and the rending off the ten tribes in the days of his successors. He appeared not then to repent of his sins, but no doubt did before his death, which took place B.C. 975, when he was succeeded by his son Rehoboam (1 Kings 12).

During the reigns of both David and Solomon, as at all other past times since the fall of Adam, while there were a few spiritual worshipers of God, the mass of the people either worshiped idols, or only outwardly worshiped God in accordance with the will, the example or the command of their rulers. “But the constant tendency was to idolatry; and the intercourse with foreign nations which Solomon maintained, as well as his own example, greatly increased the tendency. Under Solomon, indeed, idolatry struck its roots so deep that all the zeal of the reforming kings that followed him failed to eradicate it. It was not till the seventy years’ captivity of Babylon that the soil of Palestine was thoroughly purged of the roots of that noxious weed.”—W.G. Blaikie.

The question is sometimes asked, Was Solomon a spiritual Israelite, a child of grace, an heir of God, and has he gone to Heaven? We answer, Yes. All the writers of the books both in the Old and in the New Testaments were Heaven-born and Heaven-bound. God would not permit an unregenerate man, a heathen, a barbarian, to write a book for Him, and then place it in the sacred canon of Scripture. This would be a most preposterous thing. Besides, it is said that he “loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of David his father” (1 Kings 3:3). And again, the Lord said of him, “He shall build an house for my name, and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his Father, and he shall be my son. If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men: but my mercy shall not depart away from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before thee” (2 Sam. 7:13-15). The Lord made two special revelations to him, and gave him more wisdom than any other man; and this wisdom was spiritual as well as natural. And, in addition to all this, Solomon wrote three books that are preserved and handed down to us in the Old Testament, viz., the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs; in all of which there are evidences of a spiritual mind, and the unction of the Holy Spirit is clearly manifest.

During the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon there was almost an entire absence of miracles, being a period of about 120 years; yet the Lord revealed himself to His people by Urim and Thummim, through his prophets; also in visions, as in the case of Solomon and others; also by visible manifestations, as at the dedication of the temple, when the cloud and the glory descended and filled it.

We have said that during the reign of Solomon the sun of Israel’s greatness was at his height; and from his reign that sun began to decline, sinking lower and lower, until it finally set amidst the darkness and desolation that followed the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman army under Titus (A.D. 70). The nationality was then overthrown, and the remnant of Israel scattered among the nations.

King Solomon was succeeded by his son Rehoboam; and very soon thereafter the ten tribes revolted, and set up Jeroboam to reign over them. This separation continued until the return of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity, when what was left to return, both of Jews and Israelites, united as one nation again, and were thenceforward called Jews. The ten tribes had revolted twice before this against the throne of David; first, under Abner and Ish-bosheth, after the death of Saul, for seven years; second, under Absalom, and at his death under Sheba, for a short continuance. This last revolt (under Rehoboam) was about the year B.C. 975. The ten tribes were captured and carried away into Assyria by Shalmaneser, B.C. 721, which gave them an independence of the throne of David for 254 years. The kingdom of Judah, composed of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin and the most of Levi, continued from the setting up of Rehoboam to the first taking of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar (a period of 369 years), B.C. 606, from which the date of the seventy years’ captivity commences. According to this, the two kingdoms, that of Judah and Israel, were separated 439 years, say from 975 to 536 B.C., when the seventy years were ended. During all this period of separation, however, they were one people still, in feeling, in origin, in religion and destiny, and had more or less intercourse with each other. Besides this, many from the ten tribes, during the wicked reigns of Jeroboam and his impious successors, found their way to Jerusalem and the jurisdiction of Rehoboam and his successors, before Israel was carried off into Assyria.

It is deplorable to notice the sad declension of the ten tribes after this third revolt until carried away. They had not a righteous prince to rule over them during the whole period from Jeroboam the first to Hoshea the last. All were wicked, all idolatrous, and caused Israel to sin. What must have been the mortification and suffering of God’s spiritual worshipers among them for that long 254 years! They had nineteen kings to rule over them in nine distinct dynasties. Of these nineteen, seven were murdered by conspirators, namely, Nadab, Elah, Jehoram, Zachariah, Shallum, Pekahiah, and Pekah; one, Zimri, after a brief reign, to avoid falling into the hands of his competitor to the throne, burnt himself up in his palace; another, Ahab, died ingloriously in battle, “whose blood the dogs licked;” another, Ahaziah, died in consequence of a fall through a lattice in his house; and the last, Hoshea, was dethroned and carried a captive into Syria; eight only died quietly in their beds, namely, Jeroboam, Baasha, Omri, Jehu, Jehoahaz, Jeroboam II., and Menahem.

The kingdom of Israel was scourged with wars, and these were mostly with the kingdom of Judah. Their armies or populations were nearly the same, Judah having, as is supposed, two-thirds the number of Israel, some of the tribes having run down very low, and many persons uniting their fortunes to Judah, a powerful and the most religious tribe. The advantages gained on either side were about equal in the end.

“The separate history of the idolatrous kingdom of Israel may be well divided into four periods: 1st. Idolatry taking root—about fifty years, during the reigns of Jeroboam I., Nadab, Baasha, Elah and Zimri, and during the prophecies of Ahijah and Jehu. 2nd. Idolatry rampant—about forty-eight years, during the reigns of Omri, Ahab, Ahaziah, and Jehoram, and during the prophecies of Elijah, Micaiah and Elisha. 3d. Idolatry slightly checked—about one hundred and two years, during the reigns of Jehu, Jehoahaz, Joash, Jeroboam II., and Zachariah, and during the prophecies of Jonah, Hosea, and Amos. 4th. Idolatry terminating in ruin—about fifty-four years, during the reigns of Shallum, Menahem, Pekahiah, Pekah and Hoshea, and during the prophecy of Oded.”—W.G. Blaikie.

The enemies most to be dreaded by Israel were the Assyrians, who finally conquered and swept them away. Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria, in the reign of Pekah, B.C. 740, conquered and carried into captivity the two tribes, Reuben and Gad, the half tribe of Manasseh, east of Jordan, Naphtali, and portions of Galilee on the west (1 Kings 15:20; 1 Chron. 5; 2 Kings 15). The others of the tribes in the reign of Hoshea, B.C. 721, were carried away captive by Shalmaneser, king of Assyria.

The captivity of the ten tribes was a punishment from God, “because they obeyed not the voice of the Lord their God, but transgressed His covenant, and all that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded, and would not hear them nor do them” (2 Kings 17, 18) This captivity was a terrible punishment to idolaters, but not more than they deserved and not more than God had already threatened. He was faithful to carry out His long-declared purpose, known to these wicked rulers and these wicked people, from generation to generation, by His holy prophets (2 Kings 17:20-23; 1 Kings 14:7-16). This is the last account we have of these tribes as an independent and separate body of people. History is silent concerning them afterwards. Many of their descendants returned to Jerusalem, no doubt, upon the cessation of the Babylonish captivity, when Israel and Judah became one stick again (Ezek. 37:16, 17). The Babylonians conquered the Assyrians and carried many Israelites to that country, probably before the Jews were taken there from Jerusalem. When they met, they fraternized, and felt to be one people.

The land of Israel was not left desolate when the king of Assyria depopulated the country. He brought in others to fill their places, men, women and children, from different provinces of his empire, to secure the country which he had conquered; and in this way Samaria was settled. Here originated a most remarkable people, both in regard to their religion and their perpetuity. The zealous king of Judah, Josiah, undertook to destroy the idols in the lands once occupied by the ten tribes, ninety-three years after their captivity. He met with resistance else-where, but not in Samaria. There he killed the idolatrous priests, which they were willing to, and had no objection to the worship set up by Josiah. Ninety-two years afterwards, viz., in the year B.C. 536, when Ezra under the decree of Cyrus was laying the foundation of the second temple, these people desired to assist him in the work on the ground of a common religion. Said they: “Let us build with you: for we seek your God, as ye do: and we do sacrifice unto Him since the days of Esarhaddon, king of Asshur, who brought us up hither.” But the Jews replied: “Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God: but we ourselves together will build unto the Lord God of Israel as Cyrus, the king of Persia, hath commanded us” (Ezra 4) Upon this refusal of their assistance they became much displeased, and did what they could ever afterwards to hinder the work, and actually prevailed with the king of Persia to put a stop to it for awhile. The bitterness engendered on that occasion has never passed away. It continued between the two people all the time during the existence of the second temple. In the days of our Savior “the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans,” and we presume the prejudice remains to this day, whenever they come in contact. The Jewish nation has been broken up for eighteen hundred years, and their descendants are now dispersed abroad among the nations of the earth without the least sign of nationality; while the Samaritans occupy their old ground still, hold fast to their old religion, and are full of their old prejudices. They worship on Mount Gerizim, and hold to the five books of Moses, with the books of Joshua and Judges in a corrupted form. The Pentateuch, however, is their Bible, and they still look for a Savior to come.

Their copy of the Pentateuch is very ancient, and written in the ancient Hebrew or Phoenician character. When they received it or what is the date of it is unknown—perhaps a little before the Babylonian captivity.

What are we to expect by the preservation of these people through twenty-five centuries? There is mystery involved. Conquering nations have swept over them for many long centuries like waves of the sea, but they have not been washed away; there they are yet, on their same old Mount Gerizim, with Pentateuch in hand, affiliating with neither Jew nor Christian, Mohammedan nor Pagan, Romanist nor Protestant, nor with the church of God, yet looking for the Messiah to come!

They are reduced in number, it is said, to about one hundred and fifty souls, the oldest, the smallest and the extremist sect in the world, and yet, for aught we know to the contrary, it may please the Divine Mind to allow them to remain until they shall behold from their same old mountain the true Messiah, coming in the clouds of Heaven with His holy angels, to gather His ransomed people home, and take vengeance on them that know not God—not the first, but the second time, without sin unto salvation.

During the reign of nineteen kings in Israel, till their being carried away, there were only twelve who reigned in Judah, and nineteen in all down to the Babylonian captivity—and all these in a direct line from David.

Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, did well for a few years of his reign. He ruled wisely, and walked in the way of the better days of his father and grandfather. His reign was honored and revered, and so devotional was he that numbers of priests, Levites and people of Israel, moved into Judea away from the idolatry and oppression of their own rulers. But a sudden change came over the mind of Rehoboam. So soon as he felt established on his throne and everything seemed prosperous around him, he forsook the law of the Lord and plunged into idolatry and almost every vice, and drew most of his subjects with him. God brought down his high looks and defiant attitude by sending Shishak, king of Egypt, to look after him. He invaded Judah, took the fenced cities, and approached Jerusalem. He and his princes came down at once, at the preaching of the prophet Shemaiah and the approach of Shishak’s army, confessed their faults and pleaded for mercy, as did the Ninevites at the preaching of Jonah. The Lord hearkened and saved them from destruction by causing the invading forces to turn away after they had taken the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house and Solomon’s shields of gold.

There was strong opposition by God’s spiritual children in Judea all the time to the wicked devices of the king; but they were in a minority, as usual, and could not prevail. Rehoboam did better after this, but never altogether reformed (2 Chron. 11:5-23; 12:1-16; 1 Kings 14:22-24).

Abijah, son of Rehoboam, succeeded to the throne. He did not entirely reform abuses, but professed to be jealous for the honor of God, and reproached Jeroboam, king of Israel, with forsaking Him. He made war with Jeroboam, under this plea, among others, and relying upon the Lord, he went into battle with an odds of two to one against him, and defeated Jeroboam, slaying five hundred thousand of his men—being one hundred thousand more than was numbered in his own army. He strengthened his kingdom greatly, and died after a short reign (2 Chron. 13; 1 Kings 15)

Abijah’s son, Asa, succeeded him, and proved to be one of the best kings that ever reigned over Judea. He earnestly sought to extirpate idolatry and immorality from the land, and repaired the fortified places of Judea; and, in the strength of a covenant-keeping God (see his remarkable prayer in 2 Chron. 14:11), he met the mighty invading Ethiopian host of a million men, under Zerah, and utterly routed them. Encouraged by the prophet Azariah, he now became still more zealous in the destruction of idolatry. But Baasha, king of Israel, moving against him, his faith in God seemed for a time to fail him, and he, with the treasures of his palace and the temple, hired Benhadad, king of Syria, to invade Baasha’s northern frontier; and, being rebuked for this by the faithful prophet of the Lord, Hanani, he cast the latter into prison. Asa was attacked with a disease in his feet; and seeking not to the Lord, but to physicians (probably foreign idolaters), he died.

His son Jehoshaphat succeeded him, and he proved another worthy son of the house of David. One of his first acts was to conclude a peace with Israel, which had been broken for sixty years. There had been trouble and war, more or less, existing between the two kingdoms from B.C. 975 to 915. This wise and virtuous king suppressed it altogether. He was zealous for the cause of God. He did more than others before him—he became a preacher—a public instructor in the law of the Lord. He went to the extent of his dominion exhorting the people to obey God, keep his law inviolate, and worship the God of their fathers exclusively. And as he established judges throughout his territories, from Beersheba to Mount Ephraim, in the various fenced cities, he exhorted them to discharge their duties in the fear of the Lord. He not only went himself, but he commissioned others to go and teach the people in the knowledge of the Lord and remove ignorance from their minds. “He sent five princes, accompanied by nine Levites and two priests, to teach in the cities of Judah: and they taught in Judah, and had the book of the law of the Lord with them, and went about all the cities of Judah and taught the people.” This was in advance of anything ever before done in Judea, and seemed pointing to the spread of the gospel under the Christian dispensation. Our blessed Saviour both preached His own gospel in the cities and villages of Palestine, and called and qualified His disciples to do the same thing.

Jehoshaphat was unfortunate in agreeing to make an alliance with Ahab, king of Israel, and with Ahab’s son and grandson—Ahaziah and Joram. It was of no advantage to Israel and great disadvantage to Judah. He was greatly blessed of the Lord, however: he strengthened his kingdom, and had an army, prepared for war, numbering one million, one hundred and sixty thousand men—seven hundred and eighty thousand of Judah and three hundred and eighty thousand of Benjamin.

The two prosperous reigns of Asa and Jehoshaphat were soon shorn of their excellency by the wicked reign of Jehoram, son of Jehoshaphat. He married the daughter of Ahab, and engaged in the wickedness and idolatries of that abominable house. He murdered in cold blood his brothers who were better than he, restored the idolatrous high places on the mountains of Judah, and endeavored to compel all the people to forsake the worship of the true God and go with him in all his impurities of idolatrous worship. In the full tide of his apostasy he received a letter, written to him by the prophet Elijah, who died in the reign of his father, but who saw what the future course of this young prince would be when he came to the throne, and therefore wrote this letter, to be handed to him in proper time. He had fulfilled the prophecy to the letter. “He had not walked in the ways of Jehoshaphat, his father, nor in the ways of Asa, king of Judah: but had walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to go a whoring, like to the whoredoms of the house of Ahab; and had slain his brethren of his father’s house which were better than he.” All this he had done! And what was to follow? Heavy and miserable judgments, unless he should repent, and Judah with him. “Thus saith the Lord, Because thou hast so done, behold with a great plague will the Lord smite thy people, and they children, and thy wives, and all thy goods; and thou shalt have great sickness, by disease of thy bowel, until thy bowels fall out by reason of the sickness day by day.” This letter of Elijah was despised both by king and people. The judgments followed rapidly. The Edomites revolted from under his hand. The Philistines and Arabians invaded his territories, entered Jerusalem, sacked his palace, carried away his wives and all his sons save one. “And after all this the Lord smote him in his bowels, with an incurable disease; and after the end of two years his bowels fell out by reason of his sickness: so he died of sore diseases, without being desired, after a reign of eight years; his people made no burning for him, and gave him no burial in the sepulchre of the kings” (2 Kings 8; 2 Chron. 21).

What a remarkable letter was this! Was such a one ever written or received before that day? God is a being of infinite wisdom and foreknowledge, and He inspired His prophet to write a letter to this man before he came to the throne, telling him what he should do to others, what others would do to him, and with what disease he should die. He died, leaving a weak and wicked nation behind him.

His son Ahaziah, sometimes called Azariah and Jehoahaz, succeeded him and walked in his footsteps. He also married in the wicked family of Ahab. He went to war against Hazael, king of Assyria, with Joram, king of Israel; they were defeated, and returned, and both were slain by Jehu, king of Israel, who was raised up to take vengeance on the house of Ahab. Ahaziah was slain in the first year of his reign (2 Chron. 22; 2 Kings 9).

Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, upon learning the death of her son (and who had counseled him for evil during his life), caused all the seed royal of the house of Judah to be put to death, except one that escaped, and then usurped the throne herself. Wickedness appeared to be triumphant at this juncture, and Baal’s worshipers were in the ascendant. The valuable and sacred things of the temple were taken and bestowed upon the worship of Baal, and this idol was set up in Judah as it had been in Israel, with its altars, images and priests.

“But Jehoiada the priest resolutely held the temple during the six years of Athaliah’s usurpation, and conducted the services in the prescribed forms” (2 Kings 11:1-16; 2 Chron. 22, 23) He was one of the most remarkable men of the times, and seemed to stand superior to any other in his day for wisdom, prudence, and devotion to God, from first to last, without any defection or abatement of zeal for the law of the Lord. He had great influence with the people; they revered him as Israel did Samuel of old. He was contemporary with Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Jehoram, and Ahaziah—seven kings. He secreted the escaped son of Ahaziah, Joash or Jehoash, his wife’s nephew, in the temple until he could succeed in deposing Athaliah, which was done in the sixth year of her reign; and he had Joash, a child of seven years, proclaimed king of Judah, who for twenty-seven years did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, because his uncle counseled him. He brought the people generally back to the worship of God, and the bright and peaceful days of Asa and Jehoshaphat seemed to be returning again. But Jehoiada died at the advanced age of one hundred and thirty years; being kingly in life, he was honored with a kingly burial at his death.

“And they buried him in the city of David among the kings, because he had done good in Israel, both toward God and toward his house.”

So soon as Jehoiada died, the young king fell into the hands of wicked men, who soon led him astray. “They left the house of the Lord God of their fathers and served groves idols.” “Yet the Lord sent prophets to bring them again unto the Lord, and they testified against them, but they would not give ear.”

Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, became high priest, and used his utmost exertions to stay the tide of the wide-spreading idolatry; but a conspiracy was raised against him, and at the king’s command he was stoned to death in the house of the Lord! Our Saviour tells exactly where—“between the temple and the altar” (Matthew 23:35). Here was a priest of the Most High God slain in His sacred temple (while performing sacred rites), by order of a king whom his father secreted, protected, raised, had crowned king of Judah, and counseled for good all his life, and he a relative at that! How could it be otherwise than that this blood should cry aloud to heaven for vengeance? It did cry aloud for vengeance, as well as that of Abel and of the Son of God; and that divine wrath, which had been slumbering so long, fell upon an after-generation of this people, with untold misery and woe, and the remnant have been scattered to the four winds of heaven—the despised and persecuted people among the nations of the earth.

The death of Zechariah is the first recorded martyrdom of a priest of the Most High God; martyred while officiating in the holy temple service and by the professing people of the Lord! How awful and gloomy the scene, and yet how frequently has it been re-enacted since the introduction of Christianity into the world! Ministers of the gospel, pastors and elders, have been torn from their flocks and from their ministrations in holy things, hundreds and thousands of them, and cruelly slain for their faithfulness to God by those who professed to be Christians, the people of God, and the servants of Christ!

God punished Joash by the hand of Hazael, king of Assyria, and afterwards his servants slew him in his bed (2 Kings 11, 12; 2 Chron. 23, 24).

Amaziah his son succeeded him, and his reign was an improvement upon that of his father, though it was far from being good. He made a successful war against the Edomites, but publicly introduced the gods of Edom into Jerusalem as his own, for which God punished him by the hand of Joash, king of Israel. Joash made war on him, defeated and took him prisoner, destroyed part of the wall of Jerusalem, seized and carried off to Samaria part of the treasures of the temple and the king’s house, after which he was conspired against and murdered (2 Kings 14; 2 Chron. 25). While Amaziah reigned, Jonah, the first of the sixteen prophets whose writings appear in the sacred canon of Scripture, was prophesying in Israel (2 Kings 14:25).

Uzziah, also called Azariah, succeeded to the throne of his father Amaziah, and had a long and somewhat prosperous reign. He reigned fifty-two years. He sought God in the days of Zechariah, another of the sixteen prophets whose writings are in the sacred canon. He fortified Jerusalem, increased his army, and became famous abroad. He permitted idolatry among the people, though he did not practice it himself. Prosperity ruined him at last. He became so self-important that he attempted to officiate as priest in the temple, but Azariah, the chief priest, and eighty other priests, withstood him and thrust him out. And while he was wroth with them for so doing, leprosy rose up in his forehead, in the house of the Lord, beside the incense-altar, and he himself hasted to go out, because the Lord had smitten him. He was a leper to the day of his death (2 Chron. 26). Joel prophesied during a part of his reign, and Isaiah the last year of it, while Hosea and Amos prophesied in Israel (2 Chron. 26; 2 Kings 15).

Jotham was son and successor to his father Uzziah. Sacrifice and burning of incense were yet tolerated in high places, though Jotham was a moderately good king, and followed the general policy of his father. He did not attempt to usurp the priesthood.

In his latter days the Lord began more seriously to press Judah with her old enemies, Syria and Israel (2 Chron. 17; 2 Kings 15; Micah 1, 2). The next king in Judah was Ahaz, son of Jotham, who excelled all of his predecessors in idolatry. He openly espoused it, “sacrificing and burning incense, in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree;” and was the first of all the kings of Judah or Israel that sacrificed human sacrifices—even his own son—to the dumb idols! He revolutionized the whole system of religious worship in Judea, completely ignored the worship of the true God, cut in pieces the vessels of the house of the Lord, caused the sacrifices of the temple to cease, turned the priests out of doors, and closed the doors of the temple, so that the worshipers of God found no entrance. Those doors which had remained open for 267 years (B.C. 1005 to 738) were now closed, and remained so for twelve years. God punished him for all this. He set the king of Assyria on him, who defeated him in battle, and carried many of his people away as captives to Damascus. Pekah, king of Israel, also slew 120,000 of his subjects, and carried away 200,000 women and children captives to Samaria. The captives and spoil were returned, but none of the dead came back. The Edomites of the south rose up, smote Judah, and carried away captives; and the Philistines overran and retained possession of the south of Judah. Nothing seemed to touch the heart of this wicked king. He became more and more hardened, and deaf to all the appeals for reform that could be made to him. How the ways of Zion mourned during this long season of cruelty and idolatry, and how deep must have been the sorrow and mortification of all spiritual worshipers of the true God during this long night of abomination!

Hezekiah, the son of the wicked Ahaz, in the royal household, was fully alive to the wickedness of his father’s course, and mourned in secret with other devout souls over the desolations of Zion. Expecting to occupy the throne at his father’s death, he had already made up his mind to abolish these terrible abuses. Accordingly, in the first month of the first year of his reign, and on the first day of the month, he re-opened and cleansed the house of the Lord. And he revived the celebration of the feast of the Passover, sending messengers all through the land of Israel as well as of Judah to invite the faithful to the sacred and solemn festival, which was kept with greater joy than any since the days of Solomon.

Indeed, the whole course of the priests and the observance of the law appear in every particular to have been reconstructed and established by Hezekiah, and the reformation extended throughout Judah and Benjamin, and in Ephraim and Manasseh also. The groves were cut down, the high places thrown down, and the images broken to pieces. Hezekiah was honest and sincere in what he did; his heart entered into the work; and the worship of the true God was beautiful to behold in all quarters of his kingdom. Not so exactly with all the people; for, in respect to many of them, Isaiah said: “Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honor me; but have removed their heart far form me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men; therefore will I proceed to do a marvelous work among the people,” etc. (Isa. 19:1-14, etc.). Hezekiah engaged in successful wars with both the Assyrians and Philistines (2 Kings 18:1-16); but Sennacherib invaded his country in the fourteenth year of his reign, and forced him to tribute. Before the arrival of the Assyrian king, Hezekiah was miraculously healed of his sickness by the prophet Isaiah, and assured of the lengthening out of his life fifteen years by the sign of the going back ten degrees of the shadow of his dial.[6] And he was delivered out of the hand of Sennacherib, the Lord miraculously destroying his army.

These favorable circumstances exalted Hezekiah, and he became vain; they were a snare unto him. He was thought highly of and honored by the nations around him. The king of Babylon, Berodach-baladan, among others, had to send him ambassadors to congratulate him on the recovery from his sickness, and Hezekiah, in a fit of vanity and pride, showed them all his wealth and magnificence.

The prophet Isaiah reproved him for this, and pronounced the judgment of the captivity against him, his family, and his kingdom. Upon this, “Hezekiah humbled himself for the pride of his heart, both he and the inhabitants of Jerusalem; so that the wrath of the Lord came not upon them in the days of Hezekiah” (2 Kings 20). So much for this worthy, patriotic, conscientious and devout king, Hezekiah. His son was a perfect contrast to him, and excelled in wickedness all who had preceded him.

Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, succeeded his father, and was crowned at the age of twelve years. Those who ruled him were sons of Belial,[7] and plunged him into the commission of almost every crime. If the exact opposite of every good thing his father did was set down to his account it would reveal in part, but not in whole, the carnal and Satanic course of Manasseh. “He shed innocent blood very much, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another!” and finally succeeded in seducing and carrying the people along with him “to do more evils than did the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the children of Israel!” He reigned in all fifty-five years. But in the twentieth year of his wicked career he was taken captive by Esar-haddon, the king of Assyria, and carried in chains to Babylon, then his capital. Manasseh was humbled by the Spirit of God, repented, and begged for mercy, and the Lord pardoned his sins and restored him to his kingdom again. He might have quoted Paul’s experience, wherein he says, “That in me, the chiefest of sinners, Jesus Christ might show forth all long-suffering for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on Him to life everlasting” (1 Tim. 1:15, 16). He devoted the remainder of his life to the service of God, and exhorted all the people to be zealous of the law.

Amon succeeded Manasseh, and imitated his father’s idolatry; but his life was suddenly terminated, in two years, by his assassination, in his palace, by conspirators, and he thus gave way to Josiah, the last of the pious kings of Judah. Josiah was crowned at the age of eight years, and at sixteen converted to God by His Spirit. He followed in the footsteps of Asa, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah and Manasseh, and in personal piety excelled them all. Saith the Holy Spirit: “And like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him” (2 Kings 23:25).

He made a thorough purification of the temple and city of Jerusalem, of all the cities and high places in his own kingdom; and pushed his reformation into other cities and places where he might be allowed. Israel had been carried away, but there was a people substituted in their place, called Samaritans, who offered no resistance, and Josiah purged the cities of Manasseh, Ephraim and Simeon and a portion of Naphtali; destroying the houses of the high places in the cities of Samaria which the kings of Israel had made, and slaying the priests who sacrificed thereon. He made thorough work of it; and during his reign the people had rest, and departed not from following the Lord God of their fathers. Near the close of his reign he opposed the march of the king of Egypt through his territories towards the Euphrates. He made battle against him and was wounded. He was brought to Jerusalem and died in peace. All Judah and Jerusalem, especially the prophet Jeremiah, mourned for him. During his pious reign he enjoyed the ministry of the prophets Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk (2 Chron. 34, 35; 2 Kings 20, 21; Lam. 4:20).

God’s threatened wrath and captivity against Judah and Jerusalem were delayed during Josiah’s reign, but, as soon as he was gathered to his fathers, the vials were poured out.

His wicked son, Jehoahaz, succeeded him, and was deposed and carried away captive into Egypt by Pharaoh-necho, in three months after his coronation, and died there. Pharaoh-necho made Eliakim, another son of Josiah, king in his stead, changed his name to Jehoiakim, and laid him and his people under tribute. Urijah prophesied against the city and the land, for which Jehoiakim had him slain with the sword, and his body cast contemptuously into the grave of the common people.

Nineteen years before the accession of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, a priest of Anathoth, three miles north of Jerusalem, in the territory of Benjamin, having before his birth been ordained of the Lord a prophet, had been called when a mere child to the sacred office. Naturally gentle, sensitive and timid, he was made, by the indwelling Spirit of God, strong, and bold, and fearless—a defensed city, an iron pillar and a brazen wall—against the wicked king, and princes, and priests, and false prophets, and people of the land, to declare to them their religious superficiality and hypocrisy, to denounce their idolatries and corruptions, and to predict that God would, for their abominations, carry them into seventy years’ captivity[8] in Babylon; but that, though he would make a full end of their Babylonian oppressors, He would not make a full end of them, but in covenant faithfulness would visit them again and restore them to their own land. Jeremiah was accused of being a traitor to his own people and a friend of the Babylonians: he was mocked and persecuted more than any other prophet—hated, taunted, derided, put in stocks and in a miry prison-pit, and sought to be killed. Both literally and spiritually, more than any other servant of God in the Old Testament dispensation, he experienced the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ—his whole life being one long martyrdom in the cause of truth. At times, when left to himself, he became bitterly despondent, and bewailed, like Job in his extremist agony, the day on which he was born—feeling that his whole life was a failure (as the people did not heed his warnings), and doubting whether his very mission was not a delusion, and thinking that he would afterwards keep silent; but the word of the Lord was like burning fire in his bones, and he continued to deliver his solemn prophetic messages, and his eyes became fountains of tears for the sins and coming calamities of his people. Yet, “in that stormy sunset of prophecy, he beholds, in spirit, the dawn of a brighter and eternal day. He sees that, if there is any hope of salvation for his people, it cannot be by a return to the old system and the old ordinances, divine though they once had been (31:31). There must be a new (and spiritual) covenant. The relations between man and God must rest, not on an outward law with its requirements of obedience, but on that of an inward fellowship with Him, and the consciousness of entire dependence. For all this he saw clearly there must be a personal center”—the Messiah, the righteous and royal branch of David, the Lord our Righteousness, bringing salvation to Israel, writing His law in their minds and hearts, making a personal and inward revelation of Himself to them as their God, and forgiving their iniquities (23:5, 6; 31:31-34). Of this Messiah, in His persecution by and His suffering for His people, there was no more striking human type than Jeremiah, who is believed to have been finally carried to Tahpanhes in Egypt, and there stoned by the Jews, irritated by his rebukes.

The godless and reckless Jehoiakim, in the fourth year of his reign, rebelling against Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem, and carried off to Babylon the vessels of the temple, and a number of royal and noble, handsome and gifted Hebrew youths, including Daniel, Hananiah (Shadrach), Mishael (Meshach), and Azariah (Abednego), to be trained in Chaldaean learning for his service. Jehoiakim, after reigning three years as a vassal of Nebuchadnezzar, rebelled again, and was conquered and put to death, as Jeremiah had prophesied. His son Jehoiachin (or Jeconiah, or Coniah—Jah or Jehovah having abandoned him) was placed on the throne of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar because of rebellion; and the conqueror carried off to Babylon the king and all his officers, and all the chief men and soldiers and artisans, including Ezekiel and Shimei, the grandfather of Mordecai, and the remaining treasures of the temple and palace—leaving none but the very poorest people in Judea. Mattaniah, the uncle of Jehoiachin, under the name of Zedekiah, was made king over the miserable remnant.

Zedekiah rebelled in the eight year of his reign, and, upon the approach of the Babylonian army, professed penitence; but, as soon as the army turned away, he again broke his covenant with Babylon. Having defeated the king of Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar resumed the siege of Jerusalem, and took the city for the third and last time, fulfilling the word of the Lord which he spake by the mouths of His prophets, “I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down” (2 Kings 21:10-13). Nebuchadnezzar took Zedekiah, slew his sons before his eyes, then put out his eyes, bound him in fetters and carried him to Babylon, and kept him a close prisoner till he died. He made a public example of seventy-four distinguished men of Jerusalem, who had been engaged in the rebellion, by putting them to death. He sacked the temple completely. “He burnt the house of the Lord, and the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man’s house he burnt with fire.” He demolished the walls of the city, rooted and burnt out the population, leaving the city a heap of rubbish and smoldering ruins. With the exception of a few poor people, who were left in the fields and vineyards, he carried all away to Babylon as prisoners. “So Judah was carried away out of their land” (2 Kings 24:17; 25:1-21; Jer. 39:1-19; 53:1-23).

“In the kingdom of Judah, as in that of the ten tribes, the captives had been carried off in three detachments: In B.C. 606, Daniel and his three comrades and other princes; in B.C., 598, about 10,000 chief people, including Ezekiel, 7,000 soldiers, 1,000 craftsmen, and about 2,000 nobles; and in B.C. 587, nearly all the people. A small remnant was still left in the land, under Gedaliah, most of whom were massacred by Ishmael; of the remnant, the greater part went to Egypt with Johanan, while a very small fragment continued to hover about their ancient seats.”—W.G. Blaikie.

The threatenings of God had been fulfilled. The kings and priests and people would not take heed, but kept on their rebellious road to ruin. “The Lord God of their fathers sent them by His messengers, rising up betimes and sending; because He had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place; but they mocked the messengers of God, and despised His words, and misused His prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against His people, till there was no remedy” (2 Chron. 36:11-21). The land at last lay at rest and kept Sabbath for seventy years.

Israel existed as an independent kingdom 254 years; Judah 133 years longer, making 388 years to the captivity. During these 388 years Judah had seventeen kings and one queen—a usurper; and two more kings after she became tributary to Babylon, making nineteen kings in all, and every one of the house of David, according to the promise of God.

“The separate history of the kingdom of Judah may be divided into four periods: 1st. First religious decline and first religious revival—about 86 years, during the reigns of Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Jehoram, Ahaziah, and Athaliah, and during the prophecies of Shemaiah, Iddo, Azariah, Hanani, Jehu, and Jahaziel. 2nd. Second decline and second revival—about 207 years, during the reigns of Joash, Amaziah, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, and during the prophecies of Zechariah (son of Jehoiada), Joel, Zechariah (son of Berechiah), Isaiah, Micah, and Nahum. 3rd. Third decline and third revival—about 88 years, during the reigns of Manasseh, Amon and Josiah, and during the prophecies of Zephaniah and Jeremiah. 4th. Final decline—about 23 years, during the reigns of Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah, and during the prophecies of Habakkuk and Obadiah. After the return from the Babylonian captivity there was a revival under Zerubbabel, and this was followed by the Pharisaic decline, which has now lasted for more than 2,000 years, but is destined, according to the sure word of prophecy, to be succeeded by the most glorious revival of any (Rom. 11:15).”—W.G. Blaikie.

Nebuchadnezzar appointed Gedaliah ruler over the land of Judah at the time he left a few people there. He had Jeremiah taken out of prison, and his fetters loosened, and gave him leave to go wherever he pleased. He offered to take him to Babylon and provide well for him, or allow him to remain with Gedaliah. The prophet, like a patriotic and true man, resolved to remain with Gedaliah and the remnant, and share their destiny. So the king’s officer gave him victuals and a reward, and let him go to Gedaliah, who was at Mizpah, the seat of government after the destruction of Jerusalem.

Baalis, king of the Ammonites, for some cause unknown, sent an assassin, in the person of one Ishmael, to slay the good governor Gedaliah, and he did so while feasting at his hospitable table; and, with the assistance of ten men at his side, slew the Jews, the men of war, and the Chaldeans found there with him. He also slew eight more unsuspecting men who came up from Shechem, Shiloh and Samaria for religious purposes. Then gathering the people together, he departed to go over to the Ammonites, but was speedily pursued by Johanan and the captains of the forces, and overtaken in Gibeon. The captives were recovered, but Ishmael made his escape to the Ammonites with eight men.

Johanan and the leaders of the people, though having acted bravely and wisely, seemed to fear that the Chaldeans would come up and punish them for Gedaliah’s assassination. They loved idolatry still, and feignedly sought the advice of Jeremiah in regard to hiding down in Egypt. He forbade it, and warned them of the danger of going there, saying that the sword, pestilence and famine would overtake them if they did. They heeded not his warnings, but went down to Tahpanhes in Egypt, carrying the prophet with them. There they could indulge in idolatry to their hearts’ content. Both men and women justified themselves, saying “When we worshiped the queen of Heaven we saw no evil; and when we ceased to worship her we were consumed with sword and famine.” One of the most remarkable features of character in the Hebrew nation and people was their proneness to idolatry from the conquest of Jericho to the Babylonian captivity, in the face of everything that God had done for them and was continually doing for them through so many centuries—continually blessing them in their allegiance to Him and cursing them in their worship of idols.

Jeremiah’s predictions in regard to those who slid off to Egypt came to pass. Sixteen years after they went down there (B.C. 570), Nebuchadnezzar conquered Egypt, and the Jews perished under his hand, except a mere remnant who had settled there previously, or who had been compelled to go there like Jeremiah, against their will (Jer. 44:11-14, 28).

All shadow of civil government had now passed away in Judah, and the government of the Hebrews in the land of Canaan had entirely ceased.

What proportion of those carried away by Nebuchadnezzar were truly pious—were of the remnant of believers, though small, that were at all times reserved according to the election of grace—we cannot say; nor the number of such who were forced down into Egypt along with Jeremiah; yet we feel assured there was a remnant at that day as well as there had been at all times during the 864 years of their existence in Canaan. God never has left Himself without a witness on earth.

With slight intermissions, the people of Judah, like those of Israel, became more and more corrupt—more wealthy, cultured, extravagant, luxurious, licentious, covetous, dishonest, venal, deceitful and oppressive to the poor; and God sent upon them just punishment for their sins. They were now scattered in five different countries—Egypt, Palestine, Chaldea, Media and Assyria; the prophecy of Moses (Lev. 26 and Deut. 28), uttered nearly 900 years before, had received its first but not its last and greatest fulfillment.

A notable feature of Hebrew history during the kingly period is the readiness with which the people followed their kings in matters both secular and sacred. Their government was a theocracy, even when their kings reigned; because the king was considered the agent or vicegerent of God to carry out His designs; and, in cases of doubt, the last appeal was made to God. When the king did evil, so did the people; and when he did well, so did the people—proving the correctness of Solomon when he said: “Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, What doest thou?” (Eccl. 8:4).

Down to the captivity the books of the Old Testament had been completed to the second book of Chronicles, and the works of these prophets in chronological order, viz.: Jonah, Joel, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Obadiah and Jeremiah, together with his Lamentations—eleven in all.

1. “We have nothing so lovely as the book of Ruth in the whole range of epic and idyllic poetry.” says Goethe. It has been beautifully called a “Garden of Roses at the Gate of the Gospel.” It affords touching illustrations of God’s providence and grace, the afflictions, poverty and sorrows of God’s people, and the nature and results of true faith, piety, virtue, humility and unselfish love. Naomi is a type of the church; Ruth a type of every child of grace; and Boaz a type of Christ. Naomi finds nothing but sorrow in the land of Moab; Ruth cleaves to her poor, despised mother-in-law with intense and undying love; and her near, wealthy, powerful kinsman, furnishing himself all the dowry, espouses her to himself. There is no more affecting passage in all literature than the language of Ruth to Naomi, “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.”—Ruth 1:16,17. Every one who has this feeling toward the true church is a child of God.

2. Jephthah vowed that, if the Lord would give him victory over the Ammonites, whatsoever should come forth of the doors of his house to meet him on his return in peace, should surely be the Lord’s, and (or or) he would offer it up for a burnt offering. The margin states truly that the “and” may be rendered “or.” If a person met him, he would renounce all claim to such person, and wholly dedicate him or her to the service of the Lord’s sanctuary; of an inferior animal met him, he would offer it up on the altar. His only child, a daughter, first met him: and with a broken heart, because it meant lifelong separation from her, he dedicated her life to Jehovah as a spiritual burnt offering in a lifelong virginity. Volumes have been written upon this mysterious subject; but this seems to be the view held by those who have investigated the matter most profoundly, especially by taking into consideration the following passages of Scripture; Deut. 12:29-31; Lev. 27:1-5; Num. 18:15, 16; 1 Sam. 1:11, 20, 22, 28; Heb. 11:17-19, 32.

3. Let it never be forgotten that Eli and his house were cut off by God, because, though Eli was himself a pious man, yet when he knew his sons made themselves vile he simply reproved, but did not exercise his parental authority to punish and restrain them (1 Sam. 3:13, 14)—a most solemn warning to all over-indulgent parents, pastors and rulers who fail to exercise proper discipline within their peculiar spheres.

4. Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized; or, Gospel Light Brought Out of the Temple at Jerusalem, by John Bunyan, is probably the most wonderful piece of spiritual interpretation of Scripture in the world. A few of Bunyan’s seventy points we must give. Mount Moriah, on which Solomon’s temple was built, was a type of Christ, the mountain of the Lord’s house, the rock against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. The foundation stones of the temple were types of the prophets and Apostles. Christ is the foundation of His church personally and meritoriously; but the prophets and Apostles, doctrinally and ministerially. Solomon, the wise and wealthy and peaceable king, as the builder of the temple, was a type of Christ. The trees and stones of which the temple was built were first selected out of the forest and quarry where there were others equally good by nature, and were thoroughly hewed and squared and fitted for their proper place, and then brought to the temple and properly adjusted without noise or confusion; so with God’s people, who are chosen by Him in the wild field of nature, then hewed and squared by His word and doctrine applied by His Spirit, and afterwards brought in and added quietly by Him to His Zion. The temple, with its chambers, was narrowest downwards, and largest upwards—different from all other buildings; so the hearts of God’s people should be narrow in their desires for earthly things, but wide in their desires for spiritual and eternal things; those in the church who are nearest or most concerned with earth are the most narrow-spirited as to the things of God. The pinnacles of the temple were types of those lofty, airy, heady notions with which some men delight themselves while they hover like birds above the solid and godly truths of Christ; these are dangerous places—Satan tried to destroy Christ on one of them. Christians, to be safe, should be low and little in their own eyes. The porters had charge of the treasure-chambers, and had to keep diligent watch lest any not duly qualified should enter the house of the Lord; these were types of God’s ministers. The door of the temple represented Christ. The wall of the temple was His divinely sustained humanity, and the fine gold on the wall a type of His righteousness. The windows were narrow without, but wide within; types of the written word, through which as through a glass we now darkly see something of the glory of the Sun of Righteousness; by the light of the written word, the church can see the dismal state of the world and how to avoid it, but by that light the world sees but little of the beauty of the church. The chambers represented rest, safety, treasure, solace, and continuance. The two winding stairs from the first to the second story, and from the second to the third, were types of the two-fold repentance of the child of God, that by which he turns from nature to grace, and that by which he turns from the imperfections which attend a state of grace to glory. The molten sea was a figure of the pure word of the gospel, without men’s inventions, mingled with the fire of the Holy Ghost. The twelve oxen upon whose backs the sea stood were types of the Apostles and ministers of Christ, who should keep their uncomely parts covered with gospel grace, and should proclaim the gospel in all the world. A golden censer is a gracious heart, heavenly fire is the Holy Ghost, and sweet incense the effectual, fervent prayer of faith. The Holy Place was a type of the church militant; and the Most Holy Place a type of the church triumphant. Both parts of the house have the same foundation, and the same family of occupants. The way into Heaven is through the true church of Christ on earth. Things in the Most Holy Place could not be seen by even the highest light of this world, but only by the light of the fire of the altar, a type of the shinings of the Holy Ghost. The floor of the temple was overlaid with gold, like the pure golden streets of the New Jerusalem. The walk of God’s people should be beautiful and clean; and, when we happily reach the Celestial City, we shall no more step into the mire or stumble upon blocks and stones, or fall into holes and snares, but all our steps will be in pure gold. Oh what speaking things, says Bunyan, are types, shadows and parables, had we but eyes to see, had we but ears to hear!

5. The word Solomon means peace.

6. This effect may have been produced by a cloud or a modification of the laws of refraction; some eminent astronomers suppose that it may have been produced by an eclipse of the sun. But by whatever method produced, we know that the retreat of the shadow ten degrees on the dial was not the work of man, but of Almighty God.

7. Belial means worthlessness; it is not strictly a proper name, but used so by personification.

8. “The exact number of years of Sabbaths in 490 years, the period from Saul to the Babylonian captivity; righteous retribution for their violation of the Sabbath (Lev. 26:33-35; 2 Chron. 36:20, 21). The seventy years probably began from the fourth year of Jehoiakim, when Jerusalem was first captured, and many captives, as well as the treasure of the temple, were carried away; they end with the first year of Cyrus, who, on taking Babylon, issued an edict for the restoration of the Jews (Ezra 1:1). Daniel’s seventy prophetic weeks are based on the 70 years of the captivity (Dan. 9:2, 24).”—A. R. Fausset.

Chapter V. The Babylonish Captivity and the Restoration to Canaan.

The land of Judah, according to prophecy, was to enjoy its Sabbaths, and therefore the king of Babylon did not do with that what the king of Assyria had done with Israel, viz.: Substitute another population in place of the people removed. This country remained open and at rest, ready to be reoccupied when the people to whom it had been given should return from their captivity.

The history of the ten tribes from their captivity to the captivity of Judah—one hundred and thirty-three years—is a blank never to be filled. The distinction was no longer to exist. Israel was lost sight of. Many of the ten lost tribes[1] returned and associated themselves with Judah during the 133 years. The others were dispersed in the Assyrian provinces; and, when the empire of Babylon included Egypt, Assyria, and other nations to the number of one hundred and twenty-seven provinces, the remnant of Israel belonged to that empire, and therefore were found to exist under the same government with their brethren of Judah after the fall of Jerusalem. They became one people again then, under the reign of the Babylonish kings, and were so reckoned and so treated by those great eastern rulers. Henceforward all the descendants of Abraham were called Jews down to the Christian era, and have been ever since so called. According to this view the ten lost tribes need no longer be searched for; they are already found. Nebuchadnezzar was a great king; he was the great “head of gold” among the kings of the succeeding empires. He was “the great tree which grew and was strong, whose height reached unto the Heavens, and the sight thereof to all the earth; whose leaves were fair and the fruit thereof much, and in it was meat for all: under which the beasts of the field dwelt, and upon whose branches the fowls of Heaven had their habitation” (Dan. 4). Under the shadow of this great tree the chosen people of God, Judah and Israel, now dwelt, and dwelt as one people, though scattered beneath the shadow of various branches of it.

Daniel and his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, who had been carried down to Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar first took Jerusalem, were destined to occupy places of distinction under the reign of that and succeeding monarchs. After four years’ preparation they were permitted to stand before the king, and he gave them positions even within the royal court itself, where they might be prepared, when necessary, to render assistance to their kindred in captivity.

Ezekiel, who had been carried to Babylon in the second deportation from Jerusalem, was called to the prophetic office about B.C. 595. He was located among the captives on the river Chebar, which is described as falling into the Euphrates about two hundred miles north of Babylon. Thus far away in the heart of this vast empire his solitary voice was heard, and the people received his communications and sought his instruction (Ezek. 8; 14; 20). He prophesied in all about twenty-two years. His prophecies, regarding the destruction of Jerusalem and the conquest of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar, are the same in substance with those of Jeremiah, though widely separated, and unable to hold correspondence with each other. The prophecies were fulfilled to the letter. This proves them to have been prophets of God, and both moved by the Holy Ghost to speak and write as they did (Ezek. 1; 24). Ezekiel died B.C. 574.

Daniel was known to Ezekiel, for he twice names him in his prophecies (Ezek. 14:14; 28:3). Daniel attained a high distinction in the king’s court among the heathen, as well as among his own people, and was regarded by both as being superior to all other men for wisdom and holiness.

He was very similarly situated at the court of Nebuchadnezzar, as was Joseph at the court of Pharaoh.

“The one stood near the beginning and the other near the end of the Jewish history of revelation; both were representatives of God at heathen courts; both interpreters of the dim presentiments of truth expressed in God-sent dreams, and therefore raised to honor by the powers of the world; so representing Israel’s calling to be a royal priesthood among the nations; and types of Christ, the true Israel, and of Israel’s destination to be a light to lighten the Gentiles, as Romans 11:12, 15, foretells.”—Auberlen. “Among the prominent characteristics of Daniel are his personal purity and self-restraint amidst the world’s corrupting luxuries (Dan. 1:8-16; compare Moses, Heb. 11:24-27; Joseph, Gen. 39:9); his faithfulness to God at all costs, and fearless witnessing for God before great men (Dan. 4:17-23), unbribed by lucre and unawed by threats (6:10, 11); his pure patriotism, which, with burning prayers, interceded for his chastened countrymen (9); and his intimate communion with God, so that, like the beloved disciple and apocalyptic seer of the New Testament, John, he also is called ‘a man greatly beloved,’ and this twice, by the angel of the Lord (9:23; 10:11), and received the exactest disclosure of the date of Messiah’s advent, and the successive events down to the Lord’s final advent for the deliverance of His people.

“The infidel philosopher, Porphyry (born A.D. 233; died 304), asserted that the book of Daniel was a forgery of the time of the Maccabees (B.C. 170-164)—a time when confessedly there were no prophets, written after the events as to Antiochus Epiphanes, which it professed to foretell, so accurate are the details—a conclusive proof of Daniel’s inspiration, if his prophecies can be shown to have been before those events. Now we know from Josephus that the Jews in Christ’s day recognized Daniel as in the canon. Zechariah, Ezra and Nehemiah, centuries before Antiochus, refer to it. Jesus refers to it in His characteristic designation, ‘Son of man’ (Matthew 24:30; Dan. 7:13), also, expressly by name, and as a ‘prophet’ (Matthew 24:15, 21; Dan. 12:1, etc.), and in the moment that decided His life (Matthew 26:64) or death, when the high priest adjured Him by the living God. Also in Luke 1:19-26, ‘Gabriel’ is mentioned, whose name occurs nowhere else in Scripture save Daniel 8:16, and 9:21. Besides the references to it in Revelation, Paul confirms the prophetical part of it, as to the blasphemous king (Dan. 7:8, 25; 11:36) in 1 Corinthians 6:2, and 2 Thessalonians 2:3, 4; the narrative part, as to the miraculous deliverances from the lions and the fire in Hebrews 11:33, 34. Thus the book is expressly attested by the New Testament on the three points made the stumbling block of neologists—the predictions, the narratives of miracles, and the manifestations of angels.”—Fausset. The language of the book of Daniel, partly Hebrew and partly Chaldee, and the exact knowledge which the writer shows of the ancient Babylonian manners and customs, as confirmed by the latest monumental discoveries, prove the authenticity of the book. The ancient Jews classed Daniel in the same division of the Scriptures (Ketubim, writings) as the Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Esther, Lamentations, Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles; and they showed their high regard for the book of Daniel by having it, with other portions of the Ketubim, read before the high priest on the night of the Day of Atonement.

The astonishingly exact fulfillment of many of the prophecies of Daniel demonstrates the divine inspiration of the book. The extraordinary importance of this book must be our excuse for the extended space that we give to its consideration in this work.

“Daniel, with deliberate purpose of heart, would not defile himself with the king’s meat or wine; because to have partaken of it would have been a tacit sanction of idolatry, seeing that an initiatory offering had been made of it to consecrate the whole meal to idols. He who was to be the interpreter of Jehovah’s revelations against the heathen world-power, must not himself feed on the dainties, nor drink from the intoxicating cup of the world. Like Moses, he must ‘choose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.’ Faith was the secret principle of Daniel’s consistency. Faith alone can enable the young to overcome the carnal appetites of sense, which are especially strong in early life and youthful vigor. They who would excel in wisdom and piety must learn early to keep the body in subjection to the spirit. Temperance is conducive alike to the health of body and soul. A pampered body clogs the intellect, and still more incapacitates the man for spiritual exercises.”—Fausset.

The second and the seventh chapters of Daniel, under different figures, foretell the same events—the successive existence of four great world-empires, to be followed by a fifth indestructible and finally-universal spiritual kingdom to be set up by the God of Heaven and the Son of man. “In the second chapter, the world-kingdoms are seen by the heathen king in their outward unity and glory, yet without life, a metal colossus; in the seventh chapter they appear to the prophet of God in their real character, as instinct with life, but mere beast life, terrible animal power, but no true manhood; for true manhood can only be realized by conscious union with God, in whose image man was made. The Son of God as the ‘Son of man’ is the true ideal standard and head of regenerated humanity. When Nebuchadnezzar glorified and deified self he became beast-like and consorted with the beasts; but, when he lifted up his eyes to Heaven, his understanding returned, and he blessed the Most High, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion.”—Fausset. The First world-kingdom is represented by the golden head of the image and by the lion with eagle’s wings; the second by the arms and breast of silver, and by the bear with three ribs in its mouth; the third by the belly and thighs of brass, and by the four-headed and four-winged leopard; and the fourth by the legs of iron and feet partly of iron and partly of clay, and by an unnamed, terrible, exceedingly strong, ten-horned, iron-toothed, brazen-nailed beast, different from all the others, and devouring and stamping the others in pieces. The first world-kingdom, as Daniel himself says, was the Babylonian, whose vigor began and ended with Nebuchadnezzar—chief among the kingdoms, like gold among the metals, and the lion among beasts, with wide-spread and rapidly acquired power, indicated by the wings of an eagle. The second world-kingdom is almost universally admitted to have been the Medo-Persian, formed by the union of two nations, the Medes and the Persians, as the two arms are united in the breast—inferior to the Babylonian kingdom in antiquity—and its early effeminacy and the dependence of its king on his nobles, as silver is inferior to gold and the bear to the lion—cruel and slow—moving like the bear— the three ribs in its mouth representing Lydia, Babylon and Egypt, not properly parts of its body, but seized by Medo-Persia. The third world-kingdom is by the union of the Greeks and the Macedonians, as the two thighs are united in the body (or the two thighs may represent the principal and longest-lived kingdoms into which the Macedonian empire was divided, that of the Seleucidae in Syria and that of the Ptolemies in Egypt), of an inferior mercenary character, and with its soldiers clothed with brass or bronze armor—the leopard representing slyness and pertinacity, and the four wings the unexampled rapidity of the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the four heads the four Diodochi, or successors, among whom Alexander’s dominions were divided, Ptolemy in Egypt, Seleucus in Asia, Lysimachus in Thrace, and Cassander in Greece; the inferiority of the Macedonian empire is forcibly illustrated by the repeated and protracted debauchery and intemperance of Alexander and his army, and by the very brief duration of his empire. Divine Providence brings good out of evil; the wide diffusion of the Greek language in Western Asia was among the most important natural preparations for the spread of Christianity. In regard to the identification of the fourth world-kingdom opinions vary. A few modern scholars think that it was the Syrian monarchy of the Seleucidae, or the Seleucidae of Syria and the Ptolemies of Egypt; the ten toes and horns representing the monarchs of the Syrian dynasty especially—the foreign Greek element of iron, and the native Oriental element the clay; intermarrying with the Ptolemies, but still hostile to them; the little horn plucking up three others, and having the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things, being supposed to be the Syrian king, Antiochus (IV.) Epiphanes, of whom it is generally agreed that Daniel prophesies in his eighth, eleventh and twelfth chapters. But the Seleucidae and Ptolemies were the thigh sequelae of the brazen Macedonian kingdom; and it was the almost universal opinion of the ancient Jewish and Christian scholars, and it is still advocated by a very large proportion of English and German interpreters, that the fourth world-kingdom was the Roman. If not the Roman, then the prophet, in his anticipatory survey of the kingdoms of the world, has omitted the greatest world-kingdom that ever existed, and one which was existing not only long before but actually when Christ came into the world, and one with which and its subdivisions His kingdom has had the most to do; and yet the prophet, at the proper place in his predictions had used remarkable language that applies more appropriately to the Roman empire than to any that ever existed. For these reasons we are satisfied that the fourth world-kingdom was the Roman. It was a gigantic monstrosity, surpassing, in terribleness, all the beasts of the field and all the other kingdoms of the world. “Irresistible in the battlefield, within there were internal weakness, the struggles of fierce factions, civil dissensions, and finally an oligarchy of rich men, the most corrupt, since the deluge, that ever existed on earth, before whom all manliness vanished away. To save itself it had to bow to the yoke of absolute power, and at length, from the necessities of administration, was divided into the western and eastern empires, symbolized by the two legs, in which there was still vast strength, but also much weakness, the extremities of the Roman dominions being constantly harassed by incursions of the barbarians, who often even carried their raids into the very heart of the empire. It was thus partly strong and partly broken (or brittle), because, while its armies of mercenaries were irresistible, its own subjects were too feeble to defend themselves; and its toes were of iron, if protected by fortresses and regular armies, but of clay if these aids were withdrawn. As finally the government of this vast realm was ever the prize of revolt, of artifice and of crime, the emperors were always trying to strengthen themselves by ‘mingling with the seed of men,’ by marriages with members of rival families, and by national alliances, but in vain. The two dreams carry the description of the Roman empire down to a period long subsequent to the foundation of the Messiah’s kingdom—the ten toes and ten horns representing the subdivisions of the Roman empire, the number ten being the prevalent one at the chief turning points of Roman history, and it may be the number of kingdoms into which Rome shall be found finally divided when Antichrist shall appear (Rev. 13:1; 17:12). And of Messiah’s kingdom itself we have not merely the beginning, but the growth, until it had crushed and taken the place of all these empires.”—R.P. Smith. The “little horn,” in the seventh chapter, is the intensest development of the God-opposing, haughty spirit of the world represented by the fourth monarchy, and plainly denotes the Pope of Rome, plucking up three horns, the exarchate of Ravenna, the kingdom of the Lombards, and the state of Rome, which constituted the Pope’s dominions at first, obtained by Popes Zachary and Stephen II., A.D. 754, in return for acknowledging the usurper Pepin lawful king of France—the fact of three states first constituting his dominions being still indicated by the Pope’s triple-crown, a tiara with three coronets rising one above another. This little horn is diverse from the others, has in it the eyes as of a man, denoting intelligence and cunning, and a mouth speaking great words against the Most High—no other blasphemy ever equaled that of the Pope of Rome, and he wears out, persecutes and murders the saints of the Most High, and thinks to change times and laws, assuming to himself all the authority of God on earth, and finally culminating in avowed Antichrist.

These four great military world-kingdoms, though seemingly so splendid, powerful and enduring, are in reality but transitory shadows. “The metals in the image lessen in specific gravity as they go downwards; silver is not so heavy as gold, brass not so heavy as silver, and iron not so heavy as brass, the weight thus being arranged in the reverse of stability, indicating the ease with which the image can be destroyed.”—Tregelles. A stone cut out of a mountain without hands smites the image upon its feet, and breaks it to pieces and makes it like the chaff of the summer threshing-floor, scattered and, as it were, annihilated by the wind, while the stone becomes a great mountain, and fills the whole earth; that is, “in the days of these kings,” the kings of the fourth or iron kingdom, the God of Heaven sets up a kingdom, which shall destroy all the world-kingdoms, and itself fill the earth, and stand forever. Or, as the same great fact is described in the seventh chapter, the Ancient of days, the Everlasting Father, the Infinitely Holy God, with garment white as snow, and hair like pure wool, appears upon a fiery throne, surrounded by myriads of the angelic host, during the existence of the fourth beast (verses 7, 9, 10, 11, 23) or fourth kingdom, which is to be destroyed and given to the burning flame, and the Son of man comes to the Ancient of days with the clouds of Heaven, and there is given to Him a universal and everlasting dominion. While the fourth or Roman empire was reigning over the world, the Son of God, the equal of the Father, comes down from the heavenly mount, not by human agency, but by Divine power, and veils Himself in flesh as the Son of man, the weeping Babe of Bethlehem, like a poor, little, humble, worthless, off-cast, powerless stone upon the ground, and lives a life of poverty and persecution, and dies as a crucified malefactor; but behold He soon arises from the grave, and, from the top of Mount Olivet, he ascends upon a radiant cloud to the Ancient of days, His eternal Father, and receives a dominion, glory, and a kingdom, wide as the universe, and lasting as eternity (Acts 1:9, 12; Matthew 28:18). The ancient Jews understood the “stone” in the second, and the “Son of man” it the seventh chapter of Daniel, to be the Messiah. Metallic images are made by the hands of men; but stones and mountains are made by God. Christ is “the stone of Israel” (Gen. 49:24), “rejected by the builders, but become the headstone of the corner” (Ps. 118:22), a “stone of stumbling” to carnal Israel (Isa. 8:14; Acts 4:11; 1 Pet. 2:7, 8), but the sure chief foundation stone of the true church (Isa.. 28:16; Eph. 2:20; Matthew 16:18). With distinct reference to these words of Daniel, Christ said: “Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder” (Matthew 21:44; Luke 20:17, 18). Cut out of the same mountain originally, it ends in becoming a mountain; coming from Heaven, it ends in establishing Heaven on earth. “High in the impalpable air, above the highest human colossus and human kingdom, projects itself another colossus formed from the mount and rock of the heavenly Zion. A stone from this holiest of mounts looses itself and falls. If it destroys the earthly material which it strikes, it brings also with it that new, pure, heavenly spirit and material which shall fill again the earth with a stronger mount, and found a new and better city, Zion.”—Ewald.

“Thus, then, the captive Jewish youth unrolled before the eyes of the tyrant that had crushed his country, his home, and the temple of his God, the course of the five universal empires. Four rise, one after another, each to fall. For a while they beat down and destroy and fill the fair surface of the earth with tears and misery: for their weapons are force, violence and cruelty; and scarcely has one seized the sceptre before another rises to wrench it from his loosening grasp. At length, ushered in by no trumpet-blast, with no clashing of arms nor banners fluttering in the breeze, but by a still, calm, unseen influence, the fifth empire begins to arise. Its armies are recruited from the poor, the outcast, the slave. Those whom men despise are summoned to its standard; and that standard is one of suffering; but with this for their symbol, they shall conquer. This empire has its heroes; they are martyrs who bear the utmost cruelty that debased men can invent, and bear it with joy, for their love to Him who gave His life for them. It has its warriors—men who use no carnal weapons, and who wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the powers of darkness. It has its armies—thousands whose joy it is to do well and bear evil for their master’s sake. And the regeneration of the race will come when the Spirit of Christ, working in the hearts of all, has won the world for the Lord. The Persians robbed the Babylonians of the sceptre, the Greeks tore it from the Persians, and the Romans from the Greeks. But Christ is an eternal King, the true King of kings, and His people will never perish, for the very gates of hell will be forever powerless against the spiritual kingdom of our God.”—R.P. Smith.

The great, proud, lifeless, many-metalled colossus of the world stands up as the idol in every human heart, until the Spirit of God overturns this haughty image, humbles the heart, and prepares it to be filled with the glorious presence of Christ.

Daniel’s language, in his second and seventh chapters, contains an allusion, not only to the first, but to the second, coming of the Son of man. As He ascended to glory in a cloud, so shall He return, surrounded with His holy angels, to consign His enemies to the “burning flame,” while He welcomes his people into “life eternal” (Acts 1:11; Rev. 1:7; Matthew 25:31-46). Charlemagne, Charles V. and Napoleon have in vain endeavored to establish a fifth temporal universal empire. “The fourth, or Roman empire, in its subdivisions and colonies, still continues. We live under it; our civilization, letters, language and laws are essentially connected with those of imperial Rome. This fourth kingdom, though now professedly Christianized, is regarded in Scripture still in its essence to be ranked among the God-opposed beast-like world-powers, not only not better, but actually worse, than its three predecessors, in the ultimate intensity of its opposition to God and His Christ, and the full development of Antichrist, ‘the man of sin,’ ‘the son of perdition,’ that denieth both Father and Son (2 Thess. 2: 1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3). The New Testament views the present age of the world as essentially heathenish, which we cannot love without forsaking Christ (Rom. 12:2; 1 Cor. 1:20; 2 Cor. 4: 4; Gal. 1:4; Eph. 2:2; 1 John 2:15, 17). The present outward Christianity is to give place for a time to an almost universal apostasy under the last Antichrist (2 Thess. ii.) As the first, or Old Testament Antichrist, Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria B.C. 176-164, whose career is circumstantially predicted by Daniel in the eighth, eleventh and twelfth chapters of his prophecy, was the product of the highest ancient Greek civilization, so the last New Testament Antichrist is to be the product of the highest modern civilization, ignoring and despising God and vital religion, and substituting therefor a false liberalism in faith and practice, a growing laxity of morals, and a worship of money and of human science and art and invention, degenerating into avowed atheism and an unholy alliance with the Pope of Rome, for the extermination of the Church of Christ.”—A.R. Fausset.

Upon the interpretation of his dream, Nebuchadnezzar conferred extraordinary honors on Daniel; made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon, and chief of the governors over all the wise men of Babylon, and declared the God of Daniel to be supreme over all gods. His three companions, whose Chaldean names now were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, were also made rulers over the affairs of Babylon, but Daniel sat in the gate[2] of the king.

Kings’ minds are changeable, as well as those of other people. Nebuchadnezzar soon forgot Daniel’s God, and made one to suit him better. He set it up in the plain of Dura, and commanded all his subjects to fall down and worship it. Daniel was overlooked, it seems; but Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were not. They were watched, and complaint made against them as refusing to obey. They still refused to worship the idol, and, as a punishment therefore, were thrown bound into a burning, fiery furnace,[3] heated seven times hotter than usual; that is, as hot as possible. The heat of the furnace destroyed those who cast them in, but only burned off the shackles of the three who were willing to die rather than worship an idol. The king looked into the furnace and exclaimed: “Lo! I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” He called on them to come out, and he blessed the Most High for their deliverance, and said: “I make a decree that every people, nation and language which speak anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill, because there is no God that can deliver after this sort.” The king again promoted them to their distinguished positions as before (Daniel 3).

Thus by faith the violence of fire was quenched. And the hearts of these three men, as well as of all the children of God who heard of it, were strengthened and confirmed.

The king had a second dream in regard to himself more particularly. Daniel interpreted that, and then besought the king to break off his sins by righteousness, and his iniquities by showing mercy to the poor—that it might be a lengthening of his tranquility; but he heeded not the warning and went on his course, rejecting all allegiance to God and deifying himself until the Almighty struck him down, divested him of reason,[4] turned him into a brute, and drove him from the haunts of men. Seven years passed over him—his reason was restored, and so was his kingdom. He was a changed man. He no longer desires to bind other people or take their lives if they do not do as he says, but, as a pardoned sinner, he looks to himself, and praises God for what He had done for him. “Now I Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol the God of Heaven, all whose works are truth, and His ways judgment; and those that walk in pride He is able to abase” (Daniel iv. 37). Here was a God-fearing man upon the throne now, ready to wield his power in protecting and enlarging the liberties of God’s people dwelling in all parts of his dominion.

Evil-Merodach, his son and successor, when he came to the throne of Babylon, soon released Jehoiachin from prison and honored him highly, and gave him ample support for the remainder of his life. His father, in the case of Jehoiachin, had commuted the death penalty into imprisonment for life. And this act shows the kind feelings of this monarch toward the Lord’s people, and that God, though He had sent Israel into captivity, remembered them in mercy.

Belshazzar,[5] the son or grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, succeeded Evil-Merodach, and during his reign Darius the Median overthrew Babylon and took the kingdom. Belshazzar made a great feast, and among other impious acts of his, ordered the gold and silver vessels that had been taken from the temple in Jerusalem to be brought forth and used in this sacrilegious carousal, and the order was obeyed. At that moment the fingers of a man’s hand appeared to be writing upon the wall, and these are the words written: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” None could interpret the writing but Daniel. It may have been in the older Hebrew, or in altogether strange characters. Daniel was sent for, and interpreted it as follows: “Mene [numbered]; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. Tekel [weighed]; thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Peres [divided]; thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” (In upharsin, u means and, and pharsin means dividers; Peres, the singular passive participle, is substituted by Daniel for pharsin, the plural active participle of the same verb, probably because of its greater similarity to Persia.) Then they clothed Daniel with scarlet, and put a chain about his neck, and proclaimed him the third ruler in the kingdom. In that night was Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans, slain, and Darius the Median[6] took the kingdom (Daniel 5).

“It is an appalling scene when a sinning mortal knows that the great God has come to meet him in the very midst of his sins! How changed the scene from the glee of blasphemous revelry to paleness of cheek, convulsion of frame, remorse of conscience, and dread foreboding of doom!”—Cowles. “What a picture we have in king Belshazzar of every reprobate sinner’s course and final ruin! Unwarned by the judgments inflicted on others before him, on account of pride and rebellion against God, the sinner still takes no heed to glorify the God in whose hand his breath is. Instead of humbling himself in repentance, he either openly or else virtually lifts up himself against the Lord of Heaven, following after worldliness, covetousness or sensuality as his portion, and making the perishing things of time his idol. At last judgment, long deferred in mercy, goes forth. God brings to the appointed end the allotted number of the sinner’s days. Then follows the judgment whereby, weighed in the balances of God, he is found wanting in the only thing that carries weight with God—faith working by love. His past privileges are taken from him forever, and given to another, whilst he himself is ‘cut asunder, and his portion is appointed with the hypocrites, where shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ As God’s writing against Belshazzar was perfectly fulfilled, so let the impenitent be warned that no one tittle of God’s writing in His volume of inspiration shall fail to come to pass: alike the self-righteous, when weighed in the balance of the law, and the formalist and hypocrite, weighed in the balance of the gospel, shall be found wanting and shall suffer accordingly.”

“Daniel faithfully and fearlessly sets before the proud, impious king his great sin; and he interprets the mysterious writing not for any hope of reward, though the inalterability of the decrees of the Medo-Persian kings thrusts the promised rewards upon him. Estimating all things, even spiritual realities, by the standard of money, the ungodly think that the godly do the same; and therefore they try to bribe the servant of God (Dan. 5:16, 17) to procure for them deliverance from wrath, and an easy mind. But the true child of God will show a spirit superior to the love of gain, even as Daniel agreed to read and interpret the writing, but declined to accept the king’s gifts and rewards. Nothing tends more to injure a believer’s usefulness than that he should be seen by the world, like Balaam and Gehazi, to be greedy of gain; and, on the contrary, nothing tends more to make the worldly feel that believers are influenced by principles far above their own, than that they should see the children of God, as Daniel and Paul (Acts 20:33-35), ready to perform the work of faith and labor of love, without regard to worldly advantage.”—Fausset.

The Scripture prophecies relating to the conquests of Babylon, the method of the conquest (draining the river Euphrates), the name of the conqueror, Cyrus, and the restoration of Israel to their own land, may be seen in Isaiah 13, 14, 16, 44, and Jeremiah 25:l, 51. How astonishing that Isaiah, in 712 B.C., should have predicted the very name of Cyrus, as the conqueror of Babylon in 538 B.C.—174 years before the event! And then to state the exact method of conquest which Cyrus would employ! What a clear proof of the Divine inspiration of the prophet, and of the perfect foreknowledge of God!

When Belshazzar was overthrown, there was an end of the kings in Nebuchadnezzar’s line, and an end of the first great universal monarchy mentioned in the prophecies of Daniel.

Darius (associated with Cyrus or governing in his stead, by appointment, at the time) was well apprised of the character and standing of Daniel, and appointed him chief of the three presidents, whom he set to aid him in managing the affairs of the nation, and also chose him as prime minister of the realm. Thus it appears that the captive Jews had friends at court still, notwithstanding the change in the dynasties.

Others in court who hated the Jews and envied Daniel’s distinction, not being able to bring an accusation against him in regard to his want of wisdom, or high moral standing, brought one against him for praying to his God in violation of a decree which themselves were the cunning authors of, and which they had with flatteries induced the king to sign and seal. Daniel, on learning the nature of the decree and the penalty attached to its violation, in the sublimest exhibition of Divine faith and moral courage, opened his window, and, with his face turned toward Jerusalem, prayed three times a day to God, as he was wont to do. He was brought before the king for punishment, and much against his will he had to sentence Daniel to be thrown into a den of lions. Daniel was calm and quiet, and so were the lions, while the king was miserable and spent a sleepless night. He went early to the den and found Daniel alive, had him taken out and his accusers thrown in, with their wives and children, who were destroyed immediately by the wild beasts. Thus after his three friends had through faith “quenched the violence of fire,” he by the same power “stopped the mouths of lions.” Daniel’s God locked their jaws. The same want of conformity to the world and faithfulness to God have characterized His elect people in all ages of the world, before and since the coming of Christ; and for their “stubbornness,” as the world calls it—if for nothing else—they have been horribly maltreated, both under the legal and Christian dispensations. And we in this connection would ask a candid world, who of all the people on the face of this earth at the present time, do they believe, would be as willing to follow these four men and sacrifice their lives, for the testimony of Jesus, as these people called Primitive Baptists? They may be called “stubborn,” “unsocial,” “unyielding,” “too exacting,” etc., but when the Son of man cometh again on earth, where will He find faith if He does not find it among them?

“Amidst the business of a vast empire Daniel found time habitually to pray three times a day. As Daniel, in exile, looked towards the earthly temple, so let us lift up our eyes towards Christ, our heavenly temple, from this earthly scene of our captivity. As Daniel prayed openly and avowedly, so let us act as God and conscience dictate, and not as the fear of man’s anger or love of his praise might suggest. And as Daniel, even when earthly prospects were dark, and destruction seemed impending, still gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime, so have we, in our highly favored position, still more cause to thank God at all times, and to have his praise continually in our mouth (Ps. 34:1).”—Fausset.

The years of captivity were nearly ended; Daniel confessed his sins and the sins of his brethren in captivity, and prayed to God for pardon for his sins and the sins of the captives. He prayed for the fulfillment of the promise, and that the Lord would make a way for the return of the people to Jerusalem, and give him a clearer insight into the particulars thereof. The Lord heard his petition, the angel Gabriel touched him and talked with him, and gave him to understand: 1. That a commandment should go forth for the return of the people and for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. 2. The long expected Messiah, the Prince, should come sixty-nine weeks from the rebuilding of the walls and settlement of Jerusalem. 3. In the seventieth week He should be cut off, but not for Himself, but for His people; and by the one offering of Himself should make reconciliation for iniquity, bringing in everlasting righteousness, doing away with all typical sacrifices, sealing up in fulfillment vision and prophecy respecting Himself, and making an end of the dispensation which looked forward to His advent. 4. Finally, after His advent and death, a people should come and destroy city, temple and sacrifice, and break up the civil state of the church forever. This is the third prophecy (Gen. 44:10 being the first, and Dan. 2:44 the second) that fixes the time of our Lord’s appearing, and of the end of the civil constitution of the church of God. (Dan. 9:1-29).

This is the most definite prophecy of the very time of Christ’s coming that is contained in the Old Testament. The fact of its general fulfillment in the coming, ministry and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, which was followed, in about a generation, by the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman army under Titus, A.D. 70, has been admitted by the ablest scholars for 1,700 years; though there have been a great many different opinions as to the exact date when the seventy weeks, or 490 years, began and ended. The Jewish historian, Josephus, and both the old Jewish Gemaras, and the prevailing Talmudic and Rabbinical traditions of the early centuries of the Christian era, considered the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus predicted in Daniel 9:26, 27. The Old Testament Scriptures had been carried over the civilized world before the birth of Christ; and the old pagan Roman historians, Tacitus (Hist. v. 13) and Suetonius (Vesp. iv.), inform us that there was, on account of some ancient prophecies, a general expectation, in the first century of the Christian era, that there would arise out of Judea, at that time, a great personage, who would obtain the sovereignty of the world. The prophecies referred to were, no doubt, principally those in Daniel 9:24-27. And the very learned Jewish Chief-Rabbi of Venice, Simon Luzzato, in 1590 A.D., declared that “the consequence of a too extended and profound investigation on the part of Jewish scholars would be that they would all become Christians; for it could not be denied that, according to Daniel’s limitation of the time, the Messiah must have already appeared.” Sir Isaac Newton says: “He who denies Daniel’s prophecies undermines Christianity, which is founded on Daniel’s prophecies concerning Christ.” And Christ Himself (in Matthew 29:15, 21, 28, 34) not only affirms the prophetic character of Daniel, but applies Daniel 9:26, 27 to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, which was to take place before the passing away of that wicked generation that rejected and murdered Him.

The word shabuim, rendered weeks in Daniel 9:24-27, literally means sevens, that is, as it probable from Daniel 9:2, sevens of years (compare Lev. 25:4-8). Seventy sevens of years make 490 years. Now there is allusion, in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, to five different commandments for the restoration of the temple or city of Jerusalem: 1st. the commandment of God, the date of which is not given (Ezra 6:14); 2d. Of Cyrus, B.C. 536 (Ezra 1:1-4); 3d. Of Darius, B.C. 520 (Ezra 6:1-14); 4th. Of Artaxerxes to Ezra, in the seventh year of his reign, B.C. 458 (Ezra 7:11-26); 5th. Of Artaxerxes to Nehemiah, in the twentieth year of his reign, B.C. 445 (Neh. 2:1-8). The commandment of God, we know, was the cause of the other commandments; but He has not revealed to us its date. The commandments of Cyrus and Darius were of a general nature, not directed to any particular persons, and authorized the rebuilding only of the temple. But the commandment of Artaxerxes to Ezra, B.C. 458, is special, full and explicit, authorizing Ezra to “organize the colony in Judea, and institute a regular government, according to the laws of the Hebrew people, and by magistrates and rulers of their own nation, with full power of life and death.” The text of Artaxerxes’ commission to Nehemiah is not given in Scripture; but it is simply said that, at Nehemiah’s request, the king gave him letters to the governors beyond the river (Euphrates), ordering them to help him on his way, and to furnish him with materials for building the palace and wall of the city. The weight of authority is, therefore, in favor of considering B.C. 458 as the initial date of the seventy sevens, or 490 years, in Gabriel’s prophecy to Daniel (9:24). In the next three verses this period of seventy weeks is divided into three unequal periods—seven weeks, sixty-two weeks, and one week. The first seven weeks of years, or forty-nine years, was the closing period of Old Testament revelation, the age of Ezra, Nehemiah and Malachi. The sixty-two weeks, or 434 years, are the intermediate period between the seven and the one, in which there was no new revelation designed to increase the sacred canon. And the closing one week (or seven years), in the midst of which the Messiah was to be cut off, and cause the legal sacrifices and oblations to cease their virtue and efficacy, includes the three-and-a-half years of Jesus’ own preaching to the Jews, and the three-and-a-half years of the Apostles’ preaching to the Jews only; then the martyrdom of Stephen and the persecution following drove the evangelists from Jerusalem to Samaria. Soon afterwards Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, was called, and Peter, the Apostle of the circumcision, preached the gospel to Cornelius, the Roman centurion; and, though multitudes of the Jews had been converted before, we read of very few having been converted afterwards. The Jews were not immediately cast off upon their murder of Christ (Luke 24:47; Acts 3:12-26); but, after the martyrdom of Stephen, A.D. 33, they were virtually and theoretically dead, though Jerusalem was not destroyed by Titus till A.D. 70. All the arithmetics make a mistake in computing the interval of time between two dates, one of which was before, and the other after Christ; as there is no year in history known as B.C. 0 or A.D. 0, but the year immediately preceding A.D. 1 is called B.C. 1, the sum of the nominal years must be diminished by one (Sir John Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy, section 916). Even the very learned and usually accurate A.R. Fausset and William Smith, apparently not aware of this fact make the seventh year of Artaxerxes Longimanus 457 B.C. instead of 458 B.C., which it was, according to all the best authorities. Thus, 458 added to 33, and diminished by one, makes the 490 years of the prophecy. Christ was born four years before the beginning of the common Christian era; because He was born before Herod the Great died, and the latter died four years before the commencement of the common era. As he was 30 years old at His baptism, He was baptized 26 A.D. or 27 A.D., and crucified 30 A.D., in the midst of the last week (or seven years) of the prophecy. Still He, after three days, arose from the dead, and was present by His Spirit with His Apostles in confirming the covenant with many Jews the three-and-a-half years that composed the last half of the last prophetic week. Kanaph, translated overspreading, in verse 27, literally means wing. Sir Isaac Newton thinks that it refers to the Roman ensigns (silver eagles) brought to the east gate of the temple, and there sacrificed to by the soldiers. During the siege of Jerusalem by Titus it was perfectly evident, even to the Jewish general, historian and eye-witness, Josephus, that the Jews were “desolate,” or forsaken of God. Josephus asserts that it was the most ungodly generation that ever existed on earth; and he declares his belief that, if the Romans had not destroyed Jerusalem, the city would have been “swallowed up by the earth, or overwhelmed with a flood, or consumed, like Sodom, with fire from Heaven.” Titus besieged Jerusalem in April, A.D. 70, just after the feast of the passover, when twelve hundred thousand Jews, according to Josephus, or six hundred thousand, according to Tacitus, were crowded together in the city. Divided into three hostile factions, the Jews fought with and destroyed one another; reduced to famine, mothers ate their own children, as Moses predicted (Deut. 28:49-57); they suffered unexampled horrors, as Christ had foretold (Matthew 24:21). And when the temple was burned, and the city fell, August 10th, A.D. 70, Josephus records that eleven hundred thousand had perished in the siege, and ninety-seven thousand were sold into slavery. What an impressive commentary are these historical facts, related by an intelligent Jewish eye-witness, upon the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh verses of the ninth chapter of Daniel, and upon the predictions of Moses and Christ! And it is a most remarkable fact that, as Christ had warned His disciples (Luke 21:20, 21) to flee to the mountains when they saw Jerusalem compassed with armies, history states that Cestius Gallus, perfect of Syria, having besieged Jerusalem for six days, when he might have captured it in an hour or less, yet to the universal surprise, abandoned the siege, November, A.D. 66, and retreated, and his army was destroyed; so that, before the final siege by Titus, in April, A.D. 70, all the Christians in Jerusalem, remembering the words of Christ, emigrated beyond the Jordan to Pella, in the north of Perea, in the mountains of Gilead (some sixty miles northeast of Jerusalem), where king Herod Agrippa II., before whom Paul once stood, opened to them a safe asylum (Milman’s History of the Jews, Book xiii.; Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, Book iii., chap. v.; Schaff’s History of the Apostolic Church, section 98). These facts furnish a most forcible illustration of the ultimate salvation of all the true people of God, and the destruction of all their enemies.

“It was the general impression of the Jews in exile that, after the seventy years of captivity should end, Messiah would come in glory to vindicate the cause of Israel, and to set up his kingdom in Jerusalem. Daniel is, therefore, commissioned, in the ninth chapter of his prophecy, to inform them that seventy times seven years must elapse after their return before Messiah would come, and that even then Messiah would not come as yet in the glory foretold by the earlier prophets, and anticipated prematurely by the Jews, but would come to die for the making an end of sins. Thus, the faith and patience of the ancient servants of God were to be greatly exercised. Daniel studied the revelation given from God in the letters of Jeremiah (5:2), in order to know the times and events foretold. Herein we see his teachableness and humanity.” “God’s promise of deliverance from the Babylonish captivity did not restrain Daniel from prayer, but was rather his incentive to greater earnestness in supplications, as having the strongest ground of assurance that his prayers would be heard. Daniel humbly confessed, not only his nation’s, but his own sins, and acknowledged the righteousness of God in their punishment, but pleaded, in his own and Israel’s behalf, God’s covenant and mercies and forgiveness. Daniel’s confession of sin precedes immediately the revelation as to the coming of Messiah. So it ever is. The Spirit first convicts the soul of its sin, and next points to Christ, ‘the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’ Messiah died in the midst of the great prophetical week, for the confirmation of His covenant with the many who believe on Him: by His one sacrifice all other sacrifices are done away with: and by the fact that the four hundred and ninety years have long since elapsed, the falsity of the Jews’ expectation of Messiah, as if He had not yet come, is unanswerably proved.”—A.R. Fausset.

Daniel went not back to his own country. He could give greater assistance to his kindred by remaining in Babylon. He witnessed the moving forward of the first caravan, and heard of the laying of the foundations of the second temple. He delivered his last prophecy in the third year of Cyrus (Dan. 10, 11, 12).

The eighth, eleventh and twelfth chapters of Daniel (the eleventh in the most minute detail) foretell “the successive histories of Xerxes of Persia; Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, and conqueror of Persia; the four-fold division of Alexander’s kingdom at his death and the consequent conflicts between the kings of the north and the kings of the south, the Seleucidae and the Ptolemies; and, lastly, the proud violence of Antiochus Epiphanes (of the Seleucidae) against the covenant people of God, and his final doom. The history of Antiochus’s furious persecution of the Jews will be given in its proper place. The details are given with such minuteness beforehand by the prophet, in order to strengthen and support the faithful ones among God’s ancient people in the fiery ordeal through which they were about to pass during the long period when they were to be without any living prophets. If the world-powers were about to be permitted to trample under foot the people of the covenant, the latter would take comfort in knowing that their God had told them of it ‘in the Scripture of truth’ (Dan. 10:21) long before; and had also engaged that the trial, though most severe, was yet to be of short duration. Like the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, Antichrist was to have two advents—a more immediate and a more distant future. As there is to be the last great Antichrist in the latter days of the New Testament, just before the second coming of Christ, so there was to be a typical and precursory Antichrist, in the latter days of the Old Testament, just before the first coming of Christ. Both alike deal with Israel in the way of perverting her by flatteries, and them persecuting her. Hence arises the need that we should take heed to the signs of the times, and be on our guard ourselves, and put others, too, upon their guard, against the seductions, errors and dangers of these latter times, which are verging fast towards the times of Antichrist. Romanism and other forms of apostate Christianity, combined with rationalism and the godless wisdom of the world, have most of the elements of Antichristianity which are preparing the way for the man of sin (2 Thess. 2). Let us then, with holy zeal, chastened with humility and love, ‘earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints’ (Jude 3).”—Fausset.

“Towards the close of the visions of Daniel there is a melting away, as it were, of the things of time, and a transition to the things of eternity. It is, therefore, impossible fully to explain these portions of the book of Daniel. They are left as a precious possession to the church of Christ, till the time shall come when their fulfillment shall reflect light upon the written word of God.”—Rose.

Daniel is thought to have lived to be over ninety years of age, and to have died in his office at court. With him died the prophetic office in the land of captivity. He had no successor. To the remnant of the twelve tribes who yet remained scattered abroad God gave no prophet. Their spiritual advantages thereafter to be obtained were by going up to Jerusalem annually, which many of them did, even down to the second destruction of Jerusalem. The prophets in Jerusalem at the rebuilding of the temple were men who had come up with the people out of Babylon and her provinces.

Of the captivity now brought to a close we may say that it was foreordained, and predicted by Moses, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah and Habakkuk. It was to purge away the dross from the church, even the mass of formalists, apostates and idolaters, and purify and sanctify God’s elect ones who adhered to Him, together with their seed and those connected with them. It certainly cured the Jews of gross idolatry, such as the worshiping of images, the sun or moon or anything which God had made. This change was, probably, more natural than spiritual, and mainly caused by their disgust at the idolatries of their conquerors, and a patriotic clinging to their own national monotheistic religion. Mental idolatry, where in a man loves something else better than his Maker, the Jews never got entirely rid of, neither have Christians to this very day. The captivity was of great advantage to the Jews, because it humbled them—gave them a spirit of confession and supplication with deep humility, and prepared them with their whole heart to praise God for the fulfillment of this prophecy: “For thus saith the Lord, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. Then ye shall call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. And I will be found of you, saith the Lord: and I will turn away your captivity.” “And I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive” (Jer. 29:10-14).

The captivity, with the light emanating from Judea for centuries previous, was of advantage to the heathen world, not indeed generally and permanently, but in particular instances and for a season.

In the first year of his sole reign at Babylon (B.C. 536), Cyrus, acknowledging that the God of Israel is the Lord God of Heaven, proclaims that the Jews may return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple of God.[7] The time arrived for the departure of the caravan, consisting of nearly 50,000 persons—say 42,360, besides their servants and maids, 7,337, and their singing men and singing women, 200. For the transportation of these, with their clothing, provisions and property, they required 736 horses, 245 mules, 435 camels, and 6,720 asses—a total of 8,136 beasts of burden (Ezra 2:1-70).

The People were chiefly of the tribes of Judah, Benjamin and Levi—those last carried away; and their ecclesiastical rulers and guides were their military leaders in this march. It was a sublime spectacle to behold this peaceful caravan marching through the great wilderness that intervened between Babylon and the Holy Land.

Long was the march across the barren waste, and tedious was the journey. But with their splendid outfit they accomplished it in safety. On arriving in Judea each one or family selected his or their own location, and, after a partial settlement therein, came together, at the old site of Jerusalem, as one man, and upon its old foundation built the altar of the Lord, which had been overthrown at the destruction of the temple; and, on the first day of the month, set up the worship of God. From that day forth the priests lodged in the city and kept up the daily sacrifice. The smoke as of old ascended heavenward from amid the solitary ruins of the once great Jerusalem, the people came from all quarters to this identical spot, to engage in the public worship of God, and nearly the whole month was consumed in the exercise of religious services, and finally closed by the celebration of the feast of tabernacles (Ezra 3:1-16).

The rebuilding of the temple was resolved on and the work hastened. The king of Babylon made a royal contribution, but not sufficient; then all the people, from the highest to the lowest, donated what they could afford, and some of them gave abundantly. In the second month of the second year of their return they laid the foundation of the building. Zerubbabel the governor, the high priest Jeshua, and all the priests and Levites, were present. There was great rejoicing on the occasion, but some mourning. Some of the old men who had seen Solomon’s temple standing, shed tears when they saw the great contrast between that and this.

The Samaritans hindered the building of the temple, and caused an order for its suspension to be issued by the king of Babylon, and the work remained dormant fourteen years. It was no disadvantage to the Jews, because they had the more time to attend to and improve their own private affairs. At length, being urged by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, the people renewed the building of the temple (Ezra 5:1; Haggai 1:1-11). Although inferior in one respect (the lack of gold and silver) to the former, the prophet assured the people that it should excel it in another (spiritual) respect; for the “Desire of all nations” should come and fill it with His glorious presence, and this would be superior to the precious metals and the Shekinah of old. So, to the poor believer, Christ is of infinitely more value than all the treasures of earth. This prophecy, in Haggai 2:6-9, is the fourth Old Testament prediction of the time of Christ’s coming. A part of the language of Haggai has reference to Jacob’s dying prophecy of the coming of Shiloh, or the Peace-Giver, unto whom should the gathering of the people or nations be (Gen. 49:10). Divine Providence shook all nations by allowing the wars of the Graeco-Macedonian and the Roman Empires, making the Greek language and the Roman dominion universal, for the early rapid propagation of Christianity. And God shook the Heaven, in Christ’s time, when He spake from it; the earth, when it quaked; and the sea, when He commanded the winds and waves. He who alone can satisfy the true desires of all nations came, and by His holy and peace-giving presence filled the second temple with greater glory than the first. (See Isa. 49:20, 21; 60; Mal. 3:1; Matthew 12:6; 21:12-14; 26:55; John 1:14; 14:27; Colossians 1:20; 2 Cor. 4:6). Herod thoroughly repaired, enlarged and adorned Zerubbabel’s temple, but the Jews still considered and called it the second temple (Josephus, Ant., xv. 11; War, vi. 5). They expected their Messiah to come before its destruction (Josephus, War, vi. 5). The temple this time was twenty years in building, from B.C. 535 to B.C. 515. Its completion was joyfully celebrated by the offering of seven hundred sacrifices of bullocks, rams and lambs; and a special offering for all Israel of twelve he goats, according to the number of the twelve tribes of Israel. The priests were set in their divisions and the Levites in their courses, and the whole routine of temple worship fully reinstated once more. Of course the ark, with the tables of stone, the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the mercy-seat, and the cherubim, and the mysterious Urim and Thummim, were all wanting. The dedication being over, all the people observed the Passover for seven days; and then the temple remained open for the worship of God, and so continued until He who was greater than the temple entered it amid the shouts of the surrounding multitude, crying, “Hosanna to the son of David: blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” (Matthew 21:9).

Xerxes the Great, who was king of Babylon, was equally favorable to the Jews as his predecessors. So was his son Artaxerxes, called Longimanus, B.C. 464; and he is the Artaxerxes alluded to by Ezra, 7:1. He is also the king Ahazuerus, who divorced his wife Vashti in the third year of his reign, and married Esther, one of the Jewish captives (Esther 1:1-22; 2:1-15). After reigning six years he appointed Ezra, the priest, governor over Judea, and authorized him to go up to Judea with all those who wished to accompany him. Ezra accordingly gathered a company at the river Ahava, there proclaimed a fast, and humbly asked the Lord for wisdom and direction in the great undertaking, so that they and their little ones might be protected. Artaxerxes and his counselors were liberal in contributions to support this second exodus from Babylon to Canaan, and poured out their silver and gold freely. The king authorized him to draw on his treasury at Babylon for what he needed, and also gave him an order on the treasurers beyond the river for silver, wheat, wine, salt and oil. He also relieved the ministers of the sanctuary from toll, custom and tribute. He authorized Ezra to appoint judges, and have justice executed in the land, and directed him to have the people taught the laws of God and the king.

Ezra left the river Ahava with his caravan on the twentieth day of the first month, and reached Jerusalem in the fifth month (Ezra 7 and 8). The whole number of persons who accompanied him appears to have been 7,104, made up of 1,776 males and 5,328 females and children.

There were seventy-eight years between the appointments of Zerubbabel and Ezra; and we infer that Zerubbabel was dead when Ezra was appointed. Ezra corrected the vice of intermarrying with strangers, so that many put away their wives. The prophet Zechariah encouraged the church about this time by saying, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: He is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass” (Zech. 9:9).

Mordecai[8] was a man of wisdom and integrity, and, although a captive, was faithful to his king. During the first year of queen Esther he discovered a plot made by two of the king’s chamberlains to murder their royal master, and, upon his making it known to the queen, the conspirators were hanged. The king commanded his prime minister Haman to dress up Mordecai in the royal apparel, place him on the king’s horse, lead the horse through the streets of the city, and proclaim to the multitude the honor thus conferred on Mordecai. This was done at the very time that Haman was about to obtain the king of Persia’s permission to hang Mordecai on the gallows fifty cubits high, that he had made for that purpose, because Mordecai rose not up when Haman approached him, nor did him reverence. But the king, on learning that Haman was the author of the decree to have all the Jews in his empire destroyed, for the offense of Haman, ordered Haman to be hanged on the gallows which he had made for Mordecai. He also virtually reversed the decree which had been made against the Jews, and authorized them to slay their enemies on the very day that they were to have been slain by them, and made Mordecai prime minister in the place of Haman. Thus we see that in the days of Ahasuerus there were a queen and a prime minister at court of the Jewish race, and, of course, friends of the Jews (Esther 2:21-23; 3-10).

King Artaxerxes (Ahasuerus) appointed Nehemiah, his cup bearer, who was full of wisdom and courage, governor over Judea in place of Ezra, who had been governor there twelve years (from B.C. 458 to B.C. 446). Nehemiah went up with a full military escort, authorized to rebuild the city and the walls around it. All engaged in building the walls, priests, princes, smiths, merchants, etc., and even females. It had to be done in troublous times (Dan. 9:25). For, by reason of the deadly opposition of the Samaritans, the workmen on the walls had to work with one hand and hold a weapon with the other. But the work progressed and was completed in fifty-two days.

Strange wives had to be put away again, and the people under Nehemiah and with Nehemiah confessed their sins and the sins of their fathers, and entered into a solemn covenant, under a curse and an oath, to walk in the law of the Lord—to observe the Sabbath and the Sabbatical years—to consecrate their sons—to pay tithes—to worship God, and never forsake His house. They wrote the covenant and sealed it (Neh. 8-10). The Jews were now cured of gross idolatry. At last that vile passion, which had prevailed so fearfully for so many centuries, seemed to have disappeared.

Nehemiah’s government of Judea was long and prosperous, though he met with much opposition at times, in carrying out his noble reforms, from sinful and rebellious Jews. Nehemiah was alive after Joiada became high priest (Neh. 13:28); but the termination of his government over Judea and the end of his noble and useful life are hidden in obscurity.

Malachi, the last prophet of the Old Testament, is believed to have lived at the same time with or just after Nehemiah; and his prophecy was probably composed about 420 B.C. Its canonicity is established by several New Testament quotations (Matthew 11:10; 17:12; Mark 1:2; 9:11, 12; Luke 1:17; Rom. 9:13). Like Nehemiah, Malachi censured the profane and mercenary spirit of the priests, the people’s marriages with foreigners, the non-payment of the tithes, and the rich men’s want of sympathy towards the poor. He predicts the coming of John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ, under the name of Elijah the prophet, and also the coming of Christ, as the Lord coming suddenly to His temple. He points to the great separating time between the righteous who serve merciful and unchangeable Father of all that fear Him and think upon His name, arising upon them as the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His wings, keeping their name in His book of remembrance, and finally gathering them as His jewels to Himself; while he represents God as the righteous and terrible Judge of the proud and wicked, whom He will smite with a curse, and forever destroy with burning.

From the close of Nehemiah’s rule over Judea and the end of Malachi’s prophecy to the birth of our Savior, was about four hundred years; and the account of God’s chosen people during this long period must be gained from profane history, and a few items from the apocryphal[9] writings of the Jews. These latter writings are, to a great extent, inconsistent and unreliable; and the history of the Jews by Josephus is, to some extent, unreliable during this and former periods. Events that came under the notice of Josephus during his life, including the last war with Rome, the destruction of the temple, and city of Jerusalem, etc., are regarded as quite authentic.

Although the four great monarchies overran and subdued Jerusalem and Judea, yet they were not permitted by an all-wise and covenant-keeping God to destroy utterly the people of that land, or even break down their nationality until Christ came to set up His spiritual kingdom on earth. The prophet Ezekiel is to the point here. He was a captive in the Babylonish empire, and predicted the succession of the three great natural kingdoms to come (the Persian, Greek and Roman), and then the coming of Christ to overcome them all by His spiritual reign. Said he: “Thus saith the Lord God, Remove the diadem, and take off the crown; this shall not be the same: exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high. I will overturn, overturn, overturn it: and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him” (Ezek.21:26,27).

These three great overturnings were to take place after Ezekiel’s prophecy, and then Christ should come, whose right it was to reign over His people, spiritually, among all nations, and have no need whatever for any further temporal nationality. To Him as the Shiloh should be the gathering of His people, irrespective of locality. As saith He to the woman of Samaria: “The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor at Jerusalem, worship the Father.” “The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:21, 23, 24).

1. It has been seriously and learnedly argued, in recent books, that the American Indians are the ten lost tribes of Israel.

2. “The gate is the place of holding courts of justice and levees in the East (Esther 2:19; Job 29:7). So ‘the sublime Porte, or Gate, denotes the Sultan’s government, his councils being formerly held in the entrance of his palace. Daniel was a chief counselor of the king, and president over the governors of the different orders into which the Magi were divided.’”—Fausset.

3. The ancient cuneiform inscriptions on bricks found among the Babylonian ruins mention that burning was one of the national punishments of Babylon.

4. The mental disease with which God afflicted Nebuchadnezzar is believed to have been one of a well-known class of maladies known by such names as lycanthropy (wolf-man), kynanthropy (dog-man), etc., according to the animal which the patient imagines himself to be, and whose habits he imitates. During his madness, his counselors and lords (Daniel iv. 36) carried on the government.

5. The identification of Belshazzar and of Darius the Median with persons mentioned by uninspired writers is among the most intricate problems of ancient history. Combining the evidence of Scripture and of profane historians and the cuneiform inscriptions, the succession in the Babylonian monarchy was probably as follows: Nebuchadnezzar, 43 years; Evil-Merodach, son of Nebuchadnezzar, 2 years—murdered and succeeded by his sister’s husband, Neriglissar, who reigned 4 years; the latter’s son, Laborosoarchod, a mere child, reigned but 9 months, and was slain by a conspiracy, which elevated a usurper, Nabonnedus, to the throne, which he occupied 17 years. During the latter part of his reign, he associated with him in the empire his oldest son, Belshazzar, who was grandson, on the mother’s side, of Nebuchadnezzar. The term “son,” in Scripture, often means grandson, or descendant. Nabounedus was at a neighboring city, Borsippa, where he surrendered to Cyrus; while Belshazzar perished in Babylon the same night of his sensual and blasphemous banquet. Such joint kingships were not uncommon in ancient times. As his father and himself were the first and second rulers, Belshazzar offers to make Daniel only the third ruler in the kingdom (Daniel v. 16). [As to the identification of Darius the Median, see the next foot-note.]

6. It is most likely that Darius the Median was the same as Cyaxares II. (mentioned by Xenophon), who was the son and successor of Astyages (called also Ahasuarus), king of Media. Cyrus, a Persian nobleman, conquered Astyages, and married the daughter of Cyaxares II. (or Darius); and, uniting the Medes and Persians into one kingdom, and wishing to conciliate the Medes, he yielded his aged and weak uncle and father-in-law a nominal supremacy at Babylon, where the latter reigned till his death two years afterwards, while Cyrus, the real conqueror of Babylon, being fond of war, continued his military career, going against the Hindoos, the Derbaces, and the Massagatae. In accordance with this explanation, Daniel (ix. 1) says that Darius “was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans.” Some think that Darius the Mede was Astyages himself, the grandfather of Cyrus.

7. God caused Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes to be favorable to His people. “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: He turneth it whithersoever He will” (Prov. 21:1); then of course the hearts of other men, inferior to kings in power and rank and wealth and honor, are in the absolute control of God. The personal motives of the Persian kings in favoring Israel may have been their worship of but one good Supreme Being (Ormazd) like Israel; Isaiah’s prophecy of Cyrus by name as the servant of God, who should deliver Israel from Babylon; and the Persian policy to place a people friendly to Persia on the frontier of Egypt.

8. “The book of Esther supplies the gap between Ezra 6 and 7. Xerxes, the Ahasuerus of Esther, intervenes between Darius and Artaxerxes. Ahasuerus was a common title of many Medo-Persian kings. Though the name of God does not occur in Esther, His presence pervades the book. Although invisible, He is none the less active. God works no less by His providence in the world where he is veiled, than by His grace in the church wherein He is revealed. He exercises a special providence for the preservation of all His chosen people, wherever they may be.”—Fausset.
“No scene of Scripture history is more often applied to a spiritual use than Esther’s bold venture into the presence of the ‘king of kings’ (as the Persian monarchs called themselves), and his reaching out to her the golden sceptre as the sign of grace.”—Wm. Smith.

9. Apocrypha means hidden or spurious. The books called the Apocrypha, in the Old Testament, are not contained in the Hebrew Bible at all, but are found in the Greek Septuagint. They were written by unknown authors from 300 to 30 B.C. They are not quoted at all by the writers of the New Testament, and they abound in fictitious stories and doctrinal errors. The Catholic council of Trent in 1546 endorsed as canonical or inspired all the Apocrypha except 1st and 2nd Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh. The Hebrew church, “to whom were committed the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2), and all the Protestant or non-Catholic denominations, reject the Apocrypha as uninspired. These writings are interesting as showing the workings of the Jewish mind in the interval between the Old and the New Testaments. It is from the Apocrypha that the Roman Catholics derive the texts for the proof of their unscriptural doctrines of purgatory, prayers for the dead, and the meritoriousness of good works. In the Apocrypha, as derived from the Persian Zend-Avesta, two-seedism, or dualism, can find its strongest arguments.

Chapter VI. From the Restoration of the Jews to the Coming of Christ.

The affairs of the Jews continued about the same under the Grecian as under the Medo-Persian reign. While Jaddua was high priest in Jerusalem Alexander visited the Holy Land III person, was well received, and promised to befriend the inhabitants. It is said that he was met, before his entrance, into Jerusalem, by the priestly tribe in their white robes, accompanied by a vast number of citizens dressed in white, and the high priest (chief ruler) at their head, accompanied with a band of priestly musicians, clashing their cymbals. The sight was very imposing, and obtained favor in the sight of the world’s conqueror. His name was well received in Palestine during his short reign of about thirteen years, and both Jews and Samaritans embraced every opportunity to entreat his favor on themselves and urge his punishment on their opponents. For about a century and a half subsequent to the death of Alexander, Palestine was considered a province of the Graeco-Egyptian kingdom. It was the principal stage across which “the, kings of the south,” the Alexandrian Ptolemies, and the “kings of the north,” the Seleucidae from Antioch, passed to and fro with their court intrigues and incessant armies, their Indian elephants, their Grecian cavalry, and their Oriental pomp. Immediately succeeding the “death of Alexander, Judea came into the possession of Laomedon, one of his generals. On his defeat, Ptolemy, the king of Egypt, attempted to seize the whole of Syria. He advanced against Jerusalem, assaulted it on the Sabbath, and met with no resistance, the superstitious Jews scrupling to violate the holy day, even in self-defense. The conqueror carried away 100,000 captives, whom he settled chiefly in Alexandria and Cyrene. In a short time, following a more humane policy, he endeavored to attach the Jewish people to his cause, enrolled an army of 30,000 men, and entrusted the chief garrisons of the country to their care. Syria and Judea did not escape the dreadful anarchy which ensued during the destructive warfare waged by the generals and successors of Alexander. Twice these provinces fell into the hands of Antigonus, and twice were regained by Ptolemy, to whose share they were finally adjudged after the decisive defeat of Antigonus at Ipsus. The maritime towns, Tyre, Joppa and Gaza, were the chief points of contention: Jerusalem itself seems to have escaped the horrors of war. During this dangerous period Onias, the high priest, administered the public, affairs for twenty-one years. He was succeeded, the year after the battle of Ipsus, by Simon the Just, a pontiff on whom Jewish tradition dwells with peculiar attachment. His death was the commencement of peril and disaster, announced, say the Rabbies, by the most alarming prodigies. The sacrifices, which were always favorably accepted during his life, at his death became uncertain or unfavorable. The scape goat, which used to be thrown from a rook, and to be dashed immediately to pieces, escaped (a fearful omen) into the desert. The great west light of the golden chandelier no longer burnt with a steady flame; sometimes it was extinguished. The sacrificial fire languished; the sacrificial bread failed, so as not to suffice, as formerly, for the whole priesthood.”—Milman.

“Palestine was subject to the first five Ptolemies of Egypt about a century, B.C. 301-198. Simon the Just was succeeded by his brother Eleazar, his son, Onias being under age (B.C. 292-251). His long rule seems to have been profoundly tranquil, under the mild governments of Ptolemy I., Soter (the son of Lagus), and Ptolemy II., Philadelphus, who succeeded his father in B. C. 285 and reigned till B.C. 247.”—W. Smith.

About this time the translation of the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) was undertaken, under the auspices of Ptolemy Philadelphus, at Alexandria. Whether it was to gratify the king by enriching his library, and thereby adding to his fame and the gratification of learned men in that age of the world; or whether it was brought about by the combined efforts of the Jews in Alexandria and throughout the kingdom of Ptolemy, history does not authentically inform us. There are many unreasonable and fabulous statements made in regard to the matter. We may reasonably suppose, however, that the vast number of Jews scattered among the nations even at that period, who spoke the Greek language, so prevalent in the world, wanted a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek tongue. At any rate, it is said that seventy men, noted for learning, were selected to perform this work, and did so, since which time it has been called the translation of the LXX., or Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, and remains the Old Testament of the Greek “church” to this very day. There was a revival of learning about this period, and Alexandria was noted for her learned men. In that fostering atmosphere there sprang up those influences which she exercised, over the Jewish church, and the Jewish over the Christian church and professed Christian church for two thousand years.

Learned men have pronounced this translation very inaccurate, and yet perhaps no translation was ever more popular with the people. It was in use among the Jews at the time of our Savior’s appearance on earth, and was quoted by Him and His Apostles, evangelists, and early followers, and no scholastic, criticism has been able to gain foothold against such a Divine sanction as that. The New Testament writers correct the Septuagint by the Hebrew when needful.

Most of the books called Apocryphal were written between the return from the Babylonish captivity and the Christian era, and form a sort of appendix to the Jewish Scriptures, and aid to some extent in filling that blank which would otherwise exist for 400 years of the Mosaic dispensation.

Antiochus IV., Epiphanes,[1] king of Syria, B.C. 175, became one of the most cruel oppressors the Jews had ever met with. He wished to Grecianize everything—names, places, fashions, religion and all. He acted like a madman. He attempted to exterminate the religion of the Jews, and substitute that of the Greeks. At one time he approached “Jerusalem, took it without much resistance, put to death in three days’ time 40,000 of the inhabitants, and seized as many more to be sold as slaves. He entered every part of the temple, pillaged the treasury, seized all the sacred utensils, the golden candlestick, the table of show-bread, the altar of incense, and thus collected a booty to the amount of 1,800 talents (about three million dollars). He then commanded a great sow to be sacrificed on the altar of burnt offerings, part of the flesh to be boiled, and the liquor from the unclean animal to be sprinkled over every part of the temple; and thus desecrated with the most odious defilement the sacred place, which the Jews had considered for centuries the one holy spot in all the universe. Menelaus retained the dignity of High Priest; but two foreign officers, Philip, a Phrygian, and Andronicus, were made Governors of Jerusalem and Samaria.” He designed the entire destruction of the Jewish race, when, in two years after this unhallowed course, he authorized one Apollonius to carry into execution his design with cruel dispatch. “Apollonius waited until the Sabbath, when the whole people were occupied in their religious duties. He then let loose his soldiers against the unresisting multitude, slew all the men, till the streets ran with blood, and seized all the women as captives. He proceeded to pillage and then to dismantle the city, which he set on fire in many places; he threw down the walls, and built a strong fortress on the highest part of Mount Zion, which commanded the temple and all the rest of the city. From this garrison he harassed all the people of the country, who stole in with fond attachment to visit the ruins, or offer a hasty and interrupted worship in the place of the sanctuary; for all the public services had ceased, and no voice of adoration was heard in the holy city, unless of the profane heathen calling on their idols. The persecution did not end here. Antiochus issued an edict for uniformity of worship throughout his dominions, and dispatched officers into all parts to enforce rigid compliance with the decree. This office in the district of Judea and Samaria was assigned to Athenaeus, an aged man, who was well versed in the ceremonies and usages of the Grecian religion. The Samaritans, according to the Jewish account, by whom they are represented as always asserting their Jewish lineage when it seemed to their advantage, and their Median descent when they hoped thereby to escape any immediate danger, yielded at once; and the temple on Gerizim was formally consecrated to Jupiter Xenius. Athenaeus, having been so far successful, proceeded to Jerusalem, where with the assistance of the garrison he prohibited and suppressed every observance of the Jewish religion, forced the people to profane the Sabbath, to eat swine’s flesh and other unclean food, and expressly forbade the national rite of circumcision. The temple was dedicated to Jupiter Olympius; the statue of that deity erected on part of the altar of burnt offerings, and sacrifice duly performed. Two women, who had circumcised their children, were led round the city with the babes hanging at their breasts, and then cast headlong from the wall; and many more of those barbarities committed, which, as it were, escape the reprobation of posterity from their excessive atrocity. Cruelties too horrible to be related, sometimes, for that very reason, do not meet with the detestation they deserve. Among other martyrdoms, Jewish tradition dwells with honest pride upon that of Eleazar, an aged scribe, ninety years old, who determined to leave a notable example to such as be young to die willingly and courageously for the honorable and holy laws; and that of the seven brethren who, encouraged by their mother, rejected the most splendid offers, and confronted the most excruciating torments rather than infringe the law. From Jerusalem the persecution spread throughout the country: in every city the same barbarities were executed, the same profanations introduced; and, as a last insult, the feast of the Bacchanalia, the license of which, as these feasts were celebrated in the later ages of Greece shocked the severe virtue of the older Romans, was substituted for the national festival of tabernacles. The reluctant Jews were forced to join in these riotous orgies, and carry the ivy, the insignia of the god. So near was the Jewish nation, and the worship of Jehovah, to total extermination”—Milman.

Many have been the scenes described in ancient and modern history, where the people of the Most High God have suffered persecution purely for conscience’ sake, but we believe very few have surpassed in enormity that which they suffered under Antiochus Epiphanes about 167 years before the Christian era. There was no insubordination, no revolt, no political pretext, for this cruelty toward his own peaceable subjects, but simply a determination to destroy the visible signs of God’s worshipers or destroy the people themselves! Antiochus Epiphanes died at Tabae, in Persia, B.C. 164, of a most horrible and loathsome, disease of the bowels, it is said, eaten alive with worms, emitting an intolerable odor, acknowledging that his illness was sent upon him by the God of Israel for his cruelty and sacrilege, and becoming raving mad before he breathed his last.

It seems to be a matter worthy of note that while the successors of Alexander who ruled in Egypt were generally mild in their dealings with the Jews in Palestine; those who ruled in Antioch were almost invariably cruel and oppressive toward them.

Before the final extinction of the Jews and their worship God raised up their deliverers in their very midst, who by natural means resisted this “abomination of desolation,” took up arms against the mighty power of the Syrian monarch, and finally gained their independence so far as to be permitted to worship the God of their fathers as in days of old. Jehovah did not in a miraculous way destroy their enemies and give them relief, but He did it by raising up a certain individual and his five sons, who, by holy zeal, bravery, stratagem, and true wisdom, discomfited large armies, crippled the resources of their great adversary, and secured peace.

In the town of Modin, in Palestine, fifteen miles West of Jerusalem, there lived a man by the name of Mattathias, who had five sons by the names of Johanan, Simon, Judas, Eleazar and Jonathan. When Apelles, the officer of king Antiochus, came to Modin to enforce idolatry on the citizens, he manifested great regard for Mattathias, and made him splendid offers to propitiate his favor, and secure his influence in carrying the edict of Antiochus into execution. Mattathias refused his offers, and declared his determination to live and die in the faith of his fathers.

While viewing, with holy indignation, the sacrifices offered to the heathen deity, he espied an, apostate Jew officiating at the altar; this was more than he could bear to behold. Like Phineas of old, in a transport of zeal for the cause of God, he struck the offender dead upon the altar, and then turned upon Apelles, the king’s commissioner, and slew him. Here was a conflict raised single-handed with the mighty potentate at Antioch, and Mattathias prepared himself for the struggle. He called together his five sons and as many as had sufficient zeal to do so to follow him, and be retired at once to the mountains. His forces rapidly increased, but a thousand of them were surprised and destroyed by the Syrian troops on a Sabbath day—because the Jews would not fight on that day. Mattathias, therefore, resolved henceforward not to regard the Sabbath day in war, but to defend himself on that day as well as on any other. “The insurgents conducted their revolt with equal enterprise and discretion. For a time they lay hid in the mountain fastnesses; and, as opportunity occurred, poured down upon the towns, destroyed the heathen altars, enforced circumcision, punished all apostates who fell into their hands, recovered many copies of the law, which their enemies had wantonly defaced, and re-established the synagogues for public worship, the temple being defiled and in possession of the enemy. Their ranks were swelled with the zealots for the law, who were then called the Chassidim. For, immediately after the return from Babylonia, two sects had divided the people; the Zadikim, the righteous, who observed the written law of Moses, and the more austere and abstemious Chassidim, or the holy, who added to the law the traditions and observances of the fathers, and professed a holiness beyond the letter of the covenant. From the former sprung the Caraites and Sadducees of later times; from the latter, the Pharisees. But the age of Mattathias was ill suited to this laborious and enterprising warfare; having bequeathed the command to Judas, the most valiant of his sons, he sank under the weight of years and toil. So great already was the terror of his name that he was buried, without disturbance on the part of the enemy, in his native city of Modin.”—Milman.

The youthful general added vigor and enterprise to the cause, without lessening the prudence and skill which had hitherto attended it.

Judas unfurled the banner of the “Maccabees,” the reason of which name is involved in obscurity, but under which he and his brothers fought, and their names became famous on earth. One succeeded another until the whole of them disappeared, without reproach, from the scenes of earth. They governed Judea for about sixty years, and then their descendants for seventy years longer (until 37 B.C.).

The rulers in Judea were much troubled, about 100 years B.C., with dissensions, of a religious character, in their midst. The controversy between Pharisees and Sadducees increased, and the more rapidly as peace prevailed between Judea and other nations. Their views were quite opposite. “The Pharisees were moderate predestinarians; the Sadducees asserted free will. The Pharisees believed in the immortality of the soul and the existence of angels, though their creed on both these subjects was strongly tinged with Orientalism. The Sadducees denied both. The Pharisees received not merely the prophets, but the traditional law, likewise, as of equal authority with the books of Moses. The Sadducees, if they did not reject, considered the prophets greatly inferior to the law. The Sadducees are said to have derived their doctrine from Sadoc, the successor of Antigonus Socho in the presidency of the great Sanhedrim. Antigonus taught the lofty doctrine of pure and disinterested love and obedience to God, without regard to punishment or reward. Sadoc is said to have denied the latter, without maintaining the higher doctrine on which it was founded. Still, the Sadducees are far from what they are sometimes represented, the teachers of a loose and indulgent E Epicureanism; they inculcated the belief in Divine Providence, and the just and certain administration of temporal rewards and punishments.

“The Pharisees had the multitude, ever led away by extravagant religious pretensions, entirely at their disposal: Sadduceeism spread chiefly among the higher orders. It would be unjust to the Sadducees to confound them with that unpatriotic and Hellenized party, which, during the whole of the noble struggles of the Maccabees, sided with the Syrian oppressors, for these are denounced as avowed apostates from Judaism; yet probably, after the establishment of the independent government, the latter might make common cause and become gradually mingled up with the Sadduceean party, as exposed alike to the severities of Pharisaic administration. During the rest of the Jewish history we shall find these parties as violently opposed to each other, and sometimes causing as fierce and dangerous dissensions as those which rent the commonwealths of Greece and Rome or the republican states of modern Europe. It was at the close of his reign that Hyrcanus broke with the Pharisaic party, and openly joined the opposite faction; a measure of which the disastrous consequences were not entirely felt till the reign of his son, Alexander.”—Milman. Hyrcanus reigned twenty-nine years, and was an able, faithful and successful ruler.

Judas, whose Greek name was Aristobulus (son of Hyrcanus), succeeded his father in the year 106 B.C., gained the character of the “Lover of the Greeks,” and won the admiration of Gentile writers by his moderation towards them, and by the energy with which as his father had incorporated the Edomites on the south, so he conquered and absorbed the Ituraean borderers on the north. He lived but a year in office, and that was a year of crime and misery. He imprisoned his mother, and starved her to death; and imprisoned three of his brothers, and had one of them slain. But that for which he was chiefly remembered was that he was the first of his family to assume the regal title and diadem, B.C. 106. Once more there was a “king in Israel,” but bearing the name unknown before and to acquire before long a solemn significance, “King of the Jews.” “It was still, however, as high priest that he reigned, and it was not till his brother, Jonathan, mounted the throne, under the name of Alexander, that the coins alternately bear the names of Jonathan, the high priest (or, more rarely, the king) in Hebrew, and Alexander, the king, in Greek. In common parlance he was known by the two names combined, Alexander Jannaeus.”

Alexander, after an unquiet and eventful reign of twenty-seven years, departed this life, and his widow, Alexandra, succeeded him, and became first “Queen of the Jews,” B.C. 78. Upon his recommendation before his decease, she threw herself upon the protection chiefly of the Pharisees, as the most powerful and influential, as well as the most turbulent, of the sects. Alexandra reigned prosperously for nine years, and then fell sick and died. The Pharisees, emboldened by the favors shown them in her time, began to persecute the opposing sects. Her first son, Hyrcanus II., had been made high priest during her reign, while her second son, Aristobulus, a man of daring and intrigue, succeeded in placing himself at the head of the weaker party, the Sadducees, and finally at the head of the army outside of Jerusalem, and upon his mother’s death sought to make himself master of the place. He marched against it, but was opposed by the Pharisees within, and his brother, Hyrcanus II., as high priest, at their head. He, however, succeeded in obtaining possession of the city, and his brother, the high priest, yielded his claims and agreed to return to private life, B.C. 69. This blow, for a season, was fatal to the Pharisaic party. The time had now arrived when commotion succeeded commotion, by the turbulence of the three sects into which the Jews were divided, viz.: Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes,[2] the latter being much more quiet and retired than the other two. But there was another enemy to arise which would be more dangerous to the Asmonean house than the Pharisees. Antipater, the father of Herod, an Idumenean of noble birth, was the son of Antipas, who had been governor of that province under Alexander Jannaeus. He had influence over Hyrcanus, and induced him to seek the protection and aid of Aretas, king of Arabia; so that Aristobulus soon found himself assailed by 50,000 men—Aretas, Antipater and Hyrcanus at their head, B.C. 65. He was defeated and fled to Jerusalem, where he was unsupported by the people, and shut himself up in the temple and prepared for defense. A deliverer at length arose in the person of the Roman general, Pompey, who ordered the siege to be raised, and summoned both Aristobulus and Hyrcanus to appear before him at Damascus that he might decide the matter between them, B.C. 63. When the time of hearing the cause came on, representatives of Aristobulus, Hyrcanus and the Jewish people stood before Pompey, each complaining of the other. The people charged both the brothers as having usurped the prerogatives of high priests and tyrannized over them, and they therefore wished the kingly office entirely set aside. Pompey dismissed the parties courteously, without deciding in favor of either.

Aristobulus returned home, and, suspecting the goodness of his cause at court, endeavored to put his country in a state of defense. Pompey, after a while, began to assume a higher tone. He marched into Judea, and, after a stern resistance, entered Jerusalem, B.C. 57, and went himself into the Holy of Holies,[3] to the great horror of the Jews, and so, to their astonishment, carried off none of the treasures of the temple. He appointed Hyrcanus high priest without the regal authority—levied his tribute on the people, and departed with Aristobulus, his two sons and two daughters, designed to adorn his triumphal march into Rome.

The Romans, having deprived the High Priest of all royal authority, established, in five different cities, five independent Senates or Sanhedrims, according to the form of the great Sanhedrim of seventy one, which perhaps had existed from the captivity. The places where the Sanhedrims sat were Jerusalem, Jericho, Gadara, Amathus and Sepphoris. This form of government lasted until Julius Caesar reinvested Hyrcanus with the supreme dignity, B.C. 44.

During the great civil war in Rome the fate of Judea, like that of nearly all other nations, hung in trembling suspense. After the death of Pompey the prudent Antipater rendered Caesar essential service in his campaign in Egypt in favor of Cleopatra, and was rewarded with the full rites of Roman citizenship for himself, and (B.C. 47) the appointment of procurator or governor over the whole of Judea; also the full. re-establishment of Hyrcanus in the high priesthood. Antipater, still further presuming on the favor of Rome, proceeded to appoint his elder son Phasael to the government of Jerusalem, and the younger Herod to that of Galilee, B.C. 47. Herod soon began to develop his natural decision and severity of character. He arrested robbers and destroyed them without trial, and set at naught the authorities in Jerusalem. When brought before the Sanhedrim he appeared in arms, and by affrighting them escaped punishment. Only one man, Sameas, dared even to rebuke him; and, strange to say, when he afterward slew the other members of the Sanhedrim, he spared this man Sameas. He afterward obtained by a bribe the military command of Coele-Syria, and advanced against Jerusalem; but, by the intervention of his father, withdrew his forces.

Upon the death of Caesar, Capias assumed the administration of Syria, B.C. 43. Judea was heavily oppressed every way, and the taxes were so exorbitant that the whole population of some towns were sold as slaves to raise tribute.

Herod was ever dexterous and bold. After the great battle at Philippi Herod made his approaches to the rising sun, and obtained the favor of Mark Antony. Antipater had been poisoned by Malichus to prevent the rising and then powerful Idumenean influence in Judea.

“An unexpected enemy arose, to trouble again the peace of Judea. At this juncture the Parthians under Pacorus, the king’s son, entered Syria and Asia Minor, and overran the whole region. A part of their army, under Barzapharnes, took possession of Coele-Syria. Antigonus, the last remaining branch of the Asmonean race, determined to risk his fortune in the desperate hazard of Parthian protection; he offered 1,000 talents and 500 Jewish women—a strange compact—as the price of his restoration to the Jewish kingdom. Antigonus himself raised a considerable native power and entered Judea, followed by Pacorus, the cup-bearer of the king, who had the same name with the king’s son. Antigonus fought his way to Jerusalem, and, by means of his party, entered the city. Jerusalem was torn asunder by the contending factions; and the multitudes who came up at the feast of Pentecost, adopting different parties, added to the fierce hostility and mutual slaughter. The Antigonians held the temple, the Hyrcanians the palace, and, daily contests taking place, the streets ran with blood. Antigonus at length invidiously proposed to submit their mutual differences to the arbitration of Pacorus, the Parthian general. Phasael weakly consented; and Pacorus, admitted within the town, prevailed on the infatuated Phasael to undertake a journey with Hyrcanus, and submit the cause to Barzapharnes, the commander in chief. He set forth on this ill-fated expedition, and was at first received with courtesy; the plan of the Parthians being to abstain from violence till they had seized Herod, who, having vainly remonstrated with his brother on his imprudence, remained in the city. But the crafty Herod, receiving warning from his brother, whose suspicions had been too late awakened, fled with the female part of the family toward Masada. The journey was extremely dangerous, and at one time Herod, in despair, had almost attempted his own life. At Masada, a strong fortress on the west shore of the Dead Sea, he received succor brought by his brother Joseph from Idumea; him he left in command at Masada, and retired himself into Arabia, from thence to Egypt, and at length to Rome. In the meantime Hyrcanus and Phasael had been made prisoners; the former, Antigonus not wishing to put him to death, was incapacitated forever from the office of High Priest by the mutilation of his ears. Phasael anticipated the executioner by beating his brains out against the wall of his prison.”—Milman.

The Parthians plundered the city of Jerusalem and ravaged the country, notwithstanding their alliance with Antigonus. Herod, in the meantime, gained favor at Rome beyond his expectations, and Augustus and Antony united in conferring the crown upon him, 40 years B.C. He returned at once to Palestine, raised a force, rescued his brother and bride, who were shut up in the fortress of Masada, and reduced to great extremities by the besieging army of Antigonus, and, overrunning Galilee, at length sat down before Jerusalem. Silo, a Roman general who was acting with Herod, proved treacherous, and retired from before Jerusalem, and Herod was compelled to do the same.

Herod fixed his headquarters at Samaria, and contented himself with destroying robbers, B.C. 39. The next year, with Roman auxiliaries, he made another attack on Jerusalem, and was defeated. He retired to make his complaints to Antony at Samosata, and, while absent, his brother risked a battle, against Herod’s advice, with the forces of Antigonus, and was killed. Herod on his return avenged the death of his brother Joseph by the total discomfiture of Pappus, the general of Antigonus. In the spring of the next year, B.C. 87, he formed the regular siege of Jerusalem; during the siege he returned to Samaria to consummate his marriage with Mariamne, the beautiful granddaughter both of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus. By this marriage he formed an intimate connection with the line of the Asmonean princes, and he hastened to secure his throne by the conquest of the capital. Jerusalem held out for above half a year, but was finally taken by the Roman army under Sosius. Great cruelties were inflicted on the people, and much injury done to the town by the exasperated Roman soldiery, even against the expostulations of Herod himself, who did not wish to be left king over a desert. Antigonus was sent to Antony at Antioch and slain. Herod was fairly installed, by the authority of Rome, king of Judea, B.C. 37.

This was that Herod the Great who swayed the sceptre over Jerusalem and Palestine till after the birth of our Savior.

He did more by far for the outward improvement of the cities, towns and fortresses of Palestine than any other king or ruler since the captivity. He thoroughly repaired and greatly enlarged and adorned the temple of Zerubbabel at Jerusalem. He was upheld by the great power of Rome, and, while adding to his own fortune, he added to the wealth and ornament of his country. But he was one of the most jealous and vindictive of men in all his private relations, and cruel to the last degree toward all whom he suspected of designs on his crown or disobedience to his authority. He had ten wives and fourteen children. The particulars of his reign might be traced, year by year, down to the period of big death, but they are so revolting, so cruel, and bloodthirsty, that the reader might as well be spared the shocking perusal. Suffice it to say that in addition to the vast number of murders committed by him during a long, unbroken reign of over forty years, may be mentioned that of his beautiful and noble wife Mariamne, her grandfather, father, brother, uncle, and two of her sons, most noble youths, who were his own children, who were educated at Rome, and unsurpassed in promise by any in the land. All these were accused of treasonable designs toward him, without any foundation in truth. He himself arraigned before Caesar his two sons for trial, and took the lead in person to manage the case with all imaginable and unnatural hatred. No wonder then that such a monster in human shape should play off his hypocrisy with the wise men of the East, and, so soon as the birth of a “King of the Jews” was announced to him, send forth and slay all the children in Bethlehem from two years old and under, in order to include that one who, he supposed, would aspire to his throne. Neither need we wonder that a king so steeped in human blood, and so fully convinced that the execrations of an outraged people were resting on him, should, in order to make the people mourn, instead of rejoicing, at his death, order some of the principal men in every family in the land shut up in prison, so that an executioner should be ready at the announcement of his own death to slay them also. The innocents were slain in the last year of his life, it is supposed. And the last public act of his life was to order the execution of his son Antipater, who was in prison, and who, it was said, had attempted to bribe the keeper to let him out. He was slain just five days before his father’s death. Herod for a long time was awfully afflicted both in body and mind; he was haunted with dreadful forebodings and distressing dreams, and yet nothing appeared to soften his, stony heart or cause him to relent or repent for one hour. His conscience was seared, and failed to admonish or have any government over his mind. He lived to be seventy years of age, having been king of Jerusalem thirty-seven years, and died a few years before the Passover, B.C. 4, at Jericho, after suffering the most horrible agonies, mental and physical. Josephus states that he had fever, and an intolerable itching over all his body, and intestinal inflammation, and dropsy, and worms, and putrefaction. God thus gave the inhuman monster a fore-taste of the awful and eternal retribution awaiting him beyond the grave.

Sadly, indeed, does the Old Dispensation close, with such a ruler over Israel as was Herod the Great. The nation was, for the most part, demoralized, and but little better than their ruler; yet in them were found the seed royal and a remnant according to the election of grace.

Thus we have endeavored to notice some things connected with a certain race of men from Adam to the coming of Christ, a period, according to the common chronology, of 4,004 years. The record shows what sin has done for our race, and also what grace has done. Where sin abounded, grace, when applied, has much more abounded, because it hath in every instance gained the victory. One of the most prominent features of Old Testament history is the numerous wars therein stated to have been waged since the Fall. The first man born slew his brother, and brother has been slaying brother from that day to this. The proneness to war and the worship of idols seem to predominate in the human mind, and such is the frequent occurrence of them in history that the heart almost sickens at their perusal. Yet it need not, for the same working is in the hearts of all men (even now) untouched by grace, and we only read of ourselves when we read of others. “The human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” While darkness covered the earth, and gross darkness the people, the Lord has arisen upon some few and His glory has been seen upon them. The spiritual family of God have been few in all ages as compared with fleshly professors and open reprobates. God’s people are always chosen in the furnace of affliction, and in this world must suffer tribulation. We have noticed the suffering and faith of the people of God in the Old Testament dispensation, and the same will compare favorably with the New. The Apostle, in the eleventh chapter to the Hebrews, enumerates many who lived and died in the faith under the Old Dispensation, and thereby from a cloud of witnesses encourages the hearts of many professing Christianity to hold out faithful to the end of their earthly pilgrimage.

Those specially mentioned by him are Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jepthah, David and Samuel, who, through faith, subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens, etc., etc. Surely, Faith overcomes the world.

After the captivity there were added to the books of the Old Testament the prophecies and lamentations of Jeremiah, the prophecies of Ezekiel, the books of Ezra, and Nehemiah, and the prophecies of Daniel, Habakkuk, Zechariah and Malachi. These completed the sacred canon, which then consisted of thirty-nine books, now arranged in the following order, viz:

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther; Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon; Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel; Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

These books were held sacred and considered authoritative and divinely inspired, and handed down by the Jews from generation to generation to the days of our Savior. He accepted this canon as the embodiment of the Scriptures and the authoritative word of God. He commanded men to search them. He quoted them in His teachings; and all the writers in the New Testament quoted and referred to them as the Scriptures of Divine truth and the sacred oracles of God, from which there was no appeal. Paul says of them in his epistle to Timothy: ” The holy Scriptures are able to make us wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works,” These are the Scriptures which the Apostles carried with them into all the world when they went forth preaching the gospel to every creature, and these are the Scriptures out of which they reasoned, in order to bring men to the obedience of faith.

They were the only rule of faith and practice to the church from Malachi to the Christian era, a period of about 400 years, and—until the twenty-seven inspired books of the New Testament were added to them, which completed the whole volume of inspiration—God’s authoritative and revealed word, contained in what is generally known as the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

As we have now arrived at the close of the Old Dispensation, it will be proper to include some remarks upon its general character, and its relation to the New or Christian Dispensation.

There are in the New Testament, in addition to numberless allusions, about two hundred and sixty direct quotations from the Old Testament, or about one for every chapter of the former. It was a wise remark of Augustine, In Vetere Testamento Novum latet, et in Novo Vetus patet,—In the Old Testament the New is concealed, and in the New the Old is revealed. The Old was the type, and the New the antitype. “There was a pre ordained connection between the two. The antitypical realities of the gospel were the ultimate objects contemplated by the mind of God in establishing the types of the old economy. To prepare the way for the introduction of these ultimate objects He placed the church under a course of instruction by types, or designed and fitting resemblances of what was to come in ‘the ends of the world,’ or ‘fullness of the times,’ or the gospel age. The church of the Old Testament was in a state of comparative childhood, supplied only with such means of instruction, and subjected to such methods of discipline, as were suited to so imperfect and provisional a period of her being. This instruction and discipline, however, should not be regarded as employed simply for the sake of those who lived during its continuance. While primarily and wisely adapted to them, it was also fitted, and indeed chiefly designed, to tell with beneficial effect on the spiritual life of the church in her more advanced state of existence. The man of mature age, when pursuing his way amid the perplexing cares and busy avocations of life, finds himself continually indebted to the lessons he was taught and the skill he acquired during the period of his early culture. And, in like manner, it was undoubtedly God’s intention that His method of procedure toward the church in her state of minority not only should minister what was needed for her immediate instruction and improvement, but should also furnish materials of edification and comfort for believers to the end of time. In both Testaments there are the same great elements of truth; in the Old these were exhibited in a form more level to the comprehension of immature minds. The Mosaic ritual had at once a shell and a kernel; its shell, the outward rights and observances it enjoined; its kernel, the spiritual relations which these indicated, and the spiritual truths which they embodied and expressed. The symbolical institutions of the Old Testament were shadows of the better things of the gospel (Col. 2:17; Heb. 8:5; 10:1); that is, they were obscure and imperfect resemblances of the same Divine truths. By means of an earthly tabernacle, with its appropriate services, God manifested toward His people the same principles of government, and required from them substantially the same disposition and character that He does now under the higher dispensation of the gospel. For, look beyond the more outward diversities, and what do you see? You see in both alike a pure and holy God, enshrined in the recesses of a glorious sanctuary, unapproachable by sinful flesh but through a medium of powerful intercession and cleansing efficacy; yet, when so approached, ever ready to receive and bless with the richest tokens of His favor and loving kindness as many as come in the exercise of genuine contrition for sin, and longing for restored fellowship with Him whom they have offended. The same description applies equally to the service of both dispensations; for in both the same impressions are conveyed of God’s character respecting sin and holiness, and the same gracious feelings necessarily awakened by them in the bosom of sincere worshipers. But, then, as to the means of accomplishing this, there was only in the one case a shadowy exhibition of spiritual things through earthly materials and temporary expedients; while, in the other, the naked realities appear in the one perfect sacrifice of Christ, the rich endowments of the Spirit of grace, and the glories of an everlasting kingdom. The religious institutions of earlier times contained only the rudiments or elements of religious truth and life. The church, while under these ordinances, is said to have been ‘in bondage under the elements of the world’ (Gal. 4:3). The expression in Galatians 3:24, ‘the law was our pedagogue to bring us to Christ,’ conveys much the same idea; since it was the special business of the ancient pedagogue to train the youth to proper habits, and, without himself imparting more than the merest elements of learning, to conduct him to those who were qualified to give it. The law did this for such as were placed under it, by means of its symbolical institutions and ordinances, which at once conveyed to the understanding a measure of instruction, and trained and disciplined the will. It was from its very nature imperfect, and pointed to something higher and better. Believers were kept by it in a kind of bondage, but one which, by its formative and elevating character, was ever ripening its subjects for a state in which it should no more be needed. But the most of national Israel, being unspiritual, soon perverted these local, earthly, outward, imperfect ordinances into formality, carnality and corruption. God, therefore, destroyed the outward by the hand of the king of Babylon, and drove national Israel afar from the scenes of her long idolatry. The times of Daniel and the captivity formed, in some degree, the turning-point from the Old to the New, and thenceforward the one was continually shading into the other. God thus spiritualized and elevated the ideas which the Israelites entertained of Divine things, and prepared a gracious remnant for the far more spiritual and elevating teachings of Christ and His Apostles. When the veil was rent in twain, abolishing the distinction at the center, all others of an outward kind necessarily gave way. When the great High Priest had fulfilled His work, no work remained to be done by any other priest. The gospel of shadows was conclusively gone, and the gospel of realities come. And the compliances which the Apostles generally, and Paul himself latterly, made (Acts 21) to humor the prejudices and silence the senseless clamors of the Jews, though necessary at first, were yet carried to an undue and dangerous length. They palpably failed, in Paul’s case, to accomplish the end in view; and, in the case of the Jewish Christians themselves, were attended with jealousies, self-righteous bigotry, growing feebleness and ultimate decay. ‘Before Messiah’s coming, the ceremonies were as the swaddling hands in which He was wrapt; but, after it, they resembled the linen clothes which He left in the grave. Christ was in the one, but not in the other.’ The apostate Romish church, being unspiritual, like the majority of national Israel, at an early period mistook the means for the end, embraced the shadow for the substance, converted what had been set up for the express purpose of leading men to Christ, into a mighty stumbling-block to obstruct the way of their approach to Him, fell back, by a retrograde movement, from the high, mature, inward and spiritual, to the low, childish, outward and natural. By that great apostasy everything was gradually carried back from the apostolic ideal of a spiritual community, founded on the perfect atonement and priesthood of Christ, to the outwardness and ritualism of ancient times. The sacrifices of the laws, it was thought, must have their correspondence in the offering of the Eucharist; and, as every sacrificial offering must have a priest to present it, so the priesthood of the Old Covenant, determined by genealogical descent, must find its substitute in a priesthood determined by apostolical succession. It was but a step further, and one quite natural in the circumstances, to hold, that as the ancient hierarchy culminated in a High Priest at Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, so the Christian hierarchy must have a similar culmination in the Bishop of Rome, the capital of the world. In these and many similar applications of Old Testament things to the ceremonial institutions and devices of Romanism, there is a substantial perpetuation of the Judaizing error of apostolic times—an adherence to the oldness and carnality of the letter, after the spiritual life and more elevated standing of the New have come. According to it, everything in Christianity, as well as in Judaism, is made to turn upon formal distinctions and ritual observances; and that not the less because of a certain introduction of the higher element, as in the substitution of apostolical succession and the impressed character of the new priesthood, for the genealogical descent and family relationship of the old. Such slight alterations only affect the mode of getting at the outward things established, but leave the outwardness itself unaffected; they are of no practical avail in lifting Christianity above the old Judaistic level. The whole movement was a retro-gradation to the weak and beggarly elements which in earlier times had proved the constant source of imperfection and failure, and from which the church of the New Testament should have counted it her distinctive privilege to be free (Gal. 5:1). Instead of the common priesthood of believing souls anointed by the Spirit of holiness, and dwelling in the secret place of the Most High, a select priesthood of artificial distinctions and formal service were constituted the chief depositories of grace and virtue; instead of the simple manifestation of the truth to the heart, there came the muffled drapery of symbolical rites and bodily ministrations; and for the patient endurance of evil, or the earnest endeavor to overcome it with good, resort was had to the violence of the sword, and the coercive measures of arbitrary power. Strange delusion! As if the mere form and shadow of the truth were mightier than the truth itself—or the circumstantial adjuncts of the faith were of more worth than its essential attributes—or the crouching dread and enforced subjection of bondmen were a sacrifice to God more acceptable than the childlike and ready obedience of loving hearts! Such a depravation of the spirit of the gospel could not fail to carry its own curse and judgment along with it; and history leaves no room to doubt that, as men’s views went out in this false direction, the tide of carnality and corruption flowed in; the professed Christian theocracy, as of old the Jewish, was carried captive by the world; the pretended spouse became an harlot.

“This mournful defection was descried from the outset, and in vivid colors was portrayed on the page of prophetic revelation, as a warning to the church to beware of compromising the truth of God, or attempting to seek the living among the dead (Dan. 7:25; 2 Thess. 2; I Tim. 4:1-3; 2 Tim. 3:1-5; 4:3, 4; 1 John 2:18; Rev. 13:1-18; 17). What constitutes the peculiar glory of the gospel, and should ever have been regarded as forming the main secret of its strength, is the extent to which its tidings furnish an insight into the mind of God, and the power it confers on those who receive it to look as with open face into the realities of the Divine kingdom. Doing this in a manner altogether its own, it reaches the depths of thought and feeling in the bosom, takes possession of the inner man, and implants there a spirit of life, which works with sovereign power on the things around it, and casts aside, as being no longer needed, the external props and appliances that were required by the demands of a feebler age. For the kingdom established by the gospel is essentially spiritual—it is a kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost; and when true to itself, and conducted in harmony with the mind of its Divine Head, it must ever give to the spiritual the ascendancy over the carnal, and look for its gradual extension and final triumph to the power and influence of the truth itself. The Spirit-endowed church of Christ is the true theocracy in its new, its higher, its perennial form; since it is that in which God peculiarly dwells, and with which He identifies His character and glory. Every individual member of this church, according to the proper idea of his calling, is a king and a priest to God; therefore, not in bondage to the world, nor dividing between the world and God, but recognizing God in all, honoring and obeying God, and receiving power, as a prince with God, to prevail over the opposition and wickedness of the world. Every particular church, in like manner, is, according to the idea of its calling, an organized community of such kings and priests;” therefore, subject, in religious and spiritual matters, to no earthly potentate or aristocracy, but only to the King of kings, feeling to be redeemed from iniquity by His precious blood, desiring to be found holy and without blame before Him in love, and praying that His kingdom should come, and His will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven.

Protestantism, which never cast off all the fatal errors of Romanism, and which has been gravitating back towards Romanism ever since its secession in the sixteenth century, in predicting the salvation of the sinner upon himself instead of upon God, makes the same fundamental mistake in its typology as that made by the Romanists, and noticed above. “Its carnality is continually betraying itself in a tendency to depress and lower the spiritual truths of the gospel to a conformity with the simple letter of Old Testament Scripture. The gospel is read not only through a Jewish medium, but also in a Jewish sense, and nothing but externals admitted in the New, wherever there is descried, in the form of the representation, any reference to such in the Old.” The natural offspring of Abraham are said to represent the natural offspring of believers; circumcision is converted into infant baptism; the authority of the priesthood into the authority of “Mother Church;” the Hebrew theocracy into an alliance of church and state; the stoning of blasphemers into death of heretics by torture, fire and sword; the “fathers” and “reformers” are substituted for the Rabbins; and the lie is given to Christ, and inefficacy to His finished work, by robbing the church of its simplicity and spirituality, and loading it with dead materialism, formalism, traditionalism, sacramentalism and hierarchism.

One of the most fashionable Judaizing errors of the present day is the modern method of explaining away the New Testament doctrine of personal and eternal election. “The advocates of a modified Arminianism maintain that this doctrine is improperly understood of an appointment to personal salvation and eternal life, on the special ground that the election of the Jewish people was only their calling as a nation to outward privileges and a temporal inheritance. Rightly understood, however, this is rather a reason why election in the Christian sense should be made to embrace something higher and better, like all the other Old Testament types. For the proper counterpart under the gospel to those external relations of Judaism is the gift of grace and the heirship of glory—the lower in the one case shadowing the higher in the other—the outward and temporal representing the spiritual and eternal. Even Macknight, who cannot certainly be charged with any excess of the spiritual element in his interpretations, perceived the necessity of making, as he expresses it, ‘the natural seed the type of the spiritual, and the temporal blessings the emblems of the eternal.’ Hence he justly regards the outward professing church in one case, with its unconditional election to the earthly Canaan, as answering, in the other, to the invisible spiritual church, consisting of believers of all nations, with its unconditional election to the heavenly Canaan (Gen. 15:18; Acts 13:48; Rom. 8:29, 30; Eph. 1:3, 4; 1 Peter 1:1-5).”—P. Fairbairn, in Typology of Scripture.

All the Old Testament is one great type and prophecy, which finds and will find its full accomplishment in Jesus Christ. As He told His disciples both before and after His resurrection, “All things which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning me, must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). “Think not,” said He, in His sermon on the mount, “that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). Said the angel to John, “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev. 19:10). “Pure gold is not found in large masses; the value of the mass lies mostly in the small particles of the rich metal scattered through it.” The golden vein of Messianic prophecy runs through the Old Testament Scriptures, and gives them a Divine unity; and the New Testament, with the same unity, describes the fulfillment of these predictions in Jesus of Nazareth, The Messiah (Dan. 9:25, 26) was to be the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), of the family of Shem (Gen. 9:26), Abraham (Gen. 12:2,3), Isaac, (Gen. 21:12), Jacob (Gen. 28:14), Judah (Gen. 49:10), Jesse (Isaiah 11:1-10) and David (Jer. 33:15). He was to be preceded by a messenger like Elijah (Mal. 3:1; 4:5), crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord (Isa. 40:3-5). He was to be born of a virgin (Isa. 7:14), in Bethlehem of Judea (Micah 5:2), just before the sceptre departed from Judah (Gen. 49:10), in the days of the fourth universal (Roman) empire (Dan. 2:44), about 460 years after the issuing of the Persian king’s decree for the restoration of Jerusalem (Dan. 9:24-27; Num. 4:3; Luke 3:23), and before the destruction of the second temple (Hag. 2:6-9). (His earthly ministry must therefore have occurred more than 1,800 years ago; and, if it did not occur then, the Old Testament Scriptures must be false.) Rachel, who was buried near Bethlehem (Gen. 35:19), was poetically represented as weeping for her slaughtered children (Jer. 31:15), and God was to call back His Son out of Egypt (Hosea 11:1). That Son was to grow up before His Father as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground (Isa. 53:2). He was to be preeminently the Anointed One (Ps. 2:2), a Prophet like Moses (Deut. 18:18), a Priest like Melchizedek (Ps. 110:4), a King like David (Isa. 9:7). He was to be the King of Zion (Ps. 2:6; Zech. 9:9), higher than the kings of the earth (Ps. 89:27), altogether lovely (Song 5:16); the Ruler of Israel, whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting (Micah 5:2); the Maker, Redeemer, and Shepherd of Israel (Isa. 54:5; Ezek. 34:23-31); the Shiloh, or Peace-Giver (Gen. 49:10); He was to open the eyes of the blind, unstop the ears of the deaf, make the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing (Isa. 35:4-6); He was to have the law of His God in His heart, and delight to do His will, and to preach righteousness (Ps. 40:6-10); He was to be the glory of Israel, and a light to the Gentiles (Isa. 49:6; 60:1-3); the Star of Jacob and Sceptre of Israel, who should smite His foes, and have dominion (Num. 29:17, 19); the Sun of Righteousness, arising, with healing in His wings, unto all that fear the Lord (Mal. 4:2); He was to be the Lord of the temple, the Messenger of the covenant (Mal. 3:1); not only the son but the Lord of David (Ps. 110:1); the Son of man (Dan. 7:13), and yet the Son of God (Ps. 2:2, 7, 12); a man and yet the fellow or equal of God (Zech. 13:7); identified with God (Zech. 12:10); Immanuel, or God with us (Isa. 7:14); the Lord our Righteousness (Jer. 23:6); the Divine Redeemer who should stand at the latter day upon the earth (Job 19:25-27); who was to come with dyed garments, glorious in His apparel, traveling in the greatness of His strength, speaking in righteousness, mighty to save, treading the wine-press alone, perfectly able, without any help, to bring salvation to His redeemed, and to destroy all their enemies (Isa. 63:1-9); the spiritual Zerubbabel who would make the great mountain a plain, lay the foundation of the Lord’s house, and also finish it, bringing forth the headstone with shoutings of Grace, grace unto it (Zech. 4:6-10); though a child born, a son given to us, yet Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace, of the increase of whose government and peace there should be no end (Isa. 9:6, 7); His name to continue as long as the sun, and men to be blessed in Him (Ps. 72:17); His dominion to be universal and eternal (Dan. 7:14); His throne to be the throne of God, and endure forever and ever (Ps. 45:6, 7); and yet—wonderful, indeed, according to His name—He was to be a servant of God, with visage more marred than any man (Isa. 52:13, 14); despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (Isa. 53:3); He was to come to Jerusalem, as a lowly king of righteousness and salvation, riding upon the foal of an ass (Zech. 9:9); He was to be conspired against by the kings and rulers of the earth (Ps. 2:2); though never guilty of fraud or violence (Isa. 53:9), He was to be betrayed by His own familiar friend (Ps. 41:9) for thirty pieces of silver, which should be given to the potter for a field to bury strangers in (Zech. 11:12,13; Jer. 7:32, 33; 19; Matthew 27:3-10); He was to be derided by His ungodly enemies (Ps. 22:6-8); and, having been made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death (Ps. 8:5; Heb. 2:9), and being doomed to have His heel bruised while He bruised the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15), He was to be numbered with the transgressors (Isa. 53:12), and pierced by the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but be bitterly and privately mourned for by them, and open to them a fountain for sin and for uncleanness (Zech. 12:10-14; 13:1); He was to have His hands and feet pierced, and His garments parted, and lots cast for His vesture (Ps. 22:16,18); be given gall and vinegar to drink (Ps. 69:21); He was to be smitten by the sword of Divine Justice (Zech. 13:7), the sun being turned into darkness (Joel 2:31; Amos 8:9; Acts 2:20); stricken for the transgression of His people (Isa. 53:8); bruised, by God’s appointment, for their iniquities (Isa. 53:5); cut off, but not for Himself (Dan. 9:26); make an end of sins, make reconciliation for iniquity, and bring in an everlasting righteousness (Dan. 9:24); make intercession for the transgressors (Isa. 53:12); take from His people their filthy garments and clothe them with a change of raiment, and remove their iniquity in one day (Zech. 3:1-10); by the blood of His covenant send forth His prisoners out of the pit wherein is no water (Zech. 9:11); yield up His soul as an offering for sin (Isa. 53:10); be forsaken of His God (Ps. 22:1); be with the rich in His death (Isa. 53:9); not to see corruption (Ps. 16:10), but rise again the third day (Hosea. 6:2; Jonah 1:17), prolong His days, see His seed, and the pleasure of the Lord prosper in His hand (Isa. 53:10); see the travail of His soul, and be satisfied, and by His knowledge justify many, because He shall have borne their iniquities (Isa. 53:11); He should be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land (Isa. 32:1, 2); He, should come down like rain upon the mown grass, and as showers that water the earth (Ps. 72:6); not cry or lift up or cause His voice to be heard in the street, not break a bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax (Isa. 42:1-4); He should purify His people like gold and silver, that they might offer to the Lord an offering in righteousness (Mal. 3:3); He should be anointed immeasurably with the Spirit of God (as His very name, Messiah, or Christ, indicates) to preach good tidings to the meek, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all that mourn, to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified (Isa. 61:1-3).

Now reflect that these prophecies, as given by God to His people, were scattered through a period of about thirty-six hundred years, so that, if there had been any deception, it would have required the collusion of about seventy generations, and that, too, to bring about a belief of the human race in the most elevating spiritual blessings—a circumstance utterly incredible; remember that the Jews who persecuted Jesus Christ to death, and who still reject His claims, have handed down these prophetic writings to us as infallibly inspired of God, and are, many of them, today willing to lay down their lives, if necessary, in defense of such inspiration; and then carefully read the New Testament, which was written more than four hundred years after the last Old Testament prophet; and see how these vastly complicated and seemingly inconsistent details were precisely fulfilled in the history of Jesus of Nazareth; and if you have not a darkened understanding, a seared conscience, and a stony heart, you will prostrate your soul before the once incarnate and crucified but now risen and enthroned Redeemer, with the impassioned exclamation of Thomas—My Lord and my God!

As has well been said, Jesus Christ is the only key in all the universe that fits the infinitely complicated lock of Messianic prophecy.

The Jewish rabbins thought some of the Messianic prophecies so inconsistent with others that they supposed there would be two Messiahs—a Messiah ben (or son of) Joseph who should suffer, and a Messiah ben David who should reign. But the Messianic prophecies of suffering and reigning are indissolubly blended. The principles of bleeding sorrow and holy triumph are eternally blended in Him who is at once and forever the Lamb and the Son of God—the vicarious sufferer and the Divine bridegroom of His redeemed church. (Song 5:10; Isa. 53; 54:5; Eph. 5:23-32; John 1:18, 29; Ps. 2:7; Matthew 16:16; Mark 14:61, 62; Acts 3:13; Rom. 1:3, 4; Heb. 1:2, 3; 1 Peter 1:3; Rev. 1:5; 19:7, 9, 13; 22:1).

1. Epiphanes means illustrious; he was, by way of parody, surnamed by others Epimanes, the Insane.

2. This name is said to mean silent or mysterious. The sect existed from about 110 B.C. to A.D. 70. Josephus estimates their number at about 4,000. Their chief settlement was a large agricultural village in some highly cultivated oases amid the wilderness on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. They had a few other scattered communities throughout Palestine. Their creed was mainly that of the Pharisees, but their practice was even more rigorous. With Pharisaism they combined stoicism, asceticism, monasticism, celibacy and puritanism. They held all property in common, and were said to be temperate, industrious, charitable, opposed to all oaths, slavery, and war, and commerce.

3. It is said that Pompey wondered that he found no image of the Deity in the temple—the Pagans were accustomed to having and worshiping images of their gods.

Chapter VII. The Ministry of Christ and His Apostles.—The Gospels and the Epistles.

The shades of night recede before the approach of morning light; moon and stars fade away when the bright luminary of day gilds the eastern horizon; and thus, when the Sun of Righteousness arose upon the world, the shadows, types, symbols and metaphors of the Mosaic dispensation were fulfilled and had to pass away.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.” “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.” “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:1-3, 14, 17).

In the days of Herod the Great, king of Judea, the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin[1] espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; “and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. And when she saw him she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary; for thou hast found favor with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.[2] He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end” (Luke 1:26-33).

And, in the fulfillment of this prediction made to Mary by the angel, as well as of all those made by the prophets, under the legal dispensation, touching that event, it is written that, in obedience to a decree made by Caesar Augustus, taxing the Roman world, Joseph and his espoused wife “went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem (because he was of the house of lineage of David), to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:1-13). The shepherds went in search of the child and found him in a manger, and his mother and Joseph, and then returned “glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” At the expiration of eight days, the child was circumcised, and “his name was called Jesus, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb. And when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord” (Luke 2:16-22).

The precise time of our Savior’s birth, for some wise purpose, seems to have been lost sight of by chronologists. But it may be set down as having most probably occurred a few months before the death of Herod the Great, four years before the common Christian era, in the year of Rome 750, and in the year of the world 4000. Learned men have investigated this point, but, with all their researches, have not been able to fix precisely either the year or the day of His birth. The early Christians were divided on this subject, and of course it must be a matter of uncertainty to all succeeding generations. In view of this uncertainty, not even the exact year, much less the exact month being known, how groundless and puerile appears the custom of the Romish and English, as well as other communions, in holding sacred the twenty-fifth day of December (new style) as the day of Christ’s nativity, and adorning their houses of worship with flowers and evergreens as part of their religious devotion on that day!

But the precise year, month or day in which the Sun of Righteousness arose is immaterial to the church of God. She knows that He has arisen—has shone upon the world, has warmed and animated the hearts of His people, who have enjoyed the direction and influence of His vital and salutary beams. He came at the precise time and moment predetermined by the Most High God, without variation or disappointment. “When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Gal. 4:4, 5).

The words and deeds of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ have been recorded by four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, holy men of old, who wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, and to their testimony we must refer for all genuine information as to the advent and mission of the Son of God while tenementing in clay. They inform us that He was taken early by His reputed father into Egypt to escape Herod’s cruelty, and that at the age of twelve years He was found conversing in the temple with the learned doctors of the law concerning the sublime truths of religion.

Profane history, and not that of the evangelists, notifies us that, at the period of the birth of the Prince of Peace, there was peace throughout the Roman empire, which continued for about twelve years, and, as a sign of universal peace, the temple of Janus at Rome was closed, which, before the reign of Augustus Caesar, had not been the case since 241 B.C.

“The external condition and surroundings of the youth of Jesus are in sharp contrast with the amazing result of His public life. He grew up quietly and unnoticed in a retired Galilean mountain village of proverbial insignificance, and in a lowly carpenter-shop, far away from the city of Jerusalem, from schools and libraries, with no means of instruction save those which seemed open to the humblest Jew—the care of godly parents, the beauties of nature, the services of the synagogue, the secret communion of the soul with God, and the Scriptures of the Old Testament, which recorded in type and prophecy His own character and mission. All attempts to derive His doctrine from any of the existing schools and sects have utterly failed. He never referred to the traditions of the elders except to oppose them. From the Pharisees and Sadducees He differed alike, and provoked their deadly hostility. With the Essenes He never came in contact. He was independent of human learning and literature, of schools and parties. He taught the world as one who owed nothing to the world. He came down from Heaven and spoke out of the fullness of His personal intercourse with the great Jehovah. Wiser than all sages, He spake as never man spake, and made an impression on His age and on all ages after Him such as no man ever made or can make.”—P. Schaff, in History of Christian Church. His matchless teaching forms the clear, brief, powerful text of all Christian doctrine. “His short ministry of three years,” says Mr. Leckey, the infidel historian of European Morals, “has produced a more deep and lasting impression on the human race than all the disquisitions of all the philosophers, and all the exhortations of all the moralists that ever lived.”

“Hillel and Shammai and other eminent rabbins of this period,” says Mr. W.G. Blaikie, in his Manual of Bible History, “were probably alive when Christ came into the world; some of them may have been among those with whom the child Jesus conversed in the temple; and they, or their successors, must have exercised influence in His rejection and death. There could not have been a greater contrast than that between their worship of traditions and Christ’s reverence for the Word; between their theory of changing men by an influence from without, and Christ’s by a power from within; between the vain, trifling inquiries on which their teachings bore, and the grand realities of life and death which Christ’s constantly contemplated; between their pride, formality and contemptuous spirit, and Christ’s humility, simplicity and love.”

From His twelfth to His thirtieth year nothing is said of His history by the evangelists. But when about thirty years of age, the period when the Jewish priests entered the sacred office, they inform us that He came unto John the Baptist to be baptized by him. John at first refused to administer the rite to Him, urging his great inferiority, but the Savior insisted, and John at length yielded and baptized Him in the river Jordan. After being baptized He “went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the Heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon Him: and, lo, a voice from Heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:13-17).

God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was present on that occasion to honor the sacred rite of baptism and set apart the Messiah for the work of the gospel ministry. This office He then took upon Himself, and henceforward proclaimed the principles of the gospel kingdom till the time of His crucifixion. John was the forerunner of Jesus; he was filled with the Holy Ghost from his mother’s womb—his name came from Heaven, and his authority to baptize came from there also. The evangelists call him “John the Baptist.” The Savior, having been baptized by him, was surely a “Baptist,” and as He went forth preaching His own gospel He was necessarily a “Baptist preacher,” thereby affording an example for all His ministerial followers to the end of the world. And here is where the Baptists came from. An unbaptized person has no Bible right to preach the gospel.

The birth of John was announced to his father by an angel from Heaven, and it was miraculous, because his mother was barren and his father, Zacharias, a Jewish priest, was well stricken in years. To further strengthen his faith in the heavenly promise, he was made dumb until his child was born and named.

It was a custom of eastern princes, in their visits to distant nations, to send heralds or messengers before them to notify the people in advance of their coming. Our Savior, the Prince of Peace, King of kings, and Lord of lords, sent His messenger before His face, both in His birth and ministerial character, six months in advance.

“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight. John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins” (Mark 1:1-4). He taught the coming of Christ and the setting up of His gospel kingdom on earth. He pointed to Christ, saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip being tetrarch of Iturea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness. And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins; as it is written in the book of the words of Esaias[3] the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:1-6).

Filled with the Holy Ghost from before his birth, what a blessed, unworldly, unselfish and faithful servant of Christ was John the Baptist! He disdained the luxuries and smiles of men; he fearlessly rebuked, not only the Scribes and Pharisees and soldiers, but even king Herod, for their sins; and he pointed men away from himself to Christ as the sin-atoning Lamb of God. The embodiment and culmination of the Old Testament, he labored for a short season, and then “in unrivalled humility he disappeared as the red dawn in the splendor of the rising Sun of the new covenant.”

While Christ was to increase, John was to decrease. He was beheaded in prison by the cruel monster Herod, in order to please a dancing damsel and her blood-thirsty mother; and his followers for the most part attached themselves afterwards to Christ and His Apostles.

The followers of the Savior were few in number during His life to what they were soon after His resurrection and ascension to glory. He sent out his twelve Apostles first to preach, and then seventy disciples afterwards, but their success appeared to be very limited as to the acquisition of numbers. The number twelve appears to refer to the twelve patriarchs, and the number seventy to the seventy elders under the Jewish dispensation; and teach that the former were to be superseded by the latter.

Jesus called to Him whomsoever He would, and thus set up His gospel kingdom in the world. From among the number of His adherents, He ordained twelve to attend His ministry in person, to become witnesses of His miracles, of His doctrine and sufferings, and, by occupying twelve thrones as judges of the twelve tribes of Israel, spiritually, to hand down to the latest period of time, to all succeeding generations, the principles of the gospel kingdom that He came to set up.

As Apostles they have had no successors, and therefore all matters of faith and practice must be referred to them; that is, to their inspired writings. They received their instructions from the Savior. He commanded them to teach and baptize the people who believed in Him, and then to teach them to observe all things whatsoever he had commanded them (Matthew 28:19, 20). As also saith the prophet, “Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment” (Isa. 32:1). The names of the twelve Apostles were “Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the publican; James the son of Alpheus; Lebbeus, whose surname was Thaddeus; Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed Him” (Matthew 10:2-4).

“During His ministry He had no home, no earthly possessions, no friends among the mighty and the rich. A few pious women from time to time filled his purse; and this purse was in the hands of a thief and a traitor. He associated with publicans and sinners, to raise them up to a higher and nobler life, and began His work among the lower classes which were despised and neglected by the proud hierarchy of the day. He never courted the favor of the great, but incurred their hatred and persecution. He never flattered the prejudices of the age, but rebuked sin and vice among the high and the low, aiming His severest words at the blind leaders of the blind, the self-righteous hypocrites who sat in Moses’ seat. He never encouraged the carnal Messianic hopes of the people, but withdrew when they wished to make Him a king, and declared before the representative of the Roman empire that His kingdom was not of this world. He announced to His disciples His own martyrdom, and promised to them in this life only the same baptism of blood. He went about in Palestine, often weary of travel, but never weary of His work of love, doing good to the souls and bodies of men, speaking words of spirit and life, and working miracles of power and mercy. He chose for Himself the humblest of the Messianic titles, ‘the Son of Man,’ which implies His consciousness that He was originally more than man and is now more than man, having come as man among men in a condition of temporary humiliation, while at the same time the title implies His unique position as the ideal, the perfect, the representative, the archetypal Man. He calls Himself habitually, but no one else, ‘the Son of Man,’ who ‘hath not where to lay His head,’ who ‘came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many,’ who ‘hath power to forgive sins,’ who ‘came to seek and to save that which was lost.’ When Peter made the great confession at Caesarea Philippi, Christ accepted it, but immediately warned him of His approaching suffering and death, from which the disciple shrunk in dismay. And with the certain expectation of His crucifixion, but also of His triumphant resurrection on the third day, He entered in calm and sublime fortitude on His last journey to Jerusalem which ‘killeth the prophets,’ and nailed Him to the cross as a false Messiah and blasphemer. But in the infinite wisdom and mercy of God the greatest crime in history was turned into the greatest blessing to mankind.”—P. Schaff.

As says the learned John L. Mosheim: “It is not necessary to enter into a detail of the life and actions of Jesus Christ. All Christians must be perfectly acquainted with them. They must know that, during the space of three years, and amidst the deepest trials of affliction and distress, He instructed the Jewish nation in the will and counsels of the Most High, and omitted nothing in the course of His ministry that could (righteously) contribute to gain the multitude or to charm the wise. Every one knows that His life was a continued scene of perfect sanctity, of the purest and most active virtue, not only without spot, but also beyond the reach of suspicion—the only perfectly wise, perfectly sinless, and perfectly benevolent being that ever walked this earth, according to the unanimous acknowledgment of the human race; and it is also well known that, by miracles of the most stupendous kind, and not more stupendous than salutary and beneficent, He displayed to the universe the truth of that religion which He brought with Him from above, and demonstrated in the most illustrious manner the reality of His Divine commission.

“As this system of religion was to be propagated to the extremities of the earth, it was necessary that Christ should choose a certain number of persons to accompany Him constantly through the whole course of His ministry; that thus they might be faithful and respectable witnesses of the sanctity of His life, and the grandeur of His miracles, to the remotest nations, and also transmit to the latest posterity a genuine account of His sublime doctrines, and of the nature and end of the gospel dispensation. Therefore Jesus chose, out of the multitude that attended His discourses, twelve persons whom He separated from the rest by the name of Apostles. These men were illiterate, poor, and of mean extraction; and such alone were truly proper to answer His views. He avoided making use of the ministry of persons endowed with the advantages of fortune and birth, or enriched with the treasures of eloquence and learning, lest the fruits of this embassy and the progress of the gospel should be attributed to human and natural causes (1 Cor. 1:21). These Apostles were sent but once to preach to the Jews during the life of Christ (Matthew 10:7). He chose to keep them about His own person, that they might be thoroughly instructed in the affairs of His kingdom. That the multitude, however, might not be destitute of teachers to enlighten them with the knowledge of the truth, Christ appointed seventy disciples to preach the glad tidings of eternal life throughout the whole province of Judea (Luke 10:1).

“The ministry of Jesus was (principally) confined to the Jews, nor while He remained upon earth did He permit His Apostles or disciples to extend their labors beyond this distinguished nation (Matthew 10:5, 6; 15:24). At the same time, if we consider the illustrious acts of mercy and omnipotence that were performed by Christ, it will be natural to conclude that His fame must have been very soon spread abroad in other countries.

“A great number of the Jews, influenced by those illustrious marks of Divine authority and power which shone forth in the ministry and actions of Christ, regarded Him as the Son of God, the true Messiah. The rulers of the people, and more especially the chief priests and Pharisees, whose licentiousness and hypocrisy He censured with a noble and generous freedom, labored with success by the help of their passions to extinguish in their breasts the conviction of His celestial mission, or at least to suppress the effects it was adapted to produce upon their conduct. Fearing also that His ministry might tend to diminish their credit, and to deprive them of the advantages they derived from the impious abuse of their authority in religious matters, they laid snares for His life, which for a considerable time were without effect. They succeeded at last by the infernal treason of an apostate disciple, by the treachery of Judas, who, discovering the retreat which his Divine Master had chosen for the purposes of meditation and repose, delivered Him into the merciless hands of a brutal soldiery.

“In consequence of this, Jesus was produced as a criminal before the Jewish high priest and Sanhedrim, being accused of having violated the law and blasphemed the majesty of God. Dragged thence to the tribunal of Pilate, the Roman praetor, he was charged with seditious enterprises and with treason against Caesar. Both these accusations were so evidently false, and destitute even of every appearance of truth, that they must have been rejected by any judge who acted upon the principles of common equity. But the clamor of an enraged populace, influenced by the impious instigations of their priests and rulers, intimidated Pilate, and engaged him, though with the utmost reluctance, and in opposition to the dictates of his conscience, to pronounce a capital sentence against Christ. The Redeemer of mankind behaved with inexpressible dignity under this heavy trial. As the end of His mission was to make expiation for the sins of men, so when all things were ready, and when He had finished the work of His glorious ministry, He placidly submitted to the death of the cross, and, with a serene and voluntary resignation, committed His spirit into the hands of the Father.

“After Jesus had remained three days in the sepulchre he resumed that life which He had voluntarily laid down; and, rising from the dead, declared to the universe, by that triumphant act, that the Divine justice was satisfied, and the paths of salvation and immortality were rendered accessible to the human race. He conversed with His disciples during forty days after His resurrection, and employed that time in instructing them more fully with regard to the nature of His kingdom. Many wise and important reasons prevented His showing Himself publicly at Jerusalem to confound the malignity and unbelief of His enemies. He contented Himself by manifesting the certainty of His glorious resurrection to a sufficient number of faithful and credible witnesses, being aware that, if He should appear in public, those malicious unbelievers, who had formerly attributed His miracles to the power of magic would represent His resurrection as a phantom, or vision, produced by the influence of infernal powers. After having remained upon earth during the space of time above mentioned, and given to His disciples a Divine commission to preach the glad tidings of salvation and immortality to the human race, He ascended into Heaven in their presence, and resumed that enjoyment of that glory which He had possessed before the worlds were created.”

The crucifixion of our Lord and Savior was a matter of as much certainty and necessity as His birth. Both were included in the great design to save poor fallen man, and the former as well as the latter, being known and determined by the Almighty from everlasting, was spread upon the pages of Divine revelation thousands of years before its actual fulfillment; as proved by the animal sacrifices offered up by spiritual worshipers for forty centuries before His coming, and by the numerous Messianic prophecies that we have cited at the close of Chapter VI., and by Acts 4:26-28.

It was of necessity therefore that this man had somewhat also to offer as the great High Priest of spiritual Israel, made after the order of Melchizedek, and not after the order of Aaron.

Jesus was taken by the Roman soldiers from the judgment-hall of Pontius Pilate and carried to Calvary, or Golgotha, a low, rounded, bare hill outside the north gate of Jerusalem. There was He nailed to the cross and elevated above the earth, as a spectacle to angels and men. The crucifixion took place on Friday, most probably April 6th, A.D. 30. Christ hung upon the cross from 9A.M. to 3P.M., at which hour He died. From the sixth to the ninth hour (which corresponds with our time from 12 noon to 3P.M.) there was darkness over all the land. About the ninth hour (3P.M.) He cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” And when He had cried with a loud voice, “It is finished!” “Father, into Thy hands I commend my Spirit,” He yielded up the ghost. “And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after His resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many” (Matthew 27:46-53; John 19:30; Luke 23:46).

The crucifixion of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was the most memorable and wonderful event in the history of the world. The redemption of countless millions of the human race depended on it, and without it there was salvation for none. Yet the dark deed of judicial murder, instigated by the malignity of the Jews, was rebuked by the absent rays of the bright luminary of Heaven, when darkness covered the earth for three dreary, doleful hours on that memorable day.[4] He laid down His life as a propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of His people, and remained a captive to death from Friday, the Jews’ preparation day, till Sunday, the first day of the week, being the day succeeding their Sabbath. On Sunday morning He burst the bonds of death, and arose a mighty conqueror over death, hell and the grave, and in about forty days ascended to His Father’s right hand, leading captivity captive and receiving gifts for men. The same body that was crucified was buried; the same body that was buried arose from the grave; and the same body that arose from the grave was glorified, and is now seated on the mediatorial throne at the right hand of God, in Divine composure until His enemies be made His footstool, and until the consummation of all things, when He shall again come to gather His ransomed people home, and take vengeance on them that know not God.

The object of His mission to earth was to save sinners by the sacrifice of Himself, and to inculcate upon the minds of men the great method of redemption.

If Jesus was, as even infidelity admits, the Sun of Righteousness, then He was what He professed to be, the Son of God. Upon this all-important point infinite reason could not be deceived, and infinite holiness could not deceive others. All hypotheses representing Jesus as a mere man have refuted and destroyed each other. “He learned nothing from human teachers. His wisdom was not of this world. He needed no visions and revelations like the prophets and Apostles. He came directly from His great Father in Heaven, and when He spoke of Heaven, He spoke of His familiar home. He spoke from the fullness of God dwelling in Him. And His words were perfectly verified by His unapproachable deeds.”—P. Schaff, in “History of Christian Church.”

His doctrine comprehended the nature and perfections of God, the Father, and that He and the Father were one—the misery of fallen man—a declaration of His own character as the Son of God and the promised Messiah—the design of His mission into this world, which was to save His people from their sins, who were the gift of the Father to Him—the impossibility of their perishing or being plucked out of His hand—His eternal union with them as their covenant or chosen Head—His giving them repentance and remission of sins—the divinely-given immortality of the soul—the resurrection from the dead—the certainty of a future state of rewards and punishments—the necessity of a preached gospel to all nations—His appointment by God Almighty to judge the world in righteousness at the last day, and the certain assurance that the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, shall abide with His church forever.

“Christ’s ethical teaching shines most brightly in those points where other systems fail, namely, the truthfulness of inward cleansing, the majesty of lowliness, and the glory of love.”—T.D. Bernard.

“In His doctrine He rescued the moral law from the false glosses imposed upon it by the Scribes and Pharisees; unfolded its spirituality and extent, as requiring perfect love to God and man; and enforced its indispensable obligation upon all men as the rule of their correspondence with God; declaring that He Himself came not to abrogate or annul one tittle, but to fulfill its utmost requirements by His own obedience and conformity thereunto, and adopting it as the unalterable law of His kingdom, which is to regulate the conduct of His disciples to the end of time.”—W. Jones.

The judicial, civil, or political law was intended by God for the special government of the ancient Hebrew nation. The ceremonial or Levitical law was a prefiguration of the gospel, in types and shadows, and was completely fulfilled and ended by Christ. The decalogue, or ten commandments, or moral law, was audibly spoken by the voice of God from Mount Sinai, was written by His finger on two tables of stone, and was perpetually preserved in the Ark of the Covenant, the innermost shrine of the tabernacle and temple. It was perfectly kept by Christ for His people both actively and passively, He doing all that the moral law required them to do, and suffering death, the penalty of their violation of the moral law; so that there is no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus. Those who are in Christ Jesus have His Spirit of life and love in them; and they have not only in their minds, but also written in their hearts, the same holy spiritual law that He fulfilled, so that they delight in that law after the inward man, and serve God in newness of spirit and not in the oldness of the letter, from a principle, not of bondage, but of love. As they have been made free by the Son of God, and are free indeed—not to sin, but to love—and, as where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, the perfect moral law of God is to them a perfect law of liberty; and the blessed precepts of the gospel are but the Divine expansion and efflorescence of the same holy law, based upon the powerful new motive of the atoning love of Jesus. The oldest Baptist Articles of Faith declare that the moral law is a compendious “rule of life for the Christian;” so did the ablest and soundest Baptist ministers before the nineteenth century. But in the present century some speakers and writers deny that the moral law is a rule of life, and affirm that the precepts of the gospel only are such a rule; and these people have been stigmatized by others as Antinomians, or opposed to the law. The question as to whether the moral law or the preceptive part of the New Testament is the Christian’s rule of life is what Paul calls a “vain and unprofitable strife about words, whereof come envy, railings, and evil surmisings, and which we are to avoid” (Titus 3:9; 1 Tim. 6:4). The law within the heart of Christ (Ps. 40:6-8; Heb. 10:5-7) is not inferior to, but is the same as, the law written in the hearts of His covenant people (Jer. 31:31-34; Heb. 10:16, 17). A holy, perfect and unchangeable God makes at all times the same moral requirements of His creatures. According to the Scriptures, love—supreme love of God and love of our neighbor as ourselves—was the essence of the Sinaitic moral law, and is the essence of Christianity, so that there is no difference between the Old and New Testament Divine Moral Standards. This fact is absolutely demonstrated by the following Scriptures: Exodus 20:6; Leviticus 19:18; Deuteronomy 6:5; Psalms 1:1-3; 37:31; 40:6-8; 102:27; 119:29, 32, 45, 165, 174; Jeremiah 31:33, 34; Matthew 5:17, 19; 22:36-40; John 15:12; Romans 3:31; 7:12, 14, 16, 22; 13:10; 1 Corinthians 9:21; 13:1-13; James 1:17; 2:8; 1 John 4:21. Christ was the only man that ever perfectly fulfilled the holy law of God, loving God supremely and His neighbor as Himself; and the entire eternal salvation of His church is based upon His perfect obedience of the Divine law (Rom. 5:19-21; Gal. 3:13). Yet all the children of God are led by the same Holy Spirit of obedience (Rom 8:14; Gal. 4:6; Ps. 23:3); not able, while in the flesh, to obey the moral law or the gospel precepts perfectly (Rom. 3:20; 1 John 1:8), and reposing all their hope of Heaven upon the perfect obedience of Christ (Rom. 5:2; 1 Cor. 1:30; Col. 1:5, 27).

In the teaching and meditation of Christ was laid the foundation of Christianity, the principles of which were to be elucidated and made abundantly manifest by the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, who was to enlighten the understanding of His disciples and bring to their remembrance all things whatsoever that He had said unto them (John 14:26).

Before the crucifixion of Christ He directed His Apostles to tarry in Jerusalem until they were endued with power from on high (Luke 24:49). Accordingly, they did so, and were found together in one place in Jerusalem, at the end of seven times seven days after His resurrection, and ten days after His ascension, viz., the Apostles and one hundred and twenty disciples, when “suddenly there came a sound from Heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire, sitting upon each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:2-4). Instantaneously light broke in upon their understandings. Their old apprehension of a natural kingdom being set up in the world by their Lord vanished away; its true spiritual character was immediately revealed to them, and, although ignorant and unlearned, as touching all human sciences, they rose and addressed the vast multitudes that assembled on the occasion from various parts of the world, declaring the wonderful works of God, with great precision, in many different languages of earth!

Such a miraculous display of Divine power brought many thousands together to behold it, and three thousand of them, being quickened into Divine life by the Spirit of God (John 16:7-11) believed the preaching of the Apostles and were added to the number in one day. Thus the mother church was fairly set up in Jerusalem, from which all others sprang. It was a Baptist church, composed of baptized believers; because all who believed, and made a profession of their faith, were baptized straightway. None others were received into fellowship and communion. And here is where the Baptists came from.

The Apostles and primitive saints were endowed with a holy boldness, and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit went in all directions, preaching the gospel of the kingdom. They stood in no fear of man, but feared God, and, at the risk of their lives, determined to serve Him. They planted churches after the pattern of the one at Jerusalem, and they were independent bodies, distinct from each other, though all of the same faith and order. Each was a little “republic”[5] within itself, governed by the rudiments of Christ and not of the world. After the Apostles came pastors and deacons as officers in the churches. Such was the evidence of Divine authority attending the doctrine and labors of the Apostles and early ministers of the gospel that large numbers were added to the churches, and the interest was so great that some concluded they had turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6). In this respect it might be inferred that they did greater things than their Master (John 14:12).

The success which attended the first publication of the gospel is very beautifully described in the book of Revelation (6:1,2) by a vision which the Apostle had of the Lamb opening the first seal. “And I saw,” says he, “and behold a white horse; and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him; and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.” The history of the Apostles and first preachers affords a striking comment on these words, at the same time that it illustrates to us an ancient prediction concerning the Messiah (Ps. 110:2, etc.); for now we see the standard of Christ first erected as an ensign to the nations; from hence went forth the rod of His strength, by which he ruled in the midst of His enemies, and (from that time, or) in that day of His power the willing nations submitted to Him cheerfully, and “numerous as drops of morning dew.” Here indeed was the kingdom set up, which was to stand forever; as saith the prophet; “In the days of these kings shall the God of Heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms, and it shall stand forever” (Dan. 2:44). And here is where the Baptists came from. On the day of Pentecost three thousand were added to the number of the disciples; and, on the day the cripple who lay at the gate of the temple was healed, five thousand were numbered among the believers. And all this conquest made by grace was made in direct opposition to earthly powers, both Jew and Gentile.

If the religion of Christ prevailed in its infancy against the wishes and persecutions of the combined powers of earth, why should it not do so now, when it has spread its roots with the growth of eighteen centuries? Is God Almighty more dependent on men now than He was then to carry on the work of evangelization? Some would have us believe so, who go about begging the unconverted world (which belongs to Satan’s kingdom) to give them funds sufficient to break down their master’s kingdom and convert the world to God! This is setting up Satan to cast out Satan, thereby dividing his own kingdom, and exalting him above the Almighty. How preposterous!

The Apostles for some considerable time executed the different offices of Apostle, Elder and Deacon; the former, or highest office in the Christian church, being evidently considered as including every inferior one. But when murmuring among the Grecians against the Hebrews was heard, because some of their widows were neglected in the daily ministrations, then the Apostles decided to call the church together, and have men chosen whose chief duty it should be to serve tables, and see that none were neglected in the daily ministrations. By donations made to the Apostles for that purpose, a fund had been raised to purchase food for the poor of the church, and there were two classes who received the benefit of it, viz.: first, those Jews, called Hebrews, who lived in Judea and worshiped in the synagogues at Jerusalem and its vicinity, in the use of the Hebrew and Chaldee languages; and secondly, those Jews who lived outside Judea, and who had been accustomed chiefly to the use of the Greek language, into which the Old Testament Scriptures had been translated (the version which we now call the Septuagint), and which had been for some time in common use, previous to the coming of Christ, in all the Jewish synagogues dispersed throughout the cities beyond the limits of Judea. These last were called Hellenists or Grecians; and of them it would appear that many were at that time, in Jerusalem, members of the church. The church came together and chose seven men, full of wisdom and the Holy Ghost, to attend to this matter, and thereby allow the Apostles liberty to devote their time wholly to prayer and the ministry of the word. They chose Stephen and Philip and Prochorus and Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas, a proselyte of Antioch (Acts 6). Some of them (probably all) were occasionally engaged in preaching the gospel, but this was no part of their office of Deacons (if this was the Deaconship), the latter being restricted to the serving of tables or ministering to the wants of the poor.

Stephen was soon stoned to death. When the worshipers of Moses could not cope with him in argument, they could outdo him with stones, and resorted to the ancient and modern custom of killing those whom they could not convince. Stephen was a heretic of course in the estimation of these Solomons, and therefore he must not be rejected, as Paul afterward advised in the case of heretics, but must be slain by virtue of a decree of the Jewish Sanhedrim. This servant of God died as did his Master, praying for his murderers, and yielding up his spirit unto God who gave it. Saul of Tarsus was there aiding and abetting in this fanatical fury. He held the clothes of the young men who stoned Stephen; and this so whetted his appetite for blood that he persecuted the faithful followers of Jesus in all directions, dragging them to prison and to death, both men and women. The field of his cruelty seemed to expand as his business prospered, and he persecuted them in cities remote from Jerusalem. In the meanwhile the disciples, in obedience to the command of their Lord and Master, yielded to the storm, and dispersed themselves among the cities of Judea and Samaria. Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ among the inhabitants with great success. The second church was formed there. He also preached to an Ethiopian eunuch on his way home from Jerusalem, and baptized him upon a profession of his faith in Christ. The Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, while the eunuch went on his way rejoicing; thereby fulfilling the prediction of the Psalmist, “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God” (Ps. 68:31). Saul of Tarsus was of Jewish parents, both father and mother. His father was of the tribe of Benjamin, and a freeman of Rome. He was liberally educated. The rudiments he received in his native city, which was a rival of Athens and Alexandria in learning; and he then completed his studies in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel, a noted doctor of the law of Moses and the traditions of the Elders.

The three highest elements of human nobility met in Saul—Roman citizenship, Grecian culture, and Hebrew religion. He had, even by nature, a mind of the highest order, and a spirit of extraordinary mold. As Moses was learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians, so Paul was learned in the wisdom of the Greeks; being one of the “not many wise men called” to the service of Christ (1 Cor. 1:26). And a wonderful energy, resolution, zeal, fearlessness, sincerity, morality and devotion to the Mosaic law characterized him. Next to the fall of man and the crucifixion of Christ, no incident occupies so much space in the Scriptures as the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Besides being referred to several times in Paul’s epistles, it is related three times in the Acts of the Apostles (chapters 9, 12 and 26); first by Luke, the historian, then by Paul to the Jews, and then by Paul to the Gentiles; and, next to the sin of Adam and the death of Christ, no other event in human history is so full of spiritual instruction. If no other conversion had been described in the Bible, and if no explicit statement of doctrine had been made, the simple record of the Divine and instantaneous and total transformation of the bitterest enemy to the most devoted servant of Christ on earth would have perfectly demonstrated, and written, as it were, upon the Heavens, in letters of living light, the sovereignty, the almightiness and irresistibility of the grace of God in the conviction and conversion of the sinner. By the operation of this efficacious grace, the persecuting Pharisee, who was all the while a chosen vessel unto God, became the lifelong martyr of Jesus of Nazareth; and, next to incarnate Deity, Paul became—far more truly than Julius Caesar— “the foremost man of all this world”—the most richly endowed with the Spirit of God to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ to all the coming generations of the human race, the great Apostle of the Gentile world, the humblest as well as the most learned of the Apostles, the unselfish moral hero of humanity, the dauntless champion of Divine sovereignty and spiritual religion, the greatest laborer and sufferer and witness for Christ that ever appeared in the annals of time, not only preaching but living Christ “as the source and end of his whole being,” and surpassing all other men (excepting John) in the heights of spirituality and holiness to which he attained. About two-thirds of the Acts of the Apostles are devoted to his career; and he himself wrote nearly one-third of the New Testament. All the greatness of Paul was due to the efficacious grace of God (1 Cor. 15:10); and one of the most striking effects of that grace was to make him feel to be “the least of the Apostles” (1 Cor. 15:9); and, later in life, instead of feeling that he was getting better, he uses a still stronger expression of humility, and calls himself “less than the least of all saints” (Eph. 3:8); and, still later in life, he felt constrained to confess himself “the chief of sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15). Like John the Baptist, he could say of Christ, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Abandoning the name Saul (meaning in Hebrew asked, and in Greek conceited), the proudest name in the tribe of Benjamin, he wears the Roman or Gentile name Paul (meaning little); and he continued, all his life long, to grow less in his own esteem, while Christ, the hope of glory, grew greater within him. The humblest in the kingdom of Heaven is the greatest, said our Lord (Matthew 18:4); and we know that no one was ever more meek and lowly, or ever more great than He (Matthew 11:39; Philip. 2:6-11). Poverty of spirit is the first beatitude (Matthew 5:3); and there is no richer or lovelier sign of grace (Num. 12:3; Job 42:6; Ps. 8:2; 34:18; 51:17; Isa. 57:15; 61:1; 66:2; Jer. 31:9, 18-20; Dan. 5:21, 22; Micah 6:8; Matthew 11:25; Luke 4:18; 18:9-14; James 1:10; 2:5; 4:9, 10).

The reality of the life and conversion of Paul, and the genuineness of his leading epistles, are unavoidably and frankly acknowledged by the most destructive and infidel historical critics of Germany. While those rationalists futilely attempt to prove that our canonical Gospels were all written in the second century of the Christian era, and are only corrupted copies of the originals, they admit that Paul’s epistles, especially those to the Romans, the Corinthians and Galatians (containing all the most important truths of Christianity), were certainly written by Paul in the first century; and that Paul himself was suddenly converted from a persecutor to a preacher of the Christian religion. Nothing but the feeblest credulity can believe that this great change in such a mind as Paul’s was produced by a flash of lightning and his imagination.

We will now notice the circumstances of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, and of Cornelius the Roman centurion, the first described in the ninth and the second in the tenth chapter of Acts, as these are good examples of what are called the two classes of Christian conversion.

Saul was making havoc of the church (elumaineto, a term used nowhere else in the New Testament, and employed in the Septuagint and in classical Greek to describe the ravages of wild beasts), endeavoring, with all his might, to exterminate the last vestige of the Christian religion from the earth, not even sparing the helplessness and tenderness of the female sex (Acts 8:3), and doing all this in the name of religion, than which a more heinous crime cannot be imagined; and yet filled with Satanic malignity against God and His people, and breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, he voluntarily applied to the high priest for letters addressed to the synagogues of Damascus (where were many Jews and some Christians), authorizing him to arrest and bring bound to Jerusalem every Christian man and woman, for the purpose of trial and execution. It was a journey of nearly 140 miles, and usually occupied six days. Saul was accompanied by several attendants. As they neared Damascus, one of the most beautiful and ancient cities in the world, the sun attained high noon; and suddenly there shone from heaven a brighter light than even the meridian splendor of a Syrian sun—the Shekinah, or excellent glory of the Divine presence. The whole company saw the light, and were prostrated to the ground; and all heard an awful sound, but Saul, alone understood the words, because they were specially intended for him. Saul also saw in the Heavens the ascended and glorified Redeemer (Acts 9:17, 27; 22:14; 26:16; 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8), who said to him in the Hebrew tongue, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the goads.” The name of Saul was repeated to denote special solemnity, as in the case of Abraham (Gen. 22:11), Moses (Ex. 3:4), Martha (Luke 10:41), Simon (Luke 22:31), and Jerusalem (Matthew 23:37). In Paul’s first spiritual lesson, Christ identifies Himself with His poor persecuted people (Matthew 25:40, 45; 1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 1:22, 23; 5:30; Col. 2:19); and Christ reminds him that, while all his measures for crushing the church of God are vain, still, like a stupid ox, he is, by his stubborn fury, continually injuring himself. The moment Saul heard the voice of the Son of God he lived (John 5:25); from his death in trespasses and sins he was quickened by the Holy Spirit into spiritual life (Eph. 2:1; John 6:63); he was a new creature (2 Cor. 5:17); his stony heart was replaced by a fleshly heart (Ezek. 36:26, 27), his carnal mindedness by spiritual mindedness (Rom. 8:6); and every thought was brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. x. 5). In an instant and forever Saul was converted to God (John 17:3). “Out of the noonday God had struck him into darkness, only that He might kindle a noon in the midnight of his heart.” “It pleased God, who separated him from his mother’s womb, and called him by His grace, to reveal His Son in him” (Gal. 1:15, 16). “God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness,” soon “shined in his heart, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). “Trembling and astonished, Saul said, Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?” From that moment obedience to Christ became the ruling principle of Paul’s life. His falling to the ground represented the fall of his pride and rebellion against God; his physical blindness denoted the utter spiritual blindness of his natural mind, notwithstanding his fine education, morality and legalism. Christ directed him to arise and go into the city, and it should be told him what he must do. This he did, being led by the hand in astonishment by his companions, who were themselves witnesses of the marvelous light and sound, though they understood nothing of the meaning. It was all done at noonday, when there could be no deception, and to the utter amazement of all. And the strong-minded, educated, practical, truthful Apostle of the Gentiles knew, as well as he knew his own existence, that he had seen and conversed with the Lord Jesus Christ in glory. His whole future blameless, devoted, suffering, unworldly life is an unanswerable attestation of this fact. Though an angel from Heaven preached a different gospel—which was not a gospel—from his, it was false; for he had his gospel directly from the Son of God (Gal. 1:8, 12). And Paul was never ashamed of the gospel of Christ, nor of his experience of its saving power (Rom. 1:18), relating that experience even before governors and kings (Acts 26).

For three days Saul neither saw nor ate nor drank. Then to a certain disciple in Damascus named Ananias, a devout man according to the law, and of good report among the Jews, the Lord appeared in a vision, and said, “Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and inquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, and hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.” And to Ananias’s objection the Lord answered that Saul was a chosen vessel unto Him, to bear His name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel; for “I will shew him,” said He, “how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake. And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized” (Acts 9). Thus the Lord revealed His will to each of His servants in a vision (Acts 2:17, 18); there was a perfect agreement in the two revelations; Saul was at once pointedly directed to the church, and commanded to enter it by baptism, which he did. In regard to Ananias’s putting his hands on Saul, by the command of God, we observe the highly important fact that, not only was it done before Saul’s baptism, but it was done by a man who was not an Apostle, nor a successor of an Apostle (if such a thing as succession to the Apostleship were at all scriptural or possible), for the Apostles were all then living; and thus the case of the great Apostle of the Gentiles totally undermines the Episcopal doctrine of the necessity of the confirmation of every believer, after baptism, either by an Apostle or the successor of an Apostle. Upon Cornelius and his company, it is distinctly asserted, in the tenth chapter of Acts, that the Holy Ghost, both in His converting and miracle-working power, was poured out, before they were baptized; and no mention is made of Peter’s putting his hands on the company at all. The apostolic imposition of hands after baptism (except for ordination) is mentioned in only two instances in the New Testament (Acts 8:17; 19:6); and in both cases it was certainly used, as we know from the context (Acts 8:7, 18; 19:6), to represent the bestowal of the miracle-working power of the Holy Ghost. Christ put His hands upon unbaptized infants and blessed them (Matthew 19:13-15; Luke 18:15, 16). As for Hebrews 6:1, 2, in which these six principles of the doctrine of Christ are mentioned—repentance, faith, baptism, laying on of hands, resurrection and judgment, we observe that nothing is said of an Apostle or a successor of an Apostle; it is not said upon whom or for what purpose hands are to be laid; but, if we are to infer from the order, that laying on of hands should follow every baptism, so we are compelled to infer that every baptism must follow repentance from dead works, and faith toward God; and this inevitable corollary of “confirmation,” as deduced from this passage, utterly sweeps away the foundation of infant baptism, a chief corner-stone of hierarchism. The ordination to the Deaconship or Eldership by the laying on of the hands of the presbytery is scriptural (Acts 6:6; 13:3; 1 Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:6; 1 Peter 5:1; 2 John 1). So Moses ordained Joshua by laying his hands upon him (Num. 27:18; Deut. 34:9).

Saul, before his conversion, “verily thought that he ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth” (Acts 26:9). His sincerity by no means proved that he was right or acceptable with God; because it was the sincerity of a carnal and darkened mind. The Hindu is sincere in immolating himself under the car of Juggernaut; but such immolation is suicide.

While a Pharisee, Saul had no doubt uttered long and numerous forms of prayer, but he never truly prayed until quickened into spiritual life by the voice of the Son of God and the power of the Holy Ghost (Acts 9:11; John 5:25; Eph. 2:1; John 6:63).

Paul, after his conversion, immediately preached in the synagogues at Damascus, confounding the Jews, and proving that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. Then, as we learn from Galatians 1:17, 18, he retired for about three years into Arabia, most probably the Sinaitic peninsula (Gal. 4:25; Heb. 12:18-21), for the purpose, it would seem, of searching the Holy Scriptures, and, afar from the haunts of men, like Moses, in the backside of the desert (Exodus 3:1, etc.), to commune alone with God on that holy ground where the bush “had glowed in unconsuming fire, and the granite crags had trembled at the voice which uttered the fiery law.” The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who had communed there with Moses 1,500 years before, met His chosen and honored servant, and taught him the momentous lesson that he was to bear in his earthen vessel to the unborn generations of the people of God—the spirituality of the Mosaic law and his own carnality, that thus, through the law, he might be dead to the law, and so might live unto God (Acts 22:14; Rom. 7:14; Gal. 2:19; 2 Cor. 4:7). While alive to the law, hoping for salvation by obeying it, and dreading condemnation by disobeying it, he was dead unto God; and it was only when he learned from God (Isa. 54:13; John 6:45) how spiritual the law was, demanding perfect sinlessness of thought as well as of word and deed, and how carnal he was, sold under sin, and having no good thing dwelling in him, did he become dead to the law and all legal dependence, divorced from the legal covenant, delivered from the curse of the law, and truly alive unto God, united to Christ, crucified with Jesus to the sinful and perishing vanities of the world, and yet living, or rather Christ living in him, and he living the life that he now lived in the flesh by the faith of the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him (Gal. 2:19, 20).

The outward miracle of the light and sound was a sign of the inward miracle wrought upon the heart of Saul by the Holy Spirit “delivering him from the power of darkness, and translating him into the kingdom of God’s dear Son” (Col. 1:13); and he who denies that the conversion of the sinner is a miracle (that is, supernatural) point-blank denies the authority of inspiration (2 Cor. 4:6; Gen. 1:3; 2 Cor. 5:17, 18; Eph. 2:1-10; John 5:25; Acts 9:1-22). If creation and resurrection are not miraculous or supernatural, then surely nothing can be; and such atheistic philosophy would thrust God out of both His natural and His spiritual universe.

In view of Saul’s conversion, and the Scriptures just cited, it is no wonder that even Mr. John Wesley wrote: “It may be allowed, that God acts as sovereign in convincing some souls of sin, arresting them in their mad career by His resistless power. It seems, also, that at the moment of our conversion, He acts irresistibly” (Wesley’s Works, vol. vi., p. 136, as quoted in Watson’s Theological Institutes, vol. ii., p. 444).

The conversion of Saul of Tarsus illustrates the saying of God quoted by Paul from Isaiah (Isa. 45:1; Rom. 10:20: “I am found of them that sought me not; I am made manifest unto them that asked not after me.” The case of Cornelius, the Roman centurion (Acts 10), illustrates what has been called the other class of conversions, which fulfill the promise: “Ye shall seek me and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13). This language of the Lord by Jeremiah was addressed to the chosen people of God then in Babylonian captivity, and it was a most comforting prediction to them: “For thus saith the Lord, that after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not evil, to give you an expected end. Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. And I will be found of you, saith the Lord: and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the Lord: and I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive” (Jer. 29:10-14). These were the chosen people of God all the time, and it was certain, from this Divine prediction, that in the fullness of time they would call upon and seek the Lord with their whole heart, and be found of Him, and be delivered from their captivity.

The conversion of Cornelius, like that of Saul, occupies a large space in the Acts (chapters ten and eleven), far more space than that devoted to the conversion of thousands in Jerusalem. It was the opening of the door of faith to the uncircumcised Gentiles, without their passing through the intermediate state of Judaism. The disciples scattered abroad by the persecution after Stephen’s death went everywhere preaching the word, and Philip had preached and baptized believers in Samaria, as well as the Ethiopian eunuch. But there was to be a Gentile Pentecost at Caesarea, as there had been a Jewish Pentecost at Jerusalem, and the Apostle of the circumcision was, by the plainest indication of the Divine will, to admit Gentile converts into the church. By visions, or Divine communications, Cornelius and Peter were both prepared for the solemn scene (Acts 2:17; 10:3, 10-17), Cornelius being assured of God’s merciful purpose towards him, and being directed to send for Peter; and Peter being informed of the breaking down of the old partition between Jews and Gentiles, and directed to go with the men sent to him by Cornelius. As Peter was entering the house of Cornelius, where the latter had assembled his kinsmen and near friends, Cornelius met him, and, with a deep feeling of reverence for the personage whom God had sent him, such as John felt for the Angel (Rev. 19:10; 22:8, 9), he prostrated himself at Peter’s feet; but Peter at once raised him up and said to him, “I myself also am a man.” Those who falsely claim to be the successors of Peter totally differ from him in allowing and requiring such homage (contrast 1 Peter 5:1-6, with 2 Thess. 2:6). After Peter and Cornelius had told each other their visions, Peter said, in the beginning of his discourse: “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him.” By saying that God is no respecter of persons, Peter means, as is proved by the original Greek, and by the thirty-fifth verse, and by 2 Chronicles 19:7, Ephesians 6:9 and James 2:1-9, that God does not regard external distinctions; or, as Samuel says, “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (1 Sam. 21:7). Other Scriptures inform us that God does have especial respect for His lowly, spiritual, covenant people (Gen. 4:4; Exodus 2:25; Lev. 26:9; 2 Kings 13:23; Psalm 138:6). “Fearing God” and “working righteousness” are the most usual Old Testament descriptions of the true spiritual worshipers of God; and these are not the meritorious conditions or prerequisites of Divine grace, but the fruits and evidences of that grace already in the heart, proving that these characters are God’s covenant people (Jer. 32:38-41; Heb. 12:28; Ps. 25:14; 32:18; 103:13-17; 147:11; Isaiah 45:24; 54:17; 61:3, 10, 11; Jer. 23:6; 33:16; Ps. 23:3; 24:5; Rom. 5:19; Gal. 2:21; 1 John 2:29; John 3:3-8). According to the testimony of Luke, the historian, and of the Angel, and of Peter (Acts 10:2, 4, 34, 35), Cornelius was already, before Peter came, a God-fearing, righteous, benevolent, praying man, accepted with God; and Peter was only to instruct him more fully in the way of God. God had already cleansed him, as He had shown Peter in the vision (Acts 10:15). The very fact of his having the spirit of prayer, like Saul of Tarsus, after he was divinely arrested, proved that he was a child of grace (Jer. 31:1-9; 50:4-20; Zech. 12:10; Rom. 8:15, 16, 26, 27; Eph. 6:18; Jude 20). Even the Anglican “Speaker’s Commentary,” which will not be suspected of undue spirituality, admits that Cornelius not only “had the honest and good heart for the reception of the good seed,” but also a genuine though “limited faith, which was the basis of prayer and alms-giving.” While Peter was preaching Jesus to Cornelius and his company, the miracle-working power of the Holy Ghost, as well as His internal efficacy, fell upon the hearers, and they spoke with various tongues and magnified God, just as the Jewish disciples had done on the day of Pentecost (Acts ii. 4; x. 44-46). They were thus partakers of God’s eternal salvation (1 Peter 1:1-5; John 1:12, 13; 1 John 5:4, 5) even before they were baptized in water; and Peter then appropriately asked, “Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, who have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?” Only after they become spiritual believers in Christ does Peter think of baptizing them in water; and such is the case with every baptism in the New Testament—spiritual belief in Christ first, and then the burial in water; first the thing signified, and afterwards the sign, which, under such circumstances only, is not a mockery and a delusion. Though the believer should be baptized, in obedience to Christ, and for the answer of a good conscience (1 Peter 3:21), yet Christ, and not water, is his only God and Savior (Isa. 45:21, 22; Acts 4:12).

“The saving grace of God teaches men to worship Him with reverence and godly fear, to serve Him conscientiously, to unite justice and charity, and to pray with constancy and perseverance. It leads men to order their households in the fear of God; and commonly they become instrumental to the good of those around them. The excellent and devout Roman soldier, no less than Saul the persecutor, the converted jailor, and the thief upon the cross, was saved only by the atonement of Christ; that no flesh should glory in the presence of God (1 Cor. 1:29).” “Should the Lord create an humble, teachable and inquiring disposition in the heart of an inhabitant of China, Japan or the unexplored parts of Africa, He would sooner send an angel from Heaven, or a minister from the uttermost part of the earth, to show him the way of salvation, than leave him destitute of that knowledge, for which he longs and prays without ceasing. The alms and supplications of such persons spring from right principles and motives, and go up as a memorial before God, not to merit His favor, but to plead with Him to fulfill His gracious promises.” “The sublime subjects which pertain to redemption through the blood of the Son of God seem more proper for the tongues of angels to proclaim than for us poor worms of the earth. Doubtless, in many respects, they could preach them unspeakably better; yet our humiliating and thankful experience may balance something on the other side. In that case, however, it would not be so evident that the excellency of the power, which makes the word successful, is wholly of God; nor would their presence and language be so suited to man’s weakness, or so conducive to his comfort.”—T. Scott.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” say both David and Solomon (Ps. 111:10; Prov. 9:10); “the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever,” says David (Ps. 19:9); “unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in His wings,” says the Lord by Malachi (4:2). These precious declarations are precisely equivalent to the comforting assurance of the Apostle Paul, “that He who hath begun a good work in you will perform (epiteleo, bring to an end, accomplish, perfect) it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6)—not only the day when He is manifested as the Sun of Righteousness and the Divine Savior of the trembling sinner, but, as shown by the fourth verse below (Phil. 1:10), and by 1 Thessalonians 5:2, and 2 Peter 3:10, the day at the close of this dispensation, when Christ shall come in final judgment. This one verse (Phil. 1:6), like Hebrews 12:2, in which Jesus is called both “the Author and Finisher of our faith,” and like Isaiah 35:10, in which it is declared that “the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads,” and like many other verses of Scripture, cuts up the system of conditional salvation by the roots, and incontestably and eternally establishes the system of salvation by sovereign grace, beginning and consummating the good work in the sinner’s heart, so that all the glory, without the slightest reservation, shall be given by the saved sinner to God (Ps. 107:1-32; 120:1; Ex. 15:1-19; Rev. 5:9, 10; 15:3; Rom. 3:27, 28). Every system of conditionalism represents the sinner as doing that which insures his salvation, and which should, therefore, entitle him to the chief glory. As for good works, they are, as we have shown by abundant scriptural quotations, but the fruit of Divine grace implanted in the heart.

I now condense, mainly from the writing of T.D. Bernard and P. Schaff, some excellent remarks upon the books of the New Testament, especially the epistles.

“In the Gospels Christ is manifested as man and as God; in the Acts He is preached to the world; in the epistles he is received by His indwelling Spirit in the hearts of believers; and in Revelation He is, in His mystical body, the church, after great tribulation, translated to glory. In the Gospels we see the Divine temple building; in the Acts we see the doors thrown open and Jews and Gentiles fleeing into it as a refuge; in the epistles we become inmates of the temple ourselves, and behold its internal, spiritual and assimilating glory; in the Revelation the temple, with all its inmates, after passing through manifold fiery trials, is perfected and elevated into the immediate, beatific and eternal presence of God.”

Some general and comparative remarks in reference to the Four Gospels have been given in the Introduction to this work.

The book entitles the Acts of the Apostles “forms the bridge between the Gospels and the epistles. It is a direct continuation of the third Gospel, by the same author, Luke, and is addressed to the same Theophilus (‘friend of God’), probably a Christian convert of distinguished social position. In the Gospel Luke repeats what he heard and read; in the Acts what he heard and saw. The Gospel records the life and work of Christ; the Acts the work of the Holy Spirit, who is recognized at every step. The word Spirit, or Holy Spirit, occurs more frequently in the Acts than in any other book of the New Testament. It might properly be called ‘the Gospel of the Holy Spirit.’ The Acts is a cheerful and encouraging book, like the third Gospel. It represents the progress of Christianity from Jerusalem, the capital of Judaism, to Rome, the capital of heathenism. It is a history of the planting of the church among the Jews by Peter, and among the Gentiles by Paul. More than three-fifths of it are devoted to Paul, and especially to his later labors and journeys, in which the author could speak from personal knowledge. Luke was in the company of Paul, including some interruptions, at least twelve years. He was again with Paul in his last captivity, shortly before Paul’s martyrdom, his most faithful and devoted companion (2 Tim. 4:11). He probably began the book of Acts or a preliminary diary while with Paul at Philippi, continuing it at Caesarea during Paul’s two years’ imprisonment there, and finishing it soon after Paul’s first imprisonment in Rome, before the terrible persecution in the summer of A.D. 64, which he could hardly left unnoticed. The Acts and epistles supplement and confirm each other by a series of coincidences in all essential points. Paley’s examination of these numerous and undesigned coincidences in his Horae Paulinae, and James Smith’s Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, furnish to readers of sound common sense and unbiased judgment unanswerable arguments for the credibility of the Acts. No ancient work affords so many tests of veracity as the Acts, because no other has such numerous points of contact in all directions with contemporary history, politics and topography, whether Jewish, or Greek, or Roman. No other history of thirty years has ever been written so truthful and impartial, so important and interesting, so healthy in tone and hopeful in spirit, so aggressive and yet so genial, so cheering and inspiring, so replete with lessons of wisdom and encouragement for work in spreading the glad tidings of salvation, and yet withal so simple and modest, as the Acts of the Apostles.

“The epistles are addressed to baptized believers, and aim to strengthen them in their faith, and, by brotherly instruction, exhortation, rebuke and consolation, to build up the church in all Christian graces on the historical foundation of the teaching and example of Christ. The prophets of the Old Testament delivered Divine oracles to the people with ‘Thus saith the Lord;’ the Apostles of the New Testament wrote letters to the brethren, who shared with them the same faith and hope as members of Christ—a more open, equal and hearty mode of communication, suited to the gospel day, showing rather companionship than dictation, reasoning out of the Old Testament Scriptures and teaching the brethren how so to reason, giving the individual experience of the writer, yet bearing lofty, authoritative, unwavering, sure testimony to the truth, and sometimes making definite additions to former revelations. The epistles are the voice of the Spirit within the church to those who are within the church. The essential thought is ‘Of Him are ye in Christ Jesus.’ God is represented as the immediate and the still continuous author of our existence in Christ. In the epistles, we know, as Christ promised (John 14:20), that He is in His Father, as well as His Father is in Him, and that we are in Him and He in us. Believers are in Christ, and so are partakers in all that He does and has and is—they died in Him, rose with Him, and live with Him; when the eye of God looks on them, they are found in Christ, and there is no condemnation to them; they are righteous in His righteousness, and loved with the love that rests on Him, and are sons of God in His Sonship, and heirs with Him in His inheritance, and are soon to be glorified with Him in His glory; and this relationship was contemplated in eternal counsels, and predestined before the foundation of the world. So Christ is in those who believe by His indwelling Spirit, leading them to God and giving them the earnest of their eternal inheritance. Thus, by intertwined relations, the life of the believer is constituted a life in Christ and a life in God. This idea underlies all the epistles, both their doctrine and their exhortation. It is a new world of thought—a new element. All their relations and actions are in Christ. And, finally, this character of existence is not changed by that which changes all besides—they die in the Lord, and sleep in Jesus, and, when He shall appear, they will appear; when He comes God shall bring them with Him, and they shall reign in life by Him. Men bid us live in truth and duty, in purity and love—they do well; but the gospel does better, calling and enabling us to live in Christ, and find in Him the enjoyment of all that we would possess, and the realization of all that we would become.

“The epistles of the New Testament are without a parallel in ancient literature, and yield in importance only to the Gospels, which stand higher, as Christ Himself rises above the Apostles. They presuppose throughout the Gospel history, and often allude to the death and resurrection of Christ as the foundation of the church and the Christian hope. They compress more ideas in fewer words than any other writings, human or Divine, excepting the Gospels. They discuss the highest possible themes—God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, sin and redemption, incarnation, regeneration, repentance, faith and good works, holy living and dying, the conversion of the world, the general judgment, eternal glory. They are of more real value to the church than all the systems of theology and all the confessions of faith.

“The appointed epistolary teachers of the church were Peter and John, the two chief of the original twelve Apostles; James and Jude, the brethren of the Lord; and Paul, the great Apostle of the Gentiles, who wrote five times as much as all the other four together.

“The seven epistles of James, First and Second Peter, First, Second and Third John, and Jude, usually follow, in the old manuscripts, the Acts of the Apostles, and precede the Pauline epistles, perhaps as being the works of the older Apostles; they are now placed last, probably because they are supplementary and confirmatory to the more elaborate writings of Paul. The epistle of James was probably written before A.D. 50 (some think as early as A.D. 44), and is thought to be the oldest book in the New Testament; First Peter (probably also Second Peter and Jude) is believed to have been written before A.D. 67; and the epistles of John between A.D. 90 and 100. Of the epistles of Paul, those to the Thessalonians were written first, A.D. 52 or 53; then Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans between 56 and 58; then the four epistles of the captivity, Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon and Philippians, between 61 and 63; last, the pastoral epistles, but their date is uncertain, except that the second epistle to Timothy is his farewell letter on the eve of his martyrdom. The epistle to the Hebrews was probably written about A.D. 63. Its author is unknown; but it has been generally thought that Paul was its author; on account of its uncertified authorship, it was placed after Paul’s other epistles. From the fourth to the eighteenth century the Pauline authorship was the prevailing opinion; this was based upon the unanimous tradition of the Eastern church—the mention of Timothy and the reference to a release from captivity (13:23)—and the agreement of the epistle with Paul’s system of doctrine, the tone of apostolic authority, and the depth and unction of the epistle. The non-Pauline authorship is argued on the following grounds: the decided opposition to the Pauline authorship by Western tradition, both Roman and North African, down to the time of Augustine (about 350 A.D.); the absence of the customary name and salutation; the phraseology in Hebrews 2:3, seeming to distinguish the author from the Apostles, and very different from the language of Paul in the first chapter of Galatians; the difference from Paul’s writings, not in substance, but in the form and method of teaching and arguing; the superior purity, correctness and rhetorical finish of style; the difference in the quotations from the Old Testament, the author always following the Septuagint, while Paul often quotes the Hebrew. As to the real author, five of Paul’s fellow-laborers have been proposed, either as sole or as joint authors with Paul—Barnabas, Luke, Clement, Apollos and Silas. The arguments for and the objections against them are equally strong, and we have no data to decide between them. Whoever may have been the writer, the inspiration and leading ideas are those of Paul.

“The following suggestive doctrinal arrangement of Paul’s undoubted epistles has been made: 1. Anthropological and Soteriological—Galatians and Romans. 2. Ethical and Ecclesiastical—1st and 2nd Corinthians. 3. Christological—Colossians and Philippians. 4. Ecclesiological—Ephesians (in part also Corinthians). 5. Eschatological—Thessalonians. 6. Pastoral—Timothy and Titus. 7. Social and Personal—Philemon.

“As Matthew is the fit beginning of the Gospels, linking the New with the Old Testament, so the epistle to the Romans is the fit beginning to the epistles, giving the genealogy of the doctrine of Christ through the Old Testament. The Apostle Paul, in this epistle, firmly holds his ground in the prophetic and historic line of the Old Covenant, and from that standing point opens the dispensation of the Spirit. The Acts left him in Rome; the succeeding epistle is addressed to the Romans. It stands justly at the head of the Pauline epistles. It is the most comprehensive and systematic statement of Paul’s theology, both theoretical and practical, for which he lived and died. It gives the clearest and fullest exposition of a vital and fundamental subject, salvation by free grace, the need, nature and effects of gospel justification for individual souls, vindicated by the witness of the Law and the Prophets. Luther calls Romans ‘the chief book of the New Testament, and the purest gospel;’ Coleridge styles it ‘the profoundest book in existence;’ Meyer, ‘the greatest and richest of all the apostolic works;’ and Godet denominated it ‘the cathedral of the Christian faith.’

“The epistles to the Corinthians are addressed to the Greeks who seek after wisdom; and these epistles condemn a spirit of self-confident freedom both in thought and conduct—in other words, the essential spirit of the world, and they assert the Divine and indefeasible authority of the gospel, which claims the subjection of the mind and the regulation of the life of the church. These epistles abound in variety of topics, and show the extraordinary versatility of the mind of the writer, and his inspired practical wisdom in dealing with delicate and complicated questions and unscrupulous opponents. For every aberration he has a word of severe censure, for every danger a word of warning, for every weakness a word of cheer and sympathy, for every returning offender a word of pardon and encouragement. The first epistle contains the unrivaled description of the chief Christian grace, Charity or Love; the second epistle gives us almost an autobiography of the Apostle, and is a mine of pastoral wisdom.

“The epistle to the Galatians encounters, not the spirit of presumptuous freedom (as those to the Corinthians), but the spirit of a willful bondage, which returns, after its own stubborn and insensate fashion, to the elements of the world and of the flesh; and this epistle asserts the direct revelation from Christ of the apostolic doctrine which shines out more clearly as a dispensation of the Spirit and of liberty. It was directed against those Judaizing teachers who undermined Paul’s apostolical authority, and misled the Galatian churches into an apostasy from the gospel of free grace to a false gospel of legal bondage. The epistle to the Galatians treats of the same subject as that to the Romans—the preparativeness and subordination of the law to the gospel. It is a remarkable fact that the two races represented by the original readers of these epistles—the Celtic and the Latin—have far departed from the doctrines taught in them, and gone back from gospel freedom to legal bondage—thus repeating the apostasy of the fickle-minded Galatians. The Pauline gospel was for centuries ignored, misunderstood, and (in spite of Augustine) cast out at last by Rome, as Christianity itself was cast out by Jerusalem of old. But these two epistles, more than any other books of the New Testament, inspired the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and are to this day the Gibraltar of evangelical Protestantism.

“The succeeding epistles of Paul address those whose minds are now cleared, settled, and secured. The Apostle ascends to a more calm and lofty stage of thought in his epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, wherein, no longer in collision with human error, he expatiates in the view of the eternal purposes of God, and of the ideal perfections of the church in Christ; if inspiration was asserted in the other epistles, here it is felt; yet, in both epistles, this high strain passes by the most natural transition into the plainest counsels; and, in the epistles to the Philippians and Philemon, the voice is that, not only of a prophet, but of an affectionate brother and friend. These four epistles were written in captivity, probably during Paul’s first imprisonment in Rome. He glorified in being a ‘prisoner of Christ.’ He experienced the blessedness of persecution for righteousness’ sake (Matthew 5:10), and ‘the peace of God which passeth all understanding’ (Phil. 4:7). He was thus divinely enabled to turn the prison into a pulpit, to send comfort and joy to his distant churches, and render a greater service to future ages than he could have done by active labor. Chained day and night by his right arm to the left arm of a Roman soldier, he preached the gospel to his keepers, and many in the praetorian guard and in Caesar’s household believed. The epistle to the Colossians is the most Christly of Paul’s epistles, the Christology approaching very closely to that of John; and the Epistle to the Ephesians is the most churchly book of the New Testament—the very reverse, however, of churchy, as nothing can be further removed from the genius of Paul than that narrow, mechanical and pedantic churchiness which sticks to the shell of outward forms and ceremonies, and mistakes them for the kernel within. The churchliness of the epistle to the Ephesians is rooted and grounded in Christliness and has no sense whatever if separated from this root. A ‘church’ without Christ would be at best, a prayer-saying corpse (and there are such so-called ‘churches’). Paul emphasizes the person of Christ in Colossians, and the person and work of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians. Ephesians is, in some respects, the most profound and difficult, as it is certainly the most spiritual and devout of Paul’s epistles. It is the Epistle of the Heavenlies, an ode to Christ and His spotless bride, the Song of Songs in the New Testament. Philippi was the first place in Europe where the gospel was preached. Here Paul was severely persecuted and marvelously delivered. Here were his most devoted brethren; for them he felt the strongest personal attachment; from them alone would he receive contributions for his support. The epistle to the Philippians is like Paul’s midnight hymn of praise in the dungeon of Philippi. Its key-note is thankful joy. He had no doctrinal error or practical vice to rebuke, as in Galatians and Corinthians. The epistle to Philemon was written and transmitted at the same time as that to the Colossians, and may be regarded as a personal postscript to it. Onesimus, a slave of Philemon, had, on account of some offense, probably theft, run away from his master, who was a zealous Christian at Colosse, and had experienced a hope in Christ under Paul’s preaching at Rome, and now desired to return, as a penitent, in company with Tychicus, the bearer of the epistle to the Colossians. Paul accordingly sent back Onesimus to his master, yet under a new character, no more a contemptible thief and runaway, but a regenerate man and a beloved brother, with the touching request that Philemon might receive him as kindly as he would the Apostle himself. The epistle reveals Paul to us as an unsurpassed Christian gentleman; it is a model of courtesy, delicacy, and tenderness of feeling.

“The Thessalonian epistles complete Paul’s addresses to seven churches, and, though first in composition, are properly the last in the canon as they are distinguished by the eschatological element, and sustain the conflict of faith by the preaching of that blessed hope and the glorious appearing and coming of the day of God. Paul wrote these two letters from Corinth, during his first sojourn in that city; and it seems to have been a chief object of the Apostle to correct a misapprehension into which the Thessalonians had fallen in regard to the speedy coming of Christ. He taught them that the Lord would not come so soon as they expected, but that first there must be a falling away, and the man of sin, the son of perdition, must be revealed; that they could not make a mathematical calculation of the time when Christ would come; and that in no case should the expectation check industry and zeal, but rather stimulate them.

“To this rich body of doctrine the pastoral epistles add their suggestive words on the principles and spirit of the ministerial office, which has the care of the church and the stewardship of the truth. There is a very marked difference between the ecclesiastical constitution of the pastoral epistles and that of the second century. There is not a word said about the Divine origin of episcopacy; not a trace of a congregational episcopate, such as we find in the Ignatian epistles, still less of a diocesan episcopate of the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian. Bishops and presbyters (or Elders) are still identical as they are in the Acts (20:17, 28), and in the epistle to the Philippians (1:1). Even Timothy and Titus appear simply as delegates of the Apostle for a specific mission. These epistles agree with Paul’s doctrinal system in clearly tracing salvation to Divine grace alone; they are illuminated with flashes of his genius; they bear the marks of his intense personality; they contain rare gems of inspired truth, and most wholesome admonition and advice, which makes them to-day far more valuable than any number of works on pastoral theology and church government. They contain several passages which, for doctrine or practice, are equal to the best Paul ever wrote, and are deeply lodged in the experience and affection of Christians. Nothing could be a more fitting, a more sublime and beautiful, finale of such a hero of faith than the sixth, seventh and eighth verses of the last chapter of his last epistle (2 Tim.), written in the very face of martyrdom.

“The epistle to the Hebrews presents to the perplexed Hebrew-Christian mind the correct divinely-intended relation and subordination of the Old Covenant to the New. The internal evidence is that it was written from Italy between A.D. 60 and 70, before Paul’s martyrdom. The author was a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and gifted with a tongue of fire. He had the grace of exhortation and consolation in the highest degree. The epistle is a profound argument for the superiority of Christ over the angels, over Moses, and over the Levitical priesthood, and for the finality of the second covenant. It unfolds far more fully than any other book the great idea of the eternal priesthood and sacrifice of Christ, offered once and forever for human redemption, as distinct from the national and transient character of the Mosaic priesthood and the ever-repeated sacrifices of the tabernacle and the temple. He shows from the Old Testament itself that God had designed the latter as but the temporary shadow, type and prophecy of Christianity, the abiding substance. The epistle is, like Colossians and Philippians, eminently Christoligical, and forms a stepping-stone to the Christology of John. The object of the author was to warn the conservative Christians in Jerusalem of the danger of apostatizing to Judaism. His arguments were providentially emphasized soon after by the destruction of the city and temple. The language of the epistle is the purest Greek of the New Testament. The opening sentence is a rich and elegant period of classic construction. The description of the heroes of faith in the eleventh chapter is one of the most eloquent and sublime in the entire range of religious literature.

“The seven epistles following Hebrews in the canon are sometimes called Catholic or General; but his designation properly applies to only five of them: James, First and Second Peter, First John, and Jude; the second and third epistles of John are addressed to individuals. These writers do not enter into theological discussions like those of Paul, but give simpler statements of truth, supplementing and confirming Paul’s doctrine.

“James was not an Apostle, but the brother of the Lord, and the first pastor of the church in Jerusalem, where he died a martyr. He was a man of the most exemplary piety, being called even by the Jews ‘the Just,’ and he enjoyed almost apostolic authority, especially in Judea and among Jewish Christians. He had high regard for the Mosaic law. His epistle is addressed to ‘the twelve tribes scattered abroad,’ and is directed against a one-sided, speculative, dead, Antinomian faith, and shows the practical ethical side of the doctrine of Christ. James exhorts his readers to good works of faith, warns them against a merely nominal orthodoxy, covetousness, pride and worldliness, and comforts them in view of present and future trials and persecutions. Though meager in doctrine, it is rich in comfort and lessons of holy living based on faith in Jesus Christ, ‘the Lord of glory.’ It is a commentary upon Christ’s sermon on the mount. James was unwilling to impose the yoke of circumcision upon the Gentiles (Acts 15:19, 20), and he recognized Paul as the Apostle of the Gentiles, giving him the right hand of fellowship (Gal. 2:9). There is no real contradiction between James and Paul on the subject of faith and works. James says: ‘Faith is dead without works.’ Paul says: ‘Works are dead without faith.’ Both are right: James in opposition to dead orthodoxy, Paul in opposition to self-righteous legalism. James does not demand works without faith, but works prompted by faith; while Paul, on the other hand, likewise declares a faith worthless which is without love, though it remove mountains. James looks mainly at the fruit, Paul at the root. Paul solves the difficulty in one phrase—‘faith working through love’ (Gal. 5:6). By ‘faith’ Paul never means dead faith, but James sometimes does. James maintains the absolute necessity of living faith (James 1:3, 6; 2:1, 5, 18, 22, 23, 26; 5:15); and Paul emphasizes the value of good works as evidencing our faith, profiting others, and glorifying God (Rom. 2:13; 12-16; 1 Cor. 16; 2 Cor. 9; Gal. 5:6; Eph. 2:10; 5, 6; Col. 1:10; 3; 4; Phil. 4; 2 Thess. 2:17; 1 Tim. 2:10; 5:10; 6:18; 2 Tim. 3:17; Titus 2:7-14; 3:8). Paul’s life of self-sacrificing labors for Christ speaks more loudly on the importance of works of love than all his writings.

“Peter, writing to the Pauline churches, confirms them in the Pauline faith. In the Gospels, the human nature of Simon appears most prominent; the Acts unfold the Divine mission of Peter in the founding of the church, with a temporary relapse at Antioch (recorded in Gal. 2); in his epistles we see the complete triumph of Divine grace. Deeply humbled and softened, he gives the fruit of a rich spiritual experience. In no other epistles do the language and spirit come more directly home to the personal trials and wants and weaknesses of the Christian life. In his first epistle he warns against hierarchical ambition in prophetic anticipation of the abuse of his name among the Apostles (5:1-4), calling himself simply ‘an Elder,’ and exhorting his fellow-Elders to ‘feed the flock of God, not for filthy lucre but of a ready mind; neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.’ God overruled Peter’s very sins and inconsistencies for his humiliation and spiritual progress. Nowhere, except in Christ, do we find a spirit more humble, meek, gentle, tender, loving and lovely. Almost every word and incident in the gospel history connected with Peter left its impress upon his epistles in the way of humble or thankful reminiscence and allusion. Christ having prayed that his faith should not fail, and having looked upon him after his denial, Peter was enabled by Divine grace to weep bitterly and turn again to his Lord, and thus he is still strengthening his brethren. Not-withstanding Paul’s sharp rebuke of him before the church at Antioch, Peter, in his second epistle, makes an affectionate allusion to his ‘beloved brother Paul’ and his profound writings, which he classes with the ‘other Scriptures.’ Thus he probed how thoroughly the Spirit of Christ had, through experience, trained him to humility, meekness and self-denial.

“The first epistle of John is a postscript to the fourth Gospel. It is a practical application of the lessons of the life of Christ to the wants of the church at the close of the first century. It is a circular letter of the venerable Apostle to his beloved children in Asia Minor, exhorting them to a holy life of faith and love in Christ, and earnestly warning them against the Gnostic ‘antichrists,’ already existing or to come, who deny the mystery of the incarnation, sunder religion from morality, and run into Antionomian practices. The second and third epistles of John are short private letters, the second to a Christian woman (some suppose to a Christian church), and the third to Gaius (whether in Macedonia, Acts 19:29, or in Corinth, Rom. 16:23, 1 Cor. 1:14, or Derbe, Acts 20:4, is unknown). The second epistle greatly resembles the first, and so does the style of the third. In both the Apostle calls himself ‘the Elder.’ as Peter had done. True grace produces modesty and meekness.

“Jude was a brother of James, a half-brother of Christ, and not probably an Apostle. Some, however, suppose that both James and Jude, the authors of the epistles, were Apostles. The epistle of Jude strongly resembles the second chapter of the second epistle of Peter. It is a solemn warning against the licentious tendencies of Gnosticism. The allusion to the remarkable Apocryphal book of Enoch gives an inspired sanction only to the truth of the passage quoted, not to the whole book. Jude fitly closes the epistle by exhorting his readers to ‘contend earnestly for the holy heavenly faith once delivered to the saints by prophets and Apostles, looking unto Him who is able to keep them from falling, and to present them faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.’

“The epistles of the New Testament were divinely intended for the redeemed, regenerated and spiritual family of God, who inwardly feel their need of Divine mercy and guidance and comfort and preservation; and these precious gifts of the Divine Spirit should be constantly, habitually, familiarly and reverently studied.

“It is most remarkable and confirmatory to notice that the first intimation of every truth revealed to the Apostles by the Spirit, came from the lips of Christ (John 14:26; 16:13). The whole great doctrine of justification by faith elaborated in Paul’s epistle to the Romans is involved in Christ’s declaration in John 3:16; and the doctrine of Christian liberty in Galatians is comprehended in Christ’s language in John 8:36; and the sacrificial doctrine of the epistle to the Hebrews is fully implied in Christ’s words in Matthew 26:28.”

The various ecclesiastical traditions, handed down from the second and succeeding centuries, representing that the Apostles labored in different countries outside of the Roman Empire, are strange, uncritical, contradictory and apocryphal.

The system of salvation proclaimed by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to His Apostles, and by them orally and in manuscript to contemporaneous and future generations, was all perfect and complete in the outset. Unlike all other systems of religion, science or art, nothing can be added to it or taken from it, to increase its beauty, usefulness or perfection; all attempts in this direction serve to mar rather than add luster to its excellence. And for 1800 years the only way to obtain a perfect knowledge of Christian principles is to consult the original record and to gather a “Thus saith the Lord” for all that His people say and do. If men speak not according to this Word they speak at random, and give evidence that there is no light in them (Isa. 8:20).

1. Matthew gives, in his first chapter, the descent of Christ from David and Abraham, according to prophecies made about 1000 and 2000 years before, and he abridges his genealogies, as the Jews frequently did, giving three lists, each containing fourteen names, probably to aid the memory. Luke, in his third chapter, gives the descent of Christ from Adam, or “the seed of the woman,” according to the promise made to the first pair in the garden of Eden, 4000 years before. Joseph, as Luke tells us (3:23), was not the real, but only the supposed or reputed father of Jesus. According to Numbers 36:8, Joseph and Mary must have been of the same tribe and family. It is thought that Jacob, the father of Joseph, as mentioned by Matthew, was the brother of Heli or Eli, mentioned, as the father of Joseph, by Luke, and that Mary was the daughter of Eli; so that Joseph and Mary were first cousins, and Joseph was the son-in-law of Eli—son-in-law being called son by the Jews. Thus, while Matthew gives the royal or legal descent of Joseph, it is likely that Luke gives the natural or private descent of Mary. The Jews, in their genealogical tables, reckoned descent wholly by males. The bitterest early enemies of Christ did not deny His descent from David. Many able scholars believe that both Matthew and Luke give the genealogy of Joseph—Mary’s descent from David being implied.

2. Jesus means Jehovah Savior; the reason of the name being given by the angel to Joseph in a dream—“for He shall save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).

3. Esaias is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Isaiah.

4. This darkness could not have been an ordinary eclipse of the sun, which is caused by the coming of the moon between the sun and earth, and never lasts, in its totality, more than eight minutes; because Christ was crucified at the Jewish Passover, which was always when the moon was full, and therefore on the opposite side of the earth from the sun, and the darkness lasted three hours. The darkness at Christ’s death was nature’s sympathy with her suffering Lord. As the glory of the Lord shone around the scene of His birth (Luke 2:9), so a pall of darkness was fitly spread over His dying scene. Amos (8:9) predicted that the sun would go down at noon, and the earth be darkened in the clear day. The darkness might precede and accompany the earthquake that took place on the same occasion; for darkness almost nocturnal, arising from sulphureous vapors, often precedes an earthquake. Both the darkness and the earthquake at Christ’s crucifixion were no doubt supernatural.

5. This is the term used by Edward Gibbon, in the famous fifteenth chapter of his “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” to designate each one of the primitive churches. No uninspired historian has ever surpassed Gibbon in accuracy of statement.

Chapter VIII. The Destruction of Jerusalem—The Three Periods of the Apostolic Age—The Book of Revelation.

The Roman Empire, previously under Divine restraint (2 Thess. 2:6, 7), protected Christianity; but “openly assumed the character of Anti-christ with fire and sword (Rev. 13-18) in the tenth year of Nero’s reign, A.D. 64, and by the instigation of that very emperor to whom Paul, as a Roman citizen, had appealed from the Jewish tribunal. It was, however, not a strictly religious persecution, like those under the later emperors; it originated in a public calamity which was wantonly charged upon the innocent Christians.” Nero, the last of the family of Julius Caesar, was an unsurpassed monster of iniquity. He murdered his brother (Britannicus), his mother (Agrippina), his wives (Octavia and Poppaea), his teacher (Seneca), and many eminent Romans, and finally himself, in the thirty-second year of his age. On the night between the 18th and 19th of July, A.D. 64, the most destructive fire that ever occurred in history broke out in Rome. It lasted nine days and nights, and destroyed one-third of the city, including multitudes of lives. The eighteenth chapter of Revelation seems to have a primary allusion to this dreadful catastrophe. The cause of the conflagration was unknown, but, as recorded by contemporary historians, the people attributed it to Nero, “who wished to enjoy the lurid spectacle of burning Troy, and to gratify his ambition to rebuild Rome on a more magnificent scale, and to call it Neropolis.” Suetonius relates that several men of consular rank met Nero’s domestic servants with torches and combustibles, but did not dare to apprehend them; and Tacitus states that the report was universally current that, while the city was burning, Nero went upon the stage of his private theatre and sang (from Homer) “The Destruction of Troy.” “To divert from himself the general suspicion of incendiarism, and at the same time to furnish new entertainment for his diabolical cruelty, Nero wickedly cast the blame on the Christians, and inaugurated a carnival of blood such as heathen Rome never saw before or since. A ‘vast multitude’ of Christians was put to death in the most shocking manner. Some were crucified, probably in mockery of the punishment of Christ; some were sewed up in the skins of wild beasts and exposed to the voracity of mad dogs in the arena. The Satanic tragedy reached its climax at night in the imperial gardens, on the slope of the Vatican: Christian men and women, covered with pitch or oil or resin, and nailed to posts of pine, were lighted and burned as torches for the amusement of the mob; while Nero, in fantastical dress, figured in a horse race, and displayed his art as a charioteer. Burning alive was the ordinary punishment of incendiaries; but only the cruel ingenuity of this imperial monster, under the inspiration of the devil, could invent such a horrible system of illumination. It is probable that the Neronian persecution of Christians extended to the provinces; and it is believed that the Apostles Paul and Peter suffered martyrdom about this time or soon after (the dates of their death varying from A.D. 64 to 69). It is generally held that Peter was crucified at Rome, whither he had gone for the first time in the same year; and Paul, being a Roman citizen, and not subject to crucifixion, was beheaded about three miles from Rome, on the Ostian road, on a green spot, formerly called Aquae Salviae, afterwards Tre Fontane. It is thought that the Apostle John was banished by Nero to the lonely island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea (or Grecian Archipelago), where he saw the visions recorded in the book of Revelation about the same time (A.D. 68); though it has heretofore been generally thought that this banishment was under the emperor Domitian, A.D. 95.

“There is scarcely another period in history so full of vice, corruption and disaster as the six years between the Neronian persecution and the destruction of Jerusalem. The prophetic description in the last days by our Lord began to be fulfilled before the generation to which He spoke had passed away, and the day of judgment seemed to be near at hand. So the Christians believed, and had good reason to believe. Even to earnest heathen minds (such as those of Seneca and Tacitus) that period looked as dark as midnight, according to their own descriptions. The most unfortunate country in that period was Palestine, where an ancient and venerable nation brought upon itself unspeakable suffering and destruction. The tragedy of Jerusalem prefigures in miniature the final judgment, and in this light it is represented in the eschatological discourses of Christ, who foresaw the end from the beginning.”—P. Schaff.

Intimately connected with the early progress of Christianity was the destruction of Jerusalem, and the entire and final overthrow of the Jewish nation. The Jews crucified the Lord of life and glory, and persecuted His followers in the most cruel manner until their nationality was put an end to—a period of about 40 years from the Savior’s death. The Jews asked that His blood should be on them and on their children (Matthew 27:25), and their imprecation was answered. He had already foretold of their overthrow and the certainty that God’s vengeance would fall on them. Said He, “That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate” (Matthew 23:36-38). When the disciples showed Him the buildings of the temple that He might admire them, He “said unto them, See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:1, 2). And again said He: “The days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another” (Luke 19:43, 44).

As the accomplishment of these predictions ended in the utter abolition of the Jewish church and state, a constitution which was originally founded in Divine appointment, and had existed during a period of fifteen hundred years; and as it was unquestionably the most awful revolution in all the religious dispensations of God, and which, moreover, in various ways, contributed greatly to the success of the gospel, it seems to merit especial attention at our hands.

From Nero to Vespasian there were five different Roman emperors, if we include these two, in the short space of eighteen months; and during this period the empire was a scene of confusion, desolation and misery, and not in a mood to persecute Christians, as it was subsequently.

After the death of king Herod Agrippa,[1] the particulars of which the reader will find recorded in Acts 12, Judea again became a province of the Roman Empire, and Cuspius Fadus was sent to be its governor. He found matters very much unsettled in Palestine. The country was infested with banditti, and an imposter named Theudas had drawn large numbers after him, promising them to divide the waters of Jordan, as Joshua had done, by his single word, and lead them to pleasures beyond, etc. Theudas was taken and beheaded, and his followers dispersed, the Jews were quelled, and the banditti partially suppressed. Cuspius was succeeded by Tiberius Alexander, an apostate Jew, who very shortly gave way to make room for Ventidius Cumanus, under whose rule the troubles began which ended in the downfall of Jerusalem.

One of the Roman soldiers, at the time of the Jewish Passover, insulted the Jews by exposing his nakedness, and this exasperated them to such a degree that they complained of it to Cumanus, and charged him with ordering the offense to be given. He endeavored to reason with them, but could not succeed by words, so that he ordered his troops to the spot; and this so terrified the Jews that they fled in every direction, and twenty thousand were stifled to death in their flight by running over one another in the confined avenues that led to and from the temple.

Cumanus was succeeded by Claudius Felix as governor of Judea, and under his administration things went from bad to worse. The country swarmed with banditti; Jerusalem became the prey of false prophets and pretended workers of miracles, who were continually inciting discontent and sedition; and numbers of assassins, under the name of Sicarii, abounded in all the cities and towns of the country, committing the most horrible murders under the pretext of religious and patriotic zeal. These Sicarii could be hired by any one to assassinate an enemy or any person who seemed to stand in the way of another. The Jewish priests, and even the pontiffs, made no hesitation in hiring these assassins to rid them of all such persons as were obnoxious to them. In the meantime Felix went forth with his soldiers in every direction, punishing the innocent with the guilty, and thereby destroyed all confidence in the Roman government as a power for the promotion of justice and equity in the land.

Felix was succeeded in the government by Festus, who, when entering upon the duties of his office, found the very priesthood engaged in war with each other. The high priests claimed their full share of tithes, and those who had been deposed claimed a full share also, while the inferior priests were loath to yield what belonged to them. Thus parties were formed, and, each party hiring a squad of the Sicarii to accompany them dreadful encounters often occurred, wherein many were murdered, both in Jerusalem and other towns; and even the very temple itself was defiled with the blood of these victims. Festus, therefore, had a threefold task upon his hands; he had to suppress the violence of the priesthood against each other; that of the seditious Jews against the Romans and such as contentedly submitted to their government; and that of the banditti abroad, who infested the whole country, and robbed, plundered and massacred everywhere without mercy.

Festus dying soon after Paul was brought before him; Nero nominated his successor Albinus, of whom it is related by historians that he was such a cruel and rapacious monster that Felix and Festus, with all their faults, were angels when compared with him. After a two years’ tenure of office he was succeeded by Gessius Florus, the last and worst of all the Roman governors. His rapines, cruelties and acts of oppression, his compromising with the banditti for large sums of money, and, in short, his whole behavior, were so openly flagitious that the Jews were disposed to regard him rather as a bloody executioner sent to torture than as a magistrate to govern them. His great object seemed to be to goad the Jews to open rebellion against the Roman government, and he succeeded well at that.

In the days of Felix a dispute arose between the Jews and Syrians as to the ownership of Caesarea, each claiming it. It was referred to the emperor, who decided against the Jews, and the latter became indignant, and took up arms in defense of their claim. They assailed both Syrians and Romans in all places and on all occasions of their meeting together. Throughout all Judea little else was heard of but robberies, murders, and every species of cruelty—cities and villages filled with the dead of all ages and each sex, and of every quality, down to the tender infant. The Caesareans fell suddenly on the Jews in their city and massacred twenty thousand of them; two thousand were murdered at Ptolemais, and fifty thousand at the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. At Jerusalem, Florus one day caused his troops to go and plunder the market, and to kill all they met; and they accordingly murdered three thousand five hundred persons, men, women and children, and the streets of the city were day after day deluged with blood. Florus gloated over the carnage, and wrote to Cestius, the governor of Syria, casting the blame of all these horrible cruelties upon the Jews.

This war of open rebellion against the Roman government was fairly inaugurated in the second year of the government of Florus, in the twelfth Nero’s reign, A.D. 66.

The Jews next pushed their conquests beyond the river Jordan, took the fortress of Cyprus, razed it to the ground, and put all the Romans to the sword. The governor of Syria then bestirred himself, marched into Judea with a powerful army, burned the towns and villages in his way, massacred all the Jews he could come at, and then encamped before Gibeon about the feast of tabernacles. “The Jews at Jerusalem, hearing of his approach, forsook the solemnities of their religion, and, even though it was on the Sabbath day, flew to arms and proceeded to meet him with such fury, that had not the cavalry arrived at the moment to the support of his infantry, he had sustained a signal defeat. He lost five hundred men, while the Jews lost but twenty-two.” Cestius proffered terms of peace. The Jews killed one of his messengers, and wounded another. Enraged at this, he marched forward, and encamped in order of battle before Jerusalem on the 30th of October, A.D. 66. This put the Jews in great consternation, and they abandoned all their outworks, and retired to the inner cincture near the temple. Cestius fired the former, and laid siege to the latter, and took up his headquarters in the royal palace. He now hesitated; his generals were bribed; the Jews made a sortie and succeeded in repulsing him; they drove him back to his camp at Gibeon, harassed his rear, secured the passes, and attacked his army in flank. “Hemmed in on all sides, the mountains re-echoed with the hideous cries of his soldiers, and having lost four thousand foot and two hundred horse, favored by the intervening night, they on the eighth of November happily found a pass through the narrow straits of Bethoron and escaped.”

Milman says that the Romans might easily have made themselves masters of the city of Jerusalem: and it was to the universal surprise that Cestius called off his troops. Though the war continued, Jerusalem was not besieged again till April, A.D. 70. During this interval of about two years and a half the Christians in Jerusalem, remembering Christ’s words of warning (Matthew 24:15; Mark 13:14; Luke 21:21), fled beyond the Jordan to Pella, in the north of Perea, in the mountains of Gilead, some sixty miles northeast of Jerusalem, where king Herod Agrippa II. opened to them a safe asylum; and thus they escaped the horrors of the final siege of Jerusalem.

The retreat of Cestius aroused Nero, who sent Vespasian and his son Titus, in the ensuing spring, into Galilee with an army of sixty thousand men, well disciplined and equipped for service. They burnt Gadara, and marched towards Jotapata; but Josephus, the celebrated historian, and at that time governor of the province, threw himself into that place and defended it for a period of forty-seven days. It was finally taken about the beginning of July, with the loss of all its inhabitants—forty thousand slain, and only twelve hundred prisoners; among the latter was Josephus himself.

Josephus predicted the elevation of Vespasian to the throne of the Caesars in three years. Vespasian did not believe it, but treated Josephus kindly as a prisoner, and when he was elected, the next year, emperor of Rome, left the army and Josephus in the care of his son Titus, who gave him much liberty, and sent him occasionally to the Jews to urge them to desist from further rebellion.

Titus took Jaffa, two miles southwest of Nazareth, while his father was besieging Jotapata. All the men were put to the sword, and the women and children taken prisoners. Joppa, which had been repeopled by a great number of seditious Jews since it was taken by Cestius, was retaken by Vespasian, and about four thousand of its inhabitants destroyed. Tarichea and Tiberias were next taken. The other cities of Galilee then submitted to the Romans, except Gischala, Gamala and Mount Tabor.

Gamala was taken, and four thousand of its citizens were put to the sword, while vast numbers took their own lives rather than surrender to the Romans. Mount Tabor was taken by stratagem, and, after John of Gischala left that city and fled with his soldiers towards Jerusalem, the remaining citizens surrendered. This completed the conquest of Galilee, after which the whole Roman army took a respite at Caesarea before they began the siege of Jerusalem.

While Vespasian was resting his army in winter quarters at Caesarea, the Jews were exhausting themselves in Jerusalem by their factions, and warring against each other. They were at that time, no doubt, the worst population on the face of the globe, and eventually suffered more than any other. The dominant party, which was the war party, consisted of men of the vilest and most profligate characters that perhaps the pen of the historian ever described. They were proud, ambitious, cruel, rapacious and addicted to the most horrid crimes. Josephus says they acted more like infernal beings than men. Yet there were men peaceably disposed within the city, and who would have sought terms with the Romans if they could. These were very few, however, and suffered for their virtues. John of Gischala, who fled from that place to Jerusalem to escape the clutches of Vespasian, had placed himself at the head of the dominant party, and practiced the most unheard-of cruelties upon the innocent and inoffensive. At one time he and his party put to death twelve thousand persons of noble extraction, and in the flower of their age, butchering them in the most horrible manner. In short, the whole nation trembled at the mention of the names of these men, and did not dare to be seen or heard to weep for the murder of their nearest relatives nor even to give them burial. When the party of John had quelled, as they supposed, all opposition to them within the walls of the city, they began to turn their murderous weapons against each other, all of which was favorable to the Romans, and well known to them. Famine and pestilence also prevailed in the city and made its conquest the easier. Vespasian marched out of Caesarea in the spring of A.D. 70, penetrated Idumea, and plundered and burnt every place through which he passed, except where it was necessary to leave a garrison to keep the country in awe. On receiving intelligence of his election as emperor, he left the army in charge of his son Titus, and repaired to Rome. His advice to his son was to utterly destroy Jerusalem.

Titus lost no time in complying with this command. He set his army in motion in April, marched at once to the walls of that devoted city, and commenced the siege immediately after the passover, when Jerusalem was filled with strangers. It seemed almost impregnable, being on an eminence and surrounded with three walls and many stately towers. The first or old wall, which by reason of its vast thickness was looked upon as impregnable, had no less than sixty of these towers, lofty, firm and strong. The second had fourteen, and the third eighty. The circumference of the city was nearly four English miles. The siege fairly commenced on the 14th of April and ended on the 8th of September, when it was taken and entered by Titus—lasting five months wanting six days. The wonder to us is how a single city could withstand the power of Rome for such a length of time. Unheard of cruelties and sufferings occurred within that period. It was reported to Titus by a deserter that at one of the gates where he was stationed there were carried out to be buried one hundred and fifteen thousand eight hundred and eighty persons from the 14th of April to the 1st of July. Another told him that they had carried out at all the gates six hundred thousand, and that then, being unable to carry them all out, they had filled whole houses with them and shut them up.

One circumstance will suffice to show the deplorable famine that prevailed in the city. An unhappy and starving mother, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Moses (Deut. 28:56, 57), was reduced to the necessity of feeding upon her own child. “This lady’s name was Miriam, who had taken refuge, with many others, in this devoted city, from the breaking out of the war. As the famine increased, her house was repeatedly plundered of such provisions as she had been able to procure. She had vainly endeavored, by her entreaties, to prevail upon them to put an end to her miserable existence, but the mercy was too great to be granted her. Frantic at length with fury and despair, she snatched her infant from her bosom, cut its throat and broiled it; and, having satiated her present hunger, concealed the rest. The smell of it soon drew the voracious human tigers to her house; they threatened her with the most excruciating tortures if she did not discover her provisions to them; upon which she set forth before them the relics of her mangled infant, bidding them eat heartily and not be squeamish, since she, its once tender mother, had made no scruple to butcher, dress, and feed upon it. At the sight of this horrid dish, inhuman as they were, they stood aghast, petrified with horror, and departed, leaving the astonished mother in possession of her dismal fare.”

“When the report of this spread through the city, the horror and consternation were as universal as they were inexpressible. They now for the first time began to think themselves forsaken of the providence of God, and to expect the most awful effects of His anger. Nor were their fears either unreasonable or ill-founded; for no sooner had Titus heard of this inhuman deed than he vowed the total extirpation of the city and people. ‘Since,’ said he, ‘they have so often refused my proffers of pardon, and have preferred war to peace, rebellion to obedience, and famine to plenty, I am determined to bury that cursed metropolis under its ruins, that the sun may never more dart his beams upon a city where the mothers feed on the flesh of their children, and the fathers, no less guilty than themselves, choose to drive them to such extremities rather than lay down their arms.’”—W. Jones.

And yet such was the humanity of Titus that he felt reluctant to destroy so many human beings, frequently tendering them forgiveness upon repentance: and such his regard for the magnificence and value of the temple that it was set on fire, at last, and consumed, against his orders and in defiance of his commands, expostulations, and canings of his soldiers who did the awful deed.

Seeing that all was lost, and his endeavors to save the temple ineffectual, “Titus entered into the sanctuary and Most Holy place, the remaining grandeur and riches of which, even yet, surpassed all that had been told him of it. Out of the former he saved the golden candlestick, the table of the show-bread, the altar of incense, all of pure gold, and the book of the law, wrapped up in a rich golden tissue. Upon his quitting that sacred place some soldiers set fire to it, obliging those who had staid behind to come out also, in consequence of which they all began to plunder it, carrying off the costly utensils, robes, gold plating of the gates, etc., insomuch that there was not one of them who did not enrich himself by it.”

“A horrid massacre succeeded to this, in which many thousands perished, some by the flames, others falling from the battlements, and a greater number still by the enemy’s sword, which spared neither age, sex nor quality. Among them were upwards of six thousand persons who had been seduced thither by a false prophet, who promised them they should find a miraculous deliverance on that very day.

“The Romans carried their fury to the burning of all the treasure houses of the place, though they were full of the richest furniture, vestments, plate, and other valuable articles, there laid up for security; nor did they cease the dreadful work of devastation till they had destroyed all except two of the temple gates, and that part of the court that was destined for the women.”

The temple was burned on the tenth of August, the same day of the year it was said that the first temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Josephus states that the hill on which the temple stood was seething hot, and seemed enveloped to its base in one sheet of flame; t hat the blood was larger in quantity than the fire, and all the ground was covered with corpses. The Romans planted their eagles or standards on the temple ruins, offered their sacrifices to them, and proclaimed Titus Imperator with the greatest declamations of joy. Thus was fulfilled Christ’s prophecy concerning the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.

“The city was now abandoned to the fury of the soldiers, who proceeded forthwith to plunder it, setting it on fire in every direction, and murdering all that fell into their hands—whilst the factious party among the Jews, that had hitherto escaped, went and fortified themselves in the royal palace, where they killed eight thousand of their own countrymen who had taken refuge there.

“Preparations were now making for a vigorous attack on the upper city, and particularly on the royal palace, and this occupied Titus from the 20th of August to the 7th of September, during which time great numbers came and made, their submission to him, among whom were forty thousand citizens of the inferior classes, to whom he gave permission to go and settle where they would. On the 8th of September the city was taken (as has been said) and entered by Titus.

“Josephus estimates that one million and one hundred thousand Jews were slain during the siege; eleven thousand died from starvation shortly afterwards; and ninety-seven thousand were sold into slavery, or sent to the mines, or sacrificed in the gladiatorial shows in different cities.

“It is not a little remarkable that Titus, though a heathen, was frequently obliged, during this war, to acknowledge an overruling providence, not only in the extraordinary success with which he had favored, but also in the invincible obstinacy, through which the Jews, to the last, preferred their total destruction to an acceptance of his repeated overtures of mercy.

“Again and again did he, in the most solemn manner, appeal to Heaven that he was innocent of the blood of this wretched people (Josephus’ Wars, b.5, ch.12). In almost every chapter we find Josephus also ascribing these dreadful calamities, and the final ruin of his nation, city and temple, to an overruling power; to the offended Deity; to the sins of the people; but nowhere more pathetically than in that chapter in which he sums up a number of dreadful warnings, sent beforehand, not so much to reduce them to obedience as to make them discern the Almighty hand that was ever pouring out the awful vials of His wrath upon them (Josephus’ Wars, b.6, ch.5, and b.5, ch.13).

“As soon as the Romans had completed their destructive work of fire and slaughter, Titus set them to demolish the city, with all its noble structures, fortifications, palaces, towers, wells and other ornaments, down to the level of the ground; as though he had nothing in view but to fulfill the predictions of Christ concerning its destruction, as contained in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. He left nothing standing but a piece of the western wall and three towers, which he reserved merely as a monument to future ages of what had been the strength of the city, and the skill and valor of its conqueror. His orders were executed so punctually that, except what has been just mentioned, nothing remained that could serve as an index that that ground had been once inhabited; insomuch that when Titus Himself, some time afterwards, passed through it on his way from Caesarea to Alexandria, in order to embark for Rome, he wept profusely at the sight of a devastation so dreadful, cursing the wretches that had compelled him to be the author of it (Josephus’ Wars, b.6, chs.8 and 9).

“Such was the dreadful issue of this war, terminating in the utter downfall of the Jewish state and nation, from which it has never recovered to this day; it involved in it the destruction of the temple, and the discontinuance of the services annexed to it. The desolation of the country itself went on increasing; till, from being, for its size, one of the most fertile and populous countries in the world, having about five million inhabitants, it is now become the most barren and desolate, the latest computation of the number of its inhabitants scarcely exceeding three hundred thousand.

“Not only the wisdom but the justice of God is also conspicuously displayed in this great event. A particular Providence had ever attended these people. They had always been favored with prosperity while obedient to God and His prophets; and, on the other hand, calamity of some kind had been the never failing consequence of their disobedience. But the measure of their iniquities was now filled up, and the wrath of Heaven came upon them to the uttermost. Never had the nation in general shown a more perverse or obstinate disposition towards any of their prophets than was evinced towards Christ and His Apostles, though none of their prophets had ever been sent to them with such evident marks of a Divine mission. Their inveterate hostility to Christianity continues to this day, and so does their dispersion, though they are still a distinct people, and never mix, so as to be confounded, with any of the nations among whom they have settled.”

All other ancient peoples blended together in an indistinguishable mass; but the Jews, having disobeyed God, and having, according to the prediction of Moses (Deut. 28:49-68), been plucked up out of their own land by a distant, eagle-like nation, of strange tongue and fierce countenance, and having been scattered among all people from one end of the earth to the other, remain still distinct from all other people, for the purpose of being, to all men, living proofs of the truth of the Old Testament, and for the fulfillment of the prophecies that are still to be accomplished.

“The reader will perceive that the history of the Jewish war, as detailed by their own historian, Josephus, in many instances a witness of the facts he attests, forms a commentary on the prophecies of Christ. Amongst other things, he has given a distinct account of the ‘fearful sights and great signs from Heaven’ which preceded the destruction of Jerusalem; and Tacitus has confirmed the narration of Josephus (Tacit. Annal, b.5). If Christ had not expressly foretold these things, some might have suspected that Josephus exaggerated, and Tacitus was misinformed; but as the testimonies of these historians confirm the predictions of Christ, so do the predictions of Christ confirm the wonders recorded by the historians.”

While Christ made the one essential thing the relation of man to Himself, He did not formally abolish the ceremonial law, but, on the other hand, He was born under the law and lived under it, and strictly and perfectly obeyed it for His people; He said nothing about doing away with circumcision and the temple worship (except in a general manner as in John 4:21); He left the separation of Christianity and Judaism to the Spirit and Providence of God. Even Paul, the great Apostle of Christian freedom, “more than once religiously visited the temple, and accommodated himself outwardly, in various ways, to Judaism. But now the time had come for the church to be delivered from its Jewish swaddling-bands, and God Himself came down in a terrific providence, and destroyed the house in which He had been worshiped, and gave His cause and people the spiritual emancipation which He had designed for them.”

“By terrible events an end was at length put to the Mosaic economy; for, with the destruction of their city and temple, the whole Jewish polity and church state were also subverted. From that time the remnant of that once highly favored nation have been dispersed throughout the world; despised and hated by all; subjected, from age to age, to a perpetual succession of persecutions and miseries, yet under all these disadvantages, upheld by Divine Providence as a distinct people. They have ever since remained ‘without a king, without a prince and without a sacrifice; without an altar, without an ephod, and without Divine manifestations;’ as monuments everywhere of the truth of Christianity—yet with this promise, that ‘the children of Israel shall return, and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and shall fear the Lord and His goodness in the latter days’” (Hosea 3:4, 5).—W. Jones.

The Emperor Vespasian reigned ten years. His son Titus, who was superior to his father, reigned only two years, two months and twenty days, when to the great grief of his subjects he was suddenly snatched away, as was supposed by poison administered by the hands of his brother Domitian, who succeeded to the throne in the year 81. In his temper and disposition he seemed to inherit all the savage cruelty of the monster Nero. This was shown toward his subjects generally; for toward the Christians in special he appeared to have no particular hatred, until about the fourteenth year of his reign, when his cruelty toward them showed itself. He had several put to death, and others banished, on account of their religion, both in Rome and in various parts of his empire. Among the number put to death was his own cousin and colleague in the consulship, Flavius Clemens, and among those who were banished were the wife and niece of the latter, both named Flavia Domitilla. The Apostle John is said to have survived the persecution under Domitian, though it is uncertain how long, and to have died in the reign of Trajan, about 98 A.D., at Ephesus, at which city he was buried.

The crime alleged against the Christians at this period was that they were atheists, simply because they refused to acknowledge or worship the gods of the heathen, or even throw a grain of incense on one of their altars. And as Christians had neither temples, nor altars, nor sacrifices, it was taken for granted that they worshiped no god, were haters of the gods, and could be nothing better than atheists.

Domitian however, before his end, relaxed his persecution of Christians, and recalled from banishment those who had been driven away. He was at length assassinated in the sixteenth year of his reign, and was succeeded in the empire by Nerva, an excellent prince, and whose reign made the Romans as happy as that of Domitian had made them miserable. “He pardoned all that had been imprisoned for treason, called home such as had been banished, restored the sequestrated estates, punished informers, redressed grievances to the utmost of his power, and acted with universal beneficence towards all descriptions of his subjects. He forbade the persecution of any persons for their religious belief, whether Jews or Christians. After an excellent reign of sixteen months and eight days he was taken away by death, January 23, A.D. 98, and was succeeded by Trajan, whom he had previously nominated as his heir, a man well skilled in martial and cabinet affairs. In his deportment Trajan was courteous, affable, humane and just, and perhaps not undeservedly esteemed one of the best princes with whom Rome had ever been favored. And so the first century of the Christian era terminates with the mild and virtuous reign of Trajan.”

I shall now give some remarks, taken chiefly from “The Early Years of Christianity,” by E. De Pressense, of Paris, on the Petrine, Pauline and Johannine Periods of the Apostolic Age.

“It ‘is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ (1 Tim. 1:15). He also ‘came to seek and to save that which was lost,’ and ‘to call sinners to repentance.’ And it is equally true, we think, that He came to restore the kingdom Of God upon earth: to found and establish a holy community, from which, as from a new humanity reconstituted by Himself, filled with His Spirit and living by His life, the gospel should go forth into all the world. This community is the Christian Church. It differs from all other religious institutions that ever preceded it. It is not limited, like the Jewish theocracy, to one special nation, or bounded by the frontiers of any land. It is finally to conquer all the powers of earth and hell combined against it. Its character is essentially supernatural. Being born of a miracle, by a miracle it lives. Founded upon the great miracle of redemption, it grows and is perpetuated by the ever-repeated miracle of conversion. It is entered not by the natural way of birth, but by the supernatural way of the new birth. The church, resting on no national or theocratic basis, must gather its adherents simply by individual conviction, and such a basis alone corresponds with the breadth of Christianity, because it alone places the church beyond the narrow bounds of nationalities and of territorial circumscription. In truth, setting aside in man the contingent in race and the distinctions of birth, all that remains is the moral personality, the individual soul, to be brought into direct contact with God. Individuality is therefore the widest conceivable basis for a religious community. When Jesus Christ sent forth, to the conquest of the world, the few disciples whom He had gathered around Him and who formed the nucleus of the church, He by that act abrogated the old theocratic distinctions, and implicitly founded the new community, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircumcision.”

“The Christian church has a double vocation. It is called first (by the grace of God) to assimilate to itself more and more closely the teaching and the life of its Divine Founder, to be, joined to Him by tender and sacred bonds, to grow in knowledge, in charity, in holiness (Rom. 8:29). It is then, by the same grace, to carry everywhere the light and flame thus kindled and fed in the sanctuary of the soul, to the enlightenment of others, and the glorification of God (Matthew 5:16).

“Of all the periods connected with church history, none is so important or interesting as that of the Apostolic Age. Two gifts are peculiar to this age, viz., that of the Apostolate and of Inspiration. The Apostolate constitutes the direct witness for Christ, and the judgment from which there is no appeal; and the Inspiration, the Holy Ghost given in extraordinary measure, to lay a solid foundation upon which the church in all ages, must be built up. These two great facts of the Apostolic Age claim our attention. They are not at once developed, but are progressive in their nature. Such is the order in both the Old and New Testament revelations. Every one who admits that the ideal of the new covenant shines forth resplendent in the person of the God-Man must equally admit that the complete blending of the human with the Divine element is the great consummation of the gospel design. This, which is to be the aim in every age, finds its most nearly perfect realization in the age of the Apostles. Their era, therefore, may be regarded as having furnished, as it were, the theme of the history of the church; for that history is but a free and vigorous development of the great results gained in the first century. The first subject, then, for our consideration is this normal and ideal union of the human and the Divine element in the life of the primitive church.”

It may be divided into three parts, each designated by the name of the Apostle who exercised the greatest influence upon it. We have thus the period of Saint Peter, that of Saint Paul, and that of Saint John.

First Period of the Apostolic Age—Peter.

In the first the Divine element predominates, almost to the exclusion of the human, which is in comparison reduced to passivity. This is the period of the purely supernatural: it follows the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and precedes the great internal deliberations in the church. In the second and third the human element is more apparent, though always controlled and purified by the Divine; great questions are stated and debated, church organization begins, doctrine becomes more defined, and, if miracles are still many, they are less abundant than they were before. The latter fact, so far from implying any inferiority in the closing periods of the Apostolic Age, seems to us to mark a real superiority, rather. For in truth when the supernatural element is so infused into human nature that it animates it, as the soul the body, it may be said that the union between God and man is fully realized, and the most glorious results of redemption achieved.”—E. De Pressense.

Connected with and belonging to the supernatural or first period, wherein the Apostle Peter seems to take the lead, may be mentioned the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, the preaching of Peter and the addition of three thousand to the church; the healing of the cripple at the beautiful gate of the temple, the preaching of Peter and another gathering of believers amounting to five thousand. Multitudes on another occasion, professing faith in Christ, were added to the Lord, both men and women, consequent upon the numerous hearings by the Apostles of the diseased brought to them, or within range of even the shadow of Peter; the release of the Apostles from prison by the angel of the Lord, and a command to go stand in the temple and preach to the people, all the words of this life; the deliverance of the Apostle Peter from prison, wherein he was chained to two soldiers, the prison doors locked, and four quarternions of soldiers guarding the prison outside, without their knowing anything about it; and, as the angel led him along, the great iron gate of the city opened of its own accord for them to pass through; the healing of Aeneas, a bedridden invalid for eight years in the town of Lydda, at which the inhabitants of Lydda and Saron turned to the Lord; the vision of the vessel, like unto a great sheet knit at the four corners, let down from Heaven in the view of Peter, while in a trance on the house top, in which vessel were four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air, and a voice commanding Peter to slay and eat, etc., which induced him to visit a Gentile who had sent for him, and preach to him and his kinsmen and near friends, upon whom the Holy Ghost descended, and for that reason were baptized at the command of the Apostle. Well then may this be called the supernatural period; for, with but little labor, physically, on the part of the Apostles, no doubt fully ten thousand people professed faith in Christ, and were baptized in obedience to His command, and added to the church.

Pentecost was spoken of by Josephus as the feast of the great assembly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the anniversary of the promulgation of the Jewish law. Never were there such wonders performed at the celebration of this feast in Jerusalem as when the Holy Ghost came down and filled the hearts of the disciples with the fire of heavenly love, and enabled them to proclaim the gospel in the various languages of the world. “The miracle of Pentecost was an enacted prophecy of the happy time, when all the diversities created by evil (among the redeemed) will be lost in the unity of love. Is not this prophecy receiving a constant fulfillment as Christianity masters, one after another, the languages of mankind, and makes them the media for conveying its immortal truths? ‘The church in her humility,’ says the venerable Bede, ‘reforms the unity of language broken before by pride.’”

“The Apostles had received the Holy Ghost before the Pentecostal tongues of fire were displayed, in a measure, but on that occasion they were completely filled with His presence. All the barriers between earth and Heaven seemed to be removed.

“Until this time the young church might be compared to a ship, ready to depart, its sails spread for the winds. The breath from on high now blows upon it; it is no longer an inert mass, it is an animated body; it may set forth on its flight over all seas, and, be they stormy or calm, it be ever advancing towards its appointed haven.”

The rapid increase of numbers soon brought about an open rupture between the young church and Judaism. The Sadducean party took the lead in the early persecutions, because the point of doctrine mainly insisted on by the Apostles was the resurrection of the dead; which was particularly odious to the Sadducees. “Annas and Caiaphas, who presided over the council before which the Apostles were repeatedly cited, were the well-known leaders of the Roman or Sadducean party. The only judge who showed himself impartial (on one of these occasions) was the Pharisee Gamaliel” (Acts 5:17). “During all this early time the influence of the Apostle Peter predominates. The part thus taken by him has been urged as a proof of his primacy. But on closer examination it will be seen that he does but exercise his native gifts, purified and ennobled by the Divine Spirit. Peter was the son of a fisherman named Jonas, of the village of Bethsaida, in Galilee (Matthew 16:17; John 1:44). He was among the disciples of John the Baptist, and was thus prepared to respond favorably to the call of Jesus Christ. He soon received his vocation as an Apostle. His disposition was quick and ardent, but his zeal was blended with presumption and pride. Living in constant contact with the Master as one of the three disciples who enjoyed his closest intimacy, he conceived for Him a strong affection. His impetuous nature was, however, far from being at once brought under control. He had noble impulses, like that which prompted his grand testimony to the Savior: ‘Thou art the Christ of God’ (Matthew 16:16). But he was also actuated by many an earthly motive, which drew down upon him the Master’s sharp reproach. Once, under the influence of Jewish prejudice, he repelled with indignation the idea of the humiliating death of Christ. At another time he was eager to appear more courageous than all the other disciples, and, again yielding to his natural impetuosity, he drew his sword to defend Him whose ‘kingdom is not of this world.’ It was needful that the yet incoherent elements of his moral nature should be thrown into the crucible of trial. His shameful fall resulted in a decisive moral crisis, which commenced in that moment when, pierced to the heart by the look of Christ, he went out of the court of the high priest and wept bitterly. He appears entirely changed in the last interview he has with the Savior on the shores of the Lake Tiberias. Jesus Christ restores him after his threefold denial, by calling forth a threefold confession of his love (John 21:15).

“Nothing but determined prejudice could construe the tender solicitude of the Master for this disciple into an official declaration of his primacy. We are here in the region of feeling alone, not on the standing ground of right and legal institutions. Nor has the primacy of Peter any more legal foundation in the famous passage, ‘Thou art Peter.’ Jesus Christ admirably characterized by this image the ardent and generous nature of His disciple, and that courage of the pioneer which marked him out as the first laborer in the foundation of the primitive church. The son of Jonas was its most active, and, as it were, its first stone (laid on Christ, the chief corner-stone). He was also the rock against which the first tempest from without spent its fury. Beyond this, the narrative of Saint Luke lends no countenance to any hierarchical notions.” The church passed through an experience of three hundred years before any organized body of professed Christians attached the Romish sense to Matthew 16:18. “Everything is natural and spontaneous in the conduct of St. Peter. He is not official president of a sort of Apostolic college. He acts only with the concurrence of his brethren, whether in the choice of a new Apostle (Acts 1:15), or at Pentecost (Acts 2:14), or before the Sanhedrim. Peter had been the most deeply humbled of the disciples, therefore he was the first to be exalted. John’s part being at this time inconspicuous, no other Apostle is named with Peter, because he fills the whole scene with his irrepressible zeal and indefatigable activity.”—Pressense.

Even if Peter had been made by Christ the primate of the Apostles, there is not a shadow of Bible proof that Peter either had the right or attempted to confer such primacy upon a successor, still less upon the bishop of Rome, where there is no Bible proof of Peter’s ever having been. The Catholic traditions about Peter’s presence in Rome are irreconcilable contradictions. Peter was married; the popes forbid clerical marriage. Peter had no silver or gold; the popes have their millions. In the council at Jerusalem Peter assumed no special authority, much less infallibility, while James presided and his judgment prevailed; the popes claim infallibility. Peter was publicly rebuked for his inconsistency by Paul, a younger Apostle, at Antioch; the popes are the lords of Catholicism. Peter in his epistles shows the deepest humility, and “prophetically warns against filthy avarice and lordly ambition, the besetting sins of the papacy.” Peter emphatically teaches “the general priesthood and royalty of believers, obedience to God rather than man, condemnation of mental reservation in Ananias and Sapphira, and of simony in Simon Magus, opposition to the yoke of legal bondage, salvation in no other name but that of Jesus Christ.”

“From its very birth the Christian church is called to defend itself against the attacks of its adversaries, and to contend for the claims of truth. The opposition to Christianity assumes from the outset various forms. The first to be encountered is that of scoffing unbelief. This foe has not yet sharpened and polished the weapons with which in subsequent times it will wound by the hands of a Celsus and a Lucian. But was not the laugh of the scorner heard on the very day when the Holy Spirit descended upon the church? Did not his voice cry, ‘These men are full of new wine?” And from the scorner’s point of view it was a fair conclusion. The supernatural is absurd to those, who discern nothing beyond the circle of the visible; and herein is its peculiar glory. The laugh of unbelief has never ceased in all these eighteen centuries to ring through the world. But ridicule alone was not enough. Calumny and false, insinuations must be enlisted in the same cause. The miracles of the primitive church were incontestable; they could not be brought in question, but they might, like those of Jesus Christ, be ascribed to witchcraft and to the powers of darkness. The arts of magic were much believed in at this epoch, as in all periods of religious crisis. There was, therefore, profound subtilty in likening the Apostles to common magicians. Such an idea is evidently present in the question of the Sanhedrim to Peter and John, after the healing of the impotent man: ’By what power or by what name have ye done this?’ (Acts 4:7). The enemies of the Apostles did not admit that they were the organs of Divine power. The influence, then, by which they made so much stir, must be diabolical or magical. Side by side with this open unbelief, the primitive church had to encounter the ignorance and prejudices of a people of formalists and materialists. They had, with the Divine blessing, to establish the claims of Jesus Christ; that is, of a humble and crucified Messiah before a nation which was ready to believe only in a glorious king—a new Maccabeus.

“To meet all objections, the church had ready a simple and popular method of defense. We at once admit that they appealed without hesitation to the testimony of reason for all the facts coming within its competence. Thus in reply to the absurd charge of drunkenness brought against the disciples, Peter urges that it is but the third hour of the day—the hour, that is, of morning prayer, before which the Jews never presumed to eat or drink (Acts 2:15). But the advocates of Christianity do not pause long on such vindications. They have a line of argument peculiarly their own.

“It is to be observed that the miracles are rather the occasion than the cause, of them defense which accompanies them. Peter does not say, ‘Believe because of this amazing gift of tongues, or these miraculous cures.’ He says, on the contrary, ‘Believe, in the reality, the divinity, of the miracles on the scriptural and moral grounds, which show their necessity and establish their lawfulness.’ These miracles certainly contributed to the rapid spread of the new faith by the impression they produced upon the people; but so little are they the pivot on which the defense of the Apostles turns, that they are, not the proof, but rather the object of the proof. We except one miracle, which is the essential miracle of Christianity. The resurrection of Christ is not merely a marvel; it is also a great religious fact. It is the glorious seal of redemption. Therefore it occupies the first place in the preaching of the Apostles. Peter constantly appeals to it, both before the people and before the Sanhedrim (Acts 2:32; 3:15; 4:10; 5:30). The Apostles regarded themselves, pre-eminently, as the witnesses of the resurrection. Nothing in fact gave so solid, a foundation to the new religion as this splendid triumph of Jesus Christ over death. It was the proof of His Divine mission and of that of the church, and the seal affixed by the hand of God to teaching in His name. ‘Between us and you,’ the Apostles seem to say, ‘God has judged; by raising up Jesus, He has sovereignly declared that He was indeed Christ the Lord.’ Next to the proof drawn from the resurrection of the Lord, that which is most prominent in the discourses of Peter is the evidence from Scripture. He sets himself to show the harmony of the facts, in process of accomplishment, with Jewish prophecy. The first defender of the church could take no other ground. An appeal addressed to Jews by Christians of Jewish extraction must be made to a tribunal recognized by all, and this was no other than Holy Scripture. If the Apostles at Jerusalem succeeded in showing that the facts of which they were the witnesses had been foretold in the Scriptures, every upright Jew must be enlisted on their side. The Christian defense did not rise, in this its first stage, to the height to which it was carried by St. John and St. Paul. In form and spirit it was limited and characterized by the views so prominently set forth in the first Gospel.”—Pressense.

In his discourses Peter quotes freely from the Old Testament Scriptures, pointing to the scenes occurring then and there in his day; and while he charges home upon the people their guilt in murdering the blessed Savior, he fails not to urge repentance for that great crime, with a promise of forgiveness on the part of the offended Majesty of Heaven. The transition from the Old Covenant to the New was gradual and admirably accomplished. While it is true that the Apostles declared the truth of Christ in all its essentials, it is equally true that they enveloped that truth in Jewish forms. They had their own organization and held their meeting separately from the synagogue or the temple, yet they attended the stated worship of the temple during the supernatural period, circumcised their children, and observed many formalities appertaining to Judaism. The bonds between the Old and New dispensation were not suddenly snapped asunder, but suffered to become weaker and weaker, until they entirely disappeared; and upon the destruction of the temple the new church found herself standing alone, unconnected with any of the forms of the Levitical worship.

Second Period of the Apostolic Age—Paul.

“Every great truth which is to win a triumphal way must become incarnate in some one man, and derive, from a living, fervent heart, that passion and power which constrain and subdue. So long as it remains in the cold region of mere ideas, it exercises no mighty influence over mankind. The truths of religion are not exceptions to this law. God, therefore, prepared a man who was to represent in the primitive church the great cause of the emancipation of Christianity, and whose mission it was to free it completely from the bonds of the synagogue. This man was St. Paul, and never had noble truth a nobler organ. He brought to its service an heroic heart, in which fervent love was joined to indomitable courage, and a mind equally able to rise to the loftiest heights of speculation and to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the human soul. All these great qualities were enhanced by absolute devotedness to Jesus Christ, and a self-abnegation such as, apart from the sacrifice of the Redeemer, has had no parallel upon earth. His life was one perpetual offering up of himself. His sufferings have contributed, no less than his indefatigable activity, to the triumph of his principles. Standing ever in the breach for their defense—subject to most painful contradictions, not only from the Jews but from his brethren—execrated by his own nation—maligned by a fanatic and intolerant section of the church, and threatened with death by those Gentiles whose claims he so boldly advocated—he suffered as scarcely any other has suffered in the service of truth; but he left behind a testimony most weighty and powerful, every word sealed with the seal of the martyr.” With the exception of Peter in the case of Cornelius, Paul was the first Apostle to the Gentiles, and being more especially called to that work, he devoted his noble life to it, and visited many countries, and that repeatedly—preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ, and thus inaugurating, as it were, the universal triumph of Christianity.

“It was needful that the door of the church should be opened to the thousands of proselytes from Corinth, Athens, Ephesus and Rome, who came up to it and knocked. But the great Apostle of the Gentiles was not satisfied with this irresistible argument from facts; he added to it reasoning equally able and eloquent, and, armed with dialectics perfectly adapted to the habits of mind of his opponents, he victoriously established his principles.

“The epistles in which these reasonings have in part come down to us, bear on every page the impress of his heart and mind; they show us the whole man, and the very style depicts in vivid characters his moral physiognomy. His polemics are especially admirable, because with him a negative always leads to a weightier affirmation; he never destroys without replacing, and, like his Master, only abolishes by fulfilling. He is not only an incomparable dialectician in the subversion of error, but he is able also to discern all the consequences of a truth, and to grasp its marrow and inner substance. This great controversialist is, therefore, at the same time, the first representative of that true Christian mysticism which St. John was so fully to develop. St. Paul triumphed over Judaism only by putting in its place Christianity in all its breadth and beauty. What holiness, strength, nobleness of character he displayed in the course of his ministry, his history shows. St. Paul is the type of the reformer in the church; in every fresh struggle for the church’s freedom, his will be the track in which courageous Christians will follow. No true reformation can be wrought in any spirit other than that of Paul—a spirit equally removed from the timidity which preserves that which should be destroyed, and the rashness which destroys that which should be preserved.

“When God is forming a powerful instrument for the accomplishment of His designs, the process of preparation is long and gradual. Every circumstance was brought to bear on the education of the chosen witness, and every experience, even of wrong and error is made to enhance the power and completeness of the testimony rendered. When a man is called to effect some great religious reformation, it is important that he should himself have an experimental acquaintance with the order of things which he is to reverse or transform. The education of Saul the Pharisee was to him what the convent of Erfurt was to Luther. It was well that he who was to break the yoke of Jewish legalism should himself have first suffered under its bondage. Thus while the question of the emancipation of Christianity had been stated by men belonging, like Stephen, to the most liberal section of Judaism, the Hellenist Jews, it was to receive its final solution from a man who had himself felt the full weight of the yoke.

“Saul belonged to a Jewish family rigidly attached to the sect of the Pharisees. His name, which signifies ‘The desired one,’ has led some commentators to suppose that he being born like Samuel, after hope long delayed, was, like him, specially consecrated by his parents to the service of God, and therefore sent from his early childhood to Jerusalem to study the sacred writings in the most famous school of the age. However this may be, it is evident that his mind had a natural bent toward such studies. He may have received some intellectual development in his own city. Strabo tells us that literary and philosophical studies had been carried so far at Tarsus that the schools of Cilicia eclipsed those of Athens and of Alexandria. It appears, however, from the evidence of Philostratus, that a light and rhetorical school of learning predominated at Tarsus; more attention was paid to brilliance of expression than to depth of philosophical thought. The life of the East there reveled in boundless luxury, and the corruption of manners reached its utmost length. The young Jew, endowed with a high-toned morality, may well have conceived a deep disgust for this Pagan civilization; and these first impressions may have tended to develop in him an excessive attachment to the religion of his fathers.

“We may, probably, attribute to his abode at Tarsus the literary culture displayed in his writings. He familiarly quotes the Greek poets, and poets of the second order, such as Cleanthes or Aratus (Acts 17:28), Menander (1 Cor. 15:33) and Epimenides (Titus 1:12). According to the custom of the rabbis of the time, he had learned a manual trade, and, as the Cilician fabrics of goats’ hair were famous for their strength, he had chosen the calling of a tent-maker.[2]

“Jerusalem was the place of his religious education. He was placed in the school of Gamaliel, the most celebrated rabbi of his age (Acts 22:3). We know how fully the scholastic spirit was developed among the Jews at this period. To the companies of the prophets had succeeded the schools of the rabbis; the living productions of the Divine Spirit had been replaced by commentaries of minutest detail, and the sacred text seemed in danger of being completely overgrown by rabbinical glosses, as by a parasitic vegetation. The Talmudic traditions fill twelve large folios and 2,947 leaves.

“Whilst an ingenious and learned school, formed at Alexandria, had contrived, by a system of allegorical interpretation, to infuse Platonism into the Old Testament, the school at Jerusalem had been growing increasingly rigid, and interdicted any such daring exegesis. It clung with fanatic attachment to the letter of the Scriptures; but, failing to comprehend the spirit, it sank into all the puerilities of a narrow literalism. Its interpretations lacked both breadth and depth; it surrendered itself to the subtilties of purely verbal dialectics. Cleverly to combine texts—to suspend on a single word the thin threads of an ingenious argument—such was the sole concern of the rabbis. Gamaliel appears to have been the most skilled of all the doctors of the law. He is still venerated in Jewish tradition under the title of ‘Gamaliel the Aged.’ The ‘Mishna’ quotes him as an authority. We are inclined to believe that he may have been less in bondage than the other doctors of his day to narrow literalism, and that he may have maintained a spirit more upright and elevated. His benevolent intervention on behalf of the church at Jerusalem distinguishes him honorably from those implacable Jews who were ready to defend their prejudices by bloody persecutions. The fact of his having had a disciple like Saul of Tarsus, who must have been through his whole life characterized by a grave moral earnestness, leads us to suppose a true superiority in the teaching of Gamaliel. He had not got beyond the standpoint of legalism, but this he at least presented in its unimpaired and unabated majesty. He was not a man to delude the conscience with subterfuges, and his disciples were therefore disposed to austerity of life, and were distinguished by a scrupulous fidelity to the religion of their fathers.

“Saul of Tarsus embraced the teachings of his illustrious master with characteristic earnestness and ardor, and, it must be added, infused into it all the passionate vehemence belonging to his nature. At the feet of Gamaliel he became practiced in those skillful dialectics which were the pride of the rabbinical schools, and he thus received from Judaism itself the formidable weapon with which he was afterward to deal it such mortal blows. Here he gained a profound knowledge of the Old Testament. Gifted with a strong and keen intellect, he in a few years acquired all the learning of his master. He thus amassed, without knowing it, precious materials for his future polemics; but his moral and religious development in this phase of his life is of more important, to us than his intellectual acquirements. With all his knowledge he might have became, at the most, the first of Jewish doctors, surpassing even Gamaliel, and shedding some glory on the decadence of his people; but he could never have derived from that vast learning the spirit of the reformer, which was to make him immortal in the church. It is in the depths of his inner life that we must seek the distinctive character of his early religion; he has himself accurately described it when he says, that being ‘taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers,’ he ‘was zealous toward God’” (Acts 22:3).

Saul was no hypocrite, and, therefore, the burning words of rebuke spoken to his sect in general by our Lord did not apply to him. He was conscientious and honest in all his devotional exercises, and verily thought that salvation was attainable by the strict observance of the Judaistic rites and ceremonies. He says himself that be was “as touching the law blameless” (Phil. 3:6). And he again says: “I profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals (in years) in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers” (Gal. 1:14). Yet this is the same man who, by the grace of God, was made willing to count all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, his Lord. For, says he, “when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died; and the commandment which was ordained to life I found to be unto death” (Rom. 7:9, 10). After his baptism he conferred not with flesh and blood, but went forth immediately preaching Jesus to the heathen (Gal. 1:16). Yea, saith he, “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8). The spirit that was mighty in Peter to the circumcision, was powerful in Paul to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:8). He was the great Apostle of the Gentiles, and he magnified his office. He could not adduce any external connection with the Savior in the days of his flesh, as could the other Apostles; he had not seen the historic Christ, so to speak, but he had seen the ascended and glorified Christ. “This sight of Him, however, was not a mere vision; it was miraculous and positive, and it confers on St. Paul an authority in no way inferior to that of the twelve Apostles. But it is equally true that, in this respect, he more nearly represents the numerous generations of Christians who have had no outward relations with the incarnate Savior. Again he stands apart from that symbolic number of the twelve, which points to the ancient tribes of Israel. He is the Apostle of the church as it bursts the confines of Judaism; the Apostle of mankind rather than of a nation.[3] Lastly, he did not receive his office by transmission: Ananias, who laid his hands on him, was a simple believer. His Apostolate was conferred on him by a direct revelation. It stands in no relation to any positive institution, but it carries its own glorious witness in its results.” The revelation “which he received in the temple at Jerusalem bore directly on his mission to the Gentiles (Acts 22:21); and thus presupposed an enlargement of his religious views.”—Pressense.

His journeys were extensive and ranged in different and distant portions of the Roman Empire. He was usually accompanied by one or more brethren in these travels, and the labors, exposures and persecutions that they experienced were wonderful indeed. Paul made four principal journeys in the discharge of his Apostolic and ministerial duties among the Gentiles.

“First Journey.—From Antioch in Syria to Seleucia; by sea to Salamis in Cyprus; by land to Paphos; by sea to Perga; to Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe; back from Derbe to Lystra, Iconium, Antioch in Pisidia, Perga, Attalia; by sea to Seleucia and Antioch in Syria (Acts 13, 14).

“Second Journey.—From Antioch in Syria by land to Tarsus, Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, Antioch in Pisidia; through Phrygia, Galatia and Mysia, to Troas; by sea to Neapolis; to Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea; by sea to Athens; by land to Corinth; by sea to Ephesus; by sea to Caesarea; by land to Jerusalem; back to Antioch in Syria (Acts 15:40-18:22).

“Third Journey.—From Antioch in Syria, through Cilicia and Cappadocia to Galatia and Phrygia; through the province of Asia to Ephesus; from Ephesus to Macedonia (probably by sea); to Corinth (probably by land); back to Macedonia (probably by land); by sea to Troas; by land to Assos; by sea along the coast of Asia to Miletus, Rhodes, Patara; by sea to Tyre; by land to Caesarea and Jerusalem (Acts 18:22-21:15).

“Fourth Journey.—From Caesarea by sea to Sidon and Myra (in Lycia); by sea round the south side of Crete, across the sea of Adria to Melita; by sea to Syracuse, Rhegium, Puteoli; by land to Rome.”—E. Stock.

Have the ministerial labors of any man ever surpassed those of the Apostle Paul? Because he was not chosen an Apostle by the other Apostles, and did not derive his authority as such from them or any institution in Judea, many doubted his Apostleship and caused divers accusations to be preferred against him; but it was absolutely certain that the signs of an Apostle attended his labors and ministry, and there were no reasonable grounds for disputing the same.

The first Apostles could point to the work in Jerusalem and in Samaria, but he could point to that which was done at Antioch, Paphos, Iconium, Derbe, Lystra, Philippi, Corinth, and to all the churches founded by him in various parts of the world. The council held by the Apostles and Elders in Jerusalem sanctioned the authority of Paul’s Apostolate, his doctrine preached unto the Gentiles, and their release from the burdens of the Jewish ritual. Of this council it may be said that it was purely democratic. It was no autocratic college of Apostles, assembling by themselves and sending forth their infallible decrees as their pretended successors presume to do, but it was an assembly in which all present had a voice—Peter no more than any other, and the one who spoke last and to whom all gave heed was not an Apostle, for he was James the Lord’s brother. James, the brother of John, had been slain by Herod before this time.[4] This council, after all, appeared to be only a compromise in the interest of the peace of the church at that time. It was not a final settlement as to the relation of the two covenants. Jewish Christians were required or allowed to observe the law for a season, and Gentile Christians, in the course of time, ate of meats offered to idols and things strangled. Not the slightest authority was given by this council, either in precept or example, to those held under the authority of Constantine the Great, and all those held subsequently under the influence of Romish authority. The decrees of the council in Jerusalem were passed in a free conference of Christians in the behalf of Christian freedom. Those of Rome were held in behalf of worldly interests, human passions, and pride, tyranny and oppression.

After the council of Jerusalem the Apostles and brethren separate, never to meet again in council upon the shores of time. Paul goes off to his labors among the Gentiles, and some in one direction and some in another. If we inquire into the peculiar character of the work, labors and preaching of the Apostles to the Gentiles, we shall find them to differ somewhat from those of the foregoing period.

“The Divine Spirit works not less mightily in Paul than in Peter, but the apostolic office is more distinctly observable. The thousands converted on the day of Pentecost and in Solomon’s porch were acted upon together by a sudden and irresistible influence, produced by the first outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Conversions in masses like these do not occur in this second period of the church. The proselytes are many, but they are made personally, one by one. When we come to examine Paul’s teaching, we shall see how wise he was in the adaptation of his discourse to the circumstances of his hearers, and how admirably he sought and found the point of contact between those he addressed and the gospel he preached. His ministry is accompanied with miracles, but he has less frequent recourse than earlier preachers to this method of persuasion. In many places he founded churches without the aid of external miracles. In these missions of the Apostle to the Gentiles, therefore, the Divine Spirit works more directly upon the conscience and less by external manifestations. Man cannot derive any glory to himself from this fact; for though God’s method of intervention assumes a different form, it is none the less to this sovereign intervention of grace that the most beautiful fruits of the Apostle’s labor are to be ascribed.”—Pressense.

Third Period of Apostolic Age—John the Apostle and Prophet.

“As in the first period of the Apostolic age, the principal part is enacted by St. Peter, and in the second by St. Paul, so in the third period the paramount influence is that of St. John. His natural disposition and peculiar gifts account for this delay in the exercise of his Apostleship. With a soul meditative and mystical, he had neither the impetuous zeal of Peter nor the indefatigable activity of Paul. On him Christianity had wrought most intensively; he had penetrated into the deepest meaning of the teaching of Christ, or rather he had read the very heart of the Master. It was his vocation to preserve the most precious jewels in the treasury of Christ’s revelations, and to bring to light the most sacred and sublime mysteries of the gospel. In order to fulfill this mission, he must needs wait until the church was ready for such exalted teaching. The first storms of division must subside. Just as the prophet heard the still small voice which was the voice of God, only after the sound of the tempest and the roar of the thunder; so the Apostle of supreme love could not speak till a calm had succeeded to the storm stirred up by the polemics of St. Paul. His work was not more important nor attested with a diviner seal than that of the great controversialist of the apostolic age; the two are closely connected, and the latter is the natural sequence to the earlier. The revelation of love could not be complete till Judaeo-Christianity had finally succumbed, and had carried with it in its fall all the barriers within which it had sought to limit the grace of God. So true is this that we find St. Paul himself sounding the first notes of the hymn of love, and thus inaugurating the work of St. John. The former sowed in tears, the latter reaped in joy. The one resisted to blood; the other received for the church the prize of the well-fought fight. This diversity in the missions of the two Apostles is manifested in the diversity of the methods employed by them in order to establish the truth of which they are the organs. While St. Paul wields the weapons of warfare in big irresistible and impassioned dialectics, St. John is satisfied with expounding doctrine. He does not dispute; he affirms. It is clear that he has been led into the possession of the truth by a path widely divergent from that of St. Paul—by the path of intuition, of direct vision. His language has the calmness of contemplation. He speaks in short sentences, strikingly simple in form; but that simplicity, like a quiet lake, holds in its depths the reflection of the highest Heaven. ‘He has filled the whole earth with his voice,’ says John Chrysostom, ‘not by its mighty reverberations, but by the Divine grace which dwelt upon his lips. That which is most admirable is, that this great voice is neither harsh nor violent, but soft and melting as harmonious music.’

“It is very far from the truth, however, to regard St. John as the type of feminine gentleness, as he is represented in legend and in painting, which is only another form of legend. The ancient church had a far worthier conception of him when it gave to St. John the Evangelist the symbol of the eagle soaring to the sun, as though to signify that the mightiest and most royal impulse—that which carries farthest and highest—is love. The soul of the Apostle of Ephesus is as vigorous as that of Paul. He was called the Son of Thunder before grace had subdued his natural vehemence; and something of this early ardor always remained with him. In proportion to his love of truth was his hatred of error and heresy. Such love is a consuming fire, and, when it sees its object despised or wronged, it is as ardent in its indignation as in its adoration. The truth which St. John loved and served was no mere abstract doctrine; it was to him incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. He was ever the beloved disciple of the Master, the disciple admitted to His most tender and ultimate friendship; and the church has ever pictured him in the attitude in which he is represented in the Gospels at the Last Supper, leaning on the bosom of the Lord. It was by the power of love so strong and deep that he was enabled to fulfill his mission of conciliation, and to harmonize all the apparent contradictions of the apostolic age in the rich synthesis of his doctrine. Let us now inquire how he was prepared for this glorious vocation.

“John was the son of Zebedee, a fisherman of the Lake of Gennesaret, who dwelt at Bethsaida (Matthew 4:21; Mark 1:19; Matthew 10:2). It is not proved that he was actually poor, as Chrysostom maintained, for his father had ‘hired servants’ (Mark 1:20); his mother was among the women who ministered to Jesus of their substance (Luke 8:3); and John himself had a house of his own (John 19:27). Be this as it may, however, he was of obscure and humble origin. His mother was among the earliest followers of the Savior. John, as well as Peter, was a disciple of the Forerunner; the preaching of John the Baptist answered to the needs of his heart, which was eagerly waiting for the hope of Israel.

“Peter and John did not at once leave all to be Christ’s disciples (John 1:35-42). The Master gave time for their first impressions to deepen before He called them to forsake family and fishing-nets and to come after Him (Matthew 4:18-22; Mark 1:19, 20; Luke 5:1-11). John appears to have been very young at this time; his grave and thoughtful nature peculiarly fitted him to receive the education which Jesus Christ imparted to His disciples, and which consisted in impressing on them the features of His own likeness.

“John, Peter and James were, as we know, admitted to special intimacy with the Savior. There is no reason to suppose that John had, at first, a much clearer comprehension than the other disciples of the doctrine of Christ. He shared their carnal conceptions of the earthly kingdom of the Messiah (Matthew 15:20-28), and exhibited sometimes the narrow spirit of the sectary (Luke 9:49, 50). His invocation of wrath upon the Samaritans displays an alloy of human passion, blended with his affection for the Savior (Luke 9:54). But this affection was so real and true that it was sure to lead to all the developments of the religious life. He proved his love in a way not to be mistaken at the time of Christ’s passion. He followed Him into the court of the high priest, and even to the foot of the cross (John 19:26). He is the only one of the Apostles who witnessed the last sufferings of Christ; and probably for this reason he was chosen to render the most emphatic testimony to His eternal glory in the bosom of the Father.

“We can well imagine what an ineffaceable image of unparalleled love and sorrow would be left on the soul of John by this scene. Who can tell with what feelings he caught those last words of the God-Man spoken almost in His parting agony, which committed to him the mother of his Lord as a sacred legacy? (John 19:27). He was also one of the first to see the risen Christ (John 20:8). All these memories, and many more connected with them, were to be successively illuminated by the Holy Spirit till they should form in the mind of John a perfect whole. But he was not himself capable, immediately after the Pentecostal effusion of the Spirit, of receiving, in all its fullness, this Divine revelation.

“During the earlier period of the apostolic age we see John by Peter’s side, lending him efficient help, but leaving to him the initiative in speech and action (Acts 3:1; 8:14, 25). He enjoyed much consideration, but did not exert a preponderating influence; nothing is recorded of his share in the council at Jerusalem, though he appears to have been present (Gal. ii. 9). At this time he still adhered to the Mosaic law (for Jewish converts), as did Peter and James—a course of conduct confirmed by the decisions of the council at Jerusalem. There are no means of ascertaining in what year he left that city; but he was no longer there in the year 60, when Paul made his last visit (Acts 21:17,18). Nicephorus asserts that he remained in Jerusalem until the death of Mary; but this gives us no exact information, inasmuch as the date of that event is entirely unknown. There is one whole period of the life of the Apostle of which we possess no details (that are to be implicitly relied on). But if we have no precise records of his life during these years, his writings give evidence that the time was not lost in reference to his own development. He learned to contemplate one aspect of the person and doctrine of his Master, which had not presented itself to any of the other Apostles with equal distinctness; this was the profound mysterious fact of His eternal Divinity, His pre-existence and incarnation.

“We are free to suppose that the period of his life about which we have no information was devoted (under the directing grace of God) to climbing that spiritual Tabor, on the summit of which the only and eternal Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, was to appear to him in all the glory of His Divinity. The Apostle, like Mary, pondered in his heart all that he knew of his Master; in the silence of devotion he listened to His living voice, and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit discerned more and more of the mystery of His being. Augustine says, ‘While the three other evangelists remained below with the man Jesus, and spoke little of His Divinity, John, as though impatient of treading the earth, rose from the very first words of His gospel, not only above the bounds of earth, air and sky, but above the angels and celestial powers, into the very presence of Him by whom all things were made. Not in vain do the Gospels tell us that he leaned on the bosom of the Savior at the Passover Feast. He drank in secret at that Divine spring: De illo pectore in secreto bibebat.’

“All the life of St. John, during the period when scarcely a trace of him is to be found in the apostolic church, is summed up in these words: ‘The time was to come when the Apostle would emerge from his obscurity and would in his turn exert a wide and deep influence over the churches of the first century. According to the testimony of Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus, St. John, after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul, took up his residence at Ephesus. No city could have been better chosen as a center from which to watch over the churches, and follow closely the progress of heresy. At Ephesus the Apostle was in the center of Paul’s mission-field in Asia Minor, and not far from Greece. Christianity had achieved splendid conquests in the flourishing cities of that country; but it had also encountered dangerous enemies. ’It was there that false Gnosticism,[5] first of all, showed itself, and perpetually sought new adherents. The Apostle Paul had spoken before his death of its rapid progress (1 Tim. 6:20, 21). In his second epistle to Timothy (1:15-18) he seems to point out Ephesus as the city most threatened with heresy, where consequently the presence of an Apostle would be especially needed. St. John made this city his settled abode, without, however, devoting himself exclusively to the important church there founded. Ephesus was the center of his apostolic activity, but that activity extended over a wide area. Clement of Alexandria tells us how the Apostle visited the churches, presiding at the election of bishops (or pastors) and restoring order where it had been disturbed,’ etc.

“It is not possible to determine accurately at what date St. John suffered for the gospel. The ‘Fathers’ differ as to the time of his banishment to Patmos. We are inclined to place it shortly after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. His exile may have been protracted during some years. The Revelation appears to us to have been written long before the gospel. It carries us back into a period very little removed from the fearful persecution under Nero, which was the great typal war of Anti-christ against Christ. The mode of thought, the form of language, the prominent ideas, the historical allusions, all suggest this date; and, in the absence of any decisive external evidence, we are free to give full weight to the internal.

“With reference to the gospel and epistles, tradition is agreed in the date affixed to them. These writings are the slowly ripened fruit of all the labors of the apostolic age; but at the same time, like every other good gift, they come down from Heaven, and bear the undeniable seal of inspiration. They clearly belong to a period when heresy was rife, and especially those forms of heresy which, denying the corporeal reality of the Savior’s sufferings, contained the first germ of Docetism.[6] John did not indeed design his gospel to be a systematic refutation of the errors of Cerinthus or of any other heretic. He was satisfied with setting forth true Christian Gnosticism[7] in opposition to false Oriental or Judaizing Gnosticism; and his Gospel is beautifully characterized by Clement of Alexandria as pre-eminently the gospel of the Spirit. We should do injustice to the fourth Gospel were we to regard it as a mere polemical writing, or as only the complement of the synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke). The latter supposition cannot be reconciled with the admirable unity of composition to be observed in the Gospel of John. It is full of a creative inspiration. The style is altogether unlike that of a mere commentator who is completing by a gloss a text already given. John epitomises in his Gospel the substance of his preaching at Ephesus and in the other churches of Asia Minor. According to Jerome, he had no intention at first of preserving his discourses in writing, but agreed to do so at the express request of the churches.

“We have no detailed information of the last years of the Apostle. Two incidents have come down to us which agree perfectly with what we know of him. Irenaeus relates that, going one day into the public baths at Ephesus, and hearing that Cerinthus was also there, he immediately went out, exclaiming that he feared the house might fall, because of the presence of so great an enemy of the truth. Jerome tells us how the aged Apostle, no longer able to preach at any length, would be carried into the assemblies of the Christians to speak the simple words, ‘Little children, love one another.’ To his brethren and disciples who asked him why he thus repeated himself, he replied, ‘It is the Lord’s commandment, and when it is fulfilled, nothing is wanting.’ This hatred of error and this holy love give us the perfect portraiture of John. It does not appear that he died a violent death. He fell asleep in Christ at a very advanced age, at the commencement of the reign of Trajan (about A.D. 98 or 99).

“Augustine tells us that in his time there was a very current belief that the Apostle was not dead, but was only sleeping in his grave. Evidently, this impression arose from a wrong interpretation of the words of Christ spoken to Peter with reference to John:”If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?’ (John 21:22). Perhaps also the Christians may have found it hard to believe that the Apostle, whose influence was still so great, had really passed from the world. They were not altogether wrong. As Lucke has said, ‘He lives, and will ever live, by his writings, and the future belongs to him even more than the past.’“—Pressense.

“Paul is, in his statement of doctrine as in his life, the man of contrasts and antitheses. He aims to show how deep is the gulf between human nature and God, that he may the more exalt the grace which has bridged the chasm; and he traces vigorously the line of demarcation between the Old Covenant and the New. It is not so with John. Having attained gradually, and without any sudden shock, the highest elevation of Christian truth, he starts from the summit and gently comes down again. He does not even pause to establish the superiority of the gospel over the law. With him that is a settled point, an admitted principle, from which he deduces the consequences. John does not commence, like Paul, with man and his misery, but with God and His perfections. His doctrine, by this character of sustained elevation, and by the part assigned in it to love and to the direct intuition of Divine things, bears the impress of mysticism, but of a mysticism which is essentially moral, in which the great laws of conscience are always maintained, and which is as far removed from Oriental pantheism as from Pharisaic legalism.

“At the summit of his doctrine St. John places the idea of God. God is the Absolute Being, the great I Am, whom no eye hath seen or can see. He is a Spirit (John 1:18; 4:24). All perfection dwells in Him; He is at once light, life and love. As He is Absolute Being, so He is Absolute, Eternal Life, the inexhaustible source, the sole principle of every being (1 John 5:20). But this life is at the same time light (1 John 1:5). Light represents perfect knowledge and spotless purity (1 John 3:20). God knows all things; God is holy. But John does not pause at this abstract conception of moral good. He gives us a concrete notion of it when he tells us that God is love (1 John 4:16). This He is as essentially as He is life and light. Love is not only a manifestation of His being; it is His very essence. Never before had this sublime thought been expressed with such clearness; it had been discerned only by glimpses. Under the Old Covenant the love of God was subordinate to His justice. Under the New, this limited view had for a long time prevailed. St. Paul insisted with much force upon the love of God, but he considered it rather in its historical manifestation for the salvation of men than in its eternal principle. It is on this eternal principle that St. John dwells. He sees in the cross not only reconciliation between man and God, but also the revelation of the true name of God, of His very being. He is love; the God who is love is the true God (1 John 5:20). Love is so assuredly the absolute truth, that he who loveth is ‘of the truth.’ He is a partaker of the nature of God (1 John 4:7). Thus truth or light is inseparable from love; it is not simple knowledge or mere theory. St. John does not recognize the ray of light which has no flame. Truth is, as it were, full of life; it is life as it is love. To be of the truth is to be born of God, to possess Him, to be what He is: it is, therefore, to have love in one’s self. The object of knowledge being the God who is love, it is natural that true knowledge should be inseparable from love. To the Apostle, love is not one of the attributes of God (simply); it is God Himself. The metaphysical attributes are the attributes of the Divine love. God is holy, infinite, almighty love, knowing everything, everywhere present. John delights, therefore, to give Him the name of Father—that wondrous name which commands at once tenderness and reverence (John 1:14, 18; 1 John 3:1).”

This eternal and invisible Being is revealed to the world by the doctrine of the Word, by whom the worlds were made, and who came into this world to reveal the Father it His people and to lay down His life for them (John 10:15). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.” “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him” (John 1:1, 2, 14, 18). The Father and the Son are one (John 10:30). The Holy Ghost, the Comforter, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is recognized by John also as God. He is the author of the new birth (John 3:8). He takes up His abode in the church and abides with her forever. He brings all things to her remembrance, whatsoever the Savior hath said to her. He testifies of Christ. He glorifies Him, and takes the things of Jesus and shows them to His saints (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:13-15). He also convinces the world of sin, of righteousness and of judgment (John 16:8).

“John recognizes the intrusion of a principle of discord into the world. The power of sin has been let loose. He does not enter into any argument on the origin of evil. He affirms the fact, and is content without proving it. A kingdom of darkness has set itself in opposition to the kingdom of light, of which God is the Sun. The devil has had a great influence upon man, seducing him into evil. He is not, indeed, to be regarded as Ahriman the eternal, confronted with the eternal Ormazd; no, the principle of light was before the principle of evil. Satan himself was born (or created) in the light, for it is said, ‘He abode not in the truth’ (John 8:44). It is evident that John supposes a fall in his case, no less than in ours, and that, consequently, in the origin of things, all was light and purity, as became a creation called into being by the Word. The cause of evil is entirely moral. ‘Sin,’ says the Apostle, ‘is the transgression of the law’ (1 John 3:4). There is a law for the creature. It is this law which John calls the old and new commandment, the commandment of love based upon the very being of God (1 John 2:5-10). The blessed destiny of the moral creature is to become like his Creator, conformed to His nature. The creature, soon after being made, voluntarily took part against God; that is to say, he rejected life, love and light. Thus the world became dark from the day in which it turned from God. It is now plunged in moral night; all the higher elements are stifled in man; the outward and sensible life predominates; the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, enshroud it in threefold darkness (1 John 2:16, 17). It is given over to a lie, because it has set itself against good and love—that is, against God and the Word. Its prince is he who was a liar and murderer from the beginning (John 8:44), and who, having fallen himself, has dragged after him in his descent all those who have freely, and under no external constraint, followed his suggestions.”

“The Word, which was the organ of creative love, is also the organ of the compassionate love of the Father. The whole work of salvation rests upon Him. This work is twofold. It is both internal and external; for it is to effect the reconciliation between God and man. It is not enough that God should draw near to man by a series of revelations; it is also necessary that man should be inclined toward God. In truth, that he may come to the fountain of living waters, man must be athirst (John 17:37). He must be born from above in order to receive the Redeemer, who comes down from Heaven. Only ‘he who is of God heareth the words of God’ (John 8:23-49). The voice of the good Shepherd is known only by His sheep (John 10:27). In other words, the soul must have recovered the sense of Divine things, and there must be an affinity between it and the truth, in order that it may come to the light.

“The incarnation is the only reparation of the fall. We know with what emphasis St. John insists upon the reality of the incarnation in opposition to the heresies of his time, which, by a spurious spiritualism, regarded the body of the Savior as a sort of delusive semblance. ‘Every spirit,’ he says, ‘that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God’ (1 John 4:2, 3). Writing his Gospel and epistles in presence of those dualistic tendencies, which identified evil with the corporeal element, he felt himself called upon to magnify this glorious aspect of His incarnation. He does not dwell on the humiliation of Christ as St. Paul does, but there is no contradiction on this point between the Apostles. If the glory of the only begotten Son of the Father is apparent to John through the veil of mortal flesh, that glory is, nevertheless, revealed in shrouded splendor. He shows us Jesus Christ as subject to the weaknesses and suffering conditions of human life; He is weary, He groans, He weeps, He dies. His death is undoubtedly a lifting up, in a spiritual point of view (John iii. 14); and it was important to prove this in contradiction to Cerinthus, who regarded His death as only illusory. St. John gives emphasis to the truth, that it is both glorious and real: ‘This is He that came by blood.’ But death is still death—that is, the depth of humiliation. He is subject to a certain abasement: but He is subject to it voluntarily; it is an act of His Divine freedom. The Son has power to lay down His life, and has power to take it again (John 10:18); thus, in our aspect, He is glorious in His humiliation. Yet more, to the Apostle of love the highest glory is that which comes from love. For him, as for Pascal, this is the supreme order of greatness. Thus regarded, what glory can be compared with the glory of Him who gave His life for His brethren on the accursed tree?”After so much suffering and strife, endured from the beginning of the world, Divine love will at length win a glorious victory on the very scene of its conflicts. Even the brilliant colors of the Apocalypse fail to depict this triumph, for St. John exclaims in his first epistle: ‘It doth not appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is’ (1 John 3:2). To be made like God—is not this the highest possibility of the development of the creature? Is it not the realization of the sublime purpose of the redeeming Word? Is it not the fulfillment of the prayer of Christ, ‘That they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us?’ (John 17:21). Having ascended to these heavenly heights, the theology of John is complete; no mysticism can soar above it, however bold its flight. The perfect union of the creature with the Creator through the Word is the ultimate expression of the doctrine of love; beyond it there is nothing. This is, therefore, the closing utterance of the apostolic age; the conclusion and not the refutation of all that has gone before; the conciliation of all contradictions in the church; in a word, the last revelation from Heaven, absolute truth, God Himself. Freed from all error, comprehended in all its depth, it will ever be the grandest result wrought out by the historian of theology, who, bending over the book in which it was inscribed by the aged saint of Ephesus, seeks to decipher it from age to age.”—Pressense.

The Revelation.

Says Pressense: “So far from being in opposition to the other writings of St. John, this book comprehends all the essential points of his theology, but in the condition of germ not yet fully developed. There is no stronger evidence of this agreement than the place given in the Revelation to the person of Jesus Christ. Everything centres in the Savior. He is called the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah,’ and the ‘Root of David’—expressions which point to His humanity (Rev. 5:5; 22:16). His Divinity is no less distinctly recognized. He is the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev. 1:17; 2:8; 22:13). Clothed in a vesture dipped in blood, He is called the Word or the Word of God, and He is followed by the armies of Heaven. The Revelation is full of the idea of redemption. It delights in representing the Savior under the image of the Lamb slain, whose blood cleanses from all Sin (Rev. 5:9). The heavenly hosts adore Him. The King of humanity, as He was once its victim, He holds the keys of hell and of death (Rev. 1:18; 3:21). He is the Divine Head of the church, its guide and defense (Rev. 3:19). The church, in spite of a Jewish symbolism, which is of easy interpretation, is clearly distinguished from the synagogue. It comprehends a ‘multitude of every nation and kindred and people and tongue’ (Rev. 5:9). It is composed of those who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, and who are walking in the way of holiness (Rev. 7:14, 15; 14:3, 4). The Apocalypse rests, therefore, on the same doctrinal basis as the fourth Gospel.

“The Revelation is not a recital of doctrine—it is, primarily, a book of prophecy; it opens a wide and glorious horizon to Christian hope and paints it with glowing colors. It bears the impress of the age in which it was written. It raises the events of that time to the height of solemn symbols; thus it is at the same time the book of revelations and an important historical record. It was written during a time of persecution, and in it, as has been well said, we breathe the very atmosphere of martyrdom; while, at the same time, it is illuminated throughout with the certainty of triumph. Contrasting the glory of the church above with the indignities heaped on the church below, the Revelation seems to drown the cries and the blasphemies of earth in the songs of the blessed and of the angels. After depicting the conflict and the sufferings of the saints, and the terrible judgments of God upon their persecutors, it opens a vista of the heavenly places. It is one of the grandest conceptions of the sacred writer, perpetually to link together earth and heaven, and to show in the events of religious history the counterpart of other events, of which the abode of the blessed is the scene. The sealed book which contains the mystery of the destinies of humanity, is at the foot of the throne of God. From thence resound the seven trumpets which declare the doom of the wicked; from thence do the angels pour forth their vials of wrath. While for the visible church, all is humiliation and suffering or weary waiting, all is glory for the church invisible; yet never was the mysterious link uniting the two more plainly manifested. ‘These which are arrayed in white robes, whence came they?’ ‘These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve Him day and night in His temple, and He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of water; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes’ (Rev. 7:13-17).

“But the sacred writer is not content with proclaiming in a general manner the suffering and triumph of the church. The further he proceeds in his delineation of the struggle between Christianity and Anti-christ, the more definite does he become in detail, though he makes use of a stately symbolism, sometimes strange and always full of variety. Just as ancient prophecy was subject to rhythmical conditions, and uttered its most passionate inspirations in conformity to the rules of Hebrew poetry, so the prophet of the New Testament arranged his abundant materials in harmonious order. The Apocalypse has a rhythm of its own, taking the word in its wide acceptation. The seven trumpets follow the seven seals, and these again are succeeded by the seven vials. In the three cycles of revelations there is always a pause after the sixth link of the series to prepare for the last link, which is itself destined to bring in a new series. This series is not immediately introduced. The prophet seems to be lost for awhile in meditation on the history of the world and of the church. After the three series, intended to be all prophetic of the same visitations, we have the descriptions of the great conflict, which is itself divided into three acts: 1st. The fall of Babylon (Rev. 18, 19) 2nd. The combat with Antichrist and Satan, terminated by the reign of Christ over His own (Rev. 20:1-6). 3rd. The last struggle and the last victory, the new Heaven and the new earth (Rev.20:11; 22) Such is the plan of the Apocalypse. We find in it the same gradation as in the prophecy of Christ referring to the last times (Matthew 24:3-51). Thus the agonies and convulsions of nature which are to precede the final judgment, the wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, the darkening of the sun, the falling of the stars, the universal terror—all these signs, given in brief touches by the Master, are dwelt upon by the inspired disciple in bold symbolism. The terrible rider on the red horse who comes forth at the opening of the second seal to take peace from the earth, is the personification of war; as the man mounted upon the black horse, and with the pair of balances in his hand, represents famine. The earthquakes and the darkening of the sky are heralded by the opening of the sixth seal.

“The first trumpets and the first vials announce the same order of judgments, and both have reference to the commencement of the prophecy of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus Christ, after predicting the chastisements and judgments of God in nature, declared His judgments in history, and first of all, the destruction of Jerusalem. St. John, looking beyond this terrible event, proclaims another judgment of God. Sentence is to be passed now, not upon Jerusalem, but upon Rome, the impure and bloody Babylon, the incarnation at that time of the genius of evil. What a grand delineation does the evangelical prophet give of this diabolical paganism—now as the beast with seven heads and ten horns, opening its mouth to pour out blasphemy against God; now as the great whore, robed in purple and scarlet, making the inhabitants of the earth drunk with the wine of her fornications, herself drunk with blood of the martyrs of Christ, having ascended out of the bottomless pit and going into perdition! What an impression was such a prophetic cry calculated to produce, uttered as it was in the presence of the Roman Colossus, still standing in all the pride of its great power! ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city!’ (Rev. 14:8). ‘Rejoice over her, thou Heaven, and ye holy Apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her,’ etc., etc.

“But the church has not only to fight against Antichrist without; it has also to resist Antichrist within; to do battle, that is, with heresy and false prophecy. ‘Many false prophets shall arise and shall deceive many,’ said Jesus Christ (Matthew 24:11). St. John represents false prophecy under the image of a beast coming up out of the earth, in appearance like a lamb, but speaking as a beast, doing great wonders, and deceiving them that dwell on the earth by his miracles (Rev. 13:11-14). Behind this visible opponent, the Apostle shows us the invisible enemy, the dragon, the old serpent, which gave power to the beast (Rev. 13:4). The conflict is unto blood alike in the prediction of the Savior and in the Apocalypse. The two witnesses, Moses and Elijah, are types of all the confessors of Christ; though put to death, the Spirit of life from God enters into them again, and they triumph (Rev. 11:9-11).

“Thus in the Revelation, as in the prophecy of Jesus Christ, are unfolded the judgments of God as manifested in nature and in history, and the sanguinary and victorious struggles of the church with her many adversaries. The inspired writer has added in his picture new features, drawn from the historical events of the time, and interpreted by the Spirit of prophecy; but the words of St. John have not, any more than the words of Christ, an application restricted to his own age.”

The seven churches of Asia Minor addressed by Christ through John in the second and third chapters of Revelation are properly regarded as a miniature of the whole Christian church at all times. “There is no condition, good, bad or mixed, of which these seven short epistles do not present a sample, and for which they do not give suitable and wholesome direction. Here, as everywhere, the written word of God and the history of the apostolic church evince their applicability to all times and circumstances, and their inexhaustible fullness of instruction, warning and encouragement for all states and stages of religious life.

“By the ‘angel’ of each church cannot be meant holy heavenly beings, who cannot be charged with doctrinal and practical errors, but, in accordance with the enigmatic symbolism of the book of Revelation, the pastor of each church, as representing the entire membership. Pastors are thus reminded that, like the angels above, they below should fulfill God’s commission to them zealously and efficiently.

“Each of the seven epistles commences with, ‘I know thy works’—living faith will show living works, and dead faith dead works. Each epistle contains a promise ‘To him that overcometh.’ Each ends with, ‘He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.’ The title of our Lord in each accords with the special address, and is mainly taken from the imagery of the vision in chapter first. Each of the addresses has a threat or a promise, and most have both. Their order seems ecclesiastical, civil and geographical: Ephesus first, as the Asiatic metropolis, nearest to Patmos, where John received the epistles to the seven churches; also being that church with which John was especially connected; then the churches on the west of Asia; then those in the interior. Smyrna and Philadelphia—outwardly poor, small, persecuted and afflicted, but very faithful and spiritually flourishing—alone receive unmixed praise; they are exhorted to continued faithfulness. Sardis and Laodicea—the most wealthy, having a name to live but being dead, saying that they are rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing, while being really wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked—receive almost solely censure and terrible warning; but there were a few even in Sardis who had not defiled their garments; and with the truly penitent ones in Laodicea Christ promised to come in and sup. Ephesus, Pergamos and Thyatira have a mixed character, and receive both commendation and censure; Ephesus is commended for her orthodoxy, but censured for leaving her first love and her first works; Pergamos is commended for her martyr faith, but censured for her lack of discipline, not excluding those who held licentious doctrines and practices; and Thyatira is commended for her faith, and love, and patience, but is also censured for her looseness of discipline, retaining in her communion those who held Satanic principles and practices.”—P. Schaff.

We learn, therefore, that Christ requires His churches to be faithful in doctrine, in practice and in discipline.

Many suppose that the seven churches prophetically represent the seven successive ages of the general church. Vitringa regards Ephesus as representing the church from A.D. 30 to 250; Smyrna from 250 to 311; Pergamos from 311 to 700; Thyatira from 700 to 1200; Sardis from 1200 to 1517; Philadelphia from 1517 to 1617; and Laodicea from 1617 to the present time. Laodicea, it may be remarked, used to be the capital of the greater Phrygia, and a place of great size, splendor and luxury; but it is now a perfect mass of ruins.

The book of Revelation has earlier, clearer and ampler testimonies for its apostolic authorship than any other book in the New Testament. It was evidently intended to complete the volume of inspiration, no further or additional revelation to be given for the use of the church until Christ shall come (Rev. 22:18-20). “Scripture is one organic whole, its books, though ranging over 1,500 years in their date of composition, being mutually connected. The end is the necessary sequence of the middle, as the middle is the sequence of the beginning. Genesis represents man in his innocence and bliss, followed by man’s fall through Satan’s cunning, and man’s consequent dooming to death and exclusion from paradise and its tree of life and delightful rivers. Revelation represents, in reverse order, man first sinning and dying, then conquering sin and death through the blood of the Lamb; the first Adam and Eve represented by the Second Adam, Christ, and the church, His spotless bride, in paradise, with access to the tree of life, and the crystal waters of life flowing from the throne of God. As Genesis foretold the bruising of the serpent’s head by the woman’s Seed, so Revelation declares the accomplishment of that prophecy (19, 20).”—A. R. Fausset.

“While John, in the Revelation, had in view, primarily, the overthrow of Jerusalem and of heathen Rome, the two great foes of Christianity at that time, his vision was not confined to these momentous events. It extends even to the remotest future when death and Hades shall be no more, and a new Heaven and a new earth shall appear. Although the fulfillment is predicted as being near at hand, he puts a Millennium and a short intervening conflict before the overthrow of Satan, the beast, and the false prophet. We have an analogy in the prophecy of the Old Testament and the eschatological discourses of our Lord (in Matthew 24, 25, Mark 13, and Luke 21), which furnish the key for the understanding of the Apocalypse. He describes the destruction of Jerusalem and the general judgment in close proximity, as if they were one continuous event. He sees the end from the beginning. The first catastrophe is painted with colors borrowed from the last, and the last appears as a repetition of the first on a grand and universal scale. It is the manner of prophetic vision to bring distant events into close proximity, as in a panorama. To God a thousand years are as a day. Every true prophecy admits of an expanding fulfillment. History ever repeats itself, though with new variations. The Apocalypse is not a prophetical manual of church history and chronology in the sense of a prediction of particular persons, dates and events. This would have made it useless to the first readers, and would make it useless now to the great mass of Christians. It gives, under symbolic figures and for popular edification, an outline of the general principles of Divine government and the leading forces in the conflict between Christ’s kingdom and His foes, which is still going on under ever-varying forms. In this way it teaches, like all the prophetic utterances of the Gospels and epistles, lessons of warning and encouragement to every age. We must distinguish between the spiritual coming of Christ and His personal arrival, or parousia. The former is progressive, the latter instantaneous. The spiritual coming began with His ascension to Heaven (see Matthew 26:64, ‘Henceforth ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of Heaven’), and goes on in unbroken succession of judgments and blessings (for the history of the world is a judgment of the world); hence the alternation of action and repose, of scenes of terror and scenes of joy, of battles and victories. The personal arrival of the Bridegroom is still in the unknown future, but is as certain as the first advent of Christ. The hope of the church will not be disappointed, for it rests on the promise of Him who is called ‘the Amen, the faithful and true witness’ (Rev. 3:14).”—P. Schaff.

There are three methods of interpreting the book of Revelation—the Preterist, the Futurist and the Historical (or continuous). The Preterist maintains that the prophecies in Revelation have already been fulfilled—that they refer chiefly to the triumph of Christianity over Judaism and paganism, signalized in the downfall of Jerusalem and of Rome. Against this view it is urged that if all these prophecies were fulfilled some 1,400 years ago (the Western Roman Empire fell A.D. 476), their accomplishment should be so perspicuous as to be universally manifest, which is very far from being the case. The Futurist interpreters refer all the book, except the first three chapters, to events which are yet to come. Against this view it is alleged that it is inconsistent with the repeated declarations of a speedy fulfillment at the beginning and end of the book itself (1:3; 22:6, 7, 12, 20). Against both these views it is argued that, if either of them is correct, the Christian church is left without any prophetic guidance in the Scriptures, during the greater part of its existence; while the Jewish church was favored with prophets during the most of its existence. The Historical or Continuous expositors believe the Revelation a progressive history of the church from the first century to the end of time. The advocates of this method of interpretation are the most numerous, and among them are such famous writers as Luther, Sir Isaac Newton, Bengel, Faber, Elliott, Wordsworth, Hengstenberg, Alford, Fausset and Lee. The ablest living expositors of this class consider the seven seals, seven trumpets, seven thunders and seven vials as all synchronous, or contemporaneous, or parallel, a series of cyclical collective pictures, each representing the entire course of the world (as connected with the church) down to the end of time; just as the seven churches in the first three chapters represent the universal church, the message to each pointing to the second coming of Christ. So the introduction in the first chapter, and the conclusion in the last chapter, refer to the beginning and the end of time, and to the second coming of Christ. Three times in the last chapter is His quick coming predicted. For these reasons the book of Revelation has been called the “Book of the Prophecy of Christ’s Coming.” It is the most difficult and sublime book of the Bible. While foretelling the righteous and terrific judgments of God upon the sins of man, it shows that all things are absolutely subject to the Divine foreknowledge and control (Acts 15:18; Ps. 76:10; 46:6; Matthew 24:22); and it abounds in the strongest consolation to the tried people of God, revealing the certainty of their final triumph over all their enemies, and their sure entrance into eternal bliss. Hence, it has been impressively remarked that “the book spreads itself out before us like the mantle of dusky night, broidered over with brilliant stars like jewels—enlivening the hope, patience, perseverance and love of the church of God, and affording her sufficient light concerning the future to enable her to find her way in situations of the greatest obscurity, while presenting an impenetrable veil to the profane gaze of the worldly mind.” Scarcely are any two leading interpreters agreed as to the exact events alluded to by each prophecy; no doubt many of the prophecies are still future, and cannot be understood until their fulfillment. While the prophecies may have one, or more than one, typical, imperfect, historical fulfillment, there can be no question that they also imply a higher spiritual fulfillment.

It is unfortunate that King James’s, or the Authorized Version of the Bible, always translates by the same term “beast” the two different Greek words zoon and therion in the book of Revelation. Zoon occurs twenty times in the Revelation (4:6-9; 5:6, 8, 11, 14; 6:1, 3, 5-7; 7:11; 14:3; 15:7; 19:4), and should be rendered living being; in classical Greek it denotes man and the nobler animals below him, and also it denotes a symbolical figure. Therion occurs thirty-seven times in the book of Revelation (6:8; 11:7; 13:1-4, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18; 14:9, 11; 15:2; 16:2, 10, 13; 17:3, 7, 8, 11-13, 16, 17; 19:19, 20; 20:4, 10), and is properly rendered wild beast or monster. There are four living beings (or Zoa) mentioned in Revelation. Four is the emblem of creation as revealing the glory of God (Gen. 2:10; Isa. 11:12; Ps. 107:3; Luke 13:29; Matthew 24:31, etc.). The four living beings are most probably of the same character as the cherubim of the tabernacle and temple and in Ezekiel, and the seraphim in Isaiah. They have one, two or four faces, and two, four or six wings, and contain parts of one or more of four leading animal forms, man, ox, lion and eagle, and especially represent man as the summation (microcosm) and lord of the terrestrial creation, concentrating in himself the highest created energies, and testifying to the power, majesty, omnipresence and omniscience of God, as manifested by the universe of created Life. Instead of being angels, or spirits that were never embodied, they are, in Revelation, emphatically distinguished from “all the angels” (Rev. 5:11; 7:11); and it is plainly set forth in Revelation 5:8-10, 19:4, 5, that the four living beings denote not only men, but the same class of men as the twenty-four Elders, redeemed men, men endowed with true or spiritual or eternal life, who are to live with God and worship Him forever.

On the other hand, the wild beasts or monsters (theria) of the book of Revelation represent the Satanized everlasting enemies of God who are to be cast into the lake of eternal fire (19:20; 20:10). As God has His two witnesses, so Satan or the Dragon has his two, the First and Second Apocalyptic Beasts (Rev. 13:1, 11). The term beast denotes man severed from God, resting on his own physical or intellectual strength, or material resources—the combination of sensual, lawless, God-opposing elements (Psalms 73:22; 49:12; 68:30; 2 Peter 2:12; 1 Cor. 15:32). The four successive world empires are represented in Daniel (7) as beasts coming up out of the stormy sea of political commotions (Rev. 17:15). The First Apocalyptic Beast rises out of the sea (13:1) or out of the bottomless pit (17:8), and has seven heads and ten horns, each horn having a crown upon it, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy; he has the power and authority of the Dragon, and makes war upon the saints and overcomes them; and all the world wonders after the beast, and worships him, except those whose names are written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (13:1-10). The First Beast shows himself to be the direct representative of the Dragon, who also has seven heads and ten horns (12:3), and who, first in human history, assumed the lowest beastly nature, that of the serpent (Gen. 3). The First Beast represents the World-Power opposed to God—the seven heads implying the assumption of Godhead, and caricaturing the seven spirits of God (Rev. 1:4); and the ten horns implying the whole cycle of worldly opposition to the Divine perfections. The seven heads seem to be the seven world-monarchies—Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the Germanic Empire (the German hordes that conquered Rome); though many scholars think the last or seventh is not yet developed; it is certain, from the interpretation of the angel to John, that at least six of these heads have already appeared (17:10), and that the sixth was Rome, which reigned over the earth while John was living. Pagan Rome deified her emperors, and worshiped, it is said, 30,000 idols, and dominated the civilized world, and massacred the saints of God in ten persecutions. Christianity seemed, for a brief period, to give its idolatry a deadly wound, in the fourth century; but that wound was healed, that is, the idolatry was restored by the apostasy of Papal Rome to picture-worship, Mariolatry (the worship of Mary), and the adoration of the Pope and the eucharist. The ten horns of the First Beast seem to be ten kings who are to be subordinate to this world-power in its last development (17:12). The Second Apocalyptic Beast is the same as the False Prophet (13:11-18; 19:20; 20:10); and also seems, in most respects, identified with the great, richly-dressed, blasphemous, murderous whore, Mystery Babylon, who rides upon the First Apocalyptic Beast, and is drunken with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus (17:1-18); the same as the “little horn” on the fourth beast in Daniel vii., and the “man of sin,” or “son of perdition,” predicted by Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2; and, in its full development, is the chief and last of the “false christs and false prophets” foretold by Christ (Matthew 24:24), and of the “Anti-christs” foretold by John in his first epistle (2:18). He rises out of the earth, that is, out of civilized and consolidated and peaceful society, and is of the earth, earthy, worshiping earthly idols and not the God of Heaven—it is a beast, all the time, notwithstanding that it has two horns like a lamb, mocking Christ, and appearing mild and innocent, yet really having the spirit of the Dragon, and, out of the abundance of its heart, speaking and acting like the Dragon. While the First Beast was a political power, this adds to the features of the First Beast hypocrisy and deceivableness, and is a pseudo-spiritual power, prophesying and working deceptive miracles for the First Beast, and making an image to the First Beast, and commanding all to worship the image, and killing those that refuse, and setting a mark in the right hands or foreheads of the idolatrous worshipers, and letting none buy or sell except such as have the mark or name of the beast, or the number of his name. The Second Beast (or False Prophet), although assuming the garb of religion (see Matthew 7:15), is more oppressive than the first. The Dragon, Beast and False Prophet, “the mystery of iniquity,” form a hellish Anti-Trinity, counterfeit of “the mystery of godliness,” God manifest in Christ, witnessed to by the Spirit. “The Dragon personates the Father, assigning his authority to his representative, the Beast, as the Father assigns His to the Son; while the False Prophet, like the Holy Ghost, speaks not of himself, but tells all men to worship the Beast, and confirms his testimony by miracles, as the Holy Ghost attested Christ’s Divine mission. The mark in the right hand and forehead implies prostration of the body and intellect to the Beast; or the mark in the forehead shows profession, and in the hand shows work and service for the Beast. The mark may be, as in the sealing of the saints, not visible, but symbolical of allegiance.” The number of the Beast is said to be the number of a man, and is 666. Countless attempts have been made to solve this enigma. Before the invention of the Arabic digits, numbers were generally represented by letters; so that every name, by the addition of the values of its letters, had a certain numerical value. From the language of the angel to John (Rev. xvii. 18), it seems certain that Rome was at least primarily meant; and the most scholarly solutions point to Rome. The language in which John wrote the book of Revelation, like that of the remainder of the New Testament, is Greek; and the numerical value, in Greek, of each of the following words, or phrases, is 666: Lateinos (Latinus, said to have been the first king of the Roman aborigines, from whom they derived their name of Latin); E Latine Basileia (the Latin kingdom); Italike Ekklesia (Italian church); Paradosis (tradition); Euporia (wealth). Vicarius Filii Dei (a Latin phrase, meaning Vicar of the Son of God, blasphemously assumed by the Pope); Vicarius Generalis Dei in Terris (Vicar General of God on earth), have the numerical value, in Latin, of 666. Also the word Romiith (Roman), in Hebrew, has for its numerical value 666. Latin is Rome’s language in all official acts.

Let it be especially remembered that “the only two Greek nouns in all the New Testament, whose numerical value is exactly 666, are Paradosis and Euporia, precisely the two expressing the grand corrupters of the church, Tradition, the corrupter of doctrine, and Wealth, the corrupter of practice. The only unquestionable 666 in the Old Testament is the 666 talents of gold that came in yearly to Solomon, and were among his chief corrupting influences (1 Kings 10:14; 2 Chron. 9:13). The two horns of the earth-beast represent the two phases of idolatry which ever corrupt the church, literal and spiritual, image-worship and covetousness. In Pelletan’s ‘Profession of Faith in the Nineteenth Century,’ Wealth is addressed ‘Divine Son-Messiah-Redeemer-dumb confidant of God—begotten by mysterious conception, who hast saved men from misery, redeemed the world,’ etc.” As the woman divinely clothed with the sun, and having the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars, and persecuted by the Dragon (Rev. 12), represents the true church, so the woman humanly arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, and sitting upon the scarlet-colored beast, and having upon her forehead the name Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth, and drunken with the blood of the saints, represents the false or apostate church with her daughters, whether Roman, Greek or Protestant, not loving Christ, the heavenly Bridegroom, but giving its affections to worldly idols—corrupted by tradition and wealth. The name Babylon given to the head of the image of the world-powers in the second chapter of Daniel is given in Revelation to the harlot. This connects her with the fourth kingdom, Rome, the last part of the image. Her sitting upon seven mountains or hills (Rev. 17:9), and her being the city which in John’s time reigned over the kings of the earth (Rev. 17:18), also prove her to be Rome. Babylon means confusion, and well describes the rival claims of apostate Rome and her apostate daughters, and the “confused noises and blood-rolled garments” of their many wars upon each other and upon the followers of the Lamb, the Prince of Peace (Isa. 9:5, 6); but all these persecutors shall stumble, and their “confusion” shall be “everlasting” (Jer. 20:11). The harlot is at last to be deprived of all her carnal possessions by the world-powers (Rev. 17:16), and to be visited with the righteous and eternal judgment of God (Rev. 18, 19). And then it is probably that some infidel supplanter of the papacy, the fully developed false-prophet, under a false spiritual guise, will assume even more blasphemous pretensions than the pope, (still, however, identified with Rome), and will openly avow atheism, and deify Satan in himself, and combine in himself worldly wisdom and worldly power, and endeavor to destroy all who will not worship him, and he will be met by the King of kings and Lord of lords, and be cast with the beast alive (not annihilated) into the lake of eternal fire (Rev. 19). Even in Babylon God has a people, and they are exhorted to come out of her, lest they partake of her sins and plagues (Rev. 18:4); just as the believers in Christ came out of Jerusalem before its terrible destruction by the Romans (Matthew 24:15, 16).”—A.R. Fausset.

In regard to the time when all these events shall take place, it is altogether uncertain. Christ told His Apostles that it was “not even for them to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in His own power” (Acts 1:7); and that the day and hour of the coming of the Son of man were unknown to any man and to the angels, and even to Himself in His humanity, and known only to the Father (Mark 13:32). Therefore all His people are to watch (Matthew 24:42). What is called the Year-Day theory is popular with many writers, though rejected by several recent and able scholars. This theory is sought to be based upon such passages as Leviticus 7:5; Deuteronomy 16:9, 10, 16; Numbers 14:33, 34; Ezekiel 4:5, 6; Daniel 9:24; and maintains that a day in prophecy means a year in history. It is replied that prophetical numbers are symbolical, and can hardly be thought to be also literal; that the above passages are irrelevant, especially the main passage in Daniel 9:24, where the word translated weeks simply means sevens; that the theory is contrary to the words of Christ about our not knowing the times or the seasons; and that if it is applied to any prophetical numbers, it should be applied to all, and that would make the Millennium (Rev. 20:1-7) last 360,000 years. Scarcely any Year-Day theorist applies his theory to the Millennium. Still, he insists that, in the latter days, many were to run to and fro, and knowledge was to be increased, and the book of prophesy was to be sealed only to the time of the end (Dan. xii. 4); and that, as the beginnings of the periods are uncertain, although we know the periods themselves, their ends are also uncertain, so that Christ’s words would still be true. The three years and a half, or time, times and dividing of time, or 42 months, or 1,260 days, so often mentioned in prophecy, are the same period; and, if the Year-Day theory be true, they denote 1,260 years. As for the fall of Mystical Babylon, we cannot tell the exact date, even if she were to continue 1,260 years. Pope Boniface III., in A.D. 606, received from the Emperor Phocas the title of “Universal Bishop;” Pope Theodore I., in A.D. 648, assumed the title of “Sovereign Pontiff,” and was the last pope whom a bishop dared to call brother; Pope Stephen III., in A.D. 754, by acknowledging the usurper Pepin as the lawful king of France, received form him the three territories of Rome, Ravenna and Lombardy, the beginning of the temporal power of the popes. Reckoning the 1,260 years from these dates, we should reach A.D. 1849, 1891, and 1997. If the latter date were correct, and there was then to be a persecution of God’s people, unprecedented in horror, and lasting a literal period of three years and a half, as many suppose, it would make the fall of Romish Babylon about A.D. 2000. (All future dates are, of course, except to God, uncertain.) As shown by Revelation 19:17-21, “the world, at its highest development of material and pseudo-spiritual power, is but a decorated carcass round which the eagles gather,” as literal Jerusalem was at its destruction by the Romans (Matthew 24:15-28). The one was a lively type of the other.

“The destruction of Satan’s representatives, the beast and the false-prophet, to whom he gave his power, throne and authority, is followed by the binding of Satan himself a thousand years (Rev. 20:1-7). The Jewish rabbis thought that, as the world was created in six days, and on the seventh God rested, so there would be six millenaries (or six thousand years), followed by a Sabbatical Millennium” (one thousand years). If there were exactly 4,000 years before the birth of Christ, this opinion, if true, would make the dawn of the Millennium about 2000 A.D.; but, as we have stated before, there are 200 different opinions of the exact interval between the creation of Adam and the birth of Christ, so that the matter is, as to its date, quite uncertain. Whether the thousand years of Satan’s confinement in the bottomless pit, mentioned six times in the twentieth chapter of Revelation, are to be before or after the second advent of Christ, does not very plainly appear from the Scriptures, and is still a warmly contested point with the ablest Bible scholars. As the Old Testament Scriptures predicted the first coming of Christ—not only spiritually, in mercy or judgment, but also literally, personally and visibly; so, in the most unmistakable language, do the New Testament Scriptures foretell His second coming—not only spiritually, in mercy or judgment, but also literally, personally and visibly (Acts 1:11; 3:20, 21; Matthew 16:27; 25:31; 26:64; Mark 7:38; 1 Cor. 4:5; 11:26; 15:23; Phil. 3:20; 1 Thess. 4:14-18; Heb. 9:28; Rev. 1:7). By many ancient Jewish Christians, and by the church generally from 150 to 250 A.D., during a period of great persecution, and by some learned individuals and some transient parties since, it was and has been believed that there would be two future personal advents of Christ, one before and another after the Millennium, or thousand years’ confinement of Satan. John Gill (A.D. 1697-1771), perhaps the most learned, able, sound, upright and humble Baptist minister since the days of Paul, was thoroughly persuaded that Christ would come personally upon the earth again just before the Millennium, and destroy His enemies, and reign personally with His saints on earth a thousand years; and, in the second volume of his Body of Divinity, he advances a large number of powerful Scripture arguments in support of this position. And, in the present age, such distinguished Bible scholars as Alford, Ebrard, Auberlen, Birks, Elliot, Fausset, Lange and others, advocate the same opinion. This belief is based chiefly on “these two classes of passages: 1st, Those which seem to connect the future advent with the restoration of Israel, the destruction of Antichrist, or the establishment of a universal kingdom of righteousness on earth, such as Isaiah 11, 12; 59 (compared with Rom. 11:25-27); Jeremiah 23:5-8; Ezekiel 43; Daniel 7:9-27; Joel 3:16-21; Zechariah 14; Romans 11:1-27; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-18; Acts 3:19-21. 2nd, Those passages which speak of the coming of the Lord as imminent (in connection with those which declare that there is to be a period of generally diffused peace and righteousness preceding the first consummation), such as Matthew 24:42-44; Mark 13:32-37; Luke 12:35-40; 1 Thessalonians 5:2, 3; Titus 2:11-13; James 5:7,8.” Mr. E. R. Craven, American Editor of Lange’s Commentary on the Book of Revelation, believes that, as in the earlier Old Testament prophecies, only one advent of Christ seems to have been contemplated, but in the later (compare Dan. 9:25, 26 with 7:13, 14) there was a prediction of two such advents, separated, as we now know, by millennia; so, while in the earlier portions of the New Testament, only one future advent of Christ seems predicted, in the later portions (compare Rev. 19:11-16 with 20:11-15) there are indications of two—one to establish a universal kingdom of righteousness on earth, and the other to terminate the present order of things in a general judgment.

But it is the opinion of the great majority of Bible scholars that there will be but one more personal advent of Christ, and that it will be after the Millennium. They maintain that the idea of a pre-millennial advent is Jewish in its origin, and Judaizing or materializing in its tendency; that it disparages the present, the dispensation of the Holy Ghost; that it is inconsistent with the Scriptures, which teach that Christ comes but twice, to atone and to judge (Heb. 9:28); that the Heavens must receive Christ until the times of the restitution of all things (Acts 3:21); that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, but spiritual (Matthew 13:11-44; John 17:36; Rom. 14:17); that it was not to be confined to the Jews (Matthew 8:11, 12); that regeneration is the essential antecedent of admission to it (John 3:3-5); that the blessings of the kingdom are purely spiritual, as repentance, pardon, faith, etc. (Matthew 3:2, 11; Acts 5:31; Gal. 5:22, 23, etc.); that the kingdom of Christ has already come, He having sat upon the throne of His Father David ever since His ascension (Acts 2:29-36; 3:13-15; 4:26-28; 5:29-31; Heb. 10:12, 13; Rev. 3:7-12), so that the Old Testament prophecies predicting this kingdom must refer to the present dispensation of grace, and not to a future reign of Christ on earth in person among men in the flesh; and that the church is to be complete at His next coming (1 Thess. 3:13; 2 Thess. 1:10). These scholars believe that the very difficult passage in Revelation 20:1-10 has the following meaning: That “Christ has in reserve for His church a period of universal expansion and of pre-eminent spiritual prosperity, when the spirit and character of the noble army of martyrs shall be reproduced again in the great body of God’s people in an unprecedented measure (as Elias is said to have lived again in John the Baptist), and when these martyrs shall, in the general triumph of their case, and in the overthrow of that of their enemies, receive judgment over their foes, and reign in the earth; while the party of Satan, called ‘the rest of the dead,’ shall not flourish again until the thousand years be ended, when it shall prevail again for a little season. Three considerations favor this interpretation: It occurs in one of the most highly figurative books of the Bible; this explanation is perfectly consistent with all the other more explicit teachings of the Scriptures on the several points involved; the same figure, that of life again from the dead, is frequently used in Scripture to express the idea of the spiritual revival of the church (Isa. 26:19; Ezek. 37:12-14; Hosea 6:1-3; Rom. 11:15; Rev. 11:11). And three considerations bear against the literal interpretation of Revelation 20:1-10: The doctrine of two literal resurrections, first of the righteous, and then, after an interval of a thousand years, of the wicked, is taught nowhere else in the Bible, and this passage is a very obscure one; it is inconsistent with what the Scriptures uniformly teach as to the nature of the resurrection—body, that it is to be spiritual, not natural, or ordinary flesh and blood (1 Cor. 15:44), whereas this interpretation represents the saints, or at least the martyrs, as rising and reigning a thousand years in the flesh, and in this world as at present constituted; and the literal interpretation of this passage contradicts the clear and uniform teaching of the Scriptures that all the dead are to rise and be judged together at the second coming of Christ (John 5:28, 29; Rev. 20:11-15; Matthew 25:31-46; Acts 17:31; 2 Cor. 5:10; 2 Thess. 1:6-10), which is to be immediately succeeded by the burning of the world, and the revelation of the new Heavens and earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness (Ps. 102:26, 27; Isa. 51:6; Rom. 8:19-23; Heb. 12:26, 27; 2 Peter 3:10-13; Rev. 20 and 21).”

“The Scriptures, both of the Old and New Testaments, clearly reveal that the gospel is to exercise an influence over all branches of the human family, immeasurably more extensive and more thoroughly transforming than any it has ever realized in time past, which end is to be gradually brought about by the Spirit of Christ in the present dispensation (Matthew 13:31, 32; 28:19, 20; Ps. 2:7, 8; 22:27, 29; 72:8-11; Isa. 2:2, 3; 11:6-9; 60:12; 66:23; Dan. 2:35, 44; Zech. 9:10; 14:9; Rev. 11:15). The period of this general prevalency of the gospel will continue a thousand years, and is hence designated the Millennium (Rev. 20:2-7). The Jews are to be converted to Christianity (but not probably restored to Palestine) either at the commencement or during the continuance of the Millennium (Zech. 12:10; 13:1; Rom. 11:26-29; 2 Cor. 3:15, 16). At the end of these thousand years, and before the coming of Christ, there will be a comparatively short season of apostasy and violent conflict between the kingdoms of light and darkness (Luke 17:30; 2 Peter 3:3, 4; Rev. 20:7-9). Christ’s advent and the general resurrection and judgment will be simultaneous, and then will follow the conflagration of the earth, and the introduction of a new and higher order of things, adapted to the resurrection-bodies of the saints (Dan. 12:1-3; John 5:28, 29; 1 Cor. 15:23; 1 Thess. 4:16; Rev. 20:11-15; Matthew 7:21-23; 13:30-43; 16:24-27; 25:31-46; Rom. 2:12-15; 2 Cor. 5:9-11; Acts 22:31; 2 Thess. 1:6-10; 2 Peter 3:7-13; Rev. 21:1).”—A. A. Hodge, in Outlines of Theology. Such has been the general belief of the Christian church from the close of the Scripture canon to the present time. Mr. Charles Hodge (in his Systematic Theology), however, makes the wise remark: “Experience teaches that the interpretation of unfulfilled prophecy is exceedingly precarious. There is every reason to believe that the predictions concerning the second advent of Christ, and the events which are to attend and follow it, will disappoint the expectations of commentators, as the expectations of the Jews were disappointed in the manner in which the prophecies concerning the first advent were accomplished.”

In reference to the highly important discourse of Christ in Matthew 24 And 25, it is to be observed that Christ is answering three distinct questions of His Apostles: 1st, When the temple and city of Jerusalem were to be destroyed; 2nd, What were to be the signs of His coming; and 3rd, What was to be the time or the sign of the end of the world (Matthew 24:3). The questions, perhaps, amounted to but one in the minds of the disciples at that time, because they probably supposed that these three events were to be simultaneous. It is in accordance with the entire analogy of Scripture prophecy to understand that these predictions had a primary and lower fulfillment in the destruction of Jerusalem, but will have a final and higher fulfillment in the destruction of this sin-polluted world. So the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah were intended to foretell, not only the deliverance of national Israel from Babylonian captivity, but also the far more important redemption of spiritual Israel from the bondage of sin and Satan.

For the declarative glory of God, the righteousness and mercy of His dealings are to be displayed before the assembled universe on the most solemn and final day of judgment (Matthew 11:22, 24; 25:31-46; Luke 10:14; Acts 17:31; Heb. 6:2; 2 Peter 2:9; 3:7-13; 1 John 4:17; Rev. 20:11-15). The time and place and duration of that momentous scene have not been revealed to mortals. Christ, the Mediator between God and man, the Savior of sinners, He who loved and gave Himself for His chosen people, embracing every truly humble soul, is to be the judge (Matthew 25:31, 32; 28:18; John 5:27; Acts 10:42; 17:31; Rom. 14:10; Phil. 2:10; 2 Tim. 4:1); otherwise His little ones “would sink in despair before the terrible bar.” The persons to be judged are men and angels (Eccl. 12:14; Ps. 1:4; 2 Cor. 5:10; Rom. 14:10; Matthew 12:36, 37; 25:12; 8:29; 1 Cor. 6:3; 2 Peter 2:4). “The saints will be present, not to have their portion assigned (for that was fixed long before, Matthew 25:34; Eph. 1:3, 4; 2 Thess. 2:13; 1 Peter 1:1-5; John 5:24), but to have it confirmed forever, and that God’s righteousness may be vindicated in both the saved and the lost (Rom. 14:10; 2 Cor. 5:10), before the universe.” The books that are to be opened are the book of the law (Gal. 3:10), the book of conscience (Rom. 2:15, 16), and the book of God’s omniscience (Heb. 4:13); and, besides these, another most precious book, the book of God’s fatherly remembrance, mentioned at the close of the Old Testament (Mal. 3:16-18; 4:1-3), which is the same as the Lamb’s book of life, mentioned at the close of the New Testament (Rev. 13:8; 20:12-15; 21:27)—a book containing the names of all those redeemed to God by the blood of the Lamb out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation (Rev. 5:9, 10; 1:5, 6; 17:14; Isa. 35:10; 53:5-11; Jer. 23:6; Matthew 1:21; John 10:15, 27-30; 17:2, 3, 9, 10, 20-24; Acts 13:48; Rom. 5:19-21; 8:28-39; 1 Cor. 1:26-31), their names being written therein, not for their works, but for Christ’s work for and in them—the Lamb’s book of life (Rom. 3:10-20; 6:23; 11:6). The saints are justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus (Rom. 3:24), or justified by faith, the gift of God (Rom. 5:1 ; 4:16 ; Gal. 5:22; Eph. 1:19; Phil. 1:29; Heb. 12:2). Faith being appreciable by God and the believer alone (Rev. 2:17), and works being appreciable by all, the saints’ “works of faith and labors of love” are published as the external and evidential test to indicate their preparedness for glory, and to vindicate the righteousness of God (1 Thess. 1:3, 4; Matthew 25:34-40; 7:16-20; Gal. 5:22, 23; Eph. 2:1-10). Acquitted by the free mercy of God, while humbly feeling their own utter unworthiness, the saints are shown to be the children of God by their divinely inspired deeds of mercy to His people (Matthew 25:34-40; James 2:13-26; Eph. 5:1, 2). True faith worketh by love, which is the fulfilling of the law, and the proof that we have passed from death unto life, and are the justified children of God (Gal. 5:6; 6:15; Rom. 13:10; 1 Cor. 13:13; 1 John 3:14-18; 4:7, 8, 11, 13, 20; 5:1; Rom. 3:24-26 ; 5:1-5). As for their sins, while they themselves can never forget them, and can never cease to be deeply grateful to Him who loved them and washed them from their sins in His own blood (Rev. 1:5), their covenant God has long since promised, not only to forgive, but to remember their sins no more (Jer. 31:31-37). Being thus accepted in the Beloved, and freely justified by His grace (Eph. 1:6, 7; Rom. 3:24), the saints will become assessors with the Judge, and heartily indorse His righteous judgments (Ps. 149:5-9; 1 Cor. 6:2, 3; Rev. 20:4; 19:1-5). In the light of the “Great White Throne” (Rev. 20:11) all deception will be banished, the secrets of all hearts will be revealed, every individual will appear in his true character (Eccl. 12:14; 1 Cor. 4:5 ; Mal. 3:18) ; the wicked, though seeking to justify themselves, will be justly condemned by the holy law of God and by their own consciences (Rom. 3:19; 2:12-16; Gal. 3:10), and will be sentenced to everlasting misery, while the righteous are welcomed to everlasting blessedness (Matthew 25:46).

“The chief objections to the doctrine of endless punishment,” says Prof. W. G. T. Shedd, “are not Biblical, but speculative. The great majority of students and exegetes find the tenet in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Sin is voluntary; and endless sin must receive endless punishment. The unsubmissive, rebellious spirits of the lost go, with like—minded companions, to ‘their own place,’ which they prefer to Heaven. History shows that the disbelief of the doctrine of the endless punishment of the wicked is most prevalent in the most corrupt times-itself being both a sign and a cause of the corruption.”

God said to our first parents in the garden of Eden that in the day they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they should surely die; but Satan afterwards came in the form of the serpent, and flatly contradicted God, telling them that they should not surely die. So, in the present age of widespread infidelity, Satan, in the hearts of both the professing and non-professing “Christian” world, assures men that, though they go on in sin and impenitence and unbelief till temporal death, they will not die everlastingly-thus meeting with point-blank contradiction the repeated, multiform, emphatic, indubitable assurances of God in the Scriptures. This soothing, infernal poison, a combination of Arminianism and Universalism, is pervading and leavening the great masses in the Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican communions. In the minds of multitudes, a terminable purgatory is taking the place, for all men, of an interminable hell-the idea being derived, not from the inspired Scriptures, but from the ancient Persian heathens, from whom the Jews obtained it and incorporated it in their Apocrypha and Talmud; the Catholics derived it from the Jews, and Protestants derived it from the Catholics. According to this insidious deception, men after death are to be sent into purifying fires, chastened for their sins, instructed in Divine truth, and given another chance to repent and save themselves, and go to Heaven. High ecclesiastical office, pretentious scholarship, splendid eloquence, soul-moving rhetoric, and encyclopedic erudition, followed by countless hosts of lesser lights, zealously array themselves against the plainest declarations of the written word of God and in defense of this Satanic delusion. They urge that the doctrine of eternal punishment is by far the most objectionable part of the Bible to skeptics; and, unless this harsh and cruel doctrine is toned down, the infidel world never will receive the Bible. But there are other teachings of the Scriptures that are intensely offensive to the carnal mind—such as the total depravity of man, salvation by grace alone, the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, the Divinity of Christ, the atonement, the resurrection, the holiness of God, etc. All these and all other peculiar features of Christianity must be removed from the Bible, or explained away, before the unregenerate world will be willing to receive it. It will, therefore, be much better for all who profess the name of Christ never to begin the work of toning down and explaining away the Scriptures.

The present writer has read, with deep attention, the most recent and elaborate arguments advanced against the Bible doctrine of the everlasting duration of future punishment; he has compared these reasonings with themselves, with the original Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, and with the latest and most authoritative lexicons, and he is constrained to declare his belief that, for the very perfection of sophistry, these infidel treatises have no equal in the entire range of human literature. The same methods of explanation would make anything mean nothing.

The terms almost invariably used in the Scriptures to denote everlasting duration are olam in the Old Testament and aion and aionios in the New Testament. While these terms, both in and out of the Bible, sometimes certainly signify indefinite duration, it is admitted by the best lexicographers that their common meaning is everlasting; they are the most frequent terms used in the Bible to denote the everlasting duration of God, and the everlasting duration of the happiness of saints in glory; it is therefore most scriptural to understand that, when they are applied to the duration of the punishment of the wicked, they also mean everlasting. The Scriptures, being addressed in the main to God’s people, dwell more upon the perfections of God and the future happiness of His saints than upon the future punishment of the wicked. In the Old Testament olam is used 40 times in reference to God, 94 times in reference to the future happiness of His people, and 11 times in reference to the punishment of the wicked. In the New Testament aion is used 14 times and aionios 3 times in reference to God; aion 9 times and aionios 51 times in reference to the happiness of the righteous beyond the grave; and aion 5 times and aionios 7 times in reference to the future punishment of the wicked. In all these cases the reference is to the future duration of God and of the human race; and the making of a radical distinction in the meanings of these same terms, so that they shall denote infinite duration in reference to the righteous, and finite duration in reference to the wicked, is, says Professor Moses Stuart, “without a parallel in the just principles of interpretation. The conclusion is plain, and philologically and exegetically certain. It is this: either the declarations of the Scriptures do not establish the facts that God and His glory and praise and happiness are endless, nor that the happiness of the righteous in the future world is endless, or else they establish the fact that the punishment of the wicked is endless.” In Matthew 25:46 the very same Greek: word, aionios, is used by Christ, in the same sentence, in reference both to the duration of the punishment of the wicked and the duration of the happiness of the righteous. The plurals and reduplications and supplementations of these three terms are used several times in the Scriptures to express the duration of the existence and glory of God, and of the future happiness of His people; so also are they sometimes used to express the duration of the future punishment of the wicked (Ps. 9:5; Rev. 14:11; 15:7; 19:3; 20:10). The extreme position has even been taken that aionios has no reference to duration whatever, but simply means spiritual, supra-sensuous, beyond and above time; and that aionian (or eternal) life may last but ten minutes, and aionian (or eternal) death may last but ten minutes. Now the Lord Jesus Christ is, on this and on every other subject, a higher authority than any creature; and in John 10:28 He defines aionian (or eternal) life to be imperishable or indestructible life; and in Matthew 25:41, 46, He defines aionian (or eternal) fire or punishment or death (Rev. 20:14, 15) to be the same as the punishment of the devil and his angels, which, in Jude 6, is declared to be aidios, a term never meaning anything but everlasting; and in Mark 9:43 Christ declares that this “fire” is asbestos, unquenchable, inextinguishable; and in Mark 9:44, 46, 48, the “worm” is described as ateleutetos, undying, endless. In Mark 9:43-48 “the fire” signifies the wrath of God, and “the worm” signifies remorse of conscience. The “great gulf fixed” between the righteous and the wicked after death is declared by Christ in Luke 16:26 to be impassable. Not a particle of all the quibbling about olam, aion and aionios will apply to such unmistakable passages as Mark 9:43-48, John 3:3, 36, Luke 16:26; Revelation 21:8 and 22:11.

The Scriptures everywhere represent the doomed state of the wicked after death as a finality; they contain not one syllable to justify the belief that there is any repentance, or forgiveness, or radical change of state in the world beyond the grave. Even the eye of the Apostle, of love, as he stands upon the last and loftiest heights of inspiration, sees only endless misery for the wicked. The filthy and unjust then will remain guilty rebels against God and wretched sufferers forever. The severe punishment inflicted by an avenging Judge, instead of softening and reconciling, will harden and exasperate the criminal. That a Most Holy God has an infinite hatred of sin is shown by the Noachian deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Pharaoh and his host, and of Jerusalem, by the numberless and indescribable miseries of men in all ages of the world, and by the awful summons that one soul every second receives to quit these mortal shores and appear in the presence of its God. And the infinite hatred of a Most Holy God against sin is shown infinitely more than it could have been shown by all the sufferings of all the human race forever, by the bleeding unutterable agonies of the meek and lowly and spotless Lamb of God in Gethsemane and on Calvary while He expiated the sins of His spiritual Israel. “It is far less possible that the bitter cup should pass from the lips of the finally impenitent than that it should have been taken from the trembling hand of the holy and harmless Son of God.”

The unanswerable refutation of the entire body of argument used by the infidel “restorationist” is that this feeble, carnal, heathen and ungodly system wholly does away with the atonement of Christ and the sanctification of the Spirit, the most fundamental truths of Holy Writ, and substitutes, in their stead, satisfaction rendered to Divine justice, and purification obtained by each human being, by the actual individual sufferings of each sinner in this and the future world. If this doctrine be true, there is no salvation, in the true sense of the term, for any member of the Adamic race.

The Scriptures and arguments already adduced thoroughly refute also the position of those who advocate the annihilation of the wicked at or after death, or what they call a conditional immortality.

More fully, clearly and emphatically than all the prophets and Apostles does the Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate God of eternity, the Savior of men, the last Supreme Judge of the human race, describe to us the awful state of the impenitent dead. May we have the wisdom, by Divine grace, as well upon this as upon every other subject, to turn from all other masters and to hear Him.

It seems, according to the Scriptures, that the sufferings of the lost will arise: “from the loss of all earthly good; from exclusion from the presence and favor of God; from the unrestrained dominion of sin; from the operations of conscience; from despair; from evil associates; from bodily tortures; and from the everlasting duration of their sufferings.”

“When Christ comes again it will be to be admired in all them that believe. Those who are then alive will be changed in the twinkling of an eye; their corruptible shall put on incorruption, and their mortal shall put on immortality. Those who are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of man and come forth to the resurrection of life, their bodies fashioned like unto the glorious body of the Son of God. Thus changed, both classes of believers shall be ever with the Lord. The place of the final abode of the righteous is sometimes called a house, as when the Savior said, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’ (John 14:2); sometimes ‘a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God’ (Heb. 11:10). Under this figure it is called the new or heavenly Jerusalem, so gorgeously described in the twenty-first chapter of the Apocalypse. Sometimes it is spoken of as ‘a better country, that is an heavenly’ (Heb. 11:16); a country through which flows the river of the water of life, and ‘on either side of the river was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every mouth; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse; but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and His servants shall serve Him: and they shall see His face; and His name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign forever and ever’ (Rev. 22:2-5). Sometimes the final abode of the redeemed is called a ‘new Heavens and a new earth’” (2 Peter 3:13).

“As to the blessedness of this heavenly state we know that it is inconceivable: ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him’ (1 Cor. 2:9).”

“‘We know not, O we know not
What joys await us there;
What radiancy of glory,
What bliss beyond compare.’”

“We know, however: (1.) That this incomprehensible blessedness of Heaven shall arise from the vision of God. This vision is beatific. It transforms the soul into the Divine image; transfusing into it the Divine life, so that it is filled with the fullness of God. This vision of God is in the face of Jesus Christ, in whom dwells the plenitude of the Divine glory bodily. God is seen in fashion as a man; and it is this manifestation of God in the person of Christ that is inconceivably and intolerably ravishing. Peter, James and John became as dead men when they saw His glory, for a moment, in the holy mount. (2.) The blessedness of the redeemed will flow not only from the manifestation of the glory, but also of the love of God; of that love, mysterious, unchangeable and infinite, of which the work of redemption is the fruit. (3.) Another element of the future happiness of the saints is the indefinite enlargement of all their faculties. (4.) Another is their entire exemption from all sin and sorrow. (5.) Another is their intercourse and fellowship with the high intelligences of Heaven; with patriarchs, prophets, Apostles, martyrs, and all the redeemed. (6.) Another is constant increase in knowledge and in the useful exercise of all their powers. (7.) Another is the secure and everlasting possession of all possible good.”—C. Hodge.

“The everlasting duration of the happiness of the righteous is shown by its being called eternal or everlasting life, eternal glory, a house eternal in the Heavens, an eternal inheritance, an everlasting kingdom, a continuing city, a better country, a being ever with the Lord, in accordance with the eternal purpose of God and the everlasting covenant of grace; were there any fears of its ever ending, it could not be perfect happiness.

“As to whether there will be any degrees in the final happiness of the saints, those passages of Scripture usually brought to support it usually belong to the militant, not to the triumphant, state of the church. The arguments against degrees in glory are: (1.) That all the people of God are loved by Him with the same everlasting love. (2.) They were all chosen together in Christ before the foundation of the world. (3.) They are all equally interested in the same everlasting covenant of grace. (4.) They are all equally redeemed with the same precious blood of Christ. (5.) They are all freely justified by the same righteousness of Christ. (6.) All are equally the predestinated and adopted children and heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ. (7.) They are all raised up from the same low and lost estate by Christ to be kings and priests unto God.”-John Gill

The church is a unit, and must ultimately triumph over all opposition.

The Apostle Paul represents the church as the body of Jesus Christ, as may be gathered by reference to the following Scriptures: Romans. 12:5; 1 Corinthians 6:15; 10:17; 12:27; Ephesians 1:23; 4:12; 5:23, 80; Colossians 1:18, 24; 2:17. “He thus represents it as an organic living system of various members, powers and functions, and at the same time as the abode of Christ and the object of His redeeming and sanctifying influence upon the world. Christ is, in one view, the ruling head; in another the invisible, all-pervading soul of this body. Christ without the church were a head without a body, a fountain without a stream, a king without subjects, a captain without soldiers, a bridegroom without a bride. The church without Christ were a body without soul or spirit, a lifeless corpse. The church lives only as Christ lives or works in her. At every moment of her existence is dependent on Him, as the body on the soul, or the branches on the vine. But on His part He perpetually bestows upon her If is heavenly gifts, and supernatural powers, continually reveals Him—self in her, and will dwell in her during her entire, militant state, when at last all the principalities and powers of earth will yield free obedience to Him, and adore Him as the eternal Prophet, Priest and King of the regenerate race”—Schaff.

Such is the character of that society, of that church, of that kingdom that was ushered into the world in the days of the Caesars, and which has never taken one step backwards, but amidst fires and faggots, prisons and deaths, has marched steadily onward, conquering and to conquer, through the great Captain of her salvation, and will eventually fill the world with the glory of God.

1. This was Herod Agrippa I., the grandson of Herod the Great, who sought the life of the infant Savior, and the nephew of Herod Antipas, who beheaded John the Baptist, and the father of Herod Agrippa II., before whom Paul made his defense recorded in Acts 26 Josephus says that the characteristics of Herod Agrippa I. were devotion to Judaism, gentleness, beneficence, and love of popularity. The twelfth chapter of Acts illustrates his Judaism and love of popularity.

2. By this occupation Paul supported himself during his Apostleship. His churches, like the Christians in general of the first and succeeding centuries, were of the lower and poorer classes in society; and he chose not to burden them, but to labor for his own necessities, as well as for those with him. He collected money for the poor Jewish Christians in Palestine, but not for himself. “Only as an exception did he receive gifts from the Philippian brethren, who were peculiarly dear to him.” Yet he enjoins upon the churches to care for the temporal needs of their spiritual teachers.

3. It is, however, thought by many that Paul was specially chosen of God to fill the place vacated by the treason of Judas; the selection of Matthias by the eleven (Acts 1:26) being regarded as of no Divine sanction or validity.

4. The James mentioned in Acts 12:17, 15:13 and 21:18 was undoubtedly the same person; and it is evident that he was the same with him whom Paul calls “James the Lord’s brother” (Gal. 1:19), and whom Mark (6:3) mentions as being, together with Joses, Jude and Simon, a brother of Jesus. But it is the most difficult question in church history to decide whether he was the same with the Apostle James, the son of Alpheus (commonly called James the Less, to distinguish him from James the son of Zebedee and brother of John). From the latest and most thorough investigations it is most probable that James the Lord’s brother was a different person from James the Apostle, the son of Alpheus. The former was also called James the Just, and was the first pastor of the church of Jerusalem, and wrote the epistle of James, and suffered martyrdom just before the destruction of Jerusalem. He was noted for his morality and wisdom.

5. This was an aggregation of corruptions from all the countries where Christianity was disseminated—a combination of Platonic philosophy, Alexandrian Judaism, dualistic Parsism, pantheistic Buddhism, and phantasmal Christianity. A false Gnosticism exalted knowledge above faith, hope, love, humility, and every other Christian virtue. It represented God as an infinite, unfathomable, unnamable abyss, eternally and unconsciously evolving attributes or eons, the lowest of which, falling combined with dead, empty, eternal matter, and produced a weak or evil Demiurgus or Artificer who made this world; it represented Christ as the most perfect of the eons, but declared his human life an illusion; and it represented the Holy Spirit as a subordinate eon. The system degenerated into utter infidelity and sensuality, especially with the Ophite Gnostics. It originated in the first century, flourished in the second, and gradually lost importance after the middle of the third, but was to a great degree revived in the Manichaeism of the fourth and fifth centuries.

6. While the Judaizing Ebionites of the first century, like the modern Socinians and Unitarians, denied the Divinity of Christ, the pseudo-spiritualistic Docetae, a branch of the Gnostics, considering matter essentially evil, denied His real humanity, regarding His entire earthly life and death as a deceptive show or a mere vision.

7. Instead of the term Gnosticism Mr. Pressense should here have written knowledge. The term Gnosticism (now properly restricted to what Mr. P. calls false gnosticism) is derived from the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge. A true Scriptural knowledge of Divine things is highly false gnosis, opposing inspiration, is denounced (1 Tim. 6:20, 21).

Chapter IX. Characteristics of the Apostolic Church.

The church of the first century was a spiritual kingdom set up in the world by The Son of God in fulfillment of the Jewish economy and in opposition to all other religions of the earth; and this militant kingdom of Emanuel, notwithstanding the combined secular powers of the world, progressed to such an extent that, in about seventy years after the crucifixion of Christ, it pervaded portions of every province of the Roman Empire. In it is an aggressive principle against sin, though purely of love to mankind, that will never cease its action until time shall be no more.

Many errors had crept into the church from time to time in different parts of the world; but that system of discipline which had been established by Christ and his Apostles had proved effectual in removing these errors in faith and practice. “The Apostolic age is the fountain head of the Christian church, as an organized society separate and distinct from the Jewish synagogue. It is preeminently the age of The Holy Spirit—the age of inspiration and of legislation for all subsequent ages. Here springs, in its original freshness and purity, the living water of the new creation. Christianity comes down from heaven as a supernatural fact, yet long predicted and prepared for, and adapted to the deepest wants of human nature. Signs and wonders are extraordinary demonstrations of The Spirit, for the conversion of the unbelieving Jews and heathens, attend its entrance into this world of sin. It takes up its permanent abode with our fallen race, to transform it gradually, without war and bloodshed, by a quiet leaven-like process, into a kingdom of truth and righteousness. In virtue of this original purity, vigor and beauty, and the permanent success of primitive Christianity, the canonical authority of the new testament, the single but inexhaustible volume of its literature, and the character of the Apostles, those inspired organs of The Holy Spirit, those humanly-untaught teachers of mankind, the Apostolic Age has an incomparable interest and importance in the history of the church. It is the immovable ground-work of the whole. It holds up the highest standard of doctrine and discipline.”—P. Schaff.

The church of the first century forms the standard and example for the church of all future ages. Should there now exist on earth a body of professed Christians who occupy the same ground in faith and practice as that of the church of the first century, they are right; and if any should be found occupying a different position then they are wrong. The true church of Christ and false or merely nominal churches are to be distinguished by a comparison with apostolic standard.

Twelve Marks of the Apostolic Church.

1. The apostolic church consisted only of those persons who had been convicted of sin by The Holy Spirit, and who had given signs of repentance towards God, and faith in The Lord Jesus Christ as The Son of God. Their faith was the faith of God’s elect (Titus 1:1), a steadfast and earnest adherence to the doctrine of the Apostles and prophets (Acts 2:42; Eph. 2:20; Jude 3), including the total depravity of the human race in consequence of the fall of our first parents, the special eternal election of God’s people to everlasting life, the particular redemption purchased by the blood of Christ for all of his people, the effectual calling and the final perseverance of the saints to glory. In all spiritual matters Christ was their Head, King and Lawgiver, as He spoke either personally or by His Spirit in the writers of the old and new testaments scriptures. One word of their Lord and Master was worth more than all the words of uninspired men. They chose to obey God rather than man. The Jewish and heathen doctrine of salvation by human works they utterly refused, while they heartily embraced as their hope the Christian and Bible doctrine of a free and full salvation by the sovereign grace of God. In other words, this first and chief mark of the apostolic church was a regenerated or converted membership, who had been born of The Spirit of God, who had a vital, revealed, experimental religion, who were quickened, the circumcised in heart, the new creation, saints, beloved of The Lord, children of God, the saved, added to the church by The Lord, the elect vessels of mercy, who worshipped God in The Spirit, living stones built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, that they should show forth the praises of Him who had called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.

This mark utterly excludes the unregenerate world and unconscious infants from membership in the apostolic church. As Noah was a spiritual child of God, and all the human race since the flood are his descendants, infant membership, if fully carried out, would sweep the whole world into the church. Three of the evangelists inform us that some little children were brought to Jesus, who blessed them, though they were unbaptized; and who, though this was the occasion above all others for it, said not one word about their baptism or their admittance into His visible church. He uttered those forever precious and memorable words, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.” Mark says that He was “much displeased” when his disciples rebuked those who brought the children to Him. Bible Baptist have always believed that all children who die in infancy are regenerated by the almighty grace of God and go directly home to the loving arms of Jesus; and these with the adult believers compose more than one-half of the human race. As “Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8), it must still be “much displeasing” to Him that little children should not be suffered, but forbidden, to come to Him for any reason whatsoever, whether the lack of water-baptism or anything else. The language of Christ in Mark 16:16, “He that believeth not shall be damned,” shows with perfect clearness that not want of water baptism, but want of faith, is the cause of damnation; and the grace of faith is “the gift of God” (Eph. 1:19; 2:8; Gal. 5:22; Phil. 1:29; Heb. 12:2), it is as easy for Omnipotence to bestow it upon a dying infant as it is upon a living adult. The practice of infant baptism (or infant church membership) is a weak, thoroughly antiscriptural, idolatrous superstition, which most probably arose in North Africa in the third century[1] from the false idea of the magical, regenerating, saving power of water, and which did not become general until the fifth century, thus securing its triumph in the Dark Ages about the same time with the establishment of the papacy; and it is worthy of the Dark Continent and the Dark Ages. “It originated from that inborn human principle of self-righteousness which supposes it so necessary for man to do something to secure his acceptance with God that even the infant, who can not comply with the condition itself, must do it by substitute.” It is a vain human tradition which makes utterly void the commandments of God—those commandments requiring baptism after repentance and faith, as fitly symbolical of those internal graces; while the human tradition requires the baptism of unconscious, impenitent, and unbelieving infancy. It is solemn mockery, substituting for the indispensable faith of the recipient the utterly unscriptural proxy-faith of humanly invented sponsors, god-parents and sureties. It is a cruel falsehood and deception, pretending that the unconscious infant is regenerated and grafted into the body of Christ church, and depriving him of the comforts of believers baptism should he ever believe. It is the quintessence of ecclesiastical corruption that would break down all distinction between the church and the world. It is the chief prop and pillar of Catholicism, sacerdotalism, and sacramentalism, totally subversive of the fundamental principle of Protestantism and the spiritual religion of the New Testament. “Romanist deny its biblical authority, and rest its validity upon the authority of the church; and they justly insist, therefore, that Protestants, in practicing the rite, abandon the great principle that the bible is the only and sufficient rule of faith and practice, and revert to the authority of tradition. The German reformers conceded its lack of New Testament authority. The profound and scholarly and impartial German theologians are emphatic in denying that it has either precept or example in scripture.” It is absolutely certain that there is no command and no plain case of infant baptism in the bible. This is almost universally conceded. Hundreds of the most learned Pedobaptist scholars frankly admit the fact. Nearly all the standard Pedobaptist historians admit that infant baptism was unknown in the first two centuries after Christ. The last commission which Christ gave to his apostles (Matthew 28:19 & Mark 16:16) authorized them to baptize only disciples or believers. The term “infants” does not occur in the commission. Christ, and not water baptism, is the only God and Savior, both of infants and adults. He calls children, not to baptismal waters at all, but to Himself. In case of the baptism of families, there is never any mention of infants, and the context or some other scripture nearly always shows that all those who were baptized, believed, or rejoiced, or devoted themselves to the ministry of the saints, and therefore could not have been infants; there is no proof that there were any infants in any of those families; and if there had been infants in them, we know that the apostolic commission did not authorize their baptism, so that, as the ablest scholars admit, we know, without any special statement, that infants were excluded from such baptisms. The word rendered “holy” in 1 Corinthians 7:14 plainly means legitimate. As for baptism being a substitute for circumcision, there is no such statement in the bible, but a powerful array of arguments against it. The old covenant was national and temporal; the new covenant is personal and spiritual. “None were circumcised until they were born; so none should be baptized until after they are spiritually born. The natural seed of Abraham were entitled to circumcision; only his spiritual seed, or believers are entitled to baptism. Abraham’s servants were circumcised; it has never been pretended that servants of believers are entitled to baptism, unless such servants themselves believe. Only males were circumcised; both male and female are baptized. Ishmael, though circumcised, was excluded from Canaan; all baptized believers will enter the heavenly Canaan. The right of a child to circumcision did not depend upon the faith of the parents. It was not preformed in the name of God or any other being. The subject of circumcision was debtor to do the whole law. No sponsors were required in circumcision. The apostles baptized Jewish converts who had been circumcised. Jewish Christians continued for many years to circumcise their children. Paul, to satisfy the Jews, even circumcised Timothy who had already been baptized. A dispute arose about circumcising Gentile converts (Acts 15), which could not have taken place if it had been understood that baptism came in the room of circumcision.”

The Apostles neither at this council at Jerusalem, nor on any other occasion, manifest any knowledge of the substitution of baptism for circumcision. The basing of infant baptism upon circumcision has been abandoned by many of the ablest Pedobaptist scholars of Europe and America. And infant baptism itself is, in all Protestant countries, falling rapidly into disuse as an unscriptural and senseless formality. It is estimated that one twelfth of the infants born in the United States are baptized (or, rather, rhantized). A most terrible and all sufficient argument against infant baptism (and its historical and logical equivalent, baptismal regeneration) is its inconceivably horrible implication that all infants who die unbaptized, even though they die unborn, even though they be elected by God The Father, redeemed by God The Son, and regenerated by God The Holy Spirit, are, for want of a drop or two of natural water applied to them, consigned to everlasting torment or privation of happiness. No man who believes the bible can believe this diabolical doctrine. This horrid Catholic dogma, surpassing in monstrosity nearly all the errors of “heretical sects,” has been well denominated “the entering wedge of tradition which, if driven home, will split Protestantism into fragments.”

In the words of the two Languages of Germany, distinguished Pedobaptist scholars: “All attempts to make out infant baptism from the New Testament fail. It is utterly opposed to the spirit of the apostolic age and to fundamental principles of the New Testament. Would the Protestant church fulfil and attain to its final destiny, the baptism of newborn children must be abolished. It can not, on any point of view, be justified by the holy scriptures.” Mr. Alexander Carson, a most scholarly, profound, and conscientious Presbyterian minister of Ireland (1776-1844), declared after long and earnest investigation: “I found I must either give up the Bible or give up infant baptism.” He preferred to give up infant baptism, though with it he had to give up honors, riches, and friends; and he became a Baptist, and wrote one of the fullest and ablest works extant on “Mode and Subjects of Baptism.” Out of about 400 millions of so-called Christians in the world, less than 4 millions—less than one in a hundred—insist upon the First and Most important mark of the Apostolic church—a spiritual and regenerated church membership. What a lamentable falling away from the truth is this.

2. The second mark of the apostolic church was the baptism, the immersion of believers in water, in the name of The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost. Those giving credible evidence of a living personal faith in the Triune Jehovah were taken by the ministry, or by persons authorized by the church, and dipped, plunged, overwhelmed, or inundated in water, in the name of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. Thus were those already born of The Spirit born symbolically of the water and initiated into the membership of the visible church, entitled to all her privileges and exposed to all her persecutions. Thus was it clearly and beautifully and divinely indicated that they were thoroughly identified with Christ, made a part of His mystical body, “buried with Him in baptism, and risen with Him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised Him from the dead,” “quickened together with Christ from the death of trespasses and sins, fully and freely forgiven and washed from their sins by the blood of The lamb” (Col. 2:12-14; Rom. 6:4-5; Titus 3:5-7; Eph. 5:25-27). Thus were powerfully and comprehensively symbolized the central, vital truths of the gospel—regeneration by the purifying power of The Spirit of God and redemption by the atoning blood of The Son of God, and the identity, as shown by the words of the administrator, of The Father with The Spirit and Son—and the personal faith of the baptized in those truths. Thus does this one divine ordinance impressively preach the entire substance of the gospel of Christ. It was instituted and commanded by Christ, and practiced by the Apostles, and is to be observed by the church in all its primitive fullness and beauty down to the end of time.

The highly important apostolically established connection between the believer and the sufferings and triumph of Christ symbolized in the ordinance of baptism—infinitely more important than the temporal union of husband and wife—has been rationalistically and audaciously dissolved by the substitution of sprinkling, or pouring for baptism by the Roman Catholic society and her Protestant daughters. In all human literature there is not another word whose meaning is more certain, and yet more disputed, than the Greek word baptizo. The history of this word presents the strongest demonstration of the willful and obstinate blindness and perversity of the carnal mind. Just as mankind had at first from Adam a natural knowledge of the true God, but soon willfully departed from that knowledge, as shown by Paul in the first chapter of Romans, and greedily plunged into idolatry and vileness, and were given over by God to a reprobate mind; so the true meaning of baptizo, as all lexicography and church history prove, was perfectly well known to the world for more than thirteen centuries after Christ, but, for the last few hundred years, the meaning of this word has been most unblushingly and industriously perverted, not so much by Romanist, as by Protestant theologians, for the purpose of suiting carnal ideas of human expediency, convenience and decency. “The Romanist (as also the Romanizing Protestant) bases the change from baptism to sprinkling, not on an altered view of the original form of the rite, but on the authority of his ‘church’ to alter rites and ceremonies;”but, as Protestants generally claim to adhere strictly to the Bible, they seek, in order to justify their change of the ordinance of baptism, to explain away the ineradicable ground-idea of the word baptizo, and make it the most general term imaginable for the application of water in any form. This religious error, because of the headway which it has made in English-speaking countries, is embodied in the latest Unabridged Dictionaries of Webster and Worcester. A later and higher authority on etymology than either of these works is Walter W. Skeat’s “Etymological Dictionary of the English Language,” in which the only meaning of baptism is “a dipping;” baptist, “a dipper;” baptize, “to dip.” The derivation of all these English words is from the Greek word baptizo, for the meaning of which word we must of course consult the Greek Lexicon. Now every respectable Greek scholar in England and America will admit that there is only one standard Greek English Lexicon published in Europe or America, and that is the seventh edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, published in 1883. It unquestionably represents the latest and highest combined scholarship of Europe and America. This Lexicon is now before the present writer, and gives absolutely but one meaning of baptizo, “to dip in or under water.” with several subordinate but like meaning applications, as follows: “of ships, to ship or disable them; (metaphorically) of the crowds who flocked into Jerusalem at the time of the siege; to be drenched (metaphorically), soaked in wine, over head and ears in debt, drowned with questions or getting into deep water; to draw wine by dipping the cup in the bowl; to baptize; (in the middle-voice) to dip one’s self, to get one’s self baptized.” Here it is seen that dipping or immersion is the essential meaning of the word, The meaning “bathe” given in the sixth edition, is omitted, because found to be erroneous. The meaning “repeatedly” (“to dip repeatedly”), given in the second edition, is omitted because erroneous—the word baptizo, from bapto, to dip, being frequentative in form, but not in meaning, having an active or causative meaning, to make or cause another to dip; by a common tendency in language the strong form of a word gradually takes the place of a weak form, with no essential difference in meaning. The meanings “pour, steep, wet,” given in the first edition, published in 1843, were abandoned and expunged as untenable within a year and a half after their publication. The compilers of this standard Greek-English Lexicon are Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, both of them being deans, clergymen and “Doctors of Divinity” in the Established (or Episcopal) “Church of England;” not their sympathy for the Baptists, but their knowledge and reputation as scholars, have compelled them to give baptizo its only proper meaning of dipping or immersion. “Immersion, as the proper significance of baptizo and the original form of the rite, has been affirmed through all the Christian ages, and is still affirmed by the highest scholarship of Christendom, Oriental, Roman Catholic and Protestant.” The Greek Catholic “Church,” which certainly ought to understand the meaning of the Greek word baptizo, has always immersed and still immerses, even in the severe climates of Russia and Siberia, all its members, both infants and adults, and uncompromisingly declares that every other form of the rite is essentially invalid. Contrary to Ephesians 4:5, triple or trine immersion is practiced by the Greek “Church,” and was the usage of the most Christendom from the end of the second to the end of the twelfth century. The Roman Catholic “Church” at first allowed sprinkling or pouring only in the case of sick persons (clinici)—the first recorded instance being the case of Novatian, of Rome, about A.D. 250; but the sprinkling of well persons “gradually came in,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition), “in spite of the opposition of councils and hostile decrees. The Roman Catholic Council of Ravenna, in A.D. 1311, was the first council of the ‘Church’ which legalized baptism by sprinkling, by leaving it to the choice of the officiating minister.” The first pope that sanctioned sprinkling for baptism was Stephen II., A.D. 753. In England and Scotland immersion was the ordinary practice till after the “Reformation.” “What principality tended to confirm the practice of affusion or sprinkling,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica, “was that several of our Protestant divines, flying into Germany and Switzerland during the bloody reign of Queen Mary, and coming home when Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, brought back with them a great zeal for the Protestant churches beyond the sea, where they had been received and sheltered. And having observed that at Geneva, and some other places, baptism was administered by sprinkling, they thought that they could not do the Church of England a greater service than by introducing a practice dictated by so great an oracle as Calvin.” It is proper here to state that Calvin, in his Institutes, says: “The word baptize signifies to immerse; and it is certain that immersion was the practice of the ancient church.” In his commentary on Acts 8:38, Calvin says that “the church granted liberty to herself to change the rites somewhat.” In 1643 the Westminster (Presbyterian) “Assembly of Divines,” through the influence of John Lightfoot, voted for sprinkling instead of immersion by a majority of one—24 voting for immersion and 25 for sprinkling. In 1644 the English Parliament sanctioned their decision, and decreed that sprinkling should be the legal mode of administering the ordinance. The independents, or Congregationalists, adopted sprinkling from the Presbyterians; and the Methodists, in the eighteenth century, from the Episcopalians. John Wesley says: “The ancient manner of baptizing was by immersion.” The “form” of baptism was regarded by all these Protestants bodies as non-essential, as though the term “baptizm” was an indefinite one for the application of water in general, which it is perfectly certain that it is not; or as though man has the right or power to change an ordinance of Christ, which he has no more right or power to do than he has to change the course of nature. As God is unchangeable, so is “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever,” and his ordinances, like those of God in nature, are unchangeable. It was a terrible sin visited by a terrible punishment, for a man to presume to alter an ordinance of God under the old dispensation (Lev 10; Num 16; 1 Sam 13; 2 Sam 6);” the ordinances of the new testament, though fewer in number, are not of less solemnity and authority, nor is there any scriptural evidence that they may be altered by man.” He who instituted these ordinances can alone change or abrogate them. No theories or traditions or precepts of men are to allowed to make void or modify the commandments of God. By an examination of the ancient and modern versions of the new testament, we find that when the word baptizo is not simply transferred, but translated, the translators employ a word which signifies to immerse, except in a few modern versions. They never translate baptizo by “sprinkle” or “pour.” AS Mr. T.J. Conant says: “Translation decides the controversy, and ends it; for only one translation can be given the word baptizo.” In his exhaustive work entitled ”Baptizein,” this able New York scholar examines 175 instances of the use of baptizo through the entire period of the existence of Greek literature, and finds that”the ground-idea expressed by this word is to put into or under water or other penetrable substance, so as to entirely immerse or submerge; that this act is always expressed in the literal application of the word, and is the basis of its metaphorical uses; that from the earliest age of Greek literature down to its close, not an example has been found in which the word has any other meaning.” Now, as the word baptizo invariably involves the idea of immersion, and never means pouring or sprinkling, it is as obvious as the noon-day sun in a cloudless sky that every objection to immersion, and every argument for pouring or sprinkling, as scriptural or apostolic baptism, sink into total insignificance—are indeed, annihilated; and so in every case has the most recent and accurate scholarship found every such objection and every such argument to disappear.

Before proceeding to examine these objections and arguments, let us briefly inquire why Christ and his apostles did not use some other word from the copious Greek vocabulary to designate the ordinance of initiation into His church. “Bapto is found three times in the New Testament, and this also means to dip, but is never applied to baptism. Why not? Because, besides being sometimes intransitive, it also means to dye, and therefore with this word the ordinance might have been misunderstood. Louo is found six times in the New Testament, and means to wash, to wash the whole body, to bathe. If as some say, baptism means to wash, here was just the word to express it. But this word is never applied to the ordinance. Nipto is found seventeen times, and means to wash the extremities, but is never applied to baptism. Why not, if a little water applied to the head may be baptism? Rantizo means to sprinkle, and is found in the New Testament four times. This would have been the very word used to designate baptism if, as some say, that ordinance is properly performed by sprinkling. But this word is in no instance so used. Why not? Because sprinkling is not baptism. Cheo means to pour, and is found eighteen times in various combinations, but is never applied to baptism. If baptism is pouring water on the candidate, why was not this word used some times to express it? Katharizo means to purify, to cleanse, and is found thirty times, but never applied to the ordinance of baptism. If, as some say, the ordinance signifies nothing but purification, this word would have expressed it. Christ and his Apostles baptizo to designate the ordinance of baptism, because baptism is essentially a dipping or immersion.”—E. T. Hiscox. A dipping in water is both a washing or cleansing and a temporary burying. The immediate immersion or uplifting of the body out of the water, which was always done by John and the Apostles, fitly symbolized both the birth of the Spirit and the resurrection with Christ to newness of life. Mr. E.D. Barclay, in his full, clear and interesting work entitled”A Comparative View of the Words Bathe, Wash, Dip, Sprinkle and Pour, of the English Bible, and of their Originals in the Hebrew Septuagint (or Greek) Copies,” shows that while in the old testament the Hebrew has fifteen words, and the Greek thirty-one words, translated in the English “pour;” and the Hebrew two words, and the Greek sixteen words, translated in the English “sprinkle;” and the Hebrew four words, and the Greek eleven words, translated in English “wash;” and the Hebrew two words and the Greek two words, translated in the English “bathe;” no one of these twenty three Hebrew words and sixty Greek words is ever translated in the English Bible dip, or immerse, or plunge. In the Hebrew old testament two words, tabal and machats, and in the Greek old testament three words, bapto, baptizo, and moluno, are translated in the English old testament “dip” or “plunge;” tabal occurs sixteen times, and is translated fourteen times by bapto, once by baptizo (2 Kings 5:14), and once by moluno (Gen 37:31); machats occurs one time (Ps. 68:23), and is translated bapto; tabal is translated “dip” fifteen times and “plunge” one time (Job 9:31); machats in its one occurrence is translated “dip,” but is rendered by Gesenius, the ablest Hebrew lexicographer, “to shake, to move to and fro, to stir;” moluno is not defined by Liddell and Scott to dip, but, ”to stain, sully, defile.” The passage in which tabal is translated by the Septuagint baptizo is in regard to Naaman, who”went down and dipped himself seven times in Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God.” Mr. Barclays conclusion is that “the Hebrew Septuagint and English copies of the old testament, taken together, do not furnish the slightest authority for translating baptizo by either ‘sprinkle’ or ‘pour;’ but all three copies authorize ‘dip’ as the translation of this Greek verb.” He also shows that the closest and most searching examination of the old and new testaments, in the Hebrew, Greek and English, does not find a single instance of the sprinkling or pouring of unmixed water on any person or thing for any religious purpose whatever, and therefore such sprinkling or pouring is not by Divine but by purely human authority.” Jesus says of the unbelieving, tradition observing Jews: “In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrine the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9). Jesus himself was, says Mark (1:10), “baptized (eis) into the Jordan.” John baptized in the Jordan and in other places where there was “much water.” “In the vast crowds attending Christ’s preaching, no allusion is made to the need of water; it is mentioned only where baptizing is referred to. ‘Much water’ certainly could not have been necessary for sprinkling or pouring, as it is not necessary for such a purpose now;”nor do men now go to rivers for sprinkling or pouring. Paul twice alludes to baptism as a burial (Rom. 6:4 Col.2:12). Where our English version has the words “baptize with water,” the Greek has “baptize (en) in water.” The Greek preposition en occurs, it is said 2,720 times; in about 2,500 places it is correctly rendered in; in over 20 other places, out of 2,720 does it necessarily mean with. “How clear and edifying is the testimony of The Holy Spirit to the method of our salvation in the Divine ordinance of baptism, properly performed! How is it that a vile sinner can escape the wrath of God, and obtain eternal life? How is it that Christ’s work is available for him? Why, when even Christ paid our debt, we ourselves have paid our debt, for we are one with Christ. We have died with Christ, and have risen with Christ; Christ’s death is our death; Christ burial is our burial; Christ’s resurrection is our resurrection; Christ’s sitting in heavenly places is our sitting in heavenly places.”—Alex Carson. Baptism is not, as virtually represented by the prevailing Catholic and Protestant theories, a magical, material, mechanical, chemical or electrical means and instrument of grace and salvation; but it is simply and beautifully the divinely-ordained outward symbol or emblem of the inward spiritual cleansing of our guilty souls by the saving application which The Holy Spirit makes to us of the atoning blood of The Lord Jesus Christ. No ordinance of Christ must be put idolatrously in the place of Christ. The statements in the new testament about our being “sprinkled” and “washed with the blood of Christ” are allusions to the sprinklings and washings under the law; they are no where called baptisms. In the phrase “born of water,” water is figuratively represented as the womb from which we come. Christ, after having been baptized “came up straightway out of the water” (Matthew 3:16; Mark 1:10). So the eunuch, who had “gone down into the water, came up out of the water” (Acts 8:38-39). Along each one of the three roads from Jerusalem to Gaza, modern travelers tell us that there are occasionally streams, or pools, or fountains, or wadies, containing amply enough water for immersion. As for a sufficiency of water in Jerusalem to immerse the 3,000 on the day of Pentecost, the city contained, besides a countless number of large and deep and private cisterns, six immense public pools, with shelving, descending sides, affording the most extensive bathing or swimming accommodations—the Mosaic law and the traditions of the Elders requiring a vast quantity of water for ceremonial ablutions. During none of its numerous sieges did the city suffer from the lack of water. It is not stated that the 3,000 were all actually baptized on the same day; but it could have been easily in a few hours by either the twelve Apostles or by the seventy disciples helping them. Immersion takes very little longer than sprinkling or pouring if the baptismal formula is repeated with each, as is always done. Allowing one minute for each immersion, which is sufficient, twelve could have immersed 3,000 in two hundred and fifty minutes, or four hours and ten minutes; Eighty-two persons could have immersed 3,000 in thirty seven minutes. As Peter began preaching about the third hour of the day (Acts 2:15) or nine o’clock in the forenoon, and it is not probable that he spoke more than two or three hours, but apparently much less time than this, there was abundance of time left for the baptism of 3,000 persons by twelve or eighty two administrators on the same day. The Philippian jailer (Acts 21:33) was immersed as the ablest commentators think, in a tank or pool or cistern in the court of the prison—such a reservoir as ancient houses usually had for the receiving the rain from the slightly inclined roof; or the immersion may have taken place in the neighboring river, Gangas, beside which, “prayer was wont to be made” (Acts 16:13) In Acts 9:18 it is not said that Paul was baptized in the house of Judas, but he may have been, as “Damascus now abounds in water, and all the better houses either have a reservoir in their court, or stand beside a natural or artificial stream.” Paul’s remark in 1 Corinthians 10:1-2 “that our fathers were under the cloud, and passed through the sea, and were baptized unto Moses in the cloud, and in the sea,” shows that the Apostle Paul had in view, as an image of baptism, not a mere sprinkling or pouring, but a complete immersion or investment.

Peter’s comparison of baptism to the flood (1 Peter 3:20-22) is highly significant. “The ark in which Noah and his family were saved by water was God’s ordinance; it was made according to the pattern He gave to Noah, as baptism is His ordinance; and as the ark was the object of the scorn of men, so is the ordinance of baptism, rightly administered; and as the ark represented a burial when Noah and his family were shut up in it, so baptism; and when the fountains of the great deep were broken up below, and the windows of heaven were opened above, the ark, with those in it, were as it were covered with and immersed in water, and so was a figure of baptism by immersion; and as there were none but adult persons in the ark, who were saved by water in it, so none but adult persons are the proper subjects for water baptism; and though there were few who were in the ark, it was attended with a salutary effect to them—they were saved by water; so such as truly believe in Christ and are baptized shall be saved, and that by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which was typified by the coming of Noah and his family out of the ark, to which baptism, as the antitype, corresponds, being an emblem of the same.”—John Gill. In Mark 7:4 and Luke 11:38 the Greek verb rendered “wash” is baptizo (immerse); and this meaning of immersion exactly agrees with superstitious traditions of the Jewish Rabbis, as shown by Mr. Gill from the Talmud and the writings of Maimonides. “The Pharisees, upon touching the common people or their clothes, as they returned from market, or from any judicature, were obliged to immerse themselves in water before they ate; and Scaliger observes that the more superstitious of them, everyday before they sat down to meat, dipped the whole body. And not only cups, pots and brazen vessels were washed by dipping, but even beds, pillows and bolsters, unclean in a ceremonial sense, were washed in this way, according to the traditions of the Elders.” In regard to the doubtful statement in the Apocryphal book of Judith (12:7), the writer says that is was night when Judith “dipped” herself in the fountain of water. —An object that has only a few drops of water sprinkled or poured cannot be said to be washed. It was a rule with the Jews that where the law required the washing of the flesh or the clothes, the whole body must be dipped; for said they, “If any man dips himself all over except the tip of the little finger, he is still in his uncleanness” (Maimonides). —In Luke 12:50 Christ calls his own approaching sufferings “a baptism,” thus expressing their abundance, like deep waters and floods, into which he was to be plunged, covered and overwhelmed (see Ps. 69:1-2; Isa. 43:2). —“The baptism in the Holy Ghost (Acts 1:5-Greek), which Jesus promised his disciples, was fitly represented on the day of Pentecost by a complete immersion in the wind and fire, the emblem of The Spirit (Acts 2:2-4); the sound as of a rushing mighty wind filled all the house where they were sitting, and tongues as of fire sat upon each of them. They were thus surrounded by the wind and covered by the fire. The Spirit is not material, but spiritual; and we cannot understand the methods of His operation upon the soul in the new creation, any more than we can understand the methods in which God created the material universe out of nothing. The descriptive terms used in connection with the emblems of The Spirit are special accommodations to the particular emblem employed, and do not denote the mysterious manner of the communication of The Spirit. Natural things cannot explain the method in which The Spirit acts. The Spirit is not like water; but the effects of the two are similar. He is said to be poured, because He is supposed to dwell above, and His influences are like those of water; on the same principle on which God is said to have come down from Heaven, or to look down from Heaven, in accommodation to our ways of thinking and speaking. The ordinance of baptism was not intended to represent the mode of The Spirit’s communication. If baptism can be represented by pouring water out of a cup, it can just as scripturally be represented by the falling of water in rain, its springing out of the earth, its running in a stream, its distilling in dew, or by the drinking of water, or the anointing with oil, or the blowing of the wind, or the blazing of fire, or the flying of a dove, or the exhalation of breath. These various terms are adapted to each special emblem, and do not explain The Spirit’s mode of operation. Baptism, then, can not be either pouring or dipping for the sake of representing the manner of the conveyance of The Holy Spirit; for there is no such likeness. Pouring of the Spirit is a phrase, which is itself a figure, not to be represented by another figure. Baptism is a figure, not of the mode of the Spirit’s operation, to which there can be no likeness, but of the burial and resurrection of Christ, which may be represented by natural things, because it respects the objects of sense. Baptism or immersion in the Spirit does not represent the mode of The Spirit’s conveyance, but such complete subjection to The Spirit’s influence as an object immersed in a fluid experiences from the fluid.”—Alex Carson.—Not water-baptism, but the Holy Spirit, is the seal of the new covenant (2 Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:13; 4:30). The salvation of the dying thief was no doubt meant to be one strong proof that water baptism is not a saving ordinance. —The erection of numerous large baptisteries, or great circular or octagonal buildings with immense cisterns in them for baptism, in Greek and Latin Christendom, from the fourth to the ninth centuries, proves the practice of immersion during that period. As for some of the cisterns being only about three feet deep, it was common at that time for the candidate alone to enter the water and kneel down, and for the minister, who stood outside, to bend the head of the candidate forward into the water; besides infant baptism had then become common, and for the immersion of infants but little depth of water was required. Certainly these large cisterns were never intended for mere sprinkling or pouring. As for baptism being represented sometimes by pouring, in some old mosaics and frescoes and in the Roman catacombs, pouring was sometimes used by the Catholics in connection with immersion; the dates of the representations are quite uncertain; and it is known that additions have been made by modern hands. A deep and lasting impression was made some years ago upon my mind by the solemnity and emotion of a remark addressed to me by a humble, lovely and exemplary gentleman, now deceased, who had been a Presbyterian, but was then a Baptist minister, Mr. Thomas R. Owen, of Tarboro, N.C., well known to hundreds of the readers of these pages. He had visited my native town of Williamston, N.C., some years before the war, while a Presbyterian, and had preached; and now, being a Baptist, he had come again and preached. I heard him both times; and, after the last sermon I approached him, and alluded to his former visit. “Ah! Then,” said he, with deep earnestness and feeling—“Ah! Then I was in darkness on the subject of baptism.” More than three fourths of the professedly Christian worlds are still in darkness on that important subject. More than three hundred out of four hundred millions have abandoned the original and Divine ordinance of immersion, as instituted by The Lord Jesus Christ, and as practiced by the apostolic church, and have adopted in its stead a feeble human counterfeit. “There can be no question,” says Mr. A. P. Stanley, late “Dean of Westminster Abbey,” that the original form of baptism, the very meaning of the word, was complete immersion in the deep baptismal waters, and that for at least four centuries any other form was either unknown or unregarded, unless in the case of dangerous illness, as an exceptional, almost a monstrous case.” In the early centuries baptism was an entire submersion in the deep water, a leap as into a rolling sea or the rushing river, where for the moment the waves close over the bather’s head, and he emerges again as from a momentary grave. This was the part of the ceremony on which the Apostles laid so much stress. It seemed to them like a burial of the old former self and the rising up again of the new man. So St. Paul compared it to the Israelites passing through the roaring waves of the Red Sea, and St. Peter to the passing through the deep waters of the flood. Immersion followed, no doubt, the examples of the Apostles and of their Master. It has the sanction of the venerable churches of the early ages, and of the sacred countries of the East. Baptism by sprinkling was rejected by the whole ancient church (except in the rare case of death-beds or extreme necessity) as no baptism at all. The change from immersion to sprinkling has set aside the most apostolic expressions regarding baptism, and has altered the very meaning of the word.” No wonder that, on this and many other accounts, Chevalier Bunsen should declare that Protestantism, as well as Catholicism, needs, in order to restore to primitive Christianity, a “Second Grand Reconstructive Reformation.”

The apostolic churches were Baptist Churches, because composed of baptized believers; and, even if no intervening links were discoverable, it would be absolutely certain that the churches of the Bible Baptist of the nineteenth century originated from, and are the only spiritual successors of, the apostolic churches. The learned Mosheim said of the Baptist of his day that “their origin was hidden in the remote depths of antiquity.” This was quite complimentary to them as coming from a Lutheran historian, of course, but not complimentary enough after all; for, although they originated in the remote depths of antiquity, their origin was not hidden at all. It was apparent and conspicuous as the noonday sun. Did that bright luminary of heaven cast his brilliant rays in the first century over Asia, Africa and Europe? So was the progress of these Primitive Baptist as clearly seen in, Palestine, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Lycaonia, Phrygia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Mysia, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, and the islands of the Sea. Nay, verily they were not hidden, but were as a city set on a hill which could not be hid.

3. The third mark of the apostolic church was that the members, being baptized believers, came frequently around The Table of The Lord, and commemorated the suffering and death of their precious Redeemer, by partaking of common bread to represent His body broken, and common wine to represent His blood shed for them. The two practices of Baptism and The Lords Supper, or Communion, were called ordinances of the church, and were strictly observed. Baptism represented the initiation into the Divine life by an identification with Christ in His death and burial and resurrection, and by the regenerating and cleansing efficacy of The Holy Spirit; while communion represented the continued support of the new internal heavenly life by spiritual food, even the body and blood of The Son of God, thus assimilating the children of God more and more to the perfect image of Christ. Life must not only be begun, but it must be supported with proper food; and the Christian life is both spiritual in its origin and spiritual in its continuance, and all is of God. Only those persons who made a credible profession of faith in Christ were baptized (that is, immersed in water in the name of The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost by the apostles; and only those persons thus believing and thus baptized were admitted by the apostles to the ordinance of The Lord’s Supper. Life cannot be supported before it is begun. The apostles, to whom Christ first gave the symbols of His broken body and shed blood, were themselves baptized believers, several of them having been previously disciples of John the Baptist. Christ’s commission to the apostles authorized them first to preach or teach or disciple, then to baptize, then to teach to observe all his commandments, one of these commandments being the ordinance of His Supper. On the day of Pentecost, accordingly, after Peter had preached the gospel, those “gladly receiving” it, were baptized; and “they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and in fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:41-42). At Troas only the “disciples” came together to break bread (Acts 20:7). It was not upon the unbaptized or unbelievers, but upon “the church of God” (1 Cor. 1:2), that Paul enjoined the observance of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:23-34); and he praised the brethren for keeping the ordinances as he had delivered them to them (1 Cor. 11:2). If “brethren” walked “disorderly,” the apostle commanded the church to “withdraw” from such (2 Thess. 3:6) and “not to eat or commune with a man called a brother, but really a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner” (1 Cor. 5:11). It was plainly implied that the church was to judge the qualifications or disqualifications of persons for the sacred ordinance of communion. As it was the Table of The Lord, none but those who were declared by Him to be qualified could be admitted to it. Persons who were unregenerate, therefore could not be permitted to commune; persons who, even if they were regenerate, had not been baptized (that is, immersed in the water in the name of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost) could not be allowed to commune; persons who, even though regenerate and baptized, walked disorderly, could not be permitted to commune. These requirements, laid down by the Divine Head of the church, plainly exclude from the Lord’s Table infants, unrenewed adults, and even Christians, if only sprinkled or poured and not baptized, and even properly baptized Christians, if their conduct is unbecoming the gospel of Christ. In regard to these laws of exclusion, the church has no discretion; they were unchangeably instituted by her Divine Master, and are to be faithfully executed by her as long as she has existence on the shores of time. In the apostolic church only those who “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and in fellowship” communed (Acts 2:42); the cup and the bread were “the communion of the body of Christ”—the many members constituting “one bread and one body” (1 Cor. 10:16,17). The primitive church so heartily loved and fellowshipped one another that they had all things in common (Acts 2:44; John 13:34, 35; 1 Cor. 13:13; 1 John 3:14-18)—a blessed union of life and love that will be perfectly realized in glory, Christ (Ps. 17:15; Rom. 8:29; Eph. 3:19; 1 John 4:8). For communion and worship the apostolic church at first met “daily” (Acts 2:46), and afterwards weekly, on the first day of the week (John 20:19, 26; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10). The churches were not told by Christ how often they were to observe this blessed ordinance, but, “as oft as they did it, to do it in remembrance of Him” (1 Cor. 11:25). Thus was the sacred Supper to be a symbolic and grateful commemoration of our adorable Redeemer, who laid down His precious life for us; an impressive personal profession of our personal faith in Him and His atonement for us; a symbol of church fellowship; and a prophecy of the marriage supper of the Lamb in Heaven (Matthew 26:29; Rev. 19:9). The Lord’s Supper is nowhere in the scriptures called a “sacrament or seal” of salvation, an effective “means of grace,” nor do the scriptures teach the gross material Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine become the veritable body and blood of Christ (transubstantiation), or the almost equally gross Lutheran doctrine that the real body of Christ is in, with and under the bread and wine (consubstantiation). The verb “to be” sometimes in all languages means “to represent” or “symbolize,” as in Genesis 41:26-27; Exodus 12:11; Ezekiel 37:11; Daniel 7:24; Matthew 13:38-39; Revelation 1:20, 17:9, 12, 18. Christ calls Himself “the door” (John 10:9), “the good shepherd” (John 10:11), “the way, the truth, the life” (John 14:6), “the true vine,” and Paul calls Christ “that rock” (1 Cor. 10:4). And so when Christ says, “This is my body—this is my blood,” referring to the bread and wine in His Supper, He speaks, not literally, but figuratively, meaning, “this represents my body—this represents my blood.” The bread and wine are the blessed emblems and memorials of our once dying but ever-living and ever-loving Lord, who is now bodily absent from us, and whom we are thus to remember, and show His death till He come (1 Cor. 11:25-26). They are in no sense to be deified and idolized, as in the Catholic pretended sacrifice of the “Mass” which has become a chief element of Romish worship. The monstrous papal doctrine of the “Mass” is not only a contradiction of our senses and reason, but a contradiction of our faith, which assures us that the offering of the body of Christ was made once for all, by that one offering forever perfecting them that are sanctified, and that His glorified humanity is seated at the right hand of The Father upon His mediatorial throne (Heb. 10:10-14; 1:3; 7:24-27). The idolatrous doctrine of transubstantiation was first explicitly taught by Paschasius Radbert, A.D. 831 and was first decreed as an article of faith at the instance of Pope Innocent III., by the fourth “Lateran Council,” A.D. 1215. This was more than a Millennium too late for it to be a doctrine of the apostolic church. Neither the apostles nor any of their real spiritual successors or followers could tolerate for a moment the idea of “crucifying the Son of God afresh” (Heb. 6:6); only a man made, carnal, unbelieving, unfeeling, ambitious, covetous “priesthood” could ever have devised or sanctioned the gross heathenish idolatry of the “Mass,” which they pretend to be an efficacious sacrifice for the sins both of the living and the dead, and which they assiduously use for the purpose of replenishing their purses and perpetuating their power over a superstitious people. —The bread used by Christ was “artos”—a pure unleavened wheaten loaf (Ex. 12:8-20; Matthew 26:17; Ex. 29:3) and the wine was the “fruit of the vine,” the pure fermented juice of the grape. Unfermented juice of the grape is but a mass of leaven—it is must, and not wine; fermentation is the natural clarification of the juice. Paul exhorts the Corinthian church to “keep the feast”, not with the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:8). Paul’s expression is figurative; and Christ seems to have used unleavened bread because it was on hand during the Passover. It is probable that the disciples in Acts 2:46 and 20:7 used common, that is leavened bread; this, however is not certain. The Greek Catholics used leavened, and the Roman Catholic unleavened bread, the latter being in the form of small, thin, round wafers, introduced in the eleventh century, and bearing upon them either the initials of Christ or the initials I.H.S. (Iesus Hominum Salvator, Jesus the savior of men); the Greek loaf is stamped with the characters I C X C N I K A (Iesous Christos Nika, Jesus Christ Conquers). These are human devices of an idolatrous character, utterly unknown to the apostolic church. The Greek “Church” gives in a spoon the eucharistic bread and wine sopped together; beginning in the twelfth, and fully establishing the innovation in the thirteenth century, the Latin “Church” gives the wine to the priest only, on the pleas that the body (represented by the bread) contains the blood, and that there is danger of spilling the blood if passed from one communicant to another, and that the “church” only sanctioned that which had become a custom, and that the priest being, as they pretend, successors to the apostles, should drink the wine. But the Apostles, at the Last Supper, represented the whole church; and Christ, speaking of the wine, says, “Drink ye all of it” (Matthew 26:27); and Mark says “They all drank of it” (14:23); and, instead of the body containing the blood, the very separation of the two elements, the bread from the wine, the body from the blood, indicates the death of Christ. This withholding of the wine or cup from the “laity” or private members caused the Hussite War in Germany (A.D.1420-1433). Men thus make the commandments of God void by their traditions. —As infant baptism was introduced in the third century, so was infant communion; and the latter continued in the Latin “Church”; the Pedobaptist Protestant “Churches,” through professedly baptizing (but really rhantizing or sprinkling) infants, inconsistently withhold communion from infants—every argument for or against the one practice is equally valid for or against the other; there is no reason or scripture for either. Through the fascinating eloquence of Robert Hall (1764-1831), an Arminian “Baptist” preacher of England, the most of the English churches called Baptist practice open or general communion; but the “Strict Baptist” in England practice close communion. In America the Baptist who first settled here suffered so much from the persecutions inflicted upon them by other denominations that they were at first compelled to observe close communion; and those adhering to the scriptures and the apostolic precepts still practice, not a general or open, but a strict close communion.

4. The fourth mark of the apostolic church was the maintenance of strict discipline. Christ was the only perfect being that ever lived on the earth in human form. Neither the apostles or the apostolic churches attained perfection in the flesh (Phil. 3:12-14; 1 John 1:8), but all intelligent students of the bible and church history admit that the strict precepts of the Apostles were more faithfully observed by the apostolic than they have been by any succeeding churches. The church in the apostolic age, especially feeling herself to be the bride of Christ, the temple of The Holy Ghost, earnestly sought to show her love for her Lord by keeping His holy commandments. In that glorious springtime of love, but little comparatively of the dust of the earth seemed to soil her shining garments; and but few cases of rigid discipline occurred or were recorded. The infidel historian Gibbon considers “the pure and austere morals of the early Christians” as among the causes of the rapid spread of their religion. To show the great importance of prompt and strict discipline, God Himself directly interposed in the case of the first offense in the apostolic church, and struck both the joint offenders, Ananias and Sapphira, with instant death (Acts 5:1-11). The offense was falsehood, hypocrisy, covetousness—an outward semblance of devoting all to God, and yet a real heart worship of mammon. Men “cannot serve both God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). This prompt and rigid act of Divine church discipline caused “great fear to come upon all the church and upon as many as heard these things” (Acts 5:11); and “of the rest durst no man join himself to them” (Verse 13). There can be no doubt that, after this, hypocrites were kept out of the church at Jerusalem for a considerable time. The second example of church discipline is mentioned as having occurred at Corinth (1 Cor. 5). A member of that church was guilty of incest, Corinth, being at that time the most licentious city in the world. But the general prevalence of this or any other vice is no sort of justification for it being tolerated and retained in the church; a little of the leaven of wickedness soon leavens the whole lump. When Paul, at Ephesus, heard with deep grief of this scandal, he wrote the Corinthian church, and as united in spirit with the church, though bodily absent, he, in the name of Jesus Christ, judged that such an offender should be “delivered unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” —that is, excluded from the church, given over to Satan, the god of this world, for the infliction of bodily affliction, and more the mortification of the sinner’s carnal nature, and for the ultimate repentance and restoration of the offender ( 1 Cor. 5:13; 2 Cor. 4:4; Job 2:4-7; Luke 13:16 & 22:31; 2 Cor. 12:7; 1 Peter 5:8; Matthew 5:29-30; 1 Cor. 11:30-32; Rom.8:13; 1 Peter 4:1-2). The church at Corinth, according to the Apostles solemn admonition, when they were met together, excluded the offender, and we learn that he afterwards repented and was restored to their fellowship (2 Cor. 2:1-10 & 7:8-12). Even the inspired Apostle did not exclude, but he simply called upon the church, which alone had the authority, to exclude or put away that wicked person from among them (1 Cor. 5:13). It is the church not merely the pastor or Deacons or any other body, to which Christ directs that a trespass shall be finally told (Matthew 18:15-20). Christ alone has the key of the house of David—He alone can open and shut (Isa. 22:22; Rev. 1:18 & 3:7). When the church acts by His Spirit, its course will be ratified in Heaven. The keys given to His Apostles relate, not to church discipline, the admission and exclusion of members, but to gospel doctrine—not whomsoever, but “whatsoever ye bind,” etc. (Matthew 16:19 & 18:18); the doctrine of the Apostles, and not church discipline, is alluded to in John 20:23 (compare Mark 16:16), for none but God can forgive sins (Ex. 34:7; Isa. 43:25). In the conference at Jerusalem, the brethren took part with the Apostles and Elders in the deliberation and decision (Acts 15:23). The third recorded case of discipline in the apostolic church is that of Hymeneus and Philetus, doctrinal errorists, who withstood Paul’s words and denied the resurrection of the body (2 Tim. 2:17-18), and who were “delivered unto Satan that they might learn [be disciplined by chastisement and suffering] not to blaspheme” (1 Tim. 1:20). A pervading spirit of genuine brotherly love, springing from genuine love and loyalty to Christ, is the best preventive of offenses in the church. Cherishing this spirit, the members should tenderly watch over one another, and, by mutual Christian encouragement, counsel, admonition, and reproof, provoke one another, not to wrath and evil, but to love and good works (Eph. 6:13; Heb. 10:24; Ps. 141:5; Gal. 6:1; Col. 3:12-14). The affectionate subjection of one to another was a marked feature of the simple, unworldly apostolic church. This mutual loving watch-care should be active; it was while the men or servants slept that the enemy sowed tares (Matthew 13:25).—Private or personal offenses are to be adjusted in strict accordance with Christ’s directions in Matthew 18:15-17. Christ lays down four distinct steps, which are always to be taken in the order given by Him, and not in a reversed order. First: the aggrieved party, if the other does not, is to take the initiative in seeking a private interview with the supposed offender; if he fails to do so, he himself becomes an offender, as he has violated the law of Christ. The privacy of the interview is highly important; the object is, not altercation, but to gain an offending brother. Perhaps the offending brother is laboring under a mistake; the other brother may not have intended to offend him, and may not be conscience of having done so, or he may not have had an opportunity of explaining his conduct. A private interview conducted in a calm brotherly spirit may and should give full mutual satisfaction. If in such an interview the offense is denied, and there are no witnesses of the offense, the next step cannot be taken; for then the complaining party would become an offender, having published a charge which can not be proved. Absence of proof will leave him no recourse but in private admonition and the patient committal of the matter to Providence. Second: If the first step fails, and the offense can be proved, then one or two other disinterested and judicious members are to be chosen as witnesses and mediators, and the whole case is to be considered before them. They may be able to discover what is right between the members at variance, and the latter may be willing to yield to their decision. If the “one or two more” consider the offense as not real or as satisfactorily removed, the aggrieved party, though unsatisfied, can not take the third step; for the offender has “heard them,” and the accuser ought to be satisfied with the judgment of the brethren selected by himself. Third: if the second step fails, the case, after due notification of the parties, is to be laid before the church, the proof adduced, and the opportunity given for defense. Here the united wisdom and influence of the whole church is brought to bear to reconcile the difference and judge between parties. Fourth: If the party judged by the church to be in fault still refuses to make amends, it is evident that his heart is fully set in him to do evil, and must be excluded from the church; for his refusal to hear the body proves his contempt for the brethren, and they are therefore compelled to withdraw their fellowship from him. If this important law of the Great Head of the church were properly executed, long continued personal feuds, with their disastrous results, bitterness and factions, would be prevented. Differences between members in regard to worldly affairs are expressly forbidden by the inspired Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 6:1-11) to be carried before worldly courts, but must be referred to the judgment of the wise members of the church, the least esteemed of whom, if they have the Spirit of Christ, are better qualified to judge between brethren. Saints are finally to judge the wicked world and angels, and are certainly qualified to judge in small temporal matters. Christians should not contend before the ungodly, and thus bring reproach upon the cause of Christ. Besides, differences among men are often decided in worldly courts, not according to right and equity, but by legal quibbles and technicalities; whereas the children of God should always desire, in reference to their affairs, a judgment according to the equity and the Spirit of Christ.—In regard to moral or public offenses against the order, faith and purity of the church, such as neglect of church obligations, heresy, idolatry, immorality, intemperance, railing and extortion (1 Cor. 5:11; Titus 3:10; 2 Peter 2; Heb. 10:25), these may be divided into minor and gross public offenses. Minor public offenses, such as a member may be led, under strong and sudden temptation, to commit only once, and such as do not greatly scandalize the cause of Christ, are to be treated according to Paul’s direction in Galatians 6:1; these erring members are to be restored by the spiritual in the spirit of sympathizing meekness, as all are liable thus to be tempted; in these cases the method of procedure laid down by Christ for personal offenses (Matthew 18:15-17) is in spirit to be observed (Titus 3:10). Christian tenderness may also here succeed in gaining a brother. But, in the case of gross, deliberate, habitual public offenses, or such as greatly scandalize the church, where the evidence is public and unmistakable, there should be, though in a spirit of sorrow and not of bitterness, a prompt absolute exclusion, as the Apostle divinely enjoined in regard to the Corinthian offender (1 Cor. 5); any steps taken to bring such an offender to repentance and restoration should be taken afterwards (2 Cor. 2:1-11). A confession and promise of reformation are not enough to be required of this class of offenders. They should, for the honor of Christ, be at once cut off; and, if they afterwards, by a godly conduct and conversation, bring forth fruits meet for repentance, and prove genuineness of their sorrow and reformation, then they may be restored (2 Cor. 7:8-12; Matthew 3:8; Acts 26:20). The rule in Luke 17:3-4, plainly applies only to personal or private offenses, which do not bring scandal upon the church—not to public or moral offenses which seriously reproach the cause of Christ. The latter are offenses which the church can not forgive; but, when assured that God has forgiven the offender, she may then receive him back into membership. —In the apostolic church the Elders or presbyters are sometimes called Bishops or overseers or rulers of the flock, and therefore had the special responsibility of maintaining the discipline of the church (Acts 20:17 & 28; 1 Tim. 3:4-5 & 5:17; Heb. 13:7, 17, & 24). Against an Elder an accusation was not to be received but before two or three witnesses (1 Tim. 5:19), because his office is a very presumption in his favor, and because, as a minister, he is peculiarly exposed to malice. An Elder, to be efficient, must be “blameless” (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:6-7). A tender, faithful, scriptural discipline, like that observed by the people of God in the apostolic age, is of the highest and most vital importance for the welfare of the church; the neglect of such discipline is the most potent cause of evil in the church. “The object of faithful church discipline is threefold. First: The glory of God, whose great and holy name is dishonored by the evil principles or evil practices of church members, and whose honor is vindicated by their prompt and proper correction. Second: The preservation of the church from corruption and destruction; the old leaven of wickedness must be purged out, to preserve the whole body from infection; evil communications corrupt good manners; lepers were to be put out of the camp, so as not to infect others, and so erroneous persons, whose words eat as a canker (2 Tim. 2:17), must be removed from the communion of gospel churches; a church of Christ is like a garden or vineyard, which if not cared for, will be overrun with thorns and nettles and weeds, but, by a proper and timely discipline, the weeds eradicated, and the withered branches are gathered and cast out. Third: The good of the offending parties, who, if real children of God, are, by proper discipline brought to shame and repentance for their sins, and an acknowledgment of them, when they are to be received again with all love and tenderness, and to be comforted, that they might not be swallowed up with over-much sorrow.”—John Gill.

5. The fifth Mark of the Apostolic Church was the independent or congregational polity or government of each local church, subject only to the Headship of Christ; all the local apostolic churches being united, by no outward bond of force, but by an inward bond of love. The Greek word rendered “church” in the New Testament is “ekklesia,” which is derived from the verb ek-kaleo, to call out, and denotes an assembly called out, a select body separated from the mass of the people. In ancient Greece the ekklesia in each State was the assembly of the free born, native, self-governing citizens, the highest legal body in the land, from which there was no appeal; slaves and foreigners were excluded from the ekklesia. In the Septuagint ekklesia is the usual rendering of the Hebrew word kahal, “the congregation” of Israel or of The Lord, from which were excluded the uncircumcised, the unclean and the “mixed multitude.” Ekklesia occurs in the New Testament 115 times; twice referring to the Hebrew “congregation of The Lord,” three times referring to the Greek assembly, and 110 times referring to the Christian church. In 92 of these last cases the reference is to a special, local, visible society of Christians; in the remaining 18 cases the reference is to the entire body of the elect in Heaven and on earth, or what is sometimes called the invisible church (as in Eph. 5:25,29; Col. 1:18, 24; Heb. 13:23). The word is never used in the New Testament to designate a universal (or catholic) visible church, a national church (as the church of Judea or England), or a denominational church (as the church was not divided into different denominations in the Apostolic Age, and there was not then any great organization, like the Presbyterian Church, or the Methodist Church, including in it self a large number of local congregations). A visible church is always in scripture a local body; and every local church, acting by a majority of it’s members (in 2 Cor. 2:6 “ton pleionon” is literally, not “many,” but “the more,” the majority), is invested by Christ with the exclusive and final power of receiving, disciplining, excluding and restoring it’s members, electing it’s officers, and transacting all other necessary business (Rom. 14:1; Matthew 18:15-18; 1 Cor. 5:4-7 & 11-13; Rom. 16:17; 2 Thess. 3:16; Acts 1:15-26; 6:1-6; 1 Cor. 16:3; & 14:23). In this last passage the Greek verb “cheirotoneo” rendered “ordained,” means, according to Liddell and Scott, to stretch out the hand for the purpose of giving one’s vote in the Athenian ekklesia, to appoint an office in the church; the same word used in 2 Cor. 8:19; and, in accordance with the analogy of Acts 6:2-6, the word cheirotoneo in Acts 14:23 is explained by the latest and ablest German scholars to denote the election of Elders in each church under the supervision of Paul and Barnabas. Especially does the language of Christ in Matthew 18:15-18 demonstrate that the church is the highest and last ecclesiastical authority on earth; that there can be no appeal, under the law of Christ, form the decision of the church to a presbytery, or synod, or general assembly, or conference, or convention, or priesthood, or prelacy, or papacy, or Association, or any other earthly authority. After a church has excluded one of it’s members, and classed him with the heathens and publicans, it is not only thoroughly unscriptural, but also thoroughly absurd, to suppose that any man or set of men can, by any exercise of authority, put back such an offender in the fellowship of that church. With true repentance, confession and reformation the fellowship will be restored; but without these exercises gospel fellowship can never be restored. Each gospel church is a separate and independent republic, having Christ as it’s only Head and Lawgiver, and not subject, in any ecclesiastical matters, to any outside jurisdiction; such, according to the ablest scholars and historians, was not only every apostolic church in the first century, but also of the second century (see works of Gibbon, Mosheim, Neander, Coleman, Whately, Burton, Barrow, Schaff, etc.). The church is repeatedly declared in the New Testament to be the body of Christ (Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 6:15; 10:17; 12:27; Eph. 1:23; 4:12; 5:23,30; Col. 1:18,24; 2:17); the only Head therefore, of this body, is Christ, who guides and controls and preserves the church as His body. Hierarchies and synods are unscriptural, tyrannous usurpations, which have, through the ages, inflicted grievous wrongs upon the people. It is openly and proudly claimed by the advocates of these ecclesiastical monarchies and oligarchies that these systems are the fruit and product of the greatest worldly experience and wisdom; very few scholars, among these advocates, even pretend now to base these systems upon the New Testament. The apostolic church, or church of the first century, they say, was “a strictly supernatural organization, a stranger in this world, standing with one foot in eternity, and longing for the second coming of her heavenly bridegroom; but afterwards, finding that Christ did not come, she, in her new constitution, planted foot firmly upon earth, yet thus became secularized and finally Romanized, and this necessitated a reformation on the basis of apostolic Christianity.” Bible Baptists believe that, not only in the first, but also in every succeeding century, God has had on earth faithful, spiritual, unworldly, un-Romanized apostolic churches, each one of which, in it’s divinely established individuality and independence, has presented an insurmountable and indestructible breakwater against the countless tides of error, strife, and corruption setting in from every quarter; and all of which have been united by no mechanical, outward, worldly, usurping and oppressive bond of force, but by an inward, heavenly, spiritual, emancipating, purifying and elevating bond of Divine love and peace and fellowship, such as The Lord Jesus Christ, their Ever-Living, Unchangeable and Omnipotent Head, in the last solemn moments of His suffering earthly ministry, tenderly enjoined upon them and earnestly besought His Father to grant them (John 13:34-35; 15:12-13; 17:20-23). Born and taught by God, being one body, and having one Spirit, even as they are called in one hope of their calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in them all, they, not in word only, but in deed and in truth, love one another, and endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (John 1:13; 6:45; Eph. 4:1-6; 1 Thess. 4:9; 1 John 2:27; 3:14-18; 4:7-21). They have always corresponded with each other by brotherly letters and messages, and have from time to time met in a general or associational way, not to lord it over God’s heritage, but to worship God, and to edify, exhort and confirm one another in the most holy faith once delivered to the saints (Acts chap. 13-15; Phil. 2:25; Heb. 10:23-25; 12:22-29; 1 Peter 5:3-5; Jude 3:20). Scriptural Associations are only general meetings of churches, or brethren from different churches, for the purpose of Divine worship and mutual edification; and, while no church should, either in a private or general way, maintain fellowship with a church which persists in heresy or disorder, yet there is not a particle of New Testament or apostolic authority for any such general meeting assuming the functions of an individual church, such as admitting, disciplining, or excluding members of a church, or electing or disciplining church officers. It cannot be repeated too often that each gospel church is, according to Christ and His Apostles, the highest ecclesiastical authority on earth. While all gospel churches should always so live as to maintain peace and fellowship with each other, Christ nowhere in the New Testament gives the slightest authority for an organic union or consolidation of gospel churches. Such a union would be a fruitful source of corruption and oppression. The New Testament contains not a single example or intimation of the subordination of a church to any ecclesiastical authority outside of itself, whether popes, or diocesan bishops, or synods, or presbyteries, or general assemblies, or councils or associations, or conventions. The simple fact that the Apostles address their epistles, not to church officers or church judicatories, but to the churches of the called and faithful saints of God, proves both the right and responsibility of each church in respect to the management of it’s own affairs. The idea that the government of the apostolic church was presbyterial or by Elders, originated from the mistake of supposing that the Christian church was a copy of the Jewish synagogue. Bible scholars admit that neither synagogues nor the government of synagogues were of Divine institution, but that they began to be built and established after the Babylonian exile—after the close of the Old Testament canon. The only place in the Old Testament where the Authorized Version of the English Bible contains the word “synagogue” is Psalm 74:8; and the Hebrew word “moed” is here rendered by Gesenius and the best commentators, “tabernacle of the congregation” —or “holy place” —there being no allusion whatever to any organized body of people or any method of government. Christ and His Apostles use not synagogue, but ekklesia, an essentially different governed body to denote a Christian church. Only once in the New Testament did the Greek word “synagogue” used even to denote the place of a Christian assembly, and then by the most Judaic writer in the New Testament, James (2:2). The numerous passages already cited which prove that the church, subject only to Christ, was to govern itself, disprove that elders were to govern it. Elders, bishops or pastors are to lead (hegeomai), oversee or preside over (episkopeo, proistemi), care for (epimeeleomai), and shepherd (poimaino) the flock (Heb. 13:7,17.24; Acts 20:28; 1 Tim. 5:17; 3:5; John 21:15-17; 1 Peter 5:2) they are not to exercise the despotic authority of the Gentile and Jewish rulers (Mark 10:42-45—archon; compare Luke 8:41; 24:20; Acts 4:26), not to lord it (1 Peter 5:3—katakurieuo, exercise complete dominion over) God’s heritage. Even Christ Himself came not to ministered unto, but to minister (diakoneo, to serve: Mark 10:45); and His apostles are servants of the church for Jesus’ sake (2 Cor. 4:5). All His people are made by Him, kings and priest unto God (Rev. 1:5-6; 1 Peter 2:5,9); Christ alone is the High Priest of our profession (Heb. 3:1; 5:5-6)—He alone is the King of kings and Lord of lords. It would be disloyalty to Christ for any church to alienate from itself and delegate to any other persons or set of persons the rights and functions which Christ has committed to her; a gospel church can not have delegates, but may have messengers. But the sisterhood relationship of churches involve sisterhood obligations. They are all members of the same mystical body of Christ, permeated by the same Divine Spirit, and should be sweetly constrained by the same heavenly love to maintain the strict faith and order of the gospel, to have tender regards for one another’s feelings, and to keep the unity of The Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:1-6). In temporal things each church is subject, and should be quietly submissive, to worldly powers (Rom. 13:1-7; 1 Peter 2:13-25); but in spiritual things each church is subject only to Christ (Matthew 23:8-12; 17:5; John 13:13-14).

6. The Sixth Mark of the Apostolic Church was religious liberty, soul-freedom, a complete separation of church and state, the entire independence of each church from all state control so far as regarded the membership, ministry, organization, faith, worship and discipline of the church. Jesus declared to Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom was of this world, this would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews” (John 18:36). Peter and John answered the Jewish rulers: “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, Judge ye” (Acts 4:19). Those made free by the Son of God are free indeed (John 8:36), and are to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made them free (Gal. 5:1). Those experiencing the glorious and righteous ministration of the Spirit of God have a Divine liberty from the unscriptural traditions and commandments of men (2 Cor. 3:5-11, 17, 18; Jer. 1:25: Matthew 15:3-9). The church is an ekklesia, an assembly of God’s people called out from the world. The Jewish theocracy was unique—it was specially instituted and prophetically directed by God for a preliminary, typical and preparatory purpose; and, when that purpose was accomplished more than eighteen centuries ago, the Jewish church—state, in accordance with the original design and by the providence of God, passed forever away, and was perpetually superseded by a superior, personal, internal, spiritual dispensation (Jer. 31:31-34; John 3:1-8; 4:21-24; 16:7-14; Acts 2; 7; 2 Cor. 3; Gal., Eph. and Heb.). Like the ancient heathen, the modern governments exercise both political and religious powers; and the corrupt and ferocious natures of these governments are fitly indicated by the term “beasts,” applied to them in the apocalyptic language of scripture (Dan 7:3-27; 8:3-25; Rev. 13; 17). In the same manner the alliance of church and state in professedly Christian countries has always been productive of corruption and persecution. Worldly-minded religionists have thus sought to increase their influence, number, wealth, power and patronage. Ever since Constantine, the Roman Emperor, in A.D. 313, established “Christianity” by law, national establishments of religion have existed and still exist in Europe, and such an establishment is “A discrimination among religious beliefs, and assumption of infallibility, and a denial of religious liberty.” The Roman Catholic “Church,” ever since Pope Theodore I., in A.D 648, assumed the title of “Sovereign Pontiff,” has denounced as a blasphemous heresy the doctrine that the conscience is free, not to be forced by human legislation; and it is estimated that, in order to enforce conformity to her religious creed and ceremonial, she has murdered fifty million human beings, with every imaginable device of diabolical cruelty-thus shedding enough martyr blood to fill a stream ten feet wide, ten feet deep and twenty-five miles long. The Papal Syllabus of Errors, issued by Pope Pius IX. December 8, 1864, in Article 24, still affirms the right of the Romish “Church” to avail herself of force or temporal power, and there can be no earthly doubt that she will use force and repeat the horrors of the Dark Ages when ever she regains the power to do so. In Article 55 of the same syllabus she declares that the church and the state ought not to be separated. It is “One of the anomalies of history that Protestants, coming out of the Roman Catholic church and protesting against her tyrannies, should so readily copied and emulated her repressive measures. All the reformers adopted the theory and brought it into universal and oppressive practice that the state ought to legislate for the church. The Greek, the Lutheran the Reformed, the Presbyterian, the Congregational, the Episcopalian, and every other church, except the Baptist, organized previous to the eighteenth century, were organized and governed with this as a recognized and enforce principle, that state governments ought to support and regulate the church, and enact and exact penalties against all who disbelieved the state creed or neglected the state ritual. This was the universal teaching of statesmen and clergy; and is to this day, though with somewhat modified phases, in every country on the globe except the United States of America.” Doves and lambs and sheep are proverbially inoffensive, and do not make war upon other animal tribes; and so the people of God, who are in Scripture represented by these innocent creatures, do not persecute and destroy other people, but have always, since the ascension of Christ, been zealous advocates of religious of religious liberty. This fact is plainly seen in the history, especially of the Donatists, the Waldenses, and the Baptist. “The first published confession of faith asserting the right of all men to religious liberty was published by English Baptist in A.D. 1611; and in all Baptist documents since there has been no contradictory utterance.” Baptists have always advocated, not simply religious toleration, but religious freedom, and that too, not simply for themselves, but for all men. This is one of their fundamental and unchangeable principles, and has begun to be more or less recognized everywhere during the last hundred years, although previously denounced by statesmen as rebellion, and by theologians as abominable heresy. Bancroft, the historian of the United States, declares that the first instance, in the history of the world, of the establishment of a civil government whose cornerstone was absolute soul-liberty was the little Baptist colony of Rhode Island founded in A.D. 1636 by the Welsh Baptist, Roger Williams, who, flying from religious persecution in Massachusetts, bade adieu to wife and loved ones at home, and, in the middle of January, the coldest month of a New England winter, betook himself to the wilderness, inhabited by wild beasts and savages, and was for fourteen weeks, he says, “sorely tossed, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.” The Baptist had opportunity to secure state patronage for themselves in Rhode Island in 1636, in Holland in 1819, and in Virginia and Georgia in 1785; but they emphatically refused to do so because they believed and maintained the great Apostolic principle that Christ’s kingdom is a spiritual and not a worldly one, and that the alliance of church and state is destructive to religious purity and liberty. By the influence of the Baptists, the first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was adopted in 1789, forbidding Congress to make any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Even the very idea of the local independence of the state governments is believed to have been derived by Thomas Jefferson from a small Baptist church whose monthly meetings he attended for several months in succession about ten years before the American Revolution; Mr. Jefferson declared that their form of church government was the only form of true democracy then existing in the world. The Roman Catholic nobleman, Lord Baltimore, under whom Maryland was settled in 1633, was obliged, in consequence of the Protestant form of the English government, to tolerate Protestants in his colony; but the toleration was partial and poor—anti-Trinitarians, including Jews, Arians and Unitarians, were condemned to death, and respect for the Virgin Mary was encouraged by fines and whippings, confiscation and exile. The Episcopalian state glebe lands of Virginia were not ordered to be sold until 1802; and offensive religious discriminations were not removed from the laws of the Congregational State of Massachusetts until 1834; the Baptists and Quakers suffered dreadful persecutions from the established “churches” of these two states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. President Washington declared that “the Baptists had been, throughout America, uniformly the firm friends to civil liberty;” just as Mr. Locke had said that “the Baptists were from the first the friends of just and true, equal and impartial liberty;” and as Sir Isaac Newton had said that “the Baptists were the only denomination of Christians that never symbolized (held the same faith with) Roman Catholics.” “In the code of laws established by the Baptists in Rhode Island,” says Judge Story, “we read for the first time since Christianity ascended the throne of the Caesars, the declaration that conscience should be free, and that men should not be punished for worshiping God in the way they were persuaded He requires.” In all the States and Territories of the United States there is now an entire separation of church and state, accompanied by universal liberty of conscience. This is a peculiar and inestimable boon, which we at present enjoy, and for which we should be devoutly thankful to the merciful providence of God. The time will come, no doubt, when the blessed privilege will be denied even to the people of this now free country (Dan. 7:25; 2 Thess. 2:1-12; Rev. 11:7-13; 13:11-18). The apostolic churches did not persecute human beings on any account, much less for their religion; and the true successors of those churches have never engaged in persecution.

7. The seventh mark of the apostolic church was that, although there were a few exceptions, the members were generally poor, obscure, unlearned, afflicted, despised, and persecuted. John the Baptist, although greatest among those that are born of women, and filled with The Spirit from his birth, dwelt in the wilderness of Judea, was clothed with camel’s hair and a leathern girdle, like the ancient prophets, and ate locusts and wild honey; and he was finally imprisoned and beheaded. The Lord Jesus Christ, though the Creator, upholder, and possessor of all things, yet, as The Son of man, was poorer than the foxes and birds, and had not where to lay His head; He lived nearly all His earthly life obscurely in an obscure province of the Roman Empire; He was unlearned in the wisdom of the schools; He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, despised and rejected of men, smitten of God, forsaken by nearly all His followers, and put to shameful and agonizing death on a Roman cross by the malice of His own Jewish country men. He told His apostles that He sent them forth as sheep among wolves; that, as the world had hated and persecuted Him, so it would hate and persecute them; that the time was coming that whosoever should kill them would think that he was doing God service. And it is generally believed that all the apostles, except John, were put to death. The most of them were illiterate fishermen, and no one except Paul was furnished with much human learning. To the poor cripple at the gate of the temple Peter said, “Silver and gold have I none.” Paul worked with his own hands for his necessities. James says,” Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which He has promised to them that love Him?” Paul says to the church in the wealthy city of Corinth: “ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise man after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble (are called); but God has chosen the foolish things of the world confound the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty, and the base things of the world, and things which are despised, has God chosen, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.” The epistle to the Hebrews inspiringly rehearses the unworldly lives of the ancient heroes of faith. Abel was for his religion, slain by his own brother. Enoch walked with God, prophesied against an ungodly world, and passed to glory without dying. Noah preached righteousness in the midst of his corrupt generation, and he believed and feared God, and prepared an ark to the saving of his house. The patriarchs sojourned in tabernacles as strangers and pilgrims on this earth, and desire a better, even a heavenly country. Moses, when he was come to years, refuse to be called the son of Pharaohs daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt, having respect unto the recompense of the reward. “Others,” adds the inspired penman, “were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection; and others had trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were saw asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins, and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented; of whom the world was not worthy; they wandered in desert and mountains, and dens and caves of the earth.” This is the truthful picture of God’s people during the most of the eighteen centuries since the apostolic age. Those living godly, with supreme reference to God, are hated by the world, and suffer persecution; like the prophets and apostles before them, they experience tribulation in the world, but peace in Christ, and they at last come out of great tribulation, and ascend in blood-washed robes to the paradise of God (2 Tim. 3:12; Matthew 5:10-12; John 16:33; Rev. 7:13-17). They have been persecuted in manifold ways and slain, in all lands, by Pagans, Papists, and Protestants. Comparatively few, and afflicted, and poor, and despised, they have trusted, not in man, but in The Lord, and, as represented by the sun-clothed woman in Revelation, when persecuted by the dragon, they have fled into the wilderness, prepared by God for them, and God’s hidden ones have there been nourished by the Most High (Deut. 7:7; Matthew 7:14; Zeph. 3:12; Ps. 34:19; Isa. 48:10; 54:11; 2 Cor. 4:8-9,17-18; 6:9-10; Heb. 10:32-34; Jer. 17:5-8; Phil. 3:3-4; Rev. 12; Ps. 83:3; 1 Kings 17; Heb. 13:5-6). When put to death they prayed for their murderers (Matthew 5:44-48; Luke 23:34; Acts 7:60); when driven by persecution to other countries, they have gone preaching the word to the people prepared by The Lord to hear it (Matthew 10:23; Acts 8; 13:44-52; & chap. 16-28). Among the persecuted people of God have been the Novatians, Donatists, Cathari, Paterines, Paulicians, Petrobrusians, Henericans, Arnoldists, Albigenses, Waldenses, Lollards, Mennonites and baptists, nearly all of whom were occasionally designated Anabaptist or re-baptizers by their enemies, because they disregarded infant or unregenerate baptism, and baptize all adults, whether previously baptized or not, who, upon a credible profession of faith, applied to them for the membership in their churches-thus insisting upon a spiritual or regenerated church membership, the First and most important mark of the apostolic church. The “wilderness” (eremos, desolate, lonely, solitary region) into which the people of God have often fled has been found in the wild forests and mountains of Asia, Europe, and America, especially the mountainous districts of the Alps, the Pyrenees and Wales. Like Lazarus, in the parable of Christ, they had evil things in this world, but comfort in the eternal world (Luke 16:25). As the poet has truly said;

“The path of sorrow, and that path alone
Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.”

And again:—

“Trials make the promise sweet
Trials give new life to prayer
Trials bring us to Christ feet
Lay us low, and keep us there.”

8. The eighth mark of the apostolic church was the fraternal equality, the essential priesthood, of all the members, in accordance with which fact they chose to office among them those of their number whom they perceived to be already qualified thereunto by the Spirit of God-there being but two classes of officers, Bishops, or Elders, or Pastors, and Deacons; the fraternal equality of all the members involving the fraternal equality of the ministry. All the members were received upon credible profession of their being children of God, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, born of the same divine Spirit, branches of the same heavenly vine, members of the same mystical body, made by Christ kings and priest unto God, a royal priesthood, a chosen generation, a holy nation, a peculiar nation, living stones built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable unto God by Jesus Christ. Their right to choose their own officers has been shown under the fifth mark. The only classes of distinct and permanent officers in the church were Bishops and Deacons (Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:1-3). The apostles were extraordinary foundation officers (Matthew 16:18; 1 Cor. 3:10-11; Eph. 2:20; Rev. 21:14), princes sitting upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Isa. 32:1; Matthew 19:28). The qualifications of an apostle were a special commission from Christ in person (Matthew 10:5; Gal. 1:1) an actual sight of Him in the body after the resurrection (Acts 1:22-23; 1 Cor. 9:1); the power to work miracles, and confer the ability upon others to work miracles (Matthew 10:8; Acts 8:14-17; 19:6); and the authority to teach with inspired infallibility (Matthew 16:19; 19:28; John 16:13; 20:23). In their carefully preserved writings they are their own successors; and both scripture and reason inform us that others, who “say they are apostles, are liars” (Rev. 2:2). Modern scholarship has thoroughly demonstrated to every candid mind the utter baselessness of all claims, whether papal or episcopal, scriptural or historical, to authoritative succession from the apostles. These claims are founded upon deplorable perversions of scripture and forgeries of history. Every spiritual, nay, every intelligent and unprejudiced mind, will be entirely convinced of the unscripturalness of such claims by a simple reference to the scriptures adduced to sustain them (Matthew 16:18-19; Luke 22:32; John 21:15-17; 20:21; Matthew 28:18-20; Rom. 10:15; 2 Cor. 5:20; 2 Tim 1:13-14; 2:2; Titus 1:5; 2 John 9-10; Jude 3; Rev. 1:20), especially after learning that nothing in this world is more certain, as admitted by all scholars of today, that the terms “Bishop” and “Presbyter” or “Elder” and “Pastor” are in the new testament perfectly interchangeable or synonymous, designating but one class of church officers, the ministry of the word, without the slightest difference of order or rank; and that even the Apostles called themselves “Elders” (Acts 20:17,28; Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim.3:1-13; 5:17-19; Titus 1:5-7; 1 Peter 5:1-3; 2 John 1; 3 John 1; 2 Tim 1:6 compared with 1 Tim.4:14). Liddell and Scott, in the seventh edition of their Greek English Lexicon, the very latest and the very highest, nay, the only, authority on Greek-English lexicography, define “presbuteros, an Elder of the Jewish council, an Elder of the church, presbyter;” and they add, “Even the apostles call themselves by this name.” They define “episcopos” (of which the English word “Bishop” is a corruption), “one who watches over, an overseer, guardian, an ecclesiastical superintendent, in the apostolic age equal to presbuteros, but from Ignatius downward. a Bishop.” This absolutely settles the question in the mind of every scholar, no matter how much ignorance and bigotry and arrogance may rave; there is not a particle of apostolic authority for distinguishing the Bishop from the Elder, much less for elevating the Bishop over the Elder, and still less for elevating one Bishop, as the Bishop of Rome or Constantinople, over all other Bishops to the blasphemous position, distinctly predicted and denounced by Paul, of the sole and supreme and infallible vicegerency of God on earth (2 Thess. 2:3-4). The history of the ecclesiastical hierarchy has well been called “the history of triple abdication: first the community of believers committed their powers to the presbyters; then the corps of presbyters abdicated to the Bishop, and last, the Bishop to the pope (in the Vatican Council. A.D. 1870).”—Renan, as quoted approvingly by P. Schaff in the latter’s History of The Apostolic Christianity. “This subject,” adds Mr. Schaff, “may be regarded as finally settled among scholars.” “The episcopate,”says “Bishop” Lightfoot, one of the ripest Episcopalian scholars in England, “was formed, not out of the apostolic order by localization, but out of the presbyteral by elevation; and the title”Bishop”, which was originally common to all, came at length to be appropriated to the chief among them.” Clemens Romanus, or Clement of Rome, supposed to be referred to in Philippians 4:3, and to have lived from A.D. 30 to 100, and claimed by the Roman Catholics as one of their popes, is the only uninspired Christian writer of the first century whose undisputed writings have come down to us. He wrote a letter for the church at Rome to the church at Corinth, and urges the Corinthian brethren to peace, humility and love. He uses the terms Bishop and Elder as perfectly synonymous. The next so-called apostolic father is Ignatius, of Antioch, the dates of whose death ranges from A.D. 107 to 116. The latest scholarship admits only three of the epistles attributed to him to be genuine, those to Polycarp, to the Ephesians and to the Romans. He addresses Polycarp, not as a diocesan, but as a congregational Bishop, as the Bishop of the church of Smyrna; he exhorts the Ephesians to humility, meekness and mildness; and he tells the Romans that he does not command them like Peter and Paul, for they were apostles, but he is a condemned convict, as a slave. And so in other writers of the second century the Bishop is simply the presiding officer among the presbyters of a church, the first among equals, the pastor of a single congregation. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage A.D. 248-258, was the father of diocesan episcopacy and of Romanism. He represented “the Bishops as the successors of the apostles, the chair of Peter as the center of episcopal unity, and the church at Rome the root of all (radix et matrix ecclesiae Catholicae, root and mother of the Catholic church, Epistle 45).” But Cyprian conceded only an ideal precedence to the Bishop of Rome, for he accused the Roman Bishop Stephen of error and abuse of power. The first “Ecumenical council” of Nice (A.D. 325), conferred on the Bishop of Rome no more authority than on the Bishops of Antioch or Alexandria. The canons of the Nicene council were forged at Rome in the interest of the papacy, and this forgery was condemned by the council of Chalcedon A.D. 451. The first pope, in the real sense of the word, was Leo I. (A.D. 440-461), who ambitiously and energetically sought to transform the “church” into an ecclesiastical monarchy, with himself as the head; and yet the twenty eighth canon of the council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451), acknowledged by Rome to be (Ecumenical, elevated by the Bishop of Constantinople to official equality with the pope. The vast forgery of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals was made in the ninth century, and pretended that the popes from Clement I. (A.D. 91) to Damasus I. (A.D. 384) ruled over a church, which the clergy were disconnected with the state, and unconditionally subordinate to the pope. These documents, now admitted by even Roman Catholics to be fraudulent, were used by the popes and papal writers with great effect for six hundred years to establish and increase the power of the popes over the Bishops. The first half of the ninth century is known as the period of the “pornocracy,” during which the papal chair was filled by a succession of the most licentious reprobates. Hildebrand, or Gregory VII., who was pope A.D. 1073-1080, claimed to be lord over all the nations of the world, and to have the right to depose princes and absolve subjects from the oath of loyalty. Bonafice VIII. (1294-1303) issued in 1302 the famous bull “Unam sanctam,” which declared that “for every human creature it is a condition of salvation to submit to the Roman pontiff.” At the close of the fifteenth century, Innocent VIII. and Alexander VI. once more reached the deepest abyss of depravity. The council of Trent (A.D. 1545-1563) and the society of Jesuits have made the popes the absolute masters of the Catholic hierarchy and “church,” as shown by the pontificate of Pius IX. (1846-1878), who in 1854 decreed the doctrine of Immaculate Conception, or sinlessness, of the Virgin Mary; and, in 1864, by his Syllabus of Errors, sweepingly condemned all the principles of religious liberty and of modern civilization; and who was declared by the Vatican council, in 1870, to be infallible in all his official definitions of faith and morals. Thus “the worship of a woman is virtually substituted for the worship of Christ, and a man-god in Rome for the God-Man in heaven.” Heathen idolatry is no worse in principle. Such is the consistent development of what is known in the Protestant and Baptist churches as the “masterpieces of Satan,” Which is based upon the glaring falsehoods that Christ set Peter over the other Apostles, that He made Peter His sole authoritative representative on earth, that Peter was Bishop of Rome, and that his pretended vicegerency was to be perpetuated in the succession of Roman Bishops. All pretended Protestants apostolic successions are derived entirely from Rome; and yet Rome excommunicates and anathematizes all persons who are outside her communion. The contradictions of Catholic historians in regard to the succession of the pretended popes of the first century are irreconcilable; the latest and highest criticism acknowledges that an impenetrable cloud hangs over the history of the church during the last thirty years of the first century. Thus Divine Providence purposely and forever destroyed all possibility of proving the thoroughly unscriptural and carnalizing theory of a material, mechanical succession from the Apostles-a theory which, in it’s ultimate horrible development by Rome, consigns to everlasting torments all human beings who are outside the pale of such succession.

Says the able and learned Presbyterian church historian, Prof. P. Schaff: “The most learned English divines before the period of the Restoration (1660), such as Cranmer, Jewel, Hooker, Field, Ussher, Hall, and Stillingfleet, did not hold the doctrine of the Divine and exclusive right of episcopacy, and they fully recognized the validity of presbyterian ordination. Cranmer’s three successors in the primacy (Parker, Grindal and Whitgift), like him, did not question the ordination of the Lutherans and Calvinists. Queen Victoria, when in Scotland, takes the communion from the hands of a Presbyterian parson. Archbishop Ussher, the greatest English divine of his age, who in eighteen years had mastered the whole mass of patristic literature, defended the episcopacy only as a presidency of one presbyter over his peers, and declared that when abroad he would take the holy communion from a Dutch Reformed or French minister as readily as from an Episcopalian clergyman at home.

The exclusive high church doctrine was first intimated by Bishop Bancroft, of London (in a sermon, 1589), then taught and rigidly enforced by Archbishop Laud (1633-1645), the most un-Protestant of English prelates, who made such a near approach to Rome that he was offered a cardinal’s hat, and this doctrine was apparently sanctioned in 1662 by the cruel act of Uniformity. Since the Synod of Dort (1619) Arminian and High-Church principles have spread rapidly in the church of England. The Anglo-Catholicism of the nineteenth century is simply a revival of Laud’s system, which un-churched all non-Episcopal churches, and regarded the Anglican church as an independent sister of the Latin and Greek communions. It is a contradiction of the standards of the body, the consensus of its fathers down to Hooker, and an utter misstatement of the historic position of the church of England.” Macaulay says that in 1688 “the Low and High church parties, among the laity, were not unevenly balanced, but that the average of intellect and knowledge was higher among the Low church clergymen than among their order generally; that, though only one-tenth of the priesthood, there were among them as many men of distinguished eloquence and learning as could be found in the other nine-tenths.” Macaulay is the greatest English historian of the nineteenth century; and, though himself an Episcopalian, he declares, in regard to possession of the apostolic succession by the church of England, that it is utterly incapable of proof, that the transmission of ministerial orders is for 1500 years (before the reformation) “buried in utter darkness.” It has been well remarked that ” the only apostolic succession that is worth anything is the succession of the apostolic truth (doctrine), of the gospel, as apostolic men proclaimed it.” Instead of devoting our attention to “fables and endless and unedifying genealogies” (1 Tim. 1:4; Titus 3:9), we do well to leave these vanities to those who have nothing better, and to obey the direction of Christ’s to go at once to the scriptures of Divine truth to inquire concerning the will of God and the way of salvation (John 5:39).-The priestly or sacerdotal idea of the ministry, with the power of meditating between God and man, of offering sacrifice to God (in the “mass”), and of pronouncing absolution from sin, is not found in any ecclesiastical writer until the third century, and is altogether inconsistent with the sole mediatorship and eternal priesthood of Christ, and the power of God alone to forgive sins (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 8:1-6; 7:15-28; Ex. 34:7; Isa. 43:25; Matthew 6:12; Acts 5:31). The Apostles themselves never claimed these high Divine powers, which their pretended successors ambitiously and covetously claim. On the other hand, they were clothed, like their Divine Master, with humility; “they always paid tender regard to the rights feelings and freedom of all the saints; they recognized in every believer, even in a poor slave like Onesimus, a member of the same body with themselves, a partaker of their redemption, a beloved brother in Christ; they labored for the spiritual interests of churches with meekness and love and self-denial; Peter humbly calls himself a fellow-presbyter, and raises his prophetic warning against the hierarchical spirit which so easily takes hold of church officers and alienates them from the people (1 Peter 5:1-3).” In the last-named verse the Greek word rendered “heritage is kleros, from which is derived the English word clergy (compare the Septuagint in Num. 18:20 & Deut. 18:2); so that we have inspired authority for calling all God’s people”the clergy,” instead of limiting this title to a few proud lords. —The ordination of Elders and Deacons was the solemn setting apart, by the church through it’s Elders, of those members already called and qualified by God for those offices (Acts 6:1-6; 13:1-3; 1 Tim.1:6; Heb. 5:4); it was accompanied with prayer and the laying on of hands of the presbytery or Elders, and sometimes with fasting. Instead of the Spirit being communicated by the hands of the presbytery, the person ordained already had the Spirit before ordination, or else he was not qualified for the ceremony (Numbers 27:18,23; Acts 6:3-6; 13:2-3; 2 Tim 1:5-7 compared with Galatians 5:22; Heb. 5:4). The miracle working power of the Holy Ghost were sometime conferred on private members at the same time with the laying on of the hands of the Apostles (Acts 8:17-18; 19:6); but this was essentially different from ministerial ordination.

There are six different Greek words used in connection with a sacred office, and translated “ordain” in the English New Testament (poieo in Mark 3:14; ginomai in Acts 1:22; cheirotonco in Acts 14:23; orizo in Acts 17:31; tithemi in 1 Tim. 2:7; and kathistemi in Titus 1:5); only the last two of them. tithemi and kathistemi, are defined “ordain” by Liddell and Scott, the word “command” is given, under the same head, as the equivalent meaning of tithemi; kathistemi is rendered “appoint” in the new version in Titus 1:5, and so is poieo correctly rendered in Mark 3:14, as we have no record of Jesus putting His hands on Hid apostles to ordain them; nor can we suppose that, in Acts 17:31, Paul meant that God put His hands on Christ to ordain Him to the Judgeship of the world. The imposition of hands upon Deacons and Elders was but the solemn and expressive symbol of the designation of them to their sacred offices. —As for ordination to the office of Bishop in distinction from that of Elder, and allowing only such ordained Bishops to ordain, and having such ordained Bishops lay their hands (for confirmation) upon every baptized believer, there is absolutely no New Testament proof of any of these things; they are all the inventions and traditions of men, practiced from the third century by Catholic and similar communions.— “Elder” is a Jewish term applied to the ministry of the word, and denotes the gravity or dignity or wisdom of the office, and was especially used in the Jewish churches; “Bishop” is a Greek term applied to the same persons, and means overseer, and was especially used in the Greek churches; these officers are also called pastors or shepherds, as those who are to guide, feed and care for the flock. The scriptural obligations of the ministry of the word are to be ensamples or patterns to the church by their godly walk and conversation, to preach the gospel, to watch over the members, to preach, exhort, admonish, reprove and rebuke as needed, to preside in the meetings of the church and see that all things are done decently and in order, to administer the ordinances within the church (1 Peter 5:1-3; Titus 2:7; Acts 20:28; 1 Tim. 4:16; Matthew 28; 19-20; Mark 16: 15-16; 2 Tim 4:2; 1 Tim.5:17; Heb. 13:7,17,24; 1 Cor. 14:40). The qualifications of the ministry are given in 1 Tim. 3:1-7; Titus 1:6-9. Instead of one Bishop presiding over several churches, there was, it would seem, a plurality of Elders or Bishops in each of the apostolic churches, as at Jerusalem, at Ephesus, at Philippi, and at the ordination of Timothy (Acts 6:30; 14:23; 15:2,4,26; 16:4; 20:17,28; 21:18; Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 4:14; Jam 5:14); But the distinction between teaching Elders and ruling Elders, observed by Presbyterian and some congregational and some Baptist churches can not be proved by the New Testament or from antiquity; it was invented by Calvin, not in the first or second, but in the third edition of his Institutes (A.D. 1543). Very few Congregational or Baptist churches now retain the distinction; and many of the ablest Presbyterian writers have abandoned the scriptural defense of it. Only three New Testament texts have been adduced in proof of this distinction (Rom. 12:6-8; 1 Cor. 12:28; 1 Tim. 5:17—the chief stress has been laid upon the last text). If in Romans 12:6-8, ruling marks a distinct office, then there must be six distinct offices in the church, and prophecy, and ministry, teaching and exhortation are all distinct offices, and giving and showing mercy are offices are in the church. So in 1 Corinthians 12:28, if “governments” form a distinct office, there must be eight distinct offices in the church. These two texts, therefore, prove nothing in regard to the distinction between teaching and ruling Elders. Now let us examine 1 Timothy 5:17. If, as has been proved, the terms Bishop and Elder are, in the New Testament, everywhere synonymous, and an essential qualification of a Bishop is “aptness to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:9), all the Elders alluded to in 1 Timothy 5:17 are teaching Elders, and the distinction there drawn is not an official but a personal one-a distinction of service and not of rank; “the antithesis is not that of teaching and non teaching Elders, but that of those who rule well and teach zealously, and those who both rule and teach, indeed, but without any particular earnestness.” If the term Elder here does not mean a Bishop or preaching Elder, it is the only passage in the New Testament in which the term Elder has a different meaning. “If the apostles instituted the distinct office of ruling Elder, they have nowhere prescribed its qualifications. The words translated ‘double honor’ mean here, as shown by the next verse, not merely high esteem, but ample temporal maintenance; so that, if this passage does establish the office of ruling Elder, it enjoins that they who hold it shall receive ample pecuniary support; but the New Testament nowhere else enjoins pecuniary support for any church officers except those who preach the gospel. The word malista, translated ‘especially,’ does not mark distinct classes of persons, but introduces a specification of particular persons belonging to the same general class” (as in Acts 25:26; Gal. 6:10; Phil. 4:22; 1 Tim. 4:10; 5:8; 2 Tim 4:13; Titus 1:10; 2 Peter 2:10). The verb kopiao, here rendered “labor,” is defined by Liddell and Scott, for this very passage, “work hard, toil.” Thus the apostle enjoins that the Elders that rule well must be counted worthy of ample maintenance, especially those of them who laboriously devote themselves to preaching.” A sermon on “The Eldership,” preached at Lexington, VA., by James B. Ramsey, and still approvingly issued by the “Presbyterian Publishing Company,” declares that “in all cases the preaching and ruling Elders are classed together and treated as one body of rulers,” and that “ruling Elders are also Bishops, Pastors, leaders, and watchers for souls,” and are “entitled to a degree, at least, of maintenance from the church, in proportion as the devote to it their time and energies.” The office was unknown in the “church” until the sixteenth century. It is plain, from Heb. 13:7, that in the apostolic church ruling Elders were also preaching Elders.—Besides Elders or Bishops, Deacons were elected to office in the apostolic church (Acts 6:1-6; Phil. 1:1). Their qualifications are laid down in Acts 6:3; 1 Timothy 3:8-13. Their duties were to attend especially to the temporal interests of the church, to serve tables—the table of the Lord, of the pastor or minister, and of the poor (Acts 6:2; 1 Cor. 10:21; 9:9-14; Gal. 2:10). Deacons are not, like Bishops, required to be “apt to teach;” but, as they were to be “full of the holy Ghost and wisdom,” and to serve the Lord’s table, and the sacred feast was not to be eaten with the disorderly (1 Cor. 5:7-11), and the “wise” brethren were to “judge” between brethren at variance (1 Cor. 6:1-5), and the deacon, like the Bishop, must “rule his own house well” (1 Tim. 3:4-12), it would seem that deacons ought to exercise a special regard for the order and peace and spiritual health of the church. In this manner they can be valuable “helps” to the pastors (1 Cor. 12:28). Phillip was not only a deacon, but an “evangelist” (Acts 21:8), a traveling preacher of the gospel, like Timothy, and probably like Titus, Luke, Mark, Silas and Apollos (Acts 8:4-40; 2 Tim 4:5; Titus 1:5; 2 Cor. 8:18-19; Acts 20:6; 2 Tim 4:11; Acts 15:40; 18:24); more a founder or planter, than a pastor or waterer, of churches (1 Cor. 3:6)—rather the doer of a temporary work than the occupant of a settled office (2 Tim. 4:5). The term evangelist, as “an inspired writer of one of the four gospels,” was not used in the apostolic age, but this was a later custom. The offices of “Arch-Deacon” and “Sub-Deacon” are unscriptural, and were invented in the third century; the title and office of “Arch-Deacon were invented in the fourth century. As for deacons being a lower order of priests or of the ministry of the word, as in the Catholic and some Protestant communions, there is no scriptural authority for this or any other instance of hierarchy in the church of God, where all are brethren; the New testament writers are especially careful never to use the Greek verb archo, implying despostic rule, to the officer of a Christian church, but they uniformly apply this term to the rulers of the Jews and heathens.”It is certain,” says Mr. Stanley, “that in no instance before the beginning of the third century was the title or function of the Pagan or Jewish priesthood applied to Christian pastors.”

9. The ninth mark of the Apostolic church was the possession of a humble, God-called and God-qualified ministry. The qualifications laid down in the new Testament for a gospel minister are that he must be a regenerated, Christ-loving, God called and God qualified man—kind, gentle, humble, quiet, firm, virtuous, upright, just, sober, temperate, unselfish, not covetous, well-proved, exemplary, of good repute, sound in doctrine, able and apt to teach, and divinely impressed with the work of the ministry, not for ambitions or sordid ends, but for the good of men and the glory of God (Gal. 1; Eph. 3; 4:8-16; John 21:15-17; 16:13-15; Matthew 10:1-6; Rom.5:5; 2 Cor. 3:5-6; 1 Tim.3:1-7; 4:12-16; Titus 1:6-9; Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:1-4; 1 Cor. 9:16).

“The human heart,” says Mr. Schaff, “craves not a learned, letter writing, literary Christ, but a wonder working, cross bearing, atoning Redeemer, risen, enthroned in Heaven, and ruling the world; furnishing at the same time, to men and angels an unending theme for meditation, discourse and praise. So too, the Lord chose none of His Apostles, with the single exception of Paul, from the ranks of the learned; He did not train them to literary authorship, nor give them, throughout His earthly life, a single express command to labor in that way. Plain fishermen of Galilee, unskilled in the wisdom of this world, but filled with the Holy Spirit of truth and the powers of the world to come, were commissioned to preach the glad tiding of salvation to all nations in the strength and in the name of their glorified Master, who sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and has promised to be with them to the end of time.” “Christ Himself grew up quietly and unnoticed in a retired Galilean mountain village of proverbial insignificance, and in a lowly carpenter shop, far away from the city of Jerusalem, from schools and libraries. He was independent of human learning and literature, of schools and parties (John 7:15). He taught the world as one who owed nothing to the world. He came down from Heaven and spoke out of the fullness of His personal intercourse with the great Jehovah. He was no scholar, no artist, no orator; yet He was wiser than all sages, He spake as never man spake, and made an impression on His age and all ages after Him such as no man ever made or can make.” His leading or representative Apostles were Peter, John, and Paul. Peter and John were “unlearned and ignorant men” (Acts 4:13); the first adjective here, agrammatos, means “without learning, unlettered, illiterate;” the second adjective, idiotes, means, “a private or common person, an unprofessional man or layman, an unskilled, ignorant, ill-informed man.” Meyer, the most modern exegete, says that the two terms mean substantially the same thing—“the double designation being intended to express the idea very fully, destitute of all rabbinic culture, strangers to theological learning.””The Apostles,” says Albert Barnes, “Had neither wealth, armies nor allies. With the exception of Paul, they were men without learning. They were taught only by The Holy Ghost; armed only with the power of God; victorious only because He was their captain; and the world acknowledged the presence of the messengers of the Highest, and the power of the Christian religion. Its success never has been and never can be accounted for by any other by any other supposition than that God attended it.” God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” declares the apostle Paul; “and God chose the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, and things which are not, to bring to naught things which are, that no flesh should glory in His presence” (1 Cor. 1:27-29). And the inspired Apostle declares also that he himself did not receive the gospel which he preached from man, neither was he taught it but by direct revelation from Jesus Christ; and that after this revelation of God’s Son in Him, he did not confer with flesh and blood, nor go up to Jerusalem to those who were Apostles before him (Gal. 1); and accordingly, he declares that, when he came even to the learned Greek city of Corinth, he came not with excellency of speech or wisdom, declaring the testimony of God, for he determined to know nothing among them save Jesus Christ and Him crucified; that he was with them in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and his speech and preaching were not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that their faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God (1 Cor. 2:1-5). His sufficiency was of God, who made him an able minister of the New Testament, not of the letter, but of the Spirit, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life (2 Cor. 3:5-6). Not his Greek learning which he acquired in his native city of Tarsus, nor his rabbinic or theological learning which he acquired at the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, enabled Paul to preach the gospel of the Son of God, but only that Divine power with which he was endowed with from on high, and which he, with all his natural and theological learning, needed just as much as the ignorant Peter and John, in order to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ (Acts 1; 2; 9; 10.) Nay, all his natural, fleshly advantages, Paul counted but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord, in whom he desired to be found, divested of his own imperfect legal righteousness, that he might know Christ and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death, if by any means he might attain unto the resurrection of the dead (Phil. 3:3-11.)

After these plain, unmistakable statements of the New Testament, what shall we say of the ancient and modern unscriptural, proud, Pharisaic doctrine that human learning is indispensable qualification of a minister of the gospel of the meek and lowly Lamb of God? What shall we say of the numerous and splendid structures known as “Theological Seminaries,” erected in the 19th century, for the purpose of qualifying men to preach the gospel, by a course of study ranging through several years, and occupied with from 40 to 100 books of uninspired man’s composition? What resemblance do these pretentious human inventions bear to the humble, spiritual, Divine methods of the Lord Jesus Christ and His lowly Apostles and other elders of the first century? What a world-wide change, and, in the opinion of the carnal religionists of today, what a vast improvement has taken place in the methods of evangelization! And there is no precept or example of these fine religious improvements among the people of God in the Bible, the question arises where and how did they originate? Enoch and Noah, the two antediluvian preachers recorded in the Bible, had no collegiate training so far as we have any reason to believe. The Egyptian learning of Moses, with his mighty words and deeds, puffed him up, and caused him to run before he was sent, and so thoroughly disqualified him for leading the children of Israel that God saw proper to hide him in the wilderness for forty years, and train him in the Divine school at the backside of the desert, before commissioning him to undertake the leadership of Israel (Acts 7:22-36; Ex. 2; 3.) As for the “companies” or “the sons of the prophets” mentioned in the books of Samuel and Kings, there is but little authority, in the entire scriptural record, for supposing that they were anything more than sacred schools of music, or that any useful true prophets of the Lord were trained in them; but we are informed that the wicked king Saul was in one of these companies (1 Sam. 5:5-12); that the prophet Elisha told another company of them to hold their peace (2 Kings 2:3); that, in a time of famine, one gathered a lap full of deadly wild gourds to eat, and Elisha healed the pottage with meal; and that Amos says he was not one of them (Amos 7:14). There is no proof that a single prophet named in the Bible was trained in these companies.

In his reply to Wm. Hooper, D.D., LL.D., Elder P. D. Gold. of North Carolina, says: “You say, were there not schools of the prophets? Well, it seems to me that the prophets can give a sensible account of their call as anyone can give for them. Do any of them ever tell us that they were called out of any school, or were ever called to go to any such place? They spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. But it is asked, were not the disciples with Jesus for three years before they began to preach? If they are not with Him all their lives, what is their preaching worth? Are the schools in the place of Jesus, or is he to be found by going to them? And is that the way to get to Christ? But you say, will not human learning aid man in preaching the gospel—will it not give him words and power over men’s minds, and enable him to preach the gospel in a more attractive form? I am free to admit the value of human learning in man’s earthly affairs, and heartily commend its acquisition in that sense. But what does inspiration say about spiritual things, and how they are spoken? ‘Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.’ When the Lord calls a learned man (though He does not call many), that man glories in becoming a fool that he may win Christ. Human learning makes no part of the new man, and the saint who human learning is just as weak and dependent God for his crumb as any other, and all are feed with the same kind of food. But you say, after one is certainly called to preach, can not the schools polish him, and give him more influence over men, and enable him to better command their respect, by keeping pace with human learning? Tell me, from Scripture, where one ever tried it, or where it was ever authorized. How much can frail man add to God’s gift? How much pride do you think is necessary to influence man to presume such a task? Do not the scriptures pointedly forbid the employment of worldly weapons in building up Christ’s kingdom? Is the minister of Christ to suit his message to proud man’s taste? ‘We speak wisdom to them that are perfect, but not the wisdom of this world.’ It seems to me scriptures make some allusions to theological schools, though in the way of alarm. ‘But the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts will they heap to themselves teachers having itching ears.’ Much as the Bible is talked of, it’s doctrine is not endured; but this progressive age calls for theological schools that shall enlighten men to preach doctrines suitable to men’s lusts. Men who have devoted so much time and labor in the preparation for their ministry, are worthy of positions of influence and profit. The teachers come down from these schools dosed with a sort of preparation from dead men’s brains, that will make them sick enough if God would ever teach them where their dependence lies. How do these schools heap up teachers? They furnish opportunities for obtaining an education, open the way to positions of honor and reward, so that there is but little trouble attending the road, and if money enough could be commanded it would be difficult to tell how many would be heaped up; but they shall have itching ears, and shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. The doctrines and fables of men are accepted. Andrew Fuller becomes a wonderful standard. He takes repentance and faith out of the covenant of grace, and puts them under the law, in the sense that he makes them man’s duty, and not gifts of grace. If salvation comes on account of man’s performance of his duty, it is of works in some sense. He brings in the modern missionary enterprise, a system somewhat like the popish measures of propagating their creed, but unknown to the Bible and to Baptists, and is a disturber of gospel peace and order among churches. His followers have departed from the truth further than he did, as he refused flattering titles which they accept for modesty’s sake with out much urging, and they do not preach salvation as nearly by grace as he did, so they are waxing worse and worse. As the world is to be evangelized, the tender mind of the young must be converted by the means of the newly invented Sunday Schools, and humanly prepared preachers must be sent to the heathen. Some man must hold the hand of the missionary while he goes down in the wells, and he must see how his bread comes before he goes; and your churches combine in forming such tremendous agencies of power as your conventions, while you all glory in the fruits of your own wise system. That your denomination generally indorse your system is manifest, and what little I write may only have the effect of influencing them to fall down before their idols, and shout in louder strains. ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’”

After the return of the Jews from Babylon they established synagogues and synagogue-schools; and here the Jewish rabbis zealously accumulated and multiplied, and taught the Jewish youth those interminable Pharisaic traditions which made void the law of God, and which Christ severely condemned (Matthew 15:1-9; Mark 7:1-13) Truly, these are unfortunate precedents for the “Theological Seminaries” of the 19th century. The first “Christian” theological school, says Neander, and with him agree other historians, was established at Alexandria, in Egypt, about A.D. 180, and lasted about 200 years. The earliest teachers were Pantaenus and Clement, “converted” heathen philosophers, and their principal aim seems to have been to teach so-called “Christian” tradition, to transform Christianity into philosophy, to depreciate humble faith and exalt lordly knowledge, and to base human salvation upon the natural free will of man, declaring that the first motion from sin to holiness must and can be made by the sinner himself. This false system became popular, and spread widely throughout the Greek or eastern “churches.” The most learned and celebrated teacher in the Alexandrian school was Origen, a universalist. The study of “theology” was pursed in the Catholic monasteries of Asia, Africa, and Europe during the Dark Ages, and those so-called “schoolmen” were the most famous students. The cold, dry, barren Aristotelian, syllogistic. subtle, frivolous, wearisome, technical. metaphysical, traditionary, mythological, casuistical, pantheistic tomes of the Scholastic Divinity virtually completed the edifice of the Papal Hierarchy, and have been fitly compared by Milman to the great rough pyramids of Egypt, with their immense and useless display of human power, and with their small, dark, labyrinthine passages and chambers, where one may wonder without end and find nothing. The Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, the ideal “theologian,” fills twelve hundred very closely printed folio pages in double columns, and is the Roman Catholic casuistical substitute for the New Testament—in which the author shows that “he is nearly as consummate a skeptic, almost atheist, as he is a theologian.” These schoolmen proudly wore the magnificent titles of Perspicuous, Subtle, Profound, Irrefragable, Invincible, Angelical, Seraphic Doctors. Like the Jewish Rabbis, these scholastic doctors analyzed the scriptures to death, substituted the shell for the kernel, made void the word of God by the traditions of men. Christ warned His disciples not to be called Rabbi, or Doctor, or Master;”for,” says He, “one is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren” (Matthew 23:8-12) But, like the theologians of the Dark Ages, their successors in the 19th century totally disregard the commandment of Christ, and thus prove that someone else besides Him is their master; and literally and “theological” institutions presume, in professedly Christian lands, to confer these point blank Anti-Christian, childish and worthless titles. Little fear have they of God, when they give flattering titles to men (Job 32:21-22). During the 19th century a large number of the most famous German professors of theology, or “Doctors of Divinity,” have become the most thorough-going infidels in the world, and have labored with persistent and herculean efforts to undermine and destroy the entire Scriptures of inspired truth. They, and others like them, may well be called, in the language of Mr. Spurgeon,[2] “Doctors of Damnation,” sitting in the teachers seat of the scornful (Ps. 1:1). Some men occupying theological chairs in England and in the United States have developed similar tendencies. The great majority of these “Divinity Schools” teach wretched perversions of the truth, even in the letter; and so long as the Scriptures are true, it is certain that no one nor all of them combined can ever qualify one person to preach the gospel of Christ, for the sufficiency of the spiritual Christian minister is not of men, but of God; the letter, even in all it’s literal truth, only killeth, but the Spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3:5-18; Gal. 1; Eph. 3:17-21).

It was the learned religionists of Judea who rejected and crucified Christ; and yet these men had searched and idolized the Scriptures, thinking that in them they had eternal life, and ignoring Christ, who is the sum and substance of the Scriptures (John 5:39-40). The title of “holy” or “reverend” belongs not to sinful men, but alone to the High and Holy Being who inhabits eternity (Ps. 111:9; Isa. 57:15). Elder, or Bishop, or Pastor is the Bible designation of the minister of the word. —While the Scriptures totally oppose the idea of men being made either Christians or ministers by human inventions and means, they equally and emphatically enjoin upon the minister to “read, search, meditate upon the Scriptures, which are given by the inspiration of God, and are profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works; to be earnest to show himself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth; to be in these things” (rendered in both the authorized and the revised versions, “give thyself wholly to them”), “that his progress may appear to all; take heed to himself and to his doctrine, and continue in them” (1 Tim. 4:13-16; 2 Tim 2:15; 3:14-17). Like all the dear children of God, the minister should especially desire “to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18) and, as the Scriptures testify of Him, the true servant of God will delight to read the precious volume of inspiration, and will beseech the Lord Jesus by His Spirit to open his understanding that he may understand the Scriptures, even the deep things of God, the unsearchable riches of Christ, the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven, thus comparing spiritual things with spiritual, and like a good householder bringing out of his treasure things new and old, that he may properly feed the church of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood (John 5:39; Luke 24:44-48; 1 Cor. 2; Eph. 3; Matthew 13:11,52; 1 Cor. 4:1; Acts 20:28, John 16:13-15 21:15-17; 1 Peter 5:1-4). The call to preach is proved by the ability to preach to the edification of God’s people. The internal call “lies in gifts bestowed, and in the disposition of the man’s mind to make use of them in the service of God; for God never calls a man to any service but He gives him abilities for it; which, when a man is sensible of, and is satisfied that God has bestowed a gift upon him, he cannot be easy to wrap up his talent in a napkin, but is desirous of making use of it in a public manner; not by mere impulse, through vanity of mind, and with ambitious views and sordid ends, but from a principle of love to the souls of men and the glory of God; of this internal call a man’s gifts are evidences to himself and to others.” We may be sure that God does not call a man to the ministry, and then leave his qualification to men. When a man is called of God to the ministry, he at the same time has the gift or qualification (Ex. 4:11-12; Isa. 6:1-9; Jer. 1:4-10; Dan 1:17-21; Amos 9:14-15; Luke 1:15; 3:22; 4:1,14-15; Matthew 10:1-7; Acts 9:20; 20:28; Gal. 1:15-16; 2 Cor. 3:5-6; 4:5-6; Eph. 3:7-8; 4:11-16).

10. The tenth mark of the Apostolic church was the fact that, while the ministry received voluntary help from the churches, they were not salaried, but labored themselves, more or less, for their own support. As already shown, the members were mostly from the middle and lower classes of society, such as fishermen, peasants, mechanics, freedmen and slaves; and as they were few and poor themselves, and each church had several Elders, it was hardly possible for them to furnish entire support to their Elders. Even “the Jewish Rabbis taught gratuitously, and derived their support from an honorable trade and from the free gifts of their pupils. The prevailing sentiment at the time of Christ favored a combination of intellectual and physical labor as beneficial to health and character.” Each Jewish child was taught some trade. Jesus was not only a carpenter’s son, but, until He entered upon His ministry at thirty years of age, a carpenter Himself (Matthew 13:55; Mark 6:3; Luke 3:23); then He gave all His time and strength to the cause of God, and for three years “His humble wants were more than supplied by a few grateful disciples from Galilee, so that something was left for the benefit of the poor” (Luke 8:3; Matthew 27:55; Mark 15:41; John 13:29). His charge to His Apostles, when He first sends them out, is, _“Freely ye have received, freely give;_ provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, for the workman is worthy of his meat” (Matthew 10:8-10). Those whose hearts were opened of the Lord would gladly receive and entertain them in their houses (Matthew. 10:12, 13; Acts 16:14, 15). “Disinterestedness is one of the most needful and beautiful ornaments of him who proclaims the free, unmerited grace of God, and exhorts men to seek first of all the everlasting blessings of the kingdom of Heaven.” The ministry were not to turn the work of preaching into a common trade, stipulating beforehand for a regular and fixed salary, and, like a worldly hireling, preaching for filthy lucre’s sake, and, like such a one, when the price is not paid, fleeing because he is a hireling (1 Peter 5:2; 1 Tim. 3:3; Titus 1:7; John 10:13). But nothing is plainer in the Scriptures than the Lord’s ordination that they who preach the gospel (not some other gospel, which is not another, but they who preach the gospel) should live of the gospel that they who sow unto the church spiritual things should reap of the carnal things of the church that, as those called of God to the ministry of the word supply the spiritual wants of the flock, so their own temporal wants should be supplied by the flock according as God has prospered them (1 Cor. 9:7-14; Gal. 6:6; 1 Tim. 5:17, 18; 2 Cor. 16:2). Still, let it never be forgotten by the true minister of the gospel that the inspired Apostle who gave all these injunctions as to the temporal support of the preachers of the gospel testifies that he used none of these things, neither did he write these things that it should be so done unto him; that necessity was laid upon him, yea, woe was unto him if he preached not the gospel; that his reward was in preaching the gospel of Christ without charge; that he had coveted no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel; that his own hands had ministered to his necessities and to those that were with him; that he had labored night and day, because he would not be chargeable to any (1 Cor. 9:15-18; Acts 20:33, 34; 1 Thess. 2:9); that his ministry had been passed in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness, besides the daily internal care of all the churches; that he took pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake, for when he was weak, then he was strong; that he would very gladly spend and be spent for the people of God, though the more abundantly he loved them, the less he was loved (2 Cor. 11:27, 28; 12:10-15). Noble, self-denying, Christ-like servant of God, freely did he receive, freely did he give; the abundant grace bestowed upon him was, indeed, not bestowed in vain; and to that Divine grace alone he ascribes all his unparalleled service and sacrifice for Christ (Matthew 10:8; 1 Cor. 15:10). “He never collected money for himself, but for the poor Jewish Christians in Palestine, to those sore needs other Christians, in their poverty, contributed (Acts 11:27-30; 24:17; Rom. 15:25, 26; 1 Cor. 16:1-3; Gal. 2:10). Only as an exception did he receive gifts from the Philippian Christians, who were peculiarly dear to him (Phil. 4:15-19). And, by precept as well as by example, he earnestly warns ministers against the love of filthy lucre, which is peculiarly unbecoming in them, and almost annihilates their good influence and usefulness; and he exhorts them to contentment, hospitality and disinterestedness” (Titus 1:10, 11; 1 Tim. 3:2, 3; 6:6-19; Acts. 20:17, 33-35). The circumstances of those called to preach the gospel are quite different. “Although God’s ministers are generally poor,” says Elder Gilbert Beebe, of New York, “Yet there are evidently cases where one minister is more in want of help than another; some have large families, others have none; some few are wealthy, and need nothing from their flock, others are entirely dependent, and are to live of the gospel; some, again, are not so closely occupied in the labors of the gospel as to prevent their laboring some part of their time, and thus, in part, minister to their own necessities. A minister of Jesus should never be above laboring with his hands, and we are persuaded that Christ’s ministers are not; still, when it is in the power of a church to relieve their minister from the cares of this world, that he may devote his time principally or wholly to the work, it is right they should do so. But nothing is more apparent than that the worldly system of contracting with preachers to reach by the day or year for a stipulated amount of lucre presents a charm which allures thousands, whom God has not called to preach His gospel, from the bar and other pursuits in the ministry, thus, by the greediness of lucre, making merchandise of the gospel. In regard to the meager assistance given by some of our churches to their ministers, much of the fault lies within the preachers in withholding the proper admonition of the gospel; but a still greater fault is in the frequently preaching as though they thought it wicked for the ministers of Jesus to receive remuneration from their brethren for their time, service, etc. Let this subject, with every other in New Testament, receive due consideration and prompt action.” “Ministerial support,” says Elder W. M. Mitchell, of Alabama, “is a point not to be regulated by agreement between the church and minister, but it is a standing law regulated by the authority of God. Let churches and ministers see that they do not add to it, nor diminish from it. The minister may and ought to do some work if able to do it, and ought to use every lawful effort of industry and economy so far as he can without impairing his pastoral duties, and he should not use the liberality of his brethren to foster price, vanity or idleness, neither in himself nor in his family, but for a decent support, and for relieving his own mind and hands, that he may be the more serviceable to his brethren and churches. He should do this even for the sake of example, if nothing else (2 Thess. 3:7-12). When the turning point of pastoral services is placed on a money basis by any preacher, it would be best for the church to withhold from him.” “The voluntary system,” says Mr. Schaff, “best corresponds with the spirit of the gospel, was practiced by the church for the first three centuries, and is the most advantageous to the kingdom of God. Legal enactments for the payment of tithes to the ministry, as to the priests among the Jews, are not met with in Christendom before the sixth century.” Since that time the connection of “Church” and State has made the legal support of the ministry of the “established church” the custom in Europe; but the Constitution of the United States fortunately forbids such an establishment and support of any religion in this country. Yet regular stipulated ministerial salaries, though unknown in the apostolic church and in the first three centuries, are given in nearly all the religious denominations of the United States, but not among Old School, Primitive or Bible Baptists.

11. The eleventh mark of the Apostolic church was the sending out of the divinely called and qualified ministry by the Holy Spirit in themselves and in the churches, their going forth, whither soever the Lord directed, in simple dependence upon Him, and their preaching the gospel to every creature, whether Jew or Gentile, and especially shepherding the lambs and sheep of Christ. During the early part of His ministry Jesus called His twelve Apostles and sent them forth to preach, forbidding them to go to the Gentiles or Samaritans, and directing them to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10:1, 5-7); and He furthermore directed them to charge nothing for their services, and to provide nothing beforehand for their support; and He told them that, while a few would receive them, they would, like Himself, be hated and persecuted by the great majority of men; and He instructed them when persecuted in one place to flee to another, and fear not those who could kill only the body, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both should and body in hell; and He intimated to them that they were very precious in His sight, for the very hairs of their head were all numbered, and the all seeing God would be with them; nay, He even identified Himself with them, saying, “He that receiveth you receiveth Me, and He that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me” (Matthew 11:9-42). What an unworldly commission! In what an unworldly manner were the Apostles to enter upon it! How unworldly must have been the motive of Christ and His Apostles! How plainly they acted as though this world were nothing, and eternity were all! How few human beings are there now in the world like them! Christ gave to the seventy disciples instructions similar to those which He had given to the twelve Apostles (Luke 10:1-16). His language in Luke 22:35-38 is manifestly not literal, but allegorical, meaning “The predicted time of trial for the Master and His followers is now at hand; you may expect hardship, contempt and persecution hereafter much more than heretofore;” for two swords were not enough to defend eleven persons from millions of foes, and Christ healed the would inflicted by Peter’s sword, and commanded His too forward disciple to put up again his sword into its place (Matthew 26:51, 52), thus showing that the weapons of their warfare were not to be carnal, but spiritual (2 Cor. 10:15). Just before His ascension He told His Apostles that they should, in a few days, be endued with the power of this Holy Ghost, and they should be witnesses unto Him both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth (Acts 1:5-8). He said, “All power is given unto Me in Heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, lo, I am with you always, unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:18-20). Or, as Mark gives the commission, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but He that believeth not shall be damned” (Mark 16:15, 16). Instead of preaching only to the Jews, as He had commanded them during His ministry (Matthew 10:5, 6), the Apostles, after the ascension of Christ, were to preach to any human being that they) met in all the world; and they were to go forward in simple dependence upon Him who had all the power in Heaven and earth, and who would always be with them; and they were everywhere to preach the gospel, that is, according to inspired authority, “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth,_ whether Jew or Greek”—”Christ crucified,_ unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (Rom. 1:16; 1 Cor. 1:23, 24). Ezekiel, in the valley of very dry bones representing the whole house of Israel, simply prophesied, by Divine direction, the almighty power of God that was soon to be exerted in their behalf—how that God would open their graves, and cause them to come up out of their graves, and put sinews and flesh and skin upon them, and breath within them, and they should live, and know that the Lord had performed this might work (Ezek. 37:1-14); it was not the work of the bones or of the prophet or of any created arm, but exclusively the work of Almighty God, and all the living house of Israel know it. So the Apostles were commanded by Christ to preach, and did preach, not the power of dead sinners or of human appliances of any kind, but the power of a Divine and Almighty Savior to save any sin-laden soul; yea, even the amazing power of the voice of the Son of God to penetrate the should of the spiritually dead sinner, and make him live (Mark 16:15; Rom. 1:16; Matt. 1:21; John 5:25; Eph. 2:1-10). The Apostles could not utter that voice, much less can any other men; not the Apostles, but only the Divine Spirit, could impart spiritual life and hearing to one dead in trespasses and sins, and make him a new creature in Christ, prepared to hear and believe the gospel and be baptized and be saved (John 6:63; Eph. 1:19, 20; 2:1-10; 2 Cor. 5:17, 18; John 3:1-8). The Apostles had no more power to do the work of the Spirit in regeneration than they had to do the work of the Father in election, or the work of the Son in redemption; all these works being equally Divine. Only those ordained to eternal life believe, and this ordination is of God (Acts 16:48; Rom. 8:29-39; Eph. 1:3-14; 2 Thess. 2:13, 14; 1 Peter 1:1-5). —Now, as God alone knows who and where are His elect and redeemed people to whom it is His holy will for His gospel to be preached that they may hear and believe and be saved, and as He has not instituted His ministry in vain, it is quite certain that, just as the Son did during his earthly ministry, so must the Spirit now direct His ministers where to go. The Apostles received such directions from the Spirit, as we learn in the book of Acts (8:29, 39; 10:19, 20; 11:12; 13:1-4; 16:6, 7, 9, 10; 18:9-11; 21:4, 11; 22:21; 23:11; 27:24). They went as thus directed by the Holy Ghost; and, as Christ had instructed them, when they were persecuted in one city, they fled to another (Acts 8:1-25; 12:17; 13:50-52; 14:5-7, 19, 26; 16:37-40; 17:5-15; 18:6; 21-28). Thus directed by the Spirit, and driven by persecution, these true, unworldly, poor, and mostly unlearned servants of God, depending upon Him for support, and despised, hated, scourged, stoned and imprisoned by the rich, proud heathen and Jewish religionists, traversed the Roman Empire, and found some of God’s people) wherever they went, whose hearts were opened by the Lord to believe the gospel and take pleasure in entertaining the ministry of the word (Acts 16:14, 15). They thus found and taught and guided and tended and fed (not goats and dogs and swine, but) the dear lambs and sheep of Christ (not with the chaff and husks of human learning, vain philosophy, false science, and the mere externals of religion, such as rites and ceremonies, upon which gracious souls cannot live, but) with the sincere milk of the word, and the strong meat of Divine, sovereign and all-sufficient grace, and the sound doctrine of the Apostles and prophets (Ezek. 34:11-31; Isa. 40:1-11; John 10:14-16, 27-30; 21:15-17; 1 Peter 5:1-5; 2:2; Acts 20:28; Heb. 5:12-14; Rom.8:29-39; 11:5-7; 3:24-31; 4:16; 5:19-21; 6:23; 1 Cor. 1:23-31; 2; 2 Cor. 12:9; Eph. 1, 2; 1 Peter 1:1-5; Isa. 45:24, 25; 61:1-3; Jer. 23:6; 33:16; 31:31-34; Col. 2:8, 1 Tim. 1:4; 6:20; Gal. 2:21; 3:10, 17; 4:10, 11; 5:1-6).

The dear people of God who thus partook of the spiritual treasures brought them by His called and qualified and sent servants, loved these poor, persecuted and faithful ministers of the word, and freely gave them of their carnal treasures for their support. “It is God’s order,” says Elder J. R. Respess, of Georgia, “That those to whom the gospel is ministered are the are the ones to minister in Carnal things to the preacher. God opened the heart of Lydia, and He is the same God now. We grant that, if the letter of the gospel is forced upon an unwilling people, those sending it must be at charges for it; but when God sends it, He sends it to a person whom He will prepare to receive it; and, if they do receive it, they will care for those preaching it. They will, if they are worth of it, and able to do it. Though even then God’s ministers are made to approve themselves ministers of Christ, in necessities, distresses, cold, nakedness and hunger. No other ministers save God’s ministers will endure such things for the love of God; men will endure such things for the love of the world, but not for the love of God. In human schools children are pretendedly taught Christianity now as they are taught geography and arithmetic, and men are taught to preach as a doctor is taught medicine; and, in the same worldly manner in which a commercial agent is sent by a merchant to a foreign country for traffic in merchandise, the so called ‘missionary’ is now sent by his employers to heathen lands. Anybody can afford to trip over to foreign countries if the sacrifice is done away; a mere spirit of adventure may prompt a man in going; a love of science or fame will make men do it—make them encounter great dangers, privations and hardships. See how many have perished by cold and starvation in search of the North Pole. The Jesuits set up the cross in the trackless wilderness of this county amongst the Indians, years and years ago; and so did trappers and hunters make their sign there, too. But when God sends His true servants, they go in His Spirit, to do His work, and not to please the flesh; they get no honor of men; no paeans are sung to them for the great sacrifice they are making; and they go often, if not bound in chains as Paul was, bound in spirit, encountering sneers, ridicule, persecution and contempt from the Rabshakehs of the world. (God and man and true religion are the same today that they were in New Testament times.) As for many heathens made to the ‘missionary’ cause in professedly Christian lands, we don’t believe a word of it; such declarations dishonor Christ. That Christ loved His people with an everlasting love; that He gave Himself for them; suffered and died for them; that a woman never loved her little babe, or a husband his wife, as Christ loved the church; and that God spared not His only Son, but gave Him for us to die, the just for the unjust; and after all the sufferings of Christ after His resurrection and ascension and meditation; having, too, all power in Heaven and in earth and over all flesh, to give eternal life to all that the Father has given Him—and then to say that they are perishing because some stingy miser will not throw in money, or some proud, vain woman wears a diamond pin, or some unwilling man will not go to preach, or some fleeing Jonah goes to Tarsus, is absolutely ridiculous. There is not a husband in the world that loves his wife, having the power that Christ has, would leave her to pine and die on some foreign shore; and much less would Christ. No doubt the Pharisees had a mission system in Christ’s day, for we are told they compassed sea and land to make proselytes—went everywhere propagating their religion. Paul had that religion before he was a Christian. It was respectable in the eyes of the people, and they looked with great contempt upon Christ and His disciples. Christ and His religion are the same today as then. Men in nature did not love the religion of Christ then, nor do they yet; nor did they receive it by worldly wisdom, because it was and is God’s decree that men, by wisdom, should not know God. ‘For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?’ Why then resort to it, seeing it is foolishness with God, to effect the purpose of God? ‘For you see you calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh,’ etc. Our confidence is this: That the Lord will prepare His called servants to serve Him as He wills; that He will imbue them with His Spirit and endow them with power from on high, so that they will demonstrate His Spirit in their work and glorify Him. Thus it is that we find some of them called without learning sufficient even to read a hymn, but spelling out, so to speak, the Scriptures by pine-knot fires at night when the day’s work was over, and arriving at a proficiency in the word rarely equaled; men of robust minds and faith, compared with whom the men of mere worldly learning are in their littleness but dwarfs, but mole hills to mountains. (Consider, for instance, the case of John the Baptist, with his wild food and raiment and surroundings, than whom, says Christ, there was none greater among those born of women. Matthew 3; 11:11). If God wishes an educated minister, like Paul, He calls him. The Old School or Primitive Baptist ministers are Bible Missionaries, traveling, as directed by the Spirit, in the manner of the Apostles, in dependence upon the God of Israel, tens and hundreds of thousands of miles. Why we do not and have not gone all over the world, is not for us to explain any more than it is a matter for us to explain why so few, even here, in this professedly Christian land of increasing pride and greed and dishonesty and selfishness and immorality and hypocrisy, believe the truth as it is in Jesus. And that others have been over the world is no great matter after all, unless they have benefited the world more than they have the Sandwich Islands, from all accounts of those demoralized and depopulated people.” During the hundred years since these islands were first visited by Europeans, the native population has decreased from about 400,000 to about 40,000; and though the people are more generally educated than any other people in the world, never every one being able to read and write, intemperance, licentiousness and disease abound; and Mr. J. R. Graves, an “Old Landmarker Missionary Baptist,” editor of the “Tennessee Baptist,” says, in the issue of his paper of June 10th, 1882, that “if the bottom facts were only known, it would be found these Islanders are only pseudo Christianized heathens, and are today made tenfold harder to convert to Christianity than they were before a missionary ever touched the island. The work,” he adds, “was done by Pedobaptists, unchecked by Baptist teachings or influence. The poor natives were taught exactly by the Confession that if they would mentally accept the forms of Christianity instead of idolatry, and be baptized for the remission of their sins, they would be Christians and saved. What has been done in these islands,” continues Mr. Graves, “is now being done in Africa and Asia by Pedobaptist missionaries.” “We oppose such Mission Societies,” says Elder Gilbert Beebe, in the “Signs of the Times,” “as are independent of the church of God, which we hold to be the only divinely authorized religious society upon earth; but we have, through the columns of a former number of this paper, offered to support the Lord’s ministers or missionaries to the utmost of our ability, even to the dividing of our last loaf with such of them as go out without purse or scrip, relying upon the sure mercies of David, without waiting to get the Lord’s promises indorsed by a Mission Board. We feel disposed to let such as have hired themselves out to Missionary Boards stand or fall to their own master, knowing that ‘his servants they are, to whom they yield themselves servants to obey.’ We consider all that a kind Providence has put into our possession belongs to the Lord, and as His stewards we are ready to deal it out to His servants according to His word.” Such, no doubt, is the feeling of every true Bible Baptist. The history of scriptural and unscriptural missions will be given in the next chapter of this volume.

12. The Twelfth Mark of the Apostolic church was that it was absolutely the only divinely recognized religious organization in the world. There was no forbidden, unhallowed and corrupting alliance between the church and worldly societies and human institutions, combining believers and unbelievers, for carrying on God’s work of evangelizing the nations; although, as it would seem, such confederacies, if ever necessary, were most essential in the first establishment of the feeble church on earth. When Israel came out of Egypt God forbade them ever to return to the carnal delights and idolatrous corruptions of Egypt any more (Deut. 17:16; Jer. 42:13-22). And when the mighty Assyrian army was approaching Jerusalem and threatening Israel with destruction, and some carnal, unbelieving, rebellious Israelites desired to go down to Egypt to get the assistance of her strength, and wisdom, and silver, and gold, and gods, the Lord pronounced a woe upon them for taking counsel of another besides Him, and for trusting in the shadow of Egypt instead of in the living God; and He directed them to cast away their idols of silver and gold, and to rest quietly and confidently in the Holy One of Israel, and they would see His salvation (Isa. 30, 31). And the Israelites, with Hezekiah their king, had the grace given them to obey the Divine command. They trusted implicitly and alone in the God of Israel for deliverance, and the angel of the Lord slew, in a single night, one hundred and eighty-five thousand of their Assyrian enemies, and drove the remainder back to their native land, and not one Israelite was harmed (Isa. 36, 37). These wonderful and ever to be remembered facts in sacred history are thus well described by the poet;

“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

“Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown

“For the angel of death spread his wings on the blast
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever were still.

“And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.”

The one thing needful, therefore, for Israel is, not to seek a ruinous alliance with the shadowy, unreal and deceptive wisdom and gold and strength and idols of Egypt or the world, but to trust alone in the only true and living God, who, with but a glance or a simple volition or word of His, can destroy their last enemy in a moment. “Thus saith the Lord: Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord;” while, on the other hand, God says, “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is” (Jer. 17:5-8). Every step toward Egypt is a departure from Jerusalem; every leaning toward man is a desertion of God. “We readily admit,” says Elder G. Beebe, “our opposition to the present system of Bible societies are religious institutions for the conversion of the world; but we are so far from being opposed to the gratuitous circulation of the Bible (without note or comment), that in a preceding number [of the ‘Signs of the Times’] we are offered to supply a whole country at our own expense. We are opposed to Tract Societies, and we are ready to give the reason of our opposition; but we are not opposed to the circulation of Bible truth in pamphlet, tract, newspaper, or any other form, gratuitously or otherwise.” “Our people,” says Elder J. R. Respess in the “Gospel Messenger”, “do not affiliate with the temperance societies of the world, but none favor temperance among all classes more than we do; and in the church we require it, so that a drunkard cannot remain in the church. But we hold that a Christian should be temperate because he is a Christian, and not because he is a member of a temperance society; that Christ and the church should be honored by his temperance, and not a society composed of all sorts of men, whether infidel, or profane, or adulterous, or of whatever character. For a member of the church of Christ to resort to a society of worldly men in order to become a temperate man himself, or to make somebody else temperate, is to forsake Christ and turn to man to do that which Christ had failed to do, or was incapable of doing, and to say that the grace and power of Christ were not sufficient to do what a society of men could do, thus ascribing more glory and honor to the society than to the grace of God. If our influence as Christians and church members fails upon the world, then we have no more than we can do or are required to do. What man believes that Christ would have gone into a secret chamber with a crowd of Sadducees, Pharisees and Herodians, with all sorts and classes of men, and yoked Himself with them to abstain from wine or other spirits to make men temperature [or for any other professedly benevolent object]? Even the thought is monstrous, almost sinful. Then His people, in whom He dwells and walks, have no right to carry Him and yoke Him with unbelievers in these organizations. But, after all, these temperance societies have confessedly failed, and there is now a resort to mightier legislation, to the strong arm of the law, to make men temperate, and still drunkenness increases. [The extensive and rapidly increasing use of opium as a substitute for alcoholic stimulants is by no means a proof of improvement in morals. We are opposed to religious Sunday Schools taught by the blind leaders of the blind and regarded as nurseries of the ‘church;’ but we maintain that parents should raise their children morally, and to respect God, and to read the Scriptures; and we are not opposed to any one who knows the truth teaching the truth to any one else on any proper occasion.] It is claimed that these fine modern institutions have made the present age what it is; but those who make the claim should be ashamed to confess it. For the present age is, perhaps, an almost unprecedentedly bad one. There is more infidelity in the world at this time than, perhaps, ever was in any other age of the world, all men, except a very small remnant, caring very little for any particular doctrine except the almost universally received doctrine of works and money. The age is bad, socially, morally and politically; and no thinking man will deny it. Men are greedy, selfish, dishonest, cruel and unmerciful. Even modern religionists call this a nation of drunkards. Lying, false swearing and murder, are things of everyday occurrence. Look at the corruption in the capital of the nation: the Star Route prosecutions, the office holders that have, upon salaries barely sufficient to maintain them in their positions, become millionaires; the open bribery at elections. A President is murdered by a disappointed office seeker, in the very heart of the capital, in broad daylight. [Look at the oppression of the poorer classes by monopolies; they are ground by these monied princes between the nether and upper millstone. They can put the price of meat and grain up or down at their own will, and no man hinder. Look at the wide extended undermining of the very foundations of civil society, not only by the Mormonism or simultaneous polygamy practiced, in spite of congressional legislation, in Utah, and rapidly infecting the adjoining territories, and gathering in tens of thousands of converts by most industrious and unscrupulous missionaries visiting and poisoning every region of the civilized world, but also by the rapidly and alarming increasing number of unscriptural divorces, facilitating successive polygamy, in the Northern and Western States of the Union.] One thing we can say, and are glad to say, that the Primitive Baptists are not responsible for this condition of things; we have had no hand in it. The poor, tried and afflicted people of God, though few and nothing in themselves, should remember that the battle is not theirs, but the Lord’s; that more are they that be with them than they that be with their enemies; and when our eyes are opened, and faith is given us, then we can trust in the Lord and be strong and courageous, and not be afraid of all the multitude arrayed against us.” It is only when we are weak in self that we are strong in the Lord; only in our weakness is His strength made perfect; when we most feel our helplessness and nothingness, His grace is all sufficient for us (2 Cor. 12:9, 10; Phil. 3:3). Whether the Lord deliver us from the fiery furnace or not, we are not to disobey and dishonor Him, and worship the gods of the heathen. “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers,” says the inspired Apostle to the church; “for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? and 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. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty” (2 Cor. 6:14-18).

Numerous Scriptures forbid the intimate association of God’s people with the heathen or unbelievers (Ex. 34:11-16; Deut. 7:1-11; 22:9-11; Ezra 9; Neh. 13:1-3, 23-31; Ps. 26:4, 5; 44:20, 21; 106:35-48; 1 Cor. 15:33; James 4:4; John 15:18, 19), for the expressed reason that such associations are invariably corrupting to the people of God. Especially corrupting must be such alliances as are based upon money, which is represented in the Scriptures as the god of this world, and the love of which is a root of all evil (Matthew. 6:24; Luke 16:13; 1 Tim. 6:10). From such money based societies let it be deeply impressed upon our minds that Peter, who had no silver or gold, and Paul, who had to work day and night for his daily bread, and even the Lord Jesus Christ, who had not where to lay His head, would have been debarred, unless some friend had paid their fee or a miracle had been wrought for that purpose. Can it be possible that such Egyptian or worldly alliances of the children of God, so repeatedly and pointedly forbidden in both the Old and the New Testament of Scriptures, are of the Lord and will be blessed of Him? Besides corrupting the people of God, these alliances demonstrate confidence in the flesh and a lack of faith in God; that is, a departure and alienation from God, and, to the extent they reach, and identification with unbelievers. God solemnly calls upon all His dear children who have been ensnared and carried down into Babylon— “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues” (Rev. 18:4). Babylon was an idolatrous nation; and it is demonstrably certain that, if human language means anything, the language employed by a large number of high officials in these modern religious confederacies represents these human means and methods as the most important and indispensable requisite for the conversion and salvation of the world; that is, they represent these human institutions as gods, and thus, confederating with Babylon, professed Christians have become idolatrous too, just as the Scriptures abundantly warn us. Christ and His Apostles, let it be indelibly impressed upon our minds and hearts, instituted absolutely none of these forbidden, unhallowed and contaminating, idolatrous and ruinous Egyptian and Babylonian confederacies. There were in the apostolic church no such auxiliary religious societies as Foreign Mission Societies, Home Missionary Societies, Bible Societies, Tract Societies, Education Societies, Dorcas Societies, Temperance Societies, Secret Benevolent Societies; neither were there any Infant Church Memberships, Substitutions of Sprinkling or Pouring for Baptism, Sunday Schools, Religious Picnics and excursions, Church Fairs, Festivals, Taleaux, Holy Raffling, Holy Shooting at the Mark for money, Protracted Meetings full of Holy Altars, Pharisaic Preachers, Anxious Benches and Mourners’ Seats, Life Memberships in Religious Societies for sale at $100 each of less, Pulpit Affiliations with unregenerate and unbaptized religionists, Female Revivalists, Theological Seminaries, Doctors of Divinity, Reverend Gentlemen, a Man-Called, Man-Qualified, and Salaried Ministry, Corrupting alliances of Church and State, Authoritative and Imperious Religious Bodies above the individual Churches, Bishops above Elders, Popes, Cardinals, Prelates, Diocesan Bishops, Arch-Bishops, Metropolitans, Monks, Nuns, Jesuits, Holy Wafers, Holy Days, Ave Marias, Holy Images, Holy Relics, Holy Candles, Holy Incense, Holy Prayer-Books, Holy Litanies, Holy Silken Gowns, Holy White Muslin Robes, Holy Inquisitions, supplied with Holy Racks, Holy Tortures, Holy red-hot tongs, with which to pinch the flesh and pull out the tongues of Christians, Holy Crusaders to hunt them down with barbarous armies and slay them by thousands, Holy Sale of Indulgences to Sin for money enough, Holy Confessionals, Holy Penances, Holy Purgatories. Without these outward means of men’s and Satan’s invention, and in direct opposition to all human and diabolical schemes and powers, the word of God grew mightily and prevailed, so that in the 70 years from A.D. 30 to 100, according to the general estimate, the number of Christians increased to five hundred thousand in all parts of the heathen Roman Empire. It was the glorious work of the Almighty Spirit of God, who quickeneth whom He will, and bestows spiritual gifts on men according to His good pleasure, who has but to breathe upon the valley of dry bones and they will live, while, without the Divine Spirit, all the wise, pretentious, monetary, unscriptural devices of men are less than nothing and vanity. It was a stone cut without hands that smote and destroyed the great metallic lifeless image of worldly glory in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision, and that became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth—the stone representing the indestructible kingdom of the God of Heaven (Dan. 2). It is upon the immovable rock of His own eternal Divinity that the Son of God is building, and will continue to build, His church, against which the gates of hell shall never prevail (Matthew 16:18—petra, rendered “rock,” is a great mass of living rock imbedded in the earth, while Petros, rendered “Peter,” is but a small fragmentary stone, made lively or living by the life of Christ within, and built, with the other Apostles, by Christ upon Himself—see 1 Peter 2:4-10; 1 Cor. 3:11; Eph. 2:20-22; Rev. 21:14). “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it” (Ps. 127:1). The Righteous Branch, even Christ, “shall build the temple of the Lord, and He shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon His throne (Zech. 6:12, 13). The hands of the spiritual”Zerubbabel have laid the foundations of this spiritual house; His hands shall also finish it, and He shall bring forth the head-stone thereof with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it”—“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts” (Zech. 4:6-9).

No doubt it is a paradox and a mystery to the world that the Apostle Paul, who affirms, more abundantly and emphatically than any other inspired writer, the sovereignty and almightiness of Divine grace, and the great fundamental doctrine of salvation by grace alone, without the deeds of the law, was the greatest, most industrious, most self-sacrificing worker that ever lived—he declares that it was the almighty grace of God which thus wrought in him (1 Cor. 15:10; Eph. 1:19-23; 2, 3, Phil. 2:12, 13); he exhorts his brethren, partakers of the same heavenly calling, thus to be followers of him; but let it be profoundly observed that none of the religious works which this highly favored servant of God, after his conversion, engaged in, and none of the religious works to which he exhorts his brethren, were corrupt imitations of a wicked world, or unholy alliances with the servants of Satan.

The position of the apostolic church must be the standard and example to be followed by all subsequent believers in Christ; and all subsequent bodies of people professing Christianity may, by comparison, see where they stand, whether on the side of Divine truth, or on the side of human error. As they conform to the Pattern, they are to be accepted; and, as they lack this conformity, they are to be rejected.

If there is a command from Christ to observe any one or more of the customs or institutions just enumerated as not observed by the Apostles and primitive saints, then let it be pointed out and obeyed. But, if such cannot be shown, then we must fall back and rely implicitly upon the doctrine and example of those who are seated upon twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel.

1. It is claimed that Irenaeus was born A.D. 97, and that he makes one allusion to infant baptism. The fact is that both the date and place both of Irenaeus’ birth and death are unknown. The ablest scholars believe that he was born between A.D. 120 and 140; and some suppose that he died A.D. 202. His book against Heresies was composed, says Mr. Schaff, between the years 177 and 192. In that book he says that “our Lord came in order that through Himself He might save all men, infants, and little ones, and children and youths and elders, even all who through Him are born again unto God.” The expression “born again” is said, in the early so-called “Fathers,” habitually to mean “baptized;” but it remains to be proved that it always has that meaning, and that it has that meaning in the sentence just quoted from Irenaeus. The phrase “through Him,” instead of “through water,” militates emphatically against the idea of baptismal regeneration in the passage—so admit the German scholars.
The earliest undoubted reference to child baptism is by Tertullian of North Africa (born 160 A.D., died between 290 and 240—converted about A.D. 190), and he earnestly opposes it. Certainly, then, child baptism must have been, not of Apostolic, but of recent origin, when Tertullian wrote.
“Bunsen shows that Tertullian was not arguing against infant baptism at all, then unknown, but against the baptism of little growing children from six to ten years old who could go down with the other catechumens into the baptismal bath, but were not yet in a state to make the proper responses. This custom was coming into fashion, but Tertullian rejects it. From boys of ten, who might possibly sometimes give evidence of sincere piety, the clergy advanced to take in those of six or seven responded for by others, though able to descend into the water, unaided, with the adult catechumens. Then those of three or four, when just able to repeat a few of the sacred words, as Gregory Nazianzen recommends, were, by a further corruption, brought by baptism into the fold of the ‘church.’ From this very circumstances would arise the strongest argument for going a step further. For, since in these very young children baptism could not be a profession of personal faith, it could only lead the masses to suppose that it acted as a charm, and that the child was more safe in case of death, a view carefully cherished by the clergy. Thus arose the belief that all, even infants, dying without baptism, would be lost; and hence followed finally the baptism of babes eight days old, and even those of a day. The first known instance of this last was A.D. 256, in North Africa, and these ideas slowly and gradually pervaded the ‘church,’ as Neander has shown. A host of authorities fully sustain this view of the origin of infant baptism.” “The Catholic practice of pretending to make infants catechumens, or rudimentally instructed in Christianity, before baptism, is an undersigned proof of correctness of the above explanation, and of the truth of Baptist principles.”—T.F. Curtis. Dean Stanley says that there is but one known instance of infant baptism in the third century, though he defends the practice as being “a standing testimony to the truth, value, and eternal significance of natural religion.” and as showing that, “in every child of Adam, whilst there is much evil, there is more good.”

2. Mr. C. H. Spurgeon is regarded by millions as the greatest preacher of the nineteenth century. His Sunday morning sermons were for some time telegraphed by cable across the ocean, at an enormous expense, and published in the Monday morning edition of a half-dozen American newspapers, an honor conferred on no other minister in the world. Well, Me. S. himself relates that, after he had begun preaching in 1852, his father and others strongly advised him to enter a theological college and prepare more fully for the ministry, and that he had concluded to do so, but was withheld from such a course by the providence and the voice of God; the former strangely preventing an appointed meeting with the college tutor, and the latter loudly startling him with the words, “Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not!” Mr. S. says that he then looked at his motives and intentions, and he resolved, though he anticipated obscurity and poverty as the result, to renounce the idea of collegiate instruction, and to go on preaching the word in his humble way to his humble people. He acknowledges that it was the Lord who mysteriously guided him in his perplexity, saying to him, “This is the way; walk ye in it.” How inconsistent is this early individual experience of Mr. Spurgeon’s with his subsequent establishment of a “Pastors’ College” in London, and with his own remark in a recent discourse! “I wish I knew how to preach,” he said. “I wish not to use a single word of fine language, for I believe that oratory has been the curse of the Christian church. My one aim is to get the heart and bring the sinner to Christ.”

Chapter X. The Doctrine of Grace, and Missions.

The history of the doctrine of grace and of scriptural and unscriptural missions is given in the present chapter. It is thought that a connected view of these important subjects will be snore interesting and instructive than the dispersion of this information through the records of nineteen centuries.

Old School, Primitive, or Bible Baptists, believe and rejoice in the absolute sovereignty of God, their heavenly Father—in the entire dependence of all His creatures upon Him, both in nature and in grace; a doctrine that leads its adherents to abandon all confidence in creature power, and to exercise a living and a loving trust in the Most High. While they utterly repudiate, on the one hand, that total and wretched perversion of the doctrine of predestination called fatalism (a blind, unconscious, mechanical, necessitated condition of the universe), which, like pantheism, virtually abolishes all human accountability and all distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, and which is the fundamental doctrine of heathenism, Mohammedanism and nature-worship; they equally reject, on the other hand, that rationalism which appears, more or less, in the various forms of Pelagianism, Semi-Pelagianism or Arminianism, Socinianism, Deism, Unitarianism, Universalism, Indifferentism, Skepticism, Materialism, Agnosticism and Infidelity, and which places human reason above the plain declarations of the Bible, either receiving only so much of the inspired Scriptures as can be grasped by the natural understanding, or else, while professing to receive all the Bible, really explaining away and annihilating all the force of the unpalatable and incomprehensible parts. It should be indelibly impressed upon the mind of every thinking person that, while ancient heathen God-contemning civilization fittingly attained its cultured golden meridian in the hideous revelries of Nero’s hymeneal night-banquet on Agrippa’s lake, near the Pantheon, in Rome, the Second Babylon, amidst blazing fireworks and music and rich garments and viands and demoniac pollution, as described by Tacitus, Suetonius and Juvenal—modern God-less civilization reached its logical culmination in the pandemonium of the French Revolution, at the close of the eighteenth century, when carnal reason (which is declared by Paul to be enmity to God) was embodied in the person of a human female, and enthroned upon the altar amid circumstances of Horrid debauchery. Bible Baptists believe, according to the testimony of the Scriptures (Rev. 18:4; Isa. 48:20; Jer. 51:45; 2 Cor. 6:17), that many of the Lord’s people, through false teaching and superficial acquaintance with the inspired word, are captives in the Babylonian meshes of incipient rationalism, and that, for their own spiritual welfare, and the glory of God, they should come out and be separate from such unscriptural and ruinous errors, acknowledge Christ as their only Master, and render cheerful and fill obedience to Him.

The leading apostolic church in Greece, to which Paul preached a year and six months, and to which he wrote two of his longest epistles, was the church of Corinth. That church, as appears from those epistles, was troubled with a spirit of rationalistic, self-confident freedom, both in thought and conduct—a spirit seeking after worldly more than after heavenly wisdom. The inspired Apostle severely rebuked that spirit, but it broke out in several Greek churches with redoubled energy after his departure. In the second and third centuries this Hellenistic spirit, in the Alexandrian and Antiochian schools, attempting to combine Pagan philosophy with Christianity, developed what is known as the Greek Anthropology based upon the trichotomy of Pythagoras, Plato, and, after them, of the mass of Greek and Roman philosophers. They taught that man is composed of three distinct elements: 1st, soma, corpus, or bode, the material part; 2d, psuche, anima, or soul, the animal part (including animal life and propensities); and 3d, pneuma, mens, or spirit, the rational part (including the will and the moral affections); and that, of these three elements, only the first two, the body and the soul, were affected by the fall of Adam, the third element, the spirit or will, being as free and pure in all men, when born, as it was in Adam before his fall; and this universal free-will of the human race; can and must take the first step in regeneration, and then the grace of God will meet and help it, arid, if the will continues to co-operate with Divine grace, the soul will be finally saved. This synergistic, or co-operative, or Semi-Pelagian theory of regeneration and salvation, basing the decision of man’s eternal destiny upon his natural free-will, had, for its ablest advocate, Origen (born A. D. 185, died 254), who also taught that men are fallen angels, and that all men, and all the wicked angels, even Satan himself, will be finally saved. Though in point-blank contradiction not only to the general tenor but to the plain letter of the Scriptures (John 1:13, 3:3-8; Rom. 9:16, 11:6; Phil. 1:6, 2:13; Ps. 110:3; James 1:18), synergism has prevailed throughout the Greek Catholic “Church” for 1,700 years, and still thus prevails; and the result, or rather the concomitance, is that the Eastern or Greek “Churches” are declared by the latest and ablest historians to be “dead,” ” decayed,” “petrified.” Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople, who believed the truth and attempted to teach it in the Greek communion, was five times deposed and finally strangled to death through the intrigues of the Jesuits, and his body thrown into the Bosphorus (A. D. 1638).

The monergistic or scriptural theory of regeneration teaches that there is but one efficient agent or actor in the renovation of the soul, namely, the Holy Spirit; that the will of fallen man is, like all his other faculties, utterly depraved, and has not the least ability or inclination to act holily until it has been renewed by Divine grace. This view was plainly set forth by Christ and His Apostles, as shown in the texts last quoted. It was first in the Latin Catholic “Church” clearly and powerfully maintained by Augustine (born 353, died 430), the ablest and most spiritual-minded of the so-called “Latin Fathers,” who at first was an advocate of synergism, but was led by his deep experience and profound mind and intimate acquaintance with the Scriptures to abandon synergism for monergism. He maintained that the entire human race sinned and fell in Adam, according to the Scriptures, and became utterly depraved, both in will and in all their other powers, the unrenewed will being able to work only external righteousness or morality, but not at all internal righteousness or a spiritual conformity to the Divine law; that the activity of the human will, up to the pint of regeneration, is hostile to God, and cannot co-operate with the Divine agency in the regenerating act, so that the Holy Spirit must take the initiative in the change from sin to holiness, and effect this change by His sovereign and almighty power, as well as preserve the spiritual life thus imparted, in accordance with God’s eternal decree of electing love, to its perfection in heavenly glory, to the praise of the Divine mercy—while others, sinning of their own free will, of which they so much boast, and not caused to sin by God, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and who is the Sun of righteousness and not of unrighteousness, are justly left to go on and perish in their sins and pride, to the praise of the Divine Justice. Monergism, or Paulinism, or Augustinianism (as this view has been called), was first adopted by the Latin or Roman Catholic “Church,” in the Councils of Orange and Valence, A. D. 529, but, except in a few clear and able minds, such as Bede, Anselm and Bernard, was soon practically abandoned, and superseded by a return to the Greek Anthropology and Semi-Pelagianism or Cassianism; and human free-will, in the Roman communion, sank into the Cimmerian darkness of the Middle Ages—a form of Paganism, embracing the authority of the Apocrypha and tradition, monasticism, unqualified baptismal regeneration, transubstantiation, Purgatory, priestly absolution, the meritoriousness of good works, works of supererogation, justification by works as well as by faith, the union of “Church” and State, churchly infallibility and supremacy, withholding the Bible from the masses, burying Divine service in a dead language, penances and pilgrimages, the worship of the Virgin Mary and other dead saints and their images and relics, the horrors of confessional, nunnery, inquisition and crusade, and the sale of indulgences to sin. The order of the Jesuits, founded by Ignatius Loyola, A. D. 1534, has always been thoroughly Semi-Pelagian or Pelagian; and Jesuitism is synonymous with mediaeval Catholicism, hypocrisy, unscrupulousness, mental reservation and amphibology. The Jansenists arose in the Roman Catholic communion about a hundred years afterward, and were Augustinian in doctrine, and earnestly opposed the Jesuits; since 1870 they have been identified with the “Old Catholics,” and now number about 60,000. The Roman Catholic Council of Trent (A. D. 1542-1563), in its numerous Canons and Decrees, while jesuitically professing, in its general preliminary statements, to maintain the doctrine of the total depravity of human nature in consequence of the fall, and the necessity of salvation by grace alone, is uniformly Semi-Pelagian in its subsequent detailed explanations, and authoritatively affirms the deadly mediaeval errors enumerated a little while ago. Pope Plus IX., in 1854, officially affirmed the immaculate or sinless conception of the Virgin Mary, who is the peculiar object of Roman Catholic worship, as “the Mother of God” and “Queen of Heaven;” in the Vatican palace the picture of Mary is placed above the picture of the Trinity. The same Pope, in 1864, in the “Syllabus of Errors,” declares that “Church” and State ought to be united, and that the “Church” has the right to use force and temporal power. The Vatican Council of 1870 declares the Pope the successor of Peter, the vicar of Christ, the head and governor of the whole church, the father and teacher of all Christians, the supreme judge of the faithful, and that, when he speaks ex cathedra (or officially), he is infallible in all matters pertaining to faith and morals, and his definitions are irreformable; and those presuming to contradict this declaration are to be anathema (that is, excommunicated and accursed). Semi-Pelagianism, or Pseudo-Christian Pharisaism, or carnal free will, thus reaches its culmination, in the Roman Catholic communion, in substituting the Pope for God (2 Thess. 2:3, 4).

The Protestant Reformation was born, apparently, of an intense conviction of the utter sinfulness of man and his radical need of Divine regeneration. As the only antidote to the theoretical Semi-Pelagianism and the practical Pelagianism and the innumerable unspeakable pharisaical abominations of Catholicism, Luther and Calvin, in the sixteenth century, proclaimed anew, in trumpet tones, to the priest-ridden millions of Europe, the great Pauline and Augustinian doctrine of sin and grace—the entire natural equality and total depravity of all men in the eyes of an Infinitely Holy God, the absolute dependence of fallen man upon the sovereign mercy of the Most High, justification by faith alone (solifidianism)—nothing like this old Bible doctrine, when believed, to cut up human pride and merit and pharisaism by the roots, to humble man in the dust before God, to stir him up to heartfelt gratitude for the Divine salvation, to cause him to serve God in spirit from an inward principle of filial love, and to comfort him in trial and despondency. The severest denunciations of the Spirit of God had been uttered by the mouths of His prophets in the Old Testament, against a proud, heartless ceremonialism and legalism, and by Christ and His Apostles, in the New Testament, against a hypocritical pharisaical formalism. Something of the same burning and purifying Spirit doubtless animated the Protestant Reformers, and, under Divine Providence, and in connection with other events, made that great movement the transition from mediaeval to modern history, and the national dawn of universal civil and religious liberty (always advocated by the Baptists); so that today, after the lapse of four centuries, the direct influence of Rome upon the laws and governments of the civilized world is almost totally annihilated for a season. But, instead of a defective reformation, merely, the utter apostasy of Rome, carnalizing and defiling the pure spiritual religion of Christ, and repudiating Him when it set over itself another head, and made its kingdom a worldly one, needed a thorough-going renovation. Rome had become plainly-developed Anti-Christ, and should not have been acknowledged in any sense as a church of Christ. Her subjection to tradition and human authority is a repudiation of Scripture and Divine authority. Choosing to obey man rather than God, she can in no respect be considered a church of Christ, and any derivation or succession from her is a prima facie evidence of the radical unscripturalness of any religious organization. The Protestant Reformers, though real heroes of some great doctrinal truths, were not endowed with sufficient grace or penetration or boldness to recognize this basal truth, and therefore conceded to Rome the attributes of a church of Christ, and retained many of her fatal, unscriptural doctrinal errors and practices—her traditionalism (an unauthorized departure from the written word of God, to which departure there can be no logical limit), her infant baptism, her national membership, her alliance with the State and consequent corruption and exercise of persecution for the purpose of enforcing religious uniformity, her hierarchism, her sacramentalism (the sealing and saving power of ordinances), her substitution of forms for personal piety, and of the authority of the “church” for the authority of the Bible. All these features are perfectly consistent and congenial with papal synergism, Semi-Pelagianism, pharisaism, but totally irreconcilable with the great monergistic, Pauline, Christian doctrine of Divine predestination and election, justification by faith alone, salvation by grace alone. The military followers of the Protestant princes wore embroidered on their right sleeves these letters, V. D. M. I. Ae (standing for Verbum Dei Manet Aeternum, The Word of the Lord endureth forever), to which pure and noble motto it is deeply to be regretted that they did not yield complete fealty.

Baptist Churches have no succession from Rome; they are conformed to and derived from the pure, spiritual, apostolic models presented in the New Testament; their leading principles were held by poor, humble, despised, unchurchy, persecuted sects (like their New Testament prototypes, 1 Cor. 1:26-31; James 2:5; Matt. 5:3-12; Acts 4:13, 24:14, 28:22); and it is admitted by candid Romanists, and it is perfectly obvious, that “Baptists are the only consistent and thorough antagonists of their creed, and that Baptist principles are necessary in their totality for the final overthrow of Romanism.”

The inconsistency and defectiveness of the principles of the original Protestant Reformers have, in a spiritual point of view, become more apparent and pronounced with the lapse of time, because seeds of error develop and grow and strengthen, so that very high Protestant authorities have declared Protestantism (like Catholicism) a failure. Sir William Hamilton, of the University of Edinburgh, the inexorable logician and common-sense philosopher, declares that Protestantism has gravitated back toward Catholicism, until the differences are only nominal. Prof. Philip Schaff, of New York, the ablest American church historian, and one of the first Presbyterian scholars of the United States, affirms that so many churchy and Catholic elements were retained by the Reformers that, as a growing consequence, much of present Protestantism must be, considered an apostasy from the position of Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin. Prof. A. A. Hodge, of Princeton, New Jersey, a distinguished Presbyterian theologian, makes the strong remark that the Protestant pulpit of today is as much in need of a thorough reformation as was the Catholic pulpit of four hundred years ago.

Of the three leading Protestant communions, the Anglican was the least reformed, the Lutheran next, and the Presbyterian the most. As Augustine, by his principal doctrine, is a heretic in the Catholic communion, says Prof. Schaff, so Luther, by the same doctrine, is a heretic in the Lutheran communion. Many of the Lutheran clergy have, during the present century, gone back to Rome. The Anglican body, ignoring Scripture and their own early history, have, for the last 250 years, been gradually growing more exclusive, more High-Church, and more Arminian, a strong and increasing party in that communion fondly styling themselves Anglo-Catholics, and many, not satisfied with this, actually deserting to Rome during the last fifty years (since the issuance of the scholastic, sacramentarian, and churchy Oxford Tracts, 1833-1841). A small daughter of the Anglican body, the (Whitefieldian) Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, though retaining some Catholic errors, advocate the Bible doctrine of salvation by grace alone; but a very large daughter, the Wesleyan Methodists, have in the main abandoned the cautious doctrinal reserve of the Semi-Calvinists, James Arminius and Richard Watson, their ablest theologians, and have dangerously approximated a Pelagian anthropology and soteriology, and adopted numerous worldly innovations, so that it has become a common remark that the new-fashioned Methodists are very different from the old. The Presbyterians, except the comparatively small Arminian Cumberland body, have remarkably adhered, by profession, to the scriptural doctrine of human depravity and Divine salvation and Christ’s sole headship of the church; but they have also continued to hold, inconsistently, to the fundamental errors of Catholic infant baptism (or rather rhantism)—a complicated system of church government founded upon worldly wisdom, instead of being founded upon the simple spiritual plan of the New Testament—affiliation with all professed Christians, even with Catholics—and, in Europe, the unspiritual, corrupting alliance between “church” and State, though, in their ranks, this alliance is greatly weakening. Presbyterian Scotland, being further from Rome than are Germany and England, and being a poorer and rougher and less inviting country, and inhabited by a more independent people, suffered from papal interference less than Germany and England. It is not for the lack of sense that the Scotch are predestinarians, for they are noted as the most common-sense and largest-brained people in Europe.

Christian predestinarianism far surpasses Arminianism in its moral results, as history abundantly demonstrates, and as may be seen by comparing the Waldenses with the other Italians, the Huguenots with the other French, the Jansenists with the Jesuits, the Puritans with they Cavaliers, and the Scotch with other Europeans. Predestinarianism is highly promotive of both civil and religious liberty. It represents God as absolute and supreme, and makes all men equal before Him. It develops the power of self-government and a manly spirit of independence, which fears no man, though seated on a throne, because it fears God, the only real sovereign. Its church-constitutions are popular (either Presbyterian or Independent); and its civil governments are representative or republican.

Especially for about a hundred years now has scriptural predestinarianism been undermined, in Europe and America, by professedly religions and by irreligious rationalism, and by infidelity and materialism—by a denial of the fundamental Protestant, Baptist and Bible doctrine of sin and grace, of redemption and justification; by a return to Pelagianism, pharisaism, and pseudo-scientific paganism, so that, if we except some Presbyterians and some Baptists, it would be hard to find any one on earth today believing this old scriptural doctrine; and, in consequence of this almost total departure of true faith from the earth, an equally universal Epicurean laxity of morals prevails. Honesty, the basis of all high character (Luke 8:15), sincerity, straightforwardness in word and deed, has almost entirely forsaken the human race; simultaneous or successive polygamy is rampant; and crime of every species abounds in the world to an alarming extent, even as Paul predicted that, in the last days, perilous times should come, that men would wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived, lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, heady, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God (2 Tim. 3:1-4). What increases a thousandfold the darkness of the picture is the Apostle’s concluding characterization of the apostate race—having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof (2 Tim. 3:5).

This nineteenth century of ours is, above every other century of the Christian era, the century of religious pride and of religious profession. Taking its stand upon the highest Himalayan peak of Pharisaism, it unblushingly declares that all the previous centuries, except perhaps its own nearest kin, the latter half of the eighteenth century, were, comparatively, both in a material and in a religious point of view, know-nothings and do-nothings; that its wise and mighty self has not only civilized the world, but devised and created means and machinery for the rapid evangelization of the entire human race; that, while up to the year 1800 there were then only two hundred millions of Christians in the world, even during the first eighty years of this one century alone, two hundred and ten millions—more than as many again—have been added, making the number now four hundred and ten millions; that just three things are now needed, more prayers, more tears, and more money; that, in the last twenty years, the rapidity of Christianization has increased in a fourfold ratio, so that, at the same rate, in one hundred years more all the world will be converted to God. Let it be ineradically impressed upon every reflecting mind that the increase of crime has run parallel with the increase of religious profession, at least in the United States. It is especially during the past thirty-five years that crime has so greatly increased.

Now this wonderful “evangelistic” movement is said to have been inaugurated, in the home field, by the itinerancies of the Methodists, the Wesleys and Whitefield, about the middle of the last century, and, in foreign lands, by the labors of a few English Baptists at Kettering, England, in 1792. The original conception of modern evangelization, it seems, is mainly due to John Wesley, the father and standard of Methodism, and to Andrew Fuller, the reformer and standard of nineteenth century, or Fullerite, or “Missionary” Baptists.

The inconsistencies of Mr. Wesley’s system are well illustrated by the inconsistencies of his life. While first genuinely converted, as he himself says, by the writings of Martin Luther, the most predestinarian of predestinarians, he came to be the most bitter enemy of predestinarianism, denouncing it as a horrible and detestable doctrine that represented God as worse than the devil, more false, more cruel, and more unjust. And yet Mr. Wesley’s funeral sermon on George Whitefield, the extraordinary predestinarian preacher, commends the latter in the highest terms as “an eminent servant of God, who, in the business of salvation, put Christ as high as possible and man as low as possible, and who brought a larger number of sinners from darkness to light than any other man.” In the application of human wisdom to the organization of a religious society, John Wesley was, as commonly remarked, more like Ignatius Loyola than any other man; he conformed the organization of Methodism more to that of Romanism than that of any other Protestant body; and, accordingly, in nominal numerical success, he has made his society the most powerful rival of Rome. By his famous “Deed of Declaration to the Legal Hundred,” “the Magna Charta of Methodism” (made in 1784, when he was eighty-one years of age), bequeathing the property and government of all his chapels in the United Kingdom to a hundred of his traveling preachers and their successors, on condition that they should accept as their basis of doctrine his Notes on the New Testament and the four volumes of his sermons published in or before A. D. 1771, he surpassed even the worldly wisdom of Catholicism, and made himself not only the infallible but the eternal pope of his society. So his Twenty-five Articles of Religion are declared, in the Methodist Book of Discipline, to be unalterable. This makes Wesley the last and greatest authoritative teacher of the human race, and places him above Christ and His Apostles, as we are required to look through the medium of Wesley at all the Divine teaching, and to accept forever his interpretation of the doctrine and precepts of the Bible. How can any of the dear children of God be willing thus to substitute the headship of a sinful and fallible mortal for the headship of Christ? See Matthew 23:8-12.

As established by Ludwig Keller, the present royal archivist at Munster, in his thorough and authoritative work on “The Reformation and the Older Reforming Parties Exhibited in their Connection,” published at Leipzig in 1885, the evangelical Anti-Catholic Christians from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, known as Petrobrusians, Henricians, Waldenses, Pikards, Beghards, Beguins, Spirituales, Sabbati, Insabbati, Apostolic Brethren, Poor men in Christ, Friends of God, Mystics and Bohemians, were, in the darkness of the Dark Ages, Arminians. They exalted the Scriptures above all human books, and accepted the doctrine of justification by faith; but they earnestly insisted on the freedom of man’s will to accept or reject the provisions of Divine grace, and emphasized the necessity of imitating Christ in His life of self-denial. The Mennonites of the sixteenth century were also Arminians; but they strenuously maintained the spirituality of the church of Christ, and the necessity of strict Church discipline, and they suffered great persecutions for conscience’ sake.

The earliest Confession of Faith denominated Baptist was published in Switzerland in 1527. While affirming the spirituality of the membership and ordinances of the church, and the unworldliness and the purity of her discipline, it makes no direct statement in regard to the doctrine of grace, though the phraseology of the document seems Arminian. In 1609 an Arminian Baptist “Church” was formed at Amsterdam, Holland, of refugees from persecution in England, and in 1611 they published an Arminian Confession of Faith. In 1633 the first Particular or Predestinarian Baptist Church was formed in London, and in 1639 another; and in 1644 there were seven of these churches in London, and they then published a predestinarian Confession of Faith. In 1656 sixteen churches in Somerset and the adjoining counties published a similar Confession. In 1677 and in 1688, and again in 1689, was published the fullest and most esteemed Baptist Confession of Faith,—in 1689 the ministers and messengers of above a hundred churches in England and Wales meeting in London for that purpose, and, as they say in their prologue, “denying Arminianism.” This Confession is published in this volume, and adopts, on the subject of predestination, the strong language of the Westminster (the most esteemed Presbyterian) Confession. The great majority of Baptists in England and America (those called the Particular Baptists in England, and those called Regular or Calvinistic or “Missionary” Baptists in America) still profess to adhere to this old London Confession. Thus from 1523 to 1633 it seems that those called Baptists, so far as we can learn, favored Arminian views, and from 1633 to the present time (1886) the most of those called Baptists have professed to be Predestinarians; as, from 1727 to 1754, the members of the churches in the bounds of what was in 1765 called the Kehukee Association, were General or Arminian Baptists, and were not at all strict in discipline. As Whitefield says, “We are all Arminians by nature.” And so, quite often, babes in Christ retain for a while something of this carnal feeling, and have to be fed upon milk, and not, like men, upon strong meat. But “Jesus Christ,” says the inspired penman, is “the same yesterday, and today, and forever; and it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace, and not carried about with divers and strange doctrines” (Heb. 13:8, 9). Still it takes time for even the plants of our heavenly Father thus to grow and be established; and with improper food, administered by unqualified attendants, the plants may remain stunted and feeble for many years. Besides, the growth of plants depends greatly upon the influences of air and light; and so growth in grace depends greatly upon the in-breathing and illumination of the Holy Spirit. If these blessed influences be withheld, the children of God may long remain but babes. These considerations, which should be forcibly impressed upon us by early Baptist history, give us reason to hope that there are many of the dear children of God who have not yet been led to identify themselves with His visible church; who as yet see men as it were trees walking; who, though cleansed by the atoning blood of Jesus, still do not properly give glory to God (Matt. 8:22-25; Luke 17:11-19). Another instructive lesson to be derived from early Baptist history is that all human authority is only fallible and imperfect; and our faith should, therefore, be entirely based upon the infallible Scriptures of inspired truth. We are to call no man on earth our spiritual father or master, but to acknowledge Christ as our only Master (Matt. 23:8-10). Taking the Bible only for their standard, our Baptist predecessors were gradually led from Arminianism to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone; and the same Divine guidance has led the Bible Baptists of today to abandon some unscriptural practices of some former Baptists, such as open communion and affiliation with unbaptized professors of religion, the formation of religions societies based upon money for the evangelization of the world, the substitution of human education for the call and qualification of the Holy Spirit as a preparation for the gospel ministry, having ruling Elders as distinguished from teaching Elders, the laying on of hands upon all believers, shaking hands while singing, inviting mourners to the anxious bench, etc. These unscriptural practices were, many of them, but rarely and occasionally adopted by any Baptists before the present century. Into a few of them even the old Kehukee Association was at times, to a very small extent, inveigled between the years 1803 and 1827. But, as the Scriptures do not, by preceptor example, authorize any of these practices, the child of God, who disregards human tradition and looks only to the written word of God for guidance, cannot indorse, much less idolize, any of these modern innovations. Believing, as he does, in the sovereignty of God’s grace, in the perfection of Christ’s redemption, in the omnipotence of the Holy Spirit, and in the freeness and fullness of God’s salvation towards all who shall be saved, he cannot for a moment suppose that any human means have ever sent, or will ever send, a single soul to glory. Others may fall down before these idols; but, as for him and his spiritual kindred, they fear the fiery furnace heated seven times hotter than usual less than they fear and reverence the God of their salvation, and Him only will they worship.

The eminently pious and learned Baptist ministers, John Skepp (who died 1721), John Brine (who died 1765), and John Gill (who died 1771)—the latter the most learned man that has ever borne the name of Baptist—entertained precisely the same views of the sovereignty and efficacy of Divine grace as are held by the Bible Baptists of today. Though they proclaimed to sinners that they were in danger and on the high road to perdition, they did not call upon all men, whether spiritually concerned or not, to repent and believe the gospel. They dwelt much on the Divine purposes, and on the Bible fact that salvation is of the Lord. This method of preaching and writing was, after their departure, stigmatized as “selfish, hardening, refrigerant, soporific, hyper-Calvinistic, Antinomian.” “Under such instruction,” it is said, “the churches became indifferent to the means of grace, could not engage in efforts for the conversion of souls; they were satisfied with preservation, and did not seek extension, and so the cause declined. Backsliding and coldness affected all religious communities in England. But for the revivalistic labors of Whitefield and the Wesleys, evangelical truth would have well-nigh died out. The effects of their ministry were felt by all denominations.” Mr. Andrew Fuller is claimed to have been the “sledge-hammer” that beat Methodistic fervor into the cold Baptists, and roused both Baptists and Protestants to “send the gospel into heathen lands.”

Mr. Fuller is described by his adherents as a clear, plain, practical, judicious, powerful, profound theologian—“the Franklin of theology.” As he is honestly admitted by learned “D. D.’s” and “LL. D’s” among modern Baptists to be their “standard,” it is eminently proper for us to examine, at least briefly, his life and labors. He was born in 1754 and died in 1815. His parents were poor, and he had only the barest rudiments of an English education; yet the Fullerite or New School Baptists, notwithstanding the case of Mr. Fuller, and the fact that all real scholars admit that every one of the Apostles except Paul was unlearned, consider a fine classical education almost indispensable for a successful preacher, and, in the number of their theological colleges in the United States (21), they surpass all the Protestants, and equal the Roman Catholics. From his fourteenth to his sixteenth year Mr. F. says that he had two or three spurious conversions, and, in his sixteenth year, a genuine conversion; and this saving conversion of one called “the grandest champion of Christianity,” took place, be it noted, during the universal prevalence of hyper-Calvinistic views among the Baptists—views which he devoted the most of his life to denouncing as not only “false Calvinism,” but “false religion,” “more dangerous than irreligion.” But for the hyper-Calvinism in his own heart, making him feel that he needed some previous qualification to come to Christ, he reckons that he might have found rest sooner than he did; but Divine drawings enabled him to overleap this barrier. He confesses that he was “saved by mere grace, in spite of himself, by free grace from first to last.” He declared that he “never had any predilection for Arminianism, which appeared to him to ascribe the difference between one sinner and another, not to the grace of God, but to the good improvement made of grace given us in common with others, and that his zeal for the doctrine of grace increased with his years;” and his dying declarations are that “all he had done needed forgiveness; that he trusted alone in sovereign grace and mercy; that he was a poor guilty creature, but Christ was an almighty Savior; that the doctrine of grace was all his salvation and all his desire; that he had no other hope than from salvation by mere sovereign efficacious grace, through the atonement of his Lord and Savior; that with this hope he could go into eternity with composure.” The preacher of his funeral said that “he died a penitent sinner at the foot of the cross.” In his writings, Mr. Fuller admits that “the Scriptures clearly ascribe both repentance and faith to Divine influence;” and he professes himself to be a strict Calvinist or predestinarian. Notwithstanding this admission and profession, and his attributing, both in conversion and in death, all his salvation to the mere, free, sovereign, efficacious grace of God, he maintains that the prophets, and Christ, and His Apostles, gave the most unlimited invitations to unconverted hearers of the gospel, and so should all gospel ministers do; that the obligations of men to repentance and faith are universal; that man’s inability is not proper or physical, but only figurative or moral; that man is able to comply with all that God requires at his hand; that all his misery arises from his voluntary abuse of mercy, and his willful rebellion against God; that it is not a want of ability, but of inclination, that proves his ruin; that men have the same power, strictly speaking, before they are wrought upon by the Holy Spirit as after, and before conversion, as after; that the work of the Spirit endows us with no new rational powers, nor any powers that are necessary to moral agency.” He allows that “these principles may be inconsistent with the doctrines of grace,” but he maintains that “both are scriptural and therefore true”—that “we must receive both the general precepts and invitations of Scripture, and the declarations of salvation, as being a fruit of electing love.” Though in one article admitting that the evidence of our interest in the blessings of eternal life must be internal, yet he, in another article, says that “the terms hunger, thirst, labor, heavy laden, etc., do not denote spiritual desires, and do not mark out the persons who are entitled to come to Christ.” In accordance with this Fullerite principle, I myself heard the most learned Fullerite in North Carolina declare, in preaching upon Isaiah 55:1, that the address of the prophet applied to every human being, for that all men thirst after something. While at times apparently delighting to stigmatize “hyper-Calvinism” as “Antinomianism,” and inconsistent with genuine conversion, Mr. Fuller admits that some adherents of this system may have true religion; and, in another article, he declares that all men by nature are real Antinomians, for Paul says that the carnal (or unrenewed) mind is enmity against God, not subject to His law, neither indeed can be. William Huntington, S. S. (sinner saved), is regarded by many genuine Baptists in England and America as one of the most spiritual writers of the present century; but Mr. F. says that he never saw any marks of genuine religion in his writings. I am glad to see that, in one place, Mr. Fuller, the standard of the New School Baptists in England and the United States, declares that he “never imagined himself infallible.” In this candid statement all Bible Baptists will heartily agree with him, especially after having read the perfectly fair exhibition of his inconsistencies just given. The Bible, however, such Baptists do believe to be infallible, and therefore not to contain any pair of Mr. Fuller’s inconsistencies, as truth cannot be inconsistent with itself: Many of Mr. Fuller’s expressions, in regard to the ability and power of the unrenewed mind, go far beyond the Arminianism of James Arminius, John Wesley and Richard Watson, who declare that the unrenewed will and all the other faculties of the unrenewed mind are dead in trespasses and sins. Paul declares that “the carnal mind cannot be subject to the law of God;” that “the natural man cannot know the things of the Spirit of God;” and Christ declares that “the world cannot receive the Spirit of truth;” and that “no man can come to Him except the Father draw Him.” What then shall we think of Mr. Fuller’s fine-spun metaphysics about unrenewed human ability? How can any believer in the Scriptures believe a word of it? It is the superficial declaration of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent that Divine commands necessarily imply human ability—just as though man had never fallen. Though man has fallen and become unable to obey the commandments of God, the nature and law and requirements of God are unchanged and unchangeable. The gospel addresses of the Scriptures are addressed, we believe, to gospel characters—to those persons who have spiritual life, hearing, needs and appetites. These limitations are either directly expressed or implied by the circumstances. Even the letter of the word, where there is any fullness of narration, and the dictates of common sense teach this important fact. Inspired men could, far better than we, read the hearts of those whom they addressed; and they addressed hearers of different characters, and therefore used sometimes the imperative and sometimes the indicative mood. God’s under-shepherds are directed, not to create, but to tend the flock. I cannot conceive what benefit can be supposed by a believer in sovereign and efficacious grace to be derived from universally and untruthfully extending the comforting spiritual addresses of the gospel to those declared in the Scriptures to be dead in trespasses and sins—Christ expressly forbids that pearls should be cast before swine (Matt. 7:6). Unless the Spirit of God first come and impart Divine life and light to the hearer, such addresses will be forever and totally vain. The imperative mood has no more power than the indicative mood, in the mouth of a preacher, to awaken the dead to life. No language or labor of man, and no fact in creation or providence, independently of the Divine Spirit, has the slightest efficacy to take away the sinner’s heart of stone and give him a heart of flesh. I do not deny that the minister may at times have a Divine persuasion that some of his hearers are spiritually alive, and that he may not then properly address them in the imperative mood.

William Cathcart, in his recently published “Baptist Encyclopedia,” says that Mr. John Gill “knew more of the Bible than any one else with whose writings he is acquainted; that he was a man of great humility, and one of the purest men that ever lived; that, in his ‘Body of Divinity,’ the grand old doctrines of grace, taken unadulterated from the Divine fountain, presented in the phraseology and with the illustrations of an intellectual giant, and commended by a wealth of sanctified Biblical learning only once in several ages permitted to mortals, sweep all opposition before them, and leave no place for the blighted harvests, the seed of which was planted by James Arminius in modern times. In this work, eternal and personal election to a holy life, particular redemption from all guilt, resistless grace in regeneration, final preservation from sin and the wicked one, till the believer enters paradise, and the other doctrines of the Christian system, are expounded and defended by one of the greatest teachers in Israel ever called to the work of instruction by the Spirit of Jehovah.” He adds that Mr. Gill’s “commentary is the most valuable exposition of the Old and New Testaments ever published.”

Well, after the bones of this wonderfully gifted servant of God had been laid safely in the grave (in 1771), Mr. Andrew Fuller began to ponder upon the expediency of making a change in Baptist tactics, and offering salvation freely to all sinners without distinction. After four years’ rumination his views on this subject became entirely changed, and he wrote them in an essay entitled “The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation,” which he did not venture to publish, however, till 1782, seven years after it had been written. This publication involved him in a bitter controversy of twenty years with some of his Baptist brethren, including Mr. Abraham Booth, a London Baptist minister, and the learned and able author of that admirable work, “The Reign of Grace;” but it is stated that “the ability and force of Mr. Fuller’s pamphlet ultimately prevailed,” and his views were adopted by the majority of those professing the Baptist name. These views, Mr. Fuller says, were different from those held by the Baptists during the most of the eighteenth century, but were like those entertained by Bunyan and the other old Baptist writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But it should be remembered that Bunyan, though we cannot doubt a child of God, yet did not have perfect light on all subjects, and was an open communionist, and at times did not seem very well established in doctrine; and, so far as we know, all calling themselves Baptists in the sixteenth and in the early part of the seventeenth century were Arminians, whose example furnishes a poor precedent for the imitation of Bible Baptists. The actual result of Mr. Fuller’s methods has been, not to effectuate the eternal salvation of a single sinner (for Christ is the only and complete Savior of His people), but to increase largely the number of those professing, while unhappily not possessing, true religion.

In 1784 Mr. Andrew Fuller read a pamphlet on the importance of general union in prayer for the revival of true religion, written by Jonathan Edwards, President of the College of New Jersey; and in the same year he read a poem by John Scott on the cruelties of the English in the East Indies. In this manner he was led to recommend prayer meetings the first Monday evening of every month for the extension of the gospel, and to urge the formation of a moneyed religious society for sending a mission to India. The first Baptist Missionary Society was thus formed at Kettering, England, Oct. 2, 1792, and the first collection for its treasury, amounting to £13, 2s. and 6d., was taken up. Mr. Fuller was chosen and remained its secretary till his death, traveling almost continually through the British Isles, and pleading for the mission cause, and charging the society nothing for his services. He makes the following remarkable statement in his writings: “Our undertaking to India really appeared to me, on its commencement, to be somewhat like a few men who were deliberating about the importance of penetrating into a deep mine which had never before been explored. We had no one to guide us; and, while we were thus deliberating, Carey, as it were, said: ‘Well, I will go down if you will hold the rope.’ But before he went down he, as it seemed to me, took an oath from each of us at the mouth of the pit to this effect, that, while we lived we should never let go the rope. You understand me. There was great responsibility attached to us who began the business.” All this looks far more like faith in men and in money than faith in God. Instead of approving, the Scriptures utterly condemn all confidence in the flesh. Can it be possible that such fleshly confidence as that to which Mr. Fuller makes such full and candid confession was the source of modern Baptist and Protestant missions? If his language has any meaning, it would seem so. Again: Mr. Fuller makes the astonishing statement that his own “church was in a famished condition of spiritual life, and found no salvation except in becoming identified with mission, work”! Alas that the mission idol should be substituted for Christ!

This remark of Andrew Fuller is paralleled by a remark of the Methodist “Bishop,” George F. Pierces of Georgia, substantially as follows; “the question is—not so much how can the heathen be saved unless we send them the gospel, but—how can we ourselves be saved unless we send them the gospel?” If the essence of this remark is not idolatry, I confess that I do not understand the meaning of the term. How different is this declaration from the preaching of the Apostle Peter in Acts 4:10-12 !

The Apostles were commanded by Christ to “go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Scripture prophecy makes it certain that, in God’s own best time, the Apostles, by their writings, will go into all the world, and a heavenly kingdom will take the place of all earthly kingdoms (Matt. 24:14; Rev. 11:15). The Apostles must have understood Christ’s commandment to them better than subsequent uninspired men have understood it; but there is no clear Bible evidence, and, as admitted by all scholars, no other reliable evidence that the Apostles personally preached the gospel outside of the Roman Empire. By the dissemination of the Greek language and civilization, and by the multiplication of the facilities for travel under the mighty dominion of Rome, the providence of God had gradually prepared the way for the apostolic preaching of the gospel, at the same time that the Spirit of God lead prepared a people to hear and be benefited by such preaching. No doubt the genuine future evangelization of the world will take place in a similar way. Not by such nineteenth-century machinery as unscriptural alliances, upon a money basis, of the world and the nominal “Church,” but by the providential assemblage of people from all nations at Jerusalem to hear the preaching of the Apostles, by persecution, by visions of the day and the night, by special communications of the Holy Spirit forbidding the Apostles to go in certain directions and commanding them to go in others, and by the Holy Spirit preceding and accompanying the Apostles, the gospel was preached throughout the Roman Empire. And during the early succeeding centuries, by social and commercial intercourse, by persecution, by conquest, by captivity, by slavery, by enlistment in the Roman armies, the inscrutable wisdom of God, which is able to overrule evil for good and make the wrath of man praise Him, diffused the light of saving truth, to some extent, among the barbarian nations dwelling on the borders of the Roman Empire. And during the Dark Ages the Cathari, the Patarenes, the Paulicians, the Albigenses, and the Waldenses, being persecuted in one country, fled to another, as commanded by Christ, and went in every direction preaching the word (Matt. 10:23; Acts 8:1-4). And in modern times the Baptists have suffered the most religious persecution, and have been driven from country to country, preaching the gospel.

The Roman Catholic Popes, in order to aggrandize themselves, sent missionaries from time to time to convert various tribes to their own heathenish superstitions, trustworthy historians affirming that many of these heathen tribes were far more moral than the Catholics themselves. The most zealous and “successful” foreign missionaries of the pope hove been the three monastic orders of Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits. The first two orders originated in the thirteenth, and the last in the sixteenth century. Vowing perpetual poverty, chastity and obedience (to the General of the Order, or to the pope), these powerful organizations, equaling the ancient proselyting Pharisees, and utterly eclipsing all subsequent Protestant societies in zeal and apparent sincerity, have in the last six centuries victimized hundreds of millions of the human race, exterminating, by means of the Inquisition, millions of so-called heretics at home, and Catholicizing, by means of compromises with paganism, countless multitudes of poor deluded heathens in foreign lands. Of these three monastic orders, the Jesuitical has been the most zealous and “successful.” Founded in 1534 to check and overbalance the Catholic losses by Protestantism, suppressed, because of their intolerable abominations, in 1773, by the pope, Clement XIV., who died by poison in 1774, and restored by Pope Pius VII. in 1814, this nefarious order, the most powerful and the most missionary institution that ever existed on earth, has thoroughly undermined all the foundations of human morality, and, in a word, made Jesuitism equivalent to diabolism. The Protestant Reformers, Luther and Calvin, never thought of sending missionaries to the heathen, Luther denouncing with great emphasis the worldly methods of prosecuting missions; and Calvin, in his comment on the final commandment of Christ to His Apostles (Matt. 28:19), saying nothing whatever of missions to the heathen. It is, therefore, admitted in the article on “Missions” in the second volume of the Schaff-Herzog “Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge,” published in 1883, that “A church may have a vigorous spiritual life, and yet not prosecute missionary activity; and a church may be active in missionary operations, and yet be spiritually dead.”

It has now been about ninety-four years since the grand new impetus given to Protestant missions by the organization at Kettering, England, in 1792, of the first Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel amongst the Heathens; and, to show what is claimed to be the present result of Baptist and Protestant Missions, I will give some remarkable statements of a Fullerite Baptist, Mr. W. F. Bainbridge, who for ten years was pastor of the large “Missionary” Baptist “Church” at Providence, Rhode Island, and who, with his wife and son, and “provided with cordial credentials from Secretaries of all the leading Foreign Missionary Societies of America,” during the years 1879-1881 made a “Universal Survey” of the foreign mission-field, traveling 50,000 miles, and visiting more than a thousand missionaries, and upon his return published a book entitled “Around the World Tour of Christian Missions.” It is declared by leading, able and most extensively circulated religious periodicals of different denominations in the United States that “no work on this subject so complete and reliable has ever before been published in America or Europe;” that “the information contained in it is full, fresh and timely;” and that “it is unquestionably the most valuable contribution thus far made to the standard literature of Christian Missions.” I would be glad if every Old School Baptist had a copy of this book.

It may be had for two dollars per copy by mail, postage prepaid, from the publishers, D. Lothrop & Co., Boston, Mass. It is an invaluable treasury of recent facts in regard to Modern Missions.[1]

After having spied out the vast new “promise lands,” Mr. Bainbridge brings back, as he says, “a joyful Caleb report,” declaring that “the whole world is becoming Christian with bewildering rapidity,” and that during the past generation this rapidity has wonderfully increased; and he anticipates that the coming century will witness a grand progress towards “the Millennium, a decided check to the evil of intemperance, an overwhelming advance upon scientific unbelief, and the attainment of a far higher spiritual life among the myriad ranks of the Universal Church.” And yet the book contains many statements, as we shall show, hard to reconcile with these strong declarations and bright anticipations.

Mr. Bainbridge regards Greek and Roman Catholics as benighted idolaters, and admits that Protestants (including Baptists) constitute but one-twelfth of the human race; he does not state what very small proportion of Protestants give any credible evidence of their genuine Christianity. Mr. B. says that more than two-thirds of the Christian Church are practically anti-mission, contributing neither prayers nor money to the support of missions, and he would at times almost despair of Christianity but for evidence that this indifference is due chiefly to want of information.

This statement is in accordance with the following tract, sent me by Mr. H. A. Tupper, of Richmond, Secretary of the Board of Southern Baptist Foreign Missions:

Missionary Tracts No. 18.

"anti‑missionaries.

“Have we any such among us? Yes, they are numerous and almost everywhere to be found. The phrase has been applied to a certain class of Baptists as peculiarly appropriate. But are they not to be recognized elsewhere? The Presbyterians complain that a large proportion of their members give nothing to foreign missions, and so with respect to other religionists. These may properly be ranked among the anti-missionary people. This class is swelled in number if we look into our own so-called Missionary Baptist Churches.

“Can this be true? Have we in our churches anti-missionaries? Let us see. Jesus said, ‘He that is not with me is against me.’ ‘He that gathereth not with me, scattereth abroad.’ If then, in our churches any are found who give nothing to aid in the spread of gospel truth, are they not thus far anti, or against Christ, in His expressed will, ‘that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem?’ Are not all such anti‑missionaries? Such are found, and found in large numbers. Among these are some who would be shocked if classed with the anti-mission party. They sometimes pray ‘that the earth may be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’ They are missionary in name, but in reality are anti-missionaries. They feel no special interest in the spread of the gospel, and make no sacrifice for this purpose.

“Brethren, let us be consistent. If we believe that the preaching of the cross is according to the will of God—that it is the wisdom of God, and the power of God unto salvation, let us spare no means in themselves appropriate, that in regions beyond the glad tidings may be sounded out.”

We are told that more than half of the so-called ” Missionary Baptist Churches” in North Carolina do not contribute a cent to Foreign Missions.

“The Congregationalists of the United States contribute about a dollar and twenty-five cents annually per member for Foreign Missions; the Presbyterians about eighty-five cents; the Episcopalians about fifty cents; the Northern Baptists about thirty cents; the Northern Methodists about seventeen cents;” and the Southern Methodists about ten cents. We learn from other (official) sources that the Southern Baptists contribute less than three cents per member annually for Foreign Missions; the white Baptists of the South give only ten cents per member, which is only one-twentieth of what the Burmese in India give. We also learn from recent and authoritative estimates that, while the one hundred million Greek Catholics have no Foreign Missions, and the one hundred and ninety million Roman Catholics now contribute only a million and a half dollars (or less than a cent apiece annually) to this object, the one hundred and twenty million Protestants (including Baptists) contribute but seven and a half million dollars (or about six cents apiece annually) to Foreign Missions. The average annual contribution of all the advocates of Foreign Missions is less than three cents apiece. This seems to prove that the professedly Christian world has either very little faith in Foreign Mission work, or else very little love for the souls of the poor heathens.

But then the chief need of missions, says Mr. B., is prayer. He declares that “one man, with not a dollar in his pocket, afire with the love of souls, and backed by the united importunate prayers of God’s people, will do more in the destitute regions of America, Asia or Africa than a thousand missionaries with overflowing treasuries, but without power, Divine power which God has ordained as answer to prayer.” And, again, he says: “Better the car of Zion stand still a thousand years than that the Christian Church forget her absolute dependence upon her Lord, and feel that the world can be Christianized by money and men. The question of missions today is a prayer question. The grand duty of the Christian Church of the present is to get to praying, praying in secret, praying together.” It would thus seem that those laboring for foreign missions either are not much given to prayer, or else have but little faith in the prayers which they say.

As for Paul, Mr. B. thinks that he made two great mistakes, first, in not getting married, and, secondly, in working for his own support. The lukewarmness and scandals and heresies that arose in his and other churches, soon after his departure, prove, Mr. B. thinks, that it would have been “better for Paul and the other early founders to have arranged contributions from the churches sufficient, not only for the poor, but to enable their ministry and missionaries to give their undivided attention to the more thorough instruction and more potent leadership of their people,”—as though Paul’s heavenly-mindedness in preferring to serve God rather than a wife, and his disinterestedness in preaching the gospel at his own charges, were of no valve for his own and future generations, and as though the infinitely wise Spirit of God had nothing to do with the matter. “The well-meant and pious, but headstrong and impracticable, effort of Christians to apply either Paul’s exceptional example or Christ’s exceptional directions to the twelve and the seventy,” says Mr. B., “is today one of the greatest embarrassments to be met on both the home and foreign mission fields!” So much the worse then for these so called “mission-fields” if the New Testament “embarrasses” them!

Christ, “a greater than Paul,” says Mr. B., “whose life was much more intended for our example, left the carpenter’s bench, when He commenced His special evangelistic labors, and subsisted upon the hospitality and contributions of His friends.” The truth is that Christ, who worked all His life in a carpenter shop before His ministry, during His ministry was continually laboring, not only teaching in public and private, walking, thirsty and hungered and wearied, long miles of hot dusty roads, and spending whole nights upon the cold mountains in prayer, but performing “mighty works,” feeding vast multitudes, healing the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the fevered, the paralytic, the leprous, the insane, casting out devils, raising the dead, and thus, by deed as well as word, preaching the gospel to the poor.

Prof. Max Muller, in his recent lectures on India, says that the Hindus surpass, in many respects, some people who make much greater pretensions to civilization; that they are, in general, mild, gentle, kind, affectionate, virtuous, forgiving, truthful and conscientious. And Mr. Bainbridge represents that he found the heathens less roguish than professed Christians; that, while he never lost a dollar’s worth of goods during his sojourn of a year and three-quarters in heathen lands, he was ashamed to say that the stealings out of his baggage in Europe in less than a year amounted to several hundred dollars. And yet he says that there was scarcely a night when the heathens could not have stolen something from him, but they did not, even when he was paying his heathen servants but twenty-five cents a day, and when no foreign consular power was near for intimidation in the interest of honesty. No wonder the Chinese think it expedient for them to establish missions in so-called Christian lands!

The Chinese have but little (except forced) respect for Great Britain, the richest and greatest “Christian” missionary power, which, by a two years’ war (1840-1842), for her own pecuniary profit, forced upon unwilling China the infamous opium trade, which is still continued, and “destroys annually millions of lives,” says Mr. B. “Never was responsibility for a great crime,” continues our author, “more surely fastened upon a nation than this, of cursing China with opium, upon enlightened, Christian England. The pleas in defense are about as shallow as any lawyer ever presented for his guilty client.” As is well known, Protestant England has for hundreds of years heavily oppressed and impoverished Catholic Ireland. During the last two or three hundred years England has been “the most warlike of nations,” and “her acquisition of foreign territory is without a parallel in the history of the human race. She bears rule over one-third of the surface of the globe and one-fourth of its population, her possessions abroad being sixty times larger than the parent State.” She is thus, of course, preeminently qualified to preach to the world the gospel of the Prince of Peace and Friend of the poor, who, while on earth, had not where to lay His head. In 1882 she illustrated her splendid Christian character by foreclosing her mortgage upon poor Mohammedan Egypt with cannon and bayonet. “Church” and State, be it remembered, are united in England. The small number of genuine Christians in England, who have more desire for the glory of God than for the glory of Britannia, feel no sympathy for her unchristian course. Great Britain has, Mr. B. thinks, “two or three times as many benevolent enterprises as America,” but he is “persuaded that the larger proportion of this giving is misdirected philanthropy.”

The ancient Roman government, under which the Apostles preached the gospel so safely and so effectually, was Pagan and inconceivably corrupt. It is the peculiar province and pleasure of God to bring good out of evil; and it is certainly possible that, the British Government, God-sent ministers may go forth and preach the gospel to a God-prepared people in foreign heathen lands. In many respects the nineteenth century resembles the first century more than any other. It is the acme of modern, as the first was of ancient, civilization; as was the first, so the nineteenth is an age of strong government, settled order, vast internal improvements, great facilities for trade and travel. And, as the Greek language had become almost universally known in the Roman Empire, so the English is becoming the universal language now throughout the civilized world. God works all things according to the counsel of His own will, and He has a wise purpose in all that He does; telegraphs, and railroads, and steamboats, and governments, and riches, and the hearts of men are His; and it may be that He designs an early and glorious advancement of His kingdom of grace—though, on the other hand, the present low condition of spiritual affairs in the world is far from indicating any such advancement, unless it be upon the, principle that the darkest hour immediately precedes the dawn, or that “at evening time,” in prophetic language, “it shall be light” (Zech. 14:7).

Mr. Bainbridge conveys to us the painful information that professed Christians are disseminating materialism in Japan, universalism in China, and infidelity in India. In reference, especially, to the present religious condition of India, more will be said presently.

Mr. B. thinks that the reflex action of foreign missions on home Christianity has been eminently beneficial; that “but for foreign missions there would not be half as much spiritual power for the evangelizing work among our own populations, the churches would not be nearly as numerous, nor the Sunday schools so flourishing, nor the various home missions so enterprising and successful. Yes,” he exclaims, “we owe a debt of unspeakable gratitude to foreign missions for their benediction upon us at home.” Bible Baptists think that all our blessings come from the Most High, and that our gratitude is due, not to dead machines, but to the living God.

Foreign missionaries receive on an average, Mr. B. thinks, a thousand dollars per year—some getting considerably more than this. The average is about twice the average, he says, received by home ministers. The expenses, he tells us, are not, however, doubled in foreign lands, but the privations and hardships are greatly increased. Foreign missionaries have good residences and many household comforts. The missionary qualifications are high. They are thus set forth in the manual of the American Board for candidates: “An unimpaired physical constitution; good intellectual ability, well disciplined by education and, if possible, by practical experience; good sense, sound judgment of men and things; versatility, tact, adaptation to men of all classes and circumstances; sanctified common sense; a cheerful, hopeful spirit; ability to work pleasantly with others; persistent energy in the carrying out of plans once begun—all controlled by a single-hearted, self-sacrificing devotion to Christ and His cause.” No one of the Apostles was probably endowed with all these qualifications. Paul came the nearest, but he did not have an unimpaired physical constitution (Gal 4:13, 14; 1 Cor. 2:3; 2 Cor. 12:7-10), and could not, therefore, have passed a satisfactory examination before a modern Missionary Board; and all the other Apostles would have been rejected by such a Board for lack of literary education. It is really surprising, even in this tremendous century, that as many as about three thousand men, the number now in the field, should have been found with all these qualifications. Not content, however, with these requirements, this manual makes mention also of the advantage of oratorical gifts, of facility in acquiring a foreign language, of the necessity of a good character among acquaintances, and of special fitness shown in actual service for molding character. By a comparison with 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:6-9, the great improvement in religion and in ministerial qualifications will be readily seen; many things have been”added,” and many have been “taken away” (Rev. 22:18, 19).

India is admitted to be the most important and most vigorously cultivated Protestant mission field of today. It was the first foreign field selected and worked by Mr. Fuller’s society, and, therefore, has been the longest worked and ought to show the grandest results. “A tree is to be judged by its fruit, causes by their effects,” says Mr. Bainbridge. We accept this remark as being both reasonable and scriptural. “Missions are everywhere the mother of schools, and at least twelve thousand schools, with four hundred thousand pupils, owe their origin and support to missionary societies.” Mr. B. testifies that these schools in India teach science mainly, and that evangelization is a very subordinate object; and he says that out of fifty young men educated by many of these mission schools, all but two or three graduate as infidels and scoffers at all religion; that the literary demands of India are great and growing, and are “being met by vast quantities of vile native productions, and by enormous translations from European skepticism, rationalism, and materialism; that Hegel, Strauss, Renan, and even Paine, are names well known throughout India; that multitudes are familiar with Darwin’s development theory, with Comte’s positivism, and with the vagaries of Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, Mill, and Emerson.” “The greatest need of Christian Missions in India,” he says, “is spiritual power. There is an immense amount of beautiful, strong, complicated machinery,” he adds, “but it is almost lifeless.” He compares the India missionary machinery to a great irrigating machine that he saw on the right bank of the Tigris, below Baghdad; it was of very fine construction, and appeared to be much needed on the adjoining plain, but it had no power, and its custodians seemed not to understand the secret of its use. This comparison, which Mr. B. makes of the finest modern missionary machinery to a dead, powerless irrigating machine, struck the mind of the present writer as exceedingly and unexpectedly candid, forcible and truthful. The Roman Catholics, says Mr. B., are, in various countries, imitating the wise Protestant methods of evangelization, but he fears that they have only the letter which killeth, the garment without the soul, and that their power for evil will only be increased thereby; and he believes that “Protestantism will find its great mission only rendered the more important, and that it may reach the hearts of men by being driven, through the new competition, away from the means and methods upon which it has so much relied, to Him who alone is Head of the Church, its light, its pattern, and its power!“ If it should please the Lord to draw all who believe and trust in modern missions away from all creature dependence to Himself, the only true and living God, the only possible source of salvation, then undoubtedly great spiritual blessings would follow.

In the most recent, extensive, accurate and magnificent work that I have seen upon “The Earth and Its Inhabitants,” M. Elisee Reclus, the eminent French geographer, remarks (in his Asia, vol. iii., p. 411), “At present the Catholic and Protestant missionaries [in India] are chiefly engaged amongst the poor, the low castes, and the wild tribes of the interior, but everywhere with indifferent success. The first converts fancied they would be received into the caste of their teachers; but being quickly disenchanted, and perceiving that ‘to become a Christian was to become a pariah,’ they mostly returned to the cults of their fathers. Although there are altogether about five thousand Protestant evangelists of all denominations, their flocks scarcely number half a million collectively. About half of these are centered in Madras, where they consist almost exclusively of Portuguese Catholics and Nestorians, who have gone over to the religion of their new political masters. Not more than one-sixth of all the proselytes belong to the middle and upper castes; and a large proportion are the so-called ‘rice Christians,’ converted during the famines to keep from starvation. In the seaports they are mistrusted by the traders, who prefer to employ natives that have preserved the religion of their forefathers.” Of what value is a profession of Christianity that makes men less honest? See Luke 8:15, 12:1; Matt. 7:16.[2]

For the purpose of training missionaries for their work, the Mohammedans have, in the University of the Great Mosque of El Azar at Cairo, in Egypt, and in the eighty Medressehs at Bokhara,, in Turkistan (one of the latter having been founded in A. D. 1372), Theological Seminaries, to which 15,000 pupils resort from nearly all parts of Africa and Asia—three times as many pupils as all the pupils at all the Theological Seminaries, both Catholic and Protestant, in the United States. And, according to the most recent and authentic information, the Mohammedans are far surpassing both Protestants and Roman Catholics in zealous and successful proselytism throughout Asia and Africa; so that, in those great continents, the present appearance is that Islam will be the religion of the future. See Appletons’ Annual Cyclopaedia, New Series, volume iii., pp. 581-586; volume iv., p. 647; and volume vi., p. 445.—In the same Cyclopaedia, volume x. (1885), p. 169, we are told: “In China the [Christian] missionaries have been generally treated with kindness, though their teachings are regarded with contemptuous indifference. The unsympathetic attitude of the Calvinistic missionaries toward what they regard as idolatrous ancestor-worship caused them to be regarded by the generality of the Chinese as the teachers of a repulsive and inhuman religion. The Jesuit and Lazarist friars, who dressed in the national garb and taught a kindlier religion, were more successful, and were often on the best of terms with the provincial authorities.” Hence it seems that the most successful so-called Christian missionaries in China are those who corruptly blend Arminianism, Jesuitism and idolatry with a profession of Christianity, and thus please and attract a larger number of heathens into their folds.

It is estimated that, of the two hundred and fifty million people in India, one million are Christians; and that, of the one thousand million called heathen in the world, two millions only are Christians. Mr. Bainbridge reckons the actual pecuniary cost of each home convert at $550, and of each foreign convert at $320 or less. Others calculate that each foreign conversion costs $1,000, but that each home conversion costs more.

A recent number of the New York “Examiner” (a publication which claims to be the leading “Missionary” Baptist paper of the world) says that, during the year 1884, it cost $592.03 to make a Pagan an Episcopalian; $248.14, a Congregationalist; $234.91, a Presbyterian; $117.91, a Methodist; $72.88, a Campbellite; and only $37.05, a Baptist; so that the average cost of Protestant conversions being $203.91, the conversions of Pagans into Baptists cost but one-sixth of the average.

In connection with such calculations, how deeply impressive the language of the Apostle Peter in the eighteenth and nineteenth verses of the first chapter of his first epistle!

The estimates of the time that it will take to convert the world vary from one hundred years (as predicted in a recent number of a New York newspaper) to two hundred thousand years (as mentioned in Prof. Max Muller’s Lecture on Missions, delivered in Westminster Abbey, December 3, 1873). The seventh verse of the first chapter of Acts is appropriate here. If the genuine conversion of the world to Christianity is left to the power and money of men to effect it, the time required, if the Scriptures be true, will be an infinity of years, and even then it will not be begun.

In his “Along the Lines at the Front,” Mr. Bainbridge says that the Baptist principles of immersion, a regenerated church membership, and an independent church polity, give their “missionaries” a great advantage over the Pedobaptist “missionaries;” and that “Canon” Liddon advised an Episcopalian “missionary” to “go back to the old apostolic mode of baptism in the case of all adult converts from heathenism;” and that “in both the Church of England chapels in Tokyo there are baptisteries.”

The learned Prof. Max Muller has very little confidence in what he calls “controversial missions.” “We know, each of us, but too well,” says he, “how little argument avails in theological discussions; how often it produces the very opposite result of what we expected; confirming rather than shaking opinions no less erroneous, no less indefensible, than many articles of the Mohammedan or Buddhist faith.” He has much more confidence in what he calls “the indirect influence of Christianity,” to be exercised by the daily life and conduct of Christians brought into contact with heathens. The gospel can be preached much more powerfully by the life than by the tongue; but the direct regeneration of the Holy Spirit is the only power that can make a Christian.

Mr. Bainbridge returns borne with “a greatly strengthened conviction that all the heathen religions are glittering and corrupt delusions; that the supreme need of the world is Christianity; and that the establishing and guiding wisdom of the modern missions of Protestantism is that from above.” The first two of these propositions are clearly true; the last proposition, after all that Mr. B. has told us (which agrees substantially with the information derived from other sources), is not so clearly true. There can be no doubt that the effect of modern missions (or Anglo-Saxon civilization) has been to educate, soften, civilize; the minds, manners and customs of a very small number of the foreign heathens; it is even possible that, in a much smaller number of instances, the morals of a few heathens have been, in some respects, improved. In regard to whether any of the foreign heathen have been genuinely converted to Christianity or not, while the evident spuriousness of numberless alleged home conversions leads us also to fear that the last state of multitudes of heathen “converts” is worse than the first, still none but the Divine Author of faith, who looks not upon the outward appearance, but upon the heart, can speak with certainty upon this subject. The Apostle Paul rejoiced (Phil. 1:15-18) that Christ was preached to the. heathens in Rome, even though from improper motives; and so would all true Bible Baptists rejoice if they had any satisfactory evidence to believe that Christ had indeed been preached and believed on among the foreign heathens. Though Paul took pleasure in all furtherance of the gospel, he could not approve the improper motives or methods or the doctrinal errors of either friends or foes; neither can Old School, Primitive or Bible Baptists approve of the Pelagian and Arminian errors and the humanly-devised, unscriptural, unspiritual, idolized practices of modern fashionable religionists, whether in home or in foreign lands. A gentleman who occupies the highest position in the “missionary” cause in the Southern States of the Union, declares, in a recent letter to the present writer, that he has always admired the Primitive Baptists for “their two basal principles—a God-called ministry, and evangelization by New Testament churches.”

It is a demonstrable fact that Primitive Baptist Churches are nearer, in both doctrine and practice, than any others to the New Testament models—our full and critical examination of the apostolic church in the ninth chapter of this volume proves that important fact; and, if their ministry are indeed called of God, it is to be supposed that the unchangeable and ever-living Head of the church, by His indwelling Spirit, affords them all needful direction in their labors. The present writer can truly testify that the ministers of those stigmatized as Anti-Missionaries, though few in number, poor in purse, and destitute of classical training, like the Elders in the New Testament, are, so far as his own knowledge and belief extend, the most zealous and active and faithful scriptural home missionaries in the United States. Not trained in theological schools or courses, not sent out by any human authority, not furnished beforehand with ample funds, not making any charge for their services, they go forth like the twelve and the seventy, depending upon the faithfulness of the God of Israel, and, in their preaching tours, travel tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles, speaking, in general, the unadulterated truth as it is in Jesus to all having ears to hear, wherever and whenever opportunity is afforded; and I have never heard from them any other testimony than that, when they returned, like the twelve and the seventy, they lacked nothing. The impressions upon their minds to leave their homes at certain times, and go in certain directions, are often proved to be of the Lord by the wonderful spiritual results of their journeys. Taking the oversight of the flock of God, not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind, neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock, they labor in the Divine cause without any stipulated salary; and the most of them, like Paul, reflect the unworldly disinterestedness of the chiefest of the Apostles by engaging in some secular employment in order to minister to their temporal necessities, and not be burdensome to their churches, many of which are small and poor. Those who give themselves wholly to the work of the ministry prove also the genuineness of their faith and their superiority to mercenary motives by setting no price for their services, by laboring faithfully and constantly in the cause of their heavenly Master, and by leaving the question of the support of themselves and families with Him. In nearly all our Southern churches the colored people still remain members, and thus many thousands of them continue to have the benefit of regular preaching by white as well as by colored ministers.

Such are the scriptural home[3] missions of the Old School, Primitive or Bible Baptists in the United States and the adjoining countries; and when God has, in any foreign heathen land or lands, a people prepared to hear the preaching of the gospel, He is abundantly able to send whom He will to perform the labor of love without money and without price, as in apostolic times. Every unregenerated human being is a heathen. What the heathen in both unchristian and in professedly Christian lands need is, not human money and means and methods and machinery, but a Pentecostal baptism of God’s Holy Spirit, convincing them of sin, of righteousness and of judgment, leading them to fear and tremble at the infinite terrors of the Sinai law, and then sweetly drawing them to Calvary, and forever melting their stony, obdurate hearts with a transforming view of the meek, lowly and lovely Lamb of God, bleeding, agonizing and dying upon the bitter cross for their sins and for their salvation. Thus only will the inborn enmity of the carnal mind against God be superseded by that heartfelt love of Him which is greater than hope and faith, and which is the fulfilling of the law. Thus only will the great spiritual wilderness of this world be converted into the blossoming and rejoicing garden of the Lord. Thus only will the paradise of God be restored over all the earth with a transcendent, Divine and eternal glory never known in Eden, when God shall unceasingly dwell with men, and fully enlighten, comfort, hallow and bless them.

When this universal prevalence of the knowledge and glory of God on earth shall come, is unknown to mortals; but all God’s people know that God alone can bring it about, and that He will bring it about in His own best time and manner.

Says Elder P. D. Gold, in “Zion’s Landmark”

“Because we do not co-operate with the Missionary Baptists in their measures and methods of sending out their missionaries, they say we are opposed to preaching the gospel to the heathen.

“We do not believe that they preach the gospel here at home, nor do we believe that man can send the gospel to the heathen. If these people loved and preached the truth here at home we would feel more like fellowshipping them. People are not apt to act better out of sight than in sight. They deny the power of God here at home: nor do we suppose they preach any better away from home.

“When the Lord sends one to preach to the heathen, and by the Holy Ghost says, Separate me Paul and Barnabas for the work whereunto I have called them, then we can encourage such to go, and help them on their journey of a godly sort, by ministering to their necessities, and praying the Lord to bless and prosper their journey.

“We are not to receive any into our houses, nor bid them God speed, unless they bring the doctrine of Christ, which is not the doctrines of men nor devils.

“Where are the heathen? Everywhere, both in this continent and the Eastern continent.

“It is no evidence that a people are right because they are zealous in propagating their views. The Catholics, Mormons and Mohammedans are and were all active in spreading their gospel, as they call it, into all the world. Who could be more active than the ancient Pharisees, who compassed sea and land to make one proselyte? It was a command to the Apostles to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, and they did this. Jesus Himself sent them, and they literally obeyed the command. We do not read that Paul, Peter, James, John or Jude told any of the churches, or instructed Titus or Timothy, to go into all the world and preach as the Lord sent the twelve Apostles. But they were to preach the word. Jesus has all the power in Heaven and earth, and He sends laborers into His vineyard. We cannot prepare nor teach others to preach, nor send them to preach the gospel. The gospel is the power of God. We cannot carry that, but it can carry us and direct us when and where to go.

“The money, that sends the doctrines that the missionaries preach, forbids the conclusion it is the power of God that sends it. It is common for the advocates of modern missions to hold that unless the people contribute their money freely, thousands of souls for which Christ died will be lost. We do not believe that the church of Christ is redeemed with corruptible things, such as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb verily foreordained, but slain in these last times for you, who by Him do believe in God, who raised Him from the dead, and gave Him grace and glory, that your faith and hope might be in God.

“To misrepresent us, and say that we are opposed to preaching the gospel to the heathen because we do not believe the Missionaries as a denomination send the gospel anywhere (for what one has not got he cannot send off), is as absurd as to say that because man cannot raise the dead, therefore we are opposed to the resurrection of the dead; or that because man cannot save a dead sinner, therefore we are opposed to salvation.”

Says Elder Gilbert Beebe, in the “Signs of the Times:”

“The argument of Mission Baptists, as they are pleased to call themselves, is: These institutions, as auxiliaries to the church, or something nearly akin to them, have been of long standing with Baptists of former ages. Well, suppose this, though doubted, be admitted, cannot the other denominations adduce the same argument for their perversions of baptism? Cannot the Catholics show their invocation of saints, their purgatory and their triple-crowned pontiff, to be institutions and traditions of many centuries with as good a grace? But we do not admit the claim that missionary societies, as distinct organizations from the churches, with presidents, vice-presidents, directors, treasurers, collectors and executive boards, have been known, either in our country or in any other, for ages past. The cases which they have cited in England and Wales do not show that they were separate from their church organizations, or such missionism as we have and do repudiate and protest against. The self-styled Missionary Baptists make such remarks as these: ‘From the days of the Apostles to the present time, the true, legitimate Baptist Church has ever been a missionary body’—‘the churches founded by Christ and the Apostles were missionary churches!’ If by missionary churches they mean only that these churches were, as churches, engaged in the dissemination of the gospel through the gifts which God bestowed upon the Apostles, evangelists, pastors and teachers which he himself raised up, called and qualified ‘for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,’ then we challenge them to show wherein we, the Old School Baptists of the present day, have or do differ from the primitive order. Without any missionary society or board outside of the organization of the church of God to guarantee a salary, without purse, scrip or two coats, the Old School Baptists have today more gospel preachers of this description in the field than all the professedly Missionary Baptists in the world can honestly claim. But if they mean to convey the impression that the churches organized by Christ patronized missionary societies outside of the church membership, composed of members admitted at a specified price, organized with presidents, vice-presidents, directors, and a multitude of salaried officers, to employ men, appoint them their field of labor, and pay them their wages, then we demand proof from the Scriptures that any such institutions were known or tolerated in the primitive churches. If the primitive churches founded by Christ and his Apostles were missionary churches, then so are the so-called Old School Baptists of the present time; for they occupy the same ground, observe the same order and ordinances, and refuse to practice or patronize any religious order other than such as are clearly authorized by the precepts and examples of Christ and his Apostles, according to the record of the New Testament. It matters not what were the practices of the Baptists of five hundred or a thousand years ago. We have the laws of Christ as given in the New Testament, for our role, and the Apostles of Christ as expounders of the laws of Christ to us. What they have bound on earth is bound in Heaven, and what they have loosed on earth is loosed in Heaven.

“When the Fullerite heresies had been introduced among the Baptists, and produced great discord and turmoil, some of the old veterans of the cross met at Black Rock, Maryland, in 1832, and published a solemn protest against all the newly introduced innovations upon our former faith and order, and made the rejection of the new departure a test of fellowship. To distinguish those who retained the apostolic doctrine from those who departed from it, we consented to be known by a name which had been given us by our opponents, viz., Old School Baptists. This appellation we agreed to accept, with the express understanding that it referred only to the school of Christ, and not to any humanly devised system of scholastic divinity. It was not that we had changed in any wise from what we had always been, either in faith or order, but simply to distinguish us from those who had changed, and still chose to be called by our name to take away their reproach. If the New School or Missionary Baptists claim to have a regular, unbroken succession from the Primitive Baptists of the Apostolic Age, upon the ground that they were largely in the majority when the division took place in 1832, will they please tell us why the claim of succession made by Catholics is not equally clear and valid?

“The Old School Baptists never did consent to any of the antichristian doctrines and institutions of the new order, even when mixed tip with them in denominational connection; they protested against every practice for which there was no ‘Thus with the Lord,’ and after laboring to reclaim the disorderly until they found their labors were unavailing, they withdrew fellowship from them. Christ has commanded us to withdraw even from every brother that walks disorderly.”

See the Eleventh Mark of the Apostolic Church, in Chapter IX.

1. Mr. Bainbridge is the author of two other recent works—“Self-Giving, An Independent Inside View of Christian Missions;” and “Along the Lines at the Front, A General Survey of Baptist Home and Foreign Missions.” And he informs me by letter that he has drafted a more philosophical work, to be entitled “The Science of Missions;” and is writing another work, to be called “Eden to Patmos a Complete Tour of Bible Lands.” His wife, Mrs. L. S. Bainbridge, has written an interesting book, called “Round the World Letters.”

2. T. P. Crawford “D. D.,” “for 34 years a missionary to China under the supervision of the Southern Baptist convention,” and intending soon to return to China declared in a lecture at Chapel Hill, N. C., in February, 1886, that mankind are not all descended from Adam: that the Negro is not the progeny of Ham; that the average life of man before the flood was but 1211 years; that Adam lived only 130 years, and that his family or dynasty continued for 800 years longer to bear his name, etc. (see N. C. University. Magazine for February, 1886). Such assertions are point-blank denials of the Scriptures; and it seems lamentable that a “Convention” calling itself “Baptist” should tolerate such infidelity in its agents. The Scriptures reveal no salvation for any creatures on this globe except for the descendants of Adam; and, unless all men are descended from Adam, his race may have become extinct, and every human being now in the world may be excluded from the benefits of the redemption of Christ.—Mr. Crawford informs us, in the same lecture, that the Chinese have a great desire for Bibles, but it is to use them as fuel with which to cook their rice, and for other handy purposes; that thy take no interest in a church, or institution of any kind, built by foreign money; that they regard the gifts which the missionaries make to them as bribes to induce them to attend preaching, and, when the gifts cease, they cease attending; and that they do not know how to listen to a sermon.

3. The United States, throughout the length and breadth of which the Old School Baptist ministers travel and preach, contain, exclusive of Alaska, about twice the area of the Roman Empire, the only “world’ through which history gives us any evidence that the Apostles personally traveled and preached.

Chapter XI. Second, Third and Fourth Centuries.

Second Century.—The last one of the Apostles has passed away from the shores of time, and the Apostolic Age proper has therefore ended. We now descend from the Primitive Apostolic Church, with all its inspiration, signs and wonders, to what may be called the church uninspired, guided by fallible teachers, who in expounding the Scriptures referred back to Christ and the Apostles for their authority, and who expected conquest by the silent and in visible working of God’s Spirit within men more than by miracles apparent to the natural eye. “The hand of God has drawn a line of demarcation between the century of miracles and the succeeding ages, to impress us more deeply with the supernatural origin of Christianity, and the incomparable value of the New Testament. Notwithstanding the striking difference, the church of the second century is a legitimate continuation of that of the primitive age. While far inferior in originality, energy and freshness, it is distinguished for conscientious fidelity in preserving and propagating the sacred writings and traditions of the Apostles, and for untiring zeal in imitating their holy lives amidst the greatest difficulties and dangers.”—Schaff.

As admitted by all standard historians, there is an impenetrable gulf between the close of the New Testament and the beginning of uninspired church history. Mr. Joseph Henry Alien, recent lecturer on church history at Harvard University, remarks: “Any bridge across this wide gulf must be built, so to speak, ‘in the air.’ We can erect our two towers, but the cables will not meet.” Such is the uniform and destructive testimony of learning and candor against all claims to a material succession from the Apostles made by the Catholic and similar communions. Thus does the God of history direct the minds of candid inquirers beyond all mere human authority to the apostolic writings of the New Testament. “Church history severed from the New Testament and from the Christ whom that Testament presents,” says the learned, eloquent and forcible writer, Mr. Wm. E. Williams, of New York,”is a very dismal swamp, a mere morass and pestilent jungle, where trees obstruct on every side the vision and show no pathway, where the foot sinks and the miasma ascends and the snake lurks, where a man learns to plunge forward into passive credulity or to start back into sheer skepticism and despair. But, with the Bible in hand and the eye fixed on Christ, the Lawgiver and Sovereign of the kingdom and the Leader of the sacramental host, order springs out of the tangled mass of seeming confusion.”

The persecutions of the second century were unabated, and formed a continuous commentary on the Savior’s words: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves;” “I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword.” “No merely human religion could have stood such a fire as did the religion of Christ during the first three centuries.”[1] It not only suffered, but expanded and became more diffused among the nations, and went directly on towards victory over Judaism and heathenism, without physical force, but by the moral power, patience and perseverance of its votaries, and the omnipotent work of the Holy Spirit, thereby proving to the world the divinity and indestructibility of its nature.

In order to show the bitter persecution endured by Christians early in the second century, and the innocency and purity of their lives, we shall refer to a scene, presented by William Jones in his valuable History of the Christian Church, as having occurred about the year 107. Says Jones: “Trajan ascended the throne of the Caesars in the year 98, and soon afterwards conferred the government of the province of Bithynia upon his friend, the ingenious and celebrated Pliny. The character of the latter is one of the most amiable in all Pagan antiquity. In the exercise of his office as proconsul, the Christians, against whom the severe edicts which had been issued by preceding emperors seem to have been still in force, were brought before his tribunal. Having never had occasion to be present at any such examination before, the multitude of the criminals, and the severity of the laws against them, seemed to have greatly struck him, and caused him to hesitate how far it was proper to carry them into execution without first consulting the emperor upon the subject. The letter which he wrote to Trajan upon this occasion, as well as the answer of the letter, are happily preserved, and are among the most valuable monuments of antiquity, on account of the light which they throw upon the state of the Christian profession at this splendid epoch. The letter is as follows: ’C. Pliny to the Emperor Trajan wishes health. Sire! It is customary with me to consult you upon every doubtful occasion; for where my own judgment hesitates, who is more competent to direct me than yourself, or to instruct me where uninformed? I never had occasion to be present at any examination of the Christians before I came into this province; I am therefore ignorant to what extent it is usual to inflict punishment or urge prosecution. I have also hesitated whether there should not be some distinction made between the young and the old, the tender and the robust; whether pardon should not be offered to penitence, or whether the guilt of an avowed profession of Christianity can be expiated by the most unequivocal retraction—whether the profession itself is to be regarded as a crime, however innocent in other respects the professor may be; or whether the crimes attached to the name must be proved before they are made liable to punishment. In the meantime, the method I have hitherto observed with the Christians, who have been accused as such, has been as follows: I interrogated them—Are you Christians? If they avowed it, I put the same question a second and a third time, threatening them with the punishment decreed by the law; if they still persisted, I ordered them to be immediately executed; for of this I had no doubt, whatever was the nature of their religion, that such perverseness and inflexible obstinacy certainly deserved punishment. Some that were infected with this madness, on account of their privilege as Roman citizens, I reserved to be sent to Rome, to be referred to your tribunal.

“’In the discussion of this matter, accusations multiplying, a diversity of cases occurred. A schedule of names was sent me by an unknown accuser; but when I cited the persons before me, many denied the fact that they were or ever had been Christians; and they repeated after me an invocation of the gods and of your image, which for this purpose I had ordered to be brought with the statues of the other deities. They performed sacred rites with wine and frankincense, and execrated Christ; none of which things, I am assured, a real Christian can ever be compelled to do. These, therefore, I thought proper to discharge. Others, named by an informer, at first acknowledged themselves Christians, and then denied it, declaring that though they had been Christians, they had renounced their profession some three years ago, others still longer, and some even twenty years ago. All these worshiped your image and the statues of the gods, and at the same time execrated Christ. And this was the account which they gave me of the nature of the religion they once had professed, whether it deserves the name of crime or error; namely, that they were accustomed on a stated day to assemble before sunrise and to join together in singing hymns to Christ as to a deity; binding themselves as with a solemn oath not to commit any kind of wickedness; to be guilty neither of theft, robbery nor adultery; never to break a promise, or to keep back a deposit when called upon. Their worship being concluded, it was their custom to separate, and meet together again for a repast, promiscuous indeed, and without any distinction of rank or sex, but perfectly harmless; and even from this they desisted, since the publication of my edict, in which, agreeable to your orders, I forbade any societies of that sort.

“‘For further information, I thought it necessary, in order to come at the truth, to put to the torture two females who were called deaconesses. But I could extort from them nothing, except the acknowledgment of an excessive and depraved superstition; and, therefore, desisting from further investigation, I determined to consult you; for the number of culprits is so great as to call for the most serious deliberation. Informations are pouring in against multitudes of every age, of all orders, and of both sexes, and more will be impeached; for the contagion of this superstition hath spread not only through cities, but villages also, and even reached the farm houses. I am of opinion, nevertheless, that it may be checked, and the success of my endeavors hitherto forbids despondency; for the temples, once almost desolate, begin to be again frequented—the sacred solemnities, which had for some time been intermitted, are now attended afresh; and the sacrificial victims, which once could scarcely find a purchaser, now obtain a brisk sale. Whence I infer that many might be reclaimed, were the hope of pardon, on their repentance, absolutely confirmed.’”

Trajan to Pliny.

“’My Dear Pliny:—You have done perfectly right, in managing as you have, the matters which relate to the impeachment of the Christians. No one general rule can be laid down which will apply to all cases. These people are not to be hunted up by informers; but, if accused and convicted, let them be executed; yet with this restriction, that if any renounce the profession of Christianity, and give proof of it by offering supplications to our gods, however suspicious their past conduct may have been, they shall be pardoned on their repentance. But anonymous accusations should never be attended to, since it would be establishing a precedent of the worst kind, and altogether inconsistent with the maxims of my government.’”

Our author continues:—“It is an obvious reflection from these letters, that at this early period Christianity had made an extraordinary progress in the empire; for Pliny acknowledges that the Pagan temples had become ‘almost desolate.’ Nor should we overlook the remarkable proof which they afford us of the state of the Christian profession, and the dreadful persecutions to which the disciples of Christ were then exposed. It is evident from them that, by the existing laws, it was a capital offense, punishable with death, for any one to avow himself a Christian. Nor did the humane Trajan and the philosophic Pliny entertain a doubt of the propriety of the law, or the wisdom and justice of executing it in its fullest extent. Pliny confesses that he had commanded such capital punishments to be inflicted on many, chargeable with no crime but their profession of Christianity; and Trajan not only confirms the equity of the sentence, but enjoins the continuance of such executions, without any exceptions, unless it be of those who apostatized from their profession, denied their Lord and Savior, and did homage to the idols of paganism.

“These letters also give us a pleasing view of the holy and exemplary lives of the first Christians. For it appears by the confession of apostates themselves that no man could continue a member of their communion whose deportment in the world did not correspond with his holy profession. Even delicate women are put to the torture, to try if their weakness would not betray them into accusations of their brethren; but not a word, not a charge can be extorted from them capable of bearing the semblance of deceit or crime. To meet for prayer, praise and mutual instruction; to worship Christ as their God; to exhort one another to abstain from every evil word and work; to unite in commemorating the death of their Lord by partaking of the symbols of his broken body and shed blood in the ordinance of the Supper—these things constitute what Pliny calls the ‘depraved superstition!’ the ‘execrable crimes!’ which could only be expiated by the blood of the Christians!

“We should not overlook the proof, which these letters afford, of the peaceableness of the Christians of those days, and their readiness to submit even to the most unjust requisitions rather than disturb the peace of society. They knew the edicts that were in force against them; and to avoid giving offense they assembled before break of day for the worship of their God and Savior. And when Pliny issued his edict to that effect they, for a while, yielded to the storm, and desisted from the observance of their Agapae, or feasts of charity. This view of things abundantly justifies the encomium of Hegesippus, one of the earliest Christian writers, ‘that the church continued until these times as a virgin, pure and uncorrupted.’

“Considering the character which both the emperor and the pro-consul sustained for mildness of disposition and gentleness of manners, it has occasioned no small perplexity to many, and even to some of our philosophic historians, how to account for the circumstance that such men should be found on the list of persecutors, and at the same time to admit the unoffending deportment of the Christians. Mr. Warburton has given a very satisfactory solution of this difficulty; and, though the passage be rather long, I shall transcribe the substance of it in this place. ’The Pagan world having early imbibed this inveterate prejudice concerning intercommunity of worship, men were too much accustomed to new revelations, when the Jewish appeared, not to acknowledge its superior pretensions. Accordingly we find, by the history of this people, that it was esteemed by its neighbors a true one; and therefore they proceeded to join it occasionally with their own; as those did whom the King of Assyria sent into the cities of Israel in the place of the ten tribes. Whereby it happened, so great was the influence of this principle, that, in the same time and country, the Jews of Jerusalem added the Pagan idolatries to their religion, while the Pagans of Samaria added the Jewish religion to their idolatries.

“‘But when these people of God, in consequence of having their dogmatic theology more carefully inculcated to them, after their return from the captivity, became rigid, in maintaining not only that their religion was true, but the only true one, then it was that they began to be treated by their neighbors, and afterward by the Greeks and Romans, with the utmost hatred and contempt for this their inhumanity and unsociable temper. To this cause alone we are to ascribe all that spleen and rancor which appear in the histories of these later nations concerning them. Celsus[2] fairly reveals what lay at the bottom, and speaks out for them all: ’If the Jews on these accounts,’ says he, ‘adhere to their own law, it is not for that they are to blame: I rather blame those who forsake their own country religion to embrace the Jewish. But if these people give themselves airs of sublimer wisdom than the rest of the world, and on that score refuse all communion with it, as not equally pure, I must tell them that it is not to be believed that they are more dear or agreeable to God than other nations.’ Hence, among the Pagans, the Jews came to be distinguished from all other people by the name of a race of men odious to the gods, and with good reason. This was the reception the Jews met with in the world.

“’When Christianity arose, though on the foundation of Judaism, it was at first received with great complacency by the Pagan world. The gospel was favorably heard, and the superior evidence with which it was enforced inclined men, long habituated to pretended revelations, to receive it into the number of the established. Accordingly, we find one Roman emperor introducing it among his closet religions; and another promising to the senate to give it a more public entertainment. But when it was found to carry its pretensions higher, and, like the Jewish, to claim the title of the only true one, then it was that it began to incur the same hatred and contempt with the Jewish. But when it went still further, and urged the necessity of all men forsaking their own national religions and embracing the gospel, this so shocked the Pagans that it soon brought upon itself the bloody storm that followed. Thus you have the true origin of persecution for religion; a persecution not committed, but undergone, by the Christian Church.

“‘Hence we see how it happened that such good emperors as Trajan and Mark Antonine came to be found in the first rank of persecutors; a difficulty that hath very much embarrassed the inquirers into ecclesiastical antiquity, and given a handle to the deists, who empoison everything, of pretending to suspect that there must have been something very much amiss in primitive Christianity, while such wise magistrates could become its persecutors. But the reason is now manifest. The Christian pretensions overthrew a fundamental principle of paganism, which they thought founded in nature, namely, the friendly intercommunity of worship. And thus the famous passage of Pliny the younger becomes intelligible. ’For I did not in the least hesitate, but that whatever should appear on confession to be their faith, yet that their frowardness and inflexible obstinacy would certainly deserve punishment.’ What was the ‘inflexible obstinacy?’ It could not be in professing a new religion; that was a thing common enough. It was the refusing all communion with paganism—refusing to throw a grain of incense on their altars. For we must not think, as is commonly imagined, that this was at first enforced by the magistrate to make them renounce their religion; but only to give a test of its hospitality and sociableness of temper. It was indeed, and rightly too, understood by the Christians to be a renouncing of their religion, and so accordingly abstained from. The misfortune was that the Pagans did not consider the inflexibility as a mere error, but as an immorality likewise. The unsociable, uncommunicable temper, in matters of religious worship, was esteemed by the best of them as a hatred and aversion to mankind. Thus Tacitus, speaking of the burning of Rome, calls the Christians ‘persons convicted of hatred to all mankind.’ But how? The confession of the Pagans themselves, concerning the purity of the Christian morals, shows this could be no other than a, being ‘convicted’ of rejecting all intercommunity of worship; which, so great was their prejudice, they thought could proceed from nothing but hatred towards mankind. Universal prejudice had made men regard a refusal of this intercommunity as the most brutal of all dissociability. And the Emperor Julian, who understood this matter the best of any, fairly owns that the Jews and Christians brought the execration of the world upon them by their aversion to the gods of paganism, and their refusal of all communication with them.’

“From what took place in the province of Bithynia, under the government of the mild and amiable Pliny, a tolerably correct judgment may be formed of the state of Christianity during the reign of Trajan, in every other part of the empire.” One more instance it may suffice to mention.”While Pliny was thus conducting matters in Bithynia, the province of Syria was under the government of Tiberianus. There is still extant a letter which he addressed to Trajan, in which he says: ‘I am quite wearied with punishing and destroying the Galileans, or those of the sect called Christians, according to your orders. Yet they never cease to profess voluntarily what they are, and to offer themselves to death. Wherefore I have labored by exhortations and threats to discourage them from daring to confess to me that they are of that sect. Yet, in spite of all persecution, they continue still to do it. Be pleased therefore to inform me what your highness thinks proper to be done with them.’”

We have now given a minute description of the character and sufferings of Christians in the early part of the second century, and wish the Primitive Baptists of the nineteenth century to look into this mirror well and see if they do not discover their own image reflected. Were they not there then as they are here now, surrounded by religionists, who hated and persecuted them because they would not consent to an intercommunity of worship? The doctrine of salvation by grace from first to last, as entertained by the Primitive Baptists of the nineteenth century, as entertained by the Primitive Baptists of the nineteenth century, though detested by some of the professed Christian denominations around them and disliked by others—the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, though entirely ignored by some and derided by others—would be no bar to fellowship, by the various denominations around them, if the Baptists desired such fellowship and would sanction and unite in the worship of their neighbors, and aid in building up and endowing the various and numerous societies and enterprises which they have invented and set up as a means of salvation of human souls from sin and from hell.

It is for their “obstinacy” they are hated, for their “selfishness,” for their want of “sociability,” for their refusing “intercommunity of worship” with the numerous establishments around them, that they are held to be unchristian, and ignorant and barbarous. It is not only because they refuse connection with all other denominations and will have nothing to do with their religious movements, but because they maintain that all others are wrong and they alone are right; that all others are unscriptural and they alone are scriptural; that all others are disregarding the pattern given by the primitive saints, and they are the only people copying and following that pattern as clearly set forth in the first and second centuries. The early Christians did not believe that Jupiter or Mars, Venus or Diana, or even the image of Caligula or Trajan, could save a sinner from sin and eternal punishment, and would not, therefore, under forfeiture of their lives, throw one grain of incense upon their altars, or speak one word or make one sign of adoration to them. The Primitive Baptists of the nineteenth century do not believe that a fair or a festival, a missionary society or a State Convention, a theological seminary or a Sunday School, a tract society or a raffling bag, is a means of grace, or can save a sinner any better or quicker than either of the idols above mentioned; therefore they refuse to throw one grain of incense upon their altars, or give any sign or speak one word in adoration of them.

For this unsociable temper they would share the fate of their brethren in the days of Trajan and other Roman emperors, but for the civil and religious liberty which God has been pleased to confer upon them in England and the United States and some other portions of the earth. When pressed closely some of these religionists will deny their belief in their numerous societies as a means of salvation; but let no one be deceived by such incidental denial; it is only a subterfuge to entrap the unwary for the moment. They do believe and urge the adoption of the belief by the public that these extraordinary helps and auxiliary societies are the means of grace and of the conversion of dead sinners to God. This is in evidence by their best authors and most profound scholars, their public lecturers and most popular preachers.

We think it quite apparent that most of these people think more of and rely more upon these outside societies and schemes gotten up by themselves and the non-professing world, than they rely upon the special organization of their respective churches, so called, for the conversion of the world.

The great prototype of modern Sunday Schools and Theological Seminaries was the so-called “Christian” School, or School of Catechists, of Alexandria, in Egypt, founded about A. D. 180. The first president was a “converted” heathen philosopher, Pantaenus, who was succeeded in 189 by Clement, another “converted” heathen philosopher. The great scholar and universalist, Origen, succeeded Clement in 202, and presided till 232, and is said to have raised the school to the summit of prosperity. Origen’s pupils, Heraclas and Dionysius, succeeded him. The last teacher was Didymus, in A. D. 395. The two chief objects of this Alexandrian school were to prepare people, especially the young, for the church, and to prepare talented young men to preach. The number of students was very great, and it is said that many eloquent preachers were sent out from this school. The doctrines inculcated here were certainly fascinating to the natural mind—traditionalism. Arminianism, rationalism and universalism. Religion was gradually blended with and superseded by philosophy. Judaism and paganism were kindly brought in; and a broad, liberal, eclectic system, adapted to accommodate and reconcile all parties, was devised, and this monstrous compound of truth and falsehood, of light and darkness—being mostly falsehood and darkness—was considered the perfection of true religion. One of the most permanent and wide-reaching results of this school was the philosophical invention and establishment of the doctrine of free-will, scientifically known as the Greek anthropology and soteriology—the doctrine that the first step in every man’s salvation must be taken by his own natural will; that Christ’s death was not an expiatory sacrifice for sin, and is not of itself sufficient to save sinners; that repentance is a purifying and expiatory principle; that no faith whatsoever can save unless it is followed by works. The learned city of Alexandria contained the greatest library of ancient times, said to have had 700,000 volumes, collected by the Ptolemies, kings of Egypt; and this city was the home of Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, and into these fatal errors the teaching of the Catechetical School shaded off by almost imperceptible gradations. It is thought that Simon Magus, the Nicolaitans, Cerinthus, the Ophites, Sethites and Cainites, in the first century, were precursors of the Gnostics, whose system became fully developed in the second century. The three chief centres of Gnosticism were Alexandria, in Egypt, Antioch, in Syria, and Pontus, in Asia Minor. The most famous Gnostic was the Alexandrian Jew, Valentinus; his system was the most complete and consistent, and effected a fusion between nominal Christianity and the Platonic philosophy, leaving out the humbling ideas of sin, repentance and atonement, and weaving in the proud ideas of Buddhistic pantheism, man being set forth as the most perfect realization of the Divine. This system “left erect the great idol of paganism, humanity, which could behold itself deified upon the naked summits of the Valentinian metaphysics, no less than upon the golden heights of Olympus.” The Syrian Gnosis brought in the Persian or Zoroastrian idea of dualism, or the eternal existence of two first principles, one Good and the other Evil; and the system of Mareion, in Asia Minor, was distinguished by its rejection of the Old Testament and of about three-fourths of the New Testament. Gnosticism was a phantasmal philosophy of evolution substituted for religion, pretending to account for evil by identifying it with matter, and thus annihilating the moral nature of evil, which lies in the will of the creature violating the Divine law. Gnosticism flourished in the third century also, and did not finally disappear until the sixth century. -The precursor of the Neo-Platonists was the Alexandrian Jew, Philo, in the first century. He attempted to amalgamate the Platonic philosophy with the Old Testament, and his system is a heathenizing of Judaism. Ammonius Saccas, of Alexandria (who died there A. D. 241), is generally considered the founder of Neo-Platonism. He was born, it is said, of Christian parents, and was himself an apostate from a Christian profession. Neo-Platonism was a revival of Platonism, “a philosophical theology, a pantheistic eclecticism, which sought to reconcile Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy with Oriental religion and theosophy, polytheism with monotheism, superstition with culture, and to hold, as with a convulsive grasp, the old popular (polytheistic) faith in a refined and idealized form.” Among the pupils of Ammonius Saccas were Origen, the professed Christian, and the most famous president of the Alexandrian Catechetical School or Theological Seminary; and Plotinus, the most celebrated of the Neo-Platonic heathen philosophers, and the most transcendental of all ancient transcendentalists. A pupil of Plotinus was Porphyry, the ablest infidel of ancient times. —Now, if _“Gnosticism_ laid the foundation of Christian science or rational Christian theology” (as the Encyclopaedia Britannica says), and if Neo-Platonism educated the most famous professor in the first Theological Seminary of the”Christian” world, the facts just recited are a most forcible commentary upon the establishment of human institutions for the preparation of people to join the church and to preach the gospel of Christ; and Paul manifested Divine wisdom when he said: “I fear lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ”; (2 Cor. 11:3) “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ”; (Col 2:8) “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science (gnosis) falsely so-called, which some professing, have erred concerning the faith”; (1 Tim. 6:20, 21) “And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God: for I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” “That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God” (1Cor. 2:1-5). Let it be remembered that the “theological” chairs of the German universities have been the greatest strongholds of infidelity in the nineteenth century.—The chief opposition to the Alexandrian School and to Gnosticism and to the substitution of philosophy for Christianity was, in the second century, made by those called the Montanists, of whom Tertullian became, in the third century, the ablest writer. They took their name from Montanus, a native of Phrygia in Asia Minor, and were hence also called Cataphrygians, and Pepuzians, from Pepuza in Phrygia. They sought to emphasize the great importance of the spirituality and purity of the church, and especially the absolute indispensability of the work of the Holy Ghost and the dispensableness of human philosophy. “Tertullian calls the Greek philosophers the patriarchs of all heresies, and scornfully asks, ‘What has the academy to do with the church? What has Christ to do with Plato—Jerusalem with Athens?’ His theology revolves about the great Pauline antithesis of sin and grace, and breaks the road to the Latin anthropology and soteriology, afterwards developed by his like-minded, but clearer, calmer and more considerate countryman, Augustin.”—Schaff. He recognized the universal priesthood and equality of believers, and he defended the right of all men to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. Neander traces the anti-Gnosticism of the Montanists to the influence of the Apostle John in Asia Minor. In their reaction against Catholic corruptions some of them wandered off into asceticism, celibacy, prophetic ecstacies, divination and millenarianism. They spread through most of the provinces of the Roman Empire, and were found as late as the sixth century. Their general doctrinal orthodoxy is distinctly affirmed by those writers called the “Fathers.”

“The first fifteen Bishops (or pastors) of the church of Jerusalem were all circumcised Jews, and this church united the law of Moses with the doctrine of Christ.” Just before the destruction of Jerusalem, A. D. 70, this church retired to Pella, beyond the Jordan, and sojourned there “above sixty years in solitude and obscurity. They still enjoyed the comfort of making frequent and devout visits to the Holy City” until the Jews, revolting under Bar-Cochab, a pretended Messiah, were slaughtered to the number of 580,000, A. D. 132-135, by the Romans, and the Emperor Hadrian planted a Roman colony in Jerusalem, changed the name of the city to aelia Capitolina, after his own family name and the title of the Capitoline Jove, whose temple was now reared on Mount Zion, and forbade all Jews, on pain of death, to enter the city. The Jewish-Christian church (or Nazarenes) then chose a Gentile, Marcus, for their pastor, and renounced the ceremonial law of Moses, in the practice of which they had persevered for more than a century. Some of them and others with them, though acknowledging the messiahship of Christ, denied His Divinity, and considered the Mosaic law to be of universal and perpetual obligation; a part of them were successors of the Judaizing teachers opposed in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and a part were successors of the incipient Gnostics opposed in his letter to the Colossians. They were known as Ebionites (or “the poor”), and vanished from history about the end of the fourth century.

Christianity went on suffering and expanding during the second century. It required its members to deny themselves of all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world. It required of its votaries a high-toned morality, and they knew, when they became Christians, that the decree of death was out against them, and yet they increased in numbers beyond all precedent, and to the utter astonishment and dread of the Pagan world. They were derided by their enemies as being nothing more than weavers, cobblers and fullers—as being the most illiterate persons, preaching an irrational faith; but yet knew how to commend it to women and children. What better is said of Primitive Baptists in the nineteenth century?

The common people among the Pagans, as well as their rulers, were very bitter in their feelings towards the Christians. They abhorred them as supposed atheists and enemies to the gods. They readily gave credit to all the slanderous rumors of all sorts of abominations, even incest and cannibalism, practiced by the Christians at their religious assemblies and love feasts, and regarded the frequent public calamities of that age as punishments justly inflicted by the angry gods for the disregard of their worship. In North Africa arose the proverb: “If God does not send rain, lay it to the Christians.” At every inundation or drought or famine or pestilence, the fanatical populace cried: “Away with the atheists! To the lions with the Christians!” They were held responsible for all the earthquakes, also, that occurred in the empire. At a time when the Emperor Trajan was at Antioch in Syria, about entering upon the Parthian war, that city was visited by a dreadful earthquake, so as to be almost entirely ruined. “It was preceded by violent claps of thunder, unusual winds, and a dreadful noise under ground. Then followed so terrible a shock that the earth trembled, several houses were overturned, and others tossed to and fro like a ship at sea. The noise of the cracking and bursting of the timber and of the falling of the houses drowned the cries of the dismayed populace. Those who happened to be in their houses were for the most part buried under their ruins; such as were walking in the streets and in the squares were, by the violence of the shock, dashed against each other, and most of them killed or dangerously wounded. Trajan himself was much hurt, but escaped through a window out of the house in which he was.”

Ignatius[3] was pastor of the church at Antioch at the time of the earthquake, and was said to be a man of great piety. The Christians were of course charged with being the cause of the earthquake. And the popularity which generally attends superior gifts marked him as the victim of imperial fury on the occasion. “He was accordingly seized, and by the emperor’s order sent from Antioch to Rome, where he was exposed to the fury of wild beasts in the theatre and by them devoured.”

The emperors who ruled the Roman Empire during this century were Trajan, Adrian, Titus Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurclius Antoninus, Commodus, Pertinax and Severus. Adrian, Titus Antoninus Pius, and even the wicked Commodus, made the condition of things more tolerable to the Christians, but under the others the blood of the saints flowed freely in a great many portions of the empire. One of the most barbarous persecutions broke out in Vienne and Lyons in France, then called Gallia, about the year 177. It seems difficult to ascertain when Christianity first developed itself in those cities, but, when this great onslaught upon them arose, they were found to be quite numerous. The supposition is that the gospel was first introduced there by refugees from Asia Minor -fleeing persecution, and a convenient transit might have been found in merchant vessels navigating the Mediterranean between Lyons and Smyrna, thus providing means of escape from the latter and other cities in Asia. Vienne was an ancient Roman colony; Lyons was more modern; and of this latter church the presbyters, Elders or pastors were Pothinus and Irenaeus, Greek names, and many of those persecuted, mangled and destroyed had Greek names. After the storm abated to some extent, an account of it was transmitted in a letter addressed to the brethren in Asia Propria and Phrygia, and was composed as was supposed by Irenaeus, a disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna. The letter is lengthy and precise, detailing all the particulars of the persecution, and is pronounced by Lardner “the finest thing of the kind in all antiquity.” It was preserved by Eusebius, and appears in his Ecclesiastical History, published in the fourth century.

Its address, simply, must suffice here, and is as follows: “The servants of Christ, sojourning in Vienne and Lyons in France, to the brethren in Asia Propria and Phrygia, who have the same faith and hope of redemption with us; peace and grace and glory, from God the Father and Jesus our Lord.” This sounds very apostolical, and then follows the letter, which is too lengthy for insertion in this volume.

In the latter part of the second century large numbers of Christians were found to be in the Roman province of Africa. A numerous church existed at Carthage about this time, and Tertullian was one of its pastors. In the second century Christianity penetrated to Edessa in Mesopotamia, and some distance into Persia, Media, Bactria and Parthia. It reached Spain also, it is supposed, in this century, though no clear traces of churches and pastors there meet us until the middle of the third. Irenaeus speaks of the preaching of the gospel, in this century, among the Germans and other barbarians, who “without paper and ink, have salvation written in their hearts by the Holy Ghost.” “According to Tertullian, Britain was also brought under the power of the cross towards the end of the second century.”

The second century is especially the age of apologies or defenses of the Christian religion addressed to the emperor of Rome and others. Men pleading for religious liberty before their rulers, who felt it to be their duty to exterminate the Christian profession, were necessarily in earnest, and this earnestness and devotion to the sacred cause of Christ inspired them with rhetorical pathos unknown to calmer times.

We shall here give some extracts from a few authors to show the character of the times that tried men’s souls, and the relative position of persecutors and the persecuted.

“The church at this period appears poor in earthly possessions and honors, but rich in heavenly grace, in world-conquering faith, love and hope; unpopular, even outlawed, hated and persecuted, yet far more vigorous and expansive than the philosophies of Greece or the empire of Rome; composed chiefly of persons of the lower social ranks, yet attracting the noblest and deepest minds of the age, and bearing in her bosom the hope of the world; conquering by apparent defeat, and growing on the blood of her martyrs; great in deeds, greater in sufferings, greatest in death, for the honor of Christ and the benefit of generations to come. The condition and manners of the Christians in this age are most beautifully described by the unknown author of the epistle to Diognetus in the early part of the second century. ‘The Christians,’ says he, ‘are not distinguished from other men by country, by language, nor by civil institutions. For they neither dwell in cities by themselves, nor use a peculiar tongue, nor lead a singular mode of life. They dwell in the Grecian or barbarian cities, as the case may be; they follow the usage of the country in dress, food, and other affairs of life. Yet they present a wonderful and paradoxical conduct. They dwell in their own native lands, but as strangers. They take part in all things, as citizens; and they suffer all things, as foreigners. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every native land is a foreign. They marry like all others; they have children, but they do not cast away their offspring. They have the table in common, but not wives. They live upon the earth, but are citizens of Heaven. They obey the existing laws, but excel the laws by their lives. They love all, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown, and yet they are condemned. They are killed, and are made alive. They are poor, and make many rich. They lack all things, and in all things abound. They are reproached, and glory in their reproaches. They are calumniated, and are justified. They are cursed, and they bless. They receive scorn, and they give honor. They do good, and are punished as evil doers. When punished, they rejoice as being made alive. By the Jews they are attacked as aliens, and by the Greeks persecuted; and the cause of the enmity their enemies cannot tell. In short, what the soul is in the body, the Christians are in the world. The soul is infused through all the members of the body, and the Christians are spread through the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, but it is not of the body; so the Christians dwell in the world, but are not of the world. The soul, invisible, keeps watch in the visible body; so also the Christians are seen to live in the world, but their piety is invisible. The flesh hates and wars against the soul, suffering no wrong from it, but because it resists earthly pleasures; and the world hates the Christians with no reason, but that they resist its pleasures. The soul loves the flesh and members, by which it is hated; so the Christians love their haters. The soul is inclosed in the body, but holds the body together; so the Christians are detained in the world as in a prison; but they contain the world. Immortal, the soul dwells in the mortal body; so the Christians dwell in the corruptible, but look for incorruption in Heaven. The soul is the better for restriction in food and drink; and the Christians increase though daily punished. This lot God has assigned to the Christians in the world; and it cannot be taken from them.’”—Schaff.

Says Tertullian: “All your ingenious cruelties can accomplish nothing; they are only a lure to this sect. Our number increases the more you destroy us. The blood of the Christians is their seed.” And again says this able defender of Christians: “We are a people of yesterday, and yet we have filled every place belonging to you—cities, islands, castles, towns, assemblies, your very camp, your tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum! We leave your temples only. We can count your armies; our numbers in a single province will be greater.”

Says Justin Martyr, about the middle of the second century: “There is no people, Greek or barbarian, or of any other race, by whatsoever appellation or manners they may be distinguished, however ignorant of arts or agriculture, whether they dwell in tents or wander about in covered wagons—among whom prayers and thanksgivings are not offered, in the name of the crucified Jesus, to the Father and Creator of all things.”

Again says Tertullian, in his Apology: “We pray for the safety of the emperors to the eternal God, the true, the living God, whom emperors themselves should desire to be propitious to them, above all others who are called gods. We, looking up to Heaven, with outstretched hands, because they are harmless, with naked heads because we are not ashamed, without a prompter because we pray from the heart, constantly pray for all emperors and kings, that they may have a long life, a secure empire, a safe palace, strong armies, a faithful senate, a well moralized people, a quiet state of the world; whatever Caesar would wish for himself in his public or private capacity. I cannot solicit these things from any other than from Him from whom I know I shall obtain them, if I ask agreeably to His will, because He alone can do these things; and I expect them from Him, being His servant, who worships Him alone, and am ready to lose my life in His service. Thus then let the claws of wild beasts pierce us, or their feet trample on us, while our hands are stretched out to God; let crosses suspend us, let fires consume us, let swords pierce our breasts -a praying Christian is in a frame for enduring anything. How is this, ye generous rulers? will ye kill the good subjects who supplicate God for the emperor? Were we disposed to return evil for evil, it were easy for us to avenge the injuries which we sustain. But God forbid that His people should vindicate themselves by human force, or be reluctant to endure that by which their sincerity is evinced. Were we disposed to act the part, I will not say of secret assassins, but of open enemies, should we want forces or numbers? For what war should we not be ready and well prepared, even though unequal in numbers; we, who die with so much pleasure, were it not that our religion requires us rather to suffer death than to inflict it? If we were to make a general secession from your dominions, you would be astonished at your solitude. We are dead to all ideas of worldly honor and dignity; nothing is more foreign to us than political concerns; the whole world is our republic.”

“We are a body united in one bond of religious discipline and hope. We meet in our assemblies for prayer. We are compelled to have recourse to the Divine oracles for caution and recollection on all occasions. We nourish our faith by the word of God; we erect our hope, we fix our confidence, we strengthen our discipline, by repeatedly inculcating precepts, exhortations, corrections, and by excommunication when it is needful. This last, as being in the sight of God, is of great weight, and is a serious warning of the future judgment, if any one behave in so scandalous a manner as to be debarred from holy communion. Those who preside among us are elderly persons, not distinguished for opulence, but worthiness of character. Every one pays something into the public chest once a month, or when he pleases, and according to his ability and inclination, for there is no compulsion. These gifts are, as it were, the deposits of piety. Hence we relieve and bury the needy; support orphans and decrepit persons; those who have suffered shipwreck, and those who, for the word of God, are condemned to the mines or imprisonment. This very charity of ours has caused us to be noticed by some; ‘See,’ say they, ‘how these Christians love one another.’“

“But we Christians look upon ourselves as one body, informed, as it were, by one soul; and being thus incorporated by love, we can never dispute what we are to bestow upon our own members. And is it any great wonder that such charitable brethren as enjoy all things in common should have such frequent love-feasts? For this it is you traduce us, and reflect upon our little frugal suppers, not only as infamously wicked, but as scandalously excessive. The nature of this supper you may understand by its name, for it is the Greek word for love. We Christians think we can never be too expensive, but we consider all to be gain that is laid out in doing good. When therefore we are at the charge of an entertainment, it is to refresh the bowels of the needy. We feed the hungry because we know that God takes a peculiar delight in seeing us do it. If therefore we feast only with such brave and excellent designs, I leave you from thence to guess at the rest of our discipline in matters of pure religion. Nothing earthly, nothing unclean, has ever admittance here. Our souls ascend in prayer to God before we sit down to meat. We eat only what suffices nature, and drink no more than is strictly becoming chaste and regular persons. We sup as servants that know we must wake in the night to the service of our Master, and discourse as those who remember that they are in the hearing of God. When supper is ended every one is invited forth to sing praises to God; and by this you may judge of the measure of drinking at a Christian feast. As we begin, so we conclude, all with prayer, and depart with the same tenor of temperance and modesty we came; as men who have not so properly been drinking, as imbibing religion.”

“And now, O worshipful judges, proceed with your show of justice, and, believe me, ye will be still more and more just in the opinion of the people the oftener you make them a sacrifice of Christians. Crucify, torture, condemn, grind us all to powder if you can; your injustice is an illustrious proof of our innocence, and it is for the proof of this that God permits us to suffer. Do your worst, and rack your inventions for tortures for Christians. ’Tis all to no purpose; you do but attract the notice of the world, and make it fall the more in love with our religion. The more you mow us down, the thicker we spring up. The Christian blood you spill is like the seed you sow -it springs from the earth again and fructifies the more. That which you reproach in us as stubbornness has been the most instructive mistress in proselyting the world—for who has not been struck with the sight of what you call stubbornness, and from thence prompted to look into the reality and grounds of it; and whoever looked well into our religion that did not embrace it? For this reason it is that we thank you for condemning us, because there is such a happy variance and disagreement between the Divine and human judgment; and when you condemn us upon earth, God absolves us in Heaven.” So much for Tertullian’s appeal to the heathen Roman judges and murderers of Christians; and although objections now might be raised to some of the ideas set forth, yet it stands as one of the noblest apologies for Christianity found in all antiquity, and depicts in glowing colors the nature of that faith and practice maintained by the chosen people of God in the second century of the Christian dispensation.

The churches of the second century were democratic in their discipline and order, and were neither Episcopal, Presbyterian nor Monarchical in their government. This is established by ancient authors and confirmed by those of modern times, such as Mosheim and Gibbon.[4]

They were Baptist Churches because composed of baptized believers, and because each church was independent of other churches in government. Among the writers of this century may he mentioned Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Tatian, Minucius Felix, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian. These authors, so far from directly speaking of infant baptism, never once utter a syllable upon the subject. It was then entirely unknown. Adults, who were capable of professing faith in Christ, were baptized and became church members. And here is where the Baptists came from.

Third Century.—This century is distinguished for the sufferings of the Christians under cruel emperors, their ambition and worldly mindedness under tolerant emperors, and the more manifest appearance of errors in faith and practice than hitherto discovered.

The names of those who swayed the imperial sceptre of Rome during this century are Severus, Caracalla, Macrinus, Heliogabalus, Alexander Severus, Maximin, Decius, Gallus, Valerian and Diocletian.

From the death of Severus to the reign of Decius, a period of about forty years, the church enjoyed comparative tranquility, and, as a consequence, increased in numbers and increased in disorder. Pastors were now called Bishops generally, and Bishops, Presbyters and Deacons assumed great importance in the churches; each tyrannized over the other in turn, and all tyrannized over the ordinary members, with some exceptions. Metropolitan Bishops assumed superiority over the country Bishops, and became grasping for worldly honors and emoluments. Eusebius says of them: “They grew negligent and slothful, envying and reproaching one another; waging, as it were, civil wars amongst themselves, Bishops quarreling with Bishops, and the people divided into parties. Hypocrisy and deceit were grown to the highest pitch of wickedness. They were become so insensible as not so much as to think of appeasing the Divine anger; but, like atheists, they thought the world destitute of any providential government and care, and they added one crime to another. The Bishops themselves had thrown off all concern about religion; were perpetually contending with one another; they were full of ambition and tyrannically used their power.” This description is high-wrought, but in many cases was true, no doubt, to the letter; while others, the truly broken-hearted and contrite-spirited children of God, mourned these excesses and departures from the course pursued by the earlier ministers of Jesus. But by the rod of blood-thirsty tyrants God brought down these high looks and humbled His people in the dust once more.

Under the reign of Decius and some of his successors “the gates of hell,” as one writer terms it, “were once more opened, and merciless executioners were let loose upon the defenseless churches, and deluged the earth with blood.” Many cases of eminent ministers, as well as of private persons, are mentioned by various authors as having suffered cruel tortures and deaths in many parts of the Roman Empire about this time. Suffice it to say that “the most excessive and outrageous barbarities were made use of upon all who would not blaspheme Christ and offer incense to the imperial gods. They were publicly whipped, drawn by the heels through the streets of cities, racked until every bone of their body was disjointed, had their teeth beat out, their noses, hands and ears cut off, sharp-pointed spears run under their nails, were tortured with melted lead thrown on their naked bodies, had their eyes dug out, their limbs cut off, were condemned to the mines, ground between stones, stoned to death, burnt alive, thrown headlong from the high buildings, beheaded, smothered in burning limekilns, run through the body with sharp spears, destroyed with hunger, thirst and cold, thrown to the wild beasts, broiled on gridirons with slow fires, cast by heaps into the sea, crucified, scraped to death with sharp shells, torn in pieces by the boughs of trees; and, in a word, destroyed by all the various methods that the most diabolical subtlety and malice could devise.”—Chandler’s History of Persecutions.

Yet the mystery of iniquity, which began to be developed in the days of the Apostles, increased considerably in this century, especially as lenity was shown the professors of Christianity, at times, by the temporal ruling powers; so that at the close of the century it was very apparent that the order of gospel worship was in an expiring condition, and the simplicity that characterized apostolic institutions was fast passing away. The churches remained independent, a form of godliness was maintained, no radical errors in faith were promulgated, but what were managed by the churches and suppressed in order; yet the officers of the church were aggrandized, their wealth and power augmented, and in most cases luxury and pride superseded frugality and meekness. The door was being opened for the entrance of Antichrist.

“The officer formerly known by the name of Elder, Bishop, or presbyter (terms exactly synonymous in the New Testament), became now distinguished by the elevation of the Bishop above his brethren; and each of the above terms was carried out into a distinction of places in the Christian Church. The minister, whose congregation increased from the suburbs of his town and vicinage around, considered the parts from which his charge emanated as territories marking the boundary of his authority; and all those presbyters sent by him into surrounding stations, to conduct evening or other services, acknowledged the pastor of the mother interest as Bishop of the district; this view of the pastor, connected with his charge, of the baptistery, gave importance to his station and office which entailed an evil. Associations of ministers and churches, which at first were formed in Greece, became common throughout the empire. These mutual unions for the management of spiritual affairs led to the choice, of a president, which aided distinction amongst ministers of religion. In those degenerating times aspiring men saw each other in varied elevations; consequently jealousy, ambition and strife ensued, and every work followed. The learning of the philosopher contributed to popularity, and, where the suffrages of the community were to be taken, this acquisition was important to the aspirant; while the Jewish distinctions of ministers gave force and example to place and power. It was some time before the Bishops, presbyters and Deacons, now very distinct classes of men, could persuade the people that they succeeded to the character, rights and privileges of the Jewish priesthood. So far as those ministers were successful they opened a door to the adoption of every abrogated rite; and one evidence of success soon appeared in the abundance of wealth conferred on the clergy.” London Encyclopaedia. “The Bishops,” says Mosheim, “now aspired to higher degrees of power and authority than they formerly possessed; and not only violated the rights of the people, but also made gradual encroachments on the privileges of the presbyters. That they might cover their usurpations with an air of justice and appearance of reason, they published new doctrines concerning the nature of the church and episcopal dignity. One of the principal authors of this change in the government of the church was Cyprian,[5] Bishop of Carthage (A. D. 254), who pleaded for the power of the Bishops with more zeal and vehemence than had ever been hitherto employed in that cause. The change in the form of government was soon followed by a train of vices which dishonor the character and authority of those to whom the administration of the church was committed. For though several yet continued to exhibit to the world illustrious examples of primitive piety and Christian virtue, yet many were sunk in luxury and voluptuousness, puffed up with vanity, arrogance and ambition, possessed with a spirit of contention and discord, and addicted to other vices, that cast an undeserved reproach upon the holy religion of which they were the unworthy professors and ministers. The Bishops assumed, in many places, princely authority; particularly those who had the greatest number of churches under their inspection, and who presided over the most opulent assemblies. They appropriated to their evangelical functions the splendid ensigns of imperial majesty; a throne, surrounded with ministers, exalted above his equals, the servant of the meek and humble Jesus; and sumptuous garments dazzled the eyes and the minds of the multitude into an ignorant veneration for their arrogated authority. The example of the Bishops was ambitiously imitated by the presbyters, who, neglecting the sacredness of their station, abandoned themselves to the indolence and delicacy of an effeminate and luxurious life. The Deacons, beholding the presbyters deserting their functions, boldly usurped their rights and privileges; and the effects of a corrupt ambition were spread through every rank of the sacred order.” “The duties of the sanctuary consequently devolved on new officers, and menials were appointed to do the work of idle Bishops and presbyters; ceremonies were added by Bishops to please the multitude, or the immediate possessors of power; and a disposition prevailed to accommodate the religion of Jesus to the taste of heathens.”

During the rise and growth of these corruptions the churches for three centuries remained as originally formed—independent of each other, and were united by no legal authority, for the ruling powers were hostile to Christians. These corrupt practices did not prevail so much in the country as in the cities, and many in the cities were opposed to them. Such members as could not tolerate the abuses were justifiable in casting them out or withdrawing from them. Heathen emperors yet ruled and tyrannized over Christians, and the man of sin had not been fully developed.

After forty years’ toleration and a consequent large increase of nominal professors of Christianity, the severe Decian persecution of two years produced not only many martyrs, but also many apostates, who, after the abatement of the trial, applied for restoration to the churches and were generally re-admitted. Novatian, a very learned and upright Elder in the church at Rome, earnestly opposed such laxity of discipline, maintaining that, as in the days of the Apostles, the church should be a communion of saints, and should keep separate from the world both of apostates and of non-professors. Cornelius, another Elder in the church at Rome, was a loose disciplinarian, and favored the re-admission of their lapsed and unworthy members, and he was chosen in March, A. D. 251, by the majority of the church, to be their pastor. Novatian and the minority, who believed in strict church discipline, thereupon withdrew from the majority and established a separate church of their own, in accordance with the emphatic command of God, (2 Cor. 6:14-18; 1 Cor. 5:11; Rev. 18:4) and would receive no members from such loose societies except by re-baptizing them. And the example of Novatian and his brethren was followed all over the Roman Empire by the people of God who contended for the purity of the church. There can be no question that these were Baptist churches. And it should be noted that not even their enemies accused them of any heresy either in doctrine or in church constitution; a difference in discipline was the cause of the separation. They were called Novations or Cathari (the Pure), and some of them were found as late as the sixth century.—A proof that immersion was the only baptism in this century is the fact that great objection was made to the manner in which Novatian was made a member of the visible church. Being, as was supposed, in mortal sickness, he was perfused (perichutheis), that is, water was poured all around and upon him in his bed, it may have been when he was not conscious and not desiring it, but we do not know; it certainly was not scriptural baptism, and this fact was indicated by the wide-spread opposition which was made at that early day to its validity.

The Monarchians, Patripassians (or Unitarians), originated in the third century. Sabellius, a presbyter of Ptolemais, in Egypt, A. D. 250, was their ablest writer, and he seems to have derived his system not so much from the Scriptures as from the apocryphal “Gospel to the Egyptians” and the Alexandrian Jewish theology. He maintained that the distinctions of Father, Son and Holy Spirit were only external, successive and transitory manifestations of God to His creatures, and not internal, simultaneous and everlasting subsistencies of the Divine Being—that there is a trinity of offices, but not a trinity of persons in the Godhead. [See footnote 2 in Chapter I.]

Mani, Manes, or Manichaeus, a Persian (born A. D. 215, died 276), originated a dualistic religious system, deriving its theory chiefly from Parsism, its morals chiefly from Buddhism, and a few elements from a corruption of the New Testament. Manes taught that there were two original and independent principles of Light and Darkness, each presiding over his own kingdom, and in a state of perpetual conflict with the other, the principle of Light being God, and that of Darkness being Demon or Matter; that God created Christ, and Demon created Adam; that Manes was the promised Paraclete, or Comforter; that by obedience to the precepts of Christ and Manes natural men became new men, but had to be additionally purified after death in the fire of the Sun and then in the water of the Moon; that less sanctified souls were to be tortured and purged by successive migrations in other bodies; that those persistently wicked would be chained to the burnt inert mass of the world, while the powers of darkness would be forever confined to their own dismal region; and that the Sun and Moon were to be reverenced as the representatives of God. He sent out twelve so-called apostles and seventy-two Bishops, and under them a body of priests, Deacons, and itinerant evangelists. He either forbade or disesteemed baptism with water, and enjoined unction with oil. His followers were divided into two classes, called the “Perfect,” who were required to be exceedingly abstemious, and the “Hearers,” who enjoyed larger liberties. Manichaeism prevailed over a great deal of the Roman Empire, but lost its most objectionable features as it came westward, and it continued to have adherents till the thirteenth, or, some say, till the sixteenth century. The Catharists, Paulicians, Bogomiles and Albigenses were probably (at least many of them) unjustly suspected of holding its tenets.

Plotinus, the chief Neo-Platonic philosopher, taught at Rome, and died there A. D. 270. Porphyry, of Tyre, a pupil of Plotinus and also of Origen (born 233, died 304), edited and improved the writings of Plotinus, taught that philosophy was the means of the salvation of the soul, and, by a treatise in fifteen books (written in Sicily about A. D. 270), he made the greatest and most determined attempt of the ancient heathen world to disprove and destroy the Christian religion. He was a much more refined and powerful antagonist of Christianity than was Celsus in the second century. _“He is the very prototype of the skeptics of modern times, both in his critical objections and in his professions of respect for the pure teachings of Jesus,_ as contrasted with the corrupt doctrines of the apostles.” Nothing can be done against the truth, but for the truth. (2 Cor. 13:8) Porphyry has been dead nearly sixteen centuries, and the religion of Christ still survives on earth in indestructible life and vigor, for the gates of hell shall never prevail against it (Matt. 16:18).

By consulting the writers of the third century we shall find that church ordinances had undergone no change, and that baptism was immersion in water, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, administered to adults or such as were capable of believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, making a profession of faith in His name, and renouncing all sinful practices.

“During the first three centuries Christian congregations all over the East continued separate independent bodies, unsupported by government and consequently without any secular power over one another. All this time they were Baptist churches; and though all the ‘fathers’ of the first four ages down to Jerome were of Greece, Syria and Africa, and though they give great numbers of histories of the baptism of adults, yet there is not (if we except the case referred by Fidus to Cyprian, 256 A. D.) one record of the baptism of a child till the year 370, when Galetes, the dying son of the Emperor Valens, was baptized by order of a monarch, who swore he would not be contradicted (see Rob. Res., p. 55).”—Orchard.[6]

Here is the order of things at the close of the third century -the faith once delivered to the saints strictly adhered to, and the ordinances of the church primarily established by Christ and His Apostles faithfully observed by a portion of the professed Christian world, in opposition to the many who abounded in luxury and were fertile in innovations. And here from among these faithful adherents to the cause of Christ is where the Baptists came from.

Fourth Century.—This century marks the establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy or church, so-called, the development of numerous churches or bodies of Christians who never claimed connection with her, and that of many others who dissented from her corruptions. During this century also, paganism as a religion of State met its death blow, and its cruelties to Christians yielded the palm to professedly Christian Rome. The third, fifth and sixteenth were the great centuries of doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversy.

The emperors who swayed the sceptre over this great empire during the fourth century were Diocletian, Maximian Herculius, Constantius Chlorus, Maximian Galerius, Constantine the Great, Licinius, Constantine II., Constantius II., Constans, Magnentius, Julian the Apostate, Jovian, Valentinian I., Valens, Gratian, Valentinian II., Theodosius the Great, Arcadius, and Honorius. Some reigned for many years alone, others for a very short time, while in several instances two to four—two Augusti and two Caesars under them -reigned at the same time. Early in the century, about 303, the Emperor Diocletian, being instigated thereto by the Pagan priests and his barbarian colleague in authority, Maximian Galerius, set on foot one of the most cruel and wide-spread persecutions that the churches had ever experienced. It has been called the tenth and last great persecution inflicted on Christians by Pagan Rome. The order was given for all their houses of worship to be pulled down, all their books and writings to be taken from them and burned, all their civil rights and privileges to be taken from them, and they rendered incapable of any honors or civil promotion. Edict followed edict until their ministers were imprisoned, and they and their flocks threatened with death unless they sacrificed to the gods. Vast numbers suffered death throughout the empire, with the exception of Gaul, which was held by Constantius Chlorus, and it began to look as though Christianity would be entirely extinguished. But Diocletian abdicated the throne in 305, on account of his wretched health and his desire for rural retirement; Galerius died in 311 of a loathsome and horrible disease; Constantius Chlorus died in 306, nominating his son Constantine his successor, who was proclaimed emperor by the army, and finally made his way to the throne of the Caesars, and held it undisputedly for many years.

He did not profess conversion; he was not baptized until a few days before his death, but simply declared himself in favor of Christianity, at the outset, adopting the sign of the cross[7] as his army flag; and, when fairly installed emperor, gave liberty of conscience to all his subjects to worship their deities as they thought proper. This announcement was hailed throughout his empire with rapture and delight by all his professed Christian subjects; and had he gone no further than this, he would have proved, in many respects, a benefactor to his subjects. As time progressed he became, professedly, more attached to Christianity, though he never ceased to reverence the heathen gods; and he set up Christianity by law as the religion of his empire, and for a while offered a white robe and twenty pieces of gold to each person who would join the Catholic “Church.” Not only so, but he assumed to be at the head of the church, even “the Bishop of Bishops,” and pretended to write and deliver sermons to his courtiers, who loudly applauded him; and, when he could not reconcile the differences between those who adhered to the church in Rome, he called a council of Bishops to settle the difficulty, and presided as their chairman or chief moderator; and, when the council arrived at a conclusion, he anathematized those who did not subscribe to its decisions—deprived them of their positions, and banished them the country. Not only so, but when he found that he could not conciliate the Donatists and other dissenters by having them adhere to the church of Rome and indorse all her monstrosities, he laid the hand of persecution upon them, sought to obtain possession of their books, forbade their assembling together, and destroyed their places of worship. These “oppressive measures prompted many to leave the scene of sufferings and retire into more sequestered spots. Claudius Seyssel, the popish archbishop, traces the rise of the Waldensian heresy to a pastor named Leo leaving Rome at this period for the valleys.”—Orchard.

The gladness manifested by the genuine Baptists of that day, upon the ascension of Constantine to the throne, was therefore soon turned into sorrow, when they found he had become their enemy, and persecuted them as the heathen rulers had persecuted Christians before.

A similar scene appeared in after ages, when the voice of Martin Luther and his colleagues shook the thrones of popes and emperors, and proclaimed liberty of conscience to all mankind. The poor persecuted Baptists rallied to his support, and rejoiced to think that the day of their deliverance had come. But they soon went away sorrowful when they discovered that the anathemas of Luther were as violently hurled at them as those of Leo had been against him, and eventually both Catholics and Lutherans joined hands in persecuting Baptists.

During the reign of Constantine many troubles and divisions arose among those who adhered to the Roman Catholic party -none greater perhaps than that which was called the “Arian controversy.”

“In an assembly of the presbyters of Alexandria, the Bishop of that city, whose name was Alexander, expressed his sentiments on this subject (the persons in the Godhead, and the Divinity of Christ, etc.) with a great degree of freedom and confidence, maintaining among other things that the Son was not only of the same eminence and dignity, but also of the same essence[8] with the Father. This assertion was opposed by Arius, one of the presbyters, a man of a subtile turn, and remarkable for his eloquence. Whether his zeal for his own opinions or personal resentment against his Bishop was the motive that influenced him, is not very certain. Be that as it may, he first treated as false the assertion of Alexander, on account of its affinity to the Sabellian errors, which had been condemned by the church, and then, rushing into the opposite extreme, he maintained that the Son was totally and essentially distinct from the Father; that he was the first and noblest of those beings whom God had created out of nothing, the instrument by whose subordinate operation the Almighty Father formed the universe, and therefore inferior to the Father, both in nature and in dignity. His opinions concerning the Holy Ghost are not so well known. It is, however, certain that his notion concerning the Son of God was accompanied and connected with other sentiments that were very different from those commonly received among Christians, though none of the ancient writers have given us a complete and coherent system of those religious tenets which Arius and his followers really held.”

“The opinions of Arius were no sooner divulged than they found, in Egypt and the neighboring provinces, a multitude of abettors, and, among these, many who were distinguished as much by the superiority of their learning and genius as by the eminence of their rank and station. Alexander, on the other hand, in two councils assembled at Alexandria, accused Arius of impiety, and caused him to be expelled from the communion of the church. Arius received this severe and ignominious shock with great firmness and constancy of mind, retired into Palestine, and thence wrote several letters to the most eminent men of those times, in which he endeavored to demonstrate the truth of his opinions, and that with such surprising success that vast numbers were drawn over to his party; and, among these, Eusebius, Bishop of Nicomedia, a man distinguished in the church by his influence and authority. The Emperor Constantine, looking upon the subject of this controversy as a matter of small importance, and as little connected with the fundamental and essential doctrines of religion, contented himself at first with addressing a letter to the contending parties, in which he admonished them to put an end to their disputes. But when the prince saw that his admonitions were without effect, and that the troubles and commotions which the passions of men too often mingle with religious disputes were spreading and increasing daily throughout the empire, he convoked, in the year 325, a great council at Nice in Bithynia, hoping and desiring that the deputies of the church universal (as it was called) would put an end to this controversy. In this general assembly, after many keen debates and violent efforts of the two parties, the doctrine of Arius was condemned; Christ was declared consubstantial, or of the same essence, with the Father; the vanquished presbyter was banished among the Illyrians, and his followers were compelled to give their assent to the Creed, or Confession of Faith, which was composed on this occasion.”

“The council assembled by Constantine at Nice is one of the most famous and interesting events that are presented to us in ecclesiastical history, and yet, what is most surprising, scarcely any part of the history of the church (Romish) has been unfolded with such negligence, or rather passed over with such rapidity. The ancient writers are agreed with respect neither to the time nor the place in which it was assembled, the number of those who sat in the council, nor the Bishop who presided in it, and no authentic acts of its famous sentence are now extant.”—Mosheim.

It is now generally agreed that the council was held at Nice; that it convened on the 14th of June, A. D. 325, and ended on the 25th of July following; that it was composed of three hundred and eighteen Bishops, besides a multitude of presbyters, Deacons, acolythists, and others, amounting in the whole to about two thousand and forty-eight persons. This is what is termed the first general council.[9] It decided the question of Arianism, and also the time for the celebration of Easter.

“Letters were now written to all the churches in Egypt, Lybia and Pentapolis, announcing their decrees and informing them that the holy synod had condemned the opinions of Arius, and had fully determined the time for the celebration of Easter; exhorting them to rejoice for the good deed they had done, for that they had cut off all manner of heresy. When these things were ended Constantine splendidly treated the Bishops, filled their pockets and sent them honorably home, exhorting them at parting to maintain peace among themselves, and that none of them should envy another who might excel the rest in wisdom and eloquence; that they should not carry themselves haughtily towards their inferiors, but condescend to and bear with their weakness—a convincing proof that he saw into their tempers, and was no stranger to the haughtiness and pride that influenced some, and the envy and hatred that prevailed in others.”

“It requires not the spirit of prophecy to anticipate the effects which must flow from the disgraceful proceedings of this general Council, though Constantine himself wrote letters enjoining universal conformity to its decrees, and urged, as a reason for it, that ‘what they had decreed was the will of God, and the agreement of so great a number of such Bishops was by inspiration of the Holy Ghost.’ This Council laid the foundation for a system of persecution of a complexion altogether new -professing Christians tyrannizing over the consciences of each other, and inflicting torture and cruelties upon each other far greater than they had ever sustained from their heathen persecutors. The emperor’s first letters were mild and gentle, but he was soon persuaded into more violent measures; for, out of his great zeal to extinguish heresy, he issued edicts against all such as his favorite Bishops persuaded him were the authors or abettors of it; and particularly against the Novatians, Donatists, Valentinians, Marcionists and others, whom, after reproaching with being ‘enemies of truth, destructive counsellors,’ etc., he deprived of the liberty of meeting for worship either in public or private places; and gave all their oratories to the orthodox church. And, with respect to the discomfited party, he banished Arius himself; commanded that all his followers should be called Porphyrians (from Porphyry, the heathen philosopher who wrote against Christianity); ordained that the books written by them should be burnt, that there might remain to posterity no vestiges of their doctrine; and, to complete the climax, enacted that if any should dare to keep in his possession any book written by Arius, and should not immediately burn it, he should no sooner be convicted of the crime than he should suffer death. Such were the acts of the last days of Constantine.”—W. Jones.

How unreasonable for the Emperor Constantine to suppose that he could keep down pride, envy and jealousy among his Bishops, when at the same time he was enriching them and elevating them to the highest distinctions in “Church” and State! And how unreasonable to suppose that he could put down and forever extinguish the spirit of free inquiry by a decree of State!

Constantine’s leading motive was evidently one of political expediency and personal aggrandizement. When he undertook to unite “Church” and State, and constitute the kingdom of Christ into a kingdom of this world, he made a great mistake, and was found pandering to Antichrist rather than serving Christ, who most emphatically declared before Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

For the first three centuries the ministry were unsalaried, and received only irregular voluntary contributions from the private members, who were themselves comparatively few and poor. But Constantine instituted the worldly and corrupting practice of paying the Catholic ministry a fixed salary from “church” funds and from imperial and municipal treasuries. This custom, says Prof. Schaff, “favored ease and luxury, allured a host of unworthy persons into the service of the ‘church,’ and checked the exercise of free-giving among the people.”

The Arians, so far from being silenced, continued their agitations during the fourth century, and, while persecuted by some emperors, were favored by others, and when in the ascendency would persecute the Trinitarians or orthodox party, just as that party when in power persecuted them. And, although Arius was sadly in error in denying divinity to Christ, yet, so far as the acrimony of the controversy was concerned, he was no more to blame than Alexander and Athanasius, the leaders of the opposite party. Each side abounded with language unbecoming the profession they had made of belief in the Savior of sinners; and their bitterness and foul denunciations of each other rose to such a pitch and were so wide-spread throughout the empire that the very heathen mocked them and rebuked them in their theatrical performances.

This one instance goes to show that mankind are prone to make the greater noise about those things they least understand; and that there are scarcely any bounds to the presumption and arrogance of those theologians who, disregarding the limits of scriptural phraseology, make a language of their own, pretend to know as much about the mode of God’s existence as God does Himself, and hurl anathemas against all those who do not agree with them in everything they say. The Scriptures sufficiently prove that the Father, Word and Holy Ghost are each Divine, and that these three are but one, and constitute the one eternal God. Secret things belong to God, but such as are revealed belong to us and to our children. Human knowledge goes no further. No finite intelligence can fathom the infinite depths of the Godhead.

Arianism, or a denial of Christ’s divinity, continued to exist in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church (so-called) for centuries, and has never entirely left it to this day. It has shown itself under many forms from the days of Arius to the present time, and particularly under those of Mohammedanism and Unitarianism.

But to return to some of the glaring corruptions of the Romish Church, so-called, in the fourth century. In the year 366 Liberius, Bishop of Rome, died, and a violent contest arose respecting his successor. The city was divided into two factions, one of which elected Damasus to that high dignity, while the other chose Ursicinnus, a Deacon of the church. The party of Damasus prevailed, and got him ordained. Ursicinnus, enraged that Damasus was preferred before him, set up separate meetings, and at length he also obtained ordination from certain obscure Bishops. This occasioned great disputes among the citizens as to which of the two should obtain the episcopal dignity; and the matter was carried to such a height that great numbers were murdered on either side in the quarrel—no less than one hundred and thirty-seven persons being destroyed in the very ‘church’ itself![10]

“But the very detail of such shameful proceedings is sufficient to excite disgust; and enough has been said to convince any unprejudiced mind of the absurdity of looking for the kingdom of the Son of God in the ‘Catholic Church,’ as it now began to be denominated. ‘The mystery of iniquity’ which had been secretly working since the very days of the Apostles, (2 Thess. 2:7) had nevertheless been subject to considerable control, so long as paganism remained the established religion of the empire, and Christians consequently compelled to bear their cross by patiently suffering the hatred of the world, in conformity to the Captain of their salvation. But no sooner was this impediment removed by the establishment of (a nominal) Christianity under Constantine than the ‘Man of Sin,’ ‘the son of perdition,’ began to be manifest. Men were now found professing themselves the disciples of the meek and lowly Jesus, yet walking after the course of this world, ‘lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God,’—‘having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof (2 Tim. 3:3-5). And, as this state of things continued to increase in progressive enormity, until it ultimately brought forth that monstrous system of iniquity denominated ’Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’—described by the prophetic pen as ’the habitation of devils—the hold of every foul spirit—the cage of every unclean and hateful bird’ (Rev. 17:5, and Rev. 18:2), we may rest fully assured that the sheep of Christ—those who heard His voice and followed His will (John 10:27)—would see it their indispensable duty to separate themselves from such an impure communion, in obedience to the reiterated commands of God (2 Cor. 6:14-18; 2 Tim. 3:5; Rev. 18:4).”—W. Jones.

The baptism of youth, it is maintained by many, began in this century. In the year 370 the Emperor Valens sent for Basil to baptize his dying son Galetes; the ground of the request was the illness of the youth. Basil refused to do it, and it was eventually done by an Arian Bishop. If an emperor’s son must be baptized before he dies, although destitute of faith, of course the next highest in authority must have the same privilege accorded him, and so on down to the lowest officer and the poorest and most obscure man in the empire. And upon similar grounds it came to be urged that if young men and youths, who were taught to ask for baptism, could receive it and thus escape eternal punishment, the same blessing ought to be conferred on poor helpless infants, who could not even speak for themselves and knew not anything. So that it was agreed eventually that they should also be baptized as soon as born or soon thereafter, so that they also, by this means, in case of death, might escape the flames of hell! And either about 256 A. D. in Africa or 370 A. D. in Rome, is where youths’ and children’s baptism, without faith, came from; not from Christ or His Apostles. Be it remembered, then, that 370 years after the birth of our Savior, an emperor’s child was baptized by an Arian Bishop—having been refused by one of the Athanasian or orthodox party!

We now propose leaving the mother of harlots for a while, and to turn towards the bride, the Lamb’s wife. Long before the degenerate times of which we have been treating, upright, conscientious and God-fearing men were found in opposition to the “churches” of Italy and the empire under the leading strings of Rome. Although, at the command of God, His people have been coming out of Babylon in all ages since her rise, yet it remains true that the original opposition was manifested long before the days of Constantine or the setting up of the Catholic establishment.

“Long before the times of which we now treat some Christians had seen it their duty to withdraw from the communion of the ‘church’ of Rome.”

The first instance of this that we find on record is, after the Montanists, that of Tertullian, who left the “church” at Carthage A. D. 202, on account of its corruptions, and formed another on the plain, simple and sacred principles of the gospel; his followers were for 200 years called Tertullianists. The second instance of importance is that of “Novatian, an earnest, learned man, who had been led to faith through severe disease and inward struggles, and who, in the year 251, was, against his will or seeking, ordained the pastor of a church in the city of Rome, which maintained no fellowship with the Catholic party. Novatus quitted Carthage and joined Novatian. Many, called from the latter, Novatians, followed his example; and, all over the empire, Puritan Churches were constituted and flourished through the succeeding two hundred years. Afterwards when penal laws (made by the Catholics) obliged them to lurk in corners, and worship God in private, they were distinguished by a variety of names, and a succession of them (it is supposed) continued until the Reformation.”—Robinson’s Ecclesiastical Researches.

“The same author,” says Jones, “afterwards adverting to the vile calumnies with which the Catholic writers have in all ages delighted to asperse the character of Novatian, thus proceeds to vindicate him:”

“They say Novatian was the first[11] antipope; and yet there was at that time no pope, in the modern sense of the word. They call Novatian the author of the heresy of Puritanism; and yet they know that Tertullian had quitted the church near fifty years before for the same reason, and Privatus, who was an old man in the time of Novatian, had, with several more, repeatedly remonstrated against the alterations taking place; and, as they could get no redress, had dissented and formed separate congregations. They tax Novatian with being the parent of an innumerable multitude of congregations of Puritans all over the empire; and yet he had no other influence over any than what his good example gave him. People everywhere saw the same cause of complaint and groaned for relief; and when one man made a stand for virtue the crisis had arrived; people saw the propriety of the cure and applied the same means to their own relief. They blame this man and all these churches for the severity of their discipline; yet this severe discipline was the only coercion of the primitive churches, and it was the exercise of this that rendered civil coercion unnecessary. Some exclaimed that it was a barbarous discipline to refuse to readmit people into Christian communion because they have lapsed into idolatry or vice. Others, finding the inconvenience of such a lax discipline, required a repentance of five, ten or fifteen years; but the Novatians said: ‘You may be admitted among us by baptism; or, if any Catholic has baptized you before, by re-baptism; but, if you fall into idolatry, we shall separate you from our communion, and on no account readmit you. God forbid we should injure either your person, your property or your character, or even judge of the truth of your repentance or your future state; but you can never be readmitted to our community without our giving up the last and only coercive guardian we have of the purity of our fellowship.’ Whether these persons reasoned justly or not, as virtue was their object, they challenge respect; and he must be a weak man indeed who is frighted out of it because Cyprian is pleased to say, ‘They are the children of the devil.’”

“The doctrinal sentiments of the Novatians appear to have been very scriptural, and the discipline of their churches rigid in the extreme. They were the first class of Christians who obtained the name of (Cathari) Puritans, an appellation which doth not appear to have been chosen by themselves, but applied to them by their adversaries; from which we may reasonably conclude that their manners were simple and irreproachable. Some of them are said to have disapproved of second marriages, regarding them as sinful; but in this they erred in common with Tertullian and many other eminent persons. A third charge against them was that they did not pay due reverence to the martyrs, nor allow that there was any virtue in their relics!—a plain proof of their good sense. Novatian appears to have been possessed of considerable talents—Mosheim terms him”a man of uncommon learning and eloquence’—and he wrote several works, of which only two are now extant. One of them is upon the subject of the Trinity. It is divided into thirty-one sections; the first eight relate to the Father, and treat of His nature, power, goodness, justice, etc., with the worship due to Him. The following twenty sections relate to Christ, the Old Testament prophecies concerning Him, their actual accomplishment, His nature, how the Scriptures prove His divinity, confutes the Sabellians, shows that it was Christ who appeared to the patriarchs—Abraham, Jacob, Moses, etc. The twenty-ninth section treats of the Holy Spirit, how promised, given by Christ, His offices and operations on the souls of men and in the church. The last two sections recapitulate the arguments before adduced. The work appears to have been written in the year 257—six years after his separation from the Catholic ‘Church’ (or rather the dominant party at Rome). The other tract is upon the subject of ‘Jewish Meats,’ addressed in the form of a letter to his church, and written either during his banishment or retreat in the time of persecution. It opens up the typical nature of the law of Moses, and, while he proves its abolition, he is careful to guard his Christian brethren against supposing that they were therefore at liberty to eat things sacrificed to idols.” W. Jones says: “Lardner, in his Credibility of the Gospel History (Chap. 47), has been at considerable pains in comparing the various and contradictory representations that have been given of Novatian and his followers, and has exonerated them from a mass of obloquy cast upon them by the Catholic party. Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, wrote many epistles or treatises respecting the sect of the Novatians, which afford abundant evidence that their rigid discipline was relished by many. Fabius, Bishop of Antioch, in particular, was their friend and favorer. Marcian, Bishop of Arles, was firm in the same principles in the time of Stephen, Bishop of Rome. A church was formed at Carthage for the Novatian party, of which Maximus was the pastor. Socrates, the historian, speaks of their churches at Constantinople, Nice, Nicomedia, and Cotioeus in Phrygia, all in the fourth century; these he mentions as their principal places in the East, and he supposes them to have been equally numerous in the West. What were their numbers in these cities does not appear, but he intimates that they had three churches in Constantinople.

“Though, therefore, Novatian and his principles were condemned by the Catholic party at the time that Dionysius wrote the forementioned letters concerning them to the Bishop of Rome, he still continued to be supported by a numerous party in various places, separated from the Catholic ‘Church.’ They had among them some persons of considerable note and of eminent talents. Among these were Agelius, Acesius, Sisinnius and Marcian, all of Constantinople. Socrates mentions one Mark, Bishop of the Novatians in Scythia, who died in the year 439. In fact the pieces written against them by a great variety of authors of the Catholic Church—such as Ambrose, Pacian and others -the notice taken of them by Basil and Gregory Nazianzen, and the accounts given of them by Socrates and Sozomen in their ecclesiastical histories, are proofs of their being numerous, and that churches of this denomination were to be found in most parts of the world in the fourth and fifth centuries. ‘The vast extent of this sect,’ says Lardner, ‘is manifest from the names of the authors who have mentioned them or written against them, and from the several parts of the Roman Empire in which they were found.’”—Jones.[12]

As the Decian persecution, A. D. 250, had produced many lapsi, or apostates, whom the Novatians, considering the church to be a communion of saints, were unwilling to admit again to membership, and were thus led to separate themselves from the Catholic or dominant party in the churches; so the Diocletian persecution, A. D. 303, produced many traditores, or betrayers, who gave up their Bibles for destruction, and whom the Donatists, being of like minds with the Novatians, were unwilling to fellowship, and were thus also led to form separate churches. The Donatists were so called from Donatus, a very learned, eloquent and upright minister, who was chosen pastor or Bishop of the church at Carthage, A. D. 315. These people were found mostly in North Africa, and were quite numerous. When Mensurius, Bishop of the church at Carthage, who was a loose disciplinarian, died in 311, the majority of the members of the church, being of the same principles as Mensurius, chose Caecilian, a like-minded man, their Bishop. On the ground that Caecilian was consecrated by a traditor, Felix, Bishop of Aptunga, the minority withdrew and formed a separate church, and chose Majorinus for their pastor, who, dying in 315, was succeeded by Donatus. The example of this church was followed all over North Africa, and, to some extent, in adjoining countries. In Constantine’s first edict (312), professing to give universal religious toleration, he especially excepted the Donatists. Suffering under the consequent persecution, they appealed to him to examine their principles, which he professed to do by a council of twenty Bishops in the Lateran at Rome in 313, and afterwards by a council of two hundred Bishops at Arles, France, in 314, and in 316 by a personal hearing of the Donatist party at Milan. The Donatists were condemned every time, and from 316 to 321 they were treated as rebels resisting the authority of the emperor; and edicts were issued depriving them of their church edifices, and sentencing them to banishment, confiscation and death. They should not in the beginning have appealed to the emperor, although they had been condemned by him without a hearing. It was the significant question of Donatus—“What has the emperor to do with the church?” The church of Christ should be a pure spiritual body, having no corrupting connection with the State. The Donatists were not accused of heresy; they, in general, led exemplary and even austere lives; they advocated the purity and unworldliness of the church and the necessity of strict discipline; like the Montanists and the Novatians, they baptized all whom they received into their churches, whether such had previously been professedly baptized or not. Their churches also were independent of each other in government. It is possible that infant baptism was, in the latter part of the fourth or in the fifth century, practiced by a few of them; but it was plainly inconsistent with their principles. In 321 Constantine gave them full liberty of faith and worship. His son and successor, Constans, first tried in 348 to bribe them, as they were very poor, but, having failed, he then severely persecuted them. So did the other emperors of the fourth century, except Julian the apostate,[13] who gave all his subjects free and equal religious toleration. In 411, during a three days’ discussion at Carthage, where two hundred and eighty-six Catholic and two hundred and seventy-nine Donatist Bishops were present, the famous Latin theologian, Augustine, first tried in vain to argue the Donatists into submission and then appealed to the closing command in the parable of the supper (Luke 14:23) to “compel them to come in,” as authority for the State to use force to bring them into the fellowship of the Catholic “Church” out of which he, altogether inconsistently with his own principles of predestination, maintained that there was no salvation. The conquest of Africa by the Arian Vandals in 428 terminated the controversy; and a remnant of the Donatists survived until the conquest of North Africa by the Saracens in the seventh century. The Circumcelliones, a species of vicious ascetics and begging banditti and fanatical seekers of martyrdom, who pretended for a while to champion the cause of the Donatists, but were condemned by the great body of those persecuted people, were suppressed by the Roman government in 348.

In remembrance of Christ’s resurrection the ancient church, like the apostolic church, observed the first day of the week (or Sunday) as a day of sacred joy and thanksgiving, of public worship of God, and of collections for the poor; but neither the ancient nor the apostolic church ever called that day the Sabbath.[14] In the year 321 Constantine appointed the first day of the week, which he called “the venerable day of the sun,” in reference both to the Roman sun-god, Apollo, and to Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, as, in some respects, a day of rest. He forbade the sitting of courts, and military exercises, and all secular labor in towns on that day; but allowed agricultural labor in the country. As the fourth century is the source whence were derived the principal Greek and Roman Catholic liturgies or forms of prayer, so Constantine enjoined the following very indefinite form of prayer for all his Pagan and Christian soldiers. On Sunday, in the open field, at a given signal, they were required, with military exactness, to raise their eyes and hands towards Heaven, and say these words: “Thee alone we acknowledge as God; Thee we reverence as King; to Thee we call as our helper; to Thee we owe our victories; by Thee have we obtained the mastery of our enemies; to Thee we give thanks for benefits already received; from Thee we hope for benefits to come. We all fall at Thy feet, and fervently beg that Thou wouldst preserve to us our Emperor Constantine and his divinely beloved sons in long life, healthful and victorious.” The so-called prayer, as may be seen, could be addressed to one god as well as another. Formalism and ritualism can here find an ancient, but not a very good authority. The Council of Laodicea (about 372) condemned the Judaic or Sabbatic observance of Sunday, but directed that labor should be avoided on that day as far as possible. Theodosius prohibited the transaction of civil business and all theatrical and circus performances on Sunday; but the law was not very rigidly or very long enforced, and Sunday is, as it long has been, the chief day for public amusements in almost all the large cities of continental Europe.

During the fourth century pictures were introduced into Catholic houses of worship; sacerdotal marriages were first prohibited by Pope Siricius, A. D. 385; and monasticism and episcopacy were largely advanced. There was also a great increase of burial rites; and, like the funeral orations pronounced by the ancient Greeks and Romans in praise of their distinguished dead, funeral sermons began to be preached over the dead -the first one having been preached by Constantine himself over one of his courtiers, the emperor, in his discourse, speaking “of the immortality of the soul, of the blessings of the righteous, and the misery of the wicked.” The next funeral sermons were delivered by Eusebius and other Bishops over Constantine; and others were delivered in this century by Ambrose over the Emperors Valentinian and Theodosius, by Gregory of Nyssa over the Empresses Pulcheria and Placilla, and Bishop Meletius, and by Gregory Nazianzus over his father, brother and sister, and over Basil the Great. At first funeral addresses were mostly panegyrics of the dead, like the old classical funeral orations. In the middle ages funeral services were principally masses and prayers for the dead. In place of such masses the Reformation substituted the practice of funeral preaching over the dead. In the apostolic church and for two hundred years afterwards funeral preaching was unknown.[15]

The second so-called ecumenical Council was held at Constantinople in 381, and reaffirmed and enlarged the Nicene Creed, declaring the perfect humanity and the perfect divinity of Christ, and the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father (filioque, and from the Son, was added by the Council of Toledo in 589).

The Emperor Theodosius, who called this Council, enacted the first rigid penalties against both Pagan idolatry and Christian heresy, which were made crimes, punishable with fines, banishment and death. In accordance with these laws, under his colleague Maximus, the Spanish Bishop Priscillian and his six chief adherents were tortured and beheaded with the sword at Treves in 385. This was the first legal shedding of blood for heresy in the history of nominal Christianity; but it was afterwards vindicated by those called “the best fathers of the (Catholic) Church,” even Jerome and Augustine.

In 364 the brothers Valentinian and Valens divided the Roman Empire between them. In 392 Theodosius became sole emperor; but in 395 he divided the empire between his sons Arcadius and Honorius, and this division was permanent.

During the fourth century the Roman Empire assumed, in place of the outer shell of paganism, the outer shell of Christianity; but the great mass of the population not only remained heathens, but were continually becoming more and more corrupt and ready for destruction.

1. From the ten plagues in Egypt, and the ten horns in Revelation, it is commonly recorded that there were ten great or general persecutions of Christians by Pagan Rome as follows: By Nero beginning A. D. 64; by Domitian, A.D. 95, 96; by Trajan, A. D. 106-117; by Mareus Aurelius, A. D, 166-177; by Severus, A. D. 202 and onwards; by Maximin, A.D. 235; by Decius, A.D. 250, 251, continued under Gallus, A.D. 251-253; by Valerian, A.D. 258-260; by Aurelian, A.D. 275; by Diocletian and Maximinian, A. D. 303-305, continued by Galerius and Maximin to A.D. 311. Not all these persecutions, however, were general throughout the Roman Empire. Gibbon estimates that the entire number of Christians slain by Pagan Rome was far less than 100,000, the number of Protestants slain in the Netherlands by the Roman Catholic Emperor Charles V. in five years, A.D. 1550-1555. Probably only the persecutions under Severus and Diocletian were really general throughout the Roman Empire.

2. Celsus is the first infidel whose writings are now extant (his arguments against Christianity being preserved in Origen’s reply to him). His work entitled “A True Discourse” is referred by Lardner to A. D 176. It is of profound interest to know that Celsus, in the second century, used substantially all the strongest arguments against Christianity employed by the infidels of the nineteenth century. He arrays learning, philosophy, science, common sense, wit and sarcasm against the poor, ignorant, superstitious and deceived Christians, as he calls them, and pretends to know everything himself while they know nothing. He is a Platonist, a half Epicurean deist, a pantheist, a universalist, an anti-supernaturalist, a non-resurrectionist, a Darwinian evolutionist: he represents Christ and His Apostles as magicians and imposters; and he points out and ridicules what he considers the inconsistencies and mistakes of the Scriptures. Christianity was not hurt by these venomous missiles of Satan 1,700 years ago; neither will it be harmed by the same old weapons hurled against it in the nineteenth century.

3. Of the fifteen pretended epistles of Ignatius, eight, because of their numerous falsehoods and mistakes, and other reasons, are known to be spurious; and the other seven are referred by the latest and best scholarship to the middle of the second century, a considerable period after the death of Ignatius. Lightfoot thinks that the three short Syriac epistles of Ignatius (to Polycarp, to the Ephesians, and to the Romans) are genuine. These afford no arguments for that haughty diocesan episcopacy which grew up in the third century; in the writings of Ignatius the Bishop presides over but one church.

4. The language of Gibbon is as follows: “The societies [churches] which were instituted in the cities of the Roman Empire were united only by the ties of faith and charity. Independence and equality formed the basis of their internal constitution. Every society formed within itself a separate and independent republic; and although the most distant of these little states maintained a mutual as well as friendly intercourse of letters and deputations, the Christian world was not yet connected by any supreme authority or legislative assembly. Towards the end of the second century the churches of Greece and Asia adopted the useful institutions of provincial synods.” This was evidently a hundred years too late to prove the apostolic origin of the Presbyterian, Episcopal, or papal form of church government; as before the close of the second century the churches had no outward bond of union.

5. In his scholarly and elaborate work, in eight volumes, on “Latin Christianity,” Mr. H. H. Milman, the learned author of the “History of the Jews” and the “History of Christianity,” and the famous critical editor of Gibbon’s Rome, makes this profoundly interesting and important and reliable statement, which, if all men loved the truth, would put an everlasting quietus to the pretensions of Roman Catholicism: “The Decian persecution (A. D. 250) was the birth epoch of Latin Christianity; Cyprian its true parent.” This was 220 years too late for Roman Catholicism to have been founded by Christ during His ministry, and 150 years too late for it to have been founded by Christ’s oldest surviving Apostle, John. What, then, can be the spiritual virtue in tracing back succession to Rome?

6. It is of the baptism of children of six years or more, and not of infants, that Tertullian and Origen, in the third century, speak. A letter of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, to Fidus, a rustic African Bishop—regarded by many as spurious—states that a council of sixty-six Bishops had just decided that an infant might be baptized as soon as it was born (A. D. 256 or 258).

7. The ecclesiastical historian, Eusebius, says that, in A. D. 312, while Constantine was marching against the Pagan Emperor Maxentius, Constantine and his army saw in the Heavens, just after noon, a bright cross above the sun, and near it the words, Touto Nika (By this Conquer); and that the same night Christ appeared to Constantine while he slept, and directed him to prepare a standard in the form of a cross and told him that thus he would conquer his enemies. Lactantius, an earlier and more credible witness, speaks only of the night-dream, and nothing of the day-vision, which is thought by the best historians either not to have occurred, or to have been some natural phenomenon, as a parhelion, or solar halo, or a cloud, somewhat in the form of a cross, the letters being invented or imagined. Christ does not direct to carnal warfare, but is the Prince of Peace. As Constantine had in 310 slain his father-in-law, Maximian, so in 324 he slew his brother-in-law, Licinius, and his nephew Licinius, and in 326 his own eldest son, Crispus, and, it is thought by many, his own wife Fausta, with whom he had lived twenty years.

8. The Nicene or Athanasian doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father was called Homo-ousianism (sameness of essence); the Semi-Arian doctrine was called Homoi-ousianism (likeness of essence); and the Arian doctrine was called Hetero-ousianimn (difference of essence).

9. The seven so-called ecumenical or Universal Councils were held as follows: 1st. Nicaea, 325; 2nd. Constantinople, 381; 3rd. Ephesus, 431: 4th. Chalcedon, 451; 5th. Constantinople, 553; 6th. Constantinople, 680; and 7th. Nicaea, 787. Their doctrinal decisions are regarded as infallible by both the Greek and Latin Catholics; and Protestants generally receive the creeds of the first four councils as scriptural, these four creeds affirming the divinity and personality of Christ and the Holy Ghost; and the twofold nature of Christ, that He is perfect man and perfect God. The 7th council sanctioned the worship of images. All these seven councils were summoned by the Roman Emperor, and generally presided over by him, and their decisions were ratified by him. Instead of the Elders and brethren taking part (as in Acts 15), only “Bishops,” the pretended successors of the Apostles, were allowed to vote in them.

10. These diabolical scenes continued several years. Damasus was the chief instigator, he himself at the head of gangs of gladiators, charioteers, and other wild rabbles with axes, swords and clubs, storming so-called churches which had become citadels, and barbarously killing both sexes, on one occasion as many as a hundred and sixty; and the Roman emperor had finally to quell these disastrous tumults by the impartial severity of the heathen Prefect, Praetextatus. And yet men, who lay claim to Christianity, glory in tracing an imaginary and unscriptural apostolical succession through Pope Damasus and numerous others superior to him in vice and crime, and blasphemously pretend that the Holy Ghost has been transmitted through such Satanic channels as these!

11. Some suppose that Hippolytus, in the early part of the third century, was the first “Anti-Pope.”

12. At this point, after having turned to notice the bride, the Lamb’s wife, and while thus dwelling upon the history of these ancient people of God, the Novatians, the hand of my dear father was stayed in death, and his spirit was called by God to join that blessed cloud of witnesses to the truth who had preceded him to glory.—S. Hassell.

13. This emperor was a nephew of Constantine. Educated mainly by heathen rhetoricians and corrupt professedly Christian teachers, and embittered against a nominal Christianity by the massacre of his nearest kindred by the Emperor Constantius, he professed the Pagan religion of his ancestors and sought in vain to revive and restore the dying polytheism of the empire. As a means of glorifying his reign and also of warring upon Christianity, he designed and began the restoration of the Jewish temple at Jerusalem; but his death in a war with the Persians, after a short reign of only a year and eight months, defeated his purpose.

14. One of the most remarkable features of the “Ecclesia Pressa,” or the Persecuted Church of the first three centuries, was their great indifference to so-called sacred times and sacred places. With those spiritual-minded people of God, all times and all places were sacred.

15. Like some others of our brethren in the ministry, neither of the authors of this volume ever preached funeral sermons. But the most of our ministering brethren do preach on such occasions, and they give as a reason that they feel impressed to preach, not funerals, but the gospel, wherever and whenever an opportunity is presented. Still it should be remembered that Christ and His Apostles never preached on such occasions, so far as the New Testament informs us; and that no minister of Christ ever preached on such occasions until the fourth century, so far as history informs us; and that funeral sermons were the successors of the ancient heathen funeral orations (see Smith and Cheetham’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, vol. 1., pp. 253 and 704).

Chapter XII. Fifth and Sixth Centuries.

Fifth Century.—This century was the twilight of the Dark Ages and the dawn of the Papacy, a period of political and ecclesiastical chaos, marked by the increasing corruption of the people and the nominal “church,” the invasion of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires by the barbarians of Northern Europe and Northwestern Asia, the overthrow of the Western Roman Empire, the pretended adoption of Christianity by the barbarians, the universal introduction, among the Catholics, of infant baptism, a salaried ministry, the multiplication of so-called “pious” frauds and superstitions, the increase of image worship, saint worship, relic worship, Mariolatry, asceticism, monasticism, sacramentalism, hierarchism, traditionalism, formalism, hypocrisy, avarice, prodigality, intemperance, theatre-going, celibacy, licentiousness, clerical wealth and luxury, fine “church” buildings, rich festivals, and pompous processions, and theatrical pulpit eloquence, the Augustinian, Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian controversies on the doctrines of sin and grace, the Nestorian and Eutychian heresies concerning the nature of Christ, and the persecution of the Novatians and Donatists, the true people of God.

“If a man were called,” says Robertson, “to fix upon the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most calamitous and afflicted, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Theodosius the Great (A. D. 395) to the establishment of the Lombards in Italy (A. D. 571). The scourge of God, the destroyer of nations, are the dreadful epithets by which the contemporary authors distinguish the most noted of the barbarous leaders; and they compare the ruin which they had brought on the world to the havoc occasioned by earthquakes, conflagrations, or deluges -the most formidable and fatal calamities which the imagination of man can conceive.” “In the course of the fifth century the Visigoths took possession of Spain; the Franks, of Gaul; the Saxons, of England; the Huns, of Pannonia; the Ostrogoths, of Italy and the adjacent provinces. The conquerors submitted to the religion of the conquered, which at this period, indeed, in its established form, approximated closely to the superstition and idolatry of the ancient heathen.” In 402 Honorius, the Western Roman Emperor, fleeing from the Goths, transferred the seat of his government from Rome to the strong fortifications and marshes of Ravenna. In 410 Alaric the Goth sacked Rome. In 452 Attila the Hun, after having ravaged, for several years, the Eastern Roman Empire, invaded Italy, but died the following year. In 455 Genseric the Vandal sacked Rome. In 476 Odoacer, chief of the Heruli, overthrew the Western Roman Empire, banished Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Roman Emperor, and made himself king of Italy. In 493 Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, conquered Italy, and reigned over that country till 525.

In answer to the charge that Christianity occasioned all the misfortunes of the times, Salvian, a presbyter of Gaul, “lays the blame, not upon the heathens, but upon the ‘Christianity’ of the day,” says Prof. Schaff, “and draws an extremely unfavorable picture of the moral condition of the (so-called) Christians, especially in Gaul, Spain, Italy and Africa. ‘The church,’ says this Jeremiah of his time, ‘which ought everywhere to propitiate God, what does she but provoke Him to anger? How many may one meet, even in the church, who are not still drunkards, or debauchees, or adulterers, or fornicators, or robbers, or murderers, or the like, or all these at once, without end? It is even a sort of holiness among Christian people to be less vicious.’ From the public worship of God, he continues, and almost during it, they pass to deeds of shame. We are worse, says he, than the barbarians and heathens. If the Saxon is wild, the Frank faithless, the Goth inhuman, the Alanian drunken, the Hun licentious, they are by reason of their ignorance far less punishable than we, who, knowing the commandments of God, commit all these crimes. He compares the (nominal) Christians especially of Rome with the Arian Goths and Vandals, to the disparagement of the Romans, who add to the gross sins of nature the refined vices of civilization, passion for theatres, debauchery and unnatural lewdness. Therefore has the just God given them into the hands of the barbarians and exposed them to the ravages of the migrating hordes. This horrible picture of the Christendom of the fifth century,” adds Prof. Schaff, “though in many respects exaggerated, is, in general, not untrue.” The most of the barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire belonged to the Teutonic nations, who always paid the highest respect to their females, and consequently had high notions of personal purity; while the great mass of the Romans, the official as well as the private members of the Catholic “Church,” were immersed in voluptuousness and sensuality—insomuch that it is said that the barbarians blushed to hear of their almost incredible vices. Some of “the Christian teachers,” says Milman, “endeavored to shame their Latin brethren by the severity of Teutonic morals, and to rouse them from their dissolute excesses by taunting them with their degrading inferiority to barbarians, heathens and heretics.”

No wonder that such a people as this, being utterly dead in sin, having no particle of inward, genuine religion, should multiply outward religious forms and ceremonies and superstitions and idolatries; for man is, as has been said, a religious animal, and must have some object to worship. In the same manner the intellectual, cultured and depraved Athenians were so very religious that they are said to have worshiped thirty thousand gods; and then, lest they might have omitted some deity, erected several altars to the “Unknown God,” whom they ignorantly worshiped, and whom the Apostle Paul declared unto them (Acts 17:23-31). The Catholic monks of the fifth century, substituting an arbitrary, eccentric, mechanical and pretentious self-righteousness for the simple, Divine way of salvation, by living faith in Christ, practiced severe austerities, pretending to say 100, or 300, or 700, or even 1,200 prayers in a day; but they never equalled the ancient and modern Hindoo devotees, who not only used a prayer-wheel to pray rapidly and constantly with, but who practiced the most dreadful self-tortures “for the supposed benefit of their souls and the gratification of their vanity in the presence of admiring spectators.” But “the monasticism of India, which for three thousand years has pushed the practice of mortification to all the excesses of delirium, never saved a single soul, nor produced a single benefit to the race.” The culmination of Catholic anchoretic asceticism was in the performances, in the Eastern Roman Empire, from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, of the Stylites or so-called Pillar Saints, who are said to have spent thirty, forty, and one even sixty-eight years, “day and night, summer and winter, rain and sunshine, frost and heat, standing, in prayer and penances, on the top of unsheltered pillars from ten to sixty feet high,” preaching also frequently to their disciples, who carried them up food on a ladder, and who revered and almost worshiped them for their “holiness.” “In the beginning of the fifth century the worship of departed saints appeared in full bloom, and then the Virgin Mary was soon placed at the head as the Mother of God and the Queen of the heavenly host,” and as having prevailing influence and power even over the Most High. Also the elements of the communion, and the pretended images and relics of the so-called saints, were worshiped.

Among the fine products of Catholic Monasticism and Alexandrian Platonic Philosophy were Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism, against which unscriptural errors Augustine was, in the fifth century, the chief champion of the truth, and he is still regarded by many as the ablest advocate of the doctrine of grace since the days of the Apostles.[1] His “Confessions” still extant, and written in his forty-sixth year, show that he had a deep Christian experience, a most remarkable Divine change from extraordinary sinfulness to extraordinary devotion, a translation from nature to grace, realized while in a passion of tears praying for deliverance from the bondage of his sins and opening the Bible at the passage, “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:13, 14). In his Retractations, written in his seventy-first year, he acknowledges his fallibility, and conscientiously seeks to withdraw every known error from his writings. Pelagius, a British monk and legal moralist, and Coelestius, a Scotch or Irish lawyer, residing at Rome, converted by Pelagius to monasticism (neither of them having, it would seem, any Christian experience), were the founders of Pelagianism. John Cassian, a Greek monk, either by birth or education, or both, a pupil of John Chrysostom (a convert to the Alexandrian Platonic anthropology), and a founder of convents for men and women at Massilia (or Marseilles) in Gaul, a Greek colony, was the founder of Semi-Pelagianism, or Cassianism, or Massilianism. Both Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism are superficial, rationalistic, unchristian forms of self-righteousness, and they shade almost imperceptibly into each other; indeed, in their final analysis, they are really one. Pelagianism has been called human monergism—a system of salvation according to which man is represented as saving himself; Semi-Pelagianism has been called synergism—a, system of salvation according to which Divine grace and human free-will equally co-operate to effect man’s salvation; and Augustinianism has been called Divine monergism—a system of salvation according to which God alone is represented as saving the sinner. Pelagianism regards man as well and sound and strong, and able to do all that he needs for himself; Semi-Pelagianism regards man as sick, but conscious and able to desire the help of a physician, and either accept or refuse such help when offered, and that, unless he co-operate with Divine grace, he will be lost; Augustinianism regards man as dead in sin, and absolutely needing God to quicken and save him. Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism are one, in referring the actual cause of salvation to man; Augustinianism, on the contrary, refers the actual cause of salvation to God. Pelagianism declares that Adam’s fall hurt himself alone, and not his posterity; that all men are born in a sinless condition, and can keep the law of God and thus insure their own salvation; and thus that there is no need either of the atonement of Christ or the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. As will be plainly seen, Pelagianism is paganism, being an utter denial of the Scriptures from beginning to end; although Pelagius and Coelestius invented ingenious and plausible arguments to prove that their positions were scriptural, and that there was really no difference between them and their opponents. Semi-Pelagianism declares that men, though born in sin, are not born entirely sinful, but have some good still remaining in them, and that this good must form a joint partnership with God in order to insure the sinner’s salvation; that sometimes grace anticipates the human will, and draws it, though not irresistibly, to God; but that usually the human will must take the initiative, and determine itself to conversion; that in no instance can Divine grace operate independently of the free self-determination of man; that, as the husbandman must do his part,[2] but all avails nothing without the Divine blessing, so man must do his part, yet this profits nothing without Divine grace, neither does Divine grace profit anything without the work of man. Semi-Pelagianism thus, in the same manner, if not to the same extent, as Pelagianism, depreciates the grace of God, the atonement of Christ, and the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, exalts the ability, pride and work of man not only to a level with, but, virtually, to a superiority over the work of God in salvation, since God does or offers to do the same for all men, and man himself does that which actually makes him to differ from the lost, and actually carries him to Heaven. Thus Semi-Pelagianism strongly tends to Pelagianism, and ultimately and logically identifies itself with it, making man his own Savior. John Cassian, the author of this system, defends, in his Seventeenth “Conference of the Fathers,” occasional falsehood; and, in his Twentieth “Conference,” tries to show that there are “several ways of obtaining remission of sins besides through the death and intercession of Christ.” Arminianism differs from Semi-Pelagianism chiefly in declaring that all men are born entirely corrupt, and must have Divine grace operate upon them before they can think or will any good thing; but it also affirms that Divine grace operates upon all men, and that each man’s salvation actually depends upon the use which his own free-will makes of that grace; so that Arminianism, like Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism, represents God as making salvation possible to all men but sure to none, and represents man as at last doing that which really saves him—makes man his own Savior. The great majority of the professedly Christian world are Arminians.

The question of the precise extent of man’s corruption and the exact relation of man to God in salvation does not seem, so far as the records have been handed down to us, to have profoundly occupied the attention of the people of God after the days of the Apostles until the fifth century. And Augustine, Bishop of the church at Hippo Regius in North Africa, seems to have had a clearer idea of that extent and relation than any other person in the early post-apostolic centuries. Led, not by Greek philosophy and monkish moralization, but by a deep personal experience of his own utter sinfulness and of the almightiness of Divine grace -the Holy Spirit within him teaching him the same lesson as taught by that Spirit in the Scriptures, and even in creation and providence -Augustine affirmed that God is an omnipotent sovereign, and all men are entirely dependent upon Him; that all the human race were in the loins of Adam and fell in him, and are therefore born totally depraved; that Divine grace is absolutely unmerited, indispensable and irresistible in the salvation of the sinner; that, from its eternal design to its eternal accomplishment, grace does all the work of salvation, even working in the sinner all his good will and all his good works, so that he shall go at last into the Divine presence as a poor, helpless beggar, a poor, lost sinner, saved by grace alone from first to last, and shall be thus prepared to give God all the glory of his salvation. In this manner all the proud, poisonous Pharisaism in the believer’s heart is exterminated; he is made a truly and deeply humble child of God, conformed to the image of the meek and lowly Lamb of God; and he is doubly comforted, and enabled to put implicit trust not in man, not in himself, but in God, by not only “looking forward into eternal life, but also backward into the ante-mundane eternity, and finding in the eternal purpose of Divine love the beginning and the firm anchorage of his salvation” (2 Sam. 23:5; Isa. 54:10, 55:3; Jer. 31:3, 31-37; Rom. 8:29-39; Eph. 1, Eph. 2, Eph. 3; Phil. 1:6, 29; Phil. 2:12, 13; 2 Thess. 2:13, 14; 2 Tim. 1:8-10; 1 Peter 1:1-5; Heb. 6:13-20; Rev. 1:5, 6, 5:9, 10). Augustine maintained that God’s election and predestination of the sinner to eternal life were altogether of free and unmerited grace, and not at all conditioned on the sinner’s repentance, faith and good works; for these are declared in the Scriptures to be the fruit of God’s Spirit in the heart (Ps. 107:1-31; Isa. 45:24, 25; Isa. 64:6, 61:10; Jer. 31:1-9, 23:6; Zech. 12:10; Matt. 1:21; Acts 5:31, 11:18, 16:14, 13:48; Rom. 3:24, 4:5, 16, 5:19-21, 8:29-39, 9:16, 11:5-7; 1 Cor. 1:30, 31, 12:7-11; 2 Cor. 5:17-21; Gal. 5:22, 23; Eph. 1:3, 4, 19, 2:1-10; Phil. 1:6, 29, 2:12, 13; 2 Tim. 1:9, 10; Titus 3:5-7; Heb. 8:9-12, 12:2, 13:8; James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:1-5; 2 Peter 1:3; 1 John 4:19, 5:1; John 1:12, 13, 3:1-8, 5:25, 6:63, 8:36, 10:26-30, 16:7-14, John 17). Although all Semi-Pelagians and Arminians say that salvation is conditioned on the repentance and faith of the sinner, the Scriptures just quoted so plainly and unmistakably declare that repentance and faith are themselves the gift of God and the work of God’s Spirit in the heart, that the ablest Arminian writers[3] are constrained to admit this fact. The “Cyclopaedia of Methodism,” edited by Matthew Simpson, the leading “Bishop” of the Methodist Episcopal “Church” in the United States, makes the following statements: “In Calvinistic theology the process of salvation is, first, regeneration; second, faith; and third, repentance. Methodists believe that, in the salvation of the sinner, the Holy Spirit enlightens his understanding and causes him to see his need of a Savior; that under this spiritual influence and power the first step is repentance, or turning from sin, the second, believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. These are followed by regeneration. While repentance is, strictly speaking, the act of man, it is nevertheless also in another sense the gift of God. Without the grace of God first given, no man will repent or turn to God. The Holy Spirit supplies light to the understanding, quickens the emotions, and so seals Divine truth upon the conscience that the sinner not only sees, but feels his spiritual danger.” “Regeneration, or conversion, or the new birth, or the new creation, or becoming a new creature, is the work of the Holy Spirit, by which a change is wrought in the heart of the believer; it is the implantation of the love of God in the soul by the operation of the Holy Spirit. The efficient cause of regeneration is the Divine Spirit, for no man can turn himself unto God. It proceeds by enlightening the judgment through the word of truth or the gospel of salvation, and impressing that truth upon the understanding so as to subdue the will and reign in the affections.” Directly contradictory to this assertion that the regenerating Spirit of God subdues the will, the same author asserts in the same article that God gives every man His Spirit, and “gives man the power, on the one hand, of yielding to the influences of the Spirit, and, on the other, of rejecting them and pursuing a course unto perdition;” that “God has placed this fearful responsibility upon the exercise of the human will.” For the point-blank contradiction of this last assertion, any one who believes the Scriptures and acknowledges Christ as his only Master need only refer to (John 1:12, 13, 3:1-8; Rom. 9:16; Phil. 2:12, 13; James 1:18; Ps. 110:3). McClintock and Strong’s “Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature,” the most thorough and elaborate Methodist work of the nineteenth century, makes the following plain and strong scriptural statements: “The author, as well as object, of true repentance, is God (Acts 5:31).” “Christian faith does not spring from the natural working of the human mind; it is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8), and is wrought in the heart by the Holy Spirit through the word of the gospel and the free grace of Christ (Rom. 10:17; 1 Cor. 1:21). Fides donum Dei est, per quod Christum redemptorem nostrum in verbo Evangelii recte agnoscimus (Formula of Concord, 3. 11);” that is, “Faith is the gift of God, by which we rightly recognize Christ our Redeemer in the word of the gospel.” One more witness on this subject will be enough, and he shall be the ablest Methodist theologian that ever lived, the highest Methodist authority of the present century in both Europe and America. Richard Watson, in his “Biblical and Theological Dictionary,” says: “An evangelical repentance is a godly sorrow wrought in the heart of a sinful person by the word and Spirit of God, whereby, from a sense of his sin, as offensive to God and defiling and endangering to his own soul, and from an apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, he, with grief and hatred of all his known sins, turns from them to God as his Savior and Lord.”[4] “The very circumstances which rendered the new covenant necessary, take away the possibility of there being any merit upon our part; the faith by which the covenant is accepted is the gift of God; and all the good works by which Christians continue to keep the covenant originate in that change of character which is the fruit of the operation of His Spirit.” “True and saving faith acknowledges on earth, as it will be perpetually acknowledged in Heaven, that the whole salvation of sinful man, from the beginning to the last degree thereof, whereof there shall be no end, is from God’s freest love, Christ’s merit and intercession, His own gracious promise, and the power of His own Holy Spirit.”[5] If these pointed declarations do not contain the essence of the Bible doctrine of grace, known as Paulinism or Augustinianism, then it does really seem that human language has no meaning.

“The great system of doctrine known in history as the Pauline, Augustinian or Calvinistic,” says Prof. Charles Hodge, “is taught, as we believe, in the Scriptures; was developed by Augustine, formally sanctioned by the Latin Church, adhered to by the witnesses of the truth during the Middle Ages, repudiated by the Church of Rome in the Council of Trent, revived in that church by the Jansenists, adopted by all the reformers, incorporated in the creeds of the Protestant Churches of Switzerland, of the Palatinate, of France, Holland, England and Scotland, and unfolded in the Standards framed by the Westminster Assembly,” which have been doctrinally adopted by the Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists of Europe and America. And, unless words are twisted out of their lexical meanings, the Episcopal Articles of Faith, from the ninth to the eighteenth, and the Methodist Articles, from the seventh to the twelfth, establish the same doctrine, and are emphatic witnesses against their members who repudiate this doctrine of the Bible and of their fathers.

“It is a historical fact that this system of doctrine has (in its application to sinners by the Spirit of God) been the moving power in the church; that largely to it (as thus applied) are to be referred the intellectual vigor and spiritual life of the heroes and confessors who have been raised up in the course of ages; that (by the will and power of God) it has been the fruitful source of good works, of civil and religious liberty, and of human progress. Its truth may be evinced from many different sources. 1st. All the various parts of this system of doctrine, unlike those of all other different doctrines, are thoroughly consistent with all the other parts of the same doctrine, insomuch that any one part necessarily involves all the others; thus proving the infinite wisdom of the author of the doctrine. 2nd. This system of doctrine alone is consistent with all the facts of creation—and providence—the supreme, absolute, unchallengeable sovereignty of God in everything that He made and in everything that He orders throughout the universe-the inconceivable gulf between the eozoon and Gabriel, and the myriad gradations between these creatures—and the unspeakable inequalities existing among men, both nationally and individually, in the matter of original endowments, providential circumstances and religious advantages. 3rd. This system of doctrine alone is consistent with the great facts plainly revealed in the Bible. 1st. The relationship of God to men; His infinite superiority to all creatures; His absolute proprietorship of the universe, as its creator and preserver; and man’s entire forfeiture, by his apostasy, of all claim on the justice of God. 2nd. The death of fallen man in trespasses and sins, and his consequent utter inability to change his own heart, to prepare himself for that change, or to co-operate in the production of that change. 3rd. The omnipotent sovereignty of the Spirit of God in quickening, out of this spiritually dead mass, whom He will, raising the objects of His choice out of spiritual death, giving them spiritual life, and creating them anew in Christ Jesus. 4th. The plain scriptural fact that all the good in man is the fruit, and therefore cannot possibly be the cause of his election unto life (Eph. 1:3-6; 1 Peter 1:2; 2 Thess. 2:13; 1 Thess. 1:2-4). 5th. The fact revealed on almost every page of the Bible, and deeply written in every Christian heart, that salvation is not at all of works, whether actual or foreseen, but is altogether of the free, unmerited grace of God. No teacher ever sent by God to reveal His will has asserted, more unmistakably than the Lord Jesus Christ, the omnipotent sovereignty of God in salvation, the specialty and certainty of the everlasting blessedness of all whom the Father loved as He loved the Son and gave the Son out of the world before the foundation of the world (John 5; John 6; John 10:17; Matt. 11:25, 13:11). How any man can claim the name of Christian and yet deny these plain declarations of Christ, is astonishing. Any theory, however pleasant, and yet inconsistent with all these undeniable facts of nature, providence, experience and Scripture, is worse than Worthless—it is delusive and ruinous. The objections urged by the benighted carnal mind, which is enmity against God, to the Bible doctrine of salvation by grace alone, address themselves more powerfully to the feelings and the imagination than to the understanding, and are, therefore, arrayed in such distorted and exaggerated forms as to produce the strongest revulsion and abhorrence; the very same objections are urged, in equally shocking pictures, by infidels and atheists against the providence and the foreknowledge of God, His permission of sin and misery in the universe, and the unending sinfulness and misery of many of His intelligent creatures; and the very same objections were urged by unbelievers against the teachings of the Apostles. The practical tendency of any doctrine is to be decided from its character and from its effects. The proper effect of the conviction that we have forfeited all claims on God’s justice, that we are at His mercy, and that He may rightfully leave us to perish in our sins, is to lead us to seek that mercy with earnestness and importunity. And the experience of the church in all ages proves that such is the actual effect of the doctrine in question (when really believed). It has not led to neglect, to stolid unconcern, or to rebellious opposition to God, but to submission, to the acknowledgment of the truth, and to sure trust in Christ as the appointed Savior of those who deserve to perish.”—Condensed and modified from C. Hodge, in “Systematic Theology.”

As Augustinianism, shortly after the death of Augustine, degenerated, in the Catholic “Church,” into Semi-Augustinianism, which was afterwards fully developed in the writings of the Roman Catholics, Aquinas, Bellarmine and Mohler, and in the Canons of the Council of Trent, and has re-appeared in the modified or Wesleyan Arminianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is proper, here, to point out, in a few words, the grand citadel of this unscriptural theology, and to assault it with “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Eph. 6:17). If in accordance with that word, it will stand; if not, it will fall.

Catholic and Protestant Semi-Augustinians describe all men as born totally depraved, or dead in sin, since and in consequence of Adam’s fall; but these theologians declare that the Spirit of God gives every human being, in all ages and nations of the world, some degree of spiritual life, light and grace, which, if he properly accepts, embraces, improves, yields to or complies with, he will be given more life, light and grace by the Holy Spirit, more of his spiritual death will be removed, and if he thus continues to improve the grace given, he will finally repent truly and believe the gospel, and then be born again or regenerated; after all this, however, there is no certainty whatever of the sinner’s salvation—he must himself continue to obey the Lord, co-operate with His Spirit, and persevere in grace to the last moment of his conscious life, or else he will finally fall into everlasting perdition. Really, it is difficult to see what comfort such a doctrine as this can afford to the weak and tempted child of God who has been taught by experience to have no confidence in the flesh or in his own strength (Jer. 17:5, 6; Phil. 3:3); and it is equally difficult to see how that Divine Spirit, whose name is the Comforter, can be the author of such a doctrine (John 14:16; Isa. 40:1, 2). This doctrine is the most cultured and refined and the highest attainable product of natural Religion—the very closest imitation which the darkened mind can invent of the Bible doctrine of grace and salvation; and it is possible for many of the weak, unestablished, improperly instructed children of God to be deceived, in a measure, and for a season, by its ingenuity and plausibility, especially because of its conformity to carnal common sense, or natural reason, and human philosophy. “No man living,” says Wesley, “is without some prevenient grace, and every degree of grace is a degree of life.” “The visitations of the gracious influences of the Holy Spirit,” says Watson, “are vouchsafed to all men, and in the first instance, and in numberless other subsequent cases, quite independent of our seeking them or desire for them; and, in our convictions for sin under His operations, we are often wholly passive. The Holy Spirit removes so much of our spiritual death as to excite in us various degrees of religious feeling, and enable us to seek the face of God, to turn at His rebuke, and, by improving His grace, to repent and believe the gospel.” This doctrine of the human soul not being a unit, but being composed of parts, and of the Holy Spirit giving life to one or more of these parts, and, if these parts work well, giving life to one or more of the other parts, etc., until the last dead part is made alive—or, of there being degrees[6] in the spiritual life which the Holy Spirit gives the dead sinner, and the giving of the higher degrees being conditioned on the use which the partially quickened sinner makes of the lower degrees—this doctrine is an invention of the darkened mind of man, and is utterly opposed to the Scriptures of inspired truth. God’s account of the manner in which He quickens the spiritually dead sinner, and saves him from his sins, and prepares him for everlasting holiness and happiness beyond the grave, may be seen in such Scriptures as the following: (Ps. 110:3, 111:9; Ps. 105; Ps. 106, 107; Isa. 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 53, 54, 55, 57:15, 60, 61; Jer. 31, 29:10-14; Ezek. 36, 37, 47; Zech. 12:10-14, 13:1; Hosea 14; Jonah 2:9; Mal. 3, 4; Matt. 1:21, 11:25-30, 13:11; John 1:12, 13, 3:1-8, 5:25, 6:37-63, 8:36, 10:26-30, 11:25, 26, 14:16-20, 16:7-14, 17; Acts 2, 5:31, 11:18, 15:11, 16:14, 13:48; Rom. 3:24, 4:5, 16, 5:19-21, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; 1 Cor. 1:26-31; 2 Cor. 3, 4, 5; Gal. 2:16-21, 3:10-29, 4:21-31, 5; Eph. 1, 2, 3; Phil. 1:6, 29, 2:12, 13; Col. 3:3, 4; 2 Tim. 1:9, 10; Titus 3:5-7; Heb. 8:9-12, 12:2, 13:8; James 1:18; 1 Peter 1, 2; 1 John 4:19, 5:1-4; Rev. 1:5, 6, 5:9, 10). These Scriptures demonstrate that God, by the exercise of His own sovereign will and almighty power, and not because of any works[7] whatever of theirs, specially and efficaciously elects, redeems and sanctifies all who shall finally reach Heaven; that He takes away not a part of but all their stony heart, and gives them a heart of flesh; that He goes down into their spiritual graves, and brings them out, and clothes their very dry bones with sinews and flesh and skin, and puts His Spirit within them, and makes them live and know that God has done all this glorious work; that He new-creates them in Christ Jesus; that He gives them His Spirit to abide with them and dwell in them forever; that He gives them spiritual or eternal life, repentance, faith, love, peace, and all spiritual blessings in accordance with His eternal purpose before the foundation of the world; that He gives them the life of Christ, even Christ who is their life—not a partial, fragmentary, imperfect, changing, perishable, momentary life, dependent for its completion and perpetuation upon their feeble and sinful selves, but the life that He gives them is the life of Christ, yea, it is Christ Himself, the perfect and eternal God, the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever. The good work that He begins in us He will perform until the day of Jesus Christ, not only the day when Christ shall be first revealed as our Savior, but the day when He shall come finally to judge the world and take His ransomed people home (Phil. 1:6, 10; 2 Thess. 1:7-12; Heb. 12:3; Rom. 8:29-39; 2 Peter 3:10-13). Just as a pseudo-scientific infidelity seeks to expel God from the universe, or to minimize His immediate influence in the universe to the least possible degree; so a pseudo-religious dogma seeks to expel the Spirit of God from the heart of man, or to minimize His immediate influence in the human heart to the least possible degree. Spiritualism is always and everywhere offensive to the natural mind. Those natural principles that remain even with the children of God during all their earthly life may be pleased, to some extent, with a somewhat rationalistic, anti-supernatural religion; but such Christians are sadly in need of instruction in spiritual things.

Prof. Henry Drummond, in his recent able work entitled “Natural Law in the Spiritual World,” has some admirable pages unanswerably evincing the united and harmonious testimony of both science and Scripture to the truth of the Pauline or Augustinian or Calvinistic doctrine of salvation, and I will now give the substance of some of his remarks upon this subject:

The Apostle John says, “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:12). “Omne vivum ex vivo” (everything living comes from something living). Spontaneous generation is a scientific heresy, asserted by Dr. H. C. Bastian, but given up with reluctance by Tyndall, Huxley, and all the great scientists of Europe. Biogenesis is victorious along the whole line, says Huxley; no life without antecedent life, says Tyndall. Even so the spiritual life is the gift of the living Spirit, a new creation from above, which no natural man, by improving himself, can attain, although nearly all the preachers and poets and novelists and essayists proclaim differently. No physical change or evolution can endow a single mineral atom with life. The vast helpless world of the dead or inorganic is cut off from the living by the law of biogenesis; only by the bending down of some living form into this dead world can these dead atoms live. So there is a mighty gulf between the natural and the spiritual world, which is hermetically sealed on the natural side, which no natural power can bridge across. “Except a man be born again, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” The passage from the dead to the living is miraculous, Divine. Any communication from the higher to the lower world must be a revelation; “the natural man cannot know spiritual things, because they are spiritually discerned.” It is perfect folly to offer us Christianity without a living creative Spirit—a personal religion without regeneration. A stone cannot grow more and more living till it enters the organic world; neither can a natural man simply grow better and better till in his own power he enter the kingdom of God. A new principle distinguishes the plant from the stone, and the spiritual from the natural man—the principle of life. It cannot be truly said that he that hath Brahma, or Buddha, or Mohammed, hath life; but it can be truly said that he that hath Christ hath life. This fact distinguishes Christianity from all other religions. According to the analogies of biology, the new spiritual life dawns suddenly and comes without observation, and develops gradually; growth is most gradual in the highest forms of life;. no wonder that development is tardy in the creatures of eternity. Health or structure can come gradually, but life cannot. Growth is the work of time; but life is not. At one moment the being is dead; the next moment it lives; this is regeneration—the passing from death to life. Just as in natural life, so in spiritual life, the conscious moment is not (often) the real moment of birth, but follows it long afterwards. The living blade is small, near the earth, often soiled, crushed, down-trodden, but it has life, which the great imposing stone beside it does not have; and the living blade will grow spontaneously and mysteriously, and it doth. not yet appear what it shall be. The Christian, like the poet, is born, not made; and the fruits of his character are not manufactured things, but living things grown from the secret inward germ of the living Spirit—not the products of this world, but exotics from a sunnier clime. If you can account for a flower, it is artificial and dead. True life, growth and spirituality are mysterious, unaccountable. The Christian is a unique phenomenon; if you can account for him, he is not a Christian. God’s grace is free; the lily and all nature echo the blessed evangel of Jesus, “Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.” We would not urge a plea for the inactivity of the spiritual energies, but for the tranquility of the spiritual mind.

Life is correspondence with environment; death is the want of such correspondence. All organisms are living to all within the circumference of their correspondence, and dead to all beyond. The natural man is not in correspondence with, not responsive to, his spiritual environment, and is therefore spiritually dead. Those who are in communion with God live; those who are not are dead. The natural mind may be cultivated, high-toned, lovely, virtuous; its correspondence may reach to the stars of Heaven, to the magnitudes of time and space; but the stars of Heaven are not Heaven, and time and space are not God; and such a mind, if it commune not with God, is spiritually dead, just as the plant is dead to the voice of the bird. We have the most emphatic and abundant proof from the spiritually dead themselves, in the modern Agnostic philosophy, that the Pauline anthropology, instead of being an insult to human nature, is true -that the natural man does not know or commune with God, that such a mind is spiritually dead. There never before was a time when this fundamental truth of Christianity could be more boldly proclaimed, or could better secure the respect or arrest the interest of science. To know God in nature only, even however great, eternal or infinite, is not spiritual life; for eternal life consists in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. Outside of the sphere of special revelation man has never attained a sin-abhorring, passion-controlling, heart-purifying knowledge of God. The flicker of natural reason but makes the mysterious and impenetrable darkness deeper; for the carnal mind is enmity against God. The doctrine of eternal life is not a question of philosophy. Correspondence with God includes communion, faith and love; this perfect spiritual life will stretch beyond the grave and be found inviolate

“When the moon is old,
And the stars are cold,
And the books of the Judgment Day unfold.”

Every organism, however small, has a type to which it is to be conformed; so Christ is the perfect type, the Divine ideal, to which the new creature, the spiritual man, is to be finally and perfectly conformed. Christ is the life; His incarnation is the life revealing the type; and His life by His spirit in us conforms us to that type; and this conformity will go on until Christ is perfectly formed in us—the hope and the realization of glory.

The mineral is below and dead to the organic kingdom; and so the organic is below and dead to the spiritual kingdom, the kingdom of Heaven or of God. The members of the mineral kingdom are not born at all; the members of the organic kingdom are once born, while the members of the spiritual kingdom are twice born; and by the law of conformity to type, they will in the end attain to the pure and holy image of their Father, God. Thus far Prof. Drummond.

Even the Apostle Paul confesses of himself, as well as of his brethren, that, in the present state of existence, we know only in part—that now we see through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:9, 12). And Augustine, though he saw so clearly the Bible doctrine of God’s free redeeming grace, yet greatly and sadly erred in accepting also, and very inconsistently, the doctrine of sacramentalism (or salvation only through the ordinances administered by the Catholic “Church”—the Old Catholic, not Roman Catholic), and also in inconsistently persecuting the Donatists for their religion. Augustine’s ability and sacramentalism caused the Catholics at first to accept his doctrine of grace; but, soon after his death, the Catholics became Semi-Augustinian; and, at the councils of Orange and Valence, A. D. 529, Semi-Augustinianism was formally adopted as Catholic doctrine. Augustine’s theory of the right of a State to persecute its citizens to make them conform to a national religion involved the germs of absolute spiritual despotism, and of even the horrors of the Inquisition; but in practice he is said to have urged clemency and humanity upon the magistrates.[8] Sacramentalism and religious persecution are as diverse from predestinarianism as night is from day; and, as Augustine held all these three principles, we learn that even God’s regenerated people may be in great darkness on some important points, while they have light on other points still more important-in other words, that we are utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit to open our understandings and hearts, and to enlighten and animate us on all spiritual subjects.

After the decision of the Roman Emperor Honorius’s commissioner, Marcellinus, a friend of Augustine (A. D. 411), in favor of the Catholics and against the Donatists, severe civil laws were enacted against the latter; their ministers were banished; their private members fined, and their meeting-houses confiscated. In 415 they were forbidden, on pain of death, from holding religious meetings. In 428 the Arian Vandals conquered Africa, persecuted the Catholics, and put an end to the persecution of the Donatists. The Novatians continued, during the fifth century, in Italy and other countries of Europe. The Christians in Persia were persecuted for forty years during this century.

Nestorius, “patriarch” of Constantinople, maintained that there is only a moral and not a substantial union between the human and Divine natures of Christ, and virtually affirmed that Christ has two persons (Nestorianism). This error was condemned by the Council of Ephesus, A. D. 431, which declared that in Christ there is a substantial union of two natures, human and Divine, in one person. Eutyches, of Constantinople, affirmed that, at the incarnation, the human nature of Christ was merged in the Divine, making only one nature (Monophysitism). This error was condemned by a council at Constantinople, A. D. 448. The Fourth General Council at Chalcedon, A. D. 451 (the most numerous, and, next to the first, the most important General Council), condemned both Nestorianism and Eutychianism, and declared that there is in Christ an unmixed but inseparable union of two natures in one person; that neither is Christ’s person to be divided nor His two natures confounded.

The Council of Chalcedon also conferred on the “Bishops” of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem the titles of Patriarchs, thus laying the foundations of the unscriptural oligarchy of the Greek Catholic “Church;” and the “Bishop” of Rome, Leo “the Great,” who was in office from A. D. 440 to 461, and who was a man of extraordinary mental ability and of towering ambition, laid the foundations of the unscriptural monarchy of the Roman Catholic “Church” by striving to realize Cyprian’s invention of the supremacy of Peter over the other Apostles, the succession of the Bishop of Rome to Peter, and consequently that Bishop’s supremacy over the whole church.

John Chrysostom (the Golden-mouthed—born in Antioch 347, died in banishment 407) is considered by the Greek “Church” its greatest expositor and preacher. He was a thorough-going synergist; and his pupil, Cassian, was the founder of Semi-Pelagianism. Jerome (born about 340, died 419) was, among the Latin “fathers,” the most zealous promoter of monasticism, and the most learned, eloquent and authoritative; is called the founder of the grammatico-historical interpretation of the Scriptures; was proud, vain, sophistical and irritable; and his Latin version of the Bible, called the Vulgate, has been substituted, as though inspired, by the Roman Catholic “Church” in place of the original Hebrew and Greek Scriptures.

The Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, A. D. 449, broke up the ancient British Church planted in that island either in the first or the second century, and drove the remnant into Cornwall and Wales. Palladius and Patrick are said to have preached the gospel with great success in Ireland during this century; but it is certain that they were not Romanists, and had nothing to do with Rome.

Not even the exact year, much less the exact month and day, when Christ was born, is stated in the Scriptures, or is known to mortals. The sixth of January was in the second and third centuries, thought to have been the day; but it was decided by the Catholics in the fourth and fifth centuries that the 25th day of December[9] was the day. As Rome, the centre of paganism, was made the centre of Catholicism, so the Pagan festivities of the Saturnalia, Sigillaria, Juvenalia and Brumalia, which occurred in December, were very conveniently and hilariously transmuted by a worldly “Christianity” into the festival of Christmas.

Sixth Century.—During the sixth century the twilight of the Dark Ages deepens, the papacy assumes its mediaeval phase, clerical pride and splendid robing and celibacy and corruption, and formalism, sacramentalism, laxity of discipline, the worship of Mary and saints and relics and images, traditionalism, monasticism, ignorance and superstition, increase; men believe more and more in the saving efficacy of human works and ceremonies and institutions, and in purgatorial fire; the Franks, Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Lombards are, by corrupting compromises, converted to Catholicism—being simply required to make an oral profession of faith in Christ, memorize the creed, and transfer their worship from their own gods to the images of Christ and the saints, and being taught that gifts for charity and religion atoned for any amount of licentiousness and bloodshed; the Monophysite controversies rage among the Catholics amid scenes of numberless outrages, intrigues, depositions, banishments, commotions, riots, fires and murders; the “Fifth General Council, at Constantinople, adopts anew the faith of Chalcedon, and complicates the dispute;” the dissolute but able Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian (whose wife, Theodora, was of the same character), reconquers, by his generals, Belisarius and Narses, a large part of the lost Western Empire in Africa and Spain, Sicily and Italy, and wars with the Persians, and makes that celebrated digest of Roman laws which has become the common law of all civilized nations; he also “affects a life of austere piety, assumes to regulate matters of faith, discipline and worship, and, by acts of extortion, oppression and corruption of justice, procures means for building magnificent church-houses and hospitals;” he seeks to enforce general religious uniformity throughout his dominions, requiring all infants to be baptized, and enacts severe penalties against Pagans and heretics (by the latter meaning those who differed from him in religious views and practices); and the people of God flee for refuge into barbarous, or desert, or mountainous countries, especially into Northern Italy, Northern Spain and Southern France. Among the lovers of truth during the sixth century were the Novatians, the Donatists and the Montenses (or Mountaineers), so called because they dwelt for security in the caves of the mountains. These were all occasionally called Anabaptists or re-immersers, because they did not recognize the validity of Catholic baptism, but baptized all, whether Catholics or not, who united with them -just as has been done by those called Baptists during the last four centuries.

Priests in the Greek Catholic “Church” are still called “Popes” or fathers; but about A. D. 500 Latin Catholic writers restricted this title to the Catholic “Bishop” of Rome, to whom it was first applied in the letter of a “Deacon” to “Pope” Marcellus, A. D. 275. In 588 John Jejunator (the Faster, so called from his frequent and rigid fasts), “Patriarch” of Constantinople, assumed the title of “Universal Bishop;” and “Pope” Gregory I. (surnamed the “Great”) rebuked John for his “devilish” pride, and called such an appellation the sign of “the Forerunner of Antichrist.” But this title was gladly received by Gregory’s successor, Boniface III., from the Emperor Phocas in 606, and was, in 648, exchanged by “Pope” Theodore for that of “Sovereign Pontiff.” Gregory I. was Pope from A. D. 590 to 604. He is one of the four “doctors” of the Latin “Church” -Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome being the other three. He was a Semi-Augustinian, excessively superstitious, monastic, ritualistic and hierarchical, hostile to secular learning, persecuted the Donatists in Africa, and was the father of mediaeval papacy, of the practical doctrine of purgatory[10] and meritorious masses; he advocated the atoning value of good works, and furnished a basis for the later system of works of supererogation. He sought to make converts, first by preaching, and if that failed, by bribery or imprisonment and torture. He applauded and flattered the centurion Phocas, a monster of vice and cruelty, who rebelled against and atrociously slew the Roman Emperor Maurice and his wife and eight children, and who usurped the throne. In 597 he sent out Augustine, a zealous, intolerant and self-sufficient monk, with forty followers, to convert the heathen Saxons in England to Roman Catholicism—the first strictly foreign mission, of the modern style, ever undertaken; and, as England was the field of this mission, so England has appropriately become the chief mother of nineteenth-century missions—of the same character. In about a year three British kings and ten thousand of their subjects were baptized—any scandalous stories being told of these pretended conversions and baptisms; the old Pagan temples were “consecrated” by being sprinkled with “holy” water, and by having the “saints” relics put in place of the idols; and the old heathen festivals, such as Yule and Easter,[11] were transformed into so-called “Christian” festivities. In such measures of compromise and accommodation, as well as in centralized power and unflagging perseverance. Papal Rome imitated Imperial Rome; and, using even greatly superior worldly wisdom and skill, she has achieved a natural success far more extensive and enduring than that ever attained by the Caesars or their political successors. The daughters of Papal Rome attain similar success just in proportion as they adopt similar measures of corrupting accommodation to the principles and practices of the world.

The old British Christians, who traced their origin, through the mercantile relations of Cornwall, England, and Marseilles, France, to the churches planted in Asia Minor by Paul and watered by John, and who had, in the fifth century, fled from the heathen Saxon invaders into the mountains of Wales (Matt. 24:16), as others afterwards fled to the Pyrenees and to the mountains of Northern Italy and of Bohemia, refused to acknowledge the authority of the pope, or to have any alliance with Rome. Some of these old Welsh Christians are said to have preached the gospel in Ireland, in Scotland, and in England. They regarded clerical pride as a mark of Antichrist.[12] Notwithstanding a great desire and a diligent search, the present writer has not been able to find any satisfactory information in reference to the early non-monastic, non-ritualistic, and non-prelatical Christians in Wales. Among the nominal Welsh Christians corruptions were rife as early as the third century.

As for the so-called Culdees, who are said by Presbyterian writers to have flourished in Scotland and Ireland during the sixth and succeeding centuries, and whom they maintain to have been very pure in doctrine, worship and government, and through whom they claim a continuous historical extra-Roman succession from the Apostles, it is now admitted by the best scholars that the “Culdees” existed only from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries; that their faith, discipline and ritual did not materially differ from those of Rome, and that they were almost as superstitious and corrupt as the Roman Catholics -their purity existing only in poetry and legend, but being unknown to history.[13]

In this century the “Benedictine Order” gave zealous attention to the Catholic training of youth and the higher education of the clergy.

About A. D. 530 Dionysius Exiguns, a Scythian monk residing in Rome, introduced the birth of Christ as a chronological epoch, but, as is now believed, placed that event four years after it really occurred.

1. Bible Baptists believe the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, because it is unmistakably taught in the Scriptures, and not because Augustine or any other man since the Apostles has believed and maintained it. Very few of our members ever heard of Augustine, and still fewer are aware of his having been an advocate of the doctrine of grace. But, since the days of the Apostles, though that great doctrine has had more consistent, it has had no abler advocate than Augustine; and, as the first great post-apostolic controversy on that subject took place in the fifth century between Augustine and Pelagius, the doctrine of grace and the opposite doctrine of works are here treated, for the sake of unity and clearness, in the fullness of the their subsequent developments.

2. This ancient argument for conditionaliam is utterly neutralized by the fact that, as the husbandman must first be born into the natural kingdom before he can do any work in nature, so must the spiritually dead sinner first be born into the spiritual kingdom before he can do any work in that kingdom; and when thus born of God he will certainly believe in Christ, overcome the world, and have eternal life, and never perish (1 John 5:1, 4; John 10:27-30, John 11:25, 26).

3. It is a most lamentable fact, and demonstrates the unspirituality of the great mass of the Catholic and Protestant world, that nearly all professed Christians accept their own uninspired authorities in preference to the plain declarations of the inspired Scriptures. With them the word of man is every thing, and the word of God is nothing. And the most of their speakers de part further from the truth in the direction of Pagan Pelagianism than their written authorities, and thus perniciously impose upon the ignorance of their private members.

4. “The reason of pardon, in every case,” says Watson, in his “Theological Institutes,” “is not repentance, not faith, not anything done by man, but the merit of the sacrifice of Christ.” This is exactly Primitive Baptist doctrine, for believing which they are hated and persecuted everywhere.

5. One of the most learned and esteemed Methodist ministers in North Carolina remarked a few years since to the present writer: “One of your ministers recently preached in my meeting-house and some of my members, speaking to me afterwards, made the objection that the sermon was too denominational: but I told them that the objection was caused by their own ignorance; that salvation by sovereign grace was the doctrine of the Methodist Church.”

6. Confusion of thought produces inaccuracy of statement. Life itself is one thing; and the manifestation of life is another thing. While there are various degrees in the manifestations both of natural and spiritual life itself, whether natural or spiritual, is a separate entity, an indivisible unit, a clear Divine gift, essentially and totally distinguished from death by such a mighty gulf as only the Infinite Creator can span. It is not quantity, but quality, that distinguishes the essence of life, light, grace and Spirit, from the essence of death, darkness, nature and matter. And the life which the Spirit of God gives to His spiritually dead but chosen people is emphatically declared in the Scriptures to be spiritual. Divine, eternal, everlasting life, the life of Christ, even Christ Himself dwelling by His Spirit in them, and, because He lives, making them live also.

7. The Semi-Augustinianism of the nineteenth century declares that, between spiritual quickening and spiritual birth, the poor partially dead sinner must accept, embrace, use, improve, yield to and comply with the life, grace or light already given, and, it he does so properly, God will also give him repentance, faith and regeneration; but, it he does not. God will not give him these additional graces. Now, if accepting, embracing, using, improving, etc., are not works of the sinner, they are nothing. Webster and Worcester tell us that a work is an act; deed or performance; and these two lexicographers and Skeats say that the English term work is of the same root as the Greek term ergon, which Liddell and Scott say is a most general term for anything done by a human being. And the New Testament repeatedly and emphatically declares that we are not saved ex ergon or kata erga (in consequence of, in accordance with, because of, works) which we have done. Wesleyan Arminianism makes our salvation depend, primarily, upon works done by us before we are born, spiritually; and, secondarily, upon works done by us after our spiritual birth. The scriptural fact is that God, by His almighty grace, works in His people all the willing and all the doing that are acceptable to Him (1 Kings 8:58; Ps. 110:3; Prov. 21:1; Isa. 26:12; Phil 2:12, 13; Heb 13:21). Heathen authority for the limitation of the power of God and for only a partial quickening of the dead, may be found in the old Pagan Roman Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 1, lines 409, 411, 428, 429.

8. The basal idea of the theory of the persecution of so-called heretics was that temporal suffering might force them into the true faith, and thus save them from eternal punishment—an idea thoroughly inconsistent with the doctrine of salvation by grace alone.

9. “December being the height of the rainy season in Judea, it is not likely that flocks and shepherds were, during that month, found by night in the fields of Bethlehem.”

10. Gregory was the first to make practical Origen’s and Augustine’s doctrine of purgatorial fire after death, and taught that the sufferings of Christiana consigned to purgatory could be mitigated and shortened by the prayers, alms, masses, and other services of their surviving friends. He taught that each celebration of the communion was a new sacrifice, having new virtue for the atonement of sin.

11. Yule, the old name for Christmas, is from the same Anglo-Saxon root (geola) as the word jolly, and was the Pagan festival of the Winter Solstice. The word Easter is derived from Eastre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of Spring, to whom the fourth month, answering to our April, was dedicated. The ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica well remarks: “The ecclesiastical historian, Socrates, states with perfect truth that neither Christ nor His Apostles enjoined the keeping of this or any other festival. The sanctity of special times or places was an idea quite alien from the early Christian mind.”

12. See the eighteenth chapter in this volume, in regard to the Welsh Tract Primitive Baptist Church near Newark. Delaware.

13. A thorough demonstration of the utter baselessness of the theory which attempts to carry back the origin of Presbyterianism from the sixteenth to the sixth or eighth century, is given by the leading Presbyterian Church historian. Prof. Philip Schaff, in his “History of the Christian Church,” vol. 4., pp. 61-76.

Chapter XIII. Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Centuries.

Seventh Century.—During the seventh century the deep night of the Dark Ages[1] covered the world. The corruptions of Greek and Roman Catholicism increased; their bitter controversies continued; and their permanent separation and hostility were foreshadowed. Mohammedanism, less idolatrous and corrupt than Greek Catholicism, arose in Arabia, conquered Palestine, Syria, Persia, Egypt and North Africa, and threatened Constantinople. The vigorous Roman Catholicism effected the ecclesiastical conquest of England, and reduced Spain to still humbler submission, and inaugurated a systematic persecution of the Jews in Spain. Wales, Ireland and Scotland remained ecclesiastically independent of Rome. Irish and Frankish missionaries labored with considerable success among the Germans. The Paulicians arose in Armenia and Asia Minor.

It is said that in 603 the Bishops (or Elders) of Wales held two conferences with Augustine, the envoy of Pope Gregory I., but were deterred by the haughtiness of the monk from submitting to the authority of Rome, and would not unite with him in proselyting the heathen Saxons; and, in accordance with his threat, thousands of the Welsh professors of Christianity were slain, a few years afterwards, by the Saxons. Theodore, a Greek monk of Tarsus, in Cilicia, was “consecrated” by Pope Vitalian, in 668, to be “Archbishop of Canterbury,” and retained the “primacy” of England till his death in 690. He diffused Greek learning over England, and has been called “the father of Anglo-Saxon literature;” and he energetically organized the Anglican episcopate, so that the latest and most approved English Episcopalian writers frankly admit that he is, “the father of their diocesan organization”—that “the church of England, as we know it today, is the work, so far as its outer form is concerned, of Theodore;” and that “the Church of England, perhaps more directly than any other church in Europe, is the daughter of the Church of Rome.”

As the Monophysitic controversy, as to whether in Christ there are two natures or only one, lasted a hundred years; so it was continued for fifty years, from 630 to 680, in the Monothelitic controversy, as to whether there are in the one person of Christ two wills for the two natures, or only one will for the two natures. “There was a confusion in the use of the term will; the one party employing it as equivalent to that which manifests the person; the other as meaning that which manifests the nature. The Sixth General Council of Constantinople, in 680, decided in favor of the Roman view of Two Wills, declaring a moral unity by the subordination of the human to the Divine. The sum of these Christological controversies is as follows: Christ is perfect God and perfect man; one Person, two natures; with two wills, or modes of manifestation. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (said the Greek ‘Church’), and from the Son (said the Latin ‘Church’).

The Quinisextan Council of Constantinople (supplementary to the Fifth and Sixth Councils), in 692, allowed the marriage of priests, declared the equality of Constantinople and Rome, and is the great authority with the Greek “Church”; but has always been rejected by the Latin “Church;” and has thus for thirteen centuries been “a perpetual apple of discord” between these two anti-christian communions.

The first pseudo-Christian systematic persecution of the Jews occurred in Spain during this century. In the course of sixty years eight councils were held against them. The Jews were forbidden to act, or speak, or even think, against the Christian faith. Deprivation of civil rights, scourging, imprisonment, confiscation, banishment, slavery and mutilation were decreed against these most industrious and thrifty of the Spanish population. It is said that ninety thousand were thus forced to submit to a pretended baptism; and multitudes fled into France.

“The seventh century of Christianity,” says Milman, “beheld a new religious revolution, only inferior in the extent of its religious and social influence to Christianity itself. In an obscure district of a country esteemed by the civilized world as beyond its boundaries, a savage, desert and almost inaccessible region, suddenly arose an antagonistic religion (Mohammedanism) which was to reduce the followers of Zoroaster to a few scattered communities, to invade India, and tread under foot the ancient Brahmanism, as well as the more wide-spread Buddhism, even beyond the Ganges; to wrest her most ancient and venerable provinces from (a corrupted nominal) Christianity; to subjugate by degrees the whole of her Eastern dominions, and Roman Africa from Egypt to the Straits of Gibraltar; to assail Europe at its western extremity; to possess the greater part of Spain, and even to advance to the banks of the Loire; more than ever to make the elder Rome tremble for her security, and finally to establish itself in triumph within the new Rome of Constantine (Constantinople). Asiatic ‘Christianity’ sank more and more into obscurity. It dragged on its existence within the Mohammedan empire as a contemptuously tolerated religion; in the Byzantine empire it had still strength to give birth to new controversies—that of Iconoclasm, and even still later that concerning the Divine light. Yet its aggressive vigor had entirely departed, and it was happy to be allowed inglorious repose, to take no part in that great war waged by the two powers, now the only two active, dominant powers, which contested the dominion of the world—Mohammedanism and Latin ‘Christianity.’”From the ninth to the thirteenth century the Mohammedans may be said to have been the enlightened teachers of barbarous Europe; and then Mohammedanism sank back into its primeval barbarism.” Mohammed was born at Mecca, Arabia, about the year 570 A. D.; began preaching his religion in 610; fled from Mecca to Medina in 622; and died in 682. He had effected the conquest of Arabia, and was about to send a powerful array into Syria, when he died. He was a descendant of Ishmael, and was related to the Korashites, the hereditary guardians of the irregular cubical building in Mecca called the Kaaba, which, long before Mohammed’s time, was the central shrine of Arabian idolatry. This building contained in its northeast corner, about five feet above the ground, a black stone, an irregular oval, seven inches in diameter, of volcanic basalt, sprinkled with colored crystals, (supposed to have been an aerolite, but) claimed to have been brought from Heaven by the angel Gabriel and given to Ishmael; said at first to have been white, but now blackened by the kisses of sinful mortals. Pilgrimages to Mecca, and traveling around the Kaaba, and kissing the black stone, are among the most solemn duties enjoined by Mohammed upon his followers. Though claiming to be a monotheist, he thus accommodated his religion to the previous idolatry of Arabia. He restricted ordinary Mohammedans to four wives;[2] but allowed chieftains as many as they wished; and the estimate of the number of his own wives varies from thirteen to twenty-five. His first wife, Kadijah, was a wealthy widow; and his favorite wife, Ayesha, was a beautiful girl but nine years old when he married her, he being fifty-three years of age. He was subject to epileptic fits from his childhood, and was, in all probability, a partially insane religious fanatic, or mono-maniac. He says that he never knew how to read or write. He pretended that his fits were interviews with the angel Gabriel; and the so-called revelations that he dictated were recorded and preserved by others and, after his death, gathered into a book called the Koran—the Mohammedan Bible. Mohammed was a licentious, ambitious and vindictive man; and his religion was a strange compound of truth and error, of Judaism, Rabbinism, Christianity, Heathenism and Fatalism. The most of the Arabs were heathens; but many Jews and professed Christians had gradually settled in Arabia. Mohammed’s first wife’s cousin, Waraka, originally a Jew, and subsequently a professor of Christianity, was the first man on record to translate parts of the Old and New Testaments into Arabic, and he gave Mohammed much information in regard to the Scriptures. Mohammed admitted that the Old and New Testaments were divinely inspired, but had become corrupted; that numerous prophets, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, had preceded him, and that Jesus was the greatest before him, but not the Son of God. He claimed that he himself was the last and greatest of the prophets—the Paraclete, or Comforter, predicted by Jesus in John 14:16; pretending that the genuine word in that passage was, not parakletos, but periklutos, the praised or renowned, equivalent to Mohammed in Arabic. His leading doctrine was, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” He taught the utter dependence of all creatures upon the one, almighty, eternal, infinite, spiritual Creator; but he did not teach the loving, fatherly relationship and communion of God with His creatures. Though professing to teach the doctrines of the absolute predestination of all things,[3] he certainly, inconsistently taught the doctrine of salvation by outward works, such as formal prayers, fastings, alms, lustrations, festivals, pilgrimages, the subjugation of infidels and the extermination of idolaters; that prayer will carry a man half-way to God, and fasting will bring him to the door of His palace, and alms will gain him admittance. He enjoined circumcision and the observance of Friday as the Sabbath. The fundamental feature of Christianity—man’s indispensable need of salvation by the mediation of a spotless and almighty redeemer—was entirely omitted from the teaching of Mohammed. He taught that there are degrees of reward in Heaven and of punishment in hell, according to the actions of each person in this world; that, at the last day, a mighty balance will be poised by the angel Gabriel, and each human being will separately be tried by it, his good deeds being put in one scale, and his bad deeds in the other, and an atom or grain of mustard seed will suffice to turn the balance and decide the destiny of the person. Like other founders of false religions, Mohammed described, in the fullest and grossest manner, the horrors of hell and the joys of Heaven; and he placed, among the latter, each believer’s possession of seventy-two black-eyed maidens, of ravishing beauty and perpetual youth. “Under the shade of the scimitar,” said he, to encourage his deluded soldiers, “is the gate of paradise; hell is behind you if you flee, and paradise before you if you fall.” The alternative of the Koran or death was offered to idolaters; but Jews and Christians might, by tribute, purchase a limited toleration. Spirituous liquors, swine’s flesh, gambling and picture-making were strictly prohibited by Mohammed; and he copied into his system many of the moral precepts of the Bible. No religion was ever less original. Mohammedanism is a cosmopolitan, Christless, perverted, bastard, unspiritual Judaism, and, in many respects, bears a striking resemblance to Papal Babylon and her daughters. The Koran, says Gibbon, is an “endless incoherent rhapsody of fable and precept and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds. The Divine attributes exalt the fancy of the Arabian missionary; but his loftiest strains must yield to the sublime simplicity of the book of Job, composed in a remote age, in the same country, and in the same language.” Mohammed suffered great pain in his last moments, and his last words were: “The Lord destroy the Jews and Christians! O God! pardon my sins. Yes, I come among my fellow-citizens on high.” Two hundred million human beings today, it is estimated, base their eternal salvation on the intercession of this vindictive, licentious and deluded sinner. Of this number about one hundred millions are found in southern and western Asia and in Turkey in Europe; and about a hundred millions are found in Africa, composing one-half of the estimated population of that Grand Division of the globe; so that Mohammedanism may be fitly called the religion of the Dark Continent. Its chief training theological school is the University of Cairo, with its ten thousand missionary students from all parts of the Mohammedan world. “In winning the inferior races, and training them to a fervent worship of its own and a certain low level of culture, it has shown an aptness, skill and zeal quite in advance of any ‘Christian’ missions. Its bleak monotheism,[4] its lifeless morality, its somber fatalism, its intolerant fanaticism, its gorgeous luxury, and its extreme profligacy, have contributed to its missionary success. Science it treats with ignorant scorn. The arts of modern life it takes at second hand, choosing always those of mere luxury, or else mere destruction. And so it has no hold upon the future, only the memory of a bloody and stormy past. While it may be an advance on heathenism, it is an advance which seems almost to exclude the further advance of Christianity. In substituting Mohammed for Christ—a principle similar to that of all false religions—it is of course essentially antichristian.” “In thirteen distinct places in the Koran, Mohammed expressly disclaims the power of working miracles. He commanded his army in person in eight general engagements, and undertook, by himself or his lieutenants, fifty military enterprises. From the success of Mohammedanism no inference whatever can be justly drawn to the prejudice of Christianity. For what are we comparing? A Galilean peasant, accompanied by a few fishermen, without natural force, power or support, prevailing against the prejudices, learning, hierarchy, philosophy and authority of the Roman Empire in its most polished period—with a conquering chieftain, at the head of his army, bearing down opposition by military triumphs, in the darkest ages and countries of the world.”—Wm. Paley.

The Paulicians arose in Armenia in the latter part of the seventh century, and were probably so called because they especially emphasized the great spiritual principles enunciated by the Apostle Paul. The accounts of them transmitted to us (their own books having been burned) were written two hundred years afterward by their inveterate Catholic enemies; and Gibbon well remarks that, “as they cannot plead for themselves, our candid criticism will magnify the good, and abate or suspect the evil, reported of them.” Their enemies accused them of being Manichaeans; but this was denied by them. It is said that many of them were anti-Judaizing Gnostics, maintaining the eternal existence and evil of matter, and that the visible world was fashioned by an inferior evil deity, born of darkness and fire, whom they called the Demiurge (a Platonic term meaning world-creator), and that the Old Testament was the work of the Demiurge, and was therefore to be rejected; that the Demiurge was constantly drawing from the higher world human souls that had been created by the supreme God, and was imprisoning them in material bodies, but that every human soul was enlightened by the Spirit of God, and was able to attain eternal life. Of the New Testament, they received the gospels and the epistles of Paul. The Paulician movement seems to have been an extreme dualistic reaction against the extreme Judaistic corruptions of the Catholic ‘Churches’—a peremptory abandonment of the innumerable superstitious doctrines and ceremonies of human invention, and an earnest though imperfect desire to return to the simple purity of apostolic doctrine and practice, even though the Divine origin of the material creation and of the Old Testament should have to be relinquished—a preliminary excessive Protestantism arising in the East eight hundred years before the dawn of the Western Protestant Reformation. Paul did not reject, but powerfully maintained, the Divine origin both of the material creation and of the Old Testament; and those professing to follow him should not have been led, by any amount or extent of Catholic corruptions, into such anti-Pauline rationalistic extremes. The Paulicians utterly rejected the worship of saints and relics and images and the cross, and the magical power of external forms, particularly the sacraments, and the odious despotism of an avaricious and corrupt clergy. They are said to have rejected all outward ordinances. Even their enemies admitted the strict morality of their lives. Their ministers, to whom they gave not even the title of Elders, traveled and preached very much, though they worked at some secular employment for a livelihood. Their two most famous preachers were Constantine in the seventh and Sergius in the ninth century, the first of whom suffered martyrdom, and the second assassination. The Greek Catholic emperors greatly persecuted them, especially in the ninth century, the Empress Theodora, it is said, putting to death, with dreadful tortures, a hundred thousand of them. A renewal of persecutions in the eleventh century drove them into Southern Europe, where, with some modifications of doctrine, they were known as Bogomiles or Bulgarians in Turkey, Patarenes in Italy, Cathari in Germany, and Albigenses in France; the Waldenses in Northern Italy and the Wyckliffites in England were spiritual and anti-sacerdotal, like the Paulicians, but less extreme and more Biblical. Some people, calling themselves Paulicians, are still found in Turkey. It can hardly be doubted that there were numerous Christians among the ancient Paulicians, and that, as in the case of the Apostle Paul, slanderous reports have been made of their doctrine (Rom. 3:8). The seventh century was, to be sure, a period of gross darkness; but, to the present writer, it is utterly inconsistent and incredible that the Paulicians, as a body, implicitly accepted and highly esteemed the writings of the Apostle Paul, and at the same time utterly rejected the Old Testament Scriptures, which he so greatly honored as the oracles of God. But it may well be believed that they thoroughly, and often even violently, opposed that total perversion of the Old Testament, that substitution of the law for the gospel, which is the characteristic of all false religions, and which the Apostle Paul is especially distinguished for denouncing.

Mr. William Jones, a very conscientious historian, does not doubt that the Paulicians were “the genuine successors of the Christians of the first two centuries,” sealing their testimony with their blood; and he quotes, in reference especially to their pastors, the following touching lines of the poet Colton:

“Thrice hail, ye faithful shepherds of the fold,
By tortures unsubdued, unbribed by gold;
In your high scorn of honors, honored most,
Ye chose the martyr’s, not the prelate’s post;
Firmly the thorny path of suffering trod,
And counted death ‘all gain’ to live with God.”

Some of the Paulicians, or at least some who bore that name, took refuge from Catholic persecutions with the Saracens, or Mohammedans, and, in alliance with the latter, waged war with their merciless Greek enemies—a “warring after the flesh,” and with “carnal weapons,” utterly condemned by the Apostle Paul and by Christ (Rom. 12:14-21; 2 Cor. 10:3-5; Eph. 6:10-18; Matt. 5:43-48; Luke 23:34; Acts 7:60).

Eighth Century.—The eighth century may be said to close the First Watch, and to advance into the Second Watch of the Night of the Dark Ages. The Mohammedans, or Saracens, after conquering Spain and southern France, were repulsed with immense slaughter by Charles Martel at Tours, in France, A. D. 732, just one hundred years after the death of Mohammed, and were driven back into Spain. Pepin the Short, the son of Charles Mattel (encouraged by Pope Zachary, in order to increase the papal influence over France), dethroned, in 752, Chilperic III., the last of the Merovingian kings of France, and assumed the French crown, thus founding the Carlovingian dynasty, the champions of Roman Catholicism. The Exarchate of Ravenna, with its inseparable dependency of the Pentapolis, in Central Italy, having belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire since the time of Justinian, was, in 751, conquered by Astolphus, king of the Lombards, who also threatened Rome. Pope Stephen III. addressed a letter to Pepin, pretendedly “in the name and person of the Apostle Peter himself,” and urged him, under the penalty of eternal damnation if he refused, and upon the promise of paradise if he consented, to undertake the defeat of Astolphus and the deliverance of Rome. Pepin complied and succeeded, and, as he says, “for the remission of his sins and the salvation of his soul,” conferred on the Roman Pontiff the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis, A. D. 754, and this grant was confirmed and enlarged by Pepin’s son and successor, Charlemagne. The donation of Pepin founded the temporal power of the pope, which lasted eleven hundred and fifteen years, until, in 1870, at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, Napoleon III. withdrew all his soldiers from Italy, and Victor Emmanuel II. took possession of Rome. “The mutual obligations of the popes and the Carlovingian family,” says Gibbon, “form the important link of ancient and modern, of civil and ecclesiastical, history.” Charlemagne reigned forty-six years (768-814). He made the first and last successful attempt to consolidate the Teutonic and Roman races in one great empire. December 25th, A. D. 800, Pope Leo III. crowned and anointed him in Rome, as Caesar Augustus, the Emperor of the Romans. He reigned in France, in Spain as far as the Ebro, in Germany, in Hungary, and in the greatest part of Italy. His dominion was called the “Holy Roman Empire,” because allied with the pope, and, with varying boundaries, lasted a thousand and six years, until, in 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte compelled Francis of Austria to abdicate the title, and himself claimed, by his own military prowess, to be the true successor of Charlemagne.

The Saracenic invasion of the Eastern Roman Empire, the rising power of the Frankish Empire, the conquest by the latter of the kingdom of Lombardy and of the exarchate of Ravenna, and the iconoclasm of the Greek emperors (to be spoken of presently), produced, in the eighth century, the final severance of Rome and Constantinople, of Latin and Greek “Christianity,” and allied the pope with the new Empire of the West, which he now perforce acknowledged as his “lord and judge”—designing, however, just as soon as possible, to assert both temporal and spiritual supremacy over the new Roman Empire, as well as over all the remainder of the world.

Charlemagne, the pope’s new lord, whose figure stands at one end, as that of Constantine, a similar churchman, stands at the other end, of the stately porch of “St. Peter’s” at Rome, was an illiterate barbarian, though a professed patron of learning, a very licentious and ambitious man, a vigorous ruler and a bloody warrior. He had nine wives or concubines, and a number of dissolute daughters; he fought, in thirty-three bloody campaigns, during as many years, with the Saxons, Bohemians and Huns, professedly to civilize and Christianize them, compelling thousands of them to be baptized or to suffer death. He once slew forty-five hundred Saxon prisoners in cold blood; and finally effected the conquest of the Saxons by deporting ten thousand families, one-third of their entire population, and settling them in France. He was, says Milman, “the Mohammedan Apostle of the Gospel.” He is said to have restored 3,700 “church” buildings; and he ordered tithes to be paid to the “clergy.”

For a hundred years Irish and Frankish monks had been laboring as “missionaries” in Germany; but he who is known in history as “the Apostle of Germany,” and of whom even Smith’s recent and elaborate “Dictionary of Christian Biography” remarks that, “since the days of the great Apostle of the Gentiles no missionary of the gospel has been more eminent in labors, in perils, in self-devotion, in tenacity and elasticity of purpose,” was the English Saxon, Winfried, who, after having been made a ‘Bishop’ by the pope, assumed the name of Boniface, by which he is generally known. He resolved to preach among his Saxon kindred in Germany, whom he could address in his and their mother-tongue, and to convert them from paganism to Roman Catholicism. In 718 he went to Rome and took “a stringent oath of fealty to the pope ;” and, “with undoubting faith in the Roman Pontiff,” “with a large stock of relics,” with the powerful protection of Charles Martel, and with a considerable “retinue of monks and nuns,” he set out on his missionary tour through Germany. He had great apparent success. He baptized thousands, and destroyed great numbers of heathen temples, and erected so-called “church” buildings in their stead; but when he visited his converts again he found them about as Pagan as ever. The well-informed and candid Lutheran historian, Mosheim, remarks: “This eminent prelate was an apostle of modern fashion, and had, in many respects, departed from the excellent model exhibited in the conduct and ministry of the primitive and true Apostles. Besides his zeal for the glory and authority of the Roman Pontiff, which equaled, if it did not surpass, his zeal for the service of Christ and the propagation of His religion, many other things, unworthy of a true Christian minister, are laid to his charge. In combating the Pagan superstitions he did not always use those arms with which the ancient heralds of the gospel gained such victories in behalf of the truth; but often employed violence and terror, and sometimes artifice and fraud, in order to multiply the number of Christians. His epistles, moreover, discover an imperious and arrogant temper, a cunning and insidious turn of mind, an excessive zeal for increasing the honors and pretensions of the sacerdotal order, and a profound ignorance of many things of which the knowledge was absolutely necessary in an apostle, and particularly of the true nature and genius of the Christian religion. He bound the new German”Church” to Rome more firmly, says Gieseler, than the English was. “During the eighth century,” says Mr. H. B. Smith, “Rome, France, Germany and England came into an alliance which determined the course and progress of history for another seven hundred and fifty years, to the era of the Reformation.” It is related of Boniface that when, in 755, he was assailed by a band of Pagan Saxons, he forbade his few attendants from fighting: “he betook himself to the refuge of spiritual defense, taking (that is) the relics of saints which he always had with him ;”[5] and its this last refuge, of course, failed him, he and his company were slain. Such was the mournful end of one considered by many the greatest missionary since the days of the Apostles.

The Iconoclastic (or image-breaking) controversy lasted from 716 to 842. Both the Greek and the Roman Catholics had long been utterly sunk in the Pagan worship of images or pictures of Biblical personages. In the eighth and ninth centuries six Eastern Roman Emperors assembled councils and issued decrees against this degrading idolatry; but they could not change the hearts of their paganized subjects, and, therefore, they achieved only a temporary success. The monks, the ignorant and corrupt priestly rulers of the people, monopolized the manufacture of the images and accumulated wealth thereby. Seeing their craft in danger, they contended with all their might against the imperial decrees. They invented lying wonders in regard to the images, built up sophistical arguments, declared that a failure to worship images was worse than the vilest sins, and they succeeded in thus deluding and persuading the people until other emperors arose who seconded their efforts and again (A. D. 842) legalized the old idolatry. The popes of Rome zealously favored the worship of images all the time, and used their “accustomed policy by elevating the popular idolatrous feeling into a dogma of the faith.” The Germans, under Charlemagne, in the Council of Frankfort, A. D. 794, declared not against the use but against the worship of images, as idol-worship was the practice of the Pagans against whom they fought. This decision helped to restrain the pope’s championship of images until the death of Charlemagne.

A Greek monk, John of Damascus, in the civil employ of the Mohammedan caliph, was the ablest defender of image worship. He was said to have been “a child of light from his birth,” and was the most learned man in the East. He advocated the worship of images in three elegant orations, which were rapidly and widely distributed by the monks; and he declared that opposition to such worship was Manichaeism, as representing matter as essentially evil. No wonder that the spiritual-minded Paulicians, who abominated idolatry, were stigmatized as Manichaeans. And no wonder, either, that the spiritually blind and dead honored John Damascenus, the child of darkness, as “a child of light.” Mingling Aristotelianism, traditionalism and Pelagianism, he also wrote a summary of Greek Catholic theology, which was the standard of faith in that communion for a thousand years.

The clergy of this century were distinguished by their increasing wealth and power and pretensions, by their luxury, gluttony and licentiousness. “The true religion of Jesus,” says Mosheim, “was almost utterly unknown in this century, not only to the multitude in general, but also the doctors of the first rank and eminence in the ‘church’ and the consequences of this corrupt ignorance were fatal to the interests of virtue. All orders of men, regardless of the obligations of morality, of the duties of the gospel, and of the culture and improvement of their minds, rushed headlong with a perfect security into all sorts of wickedness, from the delusive hopes that, by external ceremonies, by donations to the clergy or the ‘church’, by the intercession and prayers of the saints, and the credit of the priests at the throne of God, they might easily obtain the remission of their enormities, and render the Deity propitious.”

The conflicts between the Mohammedans and the Greek Catholics in the eighth century operated to the deliverance of the Paulicians from much severe persecution.

Ninth Century.—The darkness overspreading nominal Christendom is further intensified during the ninth century—the century of the full establishment of the worship of images and relics, of the increase of ignorance and superstition and corruption, of monasticism and priestly and papal pretensions, of the Forged Papal Decrees and of the Papal Pornocracy, of the invention of the doctrine of transubstantiation, of the incursions of the Saracens and Northmen, and of the terrible persecution of the Paulicians.

“In the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries of the Christian era,” says Gibbon, “the reign of the gospel and of the church was extended over Bulgaria, Hungary, Bohemia, Saxony, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland and Russia. The triumphs of apostolic zeal were repeated in the iron age of Christianity; and the northern and eastern regions of Europe submitted to a religion more different in theory than in, practice from the worship of their native idols. The leaders of nations, who were saluted with the titles of kings and saints, held it lawful and pious to impose the Catholic faith on their subjects and neighbors. Yet truth and candor must acknowledge that the conversion of the North imparted many temporal benefits both to the old and the new Christians. The rage of war, inherent to the human species, could not be healed by the evangelic precepts of charity and peace; and the ambition of Catholic princes has renewed in every age the calamities of hostile contention. But the admission of the barbarians into the pale of civil and ecclesiastical society delivered Europe from the depredations, by sea and land, of the Normans, the Hungarians and the Russians, who learned to spare their brethren and cultivate their possessions. The establishment of law and order was promoted by the influence of the clergy; and the rudiments of art and science were introduced into the savage countries of the globe.” Mosheim says that “the pious missionaries were content with introducing an external profession of the true religion among their new proselytes; but it must be confessed that the doctrine they taught was far from being conformable to the pure and excellent rules of faith and practice laid down by our Divine Savior and his holy Apostles; for their religious system was corrupted by a variety of superstitious rites and a multitude of absurd inventions.”

Louis, surnamed the Pious, was the only surviving legitimate son of Charlemagne, and reigned over his father’s empire from 814 to 840. He vainly undertook a reformation of the corrupt “Church” and State. and destroyed the unity of his empire by successive partitions among his sons; and in 887 the empire was finally divided into the three great States of France, Germany and Italy.

The popes strove continually and successfully to decrease the power of the emperors and the “Bishops,” and to increase their own power. The feuds attending the dissolution of the Charlemagne monarchy favored these attempts. The ungodly ambition of the popes was further and very greatly favored by the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals—the grandest forgery of ancient or modern times; a compilation made about 850 by some Frankish ecclesiastic, from the Bible, from his own inventions, from patristic, monkish, papal, legal and historical writers (thirty-five, or one-third, of the Decretals, in reference to the acts of the first pretended popes, being the compiler’s invention), for the purpose of advancing the claims of sacerdotalism, sacramentalism and papalism—“to legitimate the authority of the priesthood, to make the church independent of secular control, and to vindicate the claims of Rome.” “Upon these spurious Decretals,” says Hallam, “was built the great fabric of papal supremacy over the different national churches—a fabric which has stood after its foundation crumbled beneath it; for no one has pretended to deny, for the last two centuries, that the imposture is too palpable for any but the most ignorant ages to credit.” The forgery is detected by the glaring anachronisms and monstrous ignorance of history; and yet the hypocritical sanctimoniousness of Rome pervades the work, “the whole being composed with an air of profound piety and reverence, a specious purity, and occasionally beauty, in the moral and religious tone,” says Milman. Nowhere was the work better known to have been a forgery than in Rome, and yet Pope Nicholas I. (858-867) and his successors unblushingly appealed to these fabrications to sustain their unparalleled pretensions to universal supremacy.

What is called the Papal Pornocracy, or Rule of Adulterous Popes, extended from 881 to 936.

“Monasticism made rapid progress with the progress of the papacy, and led to greater reliance on external works. The celibacy of the clergy was enforced by new laws, and attended by new scandals.”

In 842 occurred the final establishment of image worship, along the Greek Catholics, by the decision of a council at Constantinople, commemorated ever since by what is called by those deluded idolaters “The Feast of Orthodoxy.”

To satisfy the enormous demand for miracle-working relics, the names and histories of “saints” were invented by a corrupt clergy, and the carcasses of these Catholic divinities were sought by fasting and prayer and perilous voyages, and by violence and theft; and even the “saints” clothes and furniture and the ground that they had touched were supposed to have virtue to heal all diseases of body and mind, and to defend their possessors against all assaults of Satan.

In 831 Paschasius Radbert, a French monk, published a book in which he promulgated and expounded his monstrous theory of transubstantiation that the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, after having been consecrated by the priest, became the actual body and blood of Christ, the same flesh in which He was born and died and rose; and not simply the commemorative emblems of Christ’s body and blood. This amazing innovation produced great opposition at first, but gradually gained ground, and was decreed as an article of faith by the Romish “Church,” at the instance of Pope Innocent III., in the fourth Lateran Council, A. D. 1215.

During the ninth century the Saracens conquered Crete, Cyprus, Corsica and Sicily, and ravaged the coasts of Italy and France. At various times from the eighth to the twelfth centuries the Northmen, or Norsemen, or Normans, or Danes, or Eastmen, or Vikings, or Sea-kings, from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, leaving their cold, sterile and overcrowded countries, became the terror and scourge of the British Isles and of the maritime and Mediterranean coasts of Europe. They were a warlike, vigorous and brilliant race; and large numbers of them, settling at various points, are said to have infused new life into the effete, priest-ridden populations of Europe. They discovered Iceland in 860, Greenland in 876, and the mainland of North America in 986, it is said. In 919 Charles the Simple, king of France, gave his daughter and the province of Normandy to Rollo, the leader of a band of Norse rovers, on the condition that the latter should make a profession of Christianity, which they readily did; and in another generation it is said that “they became among the most devout of the French nation.”

During the ninth century, through all the provinces of the Greek Empire, confiscation and capital punishment, with exquisite tortures, were inflicted upon the Paulicians, the Empress Theodora, in 845, putting to death a hundred thousand of them.

Gottschalk, a Saxon monk in a French monastery, where he was placed by his parents and kept against his will, studied intently the writings of Augustine, and became an enthusiastic believer in a double predestination—the predestination of the elect to salvation, and of the non-elect to damnation; while Augustine had simply maintained the doctrine of the preterition or passing-by of the non-elect as complementary to his doctrine of the predestination of the elect to salvation. In his doctrine of reprobation, or the absolute or unconditional predestination of the wicked to everlasting damnation, Gottschalk has been called the supple-reenter of Augustinianism and the anticipator of Calvinism; but he seems, like Calvin, to have shrunk from the blasphemy of attributing the cause of sin to God, and to have vacillated between infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism, the doctrine of the Divine permission and the Divine efficiency in reference to sin. For his joint heresy and contumacy, as they were called, he was inhumanly scourged and imprisoned for twenty years by his ecclesiastical superior, Hincmar, the Archbishop of Rheims, a haughty tyrant, and one of the chief advocates of the Forged Papal Decretals. He died in prison, without making any recantation—Hincmar denying him the final communion and burial in “consecrated” ground. Gottschalk was a trinitarian, and accused Hincmar of Sabellianism. John Scotus Erigena, one of the leading opponents of Gottschalk, identified religion with philosophy, and wandered off into Pelagianism, Origenism, rationalism, pantheism; and has been called “the father of medieval speculation, and the forerunner, by nearly a thousand years, of the newest forum of transcendental free thought, that is, of Emersonianism.

One of the chief scenes of relief in this dark century was the ministry of Claudius of Turin, in northwest Italy, 814-839. He was appointed to that bishopric by the Emperor Louis, in whose household he had ministered, by whom he was highly regarded, and by whose authority he was preserved from the rage of his enemies. He was an earnest and profound student of the writings of Paul and Augustine, and became a bold and powerful and uncompromising advocate of a pure spiritual Christianity. He denied the supremacy of the pope, and declared that Christ is the only Head of the church. He denounced, in the severest terms, the worship of the cross and of images and of relics and of any creature—proclaiming that God the Creator is the only proper object of worship. He zealously opposed the invocation of saints, the folly of pilgrimages, the evils of monasticism, and the meritoriousness of good works; and maintained that human nature is totally depraved, and hence that the whole of man’s salvation is by grace alone. He stirred up a large number of enemies, who would have destroyed him if they had dared.

I feel satisfied that Milman is correct in supposing that the scriptural views of Claudius of Turin lay concealed in the Piedmontese Alps to reappear in the Waldenses of the twelfth century.

Tenth Century.—The tenth century brings us to the dismal midnight of the Dark Ages in European “Christendom.” Politics, society, religion and morals were all adrift. Ignorance, superstition, relic worship, saint worship, Mariolatry, ceremonialism, sacerdotalism, papalism, covetousness, warfare, drunkenness and debauchery were almost universal. Few of the monks, and scarcely any one else, could read or write. Throughout so-called Christian Europe schools were well-nigh abolished; though this was the golden age of Arabic literature in Spain. The Papal Pornocracy continued. “Theodora, a wealthy Roman widow, with her two daughters, Theodora and Marozia, as beautiful and profligate as herself, were enabled to fill the papal chair with their paramours, their children, and their grandchildren.” Even Romanist writers admit these horrible facts, and call this the “Iron Age” of their “church.” The “Holy Roman Empire,” so-called, was revived by Otho I. of Germany (936-973), who, by the appointment of Bruno, and still more by that of the French monk Gerbert (Sylvester II.) to the papacy, in the room of the profligate priests of Italy, began a Teutonic reform of papal morals. The popes, all the while, made silent but sure progress towards realizing their claims for universal supremacy. Some of the Scandinavian and Sclavonian tribes were converted to Catholicism. “The completion of the first Christian Millennium,” says Mr. Philip Smith, “marks also the epoch at which Christianity had reached nearly all the nations of Europe; though its profession was only fully established in the course of three centuries more. We purposely say its ‘profession’ for we must still bear in mind the difference between the simple primitive preaching of the gospel to hearers who received it by the mind and heart, and its propagation by the power of the sword, by political alliances, or by marriages of Christian princesses with barbarian kings, who made their subjects follow their adoption of a new religion.” These rough methods of “conversion” were followed by the milder and more insinuating and persistent schemes of the Romanist monks.

The clergy, during this century, became exceedingly wealthy and corrupt—possessing about half the landed property of Europe, and many of the ‘Bishops’ becoming dukes and nobles, and leading their armies to battle. The Feudal System was, in this century, thoroughly established in western Europe, making the tenure not only to property, but to offices, titles and ranks, hereditary; and mailed barons and surpliced priests ruled over the land. Louis V., the last of the Carlovingian dynasty, dying in France, Hugh Capet, making concessions to the Catholic authorities, and indorsed by the pope, seized the throne, which has ever since been filled by one of his descendants, except under the Bonapartes and the Republic.

In 964 was the first solemn “baptism” of a bell of the pope, the vain unscriptural ceremony taking place in “the Church of the Lateran” at Rome. The first instance on record of “the canonization of a saint” occurred in 993. Relics were greatly multiplied during this century. Among these Catholic fetishes are mentioned the blood, the shoes, and tear of Christ, a picture of Christ, crosses that fell from Heaven, a rib of Matthew, and hair of John the Baptist. The doctrines of purgatory, and transubstantiation, and the papal primacy, and traditionalism, and Semi-Pelagianism, were greatly enhanced in this midnight century. There was an increased reliance on outward and ceremonial works, and less trust reposed in the atoning mediation of the Lord Jesus. The great increase of corruption and the false interpretation of Revelation 20 created an almost universal expectation that the world would be destroyed in the year A. D. 1000; and the minds of wretched mortals were for a season overwhelmed with consternation and despair. Still, idleness and vice and crime increased; robberies and murders abounded; it is even said that cannibalism was resorted to. Many gave all their property or themselves to the “churches” or priests; many hastened to Palestine, where they supposed that Christ would descend from Heaven to judge the world; great numbers, when an eclipse occurred, fled for refuge to the deep caverns of the mountains. Multitudes would sleep nowhere but in the porches or within the shadow of the church buildings. The Catholic priests made great worldly gains out of these superstitious fears, which they diligently and successfully endeavored to excite during the last quarter of this century.

Dunstan, “Archbishop of Canterbury” (959-988), succeeded by his energy and imposture, notwithstanding great opposition, in establishing Benedictine monasteries throughout England.

During the tenth century the Paulicians, we are told, “emigrated from Bulgaria, and spread themselves throughout every province of Europe.”

The Northmen, Saracens and Hungarians made repeated depredations upon Catholic Europe during this century.

The world was so dead during the tenth century that there are said to have been not even any religious controversies nor any new religious sects or commotions.

Eleventh Century.—Only the faintest starlight of truth is seen in Catholic Europe during this century, appearing to us, as we peer through the thick darkness, chiefly in France and Northern Italy, and diligently sought to be extinguished by the Roman hierarchy. A few of God’s “hidden ones”’ were no doubt, in this obscure age, scattered through all the countries of Europe; but the accounts of them transmitted to us are exceedingly scanty and unsatisfactory. Their own statements and books were considered heretical, and were burned by the Romanists.

As Mystery Babylon occupies a large space in Scripture prophecy, so it does in Christian history. A delineation of the Masterpiece of Satan is necessary to give us a proper idea of the nature and extent of the sufferings of God’s people who were persecuted by the Second Beast. The eleventh was the century of Gothic architecture, of increased ritualism and sacerdotalism, of increased penances and pilgrimages, of money commutation for self-mortification, of the increased wealth and corruption of the priesthood, of almost universal auricular confession, of the granting of penitential indulgences to sin, of the firm establishment of a regular system of salvation by good works, of the dawn of scholasticism, of the final rupture of the Greek and Roman Catholic “Churches,” of the virtual culmination of the papal pretensions to universal monarchy, of papal war against the marriage of priests and against secular appointments to “church” offices, of the most remarkable scene in the Middle Ages—the deep humiliation of the German emperor, Henry IV., before Pope Gregory VII. at Canossa—and of the beginning of the Crusades, resulting in the conquest of Jerusalem by Latin “Christendom” from the Seljukian Turks.

As the world did not come to an end as people expected at the close of the tenth century, they supposed that it would continue for a long time to come, and they began erecting private and public buildings on a gigantic and permanent plan. The wealthy barons built their castles, and the wealthy priests their cathedrals, in the Gothic style of architecture. “The foundations were broad and deep, the walls of immense thickness, roofs steep and high to keep off the rain and snow, and there were square buttressed towers, even for the cathedral, to sustain it, and at the same time furnish it with military defense. The church-building was, in those days, not only used for public worship, but it was the town-hall, the market-place, the concert-room, the theater, the school, the news-room, and the vestry, all in one.”

The Scholastic Theology is generally reckoned to have begun with Anselm, “Archbishop of Canterbury” (1033-1109), and terminated with Eckhart of Germany (1250-1329), thus extending from about the middle of the eleventh to about the middle of the fourteenth century. It was an application of Aristotelian logic to the support of Catholic doctrines, and sublimation of theology into metaphysics. Beginning with Realism (the doctrine that universal ideas are real things), it ended in Nominalism (the doctrine that such ideas are only the names of things); and after weary, hair-splitting debates of three centuries, the system resulted in rationalism, skepticism and pantheism. “The Schoolmen,” says Taine, “seem to be marching, but are merely marking time.” They served, perhaps, to keep thought alive, and prepare the way for modern thought. The initial point of the debate was the denial (about 1050) by Berengar of Tours that the bread and wine in communion are changed into the real body and blood of Christ; Lanfranc and Anselm, of Canterbury, endeavored, in reply, to establish the doctrine of transubstantiation (that, while the sensible properties of the elements are not changed, their underlying “substance” is changed into the “substance” of Christ’s body). Twice was Berengar forced by the Catholic authorities to sign a recantation, which he twice revoked, “leaving a memory curiously mingled of veneration and abhorrence.” Under the influence of the Nominalism of William Occam, Martin Luther substituted for transubstantiation the doctrine of “consubstantiation” (that the body of Christ is actually, substantially present with the bread and wine); but, “as the logic of Protestantism became clear and self-consistent, this weak compromise faded quite away.” The Schoolman Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) is said to have been familiar with all the learning of his time; and his disciple, Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), in 2,000 folio pages, 600 topics, 3,000 articles and 15,000 arguments, made the most complete and authentic exposition of Catholic theology (Summa Theologiae).

In 1054 the Latin and the Greek Catholic “Churches” were finally sundered by the mutual excommunication of Pope Leo IX. and the Patriarch Michael.

The very learned French Pope, Sylvester II. (999-1003), had declared, when he was known as Gerbert, “Archbishop of Rheims,” that “the pope who does not hear the church is a heathen,” and that “God alone can justify;” but he changed his views on his accession to the papacy.

By a decree of Pope Nicholas II. (in 1059), the privilege of voting in the election of a pope, originally exercised by the ordinary clergy, and in the tenth century by the canons of cathedrals, was restricted “to the superior clergy of Rome and seven neighboring Bishops.”

The most arrogant and audacious pope that ever lived (excepting Innocent III. and Boniface VIII.) was Hildebrand, who called himself Gregory VII., and was real master of Rome for thirty-seven years, the lord of five popes, Leo IX., Victor II., Stephen IX., Nicholas II. and Alexander II. (from 1048 to 1073), and then pope himself (from 1073 to 1085). He was an imperious, inflexible, cruel, unscrupulous politician, whose one unswerving purpose was to make the Pope of Rome the supreme ruler and arbiter of the human race. Notwithstanding the example of Peter, and the advice of Paul, and the horrible immoralities of a nominal celibacy, Gregory, in order to bind tine “clergy” absolutely to the pope, decreed that all the priests and Bishops who had wives should put them away, and that the single should not marry; and he inaugurated what is called the Controversy of Investitures, declaring that temporal princes should have no right to appoint to “church” offices—thus making the clergy wholly free from feudal obligation to their national sovereigns, and responsible to the pope alone (although the clergy were themselves large landed proprietors and civil magistrates). Henry IV., Emperor of Germany, refused to surrender the right of investiture, and took under his protection Bishops and counselors who had offended the pope, and was summoned by the latter to appear at Rome to answer for his conduct. The emperor, enraged, assembled a diet at Worms (in 1076), and declared Gregory deposed from the pontificate. The pope retaliated by excommunicating and dethroning Henry, and absolving his subjects from their allegiance to him. Papal supremacy being an integral idea of German “Christianity,” the Saxon princes declared, at a diet in Oppenheim, that, unless the sentence of excommunication were removed in twelve months, Henry should lose his crown. Subdued by the rebellion of his subjects and the course of the pope, the emperor, with his wife and infant child and one faithful attendant, undertook, in the midst of an unusually rigorous winter, the extremely difficult and dangerous passage over the awful precipices and ice-fields of the Alps, and finally presented himself before the Castle of Canossa, in Northern Italy, where the pope was comfortably housed with his devoted adherent, Matilda, the Countess of Tuscany. On a dreary winter morning, the ground being deeply covered with snow, the emperor was admitted within two of the three walls that girded the castle. Divested of all his royal robes, he was clad only in the thin white linen dress of the penitent, and barefooted and bareheaded, shivering and hungry, he thus humbly awaited for three days (January 25th, 26th and 27th, 1077) the pleasure of the stern pontiff to admit him to his presence. The pope at last received him, and granted him absolution only on the condition that Henry should appear at the time and place named by the pope, and answer the charges made against him; if his defense were satisfactory, he should receive his kingdom back from the hands of the pope—otherwise, he was peaceably to resign his kingdom forever. Henry’s humiliation and Gregory’s absolution were both dictated by mere policy. “Freed from the church’s curse, Henry quickly won back the strength he had lost. He overthrew in battle the rival (Rodolph) whom Gregory upheld. He swept his rebellious lands with sword and flame. He carried his victorious army to Rome, and was there crowned emperor by a rival pope. Gregory himself was only saved by his ferocious allies, Norman and Saracen, at cost of the devastation of half the capital—that broad belt of ruin which still covers the half-mile between the Coliseum and the Lateran gate. Then, hardly rescued from the popular wrath, he went away to die, defeated and heartbroken, at Salerno, with the almost despairing (the proudly bitter and Pharisaic) words on his lips: ‘I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile.’ Again excommunicated, Henry, twenty years later, vainly sought mercy from his own son, the unnatural champion of the ‘church;’ vainly asked shelter in a monastery; and died in want and forsaken, deprived even of the empty honor of a royal tomb.” Thus the pope was really triumphant at last.

“The great era of papal power covers two centuries and a half, beginning (about 1050) with Gregory VII., and ending with the Jubilee of Boniface VIII., A. D. 1299. We see, in the Roman Catholic Church, a body which, after a thousand years of various fortune, has reached at length a height of power, the like of which was never held in human hands, nor, it is likely, conceived in human thought, elsewhere. It is a power resting on the invisible foundations of conscience, conviction, and religious fear. To the popular belief, it holds literally the keys of Heaven and hell. It spans like an arch the dreadful gulf between the worlds seen and unseen. Its priesthood (professedly) rules by express Divine appointment; and its chief is addressed in language such as it seems impious to address to any other than to Almighty God. We see this ‘church’ in the person of its priesthood, present absolutely everywhere. It carries in its hand the threads that govern every province of human life. It offers or withholds, on its own terms, the soul’s peace on earth and its salvation in eternity. We see it, in the persons of its Pontiffs, maintaining conflict or alliance, on equal terms, with the powers of the world. We see it, in the person of its Religious Orders, penetrating to every nook and hamlet, ruling the popular passion and imagination no less than the counsel of courts by its imperious word. We see its matchless skill and power employed in the accumulation of enormous wealth. The terrors of a death-bed, the popular fear of the approaching Day of Judgment, the enthusiasm that equips the ranks of the Crusaders, and the disorders of their impoverished estates—all are skillfully wrought upon to fill the treasuries of the ‘church.’ It turns its doctrine of purgatory into a source of profit, and sets a fixed price on its masses for the dead. It makes a traffic of penance and indulgences. It seizes lands under forged charters and deeds, and claims the administration of intestate estates. It owns half the landed property of England, a nearly like proportion of France and Germany It profits even by the violence of robbers and plunderers. We see its pomp of priests, with chant and lighted taper and silver bell, striking the rude mind of barbaric ignorance with awe, as some holy spell or oracle. We see its Hermits, in their austere seclusion; its trains of Pilgrims, with bead and cockle-shell; its Palmers, journeying from shrine to shrine, and bearing the fragrant memory of the Holy Land; its barefoot Friars, sworn to beggary, and wrangling whether Jesus and His disciples held in common any goods at all. We see its secluded Abbey, its stately Cathedral, its statuary and painting, and its Universities, thronged by great armies of young men, as many as twenty thousand at once, it is said, in a single place. Lastly, we see its monstrous enginery of despotic power, exercised through Inquisition, Excommunication and Interdict. By its secret spies, by the ambush of its Confessional, it seeks to lay bare every private thought or chance breath of opinion hostile to its imperious claim. No husband, father, brother, is safe from the betrayal that may become the pious duty of sister, daughter, bride. No place of hiding is sufficiently close, or far enough away, to escape its ubiquitous, stealthy, masked police. No soldierly valor, no public service, no nobility of intellect, no purity of heart, is a defense from that most terrible of tribunals, which mocks the suspected heretic with a show of investigation, which wrenches his limbs on the rack or bursts his veins with the torturing wedge, and under a hideous mask of mercy—since the ‘church’ may shed no blood—delivers him over to the secular arm to be ‘dealt with gently’ as his flesh crackles and his blood simmers at the accursed stake. That is the Inquisition, the ‘church’s’ remedy for free thought. For simple disobedience, it has in its hand the threat of Excommunication. Shut out from all ‘church’ privilege; shunned like a leper by servants, family and friends; incapable of giving testimony, or of claiming any rights before a court; the very meats he has touched thrown away as pollution; a bier sometimes set at his door, and stones thrown in at his casement; his dead body cast out unburied—emperor, prince, priest or peasant, the excommunicated man is met every moment, at every hand, by the shadow of a Curse that is worse than death. The Interdict excommunicates a whole people for the guilt of a sovereign’s rebellion. No church may be opened, no bell tolled. The dead lie unburied; no pious rite can be performed but baptism of babes and absolution of the dying. The gloom of an awful Fear hangs over the silent street and the somber home; and not till the ‘church’s’ ban is taken off car the people be free front the ghastly apparitions of supernatural horror. Nay, more. The Interdict, in the last resort, ‘dissolved’ all law, annulled all privilege, abrogated all rights, rescinded all obligations, and reduced society to a chaos, until it should please the high priest of Rome to reinstate order on the terms most conducive to his own glory and the pecuniary profit of the chief and his agents. These are the ultima ratio, the final appeal of ecclesiastical sway. ‘From the moment these interdicts and excommunications had been tried,’ says Hallam, ‘the powers of the earth may be said to have existed only by sufferance.’”—J. H. Allen, in Christian History.

During the first century the profession of Christianity was so spiritual that there was no special reverence for any particular places, and pilgrimages to such places were unknown. This state of things also generally prevailed during the two succeeding centuries. In the fourth century, however, as the profession of Christianity became more outward and formal, and less spiritual, particular places, especially in Palestine, were reverenced, and pilgrimages to them inaugurated. These so-called pious journeys increased during the succeeding centuries, and continued although Jerusalem was taken by the Saracens in 637. The stream of pilgrims largely increased about the beginning of the eleventh century. It was thought that “a pilgrimage to Jerusalem expiated all sin; a bath in the Jordan was, as it were, a second baptism, and washed away all the evil of the former life; and the shirt worn by the pilgrim when he entered the Holy City was carefully laid by as his winding-sheet, and possessed, it was supposed, the power of transporting him to Heaven.” In 1076 the Seljukian Turks conquered Palestine, and treated the pilgrims with great insult and cruelty. These outrages, especially under the impassioned appeals of Peter the Hermit and Pope Urban II., roused Latin “Christendom” to revenge, and, during a period of about two hundred years (from 1096 to 1291), seven crusades, in which six millions of men were enlisted and two millions destroyed, were undertaken either to wrest Jerusalem from the hands of the Mohammedans or retain it in the hands of those called Christians. They were a series of the most insane, criminal and disastrous expeditions ever undertaken in the history of the human race; instigated by the popes of Rome (who promised to all engaging in them the pardon of all sin and the assurance of everlasting life), and fitly illustrating the infernal glories of universal papal supremacy. They greatly increased the wealth of the Roman clergy, and the power of the Pope of Rome; they greatly demoralized the nations of Europe, and degraded the profession of the Christian religion. They taught men to believe in the justice and piety of so-called religious wars; they were accompanied with the exhibition of every circumstance of vice and crime, and with diabolical massacres of Jews, Mohammedans and so-called heretics. The members of the First Crusade, in their march to Constantinople, slaughtered thousands of European Jews; and when on the 15th of July, 1099, they captured Jerusalem, they burned up all the Jews there alive in their synagogue, and massacred, during three days, seventy thousand Mohammedans, women and children, even infants, as well as men, so that the streets are said to have run with blood up to their horses’ knees, and the Mosque of Omar up to their saddle girths. The crusades infused into the mind of Catholic Europe a long indelible thirst for religious persecution. Among the benefits deduced by an overruling Providence from these great evils are recounted the deliverance of the Greek Catholic Empire from the Turks for three hundred and fifty years, the breaking up of the feudal system, the abolition of serfdom, the Supremacy of common law, and an interchange of thought and learning which ultimately resulted in the revival of letters and the Protestant Reformation.

In the eleventh century a nominal Christianity had been planted in all Europe except in the south of Spain, the north of Sweden, and in Prussia and Russia.

Many persons, called Cathari (the pure), appeared in Northern Italy, Germany and France, during this century, who entertained sentiments similar to those of the Paulicians. They were stigmatized by their enemies as Manichaeans; but some of them, at, least, were only moderately, if at all, inclined to dualism. They earnestly opposed the manifold superstitions, idolatries and corruptions of the Catholics, and insisted upon the necessity of a pure, inward, spiritual religion. Especially in France did the Catholics put several of them to death, generally by burning.

1. Says Prof. P. Schaff: “The Middle Ages, compared with ancient Christianity, which preceded, and with modern Christianity, which followed, are truly called the Dark Ages. The mediaeval light was indeed the borrowed star and moonlight of ecclesiastical tradition, rather than the clear sunlight from the inspired pages of the New Testament; but it was such light as the eyes of the nations in their ignorance could bear, and it never ceased to shine till it disappeared in the great daylight of the Reformation. Christ had His witnesses in all ages and countries, and those shine all the brighter who were surrounded by midnight darkness. The superficial, wholesale, national, nominal conversions (by the Roman Catholics) were conversions not to the primary Christianity of inspired Apostles, as laid down in the New Testament, but to the secondary Christianity of ecclesiastical tradition, as taught by the fathers, monks, and popes; they we baptisms by water than by fire and the Holy Spirit. The preceding instructions amounted to little or nothing; even the baptismal formula, mechanically recited in Latin was scarcely understood; some of the barbarian tribes were made to yield to baptism only by the sword of the conqueror. The Middle Age of Western Christendom resemble the period of the Judges in the history of Israel, when ‘every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’ Might was right. It was the golden age of vice and crime, credulity and superstition. Men feared purgatory and hell, and made great sacrifices to gain Heaven by founding churches, convents, and charitable institutions. Great stress was laid on prayer and fasting, on acts of hospitality, charity and benevolence, and on pilgrimages to sacred places. And yet there was a frightful amount of immortality among the rules and the people and the clergy. It is said that every princely family of Italy in the tenth century was tainted with incestuous blood.” Roman Catholicism controlled all the departments of life from the cradle to the grave. The Paulicians, Petrobrusians, Henricians, Arnoldists, Waldenses and Albigenses contended earnestly against the horrible abominations of Catholicism.

2. But he gives the husband the absolute, immediate, unquestioned power of divorce; so that many Mohammedans marry a new wife every year, and some almost every month, and all with the sanction of their most corrupt religion.

3. The Mohammedan principle, says Neander, derived sin and holiness alike from the Divine causality, and denied the distinction between a permission and an actual efficiency on the part of God. It is Mohammedanism, and not Christianity; it is the most wretched perversion of Scripture and the most awful imaginable blasphemy, to identify God with Satan, the source of holiness with the source of sin; to maintain that the Holy, Holy, Holy Lord of hosts, the Holy One of Israel, He whose nature is holy and reverend, who is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on iniquity, who is the Father of lights, and in whom is no darkness at all, who does not tempt or seek to seduce man to maintain that the Holy Spirit, who is God, inspires sinful thoughts or purposes in any of his creatures. He foreknows, and permits, and controls all things, not instigating, but bending the wickedness of men and devils into that channel that shall enhance His own glory and His people’s good. The Divine Spirit is the author of all holiness and not the author of any unholiness. No Baptist, no Christian believes that God is the cause or author of sin.

4. Many Mohammedans in Arabia and elsewhere are more polytheistic than monotheistic: as they, like the Catholics, worship their deceased “saints.”

5. See Joseph Henry Allen’s recent lectures, delivered at Harvard University, on Christian History, Vol. i., page 223.

Chapter XIV. Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.

Twelfth Century.—During the twelfth century a still deeper darkness enveloped the greater part of the Catholic world; but in Southern France, Northern Italy, Western Germany and Bohemia, some gleams of bright starlight burst through the thick clouds, and irradiated a part of those districts with a degree of clear, cheery, heavenly light. This century was marked by the doctrinal completion of Catholic sacramentalism and sacerdotalism, by the virtual substitution of tradition for Scripture, by the fearful use of papal excommunication and interdict, by the continuance of the crusades against the Mohammedans, by the establishment of military orders for warring on the Turks and for converting the Pagans to Catholicism by fire and sword, by the increased enthusiastic worship of saints and images and relics, by the multiplication of plenary indulgences and priestly absolutions, by the increase of priestly wealth, power, covetousness, drunkenness and sensuality, by the uprising of a strong, decided, Baptist, anti-sacerdotal movement against the appalling corruptions of Roman Catholicism, and, at its close, by the muttering thunders of the gathering storm of papal wrath against the intrepid “heretics” who dared to strike a mortal blow at the full-grown fabric of medieval superstition. The century thus goes down amid the black and lurid omens of the approaching terrific tempest of Satanic vengeance upon the Albigenses of Southern France and the Waldenses of Northern Italy.

In 1144 the principality of Edessa, in Mesopotamia, the bulwark of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, was taken by the Turks; and this led to the second crusade, preached by Bernard of France and by Pope Eugenius III. “The Koran,” says Milman, “is tame to Bernard’s fierce hymn of battle.” The pope, like his predecessor Urban, promised the forgiveness of all sin to those embarking in the crusade. In 1147 twelve hundred thousand men are said to have precipitated themselves from Europe upon the plains of Western Asia, where nearly all miserably perished, the expedition proving a total failure.

In 1187 Saladin, Sultan of Egypt, conquered Jerusalem; and the third crusade was preached by Pope Gregory VIII. In 1189 Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor of Germany, and in 1190 Philip Augustus, King of France, and Richard Coeur-de-Lion, King of England, set out personally with powerful armies for Palestine. Frederick was drowned, and Philip and Richard quarreled, the former returning to France and the latter capturing Acre, with a loss of three hundred thousand lives, butchering three thousand Saracen prisoners, and obtaining from Saladin permission for “Christian” pilgrims to visit Jerusalem.

Without the elevation of woman there is no true civilization; but the Military Orders of Knights formed in this century substituted the worship of woman, along with other idols, for the worship of God. These Orders became rich, proud and oppressive. The “Teutonic Knights” and the “Brothers of the Sword” aided in conquering, desolating and forcibly converting from Pagan to Catholic idolatry the provinces of Pomerania in Prussia and Finland and Livonia in Russia.

The doctrine of the Immaculate (or Sinless) Conception of the Virgin Mary was broached, about 1140, by certain canons of Lyons, in France. It was opposed by Bernard and Thomas Aquinas and other leading Catholic theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as being in conflict with the doctrine of Original Sin; but it was defended by Duns Scotus and adopted by the Franciscans in the fourteenth century, impliedly sanctioned by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, and finally affirmed by Pope Pius IX in 1854.

Roman Catholicism has substituted the unscriptural term “sacrament” for the ordinances of the Christian religion; and, in utter defiance of the New Testament and of the true nature of vital godliness, has defined a “sacrament” to be an indispensable and efficacious means in the hands, however, only of popish priests or Bishops who may be the vilest sinners, of conveying Divine grace and salvation. In the “Sentences” of Peter Lombard, about the middle of the twelfth century, Rome fixed the number of “sacraments” at seven, as follows: Baptism, confirmation, the Lord’s Supper, penance, extreme unction, ordination and marriage. Thus to the two beautiful emblematic ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, instituted by Christ, Rome has added three institutions of her own invention—confirmation, penance and extreme unction and two other institutions—marriage and ordination—which, though of Divine appointment, are nowhere in the Scriptures called church ordinances.

Also about 1150 Rome, in the codification of her canon law, went beyond even the Pseudo-Isidorian positions,—maintaining not only that the pope is the vicar of Peter, but also that Bishops are only vicars of the pope, and that all the greater or more important causes are to be brought before the papal tribunal.

In this century tithes were everywhere demanded by the Catholic priests. About the middle of the century the custom of withholding the wine, in communion, from the “laity” or private members, was begun, on the grounds that either element contained the whole of Christ’s body, and that the wine, if handed around to so many, might be spilled, and that it was sufficient for the priest to receive both elements. The communion of children was discontinued during this century in the Roman, but not in the Greek Catholic “Church.” The marriage of priests continued during the twelfth century in Hungary, Ireland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, notwithstanding papal anathemas. Tradition was now held to be equal or superior to Scripture. In 1170 Pope Alexander III. claimed the sole right of “canonizing saints.”

In the eleventh century William the Conqueror, King of England, refused to swear fealty to the pope; but in the twelfth century England was, even more than France and Germany, subject to the pope. Thomas A. Beckett, the haughty and impracticable “Archbishop of Canterbury,” censured and quarreled with Henry II. of England, not for the vices of the king, which were great, but for his futile attempt to make himself independent of the pope; and some hasty and angry words of Henry led four knights to murder Beckett in 1170—Beckett indulging to the last in bitter invectives against his foes, and falling, says Milman, “as a martyr, not of Christianity, but of sacerdotalism.” Two years afterward the pope “canonized” him, and Beckett became for several centuries the most popular “saint” in England, his worship superseding that of God and even of Mary, and as many as a hundred thousand pilgrims at one time visiting his tomb. Henry himself, in 1174, underwent a public and humiliating penance there, walking three miles with bare and bleeding feet on the flinty road, prostrating himself at the tomb, scourged, at his own request, by the willing monks, and spending a night and day in prayers and tears, imploring the intercession of the “saint” in Heaven.

In 1160 was the first persecution in England for “heresy”. Thirty German Cathari, men and women, were tried and condemned at Oxford for denying some of the Catholic superstitions, such as purgatory, prayer for the dead, and the worship of saints. There were branded with a red-hot iron in the forehead, and whipped through the streets of the town. Then their clothes were cut short by their girdles, and in the depth of winter they were turned into the open fields, and perished with cold and hunger,—all persons being forbidden, under the severest penalties, to shelter or relieve them.

The great anti-sacerdotal movement of the twelfth century in the hearts and lives of “the inferior and more numerous classes,” is reckoned by Mr. Hallam as an important “source of moral improvement during this period, and as among the most interesting phenomena in the progress of European society. An inundation of heresy,” says he, “broke in that age upon the church, which no persecution was able thoroughly to repress, till it finally (in the sixteenth century) overspread half the surface of Europe.” Mr. Joseph Henry Allen is said to be one of the two or three men in America who understand Church History. In his recently published lectures, before Harvard University (Christian History, in three volumes), he pointedly and accurately remarks:—“The form of heresy which we meet at this period (during the twelfth century) is very radical. It deals not with surface opinions, or with points of detail. It strikes, knowingly and boldly, at the very root of the sacerdotal theory itself, to which the ‘Church’ was so thoroughly committed by its Decretals. Its five points touch with fatal logic the very essentials of ecclesiastical faith: the baptism of infants, the Lord’s body in the Eucharist, sanctity of the priestly order, worship of the cross, and invocation for the dead. No mystic rite, said these daring heretics, could do away the original curse, unless there were penitence, conversion and faith. No priest not of holy life could give the sacrament effect, to the saving of the soul. The font was but a bowl of water; the bread nothing but a baker’s loaf; the mass a form of idle words; the temple a convenient enclosure; the cross an idolatrous sign, a memorial only of torment and horror; the priesthood a class of sinful men, more arrogant and corrupt (probably) than other men, with no miraculous virtue in their word or touch. This position was the revival of an old, we may say a quite forgotten, gospel. It claimed to be simple, primitive Christianity, pure religion and undefiled, without priest, without ritual, such as we find it in the New Testament. Ever since the middle of the third century the (Catholic) ‘Church’ had been committed more and more to the theory of sacerdotalism. Its priesthood was a consecrated body. Its offices were miracles and spells. Its rite of baptism had the mysterious and awful power of removing the birth-curse of inherited guilt. The elements of its Eucharist were literally the Lord’s body, the physical germ of the immortal life. Its excommunication banished the unfaithful and unbelieving to the horror of outer darkness forever. And ever since that time, reappearing in various forms of ‘heresy’ and schism, there had been a Puritan protest. The exciting cause had always been some laxity of morals, some corruption of life, covered up under the claim of official sanctity. The symbol of it had always been the one point of the sacramental efficacy of baptism. Is that the efficient cause of regeneration, and of itself a passport to eternal life? And shall we say it is just as valid, no matter how impious and unclean the hands that perform the rite? Can an unholy man do a holy thing like that? Or, on the other hand, is baptism a sign of faith and a mark of regeneration? Then how can it be received by an infant, which knows nothing of guilt, and cannot possibly repent? Baptism is but a sign of personal penitence and faith—a mockery and blasphemy unless it is their sign. This primitive, obstinate, heroic anti-sacerdotalism, which has made the starting-place of many a radical protest, from the Puritan Novatians of the third century down to the English Independents of the seventeenth, is, in its most logical form, not only Protestant, but Baptist. The early reformers of the twelfth century were both a Protestant and a Baptist sect, appearing at a point of time when the ‘Church’ had staked its existence and its dominion more thoroughly that ever on the Divine authority of its priesthood; when that theory seemed most completely triumphant in its conflict with the empire at home and the infidel abroad. To the ‘Church’s’ claim that ‘heresy’ was fatal. The one function of the ‘Church’ was (pretended to be) to rescue human life from the universal curse by its perpetual sacrifice, that is, by physical acts which none other than she could do. All else turned on that. And her very ability to do that rested on men’s absolute, distinct, unquestioning faith that she had both the authority and the power.

“In the first years of the twelfth century Peter of Bruys (Petrobrusius) went forth like another John the Baptist, full of the Spirit and of power, and lived for twenty years as an evangelist in the south of France, which he seems to have filled completely with his doctrine, till he was overtaken by the wrath of the priesthood he had challenged, and was burned alive by a mob of monastics somewhere about 1120. Thus the seed was planted of what widened afterward into the famous and greatly dreaded ‘heresy’ of the Waldenses and Albigenses.” Peter de Bruys was a strong Bible Baptist. The Catholic monk, Peter the Venerable, arraigns him on five charges, for denying infant baptism, respect for churches, the worship of the cross, transubstantiation and prayers, alms and oblations for the dead. He baptized all who joined his communion, whether they had ever been immersed before or not. On one occasion he made a great bonfire of all the crosses he could find, and cooked meat over the fire, and distributed it to the congregation. The followers of Peter de Bruys were called Petrobrusians. Toward the end of his career Peter was joined by an ardent and eloquent younger disciple or fellow-laborer, Henry the Deacon, or Henry of Lausanne, who labored in the same spirit and country for nearly thirty years after the death of Peter de Bruys, and was at last (in 1147) condemned for heresy by the Catholic authorities, and died in prison. His followers were called Henricians. Arnold of Brescia fearlessly and powerfully preached the same anti-sacerdotalism in Italy, and, for nine years, maintained in Rome itself a republic in open defiance of emperor and pope. Frederick Barbarossa and Adrian IV. were united by their common dread and hatred of republicanism. Their forces captured Arnold, who was, by an officer of the pope, first strangled as a rebel and then burned as a heretic, and his ashes cast into the Tiber (1155). This is said to have been the first time when the Catholic “Church” put a man to death with his own hand, instead of delivering him for execution to the secular power. For its own nominal exculpation, it has generally preferred to wield the temporal sword through the carnal hand of some civil magistrate; but the guilt is as much as its own in the one case as in the other.

“In the first half of the twelfth century we have a Reform known to us by the names of its three brave, eloquent and ill-fated prisoners—each a great religious enthusiast, proclaiming his gospel of free salvation; after the middle of the century, we have a broad, popular movement, in two great sects more or less allied—the Albigenses and Waldenses, inseparable in destiny and fame as the earliest champions and martyrs of our modern liberty of thought. The Albigenses were more speculative and vigorous; the Waldenses more simple and practical.” The Albigenses are called by Milman Manichaean, and the Waldenses Biblical Anti-Sacerdotalists; and this distinction, so far as all the extant evidence shows us, seems to be correct. The Petrobrusians and Henricians he calls Simple Anti-Sacerdotalists.

The Albigenses were so called from Albi or Albiga, a town in Southern France, one of their principal seats. Their history is written in fire and blood. Their books and themselves having been destroyed, we have to glean our views of their sentiments from the distorted and unreliable statements of their Catholic enemies. It is thus impossible for us to know what their real doctrines were. The general account given of them by the latest and ablest historians represents that their doctrinal system was a strange compound of many gross errors with some simple and important truths; that, besides being severely moral and anti-sacerdotal, they held views that were strongly Manichaean, like those of the Bogomiles in Thrace and the Cathari in Germany; maintaining that matter is essentially evil, that Satan created the world, and was the God of the Old Testament, that Christ and the Holy Spirit are only temporary emanations from the true God, and will be finally absorbed in Him, that the body of Christ was not real flesh, but only phenomenal and ethereal, that the fleshly bodies of the saints, being essentially evil, will not be raised from the grave, etc. These unscriptural errors no believer in the Bible can receive; and we do not know that the Albigenses held these views. It is said, even by their enemies, that their speculative opinions were very diverse; and, in that age of darkness, when there were scarcely any Bibles, and exceedingly few persons who could read, it is not wonderful that errors abounded even in the minds of the people of God. While the Albigenses are said to have received the New Testament[1] as the oracles of God, Rome, with all her learning, substituted her own traditions for the entire Scriptures, and especially antagonized the fundamental spiritual tenets of the New Testament, and thus she committed worse doctrinal errors than those whom she stigmatized and persecuted as heretics.

The Waldenses, it is held by many of the most learned authorities, were so called for Peter Waldo, a merchant of Lyons, who about 1160 expended his wealth in giving alms to the poor, and in translating and distributing the Scriptures. His followers were called Poor Men of Lyons, or Leonists, or Sabbatati (from their wooden shoes), or Humilitati, the Downtrodden; also Waldenses, Vallenses, or Vaudois—the latter name being supposed to have been derived from the valleys of Piedmont,[2] in Northwest Italy, where these lovers and students and adherents of the written word of God abounded. When driven by Catholic persecution from France, Peter Waldo fled to Piedmont, and afterwards to Bohemia in Germany, where he is said to have died in 1179. As in the case of the primitive church, persecution disseminated the truth until it was found in nearly all the countries of Europe. The Waldenses were very industrious, honest, modest, frugal, chaste, and temperate, according even to the universal testimony of their Catholic enemies. They held the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the only standard of faith and practice; and they consequently rejected the authority of the “fathers” and the Catholic traditions, and the doctrines of purgatory, indulgences, and transubstantiation, monasticism, sacramentalism and celibacy. They held that there were only two Christian ordinances, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and that these were but emblems and signs of inward grace. They were very familiar with the Scriptures, very many of them being able to repeat entire books of the Bible from memory. They condemned all taking of oaths, shedding of blood, capital punishment and military service. The “Church of Rome” they declared to be “the whore of Babylon.” They maintained the universal priesthood of believers, and they allowed all their members, both male and female, to preach and administer the ordinances; their preachers worked with their own hands for their necessities. They taught that God alone can forgive sin. Some practiced infant baptism, and some did not; they who did baptize infants had probably been Catholics, and thus retained that unscriptural and traditional error. The earliest Waldenses are believed to have been Anti-Pedobaptists. It appears[3] that the early Waldenses were not established in the doctrine of predestination, and of the redemptive work of Christ, and of our full and free justification by faith in Him; their prevailing type of doctrine is less that of Paul than of James. In the darkness of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were more Arminian than Augustinian in their views. They were babes in Christ, and were gradually led into the doctrine of grace. It is highly probable, and is believed by many eminent historians, that the Waldenses in Northern Italy were the spiritual descendants and successors of the Novatians—like them, stigmatized as Anabaptists, rejecting the superstitions and corruptions of Rome, and re-immersing all who joined them from the Catholic communion.

Even “Cardinal” Hosius, chairman of the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, testifies not only to the existence, but also to the persecutions and cheerful sufferings of the “Anabaptists” ever since the fourth century, when Constantine connected “Church” and State, and the people of God protested against the unholy and corrupting alliance, and were persecuted by the Second Beast.

Ludwig Keller, the present royal archivist at Munster, has mastered, more completely than any other man, the printed and manuscript sources of early Baptist history. In his book, “Die Reformation und die alteren Reformparteien, in ihrem Zusammenhang dargestellt” (“The Reformation and the Older Reforming Parties, Exhibited in their Connection”), published at Leipzig, by Hirzel, in 1885, Keller proves that, while the Lutherans and Zwinglians were new sects, the churches of the so-called Anabaptists, or Baptists of the sixteenth century, were but the renewal or continuation of the Petrobrusian and Waldensian churches of the twelfth century; and he gives strong reasons for accepting the old Waldensian tradition of a succession of evangelical churches from the time of the union of “Church” and State (under Pope Sylvester I. and the Emperor Constantine), and so from the time of the Apostles. “While no Scripture, properly interpreted, requires that we should find at all times all of the elements of Christianity represented in any one Christian community, no Baptist can be indifferent to facts which seem to prove the persistence of apostolic teaching and practice, in a form more or less pure, throughout the centuries of ecclesiastical corruption.” “The Waldenses, of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, repudiated the idea of derivation from Peter Waldo, and insisted with the utmost decision upon direct apostolic derivation.” “Except when restrained by temporal power, they practiced believers’ baptism.”

In the latter part of the twelfth century the popes and councils pronounced repeated excommunications and anathemas against the Albigenses and Waldenses; affirmed the right of the “church” to banish them, confiscate their property and put them to death; and even ordered the temporal sovereigns, under the strong temptations of possessing the confiscated estates and of receiving indulgences, to carry these penalties into effect.

Thirteenth Century.—During the thirteenth century the Roman Catholic Heavens were shrouded in denser and blacker clouds, ghastly illumined by the horrible fires of persecution; while the faint dawn of popular intelligence and civil liberty appeared in England, and to some extent in France and Germany, and in Venice and Genoa. The thirteenth century is the century of the culmination of papal power (in Innocent III.), of papal pretension (in Boniface VIIII.), and of papal theology (in Thomas Aquinas); of the continuance and termination of the crusades against the Mohammedans; of the hideous home crusades against the “heretical” Albigenses, and of the exterminating missionary crusades against the Pagan Prussians and Lithuanians; of the destructive wars of the Spanish Catholics upon the Moslems in Spain; of the final Catholic loss of Jerusalem, and of the Latin conquest and loss of Constantinople; of the futile attempt at a reunion of Greek and Roman Catholicism; of the establishment of the Mendicant Franciscan and Dominican orders as the pope’s universal and devoted militia, and of the unparalleled infernal machinery of the Inquisition; of the papal announcement of the Satanic doctrine of “works of supererogation,” and of the papal sale, for not only “good works”, but for gold, of plenary indulgences to sin; of the papal prohibition of the reading of the Bible by the private members of the Catholic communion; of the papal condemnation of the Bible, in the mother tongue, as a heretical book, to be consigned, like heretics, to the flames, and of the prohibition of the discussion of matters of faith by private members; of the continuance of fearful papal interdicts, excommunications and depositions; of a great increase of penance by flagellation and by the repetition of “paternosters” with the “rosary”; of the almost universal Catholic persecution of the Jews; of the universal establishment of nominal priestly celibacy throughout Roman Catholic Europe; of the rise of Antinomian pantheistic sects in Italy, France and Germany; of the transference of the political influence over the papacy from Germany to France; of the foundation of English liberty in the Magna Charta and the organization of Parliament; of the proclamation of the Pragmatic Sanction in France by Louis IX. In vindication of Gallican independence of Rome; of the rise of the power of the electoral princes and the free cities in Germany; and finally, in the last year of the century, of the centennial Pagan and pseudo-Jewish Jubilee proclaimed and celebrated by Pope Boniface VIII., granting full forgiveness of all sin to the millions of deluded Catholics visiting Rome in that year, and pouring their gold upon the papal altar.

Innocent III. was Pope from 1198 to 1216. The papacy reached the zenith of its power in him. He was the Commander-in-Chief of the armies and navies of “Christendom”. No other man ever wielded such power in both “Church” and State. He ruled from the Jordan to the Atlantic, and from the Mediterranean to beyond the Baltic.

The fourth crusade was preached by Innocent III. and Fulk of Neuilly. The soldiers were chiefly French and Venetians; and, instead of going to Palestine, they contented themselves with capturing, with circumstances of horrible pillaging, debauchery and bloodshed, the city of Constantinople from the Greeks (in 1204), and founding there a Latin empire, which lasted till 1261. The dislike of the Greek for the Roman Catholics was thus converted into vehement and perpetual hatred.—As it was concluded by many that none but “innocent” hands could effect the conquest of the Holy Land, it is said that, in A.D. 1212, thirty thousand French boys and girls under the peasant lad Stephen, and twenty thousand German boys and girls under the peasant lad Nicholas, set out for that purpose, but perished miserably by fatigue and starvation and shipwreck and in Mohammedan slavery.—In what is called by some the fifth, and by others the sixth, crusade (1215-1229), Damietta in Egypt was taken, and Frederick II. of Germany, by a treaty with the sultan of Egypt, was crowned King of Jerusalem, which was recaptured by the Turks in 1247, and has remained in their possession ever since.—The sixth and seventh crusades were both French; in the sixth, King Louis IX. lost his liberty in Egypt in 1249; and in the seventh he lost his life before Tunis, in Africa, in 1270. In 1291 Acre was taken by the Mameluke Turks, and a termination was put to Catholic dominion in Palestine.

In 1212 the Catholic kings of Castile, Aragon and Navarre slew one hundred and sixty thousand Moslems in one battle; and, before the close of this century, the Moorish dominion was restricted to the kingdom of Granada, which paid homage to Castile.

After dreadful wars of more than fifty years (1230-1283), Prussia was made almost a desert by the papal knights—“booted apostles,” says Mosheim—and the miserable remnant of the people were forced to submit to Catholic baptism. The similar “conversion” of Lithuania in Russia was begun, but a permanent nominal success was not obtained until near the close of the fourteenth century.

The Catholic crusade against the Albigenses in Southern France (from 1209-1229), under Popes Innocent III., Honorius III. And Gregory IX., was one of the bloodiest tragedies in human history. The crusade was much shorter, easier and safer than that to Palestine, and the temporal rewards were more certain. The popes promised the crusaders, as in the Mohammedan expeditions, the forgiveness of all their sins, and also the partition among them of the estates of the heretics. An army, variously estimated at from two to five hundred thousand men, assembled from Italy, Germany and France. The leader was the able, rapacious, unfeeling and unprincipled Simon de Montfort, of England. The heretic was regarded as worse than the robber, the traitor or the murder—as a beast of prey, to be exterminated wherever found. “Never is the history of man,” says Milman, “were the great eternal principles of justice, the faith of treaties, common humanity, so trampled under foot as in the Albigensian war. Never was war waged in which ambition, the consciousness of strength, rapacity, implacable hatred and pitiless cruelty played a greater part. And throughout the war it cannot be disguised that it was not merely the army of the (Catholic) ‘Church,’ but the (Catholic) ‘Church’ itself in arms. Papal legates and the greatest prelates headed the host and mingled in all the horrors of the battle and the siege. In no instance did they interfere to arrest the massacre, in some cases urged it on.” “At the taking of Beziers (July 22, 1209), the commander, the Abbott Arnold, legate of the pope, being asked who the heretics were to be distinguished from the faithful, made the infamous reply, ‘Slay all; God will know his own.’”

“The policy of persecution,” says Mr. J. H. Allen, “was adopted by the Roman Catholic ‘Church’ deliberately and with open eyes in the Third Lateran Council of 1179, notwithstanding the opposition of a more wise and humane spirit. Nothing so completely disproves that infallibility to which she asserts so many fantastic, sentimental and rotten claims.”

As many as four hundred “heretics” were sometimes burned in one great pile, to the great rejoicing of the Catholics. Twenty thousand men, women and children were slain indiscriminately at the capture of Beziers, and two hundred thousand during that year (1209). The number of Albigenses that perished in the twenty years’ war is estimated at from one to two millions. Whoever harbored a “heretic” was to lose his property and be reduced to slavery. Every house in which a “heretic” was found was to be destroyed. A wretched few sought concealment in caves and rocks and forests, or fled to other lands.

The popes founded the Mendicant Franciscan and Dominican Orders and the Inquisition to aid them in counteracting the growing “heretical” sects, either by conversion or extermination. One of the characteristic features of Roman Catholicism is its incorporation of hundreds of religious institutions, male and female, by which to accomplish its purposes. The Military Orders were established in the twelfth century to fight against the Saracens; and the Mendicant (or Begging) Orders, in the thirteenth century, to war against the “heretics”; just as the Jesuit Order was created in the sixteenth century to counteract the Protestant Reformation. Sacerdotal “Christianity” had, in the thirteenth century, ascended a throne so high above the people, teaching them only by the ritual, and neutralizing even the small benefit derivable from that teaching by priestly wealth, pride and corruption; and those communions which it denominated “heretical sects” had drawn so near the people by their moral and lowly condition, and by their private and public preaching of the simple gospel of Christ; that the papists realized and sought to obviate this great disadvantage of theirs in winning and retaining the masses. The Franciscan Order, named from Francis of Assisi (a town in Italy), was founded in 1210; and the Dominican Order, named from Dominic, a Spanish priest, was founded in 1216. The avowed principles of both Orders were poverty, chastity and obedience, the latter to be rendered to the pope through the Superior of the Order. Those who entered the Orders thereby renounced all freedom of thought and conscience, and became absolutely devoted to the papal service, each Order, like a vast army, acting as the instrument of a single will. Their fundamental principle, not to work, but to live by begging, was in point-blank contradiction to the express Divine commandment both of the Old and the New Testament that man should labor. “The begging-friar soon became a by-word for all his ignoble arts, his shameless asking, his importunity which would take no refusal, his creeping into houses, his wheedling of silly women, his having rich men’s persons in admiration because of advantage, his watchings by wealthy death-beds to secure legacies for his house, his promising spiritual benefits, not his to grant, in exchange for temporal gifts. Bonaventura, himself the head of the Franciscan Order, and writing not fifty years after Francis’s death, does not scruple to say that already in his time the sight of a begging-friar in the distance was more dreaded than that of a robber.” These Orders were most successful Catholic missionaries. They spread with wonderful rapidity, and soon became wealthy, proud and corrupt. It was pretended that each of their founders, Francis and Dominic, performed far more miracles than Christ, and that Francis equaled or surpassed Christ in the glories of his birth, transfiguration, gospel and death, insomuch that, in the minds of multitudes, the idolatrous worship of Francis took the place of the professed worship of Christ. The Dominicans were so eager and successful in hunting and persecuting “heretics” that they were called by the people Domini Canes, dogs of the Lord. Teaching that there is virtue in frequent repetitions of forms of prayer, they invented the rosary, as series of prayers and a string of beads by which they are counted.

The Inquisition, the special and unprecedented enormity of Roman Catholicism, surpassing, in cold systematic treachery and cruelty, the wildest imaginations of romance, “the most formidable of all the formidable engines devised by popery to subdue the souls and bodies, the reason and the consciences of men, to its sovereign will,” was founded during the Albigensian war to extirpate those obstinate “heretics,” and was afterwards employed against other “heretics” and against the Jews and Moors. The Greek Emperor Theodosius I., in 382, had instituted the first Inquisition against “heresy,” especially Manichaeism, and had enforced the first death penalty for religious opinion. The Inquisition was revived in more awful form by the Twelfth General Council (Fourth Lateran) in 1215, and its code established by the Council of Toulouse in 1229. It was made a permanent tribunal in 1233, and put in charge of the Dominican Order in 1234. Special Courts (independent of the local authorities) for hunting out and exterminating “heretics” had been established under Dominic and his followers during the crusade against the Albigenses. “The base of the code of the Inquisition,” says Milman, “was a system of delation at which the worst of the Pagan emperors might have shuddered as iniquitous; in which the sole act deserving of mercy might seem to be the Judas-like betrayal of the dearest and most familiar friend, of the kinsman, the parent, the child. The Court sat in profound secrecy; no advocate might appear before the tribunal; no witness was confronted with the accused; who were the informers, what the charges, except the vague charge of heresy, no one knew. If the suspected heretic refused to testify concerning himself and others similarly suspected, he was cast into a dungeon—a dungeon the darkest in those dreary ages—the most dismal, the most foul, the most noisome. No falsehood was too false, no craft too crafty, no trick too base, for this calm, systematic moral torture which was to wring further confession against himself, denunciation against others. If the rack, the pulleys, the thumbscrew and the boots were not yet invented or applied (as they were afterwards), it was not in mercy. It was the deliberate object to break the spirit. The prisoner was told that there were witnesses, undeniable witnesses, against him; if convicted by such witnesses, his death was inevitable. In the meantime, his food was to be slowly, gradually diminished, till body and soul were prostrate. He was then to be left in darkness, solitude, silence. Then were to come one or two of the faithful, dexterous men, who were to speak in gentle words of interest and sympathy—‘Fear not to confess that you have had dealings with those men, the teachers of heresy, because they seemed to you men of holiness and virtue; wiser than you have been deceived.’ The dexterous men were to speak of the Bible, of the Gospels, of the epistles of Saint Paul, to talk the very language, the scriptural language, of the heretics. ‘These foxes,’ it was said, ‘can only be unearthed by fox-like cunning.’ But if all this art failed, or did not perfectly succeed, then came terror and the goading to despair. ‘Die you must—bethink you of your soul.’ Upon which if the desperate man said, ‘If I must die, I will die in the true faith of the gospel,’ he had made his confession; justice claimed its victim. The Inquisition had three penalties; for those who recanted, penance in the severest form which the Court might enact; for those not absolutely convicted, perpetual imprisonment; for the obstinate or the relapsed, death—death at the stake, by the secular arm. The Inquisition, with specious hypocrisy, while it prepared and dressed up the victim for the burning, looked on with calm and approving satisfaction, as it had left the sin of lighting the fire to pollute other hands.”

In case of sickness, however severe, no “heretic” was allowed the services of a physician. “Friends and relatives were admitted to testify, but only against the prisoner, never in his favor.” The property of the condemned heretic—often even before condemnation, pretendedly to pay the expenses of the mock trial—was confiscated, the most of it being given to the accusers and judges. The Inquisition (which was never established in England) was established in France, Spain, Italy and Germany during the thirteenth century, steadily increased in power and vigor through the fourteenth century, became the most terrible at the close of the fifteenth and during the sixteenth centuries, steadily declined during the seventeenth century, abandoned torture and was almost abolished during the eighteenth century, and has been partially revived, with the old murderous will, but with little power for harm, on account of the separation of “Church” and State, in the nineteenth century. Its last capital punishments were those of a Jew who was burnt, and a Quaker schoolmaster hanged, in Spain, in 1826. Roman Catholic writers of the present century acknowledge the horrible deeds of the Inquisition, and seek to justify them; and large numbers of Catholics, especially the Jesuits, yearn for the re-establishment of the Satanic institution, with all its original powers. The Prince of Darkness and his worshipers still passionately love the old deeds of darkness of the darkest ages of the world. But God is mightier than Satan, and has never left Himself without witnesses on earth.

The Lateran Council of 1215, under Pope Innocent III., adopted seventy canons, exalting the papal supremacy to the highest point, and containing a summary of papal doctrine and polity, justifying, among other things, transubstantiation, indulgences, works of supererogation, and the extirpation of “heretics.” The doctrine of “works of supererogation” was founded upon the alleged distinction between the precepts of the law and the exhortations of the gospel, the former being considered obligatory, and the latter non-obligatory; so that, when a person performed the latter, he laid up a stock of merits; and all the merits of the saints, with the merits of Christ, formed a vast treasury, from which indulgences might, on certain conditions, be granted to persons of deficient merit or of positive sinfulness. This doctrine was defended by the famous Schoolmen, Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Bonaventura; and it was implicitly decreed in the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.—The Council of Toulouse, in 1229, under Pope Gregory IX., prohibited “laymen” from possessing or reading the Bible in the mother tongue; and the same pope in 1231 prohibited “laymen” from disputing on the faith under penalty of excommunication.

The custom of voluntary flagellation, as a means of self-purification or of the propitiation of the Deity, was practiced by the ancient Pagan Egyptians and Greeks and Romans; and, before being abandoned by the latter in the fifth century, was adopted by some Catholic “Bishops” in their courts. But, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, especially in the years 1260, 1349 and 1414, it raged in many countries of continental Europe as a religious mania. “All ranks, both sexes, all ages, were possessed with the madness—nobles, wealthy merchants, modest and delicate women, even children of five years old. They stripped themselves naked to the waist, covered their faces that they might not be known, and went two and two, both day and night, in solemn, slow procession, from city to city, with a cross and a banner before them, scourging themselves till the blood tracked their steps, and shrieking out their doleful psalms. Thirty-three days and a half, the number of years of the Lord’s sad sojourn in this world of man, was the usual period for the penance of each. Sovereign princes, as Raymond of Toulouse, kings, as Henry II. of England, had yielded their backs to the scourge. Flagellation was the religious luxury of ‘Saint’ Louis IX. of France, who had his priest scourge him every Friday with an iron chain, and in Lent on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and who wore in his girdle an ivory case of such scourges, such boxes being his favorite presents to his courtiers. A year of penance was taxed at three thousand lashes. Dominic, the founder of the Mendicant Order, accompanied each Psalm with one hundred lashes; so that the whole Psalter, with fifteen thousand stripes, equaled five years’ penance. Dominicus Loricatus (wearing a shirt of mail next his skin) could discharge, in six days, the penance of an entire century, by a whipping of three hundred thousand stripes.” Francis of Assisi, from self-flagellation, had made his skin one sore from head to foot, when he died. Scourging was considered a substitute for all the “sacraments of the church,” and even for the merits of Christ. It became so excessive and scandalous that even popes and Catholic governments suppressed the public exhibitions; but the merit of voluntary self-chastisement is still a doctrine of Roman Catholicism.

In 1215 King John of England was forced by his barons, at Runnymede, to sign the Magna Charta, the legal basis of English liberties, securing life, liberty and property from arbitrary spoliation—representation with taxation, the Habeas Corpus, and Trial by Jury. In 1265 “the knights, citizens and burgesses” were summoned to form the House of Commons, and thus, with the House of Lords, complete the organization of the British Parliament.—In 1268 Louis IX. issued an edict, called the Pragmatic Sanction, which, though affirming the plenary power of the pope in all other countries, made an exception in the case of France, “limiting, in that country, the interference of the court of Rome in the elections of the clergy, and directly denying its right of ecclesiastical taxation.” This has been considered the great charter of the independence of the “Gallican Church.” It was emphasized and enlarged by the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII. in 1438, but virtually annulled by the Concordat of Francis I. with Pope Leo X. in 1516, which, though professing to grant to each party mutual privileges, gave the real advantage to Rome; these advantages it has been the constant aim of Rome ever since to improve.

Boniface VIII., who occupied the papal chair from 1294 to 1303, was the most ambitious, arrogant, avaricious, crafty, unscrupulous, revengeful and cruel of all the popes of Rome; and he was believed by his contemporaries to be exceedingly immoral. The unexampled loftiness of his pretensions shook the papal throne to its base, and led to his own most ignominious fall and end. Soon after his death his ineffaceable epitaph was announced to an un-protesting world: “He came in like a fox, he ruled like a lion, and he died like a dog.” He craftily procured the abdication of his predecessor, Celestine V., whom he imprisoned, and, it is thought, poisoned. His inauguration was the most magnificent that Rome had ever seen. The kings of Naples and Hungary held the bridle of his noble, richly caparisoned white horse on either side. He had a crown on his head, and was followed by the nobility of Rome, and could hardly make his way through the masses of the kneeling people. In the midst of the inauguration of a furious storm burst over the city, and extinguished every lamp and torch in the building. A riot broke out among the populace, in which forty lives were lost. The next day, while the pope dined in public, the two kings waited behind his chair. In 1296 he published his bull Clericis Laicos, declaring himself the one exclusive trustee of all the property held throughout “Christendom” by the clergy, the monasteries and the universities, and that no authority should, on any plea, levy any tax on that property without his distinct permission. This bull was received with indignant resistance in England and France. To aggrandize his power and enrich his treasury Boniface, by way of a Catholic revival and combination of the old Pagan Roman Secular or Centennial Games and the Mosaic Jubilee, decreed that the last year of the thirteenth century, the year 1300, should be a year of Jubilee, in which all who should make a pilgrimage, not to Jerusalem, but to Rome, and visit for fifteen days “the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul, the tombs of the chief Apostles,” and repent and confess, should receive full absolution of all their sins. It was much easier to go to Rome than to Jerusalem. All Europe, we are told, was thrown into a frenzy of religious zeal. The roads everywhere were crowded with pilgrims of all ages, of both sexes. Thirty thousand entered and left Rome in a single day; two hundred thousand strangers were in the city at one time; and it is thought that millions visited it during the year. The offerings were incalculable. An eyewitness reports that two priests stood with rakes in their hands, sweeping the uncounted gold and silver from the altars. The entire treasure was at the free and irresponsible disposal of the pope, who professed to give in return pardon of all sin and everlasting life. During the Jubilee Boniface assumed alternately the splendid habiliments of pope and emperor, with the crown on his head, the sceptre in his hand, and the imperial sandals on his feet; and he had two swords, symbolical of temporal and spiritual power, borne before him, thus openly assuming the unlimited sovereignty of the world. By his bull Unam Sanctam, issued in 1302, he declared that strict submission to the Pope of Rome was absolutely essential to salvation for every individual of the human race. From this high and golden zenith of pretension he soon had a miserable and fatal fall. He had a long and hot quarrel with King Philip the Fair, of France, who was his equal in avarice, ambition and unscrupulousness, and he was just on the point of excommunicating Philip when the envoy of the latter, William of Nogaret, a stern and bold lawyer, whose grandfather had perished, on the side of the “heretics,” in the Albigensian war, attacked with three hundred horsemen and seized the pope in his castle at Anagni, and insulted and imprisoned him. Thirty-four days afterwards the proud-hearted old man of eighty-two died a raving maniac, either beating out his own brains against the wall or smothering himself with his own pillows. The history of the world affords no more striking instance of the truth of the scriptural declaration that “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).

Among the unscriptural and fanatical sects that appeared in Germany during the thirteenth century were those who called themselves “Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit.” In their libertine doctrines and deeds they claimed to be above all law human and Divine. “Consistent pantheists, they denied the distinction between good and evil. All was good, they said, for God was good, and God was all and in all; as truly and as much in the sinner sinning as in the saint walking in uprightness; as much honored in and by the one as the other, for He had equally willed the sin and the uprightness.” They looked with contempt upon the ordinances of the gospel and upon all external acts of religious worship; and maintained that all persons would finally be absorbed in the Deity, and thus become a part of the Godhead. This doctrine was made by many an apology for all kinds of wickedness.[4] The Catholic Inquisitors put large numbers of these people to death, not, of course, because of their wickedness, but because of their opposition to Rome.

The scriptural, simple, peaceful, industrious and upright Waldenses in Northern Italy were providentially protected by the favor of the Dukes of Savoy, during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, until 1487.

Note.—Several eminent historians maintain that, in the very rough and wild times of the Dark Ages, the general influence of the Roman Catholic organization, notwithstanding the gross errors and vices and crimes of numerous individuals in that communion, was a great check on the evil passions of men, and a great political, social and moral benefit.—See George P. Fisher’s Reformation, p. 9; E. A. Freeman’s General Sketch of History, p. 169; and W. E. H. Lecky’s Rationalism, vol. ii., p. 37.

Even a nominal reverence for the true God, and a very imperfect acquaintance with the Scriptures of eternal truth, may be attended by important temporal advantages.

1. The continued quotations and perversions which the Papists made of the Old Testament—the popes blasphemously assuming to themselves the prerogatives granted, under the Old dispensation, to men directly and infallibly inspired of God, which prerogatives are, under the New Dispensation, vested solely in Christ, the Divine and Everlasting Prophet, Priest and King of spiritual Israel—were no doubt among the cogent reasons why the Albigenses and other Cathari, who denied the legitimacy of such impious applications of the law and the prophets, were charged with rejecting the Old Testament Scriptures.

2. The people of these valleys are described by contemporaries as quiet, pious and secluded; their clothing, sheepskins and coarse hempen cloth; their food, milk and venison and the yield of scanty harvests; their houses either built of flint-stone, or dens and caves of the earth; themselves, extremely poor but content; all able to read and write, and delighting to study the Scriptures; and bringing up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

3. See R. C. Trench’s Medieval Church History; Appletons’ American Cyclopedia, article Waldenses; and Ludwig Keller’s Die Reformation.

4. The true people of God are not anti-Pauline, but Pauline Antinomians; that is, they carry their opposition to the law just as far as, and no further than, Paul did. While they earnestly maintain with him that they are justified freely, without the deeds of the law, by the grace and faith of Christ—that Christ is all their wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption—they, with equal earnestness, maintain with Paul—as Paul did not only in his doctrine, but also in his life—that the grace and faith of Christ do not make void, but rather establish, God’s holy, spiritual and good law of love in the heart of every believer forever, as that law was eternally in the heart of their elder brother, Christ, and is graciously written by God also in their hearts, in accordance with the blessed promise of the new and everlasting covenant. The Spirit of Christ, that dwells in His people, is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Holiness, and frees them from the love and bondage of sin, upholds them to walk lovingly in the way of His commandments, teaches them to live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world, and to be careful to maintain good works, unto, which they were created new creatures in Christ Jesus, and in which God hath before ordained that they should walk.

Chapter XV. Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.

Fourteenth Century.—During the fourteenth century the density and blackness of the clouds overhanging the most of Catholic Europe increase; but the dark masses break partially away in England and Bohemia, and John Wycliffe, “the Morning Star of the Reformation,” appears, disseminating the light of scriptural truth; and the Waldenses in Northern Italy are still blessed with the starry beams of heavenly light.

The characteristics of the fourteenth century are the downfall of the papal Pseudo-theocracy (in the miserable overthrow and death of Boniface VIII.); the Abject subjection of the papacy to France; the so-called papal “Babylonish Captivity of Seventy Years;” the beginning of the papal Schism of forty years; the culmination of papal avarice and simony and extortion (in John XXII. and Boniface IX.); the papal abridgement of the Decalogue into two words, “Give Gold;” the unspeakable debauchery of the papal court and city, Avignon; the revival of the old Roman and Greek Pagan literature and Infidelity and immorality in Italy (Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio being the chief writers); the brief apparent restoration of the old Roman Republic by Rienzi, “The last Of The Tribunes” the improvement of the mariners compass, and the first use of cannon in war; the establishment of fifteen universities in Europe; the first authorization, by a Roman Catholic council (that of Ravenna in 1311), of the substitution of sprinkling or pouring for baptism; the decline of Pelagian Scholasticism and the rise of Pelagian and pantheistic Mysticism; the papal persecution and abolition of the wealthy Order of the Knight Templars at the dictation of the avaricious French king, Louis the Fair; the height of the Catholic persecution of the Jews; the papal persecution of the Fratricelli, the Dolcinites, and the Waldenses in France, Italy and Germany, and of the lepers in France; the discovery of the Canary Islands by Genoese and Spanish seamen, and the papal claim to those islands; the conquest of Asia Minor by the Ottoman Turks and their establishment in Europe; the unparalleled ravages of the plague called black death in Asia, Europe and Africa, destroying from one-half to two thirds of the population; the excessive increase of penance by flagellation; the celebration of the three papal Jubilees in Rome (in 1350, 1390 and 1400); the peasant insurrections in England and France produced by governmental oppression; the increase of the power and the constitutional liberty of England; the conversion of Lithuania and Poland to Catholicism; the partial nominal success of Catholic Franciscan Missions in Northwest Persia, and temporary success in Tartary and China; the career and productions of Geoffrey Chaucer, “the father of English poetry,” and John Wycliffe, “the father of English prose”—Wycliffe, the greatest and foremost man of the fourteenth century, the center of the social, literary and religious of his country and age, the able, bold and enlightened Catholic “priest” and “doctor,” who, though living and dying in the Catholic communion, devoted his wonderful God-given talents, energies and illumination to the study, translation and circulation of the scriptures (which he maintained to be the only authoritative standard of faith and practice) and to the severe and fearless exposure of the anti-scriptural traditions, superstitions and corruptions of the Catholic Mendicants and Papacy and Episcopacy—the uncompromising predestinarian, who did not flinch from declaring that the salvation of the soul depends, not upon outward ordinances or any of the imperfect works of human righteousness, but upon the sovereign and efficacious grace of God. This century was also marked by the rise and spread of the Lollards in Bohemia and England (the followers of Wycliffe in England being called Lollards), and the reformatory labors of Conrad, Milicz and Matthias in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, and the early life of the martyr-reformers, John Hus and his companion Jerome, in the same city. The most important single event of the fourteenth century was the appearance of Wycliffe’s English Bible, the first translation of the entire scriptures into a modern language.

Of the wretched end of Pope Boniface VIII. an account has already been given in connection with the thirteenth century. “The quarrel between Boniface VIII. and Philip the Fair,” says Milman, “is one of the great epochs in the papal history, the turning point after which, for a time at least, the papacy sank with a swift and precipitate descent, and from which it never rose again to the same commanding height. It led rapidly to that debasing period which has been called the Babylonian captivity of the popes in Avignon, during which they became not much more than the slaves of the kings of France.” “From this ill-omened transfer of the papacy from Rome to Avignon,” says Trench, “springs the Great Schism of the West; from the Schism, and with a view to the healing of this, the Three Councils (of Pisa, Constance and Basel, in the fifteenth century); while all these events effectually work together for the bringing about of the Reformation.”

Benedict XI., the successor of Boniface, not being sufficiently subservient to the selfish purposes of Philip The Fair, King of France, died in less than a year after his accession to the papacy, having been poisoned, as was believed. A Frenchman, who assumed the name of Clement V., was, in 1305, elected pope through the influence of King Philip, who had previously exacted from him several hard conditions, among which were the full absolution of the king and all whom he had employed in strife with Boniface, the tenths for five years from the clergy of the realm, the condemnation of the memory of Boniface, and a secret promise in blank, to be afterwards stated by the king—believed to have been the abolition of the Order of Knight Templars. At the request of Philip, Clement in 1309 removed the papal court from Rome to Avignon, a city situated on the Rhone, three hundred and sixty-five miles southeast of Paris, but not then belonging to France. Here seven popes reigned until Gregory XI., in 1376, re-established the papal chair in Rome. Avignon, during the papal residence came to have a hundred thousand inhabitants; and Petrarch, thought he had two natural children, repeatedly speaks with loathing abhorrence of the moral corruption of the city, declaring it to be “the sink of Christendom.” Several of the popes themselves set the example of profligacy. The unscrupulous, relentless and rapacious monster, John XXII., who cruelly tortured and put to death multitudes of the anti-papal Fratricelli, Dolcinites, Waldenses and Jews, and even poor lepers and others accused of witchcraft, left, at his death, twenty-five million gold florins in specie, plate and jewels—equal to fifty million dollars, and probably worth as much as two hundred million dollars at present. In extreme opposition to the unrivalled papal and Catholic avarice, the Fratricelli, or Spiritual Franciscans, of whom two thousand were burned at the stake, declared that absolute poverty was the sole perfection of Christianity; that even granaries and cellars were a wicked mistrust of God’s providence; that the birds of the air and the beasts of the field ought to be the examples of the people of God. John XXII. Was perhaps the greatest politician among the popes. Plunging more deeply than all his predecessors or successors into the political affairs of his time.

The wealthy Order of Knight Templars, founded early in the twelfth century for war against the Saracens, was, in the early part of the fourteenth century, sacrificed by Pope Clement V. to King Philip’s avarice, to avert, if possible, the condemnation of the memory of Pope Boniface. Their number throughout “Christendom” was at this time fifteen thousand. They were charged with infidelity, idolatry and sensuality; large numbers in France were horribly tortured by the inquisition, the confessions thus extorted from them being afterwards recanted; and a hundred and fifteen, including the Grand Master, James Du Moley, were burned alive in Paris alone. The order was dissolved by the council of Vienne in 1311. King Philip obtained their vast wealth in France. But he and pope Clement died in 1314, the next year after Du Moley burned.

In 1378, at Rome, Urban VI. was chosen Pope—the French “Cardinals” afterwards declared that they were forced to this choice by the violent threats of the Roman populace demanding, under penalty of their lives, a Roman Pope; and Urban was so insolent and cruel after his accession to the papacy that these “Cardinals” retired to Anagni, declared that Urban was an apostate, an accursed Antichrist, and they elected Clement VII. Pope, who removed his seat to Avignon. The different nations of Europe acknowledged that one of these two rivals to be pope whose circumstances best suited their individual temporal interests. Thus, says Wycliffe, was the head of Antichrist cloven in twain, and each part fought against the other; and the friends of truth lifted up their heads and rejoiced. Each pope excommunicated, cursed and warred upon the other; and this “Great Western Schism” lasted from 1378 to 1417. There being two costly papal courts, and the field of revenue being divided, the papal exactions upon the Catholic world became intolerable; and many, not knowing which so-called “Head of the church” to look to, looked away from both to Christ, who is the only Head and King of His spiritual people. Among the innumerable and abominable devices to fill the papal exchequer were the sales of income-yielding “church” offices, even before they were vacated by death, to all who applied for them, the pope selling the same office to as many as a hundred persons if he could, and some paying for it two or three times, and then seeking to compass the death of the incumbent so that they might take his place, and after obtaining the office, never visiting the place, but sending their agents to collect the revenues; also, the multiplication of Jubilees in Rome, reducing the period from a hundred to fifty, and thirty-three, and twenty-five years, in order for the popes to reap more frequently the golden harvests of the sales of indulgences to sin; and the establishment of pardon-marts in numerous cities in Europe, spreading tables with rich cloths, like bankers, near the altars in the “church” buildings, setting a price upon each sin, and trading pardons for gold. At this time “the whole (Catholic) organization,” says Trench, “seemed little better than a vast and elaborate machinery for the wringing, under every conceivable plea, of the greatest possible amount of money from the faithful.” Numerous Protestant organizations seem little else in this nineteenth century of ours; as the Swedish princess,”Saint” Bridget, in the fourteenth century, said of Rome, so to a great degree with them—“All the commandments seem to be abridged into one precept, Give Gold.”

While the papal court was at Avignon, the brilliant but weak Rienzi, a Catholic professing to be specially inspired with the Holy Ghost, restored at Rome the semblance of the old Republic for seven months in 1347 and two months in 1354; but, becoming a drunken tyrant, he was assassinated by the people. Relieved from the incubus of the immediate presence of the papacy, which had pressed upon them for nearly a thousand years, the Italian Catholics eagerly returned to the more ostensible paganism of former times, reviving the natural literature, cruelty and profligacy of ancient heathen Rome.

The most general and fatal epidemic that ever desolated the world was the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Originating in China, preceded by dreadful droughts, famines, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and swarms of locusts, characterized by black carbuncles and buboes all over the body, terminating fatally in two or three days, sometimes announced by dense and awful clouds coming from the east, poisoning the water and the air, maddening some and demoralizing others, the horrible pestilence ravaged the entire Eastern Hemisphere, scattering death everywhere on land and sea. It is believed to be a moderate estimate that fifty millions of human beings perished. The plague prevailed in Europe from 1348 to 1351. Flagellation was revived by armies of tens of thousands of people marching from city to city, chanting mournful ditties, and at stated times, lacerating their bodies with triple scourges armed with points of iron—thus blindly seeking to expiate their sins and avert the pestilence. The Jews, so often treated by professed Christians as scapegoats, were tortured and murdered by thousands on the charge of poisoning the wells. The Jews were also repeatedly persecuted, during this century, in France and Spain, for their wealth and their religion; hundreds of thousands are said to have submitted to compulsory “baptism;” those who refused thus to submit were either banished or massacred, and their property confiscated.

In 1386 Jagello, the Grand Duke of Poland, in order to win the young princess Hedwig, and with her the crown of Poland, was baptized into the Roman Catholic communion; and he compelled his heathen subjects to submit to the same ceremony, as the Laplanders had yielded to Catholic “conversion” fifty years before.

Let it never be forgotten by the friend of truth that it was early in the fourteenth century when even the Roman Catholic “Church” first (in the Council of Ravenna, in 1311) “legalized baptism by sprinkling, by leaving it to the choice of the officiating minister—this practice having been before permitted even by Romanists only in the case of sick persons, but having gradually spread in spite of the opposition of councils and hostile decrees” (See the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition, vol. iii., page 351; Schaff’s History of the Apostolic Church, pp. 568-570; and Stanley’s Christian Institutions, pp. 7, 8, 17, 18). The Greek Catholic “Church” has never ceased to oppose this innovation of Roman Catholicism.

About the year 1300 there was formed in Antwerp, Belgium, a semi-monastic society devoted to the care of the sick and the burial of the dead. They were called Alexians, from the “patron-saint;” Cellites, from their dwelling in cells; and Lollards, from their practice of singing dirges at funerals, and of humming psalms—the Low-German word lollen or lullen signifying to sing softly or slowly. “They soon spread through the Netherlands and Germany, and in the frequent pestilences of that period were useful, and everywhere welcome. The clergy and the begging-friars, however, who neglected their duty of attending the sick, disliked and persecuted the Lollards, and called them heretics; and the name of Lollards was afterward very commonly given as a term of reproach to different classes of religionists, sometimes to the truly pious, sometimes to the worst pretenders; and in England it became a designation of the followers of Wycliffe.”

Three zealous reformers labored, within the Catholic communion, during the fourteenth century, at Prague, in Bohemia: Milicz of Kremsier, Conrad of Waldhausen, and Matthias of Janow; John Hus and Jerome of Prague were also born in this century (the former in 1369, and the latter in 1365), but their labors for reform took place in the fifteenth century. A full account of the labors and sufferings of these five men is given in the last volume of Neander’s Church History. Milicz and Conrad were more practical, and Matthias more doctrinal, in their reformatory labors. Milicz preached especially to the poor and the sinful, sometimes five times in a day and several hours at a time; he gave them nearly everything that he had, and he exercised great influence among them, and brought about a wonderful moral reformation in Prague. Conrad was especially successful in preaching to Jews; in denouncing the hypocrisy of the wealthy and luxurious begging-friars he offered to give sixty groats ($2.40) to any one who could cite a single passage from the New Testament showing that Christ had ever begged. As Milicz was the precursor of Hus, so Matthias was the precursor of Luther. Matthias exposed and denounced the superstitions and corruptions of the hierarchy, and maintained the indispensability and the sufficiency of an internal, vital, spiritual faith in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to eternal salvation. All these five Bohemian reformers were Augustinian predestinarians.

England, like the remainder of the world, was at this time overrun with Pelagianism in theory and life. Almost the only man in the Established “Church,” in the early part of this century, of whom we have any account as opposing conditionalism, was Thomas Bradwardine (1290-1349), who for six weeks before his death was “Archbishop of Canterbury.” He was a most stringent supralapsarian predestinarian, not only denying all merit to man, but referring all things, both good and evil, including all the acts of rational beings, directly to the Divine will as the efficient cause, ignoring a distinction between the Divine will and the Divine permission in reference to evil, but still insisting that creatures are morally responsible, “since evil subjectively contradicts the will of God.”

John Wycliffe (born 1324, died 1384) was almost as stringent a predestinarian as Thomas Bradwardine. “He went far beyond Augustine himself in his polemical hostility to everything that seemed verging on Pelagianism, to all worth or ability on the part of the creature; his doctrine amounting, in fact, to the denial of free-will and of contingency. He affirmed that the original eternal ground of all things, including sin and the punishment of sin, was the Divine predestination; but still he would not throw back the causality of evil upon God, no more than ascribe the cause of darkness to the sun. While sin was necessary, its guilt and punishment was equally necessary.” “In a severe Augustinian Predestinarianism,” says Milman, “the more austere churchmen and all the first Reformers (or they would hardly have dared to be Reformers) met as to its theory, if not its application.” “Wycliffe’s predestinarian Augustinianism,” says J. R. Green, “formed the groundwork of his later theological revolt.”

Of the first forty years of Wycliffe’s life little is known; but much is known of his last twenty years. He was a pupil, a graduate, a master, a doctor, and a professor in Oxford University, an institution second to none in Europe, except the University of Paris, and in Oxford, Wycliffe stood without a rival. He was a man of slender frame, genial disposition, immense energy, immovable conviction, and of austere plainness and purity of life, “the unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of controversialists, the first reformer who dared, when deserted and alone, to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break through the tradition of the past, and, with his last breath, to assert the freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the papacy.” In many ways did Divine Providence favor him, and prepare the way for his important life-work. The long and intolerable exactions of the papacy, the removal of the pope to Avignon and his subjection to France (the inveterate enemy of England), the death of Pope Gregory XI. when he was proceeding against Wycliffe, the ensuing Schism in the papacy itself, one pope cursing, warring against, and weakening the other, the favor and protection, at different times, of King Edward III., and of one of his sons, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and of Joanna, widow of the Black Prince, another son of Edward III., and of Queen Anne of Bohemia, the wife of King Richard II. of England, and of the citizens of London—all were clear providences favoring the success of the reformatory ideas and plans of Wycliffe. Another prominent and remarkable feature of the life of Wycliffe was the progressive development of his views of Scripture truth; in his daily study and spiritual understanding of the Scriptures he discovered more and more of the unscripturalness of Romanism, and “he was thus carried along from one step to another in his progress as a reformer.” His progress was not only in the Protestant but in the Baptist direction; and I am persuaded that, if he had lived longer, and additional Divine light had been given him, he would have been a thorough-going Bible Baptist. No man perfectly understands the Scriptures; we all now see through a glass darkly; it is only at the time and to the extent that the Holy Spirit opens our understandings that we discern spiritual things. Wycliffe first denounced the corrupt practices and then the corrupt doctrines of Romanism leading to those practices. It is said that in 1360 he made a vigorous assault on the manifold impositions and corruptions of the Mendicant Friars, dwelling on their blasphemy in comparing their institutes to the gospel, their founder to the Savior; branding the wealthier Friars as hypocrites who, professing mendicancy, had all the pride and luxury of wealth; and the poorer as able-bodied beggars, who ought not to be permitted to infest the land.—The English Parliament, in 1376, declared that the taxes paid in England to the “Church” of Rome amounted to five times as much as those levied by the king; a great portion of these taxes was squandered on the luxuries and vices of the pope and his cardinals. In 1213 King John had basely surrendered his kingdom to the pope, and agreed to pay him an annual tribute of a thousand marks (about three thousand dollars). After 1332 the yearly payment was in arrear, because paying such a tribute was virtually subsidizing France, which country was at war with England. Pope Urban V. re-demanded this tax in 1365. Wycliffe wrote a powerful argument in resistance to this demand, and maintained that the pope had no temporal power. The English king and Parliament refused to continue the payment, and the pope has never revived his claim.—On an embassy, in 1374, to the papal legates at Bruges, Belgium, in reference to the extortions of Rome, Wycliffe discovered still more of papal corruptions, and on his return he declared that Christ was the only Head of the church, and that the pope was Antichrist. In 1375 he was made, for a short time, chaplain to the king; and, in 1376, “rector” of Lutterworth. In 1377 he was summoned to answer at “St. Paul’s” in London, before the “Archbishop of Canterbury” and the “Bishop of London,” for erroneous opinions; but he was delivered even from trial by the favor of the powerful John of Gaunt who accompanied him. In 1378 he was delivered from trial in a similar case at Lambeth by the favor of some citizens of London who were present, and by the command of the Princess Joanna. In the same year his persecutor, Pope Gregory XI., died, and the papal Schism occurred.—Preaching had been almost entirely abandoned by the rich, worldly, corrupt and indolent Catholic clergy. Wycliffe, longing to bring home to the great body of the people the words of eternal life, encouraged many who believed and understood some important scriptural truths to go forth as “poor preachers.” “Barefoot, and clad in long russet garments of coarsest material, and, being unmarried, content with food and lodging, they passed two and two through the land, denouncing everywhere the sins of all sorts and conditions of men, but with an especial emphasis the sins, the luxury, the sloth, the ignorance of the clergy. They declared, with simplicity and earnestness, the plain truths of the gospel in the vernacular tongue. Not one in five hundred of the people could read; and their ministers did not preach to them. The naked truths of the Scriptures shook, thrilled, enthralled the souls of men so that the adversaries of Wycliffe soon complained that half of England was infected with Lollardy.” Wycliffe taught that preaching the gospel was the highest office in the world, and that the life of the preacher should give emphasis to his preaching; that, like Paul, he should not seek to obtain the gold, silver or apparel of his hearers, but work with his own hands and be content with the barest necessaries, and follow the pattern of Christ in poverty, self-denial and renunciation of the world; also that all the ministers of Christ were on an absolute footing of equality; that, as in the apostolic church, there should be no other offices than presbyters (or Elders) and Deacons; that there should be no popes or prelatical “Bishops” over these, because Christ is the only Head of the church. He said that Christians need not visit the heathen for the purpose of converting them and dying as martyrs; but they could do plenty of preaching in England soon to win the crown of martyrdom—a prediction sadly verified in the next two centuries. The tithes, he said, should be given to the poor, while preachers should be satisfied with the voluntary contributions of their flocks.—Wat Tyler’s insurrection in 1381 was caused, as the latest and best historians agree, not by religious, but by political grievances—the people demanded a better government and the abrogation of the poll tax. Wycliffe did not encourage and was not at all responsible for it. In the same year the English Parliament passed the first English statute against heresy, enjoining the arrest, trial and imprisonment of heretics. Weak and corrupt men wrested Wycliffe’s teachings from their spiritual connection, and made such applications and perversions as he never intended; just as there were political commotions at the same time with the Donatist movement in North Africa in the fourth century, and in connection with the Lutheran Reformation in the sixteenth century.—Having already denounced, as utterly unscriptural, papal pardons, indulgences, excommunications, absolutions, pilgrimages, image worship and saint worship, Wycliffe in 1381 boldly declared his disbelief in the doctrine of transubstantiation, the chief support of mediaeval Catholicism; he maintained that, in the elements of the Lord’s Supper, Christ was not bodily, but only spiritually and sacramentally present; the ordinance of baptism he also retained, but did not regard it as essential to salvation. Condemned by Oxford University, and deserted by John of Gaunt and numerous other followers, he fearlessly stood by what he believed the Scriptures taught him, declaring that the Scriptures are the only ultimate authority in all matters of faith and practice; that all the good in man is due to grace, and that our eternal salvation is the work of Christ alone. The greatest work of his life was the translation of the entire Scriptures into the English language from the Latin vulgate,[1] completed in 1384, the year that he died—for this most important work God had prepared and preserved him. Only portions of the Psalms had before been rendered into English, and that for the clergy, not for the common people. Wycliffe’s enemies soon complained that “laymen and even women knew more of the Scriptures than the best educated of the clergy.” God had prepared a people to receive the truth; and now He sent them the truth.

“An eager appetite for scriptural knowledge,” says Mr. J. J. Blunt, “was excited among the people, which they would make any sacrifice and risk any danger to gratify. Entire copies of the Bible, when they could only be multiplied by means of amanuenses, were too costly to be within the reach of very many readers; but those who could not procure ‘the volume of the book’ would give a load of hay for a few favorite chapters, and many such scraps were consumed upon the persons of the martyrs at the stake. They would hide the forbidden treasure under the floors of their houses, and put their lives in peril rather than forego the book they desired; they would sit up at night, sometimes all night long, their doors being shut for fear of surprise, reading or hearing others read the word of God; they would bury themselves in the woods, and there converse with it in solitude; they would tend their herds in the fields, and still steal an hour for drinking in the good tidings of great joy.” As in the time of Samuel’s childhood, “the word of the Lord was precious in those days.”

I believe that Wycliffe was a child of God in Babylon. He came out of Babylon in one sense, but not in another—he denounced her abominations, but he did not leave her communion. She showed her deadly hostility to him by persecuting him all that she could during his life, and by burning his books at Prague in 1410, and burning his bones at Lutterworth in 1428. His ashes were cast into the river Swift, which, as Fuller and Wordsworth remark, conveyed them through the Avon and the Severn into the sea, and thus disseminated them, as his teachings were disseminated, over the world. How vain for man to fight against God! The truth is indestructible.

Episcopalian historians, of the High-Church order, give thanks that the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century did not occur in Wycliffe’s time and was not of his doing; as otherwise the Catholic substratum of their own communion might have altogether disappeared. This congratulation will give Bible Baptists a still higher opinion of the spirituality and scripturalness of Wycliffe’s teachings. Even Mr. Trench (in his Mediaeval Church History) admits that, notwithstanding the severe persecutions of the next two centuries, “the Lollards lived on; and when the Reformation came at last, these humble men, as we may well believe, did much to contribute to it that element of sincerity, truth and uprightness, without which it never could have succeeded.” And Mr. Jennings (in his Ecclesia Anglicana) plainly shows the un-protestant and Romanist spirit of his objections to Wycliffe by repeatedly ridiculing the idea of “all religion being gotten from the Bible, each reader being his own commentator.”

The English Lollards flourished most in the ten years after Wycliffe’s death. In 1394 they petitioned Parliament for a reformation of the “Established Church” on more scriptural principles, but without success. In 1399 Thomas Arundel, “Archbishop of Canterbury,” aided Henry IV. in his usurpation of the English throne; and Henry agreed to pay him, and thus retain the support of the hierarchy, by persecuting the Lollards.

Fifteenth Century.—Of all the nineteen centuries of the Christian era, the fifteenth, according to the unanimous testimony of all accurate and reliable historians, was the most corrupt in doctrine and practice. The densest and blackest clouds overhung all Catholic Europe, lurid everywhere with the flames of persecution. Of the long night of the Middle Ages this was the darkest period just before the day; only a few stars of inferior magnitude shone here and there through the awful gloom.

The fifteenth (and the first quarter of the sixteenth) century was the period of the Augustan culmination and thorough paganization of Latin “Christianity” (in Popes Nicholas V. and Leo X.); of the unspeakable abominations of John XXIII. and Alexander (Borgia) VI.; of papal conspiracies, poisonings for wealth, assassinations and debaucheries; of the papal suppression of all vernacular translations of the Scriptures; of the burning of the Lollards in England (including Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham) and of Hus and Jerome of Prague, and of the ferocious papal crusades against the Bohemian Hussites and the French and Italian Waldenses; of the establishment and operations of the so-called “improved, reformed, or modern,” diabolical, terrific and unequalled Spanish Inquisition against Jews, Moors and “heretics,” with Torquemada’s superintendence and his infernal autos da fe; of the so-called “Reforming Councils” of Pisa, Constance and Basel, pretending to correct some of the external evils of Catholicism (while leaving unnoticed the false doctrines lying at the root of those evils), but miserably failing in their attempts, the popes, with Satanic, yet characteristic cunning and perseverance, taking back more than all that had been taken from them; of two and even three popes and Councils at once, cursing and warring against each other, and making “confusion worse confounded;” of the unrivalled increase of the worship of images, relics, saints, and especially Mary, and of penances, pilgrimages, jubilees and post-jubilees, and of the sale of indulgences for the sins of the dead and for the past and future sins of the living, a price in money being fixed for every sin; of the abandonment of preaching by the ordinary “clergy,” and the degradation of it by the monks to the mere rehearsal of lying legends, indecent tales and low comic exhibitions; of the disappearance of religion from the head, as it had long since disappeared from the heart; of the substitution of the abominable Machiavellian politics, and of the old Pagan literature, mythology, cruelty and sensuality for Christianity; of the abandonment of the restraining principle of shame, and of the almost universal prevalence of degrading and unnatural licentiousness in monasteries and nunneries, and among the “secular clergy” and all ranks of society, and of the consequent first appearance, at the close of the fifteenth century, of the most awful and loathsome contagious disease that ever afflicted humanity; so that as in the horrible chaos of the first century of the Christian era, men everywhere even naturally despaired of their race unless it were regenerated by Divine power. The utter hollowness of the Catholic doctrine of justification by works, and the absolute necessity of a radically different doctrine, that of justification by faith, were unmistakably demonstrated to all the world that had eyes to see. And yet there were many providential events in this period of dismal spiritual darkness, unconsciously, as it were, preparing for the widespread and successful publication to poor lost sinners prepared to receive the message, of the glad news of God’s free, full, holy, and omnipotent salvation. Among these events were: the supplanting of the old chaotic feudalism, in almost all the States of Europe, by vigorous monarchies, thus consolidating and strengthening the nations and destroying their subjection to Rome; the overthrow of the Greek Empire at Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, driving many profound scholars to central and western Europe; the revival of the study of Greek and Hebrew languages and of the original Scriptures forming the pure source of Christian doctrine, and showing the utterly unhistorical and unscriptural basis of Roman Catholicism; the invention of the art of printing, which was applied to the publication of the Bible in the Latin and the original tongues; and the discovery, not only of the Cape of Good Hope and the ocean route to Asia, but also of America, thus opening up the New World, enlarging men’s view’s, and facilitating the approach of modern civilization.

The witnesses of the truth were, in the fifteenth century, allowed to bear their testimony but a little while, and were then compelled to seal it with their blood; or they were temporarily silenced in this hour of darkness by the Satanic fury of persecution; or were driven forth to the deserts and mountains, and made to dwell in the dens and caves of the earth. The world plainly shows that it was not worthy of them. The abominations of Sodom, Egypt and Babylon overspread the earth. Even the eminent Catholic, Jesuit, cardinal-archbishop and polemic theologian, Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), admits that, about the close of the fifteenth century, “religion was almost extinct” in the world. “The old paganism,” says Mr. J. H. Allen, “came back with seven spirits more wicked than itself, and took full possession of the (so-called) Christian Church. Throwing off the restraint of all law, human and Divine, it inaugurated riot of human blood and debauchery, surpassing the horrors of ancient heathenism, to which unsanctified Learning opened the door, and Grecian Art decorated the way. The last state of mankind was worse than the first. Sacerdotal ‘Christianity’ was fatally dishonored; and the forces were already in training which, in the next generation, would deliver their assault under the new (and yet the old apostolic) banner of Salvation by Faith”

The first year of the fifteenth century, 1401, was marked by the passage, by the English Parliament, of the first English statute for the burning of “heretics;” and the last year, 1500, was distinguished by the triumphal entry into Rome of that atrocious monster, “the human Beelzebub.” Caesar Borgia, the worthy son of Pope Alexander Borgia, on his return from the papal conquest of the Romagna.

“The Great Papal Schism,” says Trench, “forever dissipated the nimbus of glory with which the early Middle Ages had encircled the papacy.” The Roman and Avignonese popes, Gregory XII. And Benedict XIII., perfectly hated, mistrusted, and sought to destroy each other; neither would resign; and the cardinals of both finally united in calling a General Council to meet in Pisa in Italy to terminate the Schism, and to “reform the church in its head and members.” At this Council, which sat from March 25th to August 7th, 1409, twenty-six “Cardinals,” some two hundred “Bishops” and some five hundred Doctors of Theology and of the Civil and Canon Law, with representatives of numerous Universities and temporal potentates, were present. Both the popes were declared by the council to be notorious schismatics, heretics and perjurers, and they were both deposed; and Alexander V. was chosen in their stead. He dismissed the council as soon as he could, and promised to call another in three years to “reform the church;” and thus matters were left worse than before—instead of two popes there were three, as Gregory and Benedict would not recognize or obey the Council, and no reformation was yet effected. People called the Catholic “Church” a Cerberus, a three-headed monster. Alexander dying in less than a year, poisoned, as it was supposed, by his successor, Balthazar Cossa (John XXIII.), was, by fear or bribery, or both, chosen pope by the cardinals; he was said to be the ablest and worst man in “Christendom.” He had been a pirate; and, while papal lord of Bologna, had been guilty of the most outrageous tyranny, avarice and simony, had murdered multitudes of men and women, and had victimized two hundred maids, wives, widows and nuns. Of the seventy charges preferred against him by the Council of Constance, he is said to have confessed the truth of forty; he was generally known, says the Council, as “the Incarnate Devil.” Compelled by the German Emperor Sigismund, he summoned the Council just mentioned. Constance, where it met, now in Baden, was then a free city of the German Empire; it is situated on the southern side of the Rhine, at its exit from the lake of Constance. Its population 40,000 has now been reduced to 10,000. The most famous thing that ever occurred in it was this Council and its immortal infamy in not only the condemnation but the burning of John Hus and Jerome of Prague. The session of the Council lasted from 1414 to 1418. Its object was threefold—to end the papal schism; to prevent the spread of the teachings of Wycliffe, Hus and Jerome; and to “reform the church in its head and members.” It surpassed in the number and dignity of its attendants all the Councils that succeeded it. There were present, it is said, twenty-six princes, one hundred and forty counts, twenty-nine cardinals, thirty-three archbishops, one hundred and fifty Bishops, six hundred prelates and doctors, and four thousand priests—amounting, with their attendants, to eighteen thousand. Ordinarily fifty thousand, and sometimes one hundred thousand visitors, with thirty thousand horses, were in the city during the session of the Council. John XXIII. was deposed, having made the name (John) so infamous that no succeeding pope has assumed it; but he was afterwards made by his Dean (of Chief) of the College Cardinals. Martin V. was chosen by the Council of Constance to succeed him; and, by making concordats with the delegates of each nation separately, he thwarted all the reformatory plans of the Council, showed him that he was their master, declared that the pope was above a General Council, and Dictatorially assumed to himself the infallibility of God. He soon revived the worst evils of the papacy, and dissolved the Council, and left the city, with the emperor holding his bridle on one side, and the Elector of Brandenberg on the other, and with a train of forty thousand persons on horseback accompanying him on the first stage of his journey home. What a triumph for the religion of Satan! The apparently deadly wounds of the Babylonish captivity and the Great Schism now seemed to be completely healed.—In compliance with a rule laid down by the Council of Constance, and because of the continued clamors for reform, and in order to attempt to reunite the Greek and Roman “Churches,” Pope Eugenius IV., the successor of Martin V., confirmed the act of his predecessor in summoning the Council of Basel ( In Switzerland ), which sat from 1431 to 1443. This Council is said to have been much more democratic than the other two, the “inferior clergy” carrying most of their measures. The pope became alarmed at their entering into conciliatory negotiations with the Hussites, and tried to dissolve the Council, but that body obstinately refused to be dissolved, and the pope had to yield to them for a while. When they proceeded, however, to reform some of the papal abuses, and thus dry up some of the papal income, the pope became furious, declared that they were a collection of all the devils in the world, called upon the faithful to kill them, and, on the plea that negotiations with the envoys of the Greek “Church” could be more conveniently conducted in an Italian city, tried to remove the seat of the Council to Ferrara, and afterwards to Florence. He had Councils at both of these cities; but the Council of Pisa refused to stir; they deposed Pope Eugenius IV., and in 1439 elected Felix V., the last anti-pope, in his stead, who resigned his office in 1449. This new schism so offended the Catholics generally, and so weakened, that it finally died of inanition. Thus closed the last “Reforming Council” of the Roman Catholic “Church,” having failed in all its undertakings as completely and ingloriously as its two predecessors. The absolute necessity of reformation in that communion, or rather regeneration, was, by these Councils, however, publicly acknowledged to the world; their failure was due, says Mr. Trench, to their “refusing to see that the abuses in practice were rooted in errors in doctrine, drawing all their poisonous life from them, and that blows stricken at the roots were the only blows which would profit.”

Nicholas V., the successor of Eugenius IV., was pope from 1447 to 1455, and was acknowledged by all the Roman Catholic world. In his Jubilee of 1450, such a flood of riches poured into Rome that it became “a city of gold,” it was said. Nicholas designed and began the magnificent structures of the Vatican and “St. Peter’s,” and adorned the city with numerous splendid public edifices. For Christianity he substituted the idolatry of Greek and Roman Pagan literature. The revival of the study and the worship of the classics was quickened by the flight of large numbers of Greek scholars, with their manuscripts of the old Greek and Hebrew authors, from Constantinople to Italy and Germany, France and England—Constantinople having been taken by the Turks in 1453 ( the Greek Catholic “Church” was still tolerated by the Turks, and was made the standard of orthodoxy in Russia in 1462). The Italian Humanists, or promoters of classical learning, became thorough infidels or Pagans in profession and in morals; but the more profound and religious German and English Humanists devoted their linguistic studies to the Hebrew and the Greek Scriptures. The paganism of the Italians was nothing to the popes; but the dangerous German and English studies of the Bible were sought to be destroyed by the fires of the Inquisition. A favorite remark of Pope Leo X. (1513-1521) was, “How much that fable of Jesus Christ has profited us!” Pope IV. (1471-1484), when there was to be a duel to the death between two squads of his guard, “posted himself as a window looking down on the closed yard from which no man was to escape, gave his blessing to the combatants, and crossed himself as a signal for the massacre to begin.” The sole object of Pope Innocent VIII. (1484-1492) was to aggrandize his seven illegitimate children. Alexander VI. (1492-1503) is universally admitted to have the wickedest of all the popes. Having bought the papacy by bribing the cardinals, he, like his predecessor, sought to exalt his five natural children, especially his favorite, the monster Caesar Borgia. He lived with a Spanish lady and her two daughters. His pontificate witnessed the highest revel of debauchery, venality and murder. The scenes in his palace at the bridal feast of his daughter Lucretia surpassed in impurity, says Merle D’Aubigne, the revels of the groves of antiquity. How appropriate the inspired prophet’s designation of Mystery Babylon as the Mother of Harlots (Rev. 17)! Alexander is said to have died of the poison which he prepared for a rich cardinal, to get the money of the latter, but which the intended victim bribed the cook to give to the pope himself. His son Caesar murdered his brother and his brother-in-law, and stabbed one of his father’s favorites who had taken shelter under the pontifical robes, so that the blood spurted into the pope’s face. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), “the keenest of diplomatists,” “the demon of politics,” who idealized the character of Caesar Borgia, “did not scruple to advocate lying whenever it would pay; force and fraud whenever they would succeed; tyranny, in needful to keep a tyrant on his throne; murder and bloodshed as a means of obtaining an end. Such was the policy of the popes at this time. Rome was the center of the rottenness and corruption of the world.” How total the depravity of the human heart which could and did and will no doubt again cover such enormities with the cloak of the pure, gentle, holy and Divine religion of Christ!

In 1399 the Plantagenet King, Richard II. Of England, was dethroned and in the next year, it is believed, murdered by the Lancastrian Henry IV. At the instigation of Arundel, “Archbishop of Canterbury”—Henry promising the recompense the “church” for its nefarious assistance to him by the persecution of the Lollards or Wycliffites. Accordingly, early in 1401, the Parliament passed the first English statute for the burning of heretics; this statute remained in force for 276 years, not being repealed till 1677. The infamous law was at once carried into execution. William Sautre, a London priest, who was said to be a godly and zealous man, was in February, 1401, burned in public for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. The second victim on record was a poor tailor named John Badby; who in 1409 was burned in Smithfield for the same unpardonable crime; neither persuasions nor the promise of a yearly maintenance being sufficient to reconcile his to the idolatry of transubstantiation. In 1408 a law was passed forbidding the preaching of the Lollards, and commanding the suppression and destruction of all Wycliffe’s Bibles. In 1413 was enacted that “whoever read the scriptures in the mother tongue should be condemned at traitors and heretics, and should forfeit land, cattle, body, life, and goods from his heirs forever.” Multitudes were thus driven into exile, fleeing into Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and the wilds of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; of course they carried with them the scriptures and the love of the truth, and the glad tidings of God’s salvation were thus disseminated in many countries. The condemnation of Wycliffe’s teachings by the Council of Constance incited the English clergy to still more vigorous proceedings against the Lollards preaching and books. “Lollardy was banished, henceforth, from the fields and streets, and took refuge in places of concealment. There was no more wayside preaching, but instead there were secret conventicles in houses, in peasants’ huts, in sawpits, and in field ditches, where the Bible was read and exhortations were given, and so Lollardy continued.” A few of the Lollards were nobles, but the large were poor and obscure people. Some called Lollards seem to have planned a political insurrection; and thirty-nine of them were, in 1414, arrested and hastily tried and executed. Sir John Oldcastle (Lord Cobham) was pretended but not proved to be their leader; and was hung on a gallows and burned by a slow fire at his feet, for the alleged double crime of treason and heresy. He had greatly favored the Lollard preachers, and zealously aided in the circulation of Wycliffe’s Bible. Even his enemies admitted that he was a pious man; but then he rejected the worship of images, the efficacy of pilgrimages, the supremacy of the pope, and the doctrine o transubstantiation. “Before his execution,” says the accurate and impartial Milman, “he fell on his knees, and implored forgiveness on his enemies. He addressed the multitude in a few words, urging them to obey the law of God in the Scripture, to reject all evils in their lives. He refused the aid of a priest; ‘to God only, now as ever present, he would confess, and of him entreat pardon.’ His last words, drowned by the crackling flames, were praise of God. The people wept and prayed with him; they heard and contemptuous silence the declarations of the priests, that Cobham died an enemy of God, an heretic to the church.” On some unknown account, conjectured to be either the weariness of the persecutors or the suppression of the public worship of the Lollards, the burnings for heresy ceased in England about 1435, but were revived from 1485 to about 1515. In spite of all opposition, however, Lollardy made the Bible familiar to the people of England in their mother tongue.

On account of the marriage of Richard II. of England to Anne of Bohemia, there grew up a close association between these two countries; after her husband’s death Anne returned to Bohemia with many of Wycliffe’s writings. These productions were also carried with them by several Oxford students who went to the University of Prague; and thus the influence of Wycliffe’s writings was added to that of the writings of Milicz, Conrad and Matthias, in the publication of the truth in Bohemia. John Hus (1369-1415) was a man of poverty and affliction all his life of forty-six years. “His is undoubtedly the honor of having been the chief intermediary in handing on from Wycliffe to Luther the torch which kindled the Reformation, and of having been one of the bravest of the martyrs who have died in the cause of honesty and freedom, of progress and of growth towards the light. He added nothing to the intellectual, but immensely to the moral capital of the world. Seldom have the power conscience and the imperial strength of a faith rooted in Christ asserted themselves in so commanding and heroic a manner.” He was humble, upright, God-fearing, straightforward, unswerving, conscientious man. He did not discern as much of the truth as did Wycliffe; but what he did discern he was neither ashamed nor afraid to proclaim to the world. First a student, then a graduate, a professor and a rector of the University of Prague, he also preached in the Bohemian tongue to the people, and earnestly denounced many of the flagrant abuses of Catholicism, though he did not deny transubstantiation nor any of the other ordinary doctrines of that communion. Inconsistently, however, with these doctrines, he taught the Bible doctrine of salvation by the electing love and grace of God, and also the right of private judgment in the interpretation of the Scriptures. Summoned to appear before the Council of Constance, he attended under the safe-conduct of the German Emperor Sigismund, and he was not in the least abashed or intimidated by the presence of that imposing or formidable assemblage. He suffered greatly but most humbly in the six long months of his imprisonment. After his condemnation to death on thirty-nine articles, he fell on his knees in the Council, lifted up his hands, appealed to heaven and prayed for his enemies. He was then degraded from the priesthood with many childish formalities, but he bore all the insults with meekness and dignity. Delivered to the secular arm, he went with fortitude and even cheerfulness to his dreadful death. Reaching the place of execution, he kneeled and prayed, using especially the fifty-first and thirty-first Psalms, and repeatedly saying, “Into They hands, Lord, I commit my spirit.” After being chained by his neck to the stake he was again called upon to recant, but answered he could not unless convinced of his error; that his chief aim had been to teach men the necessity of repentance and the forgiveness of sins according to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. When the fire had been kindled, he sang with a loud voice the Kyrie Eleison, “Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon me.” His voice was stifled by the flames, but his lips were seen from some time afterwards to move as if in prayer. The ashes of the body were cast into the Rhine.

Jerome of Prague (1365-1416), the ardent friend and disciple of Hus, was even a more able, learned and eloquent man. He was a graduate of the University of Prague, and a “doctor of divinity” in the Universities of Paris, Cologne, Heidelberg, and Oxford. He traveled through many countries of Europe, circulating the writings of Wycliffe, and declaiming against the corruption of the clergy. Going to Constance to defend Hus, he was arrested and thrown into a fetid dungeon. “Four months of weary imprisonment, in chains, in darkness, on meager diet; the terror, as himself owned, of the stake; sickness; the bland promises of some; the awful threats of others; the persuasion of weaker friends, broke his spirit. In a public session of the Council he retracted all errors against the Catholic faith, especially those of Wycliffe and Hus.” But his remorseless enemies declared that his recantation was ambiguous; new articles were drawn up against him, and he was brought again to trial. His courage now returned, and he declared that he deeply regretted his cowardly recantation, and was resolved to remain even to death to the tenants of Wycliffe and Hus, believing them to be the true and pure doctrine of the gospel, just as their lives were blameless and godly. In a powerful and magnificent oration of twelve hours, occupying two days of the Council, he replied to the accusations against him, and vindicated the scriptural truth of the principals to which he had devoted his life; and from his iniquitous judges he appealed to the Supreme Judge, before whom they, as well as himself, should shortly appear. Condemned to death, he prayed for his persecutors. His heroism shone with increasing splendor as he approached the scene of martyrdom. With cheerful countenance he sung many songs and hymns to God. Bound to the stake, enclosed up to his breast with faggots, he sung with deep untrembling voice, “Hanc animam, in flammis, offero, Christe, tibi”—“This soul of mine, in flames of fire, O Christ, I offer Thee.” His ashes were also cast into the Rhine.

The execution of Hus and Jerome occasioned a storm of passionate indignation in Bohemia and Moravia. After the burning of Hus, an assembly of fifty-four Bohemian and Moravian nobles indorsed his doctrines, and protested against the action of the Council of Constance, and leagued themselves together to protect the free preaching of God’s word on their estates. Pope Martin V. inaugurated a crusade against Bohemia; and in a war of eleven years (1420-1431), characterized by the greatest atrocity, the Bohemians were almost uniformly victorious. The horrible Catholic butcheries of the Bohemian prisoners were met by equally awful reprisals on the part of the Hussites, from whom the spirit of Hus departed more and more as the hideous conflict went on. They became divided into two factions—one called the Calixtines (from calix, a cup), who chiefly demanded the restoration of the cup to the “laity” in communion; and the other Taborites (from Mount Tabor, their principal fortress, sixty miles south of Prague), who desired to sweep away all traditions and return to the simplicity of the apostolic church. The Catholic, not being able to conquer these stubborn “heretics,” made, in the Council of Basel, in 1433, some illusory concessions to the Calixtines, which were withdrawn by Pope Pius II. in 1462; but these arts accomplished their purpose in permanently dividing the Bohemians and reducing the Calixtines to submission. The Taborites were signally defeated by the Catholics in 1434, and their stronghold was taken and destroyed in 1453. The remnant fled to the borders of Moravia and Silesia, and reappeared about 1460 as the Bohemian Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), who utterly renounced all war and tradition and sought to return to apostolic usages; and who, though cruelly persecuted by the Catholics, fled to the deserts and caves (being called Cave-dwellers), and overcame now, not by the weapons of carnal warfare, but by the blood of the Lamb. Some joined the reformers in the sixteenth century. Others retained a separate organization; and to them the Moravians of the eighteenth century retrace a succession.—The galling feudal ecclesiastical oppressions suffered by the Bohemians were the chief cause of their taking up arms. The lords had long been encroaching more and more on the peasants’ rights, increasing their burden and decreasing their privileges, and reducing them to almost abject slavery. They had to work for their lords in fair weather, and for themselves on rainy days; and were not allowed their common rights in the pastures, forests and rivers. On holidays they had to turn out and gather fruit for the folks at the Castle. When a peasant died, the lord’s agent came and carried off from the widow’s home the heriot or best chattel, perhaps the horse or cow on which the family was dependent. And to the Catholic priests the peasants had to pay the tenth part of all their corn, grass, wood, colts, calves, lambs, pigs, geese, chickens, eggs, wool, milk, honey, wax, cheese, and butter; and, besides, they had to pay the priests money for baptism, for confirmation, for marriage, for confession, for indulgences, for extreme unction, and for burial. It was no wonder that, in the dark age, the poor victims of such oppression mixed political and ecclesiastical affairs together in their minds, and demanded in one breath both civil and religious freedom.

About the year 1400, in the depths of winter, the Catholics committed great depredations upon the Waldenses who inhabited the valley of Pragela in Piedmont. About 1460 the Inquisition preyed cruelly upon the Waldenses in the French valleys of Faissiniere, Argentiere and Loyse—the poor and peaceful lovers of truth fleeing with their children and valuables to the ops of the mountains and hiding in caves. Their merciless enemies placed large quantities of wood at the entrances of the caves and set it on fire, and suffocated, it is said, four hundred children in their cradles or in the arms of their dead mothers; while multitudes, to avoid suffocation, leaped down upon the rocks below, and were either dashed to pieces or immediately slaughtered by the brutal soldiery. All the inhabitants of the valley of Loyse, three thousand, are said to have perished in this campaign. In 1488 an army of eighteen thousand Catholics made war upon the Waldenses of Piedmont, who at length losing their patience, and departing from the peaceful principles of their ancestors, armed themselves with wooden targets and cross-bows, and for a while fought in defense of their wives and children, everywhere defending the defiles of their mountains, and repelling the invaders. Some were driven by fear from public to private worship; and others conformed to Catholicism. Evidences henceforth increase of a degeneracy from their primitive purity of faith and practice.

Jerome Savonarola, of Florence (born 1452), endeavoring to stem the corrupt torrent of the Italian Pagan renaissance, was tortured, strangled, and burnt, in 1498, by the sentence of Pope Alexander Borgia.

The notorious Spanish Inquisition was established at Seville in 1480 by the blind religious zeal of Queen Isabella and the unscrupulous avarice of King Ferdinand and Pope Sixtus IV.—the grand object of this famous institution being to make money by the confiscation of the property of wealthy “heretics.” In 1481, the first year of its operation, two thousand persons were burned. In the sixteen years of generalship of Thomas de Torquemada (1483-1498), it is said that 8,800 were condemned to the flames, 6,500 burned in effigy, and 90,000 subjected to imprisonment, confiscation and other penalties. Llorente, the secretary and official historian of the Spanish Inquisition, estimates that institution, during the whole period of its existence, burned about 30,000 persons alive, and condemned about 300,000 to punishments less severe than death. In 1492, persecution was begun against the Jews, of whom 500,000 were expelled from Spain and their wealth confiscated. In seventy years the population of Spain was reduced from 10,000,000 to 6,000,000 by the banishment of Jews, Moors and Morescoes (“Christianized” Moors), the most wealthy and intelligent of the inhabitants of that country.

The art of printing was invented in Germany about 1440, and about 10,000 editions of books were published in this century. The earliest known printed book was the Mazarine Latin Bible, issued about the year 1455.—In 1492 Columbus discovered America; and in 1498 Vasco de Gama, a Portuguese navigator, having doubled the Cape of Good Hope, sailed to India. By the invention of printing, knowledge was disseminated among the masses of the people; and by these maritime discoveries nearly all the habitable globe opened up to European access.

As we are now upon the eve of the great Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, when the Lutherans, Episcopalians and Presbyterians originated as distinct communions by seceding from the Catholic body, it is exceedingly interesting to notice the candid admission of the careful Lutheran historian, J. L. Mosheim, in reference to the origin of the Baptists. “The true origin of the Anabaptists or Mennonites (or Baptists),” says this learned and impartial writer, “is hidden in the depths of antiquity, and is, of consequence, extremely difficult to be ascertained. They are not entirely in an error when they boast of their descent from the Waldenses, Petrobrusians and other ancient sects, who are usually considered as witness of the truth in the times of general darkness and superstition. Before the rise of Luther and Calvin, there lay concealed in almost all countries of Europe, particularly in Bohemia, Moravia, Switzerland and Germany, many persons who adhered tenaciously to the following doctrine, which the Waldenses, Wycliffites and Hussites had maintained, some in a more disguised, and others in a more open and public manner, viz.: ‘That the kingdom of Christ, or the visible church which He had established upon earth, was an assembly of true and real saints, and ought, therefore, to be inaccessible to the wicked and unrighteous, and also exempt from all those institutions which human prudence suggests, to oppose the progress of iniquity, or to correct and reform transgressors.’” I know of no people who are, by their principles, so closely identified as Old School or Bible Baptists with this primitive, spiritual, truly apostolic succession. Again: Two learned members of the Dutch Reformed Church, Ypeig and Dermout, the first a professor of theology Groningnen, and the second the Royal Chaplain, appointed by the King of Holland to examine into the origin and history of the Dutch Baptists, made a careful investigation of the facts, and their book, published in 1819, made the following important declaration as a result of their careful and impartial researches:”The Baptists may be considered as the only Christian community which had stood since the days of the Apostles, and as a Christian society which has preserved pure the doctrine of the gospel through all ages. The notion of the Catholics that their communion is the most ancient, is erroneous.” The doctrine of the gospel is, I believe, no where else maintained in such purity as among Bible Baptists.

In reference to the period at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, Mr. W. E. H. Lecky well remarks “Wherever the eye was turned, it encountered the signs of disorganization, of corruption, and of decay. For the long night of mediaevalism was now drawing to a close, and the chaos that precedes resurrection was supreme.”

1. He did not feel sufficiently acquainted with the Hebrew and Greek languages to translate directly from the original Scriptures. His version, therefore, is not distinguished for critical accuracy; but it was by far the most valuable addition made to English literature before the sixteenth century.

Chapter XVI. Sixteenth Century.[1]

The sixteenth century was the century of the dim, early, stormy morning, when the true white light of the unrisen sun shot athwart the mediaeval night of Roman Catholic Europe, but was soon greatly, and in Southern Europe almost totally, obscured by the regathered masses of heavy and tempestuous clouds, reddened by the infernal glare of the rekindled fires of persecution.

The sixteenth century was the period of the fixed and executed purpose of the popes to build at Rome a religious structure to be known as “St. Peter’s,” designed to eclipse in costly and colossal magnificence all the other temples of earth; and, though intended by the popes to be a grand perpetual monument of Roman Catholic glory, yet designed by Providence to be a grand perpetual monument of Roman Catholic shame, proclaiming forever to the world the bottomless abyss of corruption into which an organization calling itself the “Holy Catholic Church” had descended to offer in the public marts of Europe the unblushing sale for gold of unlimited indulgences for past, present and future sins—the declared object of the popes being to devote the gold to the erection of the cathedral of “St. Peter’s;” against which tremendous and unparalleled abomination Martin Luther[2] was raised up by the Holy Spirit to utter a mighty trumpet-blast of God’s absolute and eternal predestination of His people to everlasting life, of justification by faith alone, and salvation by grace alone, which reverberated all over Roman Catholic Europe, aroused sleeping millions from their nocturnal slumbers, and shook to its center the Kingdom of Mystical Babylon. The sixteenth was the century, too, of the great counter-blast against Luther and Protestantism[3] in the necessitated external reformation of Catholic morals; in the perpetration of terrific massacres, and the waging of protracted, desolating and bloody wars; in the revivification and intensification of the horrors of the Reformed Inquisition; in the permanent petrifaction, in the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, of the mediaeval Catholic heretical doctrines of tradition, free-will, Semi-Pelagianism, falling from grace, meritoriousness of good works, transubstantiation, baptismal regeneration, sacerdotalism, Roman apostolical (or, as it should be called, apostatical) images, and indulgences; and in the establishment of the Society of Jesuits, with their Pelagianism, probabilism, and cunning casuistry, their absolute devotion, in both body and soul, to the papacy, their perverted education of European youth, and their accommodating, compromising, mongrel, and therefore “very successful missions” to India, Japan, China, and North and South America. In reference to their Chinese mission, the Schaff-Herzog “Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge” remarks (as, indeed, might well be remarked of all the other Jesuit missions): “It seemed doubtful whether it was the Jesuits who had converted the Chinese, or the Chinese who had converted the Jesuits, to such an extent had the missionaries modified Christianity, and amalgamated it with heathen elements.”

The sixteenth was the century of the birth, from Roman Catholicism, of Lutheranism, Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism—High Church Episcopalianism departing least, and Presbyterianism, the youngest daughter, departing most, from the principles of their old mother.

The sixteenth, also, was the century of the almost universal advocacy and practice, by the Protestants, of religious intolerance and persecution of one another and of the Roman Catholics—a principle inherited by the Protestants and Catholics, like Pilate and Herod, though at enmity on most other subjects, heartily agreed in inflicting the most dreadful persecutions upon those poor inoffensive lovers of the truth stigmatized as “Anabaptists” or “Re-baptizers,” who fellowshipped neither Rome nor any of her daughters, and who had inherited their fundamental principle of a pure, spiritual church membership, through the Waldenses, Cathari, Paulicians, Novatians and Montanists, from the apostolic church as plainly characterized in the New Testament. Like the Catholics, so the Protestants, in this century, almost everywhere blended and identified the interests of religion and politics; and so deep and intense was the ecclesiastical and political oppression of the down-trodden peasant-serfs of Germany (as related under the head of the fifteenth century) that even some called Anabaptists, crazed with excitement in those dark, rough, troubled times, confounded political with religious rights, and, in connection with Papist and Lutheran serfs, assumed the weapons of carnal warfare, sought to establish temporal kingdoms, and some proceeded to great extravagances and excesses, and justly perished in their folly. “It is the greatest injustice,” says Prof. Philip Schaff, “to make the Anabaptists as such responsible for the extravagances that led to the tragedy at Munster. Their original and final tendencies were orderly and peaceful. They disowned the wild fanaticism of Thomas Munzer, John Bockelsohn, and Knipperdolling. They were opposed to war and violence.”

A full narrative of the important religious events of this stirring century would fill a large volume; but my treatment of the subject will necessarily be brief.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Antichristian Rome had apparently slain nearly all her enemies, whose dead bodies lay unburied “in the streets of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt,” not yet restored to life by the voice from Heaven; and she seemed, no doubt, to herself to “sit as a queen, who should see no sorrow.” Pope Julius II, (1503-1513) was a bold, unscrupulous politician and warrior, who devoted his administration to intriguing and fighting for his own aggrandizement. In 1506, changing the plans of Nicholas V, he laid the foundation-stone of the present cathedral of “St. Peters,” which was finished in 1644 at a cost of sixty million dollars. The “elegant heathen Pope” Leo X (1513-1521), having exhausted his treasury in lavish expenditures, and yet desiring to immortalize his administration by the completion of “St. Peter’s,” commissioned and sent out a number of Dominican monks to sell indulgences or pardons for sins in order to raise money for this purpose. John Tetzel, one of these monks, went to Juterboch, four miles from Wittenberg, in Saxony, and, with unequalled exaggerations and shamelessness, “sold grace for gold as dear or cheap as he could.” He had a price for every sin, and so deluded the people that money poured into his coffers from men, women and children, rich and poor, even from beggars; and he boasted that he had saved more souls by his indulgences than the Apostle Peter had saved by his sermons, and that the red cross he carried had as much efficacy as the cross of Christ. He declared that Christ since His ascension had nothing more to do with the church till the last day, but had entrusted all to the pope, His vicar and vice-regent. Tetzel had, years before, been convicted of infamous crimes; and now he and his associates squandered large amounts of their iniquitous gains in the most abominable dissipations.

The cup of Rome’s iniquity seemed indeed, to be full. God no longer suffered this diabolical mockery of His holy religion to proceed unrebuked and unrestrained. Foreknowing all things, He had for thirty-three years been preparing, in the heart of Germany and in the bosom even of the Roman communion, a man qualified by his experience and by the Divine Spirit to meet this very emergency.

Martin Luther, the Elijah of the Protestant Reformation, the ablest man of the sixteenth century, the greatest of all Germans, and one of the grandest characters of all time, the founder of the German language and of modern public schools, the typical hero of the German race, the author of the best German hymns, and the translator of the best German Bible, was born at Eisleben, in the county of Mansfield, in Thuringia, a central district of Germany, November 10th, 1483. His parents, like their ancestors, were poor but free peasants. The day after his birth he was “baptized in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul.” His parents and teachers exercised the most rigid discipline toward him, his mother once whipping him so hard that the blood flowed; his father flogging him so severely that he ran away for awhile; and his teacher lashing him fifteen times in a single morning because he did not know what had not been taught him. In his days “children were martyrs,” he says; “the schoolmasters were tyrants and executioners; the schools, jails and hells; and in spite of fear and misery, floggings and tremblings, scarcely anything was learned.” Luther was taught “the Psalter, and the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and Latin and German hymns.” He was so trained that “he paled and trembled at the mere mention of the name of Christ, whom he had been taught to regard as a severe and angry law giver and judge, a second Moses, more rigorous than the ancient of national Israel.” His father designed to make a lawyer of him, and sent him off to school at Magdeburg a year, and then to Eisenach four years, where he formed on of the poor “bread-choirs,” going round from house to house, and singing hymns and begging his bread. In 1501, at the age of eighteen, his parents sent him to the University of Erfurt, where he became a Bachelor of Philosophy in 1502, and a Master of Arts in 1505. His moral character was at all times unblemished. From early life he had serious religious impressions. These impressions were deepened by the sudden death of an intimate friend, and by his own narrow escape from death, first by a severe illness, and then by lightning. Vividly realizing the vanity of the world, he resolved to forsake it, and at that time knowing of no better way of doing so, he entered the Augustinian convent at Erfurt, July 17th, 1505. This was the best Roman Catholic Order, and traced its origin to Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in North Africa, in the fifth century. Here Luther “subjected himself to the severest monastic discipline, and the humble services of sweeper, porter and beggar. His deep mental conflicts, penances and mortifications of the flesh seriously undermined his health and brought him to the brink of despair. He found a whole Bible and read it diligently, but it did not bring him peace.” Deeply burdened with sin, and not satisfied with his infant “baptism” or any other Roman Catholic form, he invented continually new forms of penance; but “all the while head and heart told him that outward acts could never banish sin.” “I tormented myself to death,” he said, “to make my peace with God, but I was in darkness and found it not.” He became a full monk in 1506; and his prayers, and vigils, and fasts, and castigations were so excessive that he says that all his fellow-monks will bear him witness that, if ever a monk entered Heaven through monkery, he also could thus have entered. He revered the “Fathers,” and adored the pope, and sought zealously and heartily to obey their teachings; but no comfort came to his sin-sick soul. John Staupitz, a mystic, and the Vicar-General of the Augustinian Order in Germany, seemed to know something about the truth; he sympathized with Luther in his spiritual conflicts, and said to him, “There is no true repentance other than that which flows from the love of God and His righteousness;” and an old monk referred Luther to the Apostle’s declaration that man is justified through grace by faith. He searched the Scriptures, and found to his sweet joy that it was even so; and, whereas formerly there was no word in Scripture more bitter to him than repentance, there was now no other word that was sweeter. Day and night the Apostle’s words concerning the forgiveness of sins by grace through faith occupied his mind; but he did not yet find full rest in Christ. In 1507 he was ordained a priest; and in 1508 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in Wittenberg University. In 1509 he was made a Bachelor of Theology, and in 1513 a Doctor of Theology. In 1510 he visited Rome on business for the Augustinian Order; and there he saw something of the depth of the mystery of Roman Catholic iniquity, so that he afterwards said he would not take a hundred thousand florins instead of having seen Rome. While devoutly, on his knees, creeping up the Scala Sancto, or holy stairway, he seemed to hear an inward voice crying to him, “The just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17). Pondering these words on his homeward journey, at length their full meaning burst upon him. “Through the gospel that righteousness is revealed which avails before God—by which He, out of grace and mere compassion, justifies us through faith. Here I felt at once,” he says, “that I was wholly born again, and that I had entered through open doors into paradise itself. That passage of Paul was truly to me the gate of paradise.” His own experience had been strikingly similar to Paul’s; that declaration of the Apostle henceforth became the central doctrine of his life and his theology; Paul, his favorite Apostle; and the epistles to the Romans and Galatians, his favorite Scriptures; the latter he styled, in his humorous way, his wife, his Catharine von Bora. A man with such a profound Pauline experience knew the difference between law and gospel—knew that men could not merit the forgiveness of their sins through their own works, or be justified before God through outward observances; and he could not help detesting the corrupt and corrupting legalism and Pharisaism of Rome. And when the monster Tetzel—fit tool for such Satanic business—came in four miles of Wittenberg, and, to make money for himself and the pope, hawked, with brazen impudence, the papal indulgences for sin, and when Luther learned in the confessional at Wittenberg that many of his townspeople had bought indulgences, and considered them a sufficient covering and atonement for the grossest sins, the spirit of the God-taught professor, like Paul’s at Athens, was deeply stirred within him, and he resolved to denounce the horrible abomination. Without consulting any man, and without considering the tremendous consequences, he prepared, and at noonday, Oct. 31st, 1517, he nailed to the door of the “Castle Church” in Wittenberg, ninety-five Theses or Propositions denouncing indulgences. The next day was the “Festival of All-Saints” at Wittenberg. Large numbers of people flocked to the city from all quarters, and were intensely excited by Luther’s Theses, and many rejoiced, some from political and some from religious motives, that some one had been found bold enough at last to bell the great papal cat. Instead of taking back home with them indulgences for sin, they carried Luther’s Theses; the newly invented printing presses rapidly reproduced them; and in two weeks Germany, and in four weeks, Christendom, was ablaze. The Protestant Reformation was begun. In his Theses and explanatory sermons Luther declared that “the inward spiritual facts of man’s religious experience are of infinitely more value than their expression in stereotyped forms recognized by the church, and that in each a solemn thing as forgiveness of sin man can go to God directly without human mediation.” During the Apostolic Age and every since, God’s people had thus been going immediately to Him, humbly trusting in the merits of Christ for pardon and salvation. All the children of God are priests unto Him; and Christ is the only and all-sufficient High Priest mediating between them and the Father. “All the scaffolding that impudent priests had raised to their profit between God and the soul of man was thrown down by the scriptural truth proclaimed by Luther, and man was brought face to face with his God. The word of forgiveness descended pure from on high without passing through a passing through a thousand corrupting channels.”—Luther for several years discovered and denounced more and more of the imposture, corruption and unscripturalness of Roman Catholicism. The pope at first affected to treat him with contempt; but, finding that the truth was everywhere gaining ground, and his dominion threatened, he in 1518 summoned Luther to appear at Rome; but, by the friendly intervention of the Prince Elector of Saxony, it was arranged that Luther should meet the pope’s legate, Cajetan, at Augsburg, in 1518, and also another papal legate, Miltitz, at Altenburg, in 1519. During the latter year he also had a public controversy with John Eck, at Leipsic, on the subject of indulgences and penance, and the authority of the Roman “Church” and of the pope. Leo X, feeling that he could endure this dangerous opposition no longer, in 1520 excommunicated Luther; and the latter, a few months afterwards, boldly burned the papal bull, together with the Catholic Canon Law and False Decretals, and thus declared open war with the Roman Antichrist. Summoned by Charles V, the Catholic King of Spain and Emperor of Germany, the most powerful monarch of his time, to appear before him at the Diet of Worms in 1921, Luther, to his friends who warned him that he would be burned there as Hus had been burned at Constance, replied: “Though they should kindle a fire as high as Heaven between Wittenberg and Worms, yet I will go and appear in the name of the Lord; yea, I will confess Christ in the very mouth of Behemoth.” And, as he was nearing Worms, he said to a friend who warned him of his danger: “To Worms was I called, and to Worms must I go; and, were there as many devils there as tiles upon the roofs, yet would I enter into that city.” Before the splendid and imposing assembly, composed of the emperor and more than two hundred princes and nobles, Bishops and archbishops, and five thousand people, April 18th, 1521, Luther calmly and boldly declared that unless his views were proved erroneous by some other authority than by pope or by Council, even by clear testimonies of Scripture or plain arguments, he could not and would not retract anything he had written; that his conscience would not permit him to recant; and he concluded his remarks with these undaunted words: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me. Amen.” In this, one of the sublimest scenes in history, Luther had been divinely gifted with the ability and boldness to assert the God-given right of freedom of conscience against all mere human authority. At this time it is said that Luther was in the habit of devoting three hours daily to earnest prayer to God. He was allowed by the emperor to leave Worms on a safe-conduct that gave him twenty-one days in which to return to Wittenberg; and May 8th the emperor issued an edict placing him under the ban of the empire, declaring him an outlaw, and forbidding all people to give him food or fire or shelter. The object of Charles V, in this iniquity was to conciliate the pope, and make the latter favorable to his driving the French out of Milan and Genoa; for on the same day, May 8th, a secret treaty of alliance was signed between the emperor and the pope, in which treaty the emperor promised to employ all his power against Luther, and the pope promised to help the emperor against the French. But Divine Providence defeated the wicked plans of those two political and ecclesiastical chiefs of “Christendom;” for they turned their arms against each other after the French had been conquered, and in 1527 Rome was sacked by a German army in the emperor’s name, and more pitilessly pillaged than it had been a thousand years before by the Vandals, and the pope became a prisoner and a tool of his imperial master; and Luther lived twenty-five years after he was outlawed at Worms, and then died peacefully in his bed. The German Princes, at the Diet of Worms, presented a list of one hundred and one grievances of their nation against Rome, reciting the outrageous corruptions, extortions and oppressions perpetrated by the pope and his agents upon Germany; but the emperor and the pope, for their own selfish aggrandizement, refused to concede a peaceful reform of these grievances. This wicked refusal, says F. Seebohm, “involved ten generations in the turmoils of revolution, producing the Protestant Reformation, the Peasants; War and the Sack of Rome, the Revolt of the Netherlands, the Thirty Years’ War, The Puritan Revolution in England under Oliver Cromwell, and the formation of the great independent American Republic, until the advancing tide of modern civilization came to a head and broke in all the terrors of the French Revolution. It is impossible not to see in the course of the events of this remarkable period an onward movement as irresistible and certain as that of the geological changes which have passed over the physical world. In view of the bloodshed and misery which, humanly speaking, might apparently have been spared, who can fail to be impressed with the terrible responsibility, in the eye of history, testing upon those by whom, in the sixteenth century, at the time of the crisis, the reform was refused? They were given utterly powerless, indeed, to stop the ultimate flow of the tide; but they had the terrible power to turn what might otherwise have been a steady and peaceful stream into a turbulent and devastating flood.”—Luther was protected by the national feeling of Germany from attack; but Frederic, the Elector of Saxony, fearing the most able and famous of the professors in his new University of Wittenberg might fall victim to the emperor’s ban, had him stopped, on his return from Worms, at Eisenach, by a band of armed masqued knights, and carried to the fortified castle of the Wartburg. Here he remained incognito ten months, and devoted his time to the best German translation of the New Testament that has ever been made—by far the most important work that he was ever enabled to perform for the German people, and the instrument which, under Providence, contributed most to the permanence of the Reformation. His translation of the New Testament, almost entirely his own unaided work, was published in 1522; and his translation of the own unaided work, was published in 1522; and his translation of the Old Testament, in which he was assisted by Melanchthon, Bugenhagen and Cruciger, was published in 1534.—During the first and most glorious period of Luther’s Christian life, ending about 1522, when, as Prof. T. M. Lindsay remarks in the Encyclopedia Britannica, he was “raised above himself,” he came to be virtually almost a Bible Baptist. In his tract on the Sacrament of Baptism, published in 1519, he distinguishes carefully between the sign and the thing signified—the ordinance of baptism being the mere outward sign of the far more important spiritual reality within, the death to sin, the new birth, and a new life in Christ. He considered that there was no eternally saving virtue either in the literal water of baptism or in the literal bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper; but that the true virtue lay in the living, spiritual, justifying faith within. From this simple scriptural view of the ordinances he made the first departure in his “Babylonian Captivity of the Church” published in 1520, wherein he adopted a view similar to Calvin’s—that the ordinances are seals or pledges of the inward grace. But, after he came in contact with the “Anabaptists,” he made a still farther departure from the symbolical view of the ordinances, because he thought that neither his first nor his second views would justify infant baptism; and, in his Sermon on Baptism, in 1535, his natural conservatism went far backwards towards his old Roman Catholic standpoint, mediaeval sacramentalism, substituting the outward ordinances for the efficacious atonement of Christ and the inward grace of justifying faith. From his favorite Apostle, in his favorite epistle, which has been called “the Magna Charta of Evangelical Protestantism,” Luther ought to have learned not to imitate the foolish Judaizing Galatians, who, “having begun in the Spirit,” thought to be “made perfect by the flesh” (Gal. 3:3).—In December, 1521, a party arose in Wittenberg who wished to carry out the Reformation at once to its consistent results, to make the Bible absolutely the only standard of faith and practice, and to return immediately, like the Taborites or Bohemian Brethren and some of the Waldenses, to the original simplicity of Divine worship. Some of the University students and citizens, and Carlstadt, one of the professors of the University, joined earnestly in this movement. Urged on by some sincere but misguided men from Zwickau (new Bohemia), Storch, Marx and Stubner, who mixed some great errors with many important truths, and are described by historians as half-crazy, they not only taught the spirituality of true religion, and denounced the infant baptism and the multifarious idolatry of Roman Catholicism (which course was entirely scriptural), but they proceeded to such lengths as to enter the Catholic houses of worship, interrupt the services, destroy the pictures, statues and altars, and profess to be infallibly inspired and endowed with the gift of prophecy, so that all human learning, and, as some of them said, even the Scriptures, were useless. Luther, hearing of these proceedings, and feeling that the cause of the Reformation was greatly endangered by such violence, suddenly left the Wartburg and came to Wittenberg, at the risk of his life, and against the remonstrances of the Elector of Saxony, who told him that Duke George would instantly execute upon him the imperial edict of death; Luther replied that God would protect him, and that he would go even if it should rain Duke Georges for nine days, and each one of them were nine times more wrathful than the original. By Luther’s powerful preaching, peace and order were soon restored, and the excitement subsided at Wittenberg. He now prudently declared that these Catholic forms were indifferent and permissible; though, afterwards, when he thought that his followers were prepared for the instruction, he taught them to discontinue many of these vanities.—The Peasants’ War in Germany, in 1524 and 1525, has been described as the “terrible scream of oppressed humanity.” “Their oppressions had gradually increased in severity as the nobles became more extravagant, and the clergy more sensual. The example of free Switzerland encouraged the hope of success, and from 1476 to 1517 there were risings here and there among the peasants of the south of Germany. The Reformation, by diffusing sentiments favorable to liberty, was not indeed the cause, but the occasion of the great insurrection of 1525; although Luther, Melanchthon, and the other leading reformers, while urging the nobles to justice and humanity, strongly reprobated the ultimate violent proceedings of the peasants.” The Twelve Articles expressing the demands of the peasants are now almost universally commended for their moderation. They asked the right to choose their own pastors; agreed to pay, not small tithes, but tithes of corn for the support of the pastors and the poor; they asked for freedom from serfdom; that wild game and fish should be free to all; that woods and forests, not yet purchased by the nobles, should be free to all for fuel; that the peasants should not render more services than had been required of their forefathers; that for additional services wages should be paid; that rent, when above the value of the land, should be properly valued and lowered; that definite punishments for crimes should be fixed; that common unpurchased land should be given up to common use; that death-gifts (that is, the right of the lord to take the best chattel of the deceased tenant) should be done away with; and the peasants, in conclusion, declared that any of these articles proved to be contrary to the Scriptures should be null and void. Warned by the terrible French Revolution at the close of the eighteenth century, Germany granted the most of these rights to her peasants early in the nineteenth century. But the German Princes of the sixteenth century were in no mood to grant them. Luther’s exhortations to them had no effect in abating what he called their tyranny and insanity; nor did he succeed in inducing the peasants to cease their mad rebellion. “Had he thrown the weight of his influence into the peasants’ scales,” says Prof. Lindsay, “and brought the middle classes, who would certainly have followed him, to the side of the peasants, a peaceful solution would in all probability have been arrived at, and the horrors of the massacre averted. But Luther, bold enough against the pope or the emperor, never had courage to withstand that authority to which he was constantly accustomed, the German Princes. He trusted too much in fine language. His advice for the choice of arbiters came ten months too late. The bloody struggle came; the stream of rebellion and destruction rolled on to Thuringia and Saxony, and Luther apparently lost his head, and actually encouraged the nobles in their sanguinary suppression of the revolt, in his pamphlet entitled ‘Against the Murdering Robbing Rats of Peasants,’ where he hounds on the authorities to ‘stab, kill and strangle!’ The Princes leagued together, and routed the peasants everywhere,” and butchered 50,000 of the; 100,000 perished during the war; and the survivors were subjected to greater oppression than ever. The guilt of the Peasants’ War has been charged upon the “Anabaptists” by ill-informed and prejudiced writers; perhaps because the “Anabaptists” were known to be the friends of freedom, and because a leader of the peasants was Thomas Munzer, who has been generally called an “Anabaptist.” He was a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Theology, a religious mystic and visionary adventurer, who became a disciple of Storch, and advocated some Baptist sentiments, but who himself never had any “baptism” except in infancy, and never practiced the “rebaptism” of those who had been “baptized” in infancy. He was, therefore, a practical Pedobaptist, though he had many spiritual views of the Scripture. It is said that his father had been killed in a quarrel with a feudal lord; and that he himself, because of his spiritual sentiments was driven from city to city. He finally betook himself to the peasants, and espoused their cause, and became their leader. At first disinclined to war, he was, by the alleged inspiration of one Pfeiffer, inducted to resort to arms. Losing his senses, he fiercely incited his followers to the wildest excesses and signed his addresses “Thomas Munzer, with the sword of Gideon.” Escaping from the massacre of his undisciplined army to Frankenhausen, he was captured and beheaded, with Pfeiffer, at Muhlhausen, in May, 1525. “The adherents of Munzer,” says the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia, “did not practice rebaptism, and did not form a congregation.” These settled facts should forever silence the slander unjustly heaped upon the “Anabaptists” as the pretended authors of the Peasants’ War. Luther never advocated the propagation of religion by the sword, and, except against the insurgent peasants, never advised a resort to the weapons of carnal warfare; and he never recovered from the shock produced by the effects of this advice, which crushed for centuries the rights and hopes of the laborers. He vainly deplored the injustice, tyranny and cruelty of the Princes.—To show his decided opposition to the Roman Catholic prohibition of the marriage of priests and nuns (a doctrine of the devils, according to Paul), Luther, in June, 1525, married Catherine von Bora, a nun who, with eight others, had left her convent to worship Christ without the oppression of endless ceremonies. “His marriage was a happy one, and was blessed with six children. He was a tender husband and the most loving of fathers.”

One of the most interesting events of the sixteenth century was the controversy between Desiderius Erasmus, of Rotterdam, and Luther, on the Freedom or the Bondage of the Will. Erasmus’ book, De Libero Arbitrio (Of Free Will), was published Sept., 1524; and Luther’s reply, De Servo Arbitrio (Of the Bondage of the Will), was published Dec., 1525. Erasmus (born 1466, died 1536) was the finest scholar and critic of his age, the chief of the Humanists, the literary precursor and then the cowardly deserter of the Protestant Reformation. He published, in 1516, the first complete edition of the Greek New Testament, from which Luther and Tyndall made their vernacular versions, which became the most powerful levers of the Reformation in Germany and England. In his Praise of Folly (1510) he heavily satirized the superstitions, follies and vices of the monks and schoolmen; but, when the Beast of Rome showed his teeth, he sarcastically confessed that he was not the stuff that martyrs are made of, and he said that he was willing to accept any doctrine that the “church” received. He seems to have been an utter stranger to a genuine spiritual Christian experience; and he died at last in bitterness and darkness. His defense of Free Will, which contains the usual arguments of conditionalism, is admitted to be the weakest of his writings, and is really Pelagian in its nature; as may be seen from his defining free will to be “a power in the human will, by which a man may apply himself to those things which lead unto eternal salvation, or turn away from the same.” “In attacking Luther,” says M. D’Aubigny, “Erasmus selected the point where Romanism is lost in Rationalism,—the doctrine of free will, or the natural power of man.” “I must acknowledge,” said Luther, “that in this controversy you are the only man that has gone to the root of the matter; for I would rather be occupied with this subject than with all those secondary questions about the pope, purgatory and indulgences, with which the enemies of the gospel have hitherto pestered me.” Erasmus’s treatise was so weak that Luther hesitated at first to reply to it. “What! So much eloquence in so bad a cause!” said he; “it is as if a man were to serve up mud and filth in dishes of silver and gold. One can not lay hold of you. You are like an eel that slips through the fingers; or like the fabulous Proteus who changes his form in the very arms of those who wish to grasp him.” Luther’s book is one of the most powerful of his writings, and one of the two (the other being his Catechism) that he never regretted. An English translation of it was published by Elder James Osbourn, at Baltimore, in 1837. In the preface to this edition, Elder Osbourn truly remarks: “From the early part of the sixteenth century, the church of Christ has derived manifold blessings from the pious labors of this distinguished servant of the Lord.” This work of Luther, and Jonathan Edwards’s “Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of the Will,” present an array of solid arguments, from Scripture, reason and fact, in proof of the particularity and efficacy of Divine grace, and of the goodness and holiness of God, which no rationalist, either in or out of any religious organization, has ever been able to answer. Upon an unprejudiced man who admits the perfect inspiration of the Scriptures, or who even admits that there is a God, and that He is omniscient and omnipotent, the effect of these arguments is simply overwhelming. Erasmus, both in his first and his second work. (Hyperaspistes, published in 1526), “treats the dispute entirely from the outside,” says the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The fact is that Arminian writers, as Luther said of “Doctor” Eck, “skim over Scripture almost without touching it, as a spider runs upon water.” Erasmus’s second book, Luther never thought of sufficient force to call for a reply. Luther had been an Augustinian monk, and always most highly esteemed the writings of Augustine, and (except, as already mentioned, about 1519, when he became nearly a Bible Baptist) he always closely adhered to both the Augustinian or Pauline doctrine of monergism (or salvation by grace alone) and Augustine’s inconsistent doctrine of sacramentalism (or salvation by the sacraments or ordinances). Luther rightly maintained that the imperative (or commanding) and the subjunctive (or conditional) moods do not mean the same as the indicative (or declarative) mood, in Scripture any more than in any other writings; and that the imperative and subjunctive moods are often used in Scripture to show, not the ability, but the inability of man, and his utter dependence upon God; that, if man has the free will or ability to choose holiness and go to God, then he has no need of the grace of God, of the atonement of Christ, or of the regeneration of the Holy Ghost; that, without Christ, man can do (not little, but) nothing; that the holy will of God is the perfect standard of right; that the unchangeable moral commandments of God show what unfallen man could and should have done, but what fallen man ought to, but cannot do; that the secret or decretive will of God justly permits (but does not compel) some of His creatures (both angels and men) to depart from Him and go on and perish in their voluntary sins, while the same holy will, with gracious, renewing and almighty power, quickens some of the fallen race of men (though no fallen angels) into spiritual life, conforms them to the Divine image, and makes them infallible heirs of the heavenly inheritance; and that thus both the justice and the grace of God are glorified; that man’s so-called “free will” is, according to the Scriptures, really in total bondage to sin and Satan (John 8:34; Rom. 6:20; 2 Peter 2;19; Rom. 7:14, 44; Acts 8:23; Eph. 2:1, 4:18; Ezek. 36:26; Matt. 7:18, 12:34; John 6:44; Rom. 8:7, 8; 2 Tim. 2:26; Luke 11:21, 22), and that man’s deliverance from that bondage is altogether of the free grace and almighty power of God, who raises men from the death of sin, makes then new creatures in Christ Jesus, and works in them both to will and to do of His own good pleasure (Rom. 3:24, 4:1-8, 16, 11:5,6; Eph. 1:19-20, 2:1-10; 2 Cor. 5:17, 18; John 1:12, 13, 3:3-8; Phil. 1:6, 29, 2:13; James 1:17, 18; 1 Peter 1:1-5; Ps. 110:3; 2 Tim. 1, 9). President Edward, by far the ablest writer on the Freedom of the Will, demonstrates that the arguments of Arminians are as inconsistent with themselves and common sense as they are with Scripture; that every act of the will, like every other event, has a cause, and that cause is the prevailing motive or disposition of the heart; that if freedom of will, undetermined by disposition or inclination of heart, be essential to moral agency, virtue and vice, reward and punishment, praise and blame, then there is no such thing in the universe as moral agency, virtue or vice, just praise or blame, and the most virtuous beings are least worthy of praise, and the most vicious least worthy of blame; that, if a necessary holiness is no holiness, then God and Christ and the elect angels and glorified saints are not holy; that, if it would not be just in God to require of fallen men perfect obedience, because they cannot render such obedience, and if Christ died simply to make satisfaction for the imperfections of our obedience, and to do away with the old rigorous law and put us under a new and milder law, which required no more than imperfect sincere obedience, in compliance with our poor, infirm, impotent circumstances since the fall, then our imperfections are not sins, for they are not transgressions of any existing law, and therefore they do not deserved punishment, and it would have been unjust in God not to have given His Son to die for us, and not to give His grace to all the fallen family of man, and thus salvation is not of grace, but is a debt which God owes us and is bound to bestow; that the doctrine of the sovereignty or self-determining power of the human will, or the ability of man to turn himself from sin to God, teaches men that salvation is in their own power, lulls them in carnal security, leads them to postpone eternal things to a more convenient season, and thus to perish in their sins; that God, by the withdrawal of His sustaining influence, is no more than proper cause of sin than the sun, by its departure, is the proper cause of darkness and cold, but God is thus proved to be the fountain of all holiness, as the sun is proved to be the fountain of light and heat; that it would be strange arguing indeed, because men never commit sin only when God leaves them to themselves, and always sin when He does so, that therefore their sin is not from themselves, but from God, and so that God must be a sinful being, as strange as it would be to argue, because it is always dark when the sun is gone, and never dark when the sun is present, that therefore all darkness is from the sun, and that the sun itself is dark and cold, and its beams are black and frosty; that God overrules all the evil that He permits for the ultimate good of His people and glory of His name; that the crucifixion of Christ was, as an act of His murderers, the most horrible of all sins, but, as the permission and appointment of God, was the most glorious of all possible exhibitions of the Divine holiness and goodness, perfectly demonstrating God’s infinite hatred of sin and, at the same time, His infinite love of sinners; that God’s numerous predictions, in the Scriptures, of future events, prove His foreknowledge of the innumerable volitions of future events, and, though knowledge of an event does not cause that event, yet, as an event cannot be different from certain foreknowledge of it; that, if the Scriptures are false in declaring that God foreknows all things, then He must be imperfect, constantly learning new things, exercising a precarious government over the world, and He must be the most changeable, embarrassed and miserable of all beings, and therefore not God the omniscient, omnipotent, and existed alone from eternity, and created all things out of nothing, and disposed of all things in His providence, with all the surrounding circumstances, exactly foreknowing all the results, then, certainly, in one sense, His foreknowledge of all things is equivalent to His foreordination of all things, including the volitions of his creatures, yet without the slightest degree of sin on His part, as the Most Holy God tempts no one to sin. The sinful carnal mind of fallen darkened rationalism paints this certain truth of nature and Scripture in the most revolting colors, preferring that senseless and heartless fate or chance should sit at the helm of the universe; but the regenerated, enlightened, spiritual mind of the child of God incomparably prefers that his Holy and Heavenly Father should sit at the helm, and direct and work all things according to the counsel of His own will. The foreknowledge of God is, in one sense, so evidently identical to His foreordination that some of the most able living conditionally propose to revolutionize the Arminian theology, and make consistent with itself by the denial of God’s foreknowledge of future contingent events (see the articles headed “Will” in McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, and in the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge). It is maintained by the leading Calvinistic (or Presbyterian) writers of the present century that the controversy between Luther and Erasmus, while it was nominally about free will, was really about ability; that Augustine and Luther, by denying free will to man since the fall, intended simply to deny to fallen man the power to turn himself to God; that all creatures, whether fallen or unfallen, are free agents, or endowed with power to will or act according to their nature or character, and thus are justly accountable for acts determined by their character, whether that character or inward state be inherited or acquired, or induced by the grace of God; and that all men, being contained seminally and representatively in Adam, and sinning and dying in him, are also responsible for that depraved nature or character, which is the fountain of all their iniquities. This modern criticism seems to me to be a distinction without a difference; for, if the will of fallen man is inevitably restrained from spiritual good by his innate depravity, he cannot be said to be truly free (his fallen will always preferring evil)—especially as Christ declares that the sinner is the servant (doulos, the born slave) of sin, and must be made free of the Son if he be free indeed (John 8:34, 36).

While Martin Luther had great spiritual light on the doctrine of grace, the crime of religious persecution, and other matters, he was in great spiritual darkness on many other subjects. Among the latter, I will name the most important, as follows: His urging the Princes to war on the Peasants; his increasing hatred, during the last twenty years of his life, of the “Anabaptists” and of all others who differed from him; his traditionalism; his sacramentalism; his assumption of infallibility, making himself a pope, considering himself the authoritative judge both of the meaning and the authenticity of Scripture; his thus rejecting the books of Esther, Jonah, James and Revelation, and his criticism of the books of Chronicles, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Hebrews and Jude; And his advising Henry VIII, of England to marry his second wife without getting a divorce from his first, and his authorizing, or granting a “dispensation” to Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, the princely champion of the Reformation, to do the same thing, which, to the great scandal of the morals and of the cause he espoused, the latter did, thus having two wives at once, and a large family by each. This pope-imitating “dispensation” was drawn up and signed by Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg, December 19th, 1539, and afterwards signed by seven other Protestant ministers; the prudent attempt to keep it secret failed. Luther was himself of blameless morals, and of high moral courage, too, except against Protestant Princes; but this serious practical error contributed to unsettle Protestant morals, and to make Wittenberg and Hesse centers of moral corruption; insomuch that he, shortly before his death, complained of Wittenberg as a Sodom, and, for a while, actually abandoned it. On a mission to settle a quarrel between the counts of Mansfield and some of their subjects, he died, in triumphant faith, at his birth-place, Eisleben, February 18th, 1546.

“In the northern parts of Europe” (for various political, pecuniary, moral and religious reasons), says Macaulay, “the victory of Protestantism was rapid and decisive. In fifty years from the day which Luther burned the pope’s bull, it attained its highest ascendancy—an ascendancy which it soon lost and which it never regained. In England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Livonia, Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, Wurtemberg, the Palatinate, in several cantons of Switzerland, in the Northern Netherlands, the Reformation had completely triumphed; and in all the other countries on the northern side of the Alps and the Pyrenees, it seemed on the point of triumphing. But the great outbreak of Protestantism in the north of Europe produced an equally violent outbreak of Catholic zeal in the south—the former a reformation of doctrine, and the latter a reformation of manners and discipline. The latter was also marked by the matchless Roman Catholic policy, the unscrupulous cunning of the Order of Jesuits, and the merciless fires of the Inquisition. Between the two hostile regions lay, geographically as well as morally, a great debatable land—France, Belgium, Southern Germany, Hungary and Poland. The history of the two succeeding generations is the history of the great struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism for the possession of this doubtful territory. All the weapons of carnal and of spiritual warfare were employed. Both sides may boast of great talents and of great virtues. Both have to blush for many follies and crimes. At first, the chances seemed to be decidedly in favor of Protestantism; but the victory remained with the Church of Rome. On every point she was successful. If we overleap another half-century, we find her victorious and dominant in France, Belgium, Bavaria, Bohemia, Austria, Poland and Hungary. This result was due to the fact that the Protestants had become divided, degenerate and apathetic, while the Catholics were united, reanimated and zealous. Then the great southern reaction began to slacken, as the great northern movement had slackened before. The paroxysm of religious excitement was over on both sides. During three generations religion had been the mainspring of politics. The revolutions and civil wars of France, Scotland, Holland, Sweden, the long struggle between Philip and Elizabeth, the bloody competition for the Bohemian crown, all originated in theological disputes. But a great change now took place. The religious zeal of both Protestants and Catholics having declined, the Thirty Years’ War in Germany lost its religious character, and became a war for the equilibrium of Europe. Calvinists, Lutherans and Catholics, under Gustavus and Richelieu, united against the house of Austria. When at length, the peace of Westphalia was concluded (1648), it appeared that the Church of Rome remained in full possession of a vast dominion, which in the middle of the preceding century she seemed to be on the point of losing. Since that time there has been no religious war between Catholics and Protestants as such. During the eighteenth century infidelity, rising in Paris, the virtual capital of Europe, extensively undermined the stately fabric of Roman Catholicism, and swept over the continent, in some countries obtaining a complete ascendancy; but, during the nineteenth century; Roman Catholicism has gradually revived, and (nominally) reconquered her old dominion, while the European domain of Protestantism has not been increased. It is remarkable[4] that no Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century, should ever have adopted them. Catholic communities have, since that time, become infidel and become Catholic again, but none has become Protestant. It is certain that Protestant have far outgrown Catholic countries and colonies in civilization, intelligence and prosperity.”

Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), the “Preceptor of Germany,” the scholarly, humble, ethical and conciliatory co-laborer of Luther, the lay theologian and second leader of the German Reformation, was, in nearly all respects, the exact complement of Luther. He acknowledged that infant baptism was a weak point in Luther’s system. He was the author of the Commonplaces of Theology, the Augsburg Confession, and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession. Though, under Luther’s influence, at first a monergist, he made a gradual departure towards synergism, and indeed, for the sake of peace, he seemed to be willing to yield everything except justification by faith. When the double marriage of Philip of Hesse became public, Melanchthon was so overcome by the pangs of conscience on account of his consent to that iniquity, that he sickened almost to death, and is said to have been “raised up by the powerful will and prayer of Luther, who thought that he could work miracles by his prayers, and who said, by way of comforting Melanchthon, that, while they could not justify the matter to man, they could to God, who knew all the circumstances!” Melanchthon’s wife was a pious and devoted woman, and his domestic life was happy. He called his home “a little church,” and “always found there peace, a showed a tender regard for his wife and children, and not infrequently was found rocking the cradle with one hand and holding a book with the other.” He lectured on the Scriptures at his home, which was a social center of the Wittenberg Reformation. In his public career he is said not to have sought honor or fame or wealth, but to have earnestly endeavored to serve the church and the cause of truth.

The three fundamental principles of the Protestant Reformation have been well described to be “the absolute supremacy of the Scriptures, the absolute supremacy of Divine grace, and the general priesthood of all believers.”

The bigoted and despotic Catholic Emperor, Charles V., was providentially hindered, by his wars with the pope, with the King of France, and with the Turks, from undertaking a war with the Protestant princes of Germany, until Protestantism had become deeply rooted, and Luther had died; and then in 1546 and 1547 he waged a war of ten months against the Protestants, and through the treachery of the subtle and ambitious Saxon Duke, Maurice, he defeated them, and imprisoned John Frederic, Elector of Saxony, and Philip Landgrave, of Hesse. But in 1552, the treachery of Maurice, turned against and defeated Charles and forced him to sign the Treaty of Passau, confirmed in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg, granting freedom to the imprisoned Princes, and toleration to the Lutherans. Several violent theological controversies divided the Lutherans until the adoption of the Formula of Concord in 1580.

Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), the able, scholarly, eloquent, clear-headed, bold-hearted and patriotic leader of the Reformation in German Switzerland, despising papal threats and gold, advocated, like Luther, the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and salvation by grace alone. He declared, at the daily risk of his life, that tradition is worthless, and the Scriptures are the only standard of faith and practice; that the mass and image and saint worship are idolatry; that Christ is the only sacrifice for sin, and the only mediator between God and man. In 1523 he went so far as to deny the scripturalness and propriety of infant baptism; but he afterwards retreated from this position. The Swiss Reformation was more rapid and more thorough than the German—one cause being that Switzerland was a republic, and Germany a monarchy. In the conference at Marburg (1529) Luther and Zwingli agreed in fourteen and a half articles; but in the last half of the article, in reference to the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, they did not agree. Luther maintained the doctrine of consubstantiation (the next thing to the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation), that the true body and blood of Christ are present in, with and under the bread and wine; while Zwingli maintained that the body and blood of Christ are only spiritually or emblematically present with the literal elements—that the Greek verb esti (translated is—“This is my body”) means signifies, as it does in numerous other passages in the New Testament, as well as in other Greek literature. The Seventh (or last) Edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, the highest authority on the Greek language, shows that Zwingli was correct; as do many passages in the Scriptures. It is said that Zwingli had transcribed and memorized the entire Greek New Testament, especially the epistles of Paul. At the close of the Marburg conference, Luther would not accept Zwingli’s extended hand of fellowship, but afterwards consented to give him the right hand of peace and charity; and in his “Short Confession on the Lord’s Supper” (published in 1544) Luther atrociously stigmatized Zwingli as a “heretic, liar and murderer of souls.” In a war between the Protestant and Catholic cantons of Switzerland (October, 1531) Zwingli, by the earnest request or command of the Canton of Zurich, attended as chaplain, and, with twenty-five other Protestant ministers, was slain on the battle-field of Cappel. He had, before leaving home, predicted his own death, and had bidden his weeping wife and children a most tender final farewell, and committed them to the care of God.—The learned, gentle, laborious, afflicted, spiritual, almost Baptist, John Ecolampadius, of Basel (1482-1531), the associate of Zwingli, as Melanchthon had been of Luther, overcome with sorrow at the death of Zwingli, followed his friend the next month to the grave, his last moments being full of light and peace. Calling his three little children around him, the eldest of whom was barely three years old, he took their little hands and said, “Eusebius, Irene, Alethea, love God, who is your Father.” To the ten pastors kneeling around his bedside he gave the most affecting exhortations, and then said, “I have something new to tell you; in a short time I shall be with the Lord Jesus.” His doctrinal views were expressed by him in one brief sentence: “Our salvation is of God; our perdition is of ourselves.”—Zwingli was succeeded at Zurich by the mild and energetic Henry Bullinger (1504-1575), who exercised great influence on the :Anglican Church,” and who composed the “Second Helvetic Confession,” one of the most elaborate and valuable of the Reformed Creeds. Ecolampadius was succeeded at Basel by the teacher and preacher, Oswald Myconius (1488-1552), who brought into its present shape the “First Confession of Basel.”

Checked in German Switzerland by the battle of Cappel, the Reformation made a more important conquest in western or French Switzerland, from which district it was to move westward, with the course of empire, to France, Holland, England, Scotland, and North America. William Farel (1489-1565), one of the first and boldest of the French Reformers, preached from 1526 in the French parts of the cantons of Berne and Biel, in Neufchatel, in 1530, and in Geneva in 1532. The Reformation had reached Geneva in 1528, and was adopted by the Council of this free city in 1535. In 1536 the city gained its most distinguished teach, John Calvin (1509-1564), a native of Noyon, in Picardy, seventy miles northeast of Paris. He became the ablest theologian and disciplinarian of the Protestant Reformation; and his work, “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” has been well called “the masterpiece of Protestantism.” For commanding intellect, lofty character and far-reaching influence, Calvin was one of the foremost leaders in the history of Christianity. He was always poor and sickly, severely moral and censorious (even in childhood being called by his companions “the Accusative Case”). He was educated by his father, first for the Catholic priesthood and then for the law. He injured his health by studying nearly all night; and attained such proficiency in the law as to be called to lecture to his fellow-students in the absence of the Professor. But Providence called him to a higher work. Deeply convicted of sin, he sought inward peace by the Roman Catholic methods, and found it not. Miserable and abject, with tears and cries, he was enabled to flee to God, and throw himself upon His free mercy in Christ, and thus he entered into rest, and joyfully testified, “We are saved by grace, not by our merits, not by our works. Only one haven of salvation is left for our souls, and that is the mercy of God in Christ.” He renounced Romanism, joined the persecuted Protestants, and had to flee from Paris (in 1533), in which city, during the next two years, “twenty-four Protestants were burned alive, while many more were condemned to less cruel sufferings. For more than two years he wandered a fugitive evangelist, under assumed names, from place to place.” In 1534 at Orleans he published his first theological work (Psychopannychia), a treatise against the Anabaptist doctrine of the sleep of the soul between death and the resurrection. In 1536 at Basel he published the first edition of his Institutes—his sole motive for issuing this work being, he says, “to remove the impression that his persecuted brethren in France were fanatical Anabaptists, seeking the overthrow of civil order, which their oppressors, in order to pacify the displeasure of German Lutherans, industriously propagated.” The eloquent and powerful preface was addressed to Francis I., the King of France. “The Institutes,” says Prof. Schaff, “are by far the clearest and ablest systematic and scientific exposition and vindication of the ideas of the Reformation in their vernal freshness and pentecostal fire. The book is inspired by a heroic faith ready for the stake, and a glowing enthusiasm for the saving truth of the gospel, raised to a new life from beneath the rubbish of human additions. Though freely using reason and the fathers, especially Augustine, it always appeals to the supreme tribunal of the word of God, to which all human wisdom must bow in reverent obedience. It abounds in Scripture learning thoroughly digested, and wrought up into a consecutive chain of exposition and argument. It is severely logical, but perfectly free from the dryness and pedantry of a scholastic treatise, and flows on, like a Swiss river, through green meadows and sublime mountain scenery. Greeted with enthusiasm by Protestants, the Institutes created dismay among Romanists, were burned at Paris by order of the Sorbonne (Theological College), and hated and feared as the very ‘Talmud’ and ‘Koran of heresy.’” In 1536 Calvin settled at Geneva, and lived there the remainder of his life, with the exception of three years (1538-1541), when he was banished from the city on account of his severe discipline (during which period he lived at Strassburg). In 1540 he married Idelette van Buren, “the widow of an Anabaptist preacher whom he had converted,” as the historians tell us. Their three children died in infancy. Otherwise their married life was very happy, but short, lasting only nine years, when his wife died. He deeply lamented her, and never married again.—Calvin desired to make his church at Geneva the model, mother, and seminary of all the Reformed (or Presbyterian or Calvinistic) Churches. The Presbyterian polity, or church government, is imaginarily derived, primarily from the old Jewish Sanhedrims, and secondarily from the Greek, Roman and Anglo-Saxon Senates; but the best authorities declare that the gradation of Session, Presbytery, Synod and General Assembly was an invention of Calvin himself (his doctrine of the organization of the church and of its relation to the State being the only original feature of his system, says J. R. Green); and the civil government already existing in Geneva and other cities (consisting of four Councils, rising in power one above the other) seems to have suggested the idea to him. In Geneva were the Little Council (or Council of 25), the Council of 60, the Council of 200, and the General Council or General Assembly of Citizens. As for the two permanent Jewish courts called the Lesser and the Greater Sanhedrim, the first of inferior and the second of appellate jurisdiction, they are nowhere mentioned in the Old Testament, but are believed by the most critical scholars to have been derived by the News from the Macedonians (or Greeks) about 300 B. C.—the very name, Sanhedrim, being, not a Hebrew, but a Greek word. Calvin’s Consistory (or Presbytery), composed of six preachers and twelve “laymen,” of which body he was President, exercised a most stringent, vigilant, inquisitorial supervision, in respect to doctrine, morals and manners, over the entire life of every inhabitant of Geneva; not only excommunicating persons of every age and sex, but handling them over to the civil authorities to be imprisoned, tortured or put to death for heresies, improprieties and immoralities. The proceedings of the Consistory were marked by a Dionysian and Draconian severity. “The prisons became filled, and the executioner was kept busy. A child was beheaded for striking its father and mother. Another child, sixteen years old, for attempting to strike its mother, was sentenced to death, but, on account of its youth, the sentence was commuted; and having been publicly whipped, with a cord about its neck, it was banished from the city. A woman was chastised with rods for singing secular songs to the melody of the Psalms. A man was imprisoned and banished for reading the writings of the Italian humanist, Poggio, Profanity and drunkenness were severely punished; dancing, and the manufacture or use of cards, or nine-pins, and even looking upon a dance, and giving children the names of Catholic saints, and extravagance or eccentricity of dress, and the dissemination of divergent theological doctrines, brought down upon the delinquent the vengeance of the laws. No historical student needs to be told what an incalculable amount of evil has been wrought by Catholics and by Protestants from a mistaken belief in the perpetual validity of the Mosaic civil legislation, and from a confounding of the spirit of the old dispensation with the of the new—an overlooking of the progressive character of Divine revelation.”—George P. Fisher’s History of Reformation. Christ and His Apostles did not persecute; neither does the true church of Christ. The Protestant persecutions of each other, and of Catholics, and of “Anabaptists,” were derived from Rome, and were in direct and horrid contradiction of the Protestant principle of freedom of conscience. Calvin’s condemnation and execution of the almost “Anabaptist” and the Anti-Trinitarian, Michael Servetus (1553), though then approved by his brother Protestants, is a sad and ineffaceable blot upon his character—the bloody deed producing only evil, utterly condemned by the entire spirit of the New Testament, and by ever person (not a Roman Catholic) of today. It is noteworthy that in 1537 Peter Caroli accused Calvin and Farel of Anti-Trinitarianism (or Arianism and Sabellianism), because they would not enforce the Athanasian Creed, and had not used the words “Trinity” and “Person” in the Confession that they had drawn up. In his first residence at Geneva, Calvin had avoided using these terms, although having no particular objection to them; as he has very indifferent to the terminology of theology, so long as the truth was expressed. Jerome Bolsec was imprisoned and banished from Geneva in 1551 for denying the doctrine of predestination. Like Luther, Calvin was, in general, unselfish and unworldly, honest and conscientious, doing what he believed to be right, and not seeking human applause or temporal riches. His disciplinarian severity was induced not by personal animosity, but by his views of the Scriptures of what was required for the honor of God. Under his iron and bloody discipline (the result of a combination of “Church and State”), Geneva, from being one of the most licentious places, became the most moral town in Europe. But some of the profligate people, hating him with a perfect hatred, would sometimes fire off fifty or sixty shots before his door in the night, and would set upon him their dogs, which would tear his clothes and flesh. He received from the city a small house and garden, with about five hundred dollars per year, and was very generous to the needy. In the latter part of his life he ate but one meal a day, and sometimes went without that. He would not draw his salary when he was too sick to work, and he refused an increase of salary and all kinds of presents except for the poor. Besides his library, he left only about two hundred dollars, which he gave to his younger brother and his children. “When Pope Pius IV, heard of his death, he paid him this high compliment: ‘The strength of that heretic consisted in this, that money never had the slightest charm for him. If I had such servants, my dominions would extend from sea to sea.’” Like Luther, he had a fiery temper, which was the propelling power in his extraordinary life-work. He was a walking hospital, and the wonder is that he showed so patient a spirit as he did. In his fifty-fifth year, overcome with headache, asthma, fever and gravel, he yielded to his complication of bodily infirmities. He never complained of his physical sufferings. Though his body was utterly feeble, and reduced almost to a shadow, his mind retained its clearness and energy. Assembling the city councilors, and then the ministers, around his bed, he declared that he had lived, acted and taught honestly and sincerely, according to his views of the word of God, never knowingly perverting the Scriptures, and never laboring for any personal end, but only to promote the glory of God. He thanked them for their kindness, and craved their forgiveness for his occasional outbursts of anger. He exhorted them to humility and to a faithful observance of the pure doctrine and discipline of Christ. Sitting up in bed, he offered a fervent prayer for them, and took each one by the hand, and bade him a solemn and affectionate farewell; and they parted from him, with their eyes bathed in tears, and their hearts full of unspeakable grief. According to his express injunction, no monument was erected over his grave, so that the exact spot, in the cemetery of Geneva, is unknown. “Like Moses, he was buried out of the reach of idolatry.”—Ernest Renan, the French rationalist, finds the key to Calvin’s wonderful influence in the fact that he was “the most Christian man of his generation.” As Prof. Schaff says: “Calvin’s spirit resembled that of a Hebrew prophet. Soaring high above the earth, he was absorbed in God—who alone is great—and he looked down upon man as a fleeting shadow. Though his system was Pauline, and though he strongly sympathized with Paul’s sense of the freedom of the gospel salvation, yet he looked more to the holiness than to the love of God. His piety bears more the stamp of the Old Testament than that of the New. He represents the majesty and severity of the law rather than the sweetness and loveliness of the gospel, the obedience of the servant of Jehovah rather than the joyfulness of a child of our heavenly Father.” On account of his logical and systematic mind and “Institutes,” he has been appropriately called the Aristotle of the Protestant Reformation. “The striking, the peculiar feature of his system,” says Prof. Fisher, “is the doctrine of predestination. This doctrine, at the outset, indeed, was common to all the Reformers. They were united in receiving the Augustinian theology, in opposition to the Pelagian doctrine, which affected, in a greater or less degree, all the schools of Catholic theology. It is very important to understand the motives of the Reformers in this proceeding. Calvin was not a speculative philosopher who though out a necessitarian theory and defended it for the reason that he considered it capable of being logically established. It is true that the key-note in his system was a profound sense of the exaltation of God. Nothing could be admitted that seemed to clash in the least with His universal control, or to cast a shade upon His omniscience and omnipotence. But the direct grounds of his doctrine were practical Predestination is, to him, the correlate of human dependence; the counterpart of the doctrine of grace; the antithesis to salvation by merit; the implied consequence of man’s complete bondage to sin. In election, it is involved that man’s salvation is not his own work, but wholly the work of the grace of God; and in election, also, there is laid a sure foundation for the believer’s security under all the assaults of temptation. It is practical interests which Calvin is sedulous to guard; he clings to the doctrine for what he considers its religious value; and it is no more than justice to him to remember that he habitually styles the tenet, which proved to be so obnoxious, and unfathomable mystery, an abyss into which no mortal mind can descend. And, whether consistently or not, there is the most earnest assertion of the moral and responsible nature of man. Augustine had held that in the fall of Adam the entire race were involved in a common act and a common catastrophe. The will is not destroyed; it is still free to sin, but is utterly disabled as regards holiness. Out of the mass of mankind, all of them are alike guilty, God chooses a part to be the recipients of His mercy, whom He purifies by an irresistible influence, but leaves the rest to suffer the penalty which they have justly brought upon themselves. In the ‘Institutes,’ Calvin does what Luther had done in his book against Erasmus; he makes the Fall itself the primal transgression, the object of an efficient decree. In this particular he goes beyond Augustine, and apparently affords a sanction to the extreme or supralapsarian type of theology, which afterwards found numerous defenders—which traces sin to the direct agency of God, and even founds the distinction of right and wrong ultimately on His omnipotent will. But when Calvin was called upon to define his doctrine more carefully, as in the Consensus Genevensis, he confines himself to the assertion of a permissive decree—a volitive permission—in the case of the first sin. In other words, he does not overstep the Augustinian position. He explicitly avers that every decree of the Almighty springs from reasons which, though hidden from us, are good and sufficient; that is to say, he founds will upon right, and not right upon will.[5] The main peculiarity of Calvin’s treatment of this subject, as compared with the course pursued by the other Reformers, is the greater prominence which he gives to predestination. It stands in the foreground; it is never left out of sight. Luther’s practical handling of this dogma was different. Under his influence it retreated more and more into the background, until not only in Melanchthon’s system, but also in the later Lutheran theology, unconditional predestination disappeared altogether.” “The characteristic principles of the system now called Calvinism,” says Prof. A. A. Hodge, “were first full developed by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (324-430), whose great opponent was Pelagius (Morgan), a British monk, a student of the Greek fathers. The opinions of Pelagius were unanimously condemned by the whole church, Eastern and Western, at the Councils of Carthage (407-416), Mileve (416) and Ephesus (431), and by Popes Innocent and Zosimus (417 and 418)—a sure proof that they were not in accordance with the original faith of the church. And up to the present time Pelagianism has never been adopted in the public creed of any ecclesiastical body except that of the Socinians (Unitarians) of Poland (Racovian Catechism, 1605). Afterwards the doctrines of Augustine triumphed, in their conflict with Semi-Pelagianism, at the Synods of Orange and Valence (529), and by the decrees of Popes Gelasius (496) and Boniface (530). Henceforth a moderate Augustinianism became the legally recognized orthodoxy of Western Europe, and actually tinctured the leading minds and events of that great community for several centuries. Bede, Alcuin and Claudius of Turin and afterwards the best and greatest of the schoolmen—Anselm (910), Bernard of Clairvaux (1140), Hugo St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas (1247) and Thomas Bradwardine (1348)—were all of the school of Augustine. The same is true of all of the ‘Reformers before the Reformation’—Wycliffe (1324-1384), John Hus (1369-1415), the Waldenses[6] of Piedmont, John Wessel (1419-1489), John of Goch (1475), Savonarola (1493), John Reuchlin and Staupitz, the spiritual father of Luther. The Reformation was a reaction from the growing Semi-Pelagianism, as well as from the idolatry and tyranny of the papal church. It was in all its leaders, Luther as decidedly as Calvin and in all its centers, England and Germany, as well as Scotland, Holland or Geneva, an Augustinian movement. Although Calvin was not the first to formulate the system which goes by his name (and which he himself professes to have borrowed from Augustine), he presented to the world the first and grandest work of systematic divinity, recast Augustinianism in the its Protestant form, and handed it to the modern world stamped with his own name. From him his doctrines passed to that ‘apostolic succession’ of Bullinger, Turrettin, Witsius, John Owen and Jonathan Edwards: to the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) and the Westminster Assembly (1638); and so to the churches of France, Switzerland, Holland, England and Scotland; to the Independents (Congregationalists), the Baptists, and to the Presbyterians in all lands. The Episcopal Church of England and America, whatever may be the teachings of its different leaders, was, beyond controversy, in the intention of its founders, and in the first century of its history, and is yet in its doctrinal articles, essentially Augustinian.” “Every people of Europe,” says Prof. Schaff, “was represented among Calvin’s disciples. He helped to shape the religious character of churches, and the political moral and social life of nations yet unborn. The Huguenots of France, the Protestants of Holland and Belgium, the Puritans and Independents of England and New England, the Presbyterians of Scotland and throughout the world, yea, we may say, the whole Anglo-Saxon race, in its prevailing religious character and institutions, bear the impress of his genius, and show the power and tenacity of his doctrines and principles of government. The doctrine of predestination,[7] in its milder, infralapsarian (or sublapsarian) form, was incorporated into the Geneva Consensus, the Second Helvetic, the French, Belgic and Scotch Confessions, the Lambeth Articles, the Irish Articles, the Canons of Dort, and the Westminster Standards (from which latter documents the same doctrine was incorporated into the English Congregational and Baptist Confessions of Faith of the seventeenth century); while the Thirty-nine (Episcopalian) Articles, the Heidelberg Catechism, and other German Reformed Confessions, indorse merely the positive, humbling, comforting part of the free election of believers [as also the Kehukee Baptist Association of North Carolina did in 1777 in a Confession which today constitutes the Articles of Faith of the churches of that Association, and which is given in the latter part of this work], and are wisely silent[8] concerning the decree of reprobation, leaving that to theological science and private opinion. Supralapsarian, which makes unfallen man, or man before his creation, a mere abstraction of thought, the object of God’s double foreordination for the manifestation of His mercy in the elect and His justice in the reprobate, was ably advocated by Beza in Geneva, Gormarus in Holland, Twisse (the Prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly) in England, and Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1840) in New England, but it never received symbolical authority, and was virtually or expressly excluded (though not exactly condemned) by the Synod of Dort, the Westminster Assembly, and even the Formula Consensus Helvetica (1675). All Calvinistic Confessions, without exception, trace the fall to a permissive decree, make man responsible and justly punishable for sin, and reject, as a blasphemous slander, the charge that God is the author of sin. And this is the case with all the Calvinistic divines of the present day. Prof. Charles Hodge, who best represents the Old School Calvinism in America, reject supralapsarianism, and defends infralapsarianism, which he define thus: ‘According to the infralapsarian doctrine, God, with the design to reveal His own glory—that is, the perfections of His own nature—determined to create the world; secondly, to permit the fall of man; thirdly, to elect from the mass of fallen men a multitude whom no man could number as ’vessels of mercy;’ fourthly, to send His Son for their redemption; and fifthly, to leave the reside of mankind, as He left the fallen angels, to suffer the just punishment of their sins.’”

Modern “Liberal” Philosophy (misnamed Religion), while admitting that the predestinarianism of Augustine and Calvin is the logical deduction of the language of the New Testament, especially of the epistles, particularly of Paul, pronounces it a ghastly and revolting system of religious fatalism, a hideous nightmare intolerable in this enlightened age, a lie repugnant to reason and conscience, making morality impossible by the denial of the freedom of the will, telling men that they cannot help themselves, and thus flinging them into recklessness and despair. Such tenets, these wise and gentle philosophers tell us, have in our age retired from the blaze of day, and are found only in the obscure writings of obscure men (most ignorant fanatics), and would not now be tolerated for a moment outside a small uninfluential circle. This declaration (as may be seen from Matt. 7:13,14, 11:25, 13:11, 16:17; Luke 12:32; Rom. 8:7, 8; 1 Cor. 1:23-31, 2:14, etc.) affords a strong scriptural presumption that predestinarianism is true. Strange to say, however, some of the most learned, able and candid of these philosophers (such as Messrs. J. A. Froude and J. H. Allen) admit that, while Arminianism commends itself to our feelings, Calvinism is nearer the facts—the everywhere seen facts of human sinfulness and sorrow, and the inequality of human capacities, dispositions and advantages; that, though Calvinism is now about dead (slain by the Modern “Liberal” Philosophy), yet we owe to it the best and noblest features of the last four hundred years, and that there was never any more need than now of its stern, vigorous, courageous hatred of evil and loyalty to truth; the bland optimism Epicurean Scientific Liberalism is superficial, unsatisfactory, enfeebling and demoralizing, and has never accomplished anything good and great for the human race; that the ancient fatalistic Stoics were the most noble and virtuous of the Greeks and Romans; that even modern materialistic science, like Calvinism, denies the freedom of the will, and teaches necessitarianism; that in the better sort of men there are two elementary convictions, name, that there is over all things an unsleeping, inflexible, all-ordering, just Power, and that this Power governs all things by everlasting, immutable and righteous laws, which sinful creatures cannot disobey with impunity; that the wisest and best Christians have believed and been animated and inspired by the fact that their conviction of sin and conversion to the love of holiness have been the mighty work within them, not of themselves, but of the Divine Spirit, whom they will henceforth rejoice to love and obey; that Calvin had the keenest eye to discern the unsound spots in the Roman Catholic creed, and the most imperturbable resolution to excise, tear out and destroy the false, and establish the true in its place, and make truth the steadfast rule of practical life; that his historical followers have, far more than their contemporaries, abhorred all falsehood, all impurity, all moral wrong of every kind; that the conscientious fear of doing evil, now existing in England, Scotland and America, is the remnant of Calvinism in the people’s hearts; that though the Calvinists failed to destroy Romanism, they drew its fangs, and shamed it out of its immoralities; that the spirit of Calvinism will, in due time, appear again on earth, unless God be a delusion, and men be as the beasts that perish, for it is but the inflashing, upon the conscience, of the nature and origin of the imperishable spiritual laws by which the universe is governed. Mr. Allen, who confesses that, from early childhood, he was trained to dread and hate Calvinism, and that only by reflection and a wider view of things has he come to see it in a different light, says, in his Christian History: “The strength of Calvinism lay in its facing the facts, and in its coming closer home to men’s experience and sense of duty. In its age of vigor it mean an incessant, untiring, unrelenting war—war with sword in hand and hot hate and courage in the heart—against that Evil of which its only definition was ‘enmity to God.’ It is most important of all, in considering Calvinism as a force in history, to it—in full armor and in fighting attitude [compare Paul’s stirring exhortation to the soldier of Jesus Christ, Eph. 6:10-20; 2 Tim. 2:3]. Notice, too, that the fighting quality in Calvinism lies in its very fundamental dogma of absolute predestination. Can a serious man ever once think of salvation as resting on his own merit? If he has been snatched as a brand from the burning, he is the Lord’s once for all, to do with as He will. [Paul calls himself the doulos, the born slave of Jesus Christ, Rom. 1:1; Phil. 1:1]. Of that sword of Divine Justice, which Calvinism was, we may say that the sharp point was the Eternal Decree, and that the two keen edges were Free Grace and Salvation by Faith. We for our part,” continues Mr. Allen, “think of the dogma chiefly for the great part it has played in human history, as ‘the sword of the Lord and of Gideon,’ by which the Midianites of that day were to be struck down. [This old, well-tried sword of the Spirit has lost none of its strength and keenness, and is, of all others, the very weapon with which to smite the Midianites of the present day]. Calvinism was the sharp edge of Protestantism, waging an unrelenting warfare against the pope as the Man of Sin, and all his doctrines and works, his idolatry and immorality. Not only is Calvinism an austere type of piety; it is also a fountain-head of stern, aggressive, self-sacrificing virtue, rising often to the heights of moral heroism, so necessary to brace up the tone of morals in an age of license, and even, at a crisis, to save the very life of a State, political as well as social. May the characteristics of Calvinism—mental vigor, moral courage, intolerant hate of Evil under all disguises, stern loyalty to Truth—remain an imperishable possession of mankind.”

“Over against the mock sovereignty of the pope,” says Prof. Schaff, “Calvin set the absolute sovereignty of God, and he made this the chief article in his system; while Luther gave the greatest prominence to justification by faith alone; but the central place in the Christian system belongs only to the person and work of Christ—the incarnation and the atonement.”

Calvin had extraordinary light on the doctrine of grace and the holy effects of that doctrine in the heart and life; but he was in great and lamentable darkness in regard to infant baptism, indifference of the “form” of baptism, a modified sacramentalism, alliance of “Church and State,” the civil punishment of excommunicated persons, the subjection of the individual church to a gradation of higher bodies, and fellowshipping Catholics and all the members of every so-called Christian “Church.”

The able and scholarly Theodore Beza (1519-1605), the friend, biographer and successor of Calvin, the surviving patriarch of the Reformation, was pastor of the Geneva Church for nearly forty years. While increasing the doctrinal, he relaxed the governmental rigor of Calvin. He was Professor of Greek and Theology, and Rector of the University of Geneva. In 1556 he published a faithful and elegant Latin translation of the New Testament; and afterwards four excellent editions of the Greek Testament, which were the main basis of the Authorized (James) English Version of 1611. Upon the English Geneva Bible of 1560 (translated by William Whittingham, Thomas Sampson and Anthony Gilby, English exiles at Geneva)—“a noble, scholarly production,” says the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia—Beza exerted a marked influence by his Latin version and his exegetical notes. The famous notes of the Geneva Testament are mostly original, or selected from Calvin and Beza, both of whom were profound critical scholars.

“The Church of Rome,”[9] says Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, “has caused more wars, has shed more innocent blood, and inflicted more unmerited suffering, than any other institution that has ever existed among mankind.” The history of the sixteenth century, with the decade preceding and following it, presents the most forcible illustrations of this horrible truth. Among these illustrations are the cruel enslavement and extinction, by the Spanish and Portuguese Catholics, of untold millions of the poor, inoffensive Indians of North, Central and South America; the inauguration, by the same Catholic nations, of the horrors of the African slave-trade; the Portuguese persecutions and enslavement of thousands of the Nestorian “St. Thomas Christians” in India; the pitiless impoverishment, enslavement or expulsion, with indescribable sufferings, of about a million Jews and a million Moors from Spain and Portugal; thirty-eight years of religious wars in France, and similar but shorter wars in Switzerland, Germany and Holland; three Catholic insurrections in England, and the sending forth of the Spanish Armada against the same Protestant country; the execution of about a thousand persons, on account of their religion, by the Anglo-Catholic Pope, King Henry VIII., and of about three hundred, on the same account, by his daughter, Bloody Queen Mary; the execution of from fifty to a hundred thousand Protestants in the Netherlands, and the condemnation of all the three million Netherlanders to death; the frightful massacres of the French Waldenses in Provence, and of the Italian Waldenses in Calabria, and of the Huguenots or French Protestants on the eve of St. Bartholomew (on account of which the pope sung a Te Deum and issued a medal); and the diabolical cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, with its lurid Autos-da-fe, all over Southern Europe, effectually repressing, in those countries, all exhibitions of the spirit of religious freedom. “The first Protestants,” says Mr. Lecky, “were as undoubtedly intolerant as the Catholics.” They derived the practice from the Catholics, and they persecuted the Catholics and other Protestants, and especially the “Anabaptists.” Persecution is directly opposed to the fundamental Protestant principle of the right of private judgment, and has, therefore, happily declined in almost all Protestant countries; but intolerance is the essence of Roman Catholicism, and, if armed with the power of the State, it would today wreak the same bloody and exterminating vengeance upon its opponents as it has practiced, when able, for fifteen hundred years.

The birthday of the “Lutheran Church,” when it began its existence as a distinct organization, was August 27th, 1526, the last day of the first Diet of Spires, when each German State was permitted by the emperor, Charles V., to act in religious matters according to its own convictions, and when the Lutheran territorial churches were thus legitimized. The birthday of the “Church of England” (or Episcopalian Church), when it began its existence as a distinct organization, was November 3rd, 1534, the date of the passage, by the British Parliament, of the “Act of Supremacy,” extirpating the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Pope in England, and making King Henry VIII, the “Supreme Head of the Church of England.” And the birthday of the “Church of Scotland” (or Presbyterian Church), when it began its existence as a distinct organization, was August 17th, 1560, when the Scotch Confession of Faith, drawn up by John Knox and his compeers, was formally adopted by the Scotch Parliament.[10] All these three bodies were born from the “Roman Catholic Church,” and therefore acknowledged that body to be a true church of Christ, and her ordinances to be valid.

The “Church of England,” as Macaulay, the best-informed English historian of the nineteenth century, himself an Episcopalian, tells us, was “the fruit of a union between Protestantism and the British government”—the result of “a compromise huddled up between the eager zeal of reformers and the selfishness of greedy, ambitious and time-serving politicians; from the first considered by a large body of Protestants as a scheme for serving two masters, as an attempt to unite the worship of the Lord with the worship of Baal. As for the Church of England having the apostolical succession, the proofs of this for fifteen hundred years are buried in utter darkness; as for her having apostolical unity, she is a combination of a hundred sects battling within one organization.” The elder William Pitt, more than a hundred years ago, well described her as a body with “a Calvinistic creed, a Popish liturgy, and am Arminian clergy.” The able and accurate church historian, Prof. Philip Schaff, says:—“The despotic and licentious monarch (Henry VIII.), whom Pope Leo X. rewarded for his book against Luther with the title, ‘Defender of the Faith,’ remained a Catholic in belief and sentiment till his death; he merely substituted king-worship for pope-worship, a domestic tyranny for a foreign one, by cutting off the papal tiara from the Episcopal hierarchy, and placing his own crown on the bleeding neck.” Because the pope would not sanction his divorce from his wife, Catharine of Aragon, he abolished the papal supremacy in England, and made himself virtual pope, assuming to decide all questions of doctrine and worship, and putting to death those who dared to differ from him. In 1543 he decreed that none under the rank of gentlemen and gentlewomen should be allowed to read the Scriptures. Under Edward VI., Henry’s son (1547-1553), the forty-two Articles of Religion, mostly written by “Archbishop” Cranmer, and afterward reduced to thirty-nine, were adopted. If the seventeenth Article is not predestinarian, the ablest historians are at fault, and language is meaningless. Henry’s oldest daughter, Mary Tudor (1553-1558), revenging the injustice done her Spanish Catholic mother, the divorced Catharine, instituted a papal reaction. “Her short but bloody reign was the period of Protestant martyrdom, which fertilized the soil of England, and of the exile of about eight hundred Englishmen, who were received with open arms on the Continent (especially at Geneva), and who brought back clearer and stronger views of the Reformation. The violent restoration of the old system intensified the hatred of popery, and forever connected it in the English mind with persecution and bloodshed, with national humiliation and disgrace.” John Foxe’s “book of Martyrs” is a pathetic account of these sufferings, the author himself having been an exile during the persecution. The Protestant Reformation was permanently established in England under Elizabeth (1558-1603), the masculine daughter of Henry VIII., and the Protestant Anne Boleyn. Declared illegitimate by the pope, who would not sanction the divorce of Henry and Catharine, and excommunicated by the pope, and continually plotted against by the Catholics, she ably and successfully maintained the Protestant cause. Her motives were entirely political. She herself was “wholly unspiritual,” says Mr. J. R. Green, “a brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth and the Pagan renascence,” and yet the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” She had the discretion to drop the blasphemous antichristian title of “Head of the Church.” The shipwreck and defeat of the great Spanish Armada, sent in 1558 by Philip II., of Spain for the conquest of England, transferred naval and commercial supremacy from Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. The “Church of England” is at present boastfully declared to be “the strongest and richest national Church in Protestant Christendom”—very much then like the “Church of Rome,” and to the same extent unlike the church of the New Testament (Matt. 8:20; Acts 3:6, 20:34, 28:22; 1 Cor. 1:26-31; Heb. 11:35-38; James 2:5; Rev. 1:9, 7:14, 12:6, 13-17).

The Scriptures just cited are a fitting introduction to

“The short and simple annals of the poor.”

persecuted people of God called “Anabaptists,” or “Gospellers,” or Image-Breakers,” or “Mennonites,” in this century, “a set,” like the apostolic church, “everywhere spoken against,” and “the persecutions of whom,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica, “were incomparably fiercer than any of the larger Protestant bodies ever underwent.” The Catholics hated them with a perfect hatred, because they were in all respects the antipodes of Rome. And the Protestants detested and destroyed them as deformers, heretics, traitors, dangerous radicals in Church and State. There is no doubt that this hostility and persecution were partially occasioned by the wild, licentious, revolutionary and insane excesses into which some unworthy, carnal and partial professors of Baptist sentiments plunged—making the Reformation indeed appear as a deformation, threatening the overthrow of civil governments, and drawing the vengeance of these governments down not only upon the guilty, but also upon the innocent, scriptural, inoffensive and blameless advocates of religious liberty. The connection of the theoretical”Anabaptist,” but practical Pedobaptist, Thomas Munzer, with the Peasants’ War, has already been related. After most of the “Anabaptist” ministers had suffered martyrdom or died of the plague, the able but fanatical Melchior Hoffman, of Sweden (from 1529 to 1534), acquired great influence over the “Anabaptists” in the Netherlands and Germany, and instilled his false and exciting Manichaean and Millenarian views into the minds of many. Two of his disciples, John Matthiesen, of Harlem, and John Bockhold, of Leyden, went, in 1533, to Munster, in Westphalia, converted large numbers of the people in their views, overturned the city government, and set up what they called the Kingdom of New Zion, and intended to proceed to the conquest of the world. The city was besieged by an imperial army, and Matthiesen was killed in a sally from the walls. Bockhold made himself king, and inaugurated a diabolical reign of lust and blood, establishing a complete communism both of property and wives, and beheading, sometimes, more than fifty persons in a day. After fifteen months the city was taken; Bockhold and two of his leading associates, Knipperdolling and Krechting, were tortured to death with red-hot pincers, and then hung up in iron cages, which are still preserved in Munster. Similar revolutions were ineffectually attempted in Leyden and Amsterdam. The best historians agree that many of these people, in those times of great change and excitement—when the iron bondage of Roman priestcraft of a thousand years was being relaxed—were affected with religious mania or lunacy, and ought rather to have been confined in straight waistcoats than to have been executed. The vicious and criminal excesses of these new so-called “Anabaptists” were earnestly condemned and repudiated by true Baptists everywhere, who saw and declared that these false prophets who professed to be inspired of God were really inspired of the Devil. The true Baptists of this century, like their brethren of former centuries, were—not licentious and warlike madmen, but—peaceful, harmless, God-fearing, God-serving witnesses for the truth. Why, in the first year of the sixteenth century, when Luther and Zwingli were schoolboys, there were, besides the Waldenses in Italy, France and Holland, and the Wycliffites in England, two hundred churches of the Bohemian Brethren in Germany (to whom the careful and exact Gieseler and Keller trace the “Anabaptists”), who were not only virtuous and blameless, but such true and loyal subjects of the Prince of Peace that they were utterly opposed to war, and who, during this century, though grievously persecuted, by thousands, robbed, imprisoned, tortured, driven with their wives and children from their homes to woods and deserts, yet declared that they would rather die than raise a hand, much less a weapon, against their enemies! The Baptist history of the sixteenth century has well been named “The Baptist Martyrology.” In republican Switzerland, where the social disturbance were but few and moderate; in England, under all the Tudors, where there were no social disturbances; as well as in the Netherlands and Germany, and everywhere, Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in the most horrible cruelties against those stigmatized as “Anabaptists;” and these poor people vied with their ancient brethren in meek submission to the merciless rage of their oppressors. Says Cardinal Hosius, Chairman of the Council of Trent: “If the truth of religion were to be judged of by the readiness and cheerfulness which a man of any sect shows in suffering, then the opinions and persuasions of no sect can be truer or surer than those of the Anabaptists, since there have been none for twelve hundred years past that have been more grievously punished.” Besides imprisonment, banishment, confiscation and torture, we read that three thousand were in this century put to death in Germany, six thousand in the Netherlands, and a smaller unknown number in Switzerland and England. Foxe does not record the martyrdoms of the Baptists; but “their record is on high.” They were generally poor laboring people, and their ministers were generally uneducated, and labored with their own hands. They had, however, a few learned and eloquent preachers among them, as Grebel, Mauz, Denk, Hetzer and Hubmaier. The last mentioned, Balthasar Hubmaier, was their ablest and most learned minister. He had been professor of Catholic Theology at Ingolstadt, then a zealous and eloquent Protestant preacher, and had translated the Gospels and epistles into German. Not having been able to find infant baptism in the New Testament, he felt constrained to follow the example and command of Christ, and receive believers’ baptism, and he himself baptized several hundred others. Prof. Schaff says: “He was perhaps the first who taught the principle of universal religious liberty, on the ground that Christ came not to kill and to burn, but to save, and condemned the employment of force in His kingdom. He was tortured in Switzerland, and burned in Vienna (March 10th, 1528), going steadfastly to the stake with pious joy. His wife, who had encouraged him in his martyr spirit, was three days afterwards drowned in the Danube.”

Erasmus, Beza, Commenius, Cassander, Bullinger, Meshovius, Hosius and others testify to the blameless and harmless lives of the “Anabaptist.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica says: “There is an obvious genetic, though not historical, connection between the Anabaptists and those earlier sects (Novatians, Donatists, Albigenses, Waldenses) which did not practice infant baptism.”

Menno Simons (1496-1561) was no doubt the most useful Baptist minister of the sixteenth century. While a Catholic priest, he saw an Anabaptist beheaded, and was led to inquire into the scriptural authority of infant baptism; and not being enabled by his Catholic superior or by Luther or Bucer or Bullinger to find such authority anywhere in the Bible, he was conscientiously led, at great worldly sacrifice, to renounce the custom, and to join the despised Anabaptists (in 1536). For twenty-five years he traveled in the Netherlands and Germany, with his wife and children, amid perpetual sufferings and daily perils of his life, and proclaimed God’s full and free salvation to all believing sinners, and he founded numerous churches. He seemed, says Mosheim, to be “the common Bishop of all Anabaptists.” He earnestly warned his brethren against the Munster abominations; and he insisted upon strict discipline in all his churches, which were independent of each other in church government, and united only by a bond of love. Some practiced feet-washing, and some did not. The members of his church were called Mennonites, and were plan, honest, industrious people, mostly farmers.

In the Protestant Confessions and writers of the sixteenth century many false doctrines are charged upon the Anabaptists—such Manichaeism, Millenarianism, Arianism, Arminianism, revolutionism, communism, asceticism, psychopannychism (the sleep of the soul from death to the resurrection), universalism, libertinism, and opposition to holding civil offices, to capital punishment, to keeping inns or carrying on trades. In reference to these charges, it may be said that there were numerous sects of the “Anabaptists,” and some of them were fanatical and apparently insane; some even professing to be so inspired as to be able to prophesy and to set aside the Scriptures; and some going so far into error as to believe (and be willing to suffer martyrdom for that belief) that David Joris (who died at Basel in 1556) was a second Christ, greater and better than the Lord Jesus; and some who bore the name rushing into the abominable excesses of Munster. But of those who were most like their brethren in preceding and succeeding centuries, we have two Confessions of Faith—the Swiss Confession of 1527, and the Mennonite Confession of 1580. The seven articles of the Swiss Confession teach the baptism[11] of believers; the exclusion of unworthy members; communion of baptized believers; separation from the impure churches and the world; the support of needy pastors by the voluntary offerings of the members; the condemnation of Christians holding civil offices, but allowing others to do so, and enjoining obedience to civil magistrates, except when their commands are opposed to religious convictions; and the disuse of oaths. The forty articles of the Mennonite Confession reject also the use of arms, lawsuits, revenge, all kinds of violence and worldly amusements, and divorce, except in case of adultery. The Swiss Confession seems to imply, and the Mennonite Confession plainly declares, that the atonement of Christ was universal, and that election is conditional. While the true “Anabaptists” or “Mennonites” of the sixteenth century had great spiritual light on most other subjects, Bible Baptists of today believe that they were greatly in the dark in regard to the conditionality of salvation. The bitter persecutions inflicted upon them, inconsistently and unscripturally, by the Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans, who professed to believe the doctrine of predestination,[12] did not incline them to receive that Bible doctrine, nor indeed did they seem to devote any particular attention to its consideration. It was the ordination of Divine Providence for the Protestant Reformers to consider and elucidate that important scriptural doctrine. The defense of another most important point of truth, neglected by all other religionists, providentially devolved upon the Baptists of that century—and this point was the spirituality of the church of Christ, a New Testament principle utterly inconsistent with infant or vicious membership in the church, and with alliance of Church and State. This Bible principle was in the sixteenth century regarded, by Catholic and Protestant alike, as the most intolerable of heresies, urgently demanding the severest vengeance of the secular arm. The Protestants lacked sufficient confidence in God to carry out to its logical results their own fundamental doctrine, that the Bible is the only and perfect standard of faith and practice, and the inevitable corollary of that doctrine—that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. Instead of thoroughly maintaining this scriptural position, it is an indisputable fact that the Lutherans and Calvinists actually corrupted the principles and practices of large numbers of the old Bohemian Brethren and Waldenses, and induced thousands of these simple-minded people to unite with themselves in the abandonment of New Testament ground in reference to the proper subjects of baptism and the apostolic strictness of church discipline. In the early part of the sixteenth century, when, on account of persecution, those entertaining Baptist sentiments lay concealed, according to Mosheim, in almost all the countries of Europe, the intelligence of the Protestant movement caused them to come joyfully and hopefully out of their hiding places, but only to meet with bitter disappointment; for if flattery failed to entice them from the simplicity of the gospel of Christ, they were heathenishly punished with fines, imprisonment, torture, banishment and death, and that, too, by men who professed to advocate the principles of Christian liberty.

The early “Celtic Church” of Ninian and Columba, with its monastic establishments ruled over by the abbot-presbyter of Iona, was neither Presbyterian nor Episcopalian nor Roman Catholic in its polity, as the latest and ablest scholars declare; and, even if this body had been Presbyterian, the continuity of the Scottish Church was interrupted 410 years by the establishment, in Scotland, of the “Roman Catholic Church,” by King David I, in 1150.

1. The sixteenth century, or the period of the Protestant Reformation, was, says Prof. Schaff, “by far the richest and deepest in church history next to the age of Christ and His inspired Apostles.”

2. The extremely accurate John C. L. Gieseler, whose Church History is an indispensable help and an authority with all German, English and American scholars, of every ecclesiastical denomination says (vol. Iv, page 385): “All the genuine attempts for the reformation of the church have proceeded from Augustinianism, which, in opposition to reliance upon works, that fundamental source of corruption, declared the entire helplessness of man, and this fostered the humility which is the essence of all true piety. The doctrine of Augustine as to the corruption of human nature, and that man could be saved only by Divine grace given in Christ, was the one with which the Reformers of the sixteenth century were most deeply penetrated, and which they consequently enforced in the most living manner.”

3. The name of “Protestants” originated from the solemn “Protest” (April 19, 1529) made by the evangelical princes of Germany against the intolerant decrees of the second Diet of Spire—the Protest reciting, in defense of its position, the Scriptures, the inalienable rights of conscience, and the decree of the first Diet of Spire (in 1526), which left each State to its own discretion concerning the question of reform until a general council should settle it for all.

4. Among the causes of this fact may be reckoned the old ingrained pride and hatred of Roman Catholics against Protestants, intensified by the fierce and long religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the dense ignorance and superstition of modern Catholic countries; and the revival of the Order of Jesuits and of the Inquisition in the nineteenth century.

5. “God’s precepts,” says Prof. B. L. Dabney, in his Theology, “are, for us, an actual, a perfect and a supreme rule of right. They are right not only because He commands, but because they are in themselves right. The distinction between right and wrong inheres and abides in the eternal, self-existent and necessary principles of His moral essence.”

6. This statement of Prof. A. A. Hodge, and a similar one by his father, Prof. Charles Hodge, need correction. As shown on page 335, the early Waldenses, like the other Anti-Sacerdotalists, were, in the darkness of the Dark Ages, Arminians. Under the influence of the Bohemian Brethren, and a more accurate acquaintance, with the Scriptures, they became predestinarians in the sixteenth century,

7. “As a matter of history,” says Prof. Schaff, “it is an undeniable fact that the strongest predestinarians have been the most earnest, energetic and persevering Christians.” The life labors and sacrifices of Paul, the most strongly predestinarian of the Apostles, furnish the brightest and most unanswerable demonstration of this great fact, and proofs of it also are afforded in the lives of thousands since the Apostolic Age.

8. “This course,” says Mr. Schaff, “may be a defect in logic, but it is an advantage in religion which is broader and deeper than logic. Even Calvin says that Christ died sufficienter pro omnibus, efficaciter pro electis (sufficiently for all, efficiently for the elect); and all Calvinists admit the infinite worth and value of Christ’s atonement; though the advocates of a limited atonement, reasoning from the effect to the cause, believe the Divine intention co-extensive with the actual application.”

9. This, be it remembered, is the monstrous organization through which it is the chief glory (when it should be the chief shame) of millions of the spiritually blind to trace an imaginary succession from the Apostles of the meek and lowly, loving and peaceful Lamb of God. May our hearts be filled with sorrow, pity, and prayerfulness for those of our fellow-mortals who are possessed with such a carnal and wretched delusion.

10. The body founded by Zwingli, and afterwards completed to Calvin, in Switzerland, and called on the Continent “The Reformed Church” as distinguished from the less reformed “Lutheran Church,” was established by law in the Canton of Zurich, May, 1524, when a decree was made, by the Council, abolishing masses, images, relics, and afterwards, crosses and organs from places of worship.

11. To such an extent had Rome corrupted the apostolic form of baptism, which was, as the name exclusively means, nothing but immersion, that even the Baptists of this century were to such darkness, on this subject, that they generally practiced aspersion or pouring.

12. Thus we see that even those who ably and strenuously advocate the doctrine of salvation by sovereign grace alone may be in great darkness on other important subjects; and, in the case of the conditionalist “Anabaptists” and “Mennonites,” we also see that persons may be in mental darkness in regard to the glorious doctrine of grace, and yet may be blessed with heavenly light on other spiritual subjects of great importance.

Chapter XVII. Seventeenth Century.

The seventeenth was the century, during its first half, of the continued fearful storm of the early morning; and, especially during its second half, the century of the fierce raging of the fires of persecution, at last extinguished under the advancing light of day.

This was the century of the last religious wars in “Christendom,” the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, fomented by the Jesuits, reducing the people to cannibalism, and the population of Bohemia from 4,000,000 to 780,000, and of Germany from 20,000,000 to 7,000,000, and making Southern Germany almost a desert, terminated by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, securing a legal basis for Protestant rights on the continent of Europe; and the century of the Great Rebellion, in England, against the haughty, cruel and Romanizing Stuarts, of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of the Stuarts, and the “Glorious Revolution of 1688,” under William and Mary, foiling the intrigues of despotism and Jesuitism, and finally establishing the constitutional freedom and the Protestant character of England, the Toleration Act of 1689 legalizing dissent, and being the charter of freedom for non-conformists. The seventeenth was the century of the final deliverance of central Europe from Turkish invasion by the heroism of the Polish King, John Sobieski, who, in 1683, with about one-fifth their number, disastrously routed 300,000 Turks then besieging Vienna; the century of the secularization of politics; and of the almost universal prevalence of Roman Catholic Jesuitism in Southern Europe, crushing out by means of its Expurgatory and Prohibitory Indexes of Books, and its Inquisition, and its Propaganda or Missionary Society and Schools, nearly every vestige, not only of Protestantism, but also of Jansenism (a revived Roman Catholic Augustinianism), in Spain, France, Italy and Austria; of Louis XIV.’s infamous dragonnade “conversions,” and his virtual banishment of 500,000 Huguenots from France, and his deprivation of two million others of almost every right, by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (in 1685, the Edict having been issued in 1598 by Henry IV., and granting civil and religious rights to his Protestant subjects)—to all this barbarity and stupidity Louis XIV. having been instigated by the Jesuits, who urged him thus to seek atonement for his gross immoralities; the century of the almost total extermination, under the same baleful influence, of the Bohemian Brethren in Germany; of the similarly instigated martyrdom of Cyril Lucar, “the Patriarch of Constantinople” (in 1638), who had attempted a Calvinistic reformation of the corrupt Greek Catholic “Church;” of the numerous trials, condemnations and executions, in England and New England, of persons, generally feeble or lunatic females, accused of witchcraft, which judicial murders had reached their climax in continental Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; of the severe persecution of the Waldenses in Piedmont, of the Covenanters in Scotland, of the Protestants in Switzerland and Ireland, and of the Dissenters in England and North America. The seventeenth was the century of the publication of the King James or Authorized Version of the English Bible (in 1611), the best and noblest of all the translations of the Bible ever made in any language; of the formation, in England and North America, of Independent (or Congregational) and Baptist Churches, and of the Societies of Friends (or Quakers); of the learned, quasi-ecumenical Synod of Dort (in 1618 and 1619), which, without plunging into Supralapsarianism, emphatically condemned the five erroneous points of Arminian doctrine; and of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the most able, elaborate and influential of all Protestant Confessions, adopted by the Westminster Assembly (1643-1649) called together by the Long Parliament, and composed mostly of learned and devout Presbyterian ministers, one hundred and twenty-one in number, who met in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey—the Confession ranging from the eternal decrees to the final judgment, and while sublapsarian, yet more Calvinistic than the Thirty-nine Episcopalian Articles of “Archbishop” Whitgift (1595), or the Irish Articles of “Archbishop” Ussher (1615), and adopted by the Presbyterians of England and America, and, with changes as to church government, but also as to the proper subjects and “mode” of baptism, by the Regular Baptists of England and America, the doctrinal substance and language being the same in all these Confessions. The seventeenth was the century of the expulsion of the intriguing and casuistical Jesuit missionaries from Japan; of the Dutch pretended conversions of five hundred thousand heathen in Ceylon and Java, these first organized, commercial, Protestant missionaries baptizing all who could repeat the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, and the Governor conditioning not only office but governmental protection upon signing the Helvetic Confession; and the century of the earnest, humble, self-denying and devoted labors of John Eliot (born 1604, died 1690) among the American Indians, his translation of the Bible into their language (in 1633—the first Bible printed in America), the ordination of twenty-four Indian preachers, and the formation of thirty Indian churches in New England; the establishment, by the Long Parliament (in 1649), under the stimulus of Eliot’s labors of, a “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England,” revived with a royal charter in 1667, Eliot giving the poor and sick Indians nearly all the annual salary of fifty pounds (or $250) sent him by the Society, and proving himself in every way the Indians’ best human friend; and this was the century of the establishment, in 1698, of a “Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge” in England and in the Colonies. The seventeenth was also the century of the rise and rapid growth and wide prevalence of modern Arminianism (a low Arminianism, low morality, and High-Churchism together distinguishing England during the latter part of this century); and it was the century of the rise and early progress of modern philosophy, latitudinarianism, naturalism, deism, rationalism, materialism, pantheism and atheism, which potent germs of evil have so grown and expanded, and have been so fruitful of darkness and corruption, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

My space will permit only a brief treatment of but a few of these matters.

James Arminius, of Holland (1560-1609), an able, learned and amiable man, was a disciple of Theodore Beza, and at first a strict Calvinist but, through the combined influences of the rationalism of Peter Ramus, the synergism of Philip Melanchthon, the Semi-Pelagianism of Robert Bellarmine, and the liberalism of Theodore Koornhert, he came to believe and advocate that the election of the sinner to eternal life is not absolute, but is conditioned on the sinner’s foreseen faith and perseverance. Still he inconsistently maintained the total depravity of human nature since the Fall; that “man, in his natural condition, is dead in sins; that his mind is darkened, his affections depraved, and his will refractory; that the will of man, with respect to true good, is not only wounded, bruised, inferior, crooked and attenuated, but that it is likewise captivated, destroyed and lost, and has no powers whatever, except such as are excited by grace; that the grace of Christ is simply and absolutely necessary for the illumination of the mind, the ordering of the affections, and the inclination of the will to that which is good; that it infuses good thoughts into the mind, inspires good desires into the affections, and leads the will to execute good thoughts and good desires; that it goes before, accompanies and follows; that it excites, assists, works in us to will, and works with us that we may not will in vain; that it averts temptation, stands by and aids us in temptations, supports us against the flesh, the world and Satan; and that, in the conflict, it grants us to enjoy the victory; that it raises up again those who are conquered and fallen, establishes them, endues them with new strength, and renders them more cautious; that it begins, promotes, perfects and consummates salvation” (Watson’s Theological Institutes, Vol. 2, pp. 46 and 47). It has been truly said that “James Arminius was much less Arminian than his followers.” The latter, after his death, being continually reproached as Pelagians, had their creed drawn up in Five Articles by one of their preachers, James Mytenbogaert, and presented, as a “Remonstrance,” to the States of Holland and West Friesland, in 1610. This original Arminian Creed, which sets forth a carefully restricted Semi-Pelagianism, is as follows:

“Article I. That God, by an eternal, unchangeable purpose in Jesus Christ His Son, before the foundation of the world, hath determined, out of the fallen, sinful race of men, to save in Christ, for Christ’s sake, and through Christ, those who, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, shall believe on this His Son Jesus, and shall persevere in this faith and obedience of faith, through this grace, even to the end; and, on the other hand, to leave the incorrigible and unbelieving in sin and under wrath, and to condemn them as alienate from Christ, according to the word of the gospel in John 3:36, and according to other passages of Scripture also.

“Article II. That, agreeably thereto, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, died for all men and for every man, so that He has obtained for them all, by His death on the cross, redemption and the forgiveness of sins; yet that no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins except the believer, according to the word of the gospel of John 3:16, and in the First Epistle of John 2:2.

“Article III. That man has not saving grace of himself, nor of the energy of his free-will, inasmuch as he, in the state of apostasy and sin, can of and by himself neither think, will nor do anything that is truly good (such as saving faith eminently is); but that it is needful that he be born again of God in Christ, through His Holy Spirit, and renewed in understanding, inclination or will, and all his powers, in order that he may rightly understand, think, will and effect what is truly good, according to the word of Christ in John 15:5.

“Article IV. That this grace of God is the beginning, continuance and accomplishment of all good, even to this extent, that the regenerate man himself, without prevenient or assisting, awakening, following and co-operative grace, can neither think, will nor do good, nor withstand any temptations to evil; so that all good deeds or movements, that can be conceived, must be ascribed to the grace of God in Christ. But as respects the mode of the operation of this grace, it is not irresistible, inasmuch as it is written concerning many that they have resisted the Holy Ghost, Acts 7, and elsewhere in many places.

“Article V. That those who are incorporated into Christ by a true faith, and have thereby become partakers of His life-giving Spirit, have thereby full power to strive against Satan, sin, the world, and their own flesh, and to win the victory; it being well understood that it is ever through the assisting grace of the Holy Ghost; and that Jesus Christ assists them through His Spirit in all temptations, extends to them His hand, and if only they are ready for the conflict, and desire His help, and are not inactive, keeps them from falling, so that they, by no power or craft of Satan, can be misled nor plucked out of Christ’s hands, according to the word of Christ in John 10:28. But whether they are capable, through negligence, of forsaking again the first beginnings of their life in Christ, of again returning to this present evil world, of turning away from the holy doctrine which was delivered them, of losing a good conscience, of becoming devoid of grace, that must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scripture, before we ourselves can teach it with the full persuasion of our minds.

“These Articles, thus set forth and taught, the Remonstrants deem agreeable to the word of God, tending to edification, and, as regards this argument, sufficient for salvation, so that it is not necessary or edifying to rise higher or descend deeper.”

The question as to the possibility of finally falling from grace, left open in the Fifth Article, was decided by the Remonstrants or Arminians in the affirmative during the very next year (1611). And so, though having pronounced it both “unnecessary and unedifying,” they continued to “descend deeper” into false doctrine, until, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, large numbers of them had logically degenerated into Pelagians and Arians; and they were but little removed from the deism of Herbert of Cherburg, the materialism of Hobbs, the pantheism of Spinoza, and the skepticism of Bayle. Thus error, instead of rectifying itself, continually tends to depart more widely from the truth. “In opposition to Aristotelianism, which had possession of the universities and schools, Modern Philosophy began its course in the seventeenth century with the three tendencies of mystic idealism (in Jacob Bohme), inductive philosophy (in Francis Bacon), and rationalism (in Rene Descartes); which forms of speculation have ever since been in perpetual conflict with each other and with Christianity.” “The most powerful enemy that philosophy ever had,” says Victor Cousin, “was Blaise Pascal” (born 1623, died 1662), “the greatest genius and the best man that France ever produced,” the most evangelical and the most profound of all the uninspired defenders of Christianity, who proves, in his fragmentary and posthumous “Pensees” or “Thoughts,” that the revelation of Christ in the Scriptures and by His Spirit furnishes the only solution to the dark and countless mysteries of human life, the only antidote for its ills, the only relief for its necessities. In his “Provincial Letters” he made the Jesuits’ code of ethics the derision of all Europe. He was of that small and persecuted body of Catholics called Port Royalists, or Jansenists, or Augustinians, who heartily believed and advocated the two great Bible principles of the nothingness of fallen man and the omnipotence of Divine grace. He showed that all human philosophies, like all human religions, are full of vanity, follies, weakness, errors, extravagances and contradictions; and thus that it is the part of true wisdom to look away from all these ignesfatui, which can lead only to destruction, to the true and saving light of the eternal Sun of Righteousness. “I find it true,” says he, “that since the world began it has been constantly announced to men that they are in a state of universal corruption; but that a Restorer shall come. That it is not one man who says it, but a countless number of men, and an entire people, during four thousand years, prophesying thus, and made expressly for this purpose. Thus I extend my arms to my Liberator, who, having been foretold for four thousand years, came to suffer and to die for me on the earth, at the time and with all the circumstances which had been predicted; and, by His grace, I await death in peace, in the hope of being eternally united to Him; and I live, nevertheless, with joy, either in the blessings which it may please Him to give me, or in the ills[1] which He may send for my good, and that He has taught me to endure by His example. I find the Christian religion as foreshadowed in the Old Testament, and unfolded in the New Testament, altogether Divine in its authority, in its duration, in its perpetuity, in its morality, in its government, in its doctrine, and in its effects.”—It may be mentioned that the poet John Milton, the natural philosopher Sir Isaac Newton, and the mental philosopher John Locke, were not only Arminians, but also Arians. The learned Dutch statesman and theologian, Hugo Grotius, was an Arminian, and substituted, in place of the strict Anselmic theory of a real satisfaction on the part of Christ, the idea of a Divine acquittal for Christ’s sake. G. W. Leibnitz, of Germany, the most universal genius of all time, traces, in his splendid and imposing Theodicy, all evil to the necessarily imperfect and erring will of the creature; declares God the Alpha and Omega of the whole order of things in time and out of time; and, like John Milton,[2] regards every human creed as a mutilated and imperfect presentation of truth.

The National Synod of Dort (in South Holland), convened by the States-General for the settlement of the Arminian controversy, and containing, among its eighty-four members, twenty-eight delegates from Germany, the Palatinate, Switzerland and England, sat from November 13th, 1618, to May 9th, 1619. All the Dutch members were orthodox. Three Arminian delegates elected fro m Utrecht had to yield their seats to their orthodox competitors. Francis Gomarus was said to be the only Supralapsarian delegate. Prof. Schaff says that, in learning and piety, the Synod has never been surpassed since the days of the Apostles. The Synod emphatically condemned all the five points of Arminianism, and affirmed, to the contrary: 1st. Unconditional Election; 2nd. Particular Redemption; 3rd. Total Depravity; 4th. Effectual Calling; 5th. Final Perseverance. They declared that election, instead of being founded upon foreseen faith and holiness, is itself the very fountain of faith holiness and eternal life; that, while the atonement of Christ is of infinite worth and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world, its saving efficacy extends only to the elect, so as to bring them infallibly to salvation; that all men are born in the likeness of their fallen parents, in a state of spiritual death; that faith and repentance are the efficacious gifts or works of the Spirit of God in the hearts of all His chosen people, who are thus wholly of God rescued from the power of darkness, and translated into the kingdom of His dear Son, that they may show forth His praises, and glory not in themselves, but in the Lord; and that, notwithstanding all the remains of indwelling sin, and all the temptations of the, flesh, the world and the devil, God, their heavenly Father and unchangeable friend, who has conferred grace upon His elect, is faithful, and will never leave or forsake them, but will recover them, in true repentance and humility, from all their falls, and mercifully confirm and powerfully preserve them in a gracious state even to the end.

The victorious party gave proof of the darkness still remaining in their minds by not only deposing about two hundred Arminian ministers, but by banishing such as would not consent to keep silent, and beheading (under a false charge of treason) the aged Advocate-General of Holland, Van Olden Barneveldt, and condemning to perpetual imprisonment Hugo Grotius, who escaped through the ingenuity of his wife. In 1625, after the death of Prince Maurice, the Arminians were allowed to return and re-establish their churches and schools in Holland, which became more and more a land of religious toleration and liberty.

The seventeenth was the great century of the prevalence of Jesuitism; and Macaulay’s unrivalled characterization of this perfection of Pharisaism and Pelagianism must now be given. In the sixteenth century “the Pontificate, exposed to new dangers more formidable than had ever before threatened it, was saved by a new religious order, which was animated by intense enthusiasm and organized with exquisite skill. When the Jesuits came to rescue, they found the Papacy in extreme peril; but from that moment the tide of battle turned. Protestantism, which had, during a whole generation, carried all before it, was stopped in its progress, and rapidly beaten back from the foot of the Alps to the shores of the Baltic. Before the Order had existed a hundred years it had filled the whole world with memorials of great things done and suffered for the faith. No religious community could produce a list of men so variously distinguished; none had extended its operations over so vast a space: yet in none had there ever been such perfect unity of feeling and action. There was no region of the globe, no walk of speculative or of active life, in which Jesuits were not to be found. They guided the counsels of kings. They deciphered Latin inscriptions. They observed the motions of Jupiter’s satellites. They published whole libraries, controversy, casuistry, history, treatises on optics, Alcaic odes, editions of the fathers, madrigals, catechisms and lampoons. The liberal education of youth passed almost entirely into their hands, and was conducted by them with conspicuous ability. They appear to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual culture can be carried without risk of intellectual emancipation. Enmity itself was compelled to own that, in the art of managing and forming the tender mind, they had no equals. Meanwhile they assiduously and successfully cultivated the eloquence of the pulpit. With still greater assiduity and still greater success they applied themselves to the ministry of the confessional. Throughout Roman Catholic Europe the secrets of every government and of almost every family of note were in their keeping. They glided from one Protestant country to another under innumerable disguises, as gay Cavaliers, as simple rustics, as Puritan preachers. They wandered to countries which mercantile avidity nor liberal curiosity had ever impelled any stranger to explore. They were to be found as Mandarins, superintending the observatory at Pekin. They were to be found, spade in hand, teaching the rudiments of agriculture to the savages of Paraguay. Yet, whatever might be their residence, whatever might be their employment, their spirit was the same, entire devotion to the common cause, unreasoning obedience to the central authority. None of them had chosen his dwelling-place or his vocation for himself. Whether the Jesuit should live under the Arctic circle or under the Equator, whether he should pass his life arranging gems and collating manuscripts at the Vatican or in persuading naked barbarians under the Southern Cross not to eat each other, were matters which he left with profound submission to the decision of others. If he was wanted at Lima, he was on the Atlantic in the next fleet. If he was wanted at Baghdad, he was toiling through the desert with the next caravan. If his ministry was needed in some country where his life was more insecure than that of a wolf, where it was a crime to harbor him, where the heads and quarters of his brethren, fixed in the public places, showed him what he had to expect, he went without remonstrance or hesitation to his doom. Nor is this heroic spirit yet extinct. When, in our time, a new and terrible pestilence passed round the globe, when, in some great cities, fear had dissolved all the ties which hold society together, when the secular clergy had forsaken their flocks, when medical succor was not to be purchased by gold, when the strongest natural affections had yielded to the love of life, even then the Jesuit was found by the pallet which Bishop and Curate, physician and nurse, father and mother, had deserted, bending over infected lips to catch the faint accents of confession, and holding up to the last, before the expiring penitent, the image of the expiring Redeemer.—But, with the admirable energy, disinterestedness and self-devotion which were characteristic of the Society, great vices were mingled. It was alleged, and not without foundation, that the ardent public spirit which made the Jesuit regardless of his ease, of his liberty, and of his life, made him also regardless of truth and of mercy; that no means which could promote the interest of his religion seemed to him unlawful, and that by the interest of his religion he too often meant the interest of his society. It was alleged that, in the most atrocious plots recorded in history, his agency could be distinctly traced; that, constant only in his attachment to the fraternity to which he belonged, he was in some countries the most dangerous enemy of freedom, and in others the most dangerous enemy of order. The mighty victories which he boasted he had achieved in the cause of the church were, in the judgment of many illustrious members of that church, rather apparent than real. He had indeed labored with a wonderful show of success to reduce the world under her laws; but he had done so by relaxing her laws to suit the temper of the world. Instead of toiling to elevate human nature to the noble standard fixed by Divine precept and example, he had lowered the standard till it was beneath the average level of human nature. He gloried in multitudes of converts who had been baptized in the remote regions of the East; but it was reported that from some of those converts the facts on which the whole theology of the gospel depends had been cunningly concealed, and that others were permitted to avoid persecution by bowing down before the images of false gods, while internally repeating Paters and Aves. Nor was it only in heathen countries that such arts were said to be practiced. It was not strange that people of all ranks, and especially of the highest ranks, crowded to the confessionals in the Jesuit temples; for from those confessionals none went discontented away. There the priest was all things to all men. He showed just so much rigor as might not drive those who knelt at his spiritual tribunal to the Dominican or the Franciscan Church. If he had to deal with a mind truly devout, he spoke in the saintly tones of the primitive fathers; but with that large part of mankind who have religion enough to make them uneasy when they do wrong, and not religion enough to keep them from doing wrong, he followed a different system. Since he could not reclaim them from vice, it was his business to save them from remorse. He had at his command an immense dispensary of anodynes for wounded consciences. In the books of casuistry which had been written by his brethren, and printed with the approbation of his superiors, were to be found doctrines consolatory to transgressors of every class. There the bankrupt was taught how he might, without sin, secrete his goods from his creditors. The servant was taught how he might, without sin, run off with his master’s plate. The pander was assured that a Christian man might innocently earn his living by carrying letters and messages between married women and their gallants. The high spirited and punctilious gentlemen of France were gratified by a decision in favor of dueling. The Italians, accustomed to darker and baser modes of vengeance, were glad to learn that they might, without any crime, shoot at their enemies from behind hedges. To deceit was given a license sufficient to destroy the whole value of human contracts and of human testimony. In truth, if society continued to hold together, if life and property enjoyed any security, it was because common sense and common humanity restrained men from doing what the Order of Jesuits assured them that they might with a safe conscience do.” “The Jesuits unfolded the doctrine of moral Probabilism in such manner and measure,” says Gieseler, “that, while they condemned sin in general, yet in its particular manifestations they very frequently excused and palliated it. At the same time, they so defined the difference between mortal and venial sins, and made such statements upon the sufficiency of repentance, that men’s minds were cradled in complete carnal security. They elevated the papal power above everything, since their own rested on it. Bishops and councils might err, but the pope was infallible, and could never lapse into heresy; indeed, he was so far the lord of Christendom that sin itself, enjoined by him, would be a duty. Thus he was elevated so far above the human sphere that he must be looked upon as a demigod. As it was with the doctrine about the pope, so the other doctrines assailed by Protestants were for the most part carried to excess—the celibacy of the clergy, their independence of the civil power, the worship of saints, of Mary, and of images, the multiplication of indulgences. To keep dangerous light away, not only were the Indexes of Prohibited Books set to work,, but the Indexes of Expurgated Books were also published, mutilating and falsifying the ancient writings.”

In 1622 Gregory XV., the first pope who had been a pupil of the Jesuits, established the first great Missionary Board in the world, the prototype of all other Missionary Boards, whether Catholic or Protestant, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith), consisting of cardinals, and having in charge the entire Roman Catholic Missionary System. This body is still in existence. The object of this organization was and is the conversion of heathens and Protestants to Roman Catholicism and the extirpation of heretics. For this latter purpose the civil power has been employed in Catholic countries, and will be also employed in all Protestant countries wherever Roman Catholicism gains the supremacy. To promote the same purpose of Catholicizing the world, the next pope, Urban VIII., established in 1627, the Seminarium or Collegium de Propaganda bide (Seminary or College for Propagating the Faith), “to which young men from all nations are brought at early age, and gratuitously instructed in languages and sciences, and fitted out for the missionary work. This College was subordinated entirely to the Congregation of Cardinals or Missionary Board, and a splendid palace was built for both institutions. To the Propaganda no small part of the aggressive power of the Church of Rome is due. It has complete military power, under the pope, over the whole missionary field, not only to send missionaries wherever ever it is the interest of the church to send them, but to give them special training adapted to their special work.”

In addition to the Jesuit or Catholic atrocities of this century already enumerated with some particulars, they massacred 400 Protestants at Grossoto, in Lombardy, July 19th, 1620; are said to have destroyed 400,000 Protestants in Ireland, in 1641, by outright murder, and cold, and hunger, and drowning; cruelly exiled 500 families of Waldenses in Piedmont, in 1601; most diabolically tortured, outraged and massacred 6,000 of the same poor people in 1655; and partly butchered, and partly imprisoned most foully, and banished most inhumanly 12,000 of these inoffensive people of God in 1686, thousands of them being led like sheep to the slaughter because they would not bow down to the corrupting idolatries of Rome.

The “Church of England” for a long time imitated the tyrannical and persecuting spirit of her old mother, Rome. “Created in the first instance by a court intrigue,” says Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, pervaded in all its parts by a spirit of the most intense Erastianism (representing the church to be a mere creature of the State, dependent upon the State for its existence and authority), and aspiring at the same time to a spiritual authority scarcely less absolute than that of the Romish church which it had superseded, Anglicanism was as from the beginning at once the most servile and the most efficient agent of tyranny. Endeavoring by the assistance of temporal authority and by the display of worldly pomp to realize in England the same position as Catholicism had occupied in Europe, she naturally flung herself on every occasion into the arms of the civil power, No other church so uniformly betrayed and trampled on the liberties of her country.[3] In all those fiery trials through which English liberty has passed since the Reformation, she invariably cast her influence into the scale of tyranny, supported and eulogized every attempt to violate the Constitution, and wrote the fearful sentence of eternal condemnation upon the tombs of the martyrs of freedom. When Charles I. attempted to convert the monarchy into a despotism, the English Church gave him its constant and enthusiastic support. When, in the gloomy period of vice and of reaction that followed the Restoration, the current of opinion set in against all liberal opinions, and the maxims of despotism were embodied even in the Oath of Allegiance,[4] the Church of England directed the stream, allied herself in the closest union with a court whose vices were the scandal of Christendom, and exhausted her anathemas, not upon the hideous corruption that surrounded her, but upon the principles of Hampden and of Milton. All through the long series of encroachments of the Stuarts she exhibited the same spirit. It was not till James II. had menaced her supremacy that the church was aroused to resistance. Then indeed, for a brief but memorable period, she placed herself in opposition to the Crown, and contributed largely to one of the most glorious events in English history. But no sooner had William mounted the throne than her policy was reversed, her whole energies were directed subversion of the constitutional liberty that was then firmly established, and it is recorded by the great historian of the Revolution that at least nine-tenths of the clergy were opposed to the emancipator of England. All through the reaction under Queen Anne, all through the still worse reaction under George III., the same spirit was displayed. In the first period the clergy, in their hatred of liberty, followed cordially the leadership of the infidel Bolingbroke; in the second they were the most ardent supporters of the wars against America and against the French Revolution, which have been the most disastrous in which England has ever engaged. From first to last their conduct was the same, and every triumph of liberty was their defeat.”

The despotic and persecuting spirit of the “Church of England” was manifested against its own Puritan, or Non-conformist members; and against the Independents (or stricter Puritans, who formed churches separate from the Established “Church”); still more against the Covenanters (or Covenanted Presbyterians who entered into a compact to resist the imposition of Episcopacy upon Scotland); and most of all against the Baptists and Quakers. And this spirit was manifested both in the early part of the seventeenth century, when the leading clergy of the Establishment were Calvinistic, and in the later part, when they were Arminian; but the Arminian persecutions far surpassed the Calvinistic both in number and atrocity—persecution being more logically consistent with Arminianism, especially when, as in this case, the latter was blended with ritualism and sacerdotalism.

The Independents, originating in England about the year 1581 under the leadership of Robert Browne (hence first called Brownists), and being deserted by Browne, who in 1590 conformed to the “Church of England,” chose John Robinson, a pious Calvinist, as their pastor in 1603, and in 1608, to secure liberty of conscience and worship, fled to Amsterdam, and in 1609 to Leyden, in Holland; and one hundred and one of them, for the same purpose, emigrated, with their Ruling Elder, William Brewster, in the Mayflower, in 1620, to Plymouth, Massachusetts. These emigrants (forty-one men, with their families) are known as the “Pilgrim Fathers ;” they were mostly poor men and artisans; they advocated the self-government of each local church, and the admission of none but true believers to the Lord’s Supper; and they were not much disposed to persecute others for having different religious views and practices from themselves. But in 1629 the “Puritans,” or Episcopalians, who wished to purify the discipline and worship of the “Church of England,” and still not separate from that “Church,” began emigrating to Massachusetts. They consisted in great part of the professional and middle classes; and, though establishing a system of Congregationalism, yet like their brethren in England they set up a sort of theocratic state, and strove to secure uniformity of worship by rigorous laws for the civil punishment of heresy and schism. They unscripturally retained the pedobaptism of the “Church of England;” and they therefore wreaked their peculiar vengeance on Baptists and Quakers. The “Church of England” was established by law “in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, in Maryland after the decline of the Roman Catholic influence, and in New York after its cession by the Dutch;” and its tyrannical and persecuting spirit, combined with its lack of “Bishops” and its dependence on England, caused it to languish in a country destined by providence to be the home of religious liberty.

The Scottish Covenanters made a bold stand for civil and religious freedom especially from 1660 to 1688, during the reigns of Charles II. and James II. The persecutions that they suffered from the “Church of England” were very numerous, and in many cases most harrowing. It is computed that, during these twenty-eight years, eighteen thousand of them were either banished or put to death.

The Friends or Quakers originated in 1647. They were, in some respects, the successors of the Mystics of the Middle Ages, and the predecessors of the Methodists of the eighteenth century. George Fox (1624-1690), a moral, meek, odd, uneducated, bold and poor man, was their founder; Robert Barclay (1648-1690) their apologist and theologian; and William Penn (1644-1718) their statesman and politician. They claimed, not to be founders of a new sect, but revivers of primitive Christianity. They taught the spirituality of true religion; the indispensable need of “the inner light” or the Spirit of Christ for the understanding of the Scriptures; the privilege of direct access to God without the intervention of human priest or ceremony; entire freedom of conscience and worship for all men; that the ministry need no human education or theological training, but only the preparation afforded by the Holy Spirit, and that they ought to preach without hire or bargaining, though they may receive voluntary contributions from those to whom they administer in spiritual things. They steadfastly opposed tithes, oaths, infant baptism, war, slavery, intemperance, vain fashions, corrupting amusements and flattering, titles; and these eccentricities brought upon them the terrible vengeance of the “State Church.” It is said that, from 1650 to 1689, 13,258 Quakers suffered fine, imprisonment, torture and mutilation in the British Isles, 219 were banished, and 360 perished in prisons, some almost literally rotting in pestilential cells; and, in New England, 170 cases of hard usage are enumerated, 47 were banished, and four (including one woman) were hanged. These sufferings they bore with exemplary patience and heroism, leaving their enemies to the correction of the Lord, and meekly saying that it was better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. But, with their wonderful light, they had much spiritual darkness. They taught that the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper were not designed by Christ and His Apostles to be observed outwardly by the church, but only inwardly; that Christ died for every individual of the human race, and that the inner light or grace of His Spirit is given in sufficient measure to every human being, in all ages and countries of the world, to save all if they obey it, and condemn them if they reject it (the Quakers thus being the most Arminian of Arminians, and surpassing all other denominations in their latitudinarian view of the Spirit’s influence); that men are justified in their works, though not on account of their works; and that it is possible, in the present world, to reach a state of sinless perfection. Their four grades of meetings for discipline—the preparative, the monthly, the quarterly and the yearly, the latter exercising exclusive legislative and finally appellate power over a large collection of Societies—somewhat resemble the polity of Presbyterianism; the system has too much worldly wisdom, and too little New Testament authority. Some of their writers, even in the seventeenth century, approached very near to Socinianism, denying the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the vicarious nature of the atonement, and imputed righteousness. And in 1827 a schism took place among the American Quakers, Elias Hicks, of New York (1769-1830), openly advocating Socinianism, and drawing off into a separate body (called the Hicksite Quakers) the most of the Quakers in the Atlantic States; while this movement caused those called the Orthodox Quakers to adhere more closely to the Scriptures. Each party professes to hold the views of the founders of the Society in the seventeenth century—the name which they have given themselves not being the church, but “The Religious Society of Friends.” Towards the close of the seventeenth century they numbered about 75,000; and they have never had as many as 200,000 members.

The most of the seventeenth century was a time of outward persecution, but of spiritual prosperity, for the Baptists in Europe and America. By the so-called “Reformed Churches” in the departments of Zurich and Berne, in Switzerland, hundreds of the poor people styled Anabaptists or Mennonites were, on account of their religion, whipped, branded, robbed, imprisoned and banished. Similar punishments were inflicted upon the Baptists by the Episcopalians in England and Virginia, and by the Congregationalists in Massachusetts. The last man burned alive in England for his religion was Edward Wightman, a Baptist, April 11th, 1612; just as the first man, William Sautre, burned in 1400, in England, for his religion, is said to have been a Baptist in sentiment. The only other person bullied in England for his religion during this century was Bartholomew Legate, an Arian, March 18th, 1612. The horror of the people at these renewed executions for heresy caused James I. and his successors to adopt slower and less public modes of death for heretics’,—such as long and barbarous imprisonment. Baptist ministers especially suffered from long imprisonment.” “Francis Bampfield was eight years in Dorchester jail, and spent the last year of his life in Newgate, where he died. John Miller was confined ten years in the same jail. Henry Forty was twelve years in prison at Exeter. John Bunyan was in Bedford jail twelve years. Joseph Wright lay in Maidstone jail twenty years. George Fownes died in Gloucester jail. Thomas Delaune, and many other servants of God, died in Newgate.”

Samuel Howe, a cobbler and a Baptist preacher, and author of a pamphlet called “The Sufficiency of the Spirit’s Teaching, without Human Learning,” died in prison in 1640, and was buried in the highway, because interment in consecrated ground, so called, was refused him.

It was particularly during the infamous reigns of Charles II. and James II. (1660-1688) that the Baptists were persecuted in England. In November, 1661, John James, an excellent, inoffensive and benevolent Seventh-Day Baptist minister in London, was on suborned and perjured testimony as to treasonable words used by him, hanged, drawn and quartered, his quarters being placed over the city gates, and his head set on a pole opposite the meeting-house where he had preached the gospel. The “Act of Uniformity” in 1662, drove two thousand conscientious ministers from the Establishment, and subjected many Baptists to the pillory and imprisonment. The first “Conventicle Act” in 1664 forbade as many as five or more persons, over sixteen years of age, besides the household, from meeting anywhere for religious worship in any other manner than allowed by the liturgy or practice of the “Church of England;” the penalty for the first offense was three months imprisonment, or a fine of five pounds; for the second offense six months’ imprisonment, or a fine of ten pounds; and for the third offense banishment to America (the West Indies) for seven years (and death, if they returned without per mission), or a fine of one hundred pounds. Vast numbers suffered under this act in every part of the kingdom. The Five-Mile Act in 1665 forbade Non-conformist ministers from going within five miles of any city or town that sent members to Parliament, or within five miles of any place where there was stated service in the Established “Church” also declared them incapable of teaching any public or private schools. The penalty for each offense was forty pounds. This Act inflicted great suffering upon the true ministers of the word and upon their families; and it caused many Baptist Churches to be formed in villages, nooks and corners of the land, beyond the reach of the Five-Mile Act. The second “Conventicle Act” in 1670 was still more searching and extensive than the first. “All persons attending conventicles (or the religious meetings of Non-conformists) were to be fined five shillings for the first offense, ten shillings for the second; the preachers were to be fined twenty pounds for the first offense; forty pounds for the second; the owners of the houses, barns, buildings or yards in which the meetings were held were to be fined twenty pounds each time; the fines were to be levied by distress and sale of the offender’s goods and chattels; the money was to be divided into three parts, one-third for the king, one-third for the poor, and one-third for the informer and his assistants; in case of the poverty of the ministers, their fines were to be levied on the goods and chattels of any others present. If the first Act scourged the Dissenters with whips, the second was a scorpion plague. They were plundered and imprisoned without remorse. Many of the Bishops exerted themselves in every possible way to enforce the Act. They sent circulars to the clergy, directing them to stimulate and aid the civil authorities; and some of the Bishops went in person to the places where the meetings were supposed to be held, in order to encourage the constables, or insure the rigorous discharge of their duty. The activity of the informers was cited by the promised share of the penalties. Their infamous trade became lucrative, and many of them amassed large sums, mercilessly filched from the servants of God. A more degrading and detestable occupation cannot well be imagined. They spent their time in prowling about the retired streets and by-lanes of towns, or in exploring the recesses of woods, and wild, desolate places, if happily they might hear the voice of singing or prayer, or watch the movements of some straggler hastening to join his brethren. With savage glee they darted upon the secret assembly, gloating over their confusion and distress, and specially rejoicing when they seized the preacher, because of the heavier fine. They accompanied the constables when they executed warrants of distress on property; and they attended the sales of the goods seized, taking care to get bargains for themselves. They scrupled not to take the bed from under the sick; they robbed of their bread children whose fathers were languishing in prison. The law created their calling, and encouraged them in diligently pursuing it. Magistrates urged them on. Clergymen and country squires applauded their cleverness; and judges on the bench commended them for their zeal. There was an unholy alliance against truth and righteousness, in which the titled and the learned were willing to associate themselves with the meanest, the wickedest, and the most brutal of men. The prisons were crowded. Families were ruined. Houses were desolated. Estates were impoverished or abandoned. Numbers fled their native shores, and sought in Holland or in the American wilderness for freedom to worship God.” But all this severe persecution did not succeed in putting an end to the religious meetings of the Dissenters in England. They met for worship in private houses, in the lanes, in the fields, in the woods, at all hours of the day and of the night, wherever and whenever they could best escape the vigilance of the authorities. The word of the Lord was very precious in those days. There was a very lively spirit of faith and prayer among the people of God; their numbers increased; it was a spiritual spring-time with them, though a period of great outward gloom; they felt and declared that the time of the singing of birds was come, and that the voice of the turtle was heard in the land. They blessedly realized the holy rejoicing of the prophet Habakkuk, not in worldly prosperity, but in the God of their salvation (Hab. 3:17-19). It has been computed that, from 1660 to 1689, in England, seventy thousand persons suffered on account of religion, eight thousand persons perished, and two million pounds sterling (ten million dollars) were paid in fines. “The Baptists,” says Sir James McIntosh, “suffered more than any others under Charles II., because they had publicly professed the principles of religious liberty.” Bonds and imprisonment and scourging attended the Baptists in Massachusetts. A few came over with the first emigrants, but not making their sentiments public, were not molested for several years. In 1635 Roger Williams was banished, and, leaving Massachusetts, founded Rhode Island. In 1639 several Baptists were fined, or imprisoned, or disfranchised, or threatened with banishment (different penalties being inflicted on different ones), for attempting to found a church in Weymouth, a town about fourteen miles southeast of Boston. In 1644 a poor man named Painter, in Boston, was tied up and whipped for refusing to have his infant child baptized. In July, 1651, upon the request of an aged Baptist, of Lynn, named William Witter, who was not able to travel and visit his church at Newport, Rhode Island, three members of that church, John Clarke, Obadiah Holmes and a John Crandall, came to Lynn, Mass., twelve miles from Boston, to hold meeting with him. While Mr. Clarke was preaching from Revelation 3:10, two constables entered the house and arrested Clarke, Holmes and Crandall; and the Court sentenced Clarke to pay a fine of twenty pounds, Holmes thirty pounds, and Crandall five pounds, or be publicly whipped. All conscientiously refused to pay the fines, and were sent back to prison. Some of Mr. Clarke’s friends paid his fine without his consent. Mr. Crandall was released on a promise to appear at the next Court. Mr. Holmes was kept in prison at Boston until September, when, his fine not having been paid, he was brought out and publicly and severely whipped, receiving thirty stripes with a three-corded whip, so that he could take no rest for some weeks except as he lay on his knees and elbows, not being able to suffer any other part of his body to touch the bed. While he was undergoing the cruel strokes, the Lord gave him a more glorious manifestation of His presence than ever before, so that he scarcely felt the outward pain, and he told the magistrates that they had struck him as with roses, and he prayed the Lord not to lay this sin to their charge. Warrants were issued against thirteen persons, whose only crime was showing some emotions of sympathy towards this innocent sufferer; but eleven escaped, and, while the other two were preparing to receive ten lashes apiece, some friends paid their fines. Notwithstanding Congregational persecutions, the Baptists increased in Massachusetts. A Baptist Church was formed in Boston in 1665, and for several years some of the members spent most of their time in courts and prisons. In 1643 the “Church of England” was established by law in Virginia. In 1653 Sir William Berkeley, royal governor of Virginia, strove, by whippings and brandings, to make the inhabitants of that colony conform to the Established “Church,” and thus drove out the Baptists and Quakers, who found a refuge in the Albemarle country of North Carolina, a colony which “was settled,” says Bancroft, “by the freest of the free, by men to whom the restraints of other colonies were too severe.”

Having described, in the same connection, the religious persecutions by Protestants during the seventeenth century, I will now briefly speak of some individual Baptist Churches, Baptist principles and practices, and a few Baptist ministers of this century.

The first English Baptist Church was formed, in 1608, of refugees in Amsterdam, under the pastoral care of John Smyth, who had been an Episcopalian, and afterwards a Brownist clergyman, and who has been called a Se-Baptist because he was said to have baptized himself; but it is more probable that one of the brethren baptized him, and he then baptized the others. This church, as shown by their Confession of Faith, published in 1611, held Arminian views—the members being what are called in England General Baptists, because they believe in a general atonement. In 1612, Mr. Smyth having died, Mr. Thomas Helwys was chosen to succeed him as pastor, and he and the most of the church returned to England, and located their place of worship in London. In 1633, September the 12th, the first Particular or Calvinistic or Predestinarian English Baptist Church was founded in London, under the pastoral care of John Spilsbury, from those members of an Independent Church who rejected infant baptism; it was called Broad Street Church, and was in the parish of Wapping, London. In 1644 they numbered seven churches in London, and forty-seven in the country; and the same year, three years before the Westminster Confession, in answer to the calumnies of Daniel Featley, an Episcopalian clergyman, the seven London churches published, in fifty-two Articles, a Confession of Faith, showing that, in all important doctrinal principles, the Baptists agreed with the “orthodox Reformed Churches.” The concluding paragraph of this Confession is most admirable. It is as follows: “Thus we desire to give unto Christ that which is His, and unto all lawful authority that which is their due; and to owe nothing to any man but love; to live quietly and peaceably, as it becometh saints, endeavoring in all things to keep a good conscience, and to do unto every man (of what judgment soever) as we would they should do unto us: that, as our practice is, so it may prove us to be a conscionable, quiet and harmless people (no ways dangerous or troublesome to human society), and to labor and work with our hands that we may not be chargeable to any, but to give to him that needeth, both friends and enemies, accounting it more excellent to give than to receive. Also we confess that we know but in part, and that we are ignorant of many things which we desire and seek to know; and if any shall do us that friendly part to show us from the word of God that we see not, we shall have cause to be thankful to God and them. But if any man shall impose upon us anything that we see not to be commanded by our Lord Jesus Christ, we should in His strength rather embrace all reproaches and tortures of men, to be stripped of all outward comforts, and, if it were possible, to die a thousand deaths, rather than to do anything against the least tittle of the truth of God, or against the light of our own consciences. And if any shall call what we have said heresy, then do we with the Apostle acknowledge that ‘after the way which they call heresy, worship we the God of our fathers,’ disclaiming all heresies (rightly so called), because they are against Christ, and to be steadfast and immovable, always abounding in obedience to Christ, as knowing our labor shall not be in vain in the Lord.” Devonshire Square Church, one of the seven churches that published this Confession, is still in existence. In 1656 was published, in forty-six Articles, the Confession of Somerset, signed by the messengers of sixteen churches in Somerset and the adjoining counties. What is called the Confession of 1688, in thirty-two chapters, by far the most important and authoritative of all uninspired Baptist Confessions, and still generally received by all Baptists who hold the doctrine of personal election and the certainty of the final perseverance of the saints, first appeared in 1677 at London, and was, in 1688 and 1689, approved and recommended by the ministers and messengers of above a hundred churches who were in session in London July 4-11, 1689. It was adapted by the Philadelphia Baptist Association, in Philadelphia, Sept. 25th 1742, and is hence also called the Philadelphia Confession—the latter retaining all the old London Confession, and adding two other Articles (Chapter 23, Of Singing of Psalms, and Chapter 31, Of Laying on of Hands). The Charleston (South Carolina) Association was organized, in 1751, on the basis of the old London Confession; and the Kehukee (North Carolina) Association w as organized in 1765 on the same Confession, adding, from the Philadelphia Confession, the Chapter on the Singing of Psalms, but not adding the Chapter on the Laying on of Hands. The practice of laying the hands of the presbytery on all believers after baptism was first introduced among the Baptist Churches in England about the year 1645, and became common, though not universal, among the Baptists in England and America during the seventeenth century, and its observance or non-observance sometimes caused bitter controversies, and even rent churches; but the practice is now almost entirely discontinued, except in cases of ordination to the deaconship and eldership. As the English Congregationalists had done in the Savoy Declaration in 1658, so the Baptists, in the London Confession, followed the Presbyterian Westminster Confession both in sentiment and in language, with very few verbal alterations, except in the doctrine of the church and the ordinances,—for the purpose, as they said, of showing their agreement with the Presbyterians and Congregationalists “in all the fundamental articles of the Christian religion.” And they say in their Appendix: “If any of the servants of our Lord Jesus Christ shall, in the spirit of meekness, attempt to convince us of any mistake, either in judgment or practice, we shall diligently ponder his arguments, and account him our chiefest friend that shall be an instrument to convert us from any error that is in our ways; for we cannot wittingly do anything against the truth, but all things for the truth.”

By the close of the seventeenth century there were probably, in England and Wales, about two hundred Baptist Churches with about twenty thousand members; and there were in the present United States sixteen churches, organized as follows: First Newport, R. I., 1638; Providence, R. I., 1639 ; Second Newport, R. I., 1656; First Swansea, Mass., 1663; Boston, Mass., 1665; North Kingston, R. I., 1665; Seventh Day, Newport, R. I., 1771; South Kingston, R. I., 1680; Charleston, S. C., 1683; Tiverton, R. I., 1685; Middletown, S. J., 1688; Lower Dublin, Pa., 1689; Piscataway, N. J., 1689; Cohansey, N. J., 1691; Second Swansea, Mass., 1694; First Philadelphia, Pa., 1698. Several of these churches were composed of General or Arminian Baptists. From the most recent and thorough investigation, it is believed that Dr. John Clark (a physician) and eleven other persons formed, at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1638, the first Baptist Church in America; Clark resigning the proposed care of the church in 1651, in order to return to England, was succeeded by Obadiah Holmes. The pastors and members of this oldest Baptist Church in America remained strongly Calvinistic or predestinarian until about the year 1820.—In 1636 the town, and in 1639 the Baptist Church, of Providence, Rhode Island, were founded by Roger Williams (1599-1683). He was a Welshman by birth, an Episcopalian by training, and had been a Congregationalist by choice, and he was a graduate of the University of Cambridge. He came to Massachusetts in 1631, and was for a few years assistant minister of the Congregational Church at Salem; but, denying the right of the magistrates to punish offenses of a purely religious character, he was banished, and, leaving his wife and children at Salem, he fled, in the depth of a severe winter, to the Narragansett Indians, and, in gratitude to God for his preservation during fourteen weeks of bitter wilderness wandering, he called the town that he founded Providence and he made it a shelter for persons distressed for the sake of conscience. He established the colony of Rhode Island upon principles of entire religious liberty—principles which have since been adopted in all the States of the American Union, but upon which no State before Rhode Island had ever been founded.[5] In March, 1639, Roger Williams, Ezekiel Holliman and ten others constituted the Baptist Church at Providence. Holliman baptized Williams, and then Williams immersed Holliman and the others. Four months afterwards, doubting the validity of this procedure, Williams withdrew from the church, and seems never again to have united with any religious organization, but remained a Seeker, seeking but never finding a church of pure apostolic faith and practice. “For one hundred and thirty years the ministers of the Providence Church were natives, bred on the spot, generally advanced in years, worked for their daily bread, and had no special training.” For a long time it was thought that this church was the first Baptist organization in America; but the best evidence seems to show that the Newport Church was the first.—John Miles formed a Baptist Church at Swansea in Wales in 1649; and removing, with a few of his members and a copy of the old church records, to America, he founded in 1663 the first Baptist Church in Massachusetts at Swansea or Swanzy.

The Baptists of the seventeenth century acknowledged no master but Christ, no infallible authority but the Scriptures. They advocated perfect religious liberty for all men. They required true piety as the indispensable re requisite for church membership; and, in accordance with 1 Corinthians 5:11 and 2 Corinthians 6:17, they excluded from their fellowship, those guilty of immoral, unscriptural or disorderly conduct. They debarred or excluded from fellowship persons who sold spirituous liquors; those who drank to excess; those who borrowed money and did not repay it; those who married irreligious and disorderly companions; those who did not treat their companions with proper love and kindness; those who told lies; those who swore; and those guilty of unchastity. Upon thoroughly satisfactory proof of heartfelt repentance, the churches were rejoiced to restore excluded members again to fellowship. They silenced preachers for improper conduct which was not thought to be so gross as to demand their exclusion; and, upon proper repentance, restored to them the privilege of exercising their gifts in public. Some of the churches observed the Lord’s Supper weekly, but most of them monthly. Singing was not commonly practiced; and, when engaged in, it was only at the close of the meeting, so that all opposed to it could freely go out, and the church would not be offended. Many churches had two or more Elders or pastors. In some churches there were “ruling Elders,” who, in the absence of the pastor, presided at church-meetings and preached. Any preacher, whether ordained or not, could baptize. Strict communion was practiced in most of the churches; but some admitted unbaptized persons, if pious, to communion. They were not perfect, and did not have perfect light on all subjects. In some of their controversies, especially on predestination and free-will, there was great virulence, Arminians charging Calvinists with uncharitableness, and Calvinists charging Arminians with latitudinarianism. There was, as already mentioned, a great contention on the subject of laying on of hands, and this was by some made a bar to fellowship. Some believed in the perpetuity of the Jewish Sabbath, but most observed the first day of the week as the day of rest and worship. A very few churches observed the washing of feet; but this was placed among the things indifferent, and was never made a bar to fellowship. Some churches had a love-feast before the Lord’s Supper. Only so far as the people of God have been taught by the Spirit of Christ, have they been perfectly agreed in faith and practice.

John Bunyan (1628-1688) was the most gifted preacher of the seventeenth century, and the most wonderfully gifted experimental and spiritual writer since the days of the Apostles. His “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,” his “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and his “Holy War,” are the records of his own deep and varied spiritual experience. Next to the Bible, his Pilgrims Progress has been translated into more languages, and has passed through more editions (about four hundred), than any other book in the world. It is generally the first book after the Bible translated into the heathen languages. The common people heard and read Bunyan gladly. Until the present century, few except the poor and lowly and uneducated admired Bunyan’s writings; but it is now the fashion of the rich and lordly and educated to commend them for their pure and strong English, and their simple, natural and allegorical power. Only the spiritual can admire their spirituality. Bunyan was himself, like the Apostles of Christ during His ministry, a poor, hard-working, uneducated man. He was a tinker, like his father. At seventeen years of age he served a year in the Parliamentary army; and then, returning home, married a poor orphan girl—both being so poor that they had not a dish or a spoon between them. All the portion that she brought him was two religious books which her father had left her, “The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven,” and “The Practice of Piety.” He soon experienced some concern on the subject of religion, and he began a constant attendance at prayers and sermons, and became a strict Pharisee, a “poor, painted hypocrite,” he says, worshiping the Established Church and all its appurtenances. He gradually abandoned his favorite amusements, playing at tip-cat on the “Sabbath,” swearing, ringing the church bells, and dancing, and he made some outward reformation both in his words and life, and set the ten commandments before him for his way to Heaven, and thought that he generally kept them pretty well; and, when he broke one, he was sorry for it, and promised God to do better next time, and he thought he pleased God as well as any man in England. He was now talked of by his neighbors as an eminently pious man, and he was proud of his “godliness.” But, while working at his calling, he heard three or four poor women one day talking of a new birth, and of the work of God in their hearts, and how they were convinced of their miserable natural state, and how God had visited their souls with His love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted and supported against the temptations of the Devil, and they contemned their own righteousness for its filthiness and insufficiency. This conversation made a deep impression upon Bunyan, and he sought the company of the same truly godly persons again and again, and he was convicted by the Holy Spirit of his own dreadful sinfulness, and made to long and cry to God for deliverance—he felt that he would have given ten thousand worlds, if he had them, for true conversion. But he seemed to grow worse and worse; terrible temptations and trials assailed him for more than a year; he feared that he had committed the unpardonable sin, and the day of grace was forever gone with him, and he was about to sink in despair, when Christ seemed to speak mercy and pardon to his soul. Reading Martin Luther’s commentary on the Galatians, he saw his own spiritual conflicts fully described, and he esteemed that book above all others except the Bible as fit for a wounded conscience. His soul seemed to be filled with the love of Christ; but, after this, he experienced many sore temptations, which, however, he was enabled to overcome by the all-sufficient grace of Christ. The Holy Spirit taught him that his righteousness did not consist in his own perfections or his own frames and feelings, but that Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, today and forever, was his righteousness. Now his chains fell off indeed, and he gloried and rejoiced in Christ Jesus as his wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption; and he was led by the Lord into the mysteries of the union with the Son of God, and enabled to feel that he was joined to Him, and was flesh of His flesh, and bone of His bones (Eph. 5:30). He united with the Baptists (at Bedford, forty miles northwest of London), “the most thorough-going and consistent of all Protestant sects,” says Mr. J. A. Froude in this connection. He passed through other severe spiritual trials and temptations, and was led into the heights and depths of Divine grace, love and mercy; and he was enabled especially to realize the sweetness of Hebrews 11:22-24 “Ye are come unto Mount Sion,” etc. Two years after his baptism, some of the wisest and best of his brethren thought that they saw in him a special gift of spiritual understanding and utterance, and they earnestly requested him to speak a word of exhortation to them at one of their meetings. Though much abashed, he after a while consented to try to do so, yet, he says, with much weakness and infirmity. The church was much affected and comforted, and encouraged him to persevere, and soon ordained him to the work of the ministry. After preaching very acceptably to the brethren five years, and working at his trade for the support of himself and family, he was arrested and thrown into Bedford jail twelve years (1660-1672) for “teaching men to worship God contrary to the law.” He would have been released any day if he had promised not to preach; but he felt called of God to the work of the ministry, and he continually replied to his jailors, ” If you release me today, I will preach again tomorrow.” His separation from his poor wife and his four small children, one of them a blind daughter whom he loved with peculiar tenderness, and who died while he was in prison, was very distressing to him. Not being able to practice his old trade, he took up a new one, that of making long-tagged-thread laces, of which he made many thousands for the support of his family. He was allowed to preach and pray with the other prisoners in jail, where no informers were prowling about to catch him; and he was there providentially and graciously directed and assisted to compose his three most influential writings, Pilgrim’s Progress, Holy War, and Grace Abounding. Thus the wisdom of God overruled the malice of Satan, and enabled His highly gifted servant to preach to millions who would perhaps otherwise have never heard of His name. His only books, while in prison, were the Bible and Concordance, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The Bible was his constant companion, and he is said to have almost known it by heart. “It is easy,” says Mr. Froude, “to conceive a university-bred Bunyan, an intellectual meteor, flaring uselessly across the sky and disappearing in smoke and nothingness.” He lived sixteen years after his release from prison, and remained all the while pastor of the church in Bedford, though he visited other churches much, “animating the zeal of his brethren, collecting and distributing alms for the poor, and settling difficulties.” He rode to London, on a preaching tour, once a year, and it is said that three thousand persons would meet before breakfast on a dark winter morning to hear him. The learned Independent minister, John Owen, said to Charles II. that he would gladly relinquish all his learning for the tinker’s preaching abilities. Bunyan abstained all his life from politics. He steadily refused official, pecuniary or ecclesiastical promotion for himself or family. He did not speak of his own talents, but was low in his own eyes; and, instead of seeking, he humbly put aside the applause of men. “A little grace, a little love, a little of the true fear of God,” he said, “is better than all the gifts; the Scripture does not say, the Lord gives gifts and glory, but the Lord gives grace and glory; true grace is a certain forerunner of glory.” He was a strong predestinarian, maintaining not only the doctrine of personal, unconditional, efficacious election unto holiness and eternal life, but also the doctrine of reprobation, which, he said, made no man a sinner, but left him as he made himself. “No man ever quickened his own soul, or had any power to take a single step in the way of salvation, till God made him willing in the day of His power. The absolute promises are big promises, containing in themselves all the conditional promises, with all their conditions and all their blessed fulfillments. All that the Father giveth the Son shall come to Him; they may say they will not, but they will be found liars, for Gods’ word is true; they shall come to Him; they shall be enabled to see and repent and believe; their hearts shall be inclined to come by God, who worketh in them both to will and to do of His good pleasure; He will give them power to come, and to rest in Jesus and be saved.” Bunyan’s last sermon, preached a month before he died, was from the text, “Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). “They that believe,” said he, “are born to it as an heir is to an inheritance—born, not of natural privileges or desires or will (I am not a free-willer; I do abhor it), but born of God, of the Spirit of God, raised out of the grave of sin, and translated into the kingdom of God’s dear Son, and made to live a new life. And the new-born child that has life will cry; the spiritual child will cry to God for mercy, and will desire the sincere milk of the word, that he may grow thereby, and will crave to be comfortably clothed with the golden righteousness of Christ, and will be satisfied with the breasts of God’s consoling promises, and will bear some resemblance to his heavenly Father, and will be trained up in the ways and house of God, the true church, and will go to God for the supply of his necessities, and for relief and strength in trials anti temptations If you have not these marks, you will fall short of the kingdom of God; if you are not a child of God, you will have no heavenly inheritance. If you have these marks, you are the children of God, and you should set your affections on things above, and not on things below; you should talk of your Father ’s promises, and love His will, and be content and pleased with your worldly lot, and live lovingly together with all the children of God, serve one another, do good to one another, and, if any wrong you, pray God to right you; and be holy in all manner of conversation and live like the children of the holy God.” “Happy in his heavenly work and influence, which spread over his own country and to the far-oft settlements in America, Bunyan spent his last years in his own Land of Beulah, Doubting Castle out of sight, and the towers and minarets of Emmanuel Land growing nearer and clearer as the days went on. Returning on horseback from a successful journey from Bedford to Reading undertaken to reconcile an angry father and an offending son, he was thoroughly wetted in a storm of rain, and was attacked with chill and fever, and died in ten days, towards the end of August 1688, between two and three months before the landing of King William.” His last words were, “Take me, for I come to Thee.” The ablest writers testify that there were no nonsense, no fanaticism, and no harshness in Bunyan. He had a horror of the Roman Catholics, whom he thought to compose Mystical Babylon; and also of the Quakers, whom he understood to deny the inspiration of the Scriptures, the divinity and atonement of Christ, and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body and general judgment, and whom he understood to affirm that every man in the world had the Spirit of Christ, grace and faith. With all Protestants, if moral and pious, he was willing to commune, considering differences in judgment about water baptism no bar to such communion; but could cite no plain scriptural precept or example for his open communion views satisfactory to the most of Baptists then or since, and the natural tendency of such views is illustrated by “the progress backwards of his own Bedford Church to infant sprinkling and Congregationalism.” The New Testament shows this practice of open communion to be erroneous; and history proves it to be a failure. There can be no agreement between truth and error. It is evident that even Bunyan, with his extraordinary gifts, was in darkness on the subject of communion.

“Great as was the authority [or influence, rather] of Bunyan with the Baptists,” says Macaulay, ” that of William Kiffin was greater. Kiffin was the first man among them in wealth and station.” He was born in 1616, and died in 1701. He was an industrious, honest, skillful and successful merchant of London, and had great influence at the courts of Charles II. and James II., and took pleasure in using his wealth and influence for the relief and protection of his poor, persecuted brethren like Mordecai at the Court of Ahasuerus. He was himself arrested many times, and imprisoned once. He was for five years a member and minister in an Independent Church, and then joined the first Particular Baptist Church formed in England, of which Mr. Spilsbury was pastor. Two years afterwards he and those of his brethren who thought it improper to allow ministers that had not been immersed to preach to them, withdrew in 1640 and formed another church, which met in Devonshire Square; and of this church Mr. Kiffin was pastor sixty-one years, until his death, being aided in his long pastorate, at different times, by three assistant pastors. He kept aloof from politics, and always tried to obey the powers that be, and he submitted with unmurmuring resignation to the most painful[6] dispensations of Providence. “He left behind him a character of rare excellence, tried alike by the fire of prosperity and adversity in the most eventful times.” The only work he ever published was a defense of Close Communion.

Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) was a poor, sickly, uneducated boy, who found peace in Christ in his fifteenth year, and united with a Baptist Church. Three years afterwards he was invited by the church to preach, though he did not undertake a pastoral charge till his twenty eighth year, when he was chosen pastor of Horsleydown Church in London, and retained that office till his death. At first he was an Arminian as to free-will and the extent of the atonement; but, by reading the Scriptures and conversing with those who understood the truth more perfectly, he abandoned those errors. He wrote forty-three works, polemical, practical and poetical—some of his subjects being the laying on of hands, the lawfulness of singing in public worship, the authority of the “Christian Sabbath,” baptism, Scripture metaphors, gospel mysteries, the parables, the travels of true godliness and the travels of ungodliness, Zion in distress, distressed Zion relieved, and spiritual melody (nearly three hundred hymns). The historian, Thomas Crosby, was a member of his church, and expresses his warm admiration of him as a man and a minister. Mr. Keach was often imprisoned for preaching, and his life was sometimes endangered. He was a bold defender of the truth, and his books were widely circulated. In 1644 he wrote a small book for children, called “The Child’s Instructor,” in which he affirmed that none but believers should be baptized, and he also taught the personal reign of Christ on earth for a thousand years. And, what was especially of offensive, he said: “Christ’s true ministers have not their learning and wisdom from men, or from universities, or human schools; for human learning, arts and sciences are not essential to the making of a true minister; but only the gift of God, which cannot be bought with silver or gold. And also, as they have freely received the gift of God, so they do freely administer; they do not preach for hire, for gain or filthy lucre; they are not like false teachers, who look for gain from their quarters, who eat the fat, and clothe themselves with the wool, and kill them that are fed (Ezek. 34). Also, they are not lords over God’s heritage; they rule them not by force and cruelty, neither have they power to force and compel men to believe and obey their doctrine, but are only to persuade and entreat; thus is the way of the gospel, as Christ taught them.” For publishing this heretical book, Mr. Keach was indicted and tried and condemned to go to jail two weeks, and then stand in the pillory two hours in the open market place of Aylesbury, and two hours in the open market place of Winslow; and, at the latter place, to have his book openly burnt before his face by the common hangman, in disgrace of him and his doctrine, and to pay a fine of twenty pounds, and then remain in jail until he found sureties for his good behavior, and appearance at the next court, there to renounce his doctrines and make such public submission as should be enjoined him. This shameful sentence was rigorously executed, and Mr. Keach bore the indignities with great patience and manliness, and, even while standing in the pillory, boldly defended the Bible doctrine that he had taught, and the people treated him not only with respect but with sympathy.

Hanserd Knollys (1598-1691) was a graduate of the University of Cambridge, and experienced conversion while a student there. He was first a Deacon and a priest in the “Church of England;” but, finding that infant baptism was not taught in the Scriptures, he gave up his salary, but continued preaching, and the subject of his discourses was “the doctrine of free grace, according to the tenor of the new and everlasting covenant.” In 1636 the High Commission Court, or Protestant Inquisition, arrested and imprisoned him; but, through the connivance of his jailor, he escaped, in 1638, with his wife to America. He arrived in Boston a penniless fugitive, and was treated as an Antinomian, and had to work with a hoe for his daily bread. Going to Dover, N. H., he preached there three years, and then, summoned by his aged father, returned to England. He settled in London, and gained his livelihood by teaching school till near the close of his life. Commanded by the Chairman of “The Westminster Assembly of Divines” to preach no more, he readily and boldly replied that he would preach the gospel publicly and from house to house. In 1645 he was ordained pastor of a Baptist Church in London, and he remained so till his death, though for a while a fugitive in Holland and Germany. He was frequently imprisoned for preaching, even in his eighty-fourth year being in jail six months. He was a strong predestinarian, a decided Baptist, and was a man of great learning and preaching abilities. He wrote eleven books, one of which was a grammar of the Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages His learning was seasoned with Divine grace, so that it did not puff him up or lead him away from the simplicity of the gospel of Christ.

“The mild, harmless, godly and persecuted Baptists,” are frequent names given by eminent historians to the people of God in the seventeenth century.

1. For more than half of his short life of thirty nine years, Pascal was deeply affected with dyspepsia, or paralysis, or hypochondria, or all these combined and from his eighteenth year he never passed a day without pain. Yet he bore his sufferings with exemplary patience and, under the mournful darkness of Catholic superstition, he continually inflicted upon his poor body additional sufferings. For he wore an iron girdle next his skin, armed with sharp points, which he would drive into his flesh with his elbow whenever he felt himself assailed by sinful thoughts

2. “Truth indeed,” says Milton in his Aeropagitica, “came once into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on; but when He ascended, and His Apostles after Him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as the story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osyris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osyris, went up and down gathering up limb and limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall till her Master’s second coming.

3. As Macaulay very truly and eloquently wrote, “The Church of England continued to be for more than 150 years the servile handmaid of monarchy, the steady enemy of public liberty. The Divine right of kings and the duty of passively obeying all their commands were her favorite tenets. Once and but once—for a moment, and but for a moment—when here own dignity and property were touched, she forgot to practice the submission she had taught.”

4. In this clause that it was not lawful “on any pretense whatever to take up arms against the king.”This clause was expunged at the Revolution. Magna Charta had declared that kings who violated it might be resisted. “The doctrine that kingly government is peculiarly favored by Heaven,” says Macaulay, “receives no countenance from the Old Testament; for in the Old Testament we read that the chosen people were blamed and punished for desiring a king, and that they afterwards commanded to withdraw their allegiance from him. Nor does a this system receive any countenance from those passages of the New Testament which describe government as an ordinance of God; for the government under which the writers of the New Testament lives was not a hereditary monarchy. The Roman Emperors were republican magistrates, named by the senate.”

5. An English Baptist, named Leonard Busher, published in 1614 the first work in the English language advocating perfect liberty of conscience. It was called “Religious Peace, or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience.”

6. One of his sons was poisoned in Venice by a Catholic priest for denouncing his religion. And two of his grandsons the pious William and Benjamin Hewling. under the pretense of complicity in Monmouth’s rebellion were sent to the gallows by the infamous Judge Jeffries, and hanged amid the lamentations of: the spectators, including even the soldiers on guard. Chief Justice George Jeffries, whose name is “a synonym for a monster of bloodthirsty cruelty, blasphemous rage, and brutish intemperance,” whose yell on the bench sounded, it was said, like the thunder of the judgment day, and who was the fit tool of the bigoted and unfeeling Catholic King, James II., in his notorious circuit of 1685, sentenced 320 prisoners to be hanged, 841 to be sold into slavery beyond the sea, and a still larger number to be whipped and imprisoned. The sufferers were, for the most part, says Macaulay, blameless and pious, and regarded as martyrs to the truth of the Protestant religion.

Chapter XVIII. Eighteenth Century.

The eighteenth century was a century mostly of religious calm, but of clouds of thick darkness overspreading the whole face of civilization, turning the risen day into the semblance of dead night—the darkness originating in England and extending to America, but becoming denser on the continent of Europe, and densest in France; these frightful clouds being occasioned by the thick and poisonous vapors arising from a vast number of the earthy, sickly wild flickering tapers and torches of human philosophy and human religion kindled by the wisdom of this world; but, rifting these clouds, the powerful and glorious beams of the Sun of righteousness irradiated some favored spots in Germany, and many more in the British Isles and in the British North American Colonies, known, in the latter quarter of the century, after a seven years’ struggle for independence, as the United States of America; while in wretched France the darkness deepened into the lurid blackness of Tophet, and the deification of human reason, in the person of a harlot, culminated in a Reign of Terror unparalleled in the annals of human history.

During the eighteenth century, the low Arminianism and low morality of the latter part of the seventeenth century produced, largely in Europe and somewhat in America, the legitimate fruits of latitudinarianism, indifference, Arianism, Plagiarism, deism, naturalism, philosophism, illuminism, perfectionism, universalism, infidelity, and materialism; and the seeds of these evils showed, especially in Europe, their ungodly origin and nature in the production of an extraordinary and terrible crop of worldliness, selfishness, avarice, venality, mild speculation, lotteries, gambling, intemperance, profligacy, political corruption, robberies, murders, and almost social chaos.[1] The notorious, ignorant, shallow, conceited, ambitious, avaricious and licentious infidel, Voltaire, who was the echo of the drunken English debauchee, Bolingbroke, and the influential companion of the German King, Frederick “the Great,” was the leader of the public opinion of the eighteenth century. The disguised unbelief of the latter part of the seventeenth century became the blatant infidelity of the eighteenth century, denying the possibility and credibility of miracles and of a, Divine revelation and of everything supernatural, declaring all religion either merely natural or a nullity, find idolizing human reason and human morality or human benevolence. The infidelity of eighteenth century appeared first as deism in Protestant England and America, and afterwards as historical and ethical rationalism in Protestant Germany, and as materialistic atheism in irreligious, ecclesiastically and politically oppressed Roman Catholic France. The lurid and ghastly horrors of the French Revolution should, as a lofty and terrific beacon light, forever warn the world of the legitimate effects of the substitution of human reason and “free-thinking” for the religion of the Bible, or for even for a nominal adherence to the religion of the Bible. Immanuel Kant, of Germany (1724-1804), the greatest of all modern mental philosophers, is well called by Mr. John Cairns “the highest summit of rationalism.” He idealized all the positive truths of Christianity, and reduced it to a perfect but mere system of morality; and, while inconsistently admitting, beyond all other philosophers, the doctrine of human depravity taught in the third chapter of Genesis, and of the necessity of regeneration taught in the third chapter of John, he, like all his rationalizing brethren, made this regeneration, not the work of God’s Spirit, but the work of man’s own will and free agency. He, like them, fondly quoted one-half of the Apostle’s language—“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” but carefully omitted the concluding remark of the Apostle, “For it is God who worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12, 13). Like many of his rationalizing followers in the nineteenth century, Kant “sees the progress of the kingdom of God in a kind of euthanasia (easy death) and ultimate disappearance of historical Christianity!”[2]

The characteristics of the eighteenth century were a dead formalism, not only in the Catholic, but also, more or less, in all the Protestant communions; the general discontinuance of doctrinal, experimental, spiritual and extemporaneous preaching, and the substitution, in its place, of cold, lifeless, written moral essays[3] read in the pulpit; the unconverted state; not only of most of the private members, but; also of most of the ministers of nearly all denominations; the immersion of the “clergy” in the gayeties [gaieties] and vanities of the world; the intolerable intrigues and corruptions of the Jesuits, and their almost total extermination from China, their overthrow in Paraguay, their expulsion from Portugal, France, Spain, Naples, Malta and Parma, and the suppression of their order by Pope Clement XIV. in 1773, he dying the next year by poison supposed to have been administered by them; the occasional persecution of Protestants in Catholic countries, and of dissenters in England and America, but the general prevalence of religious toleration occasioned by religious indifference, providence thus overruling evil for good, and establishing the original New Testament and Baptist principle of soul-liberty or freedom of conscience, more extensively than ever before in the world, and especially in the United States; the Particular or Predestinarian Baptist ministers, both in England and America, in this undoctrinal, indifferent, Arminian,[4] Pelagian, corrupt, antichristian age, laying the axe at the root of the tree of human pride and corruption, and insisting upon the great radical reformatory Bible principles of total depravity, personal election, particular redemption, effectual calling and final perseverance—these Divine and eternal truths being stigmatized as “Hyper-Calvinism” and “Antinomianism” by those who erred because not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God; the publication, in 1784, of “The Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation,” by Andrew Fuller, of England, who may almost be considered the founder of the New School or so-called “Missionary” Baptists; and who in this work modernized and moderated Calvinism by maintaining a general atonement with special application, and consequently urging that the gospel should be offered freely and indiscriminately to all men, whether they had ears to hear or hearts to receive it or not,—this work involving him in a bitter controversy of nearly twenty years with his brethren, and resulting in the conversion of most of them to his views; many of the General or Arminian Baptists degenerating into Arianism and infidelity, and some of them being converted to the scriptural views of the Strict Particular Baptists; the success of pietism, under Spener and Francke, in Germany, containing, as it did, much legalism, but also some highly important evangelical truths, such as the indispensable necessity of a spiritual birth, and of the religion of the heart and life; the origin, in Germany, under Zinzendorf, and the most extensive spread over the world, by schools and zealous, self-denying missions, costing but little money (the first Protestant missions not undertaken in connection with the planting of colonies), of a new Moravianism, characterized at first by many gross excesses, but emphasizing the importance of a personal, vital, inward experience of religion, making the gospel, the grace and love and perfection of Christ, so prominent, to the almost entire exclusion of the law, as to be accused of Antinomianism; the great religious awakening, in the British North American Colonies, under the fervent preaching, first, in 1734, of the intensely predestinarian Congregationalist, Jonathan Edwards, and then, in 1740 and afterwards, of the strongly Calvinistic Methodist, George Whitefield—the extraordinary spiritual blessings of their ministry permeating all the religious denominations, particularly the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians and the Baptists, in all the colonies, Edwards, the greatest theologian of America, being especially careful to promote and restore Bible purity of doctrine, and exercising a, great influence on Whitefield in this regard; the rise and rapid multiplication, in the British Isles and the United States, of Methodist Societies, under the preaching of Whitefield and the Wesleys, Coke and Asbury and others, Whitefield being Calvinistic and the Wesleys Arminian—all the true success of this extensive movement being due to the Holy Spirit’s blessing the highly important, but generally forgotten, spiritual and evangelical truths fervently proclaimed by the first Methodist preachers, “the utter depravity of human nature, the lost condition of every man who is born into the world, the vicarious atonement of Christ, the necessity to salvation of a new birth, of living, sanctifying, justifying faith, of the constant and sustaining action of the Divine Spirit upon the believer’s soul”—and the false success of the movement being due to the extreme Arminianism of the Wesleys, to an unequalled system of religious terrorism and the consequent ingathering of a large unconverted membership, to the attachment of the Wesleys to the Anglican Establishment, the retaining of infant baptism, and to an at first imperial and then oligarchical unscriptural organization.

The eighteenth was also the century of the rise of Swedenborgianism, or the so-called “New Jerusalem Church,” established by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swede (1688-1772), who professed to have been divinely inspired from 1743, and to have lived the remainder of his life in intercourse with the world of spirits, and to have seen the last General Judgment of the world in 1757,—the second coming of Christ and the setting up of the New Dispensation, the New Jerusalem Church, then taking place. He professed to preach a new gospel, which was not a gospel; he rejected or rationalized away (he called it spiritualizing) nearly all the fundamental principles of Christianity, as commonly understood, denying the tripersonality of God and the personality of the Devil, the vicariousness or reality of the atonement, the resurrection of the body, the future general judgment, and the destruction of the world; he claimed to understand the internal sense of the Scriptures better than the Apostles did; he taught, like Mohammed, that Heaven is material, and that marriage will be continued there, notwithstanding the declaration of Christ to the contrary (Matt. 22:30). He also taught that all religions, even those of the heathens, contain the essence of saving truth; that man’s will is free; that God loves all alike, and gives Himself equally to all, but all do not receive Him; and the system of salvation inculcated by Swedenborg went beyond the last verge of Arminianism, and plunged into the depths of Pelagian darkness. It is mournful that this theosophic mysticism is gaining much ground, in various quarters, in the nineteenth century.

During the eighteenth century also arose the Shakers, a kind of off-shoot from the Quakers, originating in England, but emigrating and now confined to the Northern United States. These people worship Ann Lee (1736-1784), a very poor, uneducated Englishwoman, who married when very young, and lost four children in their infancy, and who became opposed to marriage, and left her husband, the latter then marrying another woman. Ann professed to be the manifestation or the second appearing of Christ in His glory; and she taught her followers celibacy (called by Paul a “doctrine of devils,” Tim. 4:1-3) and community of goods. The Shakers are mostly farmers, living together and having; all things in common, and worshipping their “Eternal Mother” with measured dance and song. They are spiritualists, and reject vicarious atonement, the resurrection of the body, a future general judgment, and predestination and election. Like the Swedenborgians, they are not only Arminians, but thorough-going Pelagians, maintaining that the will is free; that Heaven is opened by man’s good deeds, and hell by his evil deeds; and that man will have a chance of saving himself, not only before, but after death. They are said now (1886) to number about five thousand members, in seventeen communities, and to be worth about ten million dollars, The sect called Glassites, in Scotland (from John Glass, 1695-1773), and Sandemanians, in England and America (from Glass’s son-in-law Robert Sandeman, 1718-1771), sprang from the Presbyterians in the eighteenth century, advocating the independency, and voluntary support of churches, and that “faith is a bare belief of the bare truth;” though both Glass and Sandeman, with at least their immediate adherents, regarded faith as the fruit of Divine grace and the work of the Holy Spirit. They at first observed feet-washing, but have now discontinued it. Some of their peculiarities are weekly love-feasts, the kiss of charity, abstinence from blood and things strangled, plurality of Elders in every church, prohibition of games of chance and of college training, and an adherence to the most literal interpretation of Scripture. They have decreased in the nineteenth century, and now number less than 2,000 members.

Modern Protestant Missions originated in the eighteenth century. The English “Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts,” established in 1701, devoted itself to the diligent dissemination of High-Church Episcopalianism. The Danish Government, under the influence of the German Pietist, A. H. Francke, sent out a few missionaries to India in 1705, to Lapland in 1716, and to Greenland In 1721. The Moravian Zinzendorf sent out from 1732 to 1750 “more missionaries than the combined Protestant Church in two hundred years—illiterate laymen, who were enjoined to practice rigid economy, labor with their own hands, use only spiritual means, and aim at the conversion of individuals.” Thomas Coke, John Wesley’s “right-hand,” “the embodiment of Methodist Missionism,” established in 1786 a mission among the Negroes in the West Indies. “The independent Protestant Missionary Societies formed in this century may be regarded as a substitute for the Orders of the Roman Church,” says the able and accurate Schaff-Herzog Catholic Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. The “Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel amongst the Heathen” was formed at Kettering, England, October 2nd, 1792, under the influence of Andrew Fuller, William Carey, and others, and operated in India. The “London Missionary Society” was formed in 1795, soon passed under the control of the Independents, and began work in the South Sea Islands and South Africa. The “Society for Missions to Africa, and the East” was formed in 1799 by Episcopalians.

The modern system of Sunday Schools originated in the eighteenth century. The patriarchs, by Divine direction, taught religious truths to their own children. The prophets gave religious instruction to all, both old and young, who were prepared to receive it. Ezra and his assistants “read to all who could hear with understanding in the book of the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Neh. 8). After the Babylonian captivity, the Jews established synagogues, and religious schools in connection with them, in almost every town in Palestine. In the second century of the Christian era, Catechetical schools were established in connection with many churches to give religious instruction to the young and ignorant; and these schools were especially flourishing in the fourth and fifth centuries. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic “Church” being engrossed with the wholesale “conversion” of nations by the sword, it is said that catechetical instruction was given by the so-called “heretics,” the Cathari, Waldenses, Wycliffites, Bohemian Brethren, etc. In the sixteenth century the Reformers, to some extent, instituted catechetical instruction on Sundays. But Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, England, is generally admitted to have been the founder of modern Sunday Schools. In 1781 he hired teachers to instruct some poor children in Gloucester in reading and in the catechism on Sunday. His example was extensively imitated in the British Isles and the United States; and, by the end of the eighteenth century, the instruction had almost universally become gratuitous, and was said to be far superior in quality to what it was before, because now springing from pure benevolence. It is claimed by the Methodists that John Wesley, first in 1784, suggested that the instruction should be gratuitous, and also expressed the hope that Sunday Schools would become “nurseries for Christians” (See the Article on Sunday Schools in McClintock and Strong’s Encyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. x., p. 21). The writer of the Article just mentioned declares that, “within the last fifty years Sunday Schools have come to be regarded as an essential branch of church action, not merely in England and America, but throughout the Protestant world whether in home or mission fields;” and he intimates, at the conclusion of his Article, that, in the Sunday School, he sees “the problem of the conversion of the world in process of solution.” It thus appears that, for nearly 1,800 years of the Christian era, the church was destitute of an “essential” requisite in its work, and the problem of the conversion of the world had not begun to be solved!

The extermination of the Jesuits from China was due to the success of their jealous brethren, the Dominicans, in finally prevailing on the pope to compel the Jesuits to abandon, in that country, their heathen customs and accommodations this step provoking the Chinese to destroy hundreds of thousands of them.

The rationalistic Lutheran[5] theologians Ernesti, Michaelis and Semler, declared that the Bible was to be explained and interpreted just like any other book; vainly substituted their own ideas for the thoughts of the inspired writers; set aside the great doctrinal truths of revelation as rhetorical types and bold metaphors, the Asiatic language of emotion and imagination, and not the modern European language of strict scientific accuracy; distilled away the positive facts of Christianity in pretending to get at its essence; and founded schools of thought which have filled almost all the professors’ chairs and pulpits in Protestant Germany during the nineteenth century.

The Anglican Establishment showed but few signs of spiritual life during the eighteenth century; it was nearly buried under the rubbish of formalism, skepticism and corruption. “In America it was a sickly exotic, striking no deep roots into the soil, and it almost withered away when scorched by the fervent heat of the Revolutionary epoch. Not only was it then regarded as disloyal to the Colonies, but it had long been looked upon as not promotive of piety.”[6] In the latter part of the eighteenth century, a very limited but genuine revival of spiritual life was manifested in the Anglican communion in the true conversions and godly lives and labors of William Romaine (1714-1793), whose sermon on “The Lord our Righteousness” excluded him forever afterwards from the pulpit of Oxford University, and who wrote three admirable works called “The Life of Faith,” “The Walk of Faith,” and “The Triumph of Faith;” of A. M. Toplady (1740-1778), who edited “The Gospel Magazine,” combated the Arminianism of John Wesley, maintained the doctrinal Calvinism of the “Church of England,” and published a volume of Psalms and Hymns, among which were his own excellent compositions, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me; Let me hide myself in Thee,” “When languor and disease invade this trembling house of clay” “Prepare gracious God” and “Your harps, ye trembling saints, down from the willows take;”[7] of John Newton (1725-1807), who was converted from infidelity and profligacy, and became curate of Olney in Buckinghamshire, was an able minister of the New Testament, and wrote charming spiritual letters, and published the “Olney Hymns,” many of which were written by himself, among these being, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” ” In evil long I took delight,” “Sweet was the time when first I felt,” “Approach, my soul, the mercy-seat,” “Come, my soul, thy suit prepare,” “’Tis a point I long to know,” “Mercy, O thou son of David,” “Savior, visit Thy plantation,” “How tedious and tasteless the hours,” ” How sweet the name of Jesus sounds,” and “Glorious things of thee are spoken;” of William Cowper (1731-1800), the best of English letter-writers, and the gentlest and purest of English poets, who was for several years of his life, at intervals, melancholic and insane but who had a profound religious experience, and who wrote sixty-eight of Newton’s 280 Olney Hymns, including, “I thirst, but not as once I did,” “God moves in a mysterious way,” “The Spirit breathes upon the word,” “’Tis my happiness below,” “Sometimes a light surprises,” “Hark, my soul, it is the Lord,” “When darkness long has veiled my mind,” “O for a closer walk with God,” “The Lord will happiness Divine,” ” God of my life, to Thee I call,” “Far from the world, O Lord, I flee,” “There is a fountain filled with blood” and “Grace, triumphant in the throne;” of Joseph Milner (1744-1791) and Isaac Milner (1751-1820), who were brothers, and authors of an evangelical church history; of the eccentric, able and pious brothers, Richard Hill (1733-1808) and Rowland Hill (1744-1833); and of Thomas Scott (1747-1821), who is considered the expiring defender of Calvinism in the “Church of England,” who wrote an account of his own experience in the “Force of Truth,” and excellent Notes on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and whose “Family Bible, with Notes,”[8] has probably been read more widely than any other. Mr. Scott was, in early life, a poor farm-laborer, and had scarcely any educational advantages; yet his religious writings were sold (mostly in America) even during his life to the value of more than a million dollars, although they were sold at about the cost of publication. He was a moderate Pedobaptist and a moderate Calvinist, but a spiritual-minded, reverential, godly, humble and benevolent man. Multitudes of the poor deeply mourned his death, feeling that they had lost a devoted friend. He tenderly relates, in his autobiography, the evidences of the genuine conviction and conversion of his little daughter, who died at the age of four years and a half. In the preface to his sermon on Election and Final Perseverance, Mr. Scott remarks: “Perhaps speculating Antinomians abound most among professed Calvinists; but Antinomians, whose sentiments influence their practice, are innumerable among Arminians. Does the reader doubt this? Let him ask any of those multitudes who trample on God’s commandments, what they think of predestination and election; and he will speedily be convinced that it is undeniably true; for all these, in various ways, take occasion from the mercy of God to encourage themselves in impenitent wickedness.”[9] And, in the last year of his life, he remarked, in a letter to a friend: “Indeed, eager, vehement, speculating Arminianism is most nearly allied to Plagiarism, and the transition is almost imperceptible.” Says Mr. Toplady: “I consider that Arminianism is the original of all the pernicious doctrines that are propagated in the world, and Destructionism will close the whole of them.”

In the last year of his life Mr. John Wesley (1703-1791) published a letter in which he wrote: “I live and die a member of the Church of England, and no one who regards my judgment or advice will ever separate from it.” He designed only to found a “Society” in the Anglican communion; and he declared he wished that the very name of “Methodists” “might never be mentioned more, but be buried in eternal oblivion.” He was so staunch an Anglican that he not only wrote a pamphlet against the American cause, but also offered to raise troops for the British government against the Colonies; and all his preachers in America, except Francis Asbury, on the breaking out of the Revolutionary War, fled to England. In the matter of church polity, he conceded that the three orders of Deacons, Priests and Bishops early appeared in the church, but he denied that these three orders are enjoined in Scripture. He considered himself, though ordained only as a “priest” in the “Church of England,” a scriptural “Bishop;” and he ordained Thomas Coke as a superintendent of American Methodists, for the purpose, merely, of recommending his delegate to his followers in America—though “Coke, in his ambition, wished and intended the ceremony to be considered as an ordination to a bishopric.” As for an uninterrupted succession of Bishops from the Apostles, Wesley declared that it was a “fable which no man ever did or could prove.” Wesley governed his Societies with absolute power; and in 1784, towards the close of his life, he, by his famous “Deed of Declaration,” vested similar power in an Annual Conference of a hundred preachers and their successors. He received into his Societies all persons who expressed “a desire to flee from the wrath to come and be saved from their sins.”[10] He prepared, especially for his American Societies, his Articles of Religion, at first twenty-four in number, increased to twenty-five by the adoption, in 1804, of the twenty-third Article (“Of the Rulers of the United States of America”), and in 1832 placed beyond the power of the “Church” to “revoke, alter or change” them. These Articles were an abridgment of the “Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England,” Wesley omitting the Calvinism of the Thirty-nine Articles, and not inserting his own Arminianism or other peculiar doctrines his design being to provide a broad and liberal platform for all professed Christians to stand upon. He believed in the inspiration both of the Scriptures and of himself, and therefore made the doctrines of his Sermons and his Notes on the New Testament (mostly adapted from Bengel’s Gnomon) the legal basis of his Societies. He generally preached briefly and extemporaneously, often selecting a text after he entered the pulpit; but sometimes, on special occasions, he spoke from manuscript. He is said to have traveled 280,000 miles in his preaching tours, and preached, in the fifty years of his itinerant ministry, 42,000 sermons; also to have written, translated or edited 200 religious works, and for the latter to have received a hundred thousand dollars, which, however, with almost all his other receipts, he gave away in charities, so that he died poor. He left, in his Societies at his death, 541 itinerant preachers, and 135,000 members. “In general,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Wesleyan theology is to be described as a system of evangelical Arminianism. In particular, Wesleyan ministers insist on the doctrines of original sin, general redemption, repentance, justification by faith, the witness of the Spirit, and Christian perfection” by “the witness of the Spirit” meaning, they say, a sense of sins forgiven, but not necessarily final salvation; and, by “Christian perfection,” meaning, not sinlessness, but the perfection of love, which they believe to be attainable in the present life.[11] The doctrinal essence of Methodism is thus well stated in the American Cyclopaedia: “Methodism holds that the salvation of each human being depends solely on his own free action in respect to the enlightening, renewing and sanctifying inworkings of the Holy Spirit (which this system holds to be universal). If, in respect to these inworkings, he holds himself receptively, he will be saved both here and hereafter; but if he closes his heart against these influences of the Spirit, he will continue in death both here and in eternity.” Wesley taught that God made man holy, but that man, when he disobeyed the commandment of God, fell into spiritual death, became dead in the spirit, dead to God, dead in sin, his body then becoming corruptible and mortal, and he hastening on to death everlasting, to the destruction both of body and soul, in the fire never to be quenched. He declared that the fall of man is the very foundation of revealed religion, and that it is a, scriptural, practical, rational, experimental doctrine; and from this utter corruption of man’s nature, this death of the soul, he inferred the necessity of a New Birth, and Justification by faith. He declared that Christian or saving faith is not an opinion or any number of opinions, be they ever so true, but is a power wrought by the Almighty in an immortal spirit, inhabiting a house of clay, to see spiritual and eternal things; that faith is the eye of the new-born soul, whereby every true believer seeth Him who is invisible; that it is the ear of the soul, whereby the sinner hears the voice of the Son of God, and lives; the palate of the soul, whereby a believer tastes the good word and the powers of the world to come; the feeling of the soul, whereby, through the power of the Highest overshadowing him, he perceives the presence of Him in whom he lives, and moves, and has his being, and feels the love of God shed abroad in his heart. Why have not all men this faith? He asks. Because, he replies, no man is able to work it in himself; it is a work of omnipotence. It requires no less power, he says, thus to quicken a dead soul, than to raise a body that lies in the grave. It is, he adds, a new creation; and none can create a soul anew, but He who at first created the Heavens and the earth. You know this to be so by your own experience. Faith is the free gift of God, which He bestows not on those who are worthy of His favor, not on such as are previously holy, and so fit to be crowned with all the blessings of His goodness; but on the ungodly and unholy; on those who, till that hour, were fit only for everlasting destruction; those in whom was no good thing, and whose only plea was, God, be merciful to me, a sinner! No merit, no goodness in man, precedes the forgiving love of God. His pardoning mercy supposes nothing in us but a sense of mere sin and misery; and to all who see and feel and own their wants, and their utter inability to remove them, God freely gives faith, for the sake of Him in whom He is always well pleased. Without faith a man cannot be justified, even though he should have everything else; with faith he cannot but be, justified, though everything else should be wanting. This justifying faith implies not only the personal revelation, the inward evidence of Christianity, but likewise a sure and firm confidence in the individual believer that Christ died for his sins, loved him, and gave His life for him. And at what time so ever a sinner thus believes, God justifieth him. Repentance, indeed, must have been given him before; but that repentance was neither more nor less than a deep sense of the want of all good, and the presence of all evil; and whatever good he hath or doth from that hour when he first believes in God through Christ, faith does not find, but brings. What clear spiritual light Wesley seemed at times to have on these important subjects of the new birth, and faith, and repentance; and yet at other times, when speaking on these same subjects, especially in connection with the doctrine of predestination and election, with what gross spiritual darkness and bitterness is his mind filled! In the Conference of 1771 he said: “Take heed to your doctrine! we have leaned too much toward Calvinism. 1. With regard to man’s faithfulness; our Lord Himself taught us to use the expression, and we ought never to be ashamed of it. 2. With regard to working for life; this, also, the Lord has expressly commanded us. Labor, ergazethe, literally, work for the meat that endureth to everlasting life. 3. We have received it as a maxim, that a man is to do nothing in order to justification. Nothing can be more false. Whoever desires to find favor with God should cease from evil, and learn to do well. Whoever repents, should do works meet for repentance. And if this is not in order to find favor, what does he do them for? [Just as though the forgiven penitent had not already found Divine favor, and would not now spontaneously and gratefully work from a new and living principle of love!] Is not this,” he adds, “salvation by works? Not by the merit of works, but by works as a condition. What have we then been disputing about for these thirty years? I am afraid, about words. As to merit itself, of which we have been so dreadfully afraid, we are rewarded according to our works, yea, because of our works. How does this differ from for the sake of our works? And how differs this from secundum merita operum, as our works deserve? Can you split this hair? I doubt I cannot.” Thus, ignoring the most important and essential fact of revelation, that salvation is entirely of grace, the natural, darkened reason of man reaches the deepest abysses of Pelagian darkness, and makes salvation entirely of works. The wonder is how a sane mind can believe two such utterly contradictory systems. Wesley’s bitter opposition to the doctrine of predestination and election is most conspicuous in his sermon on “Free, Grace,” a sermon which he decided by lot whether to preach and print or not, and a sermon which should have been entitled, not Free Grace, but Free Will; for, if human language means anything, it makes the salvation of every sinner depend, not on the free grace of God, which Wesley represents to be the same to the lost as to the saved, but on the free will of the sinner, which really carries him to Heaven. The carnal caricaturing and railing at God’s eternal truth (grossly misunderstood and misrepresented) exhibited in this so-called sermon, instead of being forever perpetuated in the body of Methodist doctrine, should, as Wesley said of the name of Methodists, be “buried in eternal oblivion.” If God be an eternal and unchangeable Being, Wesley’s own language already quoted in reference to the spiritual death of all mankind since the fall, and the absolute need of omnipotent power to create the soul anew, and freely give if repentance and faith, necessitates the truth of the doctrine of predestination and election;[12] insomuch that the acute S. T. Coleridge “pledges himself to apply every sentence of Wesley’s declamation against election to Wesley’s own creed,” and Mr. Coleridge declares that “the only effective way of dealing with the Predestinarians is by demonstrating the inherent unreality and in consequence of all logic and all logical conclusions”—but this course would be fatal to all rationalistic religion. Even Mr. Daniel Curry, of New York, one of the leaders of American Methodism, admits that Wesley’s Treatise on Baptism is a capital instance of blindness; the difficulty arising from a hopeless attempt to reconcile the Anglican catechism and ritual to the New Testament. I do not know of any eminent character in ecclesiastical history more full of doctrinal inconsistencies than Mr. John Wesley; and I do not see how any child of God, with a knowledge of these facts, can substitute John Wesley’s writings (or any other uninspired writings) for the Bible as his standard of faith and practice.—Charles Wesley (1708-1788), the younger brother of John, was the poet of Methodism, and the most voluminous of all English hymnists. Much of his poetry contains false theology, as “O Horrible Decree,” and “A charge to keep I have;” but some of his hymns are excellent, as “Jesus, lover of my soul,” “Blow ye the trumpet,”Come, Thou Almighty King,” “Blast be the dear uniting love,” and ” Come, let us join with saints above.”

The Independents, or Congregationalists, rapidly multiplied in England during the eighteenth century; and they became the most numerous and influential denomination in America, being mostly confined to New England. A learned ministry was their pride and boast. In Connecticut, about 1735, a law was passed providing that no man should be entitled to recognition as a clergyman who was not a graduate of Yale or Harvard or of some foreign university. Their ministry had almost unrivaled authority and influence. President Quincy gives a graphic description of the Congregational pastor in Andover, Massachusetts, “issuing from his mansion, at the moment of service, on Sunday morning, with Bible and manuscript sermon under his arm, with his wife leaning on one arm, flanked by his negro man at his side, as his wife was by her negro woman, the little negroes being distributed, according to their sex, by the side of their respective parents; the other members of the family and visitors then following according to age and rank; the whole congregation rising and standing till the minister and his family were seated; and at the close of the service the whole congregation rising and standing till the minister and his family had left the meeting-house.” The clergy were very aristocratic, and also showed a marked predilection for political discussions.—Isaac Watts (1674-1748), an almost life-long invalid, and never married, was an English Independent minister, and the inventor of English hymns. Besides versifying the Psalms, he wrote a large number of the best hymns in modern hymn books, including, “Eternal Power, whose high abode,” “Keep silence, all created things,” “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun,” “When I survey the wondrous cross,” “Come, we who love the Lord,” ” Sweet is the work, my God, my King,” “The Heavens declare Thy glory, Lord,” “How beauteous are their feet,” “Am I a soldier of the cross,” “Our God, our help in ages past,” “How pleasant, how divinely fair,” “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair,” “Join all the glorious names,” ” My soul, repeat His praise,” “Not to ourselves, who are but dust,” “Let others boast how strong they be,” ” How precious is the book Divine,” “The law commands, and makes us know,” “Blest is the man, forever bless’d,” “Vain are the hopes the sons of men,” “Go, worship at Emmanuel’s feet,” “Behold the sure foundation stone,” “From all that dwell below the skies,” “He dies, the friend of sinners dies,” “Salvation, O the joyful sound,” “Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove,” “Alas, and did my Savior bleed,” “Show pity, Lord, O Lord, forgive,” “We are a garden wall’d around,” “Lo, what an entertaining sight,” “I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,” “My God, my Life, my love,” “When I can read my title clear,” “So let our lives and lips express,” “Twas on that dark, that doleful night,” “Jesus is gone above the skies,” “How sweet and awful is the place,” “Lord, what is man, poor, feeble man,” “Teach me the measure of my days,” “There is a land of pure delight,” “There is a house not made with hands,” “And must this body die,” and “That awful day will surely come.”—Philip Doddridge (1702-1751), an English Independent minister, was a life-long invalid, a very conscientious man, and the author of “A Family Expositor” (of the New Testament), “The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul,” and of 374 hymns, including, “Grace, ’tis a charming sound,” “Do not I love Thee, O my Lord,” “Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve,” “O happy day, that fixed my choice,” “See Israel’s gentle Shepherd stand,” “Jesus, I love Thy charming name,” “Jesus, I sing Thy wondrous grace,” “Savior Divine, we know Thy name,” “Dear Savior, we are Thine,” “’Tis mine, the covenant of His grace,” ” What if death my sleep invade,” “Salvation, O melodious sound,” “Ye little flock, whom Jesus feeds,” “My God, what silken cords are Thine,” and “While on the verge of life I stand.”—Matthew Henry (1662-1714), an English Non-conformist minister, preached through the whole Bible, in expository sermons, more than once; and his Exposition of the Bible, though not scientific or critical, is said to be still the most practical, devotional and spiritual of all English commentaries. “George Whitefield read it through four times, the last time on his knees.” Matthew Henry’s dying language was: “A life spent in the service of God, and communion with Him, is the most pleasant life that any one can live in this world.”

The American Presbyterians were almost exclusively of Scotch or Irish-Scotch descent, and were mainly confined to the Middle and Southern States, during the eighteenth century. They also insisted upon a learned ministry; but their preachers, being trained to speak without notes, surpassed the Congregational ministry in pulpit power. “Even up to the close of the eighteenth century the prejudice against preaching written sermons was still so strong among the Presbyterians that a man’s reputation would be ruined should his manuscript be seen. The Presbyterians in America, as in Scotland, were staunch advocates of popular rights, and they increased rapidly after the Revolution.” During the eighteenth century the Presbyterians were greatly infected with Arminianism and Arianism.

The Arminianism widely prevailing among all the denominations in America was stayed for a while, and genuine spiritual life was extensively revived, throughout the Colonies, by the Spirit of God, under the earnest predestinarian ministry of Jonathan Edwards (from 1734) and George Whitefield (from 1740), in the greatest religious awakening that had been known on this continent. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), a native of Connecticut, for depth of religious thought and feeling, was perhaps never surpassed, if indeed equaled, among uninspired men. He was a graduate and tutor in Yale College, and six months before his death he was elected, and five weeks before his death inaugurated, President of Princeton College, New Jersey. In early life he had a shallow Pharisaic experience, and then a profound spiritual experience, during which he was changed, in his seventeenth year, from nature to grace, and from the bondage of sin and the law to the sweet and loving service of God, whom he saw and adored in all nature and Scripture too, and whose absolute sovereignty in all things he unreservedly accepted and rejoiced in, admitting His perfect justice in the salvation or damnation of the human race, in accordance with His holy and eternal purpose. “To those who questioned this absolute sovereignty, and rejected it as a doctrine full of horror, he made a twofold answer, not as finding excuses for the Creator, but subjectively as shutting the mouth of cavilers: First, that man’s depravity is an unquestionable fact; that through the medium of his senses and merely animal organization man can attain to no knowledge of God and no spiritual perfection. Secondly, he set forth the unity of the race; its common constitution as branches from one root, forming one complex person, one moral whole, the natural being the ground of the legal headship of Adam, which is the view also of Augustine and Calvin. The virtue and vice of the dispositions and acts of the mind lie not in their cause, but in their nature. Liberty consists in the power of doing what one wills, not in any power of willing without a motive. The will always follows the greatest seeming good; and what shall seem to a man the greatest good depends on the state of his soul. Liberty is not in the act, but in the man; and, if a depraved nature is to abstain from sin, it can only be effected by a change of heart.” The central idea of Jonathan Edwards’ system was that of this change of heart or a new spiritual life as the gift of sovereign grace. He taught that true virtue consists in active love to God and His creatures; and that the history of the kingdom of God is the center of all human history. He began to preach in his nineteenth year, and for several months served a small Presbyterian congregation in New York City. In his twenty-fourth year he was ordained to assist his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the pastorate of the Congregational “Church” in Northampton, Mass. Mr. Stoddard died two years afterwards, and Mr. Edwards continued sole pastor for twenty-one more years. Then, because he rebuked his members for reading immoral books, and because he insisted, contrary to the notions of his grandfather, that unconverted persons should not be admitted to partake of the elements of the Lord’s Supper, he was ejected from the pastorate which he had adorned for twenty-three years. About a year afterwards he went to Stockbridge, Mass., and preached six years and a half to a small Congregational Church and a large number of Indians residing at that place. During these years of retirement and profound study and almost virtual exile from civilization, he had the providential opportunity to write his ablest works, “Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will,” “God’s Last End in the Creation of the World,” “Nature of True Virtue,” “Original Sin,” and “History of Redemption.”[13] Among his other works were: “God Glorified in Man’s Dependence,” “A Divine and Supernatural Light Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God,” “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton,” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” “Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the True Spirit,” “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections” (called “one of the most important guards against a spurious religion”), “Types of the Messiah,” and “Notes on the Bible.” President Edwards exerted a powerful influence on the leading religious minds of England. Thomas Chalmers esteemed his Treatise on the Will above every other book of human composition. Robert Hall considered Jonathan Edwards the greatest of the sons of men. Sir James Mackintosh declared that his power of subtle argument was perhaps unmatched, certainly unsurpassed, among men.

George Whitefield (1714-1770), a native of Gloucester, England, was, probably, the most persuasive preacher since the days of the Apostles. After years of early dissipation and then years of rigid Pharisaism, which was so excessive as almost to carry him to his grave, he experienced a hope in Christ in 1733, before the conversion of either of the Wesleys or any other member of the Methodist “Holy Club” at Oxford. He began to preach in 1736, and, at the solicitation of the Wesleys, he embarked for Georgia in December, 1737. Excluded from the pulpits of the Established “Church of England,” he began open field-preaching in 1739. On preaching tours he visited Scotland twelve times, Ireland three times, and America seven times; and he preached in almost every important district in England and Wales. His audiences sometimes numbered ten, twenty or even thirty thousand. He had a rich and powerful voice. In the thirty-four years of his active ministry it is estimated that he preached eighteen thousand sermons, or, on an average, ten a week, often in the open air, and with great vehemence of voice and gesture. His style was severely simple, and his language that of the common people. He made no display of human learning or reasoning. He spoke most fervently from his own heart, and what he said went to the hearts of his hearers. Even such unspiritual persons as Hume and Franklin, Bolingbroke and Chesterfield, were naturally overwhelmed by his resistless eloquence. “But the glory of Whitefield’s preaching was its heart-kindled and heart-melting gospel. So simple was his nature that glory to God and good will to man had so filled it that there was room for little more. Having no church to found, no family to enrich, and no memory to immortalize, he was simply the ambassador of God, and inspired with its genial, piteous spirit, he soon became himself a living gospel.” “Of no other preacher,” remarks Mr. Lecky, “could it be more truly said that he preached ‘as a dying man to dying men.’ His favorite maxim was that ‘a preacher, whenever he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear.’ To his vivid imagination Heaven and hell, death and judgment, appeared palpably present. His voice was sometimes choked with tears; he stamped vehemently on the pulpit floor; every nerve was strained; his whole frame was convulsed with emotion. He had nothing of the arrogant and imperious spirit of Wesley. A more zealous, a more single-minded, a more truly amiable, a more purely unselfish man, it would be difficult to conceive. Very few men have passed through so much obloquy with a heart so entirely unsoured, and have retained amid so much adulation so large a measure of deep and genuine humility. There was, indeed, not a trace of jealousy, ambition or rancor in his nature. With almost childish simplicity he was always ready to make a public confession of his faults.” On the question of predestination and election, there was, after Wesley preached and printed his “Sermon on Free Grace,” in 1740, a temporary alienation between him and Whitefield, and, after the latter’s death, an entire separation between their respective Societies. After the publication of Wesley’s “Sermon,” in consequence of drawing a lot, as already mentioned, Whitefield wrote him: “I have often questioned whether in so doing you did not tempt the Lord. A due exercise of religious prudence without a lot would have directed you in that matter. Beside, I never heard that you inquired of God whether or not election was a gospel doctrine. But I fear, taking it for granted it was not, you only inquired whether you should be silent, or preach and print against it. I am apt to think one reason why God should so suffer you to be deceived was, that hereby a special obligation should be laid upon me faithfully to declare the Scripture doctrine of election, that thus the Lord might give me a fresh opportunity of seeing what was in my heart, and whether I would be true to His cause or not. Perhaps God has laid this difficult task upon me, even to see whether I am willing to forsake all for Him or not.” He reminded Wesley of the latter’s own confession that the Lord had once before given him a wrong lot.[14]

Under the Holy Spirit’s effectual blessing of His own eternal truth preached by Edwards and Whitefield, there was, for some twenty-five years, a great revival of spiritual life in the British American Colonies, from 1734 to 1760; and it was, as the learned and accurate Professor Henry Boynton Smith shows, like all the genuine reformations of the church in modern times, a staying of the prevailing Arminianism, and a revival of scriptural predestinarianism, of the great Bible truths of God’s sovereignty, and of salvation by grace alone, and justification by faith alone. Generally throughout the Colonies there were large ingatherings into the Congregational, Presbyterian and Baptist communions. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, three fourths of all the American churches were predestinarian; and the people of this country were more honest, earnest, sincere, truthful, serious, solemn and reverential than they have ever been since (see Prof. J. L. Diman’s “Religion in America, 1776-1876,” published in the Centennial Number of the North American Review, January, 1876). After the demoralizing influences of the Revolutionary War had, to a considerable extent, passed away (for the demoralization of the people is much the worst result of wars), there was, at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, under similar predestinarian preaching and similar Divine blessing, another extensive spiritual revival in the United States.

“Some of the peculiarities of the History of the Church in America,” says Prof. H. B. Smith, “are the following: 1. It is not the history of the conversion of a new people, but of the transplantation of old races, already Christianized, to a new theatre, comparatively untrammeled by institutions and traditions. 2. Independence of the civil power. 3. The voluntary principle applied to the support of religious institutions. 4. Moral and ecclesiastical, but not civil power, the means of retaining the members of any communion. 5. Development of the Christian system in its practical and moral aspects, rather than in its theoretical and theological. 6. Stricter discipline in the churches than is practicable where Church and State are one. 7. Increase of the churches, to a considerable extent, through revivals of religion, rather than by the natural growth of the children in an establishment. 8. Excessive multiplication of sects; and division on questions of moral reform. The divisions in the Old World are chiefly on ecclesiastical and doctrinal grounds. The dissenting sects of the Old World are strongest in the New. The entire separation of the Church from the State in this country was gradually effected. Before the Revolution religious freedom was known only in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. The voluntary principle was first carried out in Maryland, 1776, and in Virginia, 1786‑1789, under the pressure of the Presbyterians and the Baptists. An amendment to the Constitution of the United States, 1791, prohibited Congress from passing any law establishing religion or prohibiting its free exercise. But Christianity, in its general principles, is part of the common law of the land.” “To the separation of Church from State, in the United States,” says Prof. J. L. Diman, “three wholly distinct causes have contributed. The first of these was the number of religious organizations, widely differing in doctrine and worship, which rendered any public support of religion almost impracticable, although many of these bodies regarded such support without disfavor. A second cause was the conscientious objection of certain sects (especially the Baptists) to any recognition of religion by the civil power. The third and most decisive cause was the rise of the secular theory of the State, a part of the great political development of modern times, Mr. Thomas Jefferson being the chief representative of this view, which found its first expression in the famous Virginia act of 1785; in after years he looked back upon this as the most creditable achievement of his life.”

I will now give some special information about the Baptists during the eighteenth century.

The list of forty-eight American Baptist Churches formed in the first half of the eighteenth century, as given by David Benedict, and corrected and supplemented by later authorities, is as follows: Welsh Tract, New Castle County, Del., 1701; Groton, Conn., 1705; Smithfield, R. I., 1706; Seventh-Day, Piscataway, N. J., 1707; Hopkinton, R. I., 1708; Great Valley, Pa., 1711; Cape May, N. J., 1712; Burley, Isle of Wight County, Va., 1714; Hopewell, Mercer County, N. J., 1715; Brandywine, Pa., 1715; Montgomery, Pa., 1719; New York City, 1724; Scituate, R. I., 1725; Warwick, R. I., 1725; Richmond, R. I., 1725; French Creek, Pa., 1726; New London, Conn., 1726; Shiloh, Pasquotank County, N. C., 1729; Indian Town, Mass., 1730; Cumberland, R. I., 1732; Rehoboth, Mass., 1732; Shiloh, N. J., 1734; Meherrin, Hertford County, N. C., 1735; South Brimfield, Mass., 1736; Welsh Neck, S. C., 1738; Leicester, Mass., 1738; Southington, Conn., 1738; West Springfield, Conn., 1740; Kehukee, Halifax County, N. C., 1742; Kingwood, Hunterdon County, N. J., 1742; 2nd. Boston, Mass., 1743; North Stonington, Conn., 1743; Colchester, Conn., 1743; East Greenwich, R. I., 1743; Opeckon (afterwards called Mill Creek), Berkeley County, Va., 1743; Euhaw Creek, S. C., 1745; Heights Town, N. J., 1745; Southampton, Bucks County, Pa., 1746; Scotch Plains, N. J., 1747; King Street, Conn., 1747; Oyster Bay, N. Y., 1748; Sturbridge, Mass., 1749; Bellingham, Mass., 1750; Killingby, Conn., 1750; Westerly, R. 1., 1750; Exeter, R. I., 1750; Thompson, Conn., 1750; Sandy Run, Bertie County, N. C., 1750. A considerable number of these churches were composed of General or Arminian Baptists. Those whose names are in italics are now known as Old School or Primitive Baptist Churches.

The following is a list of the Old School or Primitive Baptist Churches formed in the United States during the latter half of the eighteenth century:[15] Ketocton, Loudoun County, Va., 1751; Harford, Harford County, Md. (first called Winter’s Run), 1754; Tonoloway, Fulton County, Pa., 1754; Daniel’s (or Fishing Creek), Halifax County, N. C.; 1755; Smith’s and Lynville’s Creek, Rockingham County, Va., 1756; Wilson (first called Toisnot), Wilson County, N. C., 1756; Falls of Tar River, Nash County, N. C., 1757; Red Banks, Pitt County, N. C., 1758; Warwick, Orange County, N. Y., 1766; Broad Run, Fauquier County, Va., 1766; Mill Creek, Berkeley County, W. Va., 1766; New Valley, Loudoun County, Va., 1767; Chappawamsick, Stafford County, Va., 1767; Little River, Loudoun County, Va., 1769; Mountain Run, Orange County, Va., 1769; Birch Creek Church, Halifax County, Va., 1770; Potomac Creek Church, Stafford Co., Va., 1790; Mill, Pittsylvania County, Va., 1770; Strawberry, Pittsylvania County, Va., about 1770; Clear Spring, Stokes County, N. C., about 1770; Hartwood, Stafford County, Va., 1771; County Line, Pittsylvania County, Va., 1771; Leatherwood, Henry County, Va., 1772; Thumb Run, Fauquier County, Va., 1772; Buck Marsh, Frederick County, Va., 1772; Mill Creek, Berkeley County, W. Va., 1772; Pig River, Franklin County, Va., 1773; Upper Banister, Pittsylvania County, Va., 1773; Brent Town, Fauquier County, Va., 1773; Catawba, Halifax County, Va., 1773; Rehoboth, Chesterfield County, Va., 1773; Eno, Durham County, N. C., 1773; Rocky Swamp, Halifax County, N. C., 1774; Bethel (New River), Wythe County, Va., 1774; Muddy Creek, Powhatan County, Va., 1774; Smith’s Creek, Shenandoah County, Va., 1774; Mayo, Halifax County, Va., 1774; Goose Creek, Loudoun County, Va., 1775; Bull Run, Fairfax County, Va., 1775; Difficult, Fairfax County, Va., 1775; Popeshead, Fairfax County, Va., 1775; Occoquan, Prince William County, Va., 1776; Flat Swamp, Martin County, N. C., 1776; Skinquarter, Chesterfield County, Va., 1778; London Tract, Chester County, Pa., 1780; Catawba, Botetourt County, Va., 1780; Lower Town Creek, Edgecombe County, N. C., 1780; Hunting Quarter, Carteret County, N. C., about 1780; Newport, Carteret County, N. C., about 1780; Bryn Zion, Kent County, Del., 1781; Cow Marsh, Kent County, Del., 1781; Greenbrier, Greenbrier County, W. Va., 1781; Salisbury, Wicomico County, Md., about 1782; Cedar Island (or Fox Creek), Grayson County, Va., 1782; Buck Lick, Fairfax County, Va., 1782; Coinjock, Currituck County, N. C., 1782; Shenandoah, Shenandoah County, Va., 1783; South River, Shenandoah County, Va., 1783; Happy Creek, Frederick County, Va., 1783; Salem, Montgomery County, Va., 1784; Upper Carter’s Rim, Fauquier County, Va., 1784; Battle Run, Culpeper County, Va., 1785; Mount Poney, Culpeper County, Va., 1785; South Quay, Southampton County, Va., 1785; Meadow Creek, Montgomery County, Va., 1785; Meadow, Greene County, N. C., 1785; First Baptist Church, Wilmington, New Castle County, Del., 1785; Long Branch, Fauquier County, Va., 1786; Cross Roads, Edgecombe County, N. C., 1786; Bryan’s, Fayette County, Ky., 1786; Tate’s Creek, Madison County, Ky., 1786; North Fork, Loudoun County, Va., 1787; Water Lick, Shenandoah County, Va., 1787; North River, Hampshire County, W. Va., 1787; Skewarkey, Martin Co., N. C., 1787; Mount Tabor, Mongalia County, W. Va., 1788; Union, Pittsylvania County, Va., 1789; Greasy Creek, Montgomery County, Va., 1789; Crooked Run, Hampshire County, W. Va., 1790; Hadnot’s Creek, Carteret County, N. C., about 1790; Flatty Creek, Pasquotank County, N. C., 1790; Philadelphia (Big Red Stone), Fayette County, Pa., 1701; Chemung, Chemung County, N. Y., 1791; White Oak, Statford County, Va., 1791; White Thorn, Pittsylvania County, Va., 1791; Frying Pan, Fairfax County, Va., 1791; Hedgeman’s River, Culpeper County, Va., 1791; Morattuck, Washington County, N. C., 1791; Nahunta, Wayne County, N. C., 1791; Indian Creek (1st), Monroe County, W. Va., 1792; Seneca, Montgomery County, Md., about 1792; Conoho, Martin County, N. C., 1704; Tuscarora, Juniata County, Pa., about 1795; Great Swamp, Pitt County, N. C., 1795; Lawrence’s (or Cotten’s), Halifax County, N. C., about 1795; North Creek, Beaufort County, N. C., about 1705; South Matamuskeet, Hyde County, N. C., about 1795; Forks of Cheat, Mongalia County, W. Va., 1795; Meadow Creek, Grayson County, Va., 1796; Sinking Creek, Giles County, Va., 1796; North Fork of New River, Grayson County, Va., 1796; Big Levels, Greenbrier County, W. Va., 1796; Canawha, Greenbrier County, W. Va., 1796; Apequan, Berkeley County, Va., 1797; Olive & Hurley, Ulster County, N. Y., 1799; Zoar, Jefferson County, W. Va., 1799; South Fork of Roaring River, Wilkes County, N. C., 1799.[16]

The Welsh Tract Church, whose meeting-house is two miles from Newark, in New Castle County, Delaware, is the oldest Old School Baptist Church in the United States, and the only American Baptist Church that was regularly organized in Europe before emigrating to this country. It was constituted, in the spring of 1701, by sixteen Baptists in the counties of Pembroke and Caermarthen, in South Wales, with Thomas Griffith, one of their number, as their pastor. A “Church Emigrant,” they embarked at Milford Haven in June, 1701, and landed at Philadelphia September 8th, 1701. They first settled about Pennypack, near Philadelphia, where they continued about a year and a half, and where their membership increased to thirty-seven. Then they procured land in Northern Delaware from Messrs. Evans, Davis and Willis, who had purchased upwards of 30,000 acres of William Penn, called the “Welsh Tract,” and in 1703 they removed to that location, and built, near Iron Hill, a small meeting-house, which stood until 1746, and was then succeeded by the present substantial stone house of worship. In the yard around the house rest the bodies of many of the pastors and members who, during almost two centuries, have met and joined here in the service of God. The Welsh Tract Church was one of the five original churches that, in 1707, formed the Philadelphia Baptist Association (the oldest Baptist Association in America), and for many years it was the most influential member of that body. The Philadelphia Confession of Faith, published by this Association in 1742, was the old London Confession of 1689, with two other Articles, added principally through the influence of the Welsh Tract Church—Article 23, Of Singing of Psalms (in Public Worship), and Article 31, Of Laying on of Hands (on all Baptized Believers). Until 1732 the Church Book was kept in the Welsh language; and for about seventy years the pastors were of Welsh extraction. The Welsh are the most conservative people in Europe, their language and customs having undergone no radical changes for some twenty centuries. Mr. David Benedict speaks, in strong terms, of “the order, intelligence and stability of the Welsh Baptist Churches in America, and their sound, salutary and efficient principles.” The pastors of Welsh Tract Church have been as follows; Thomas Griffith, Elisha Thomas, Enoch Morgan, Owen Thomas, David Davis, John Sutton, John Boggs, Gideon Farrell, Stephen M. Woolford, Samuel Trott, William K. Robinson, Thomas Barton (from 1839 to 1870, when he died, after having been sixty years in the ministry), G. W. Staton, William Grafton and Joseph L. Staton, the present pastor. The church owns a residence and tract of land, which the pastor occupies.

The second oldest Old School Baptist Church, and the one that has the largest membership, in the United States, is Hopewell, in a village of the same name, in Mercer County, New Jersey. Elder William J. Purington, the present pastor, on April 23rd, 1882, delivered, in their meeting‑house, a sermon from Psalm 83:1-4, and a historical sketch of the church, afterwards printed, demonstrating, from the original records, that old Hopewell has never been moved at all, even by the stormiest winds of doctrine, from the faith of the fathers, nor from the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone. The church, composed of twelve members, five of whom were Stouts, was organized at the residence of Joseph Stout, April 23rd, 1715, upon these eight fundamental principles: 1st. The Three-Oneness of God; 2nd. His Self-Existence and Sovereignty; 3rd. The Total Depravity of the Natural Man; 4th. The Eternal, Personal, Unconditional Election of all the Members of the Body of Christ; 5th. The Specialty and Definiteness of the Atonement; 6th. The Necessity of a Spiritual Birth in order to Worship God in Spirit and in Truth; 7th. The Sovereign and Efficacious Operation of Divine Grace upon all the Vessels of Mercy; 8th. The Baptism of Believers by Immersion. The pastors who served the church for any considerable length of time are the following: Joseph Eaton, Thomas Davis, Isaac Eaton (1748-1772), Oliver Hart, James Ewing (1796-1805), John Boggs (1807-1846), William Curtis (1850-1854), Philander Hartwell (1854-1879), and William J. Purington (since 1879). Elder Isaac Eaton taught, at Hopewell, from 1756 to 1767, not a Theological Seminary, beta Classical School, the most of his pupils afterwards becoming lawyers, physicians, statesmen and honored citizens, and some of them becoming ministers. Mrs. Elizabeth Hobbs bequeathed three hundred and fifty pounds to the Philadelphia Association to assist poor candidates for the ministry in obtaining a liberal education, which amount was invested and lost in continental money; there is no evidence to show that Mrs. Hobbs was a member of Hopewell Church, or that she made any bequest to Hopewell Church. In 1742 a letter of dismission was granted to the members living near Bethlehem, and they were organized into a church called Kingwood, in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. For thirty-two years the meetings of Hopewell Church were held chiefly at the dwellings of the Stouts. In 1747 the church erected a meeting-house. In 1749 a parsonage was purchased for the pastors. In 1755 John Gano, a member of this church, was ordained to the ministry, and, in the same year, visited some of the churches in the Kehukee Association, and preached among them with power and acceptability. In 1803 twenty‑four members were dismissed to form a church[17] near Harbourtown. In 1805 Hopewell Church decided not to collect money for missionary or educational funds; and this has been her consistent scriptural position from her organization to the present time, although she has ever been forward to contribute, like the apostolic churches, to the necessities of poor saints. Against all carnal innovations, both in doctrine and in practice, she has stood, a spiritual Gibraltar, unmoved and unmovable.

The history of Kehukee Church, in North Carolina, is given in the latter part of this volume. Southampton Church, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was constituted in 1746 by members from Pennypack, near Philadelphia, who had for many years been settled in and about Southampton, and had been holding monthly meetings in the houses of Peter Chamberlain and John Morris. The latter finally gave them a small plantation for the use of the church, and another piece of land for a burying-place and to build a meeting-house upon. The house was built in 1746. Some of the pastors have been as follows: Thomas B. Montanye, Jenkin Jones, Joshua Potts, Thomas Davis, Samuel Jones, Erasmus Kelly, William Vanhorn, David Jones, Thomas Messenger, James B. Bowen, William J. Purington (1867-1879), and Silas H. Durand (since 1884).

Elders Isaac Eaton and Oliver Hunt, two eminent ministers, were originally members of this church.

The above are the five oldest Primitive Baptist Churches in the United States, and the only ones formed in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Of the churches formed in the latter half of the eighteenth century I must take the space to state a remarkable fact in the history of Bryan’s Church, Fayette County, Kentucky. For its first ninety-four years, from 1786 to 1880, that church had but two pastors, Elder Ambrose Dudley, who died in 1825, at the age of seventy-five, and his son, Elder Thomas P. Dudley, who became very feeble and blind in 1880, and was then considerably relieved of pastoral work by the appointment of an assistant, and who died July 10th, 1886, in his ninety-fifth year. There is abundant testimony to prove that both father and son have been sound and zealous, faithful and fearless advocates of the truth. In a series of letters published in 1873, Elder Thomas P. Dudley makes the following pointed and powerful remarks: “Let it be remembered that those institutions (moneyed religious societies, Theological Seminaries, Sunday Schools, etc.) were unknown in this country until within the present century, and yet their advocates presume to tell us they are Old School Baptists. Did the Apostles, or subsequent ministers who made similar sacrifices, wait to make a contract with a Missionary Board for a stipulated salary, and thus make themselves hirelings; or did they, in ordaining subsequent ministers, give it in charge that they should not preach for a church or churches unless they were paid for it? We ask the community to contrast the course of those Apostles and pioneers with that of the advocates for the modern inventions of men to evangelize the world, and determine who are Old School Baptists. The commission given by the Lord Jesus is silent as death on the subject of Missionary, Bible, Tract and Temperance Societies and Sunday Schools, with all the modern inventions originated by men as aids in evangelizing the world; and the teachings of His inspired Apostles are equally silent; furthermore, the London and Philadelphia Baptist Confessions of Faith urge no duty on the church to rear and sustain these inventions. So far from it, these Confessions assume and insist that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the words of God, and the only certain and infallible rule of faith and practice; that they contain everything for us to know, believe or do in the service of God.—I do not object to the Bible being circulated. It contains the best code of morals for men, in nature, that ever was produced; and the gospel presents to those enlightened from above the only system of salvation that can save a sinner. That system proclaims, ‘Mine own arm brought salvation, and of the people there were none to help.’ ‘Salvation is of the Lord.’ ‘It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.’ ‘Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.’—There is a radical difference between discussing some Bible subject in the ‘Signs’ or elsewhere, and publishing a tract or some fabulous tale of fiction, or catechism, or questions and answers for Sunday School children, and, when they can memorize and answer these questions, recognizing them as fit subjects for the ordinance of baptism, and for membership in the church of God. There is a radical difference between our contributing of our carnal things to defray the expenses of the servants of our God who have visited us from abroad, and ministered to us spiritual things, the pure and unadulterated gospel of the Son of God,—and begging from saint and sinner to employ hirelings to preach ‘another gospel, which is not another, but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of the Son of God.’ Between forty and fifty years since, we were told, by the advocates of these modern institutions, that with from twenty-five to fifty cents per head the world could be evangelized; since which time they have collected millions of dollars for that purpose, professedly; it is submitted to intelligent men whether the morals of the people have been improved, or whether the professed Baptist Church enjoys the same love, Christian fellowship, union and harmony she did fifty years since. Experience and observation of more than fifty years have satisfied me that where Andrew Fuller’s system, attempting to harmonize Divine sovereignty and human free agency, a general atonement and special application, salvation by works and salvation by grace, prevails, it has only widened the flood-gates of error, making the preacher the instrument, and the preached gospel the means, of the eternal salvation of our apostate world. I, however, have not so learned Christ. I hold that it is not more impossible for God to change than for the blood of Christ to fail to secure the eternal deliverance of all for whom it was shed. ‘He, by one offering, hath perfected forever them that are sanctified.’ ‘He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.’ Fuller’s system, as I understand, would ‘tread under foot the Son of God, and count the blood of the covenant an unholy thing.’”[18]

The following is a list of the Old School or Primitive Baptist Associations formed in the eighteenth century: Kehukee (N. C. and Va.), 1765; Ketockton (Va.), 1766; Redstone (Pa. and Va.), 1776; Strawberry (Va.), 1776 ; Salisbury (Md.), 1782 ; Salem (Ky.), 1785; Yadkin (N. C.), 1790; Warwick (N. Y.), 1791; Baltimore (Md.), 1793; Tates Creek (Ky.), 1793; New River (Va. and N. C.), 1793; Delaware (Del.), 1795; Chemung (Pa.), 1796; Miami (Ohio), 1797; Mayo (Va. and N. C.), 1798; and Mountain District (Va. and N. C.), 1799.

Thus, in the year 1800, there were in the United States sixteen Old School or Primitive Baptist Associations, containing about 200 churches, and about 10,000 members; while there were, in all, about 1,500 “Regular Baptist” Churches, with about 100,000 members.

The accurate and impartial Prof. J. Lewis Diman, late of Brown University, R. I., in his centennial sketch of “Religion in America, 1776-1876,” published in the North American Review, Jan., 1876, and in his Memorial Volume of “Orations and Essays,” assigns two distinct causes as contributing to the rapid increase of the Baptists in the United States in the latter half of the eighteenth century. 1st. “Before all else the Baptists had insisted on a personal experience of religion, as the absolute condition of admission to the Christian Church. But this was precisely the doctrine on which the leaders of the Great Awakening had laid such stress. The great Northampton controversy had turned on this very point. The inevitable effect was not only to direct increased attention to the tenets of the Baptists, but also to carry over to their ranks the numerous congregations of Separatists which had been called into existence by the conservatism of the Congregational Churches. Backus, the faithful historian of the Baptists, was one of this description. 2nd. But, besides this, there was another and perhaps more potent reason. A distinctive characteristic of the Baptists was the energy with which they extolled the gifts of the Spirit and advocated an unlearned ministry. On this latter point, as we have already seen, the Congregationalists took high ground. Even Edwards, the most powerful promoter of the revival, would not allow that a man should enter the pulpit who had had no education at college. Against what seemed to them an unrighteous prejudice in favor of the original tongues, both Separatists and Baptists strenuously maintained that every brother that is qualified by God has a right to preach according to the measure of faith. ‘Lowly preaching’ became their favorite watch-word, and it marked the beginning of a popular tendency destined to make itself deeply felt on the religious institutions of New England. The Baptists not only gained a controlling influence with a devout but humble class who had little appetite for the elaborate discussions of the Congregational divines, but they were powerfully helped by the prejudice which exists in every community against the exclusiveness of superior culture. The rapid growth of the Baptists was, in large part, a democratic protest; and it is a noticeable fact that even during the war their numbers steadily augmented.” “The fundamental principle of the Baptists,” says Prof. Diman, “is their appeal to Scripture as the sole authority in religious matters; and to this principle, through all their history, they have steadfastly adhered.”

To show the doctrinal belief, in the eighteenth century, of all Regular Baptists in the United States, including the churches now called New School, as well as those now called Old School, I will quote a few pages from the published volume of “The Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, 1707-1807,” the oldest and, in many respects, the most honored of all the Baptist Associations in America, to which not only numerous New School Baptist Churches belonged, but also the Old School Baptist Churches of Welsh Tract, Hopewell, Kingwood, Southampton, Warwick, Cow Marsh, London Tract, Bryn Zion and Wilmington.

In 1761 the Philadelphia Association passed these two resolutions:

“1st. The Holy Scriptures we profess to be our full, sufficient and only rule of faith and obedience; and we caution all to beware of every impulse, revelation, orally other imagination whatever, inconsistent with or contrary to the Holy Scriptures, under the pretense of being guided by the Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit illuminates the understanding to know the mind of God contained in the Scriptures, and may properly be called a guide.”

“2nd. God worketh all things after the counsel of His own will. Whatsoever comes to pass is either by His agency or permission; and though He permit sin to be, He is not therefore the author of it.”

The Circular Letter issued in 1774 was written by Elder Samuel Jones, who was born in Wales ill 1735, and was pastor of Pennypack Church, near Philadelphia, from 1763 till his death in 1814, and who also served for a while the Southampton Church, and who in 1779 received a call to the pastoral care of Hopewell Church. The subject of this letter is the second article of tile Philadelphia (and also of the London) Confession of Faith, “Of God and the Holy Trinity.”[19] “This,” says the Circular Letter, “is all important article; a foundation, a corner-stone in the Christian faith. Remove this, and the whole superstructure will fall. Material then it is that we clearly conceive of, firmly believe, and without wavering hold the same agreeable to the form of sound words wherein it is held forth in. Divine revelation. First. That there is an only living and true God, the supreme and eternal Jehovah, is manifest. 1. From the reason of things. Since there cannot be an effect without cause, there must be a first cause, self-existent and independent. 2. From the works of creation, all marvelous and astonishing from the least to the greatest. As also 3. From those of Providence, in sustaining and well ordering the whole universe, through all the successive periods of time. And especially 4. From the consciousness of a Supreme Being impressed on every rational soul. Above all 5. From the Holy Scriptures. Deuteronomy 6:4, 23:39, 4:35; Psalm 86:10; Isaiah 45:5.

“Secondly, the perfections of God may be easily deduced from the same sources, especially His wisdom, power, and goodness infinite. And though His mercy, justice, truth and holiness be not so clear from the works of creation and providence, yet there is a strong consciousness of these, as well of His omniscience, omnipresence, etc., while they are also abundantly manifested by His word and Spirit.”

“Thirdly. Now, in this Divine and Infinite Being there are three subsistences, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Father neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son, or Word, eternally begotten of the Father, John 1:14, 18, 3:16; 1 John 4:9; and the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Father and the Son, John 5:26, constituting, in the undivided essence of the Godhead, a trinity of persons, each of them possessed of all Divine perfections, and every way co-equal, and these three are one, the One God. 1 John 5:7. That there are three appears all through the sacred writings, in reference to the works of creation, providence and grace, 1 Peter 1:2; in whose name baptism is administered, Matthew 28:19; and to whom Divine worship and adoration are addressed, 2 Corinthians 13:14; and that these Three are, or that there is One, and but one God, is no less clear, as above.”

“Now, that we may further explain this doctrine, and remove some difficulties attending it, so far as the mysteriousness of the subject will admit, we shall endeavor to resolve the following queries: Question 1.—How can Three be One, and One Three? Answer.—Three are not said to be One, and One Three, in the same respect strictly. We do not say that there are Three persons in One person, nor that there are Three Gods in One God; but Three persons or subsistences in the undivided essence of the One God. Question 2.—Why are these three subsistences called persons? Answer.—1. Because they are distinguished by personal relative properties; the Father begetting, the Son begotten, and the Holy Ghost proceeding. 2. They are styled I, Thou and He. They speak, are spoken to, and spoken of. 3. They have each of them understanding and will. And besides, 4. They have personal characters, as Creator, Redeemer, Judge, Comforter, Intercessor, etc., and are covenanted with, sent, etc. Psalm 110:1‑3, 6, 7; John 8:16, 14:16, 17, 26. In one word, they have attributed to them and spoken of them everything essential to and descriptive of personality. Question 3.—In what respect is Christ the only begotten Son of God? Answer.—1. Not with respect to His human nature; for He was the only begotten Son of God before. In that case the Spirit would have been the Father. And in His human nature He was manifested to be what He was before, namely, the only begotten of the Father. 2. Nor with respect to His resurrection; for He was so before He rose by His own power. And by His resurrection from the dead, He was manifested to be what He was before. Romans 1:4. 3. Nor yet with respect to His mediatorial office; for it is His sonship that adds lustre to this office, Hebrews 4:14, as well as efficacy, 1 John 1:7. Neither is there anything in that office that should give rise to the title Son, only Son, only begotten. Further, this did not make the Son a son, but a priest. Hebrews 1:8, 7:28. And His priesthood and sonship are distinctly spoken of, Acts 8:37, 9:20; while also in the capacity of a Mediator He was a servant. 4. It remains, then, that He was the only begotten Son of God by eternal generation, inconceivable and mysterious. He was His Son, John 5:18; 1 John 5:5; His own Son, Romans 8:3, 32; His only begotten Son, John 1:14, 18, 3:16; 1 John 4:9; was with Him in the beginning, John 1:1; before His works of old, even from everlasting, Micah 5:2; Proverbs 8:22, 23. Question 4.—If He was the Son of God by generation as to His divine nature, how could He be co-equal and co-eternal with the Father? Answer.—When we conceive of the Father and the Son, there is a priority in the order of nature, but not in the order of time. As God’s eternal decrees, the mind and thought, the sun and light; though these be prior and successive among themselves in the order of nature, yet not in point of time. The instant the sun existed, light did exist also, proceeding from it, or, as it were, generated by it. So the instant there is a Father, there must be a Son; and as the Father exists a Father from eternity, so does the Son a Son.”

“Thus, dearly beloved, we have endeavored to set before you this essential article of our faith in as clear a manner as the narrowness of our limits and the mysteriousness of the subject would permit. But let no one presume to think that he can, by searching, find out the Almighty to perfection, nor vainly inquire where the Lord has not revealed. Let us rather be humbly thankful that the Divine Majesty has condescended to make such wondrous discoveries of His being and perfections.”

“Let us set the Triune God before us in all our ways and enjoyments, and rejoice in Him, who is worthy of our highest confidence and purest affection, worthy of all Divine worship and adoration. Finally, brethren, let us be established in the present truth, nor suffer any to remove us front the firm basis of Divine Revelation. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be all Honor, glory, Divine worship, praise, power and dominion, both now and forever.” This Circular Letter is signed, for the Association, by Elder Benjamin Miller (of Scotch Plains), Moderator; and Elder William Vanhorn (of Southampton), Clerk.

In the Circular Letter of 1775, written by Elder Abel Morgan, occurs this paragraph: “When all the human race, by the sin of the first man, were involved in guilt, Romans 5:12, and fallen under condemnation, and all become the children of wrath; it would manifestly be doing them no injustice if they were, to every individual, left in that state, and eternally punished for their sins; this would have been their proper desert, their just reward. But God, out of His mere free grace and love, without any moving cause in the parties chosen, hath predestinated some unto life, through a Mediator, Ephesians 1:4; Romans 11:5, 6 (without any wrong done to others), together with all the means subservient to this end, viz., their redemption by the blood of Christ, and renovation by the Spirit of Holiness, to the praise of His glorious grace; the others left to act in sin, to their final destruction, to the glory of Divine justice, Romans 9:22, 23.” In the Letter of 1780, by the same writer, the following remarks occur: “Man became separated from God, an enemy unto Him, to His glory and government, from the first sin even until now—obnoxious to the curse of a just law violated, and tinder the wrath of God due to transgressors; also, woefully polluted throughout soul and body, ‘We are all as an unclean thing,’ Isaiah 64:6. Man, by his departure from God, is become idolatrous, turned from the only true God unto self, which is the grand idol of the whole world ever since Adam’s revolt. Self was the very alluring bait, wrapped up in the first temptation, ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ Now it cannot be otherwise, but that He who will not give His glory to another, should always abhor and detest any one, and every one, that sets up another god in the room of the true God, and lives to him as man doth to self. Again, what further aggravates the evil of the first sin of man is the capacity which Adam stood in, viz., as the public head and representative of all his posterity—that in him, and with him, all have sinned, and fell from happiness in his first transgression, ‘All have sinned,’ Romans 5:12; which is evident not only by Divine testimony, but is also universally manifested by the aversion to good—the ignorance, stupidity, selfishness and propensity to evil apparent in every one by nature, Ephesians 2:3. May we all, therefore, brethren, not only assent to the truth of the historical narration of these things, but also know the absolute necessity of a real, abiding, convincing sense of our case, thus ruined, guilty arid depraved. In order, 1. To suppress all pride and high conceits of ourselves, our supposed excellency and goodness; 2. Truly to acknowledge whatever favors mankind receive, that they are every way gratuitous, and wholly undeserved; 3. For our humiliation before God, confession of our sins, and deep distress of soul; 4. To raise in our minds a becoming admiration of God’s patience and forbearance with a sinful world, in that vindictive justice is not immediately executed on transgressors; 5. To learn the true and proper cause of His forbearance—viz., the interposition of the Mediator, Christ Jesus, between the execution of the penalty and man’s desert; 6. To give us enlarged views of rich mercy and grace with God, in constituting a way whereby to restore creatures so unworthy from present ruin and future misery, even by His own beloved Son; 7. To teach us the necessity we are under of a renovation. Again, an abiding sense of our case is necessary, in order to make us all anxiously inquisitive about our acquaintance with, and an interest in, Christ the, Mediator; and to excite all believers in Him to continued thanksgiving and praise, that they should not henceforth live to themselves, but unto Him that died for them and rose again. God, who is wise in counsel and excellent in working, suffered or permitted man to fall, and thence took occasion to bring the greatest good out of the worst of evil, or overruled the fall of man, to the more abundant display of His Divine perfections to the everlasting disappointment and confusion of His enemies, the security of His elect, and the endless praise of His glorious name.”

In the Circular Letter of 1783, written by Elder Samuel Jones, are found these remarks: “It is clear from the Scriptures that the providence of God is somehow conversant even about evil actions; but we know it must be in such it way His that He is neither the author nor approver of sin; and it may be in these ways following: 1. By causing the object to be presented, which, through the corruptions of our nature, may be the occasion of sin; as in the case of Joseph and his brethren, David and Shimei. Now, all this may be, and yet the Supreme Disposer of all things perfectly clear; for the presentation of the object does not lay a necessity of sinning, nor is the object presented with a view to occasion the sin; as in the case of our blessed Lord going to Jerusalem a little before His crucifixion. 2. It may be in suffering and permitting sin, not in suggesting or influencing to it, as James speaks in 1:13, 14. 3. The providence of God is conversant about evil actions, in overruling them to His own glory, as in the case of Joseph, but especially in the fall of man and the, sufferings of our Redeemer. The sun draws forth vapors from the earth by that heat which has a tendency to exhale them; but the stench that attends what is exhaled front any putrid substance is not owing to the sun, but to the nature of the substance from whence it is drawn. Jesus is said to have been delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, Acts 2:23. But what influence could this foreknowledge have had on the Jews, who were not conscious of it, and never adverted to it in all their proceedings, but acted freely, according to the natural course of their wicked inclinations, even those vile affections of malice, hatred, selfishness, envy, and the like, they were actuated by?”

The Circular Letter of 1784, written by Elder John Gano, is upon the tenth chapter of the Confession of Faith—“Effectual Calling.” The letter considers “1. The Call. This is an act of sovereign grace, which flows from the everlasting love of God, and is such an irresistible impression made by the Holy Spirit upon the human soul as to effect a blessed change. 2. The Author of the Call. The Author is God, the Father, Son and Spirit. 1 Thessalonians 2:12; 2 Timothy 1:9; Proverbs 1:20, 8; Philippians. 1:6. 3. The Called. They are such as God hath chosen and predestinated both to grace and glory, elected and set apart in Christ, as redeemed by His blood, although by nature children of wrath even as others; not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles. This is an holy, heavenly, and consequently an high calling. 4. Its Efficacy. It is effectual to bring the subjects of it to a piercing sense of their guilt and impurity. The mind is deeply convicted that the fountain is in the very heart or nature, from which all its criminal actions have sprung. The soul is affected with a view of its sinfulness and the malignity of sin in its nature, as entirely opposed to the holy law of God; hence arises an abhorrence of sin, as vile and odious, and a sense of its demerit as deserving eternal death. This call produces a consciousness of the absolute impossibility of our contributing in the least towards a recovery from this wretched condition, and destroys all confidence of help in the flesh. It is a call to Christ, and gives a view of Him in His suitableness and ability as a Savior; the merit of His obedience and sacrifice, and the treasures of His grace are all brought into view, which creates desires of an interest in Him, and resolutions of looking unto and relying wholly upon Him for salvation; at the same time cordially acknowledging desert of rejection from Him, and yet strengthened to rely entirely upon and surrender all unto the disposal of Christ; setting to our seal that God is true; believing the record He has given of His Son, which is eternal life, and that this life is in His Son. The changes produced are from darkness to light, from bondage to liberty, from alienation and estrangedness to Christ to a state of nearness and fellowship with Him and His saints. This is an holy calling, and is effectual to produce the exercise of holiness in the heart, even as the saints are created in Christ Jesus unto good works—God having called us, not to uncleanness, but to holiness, yea, even to glory and virtue, and to live holily, righteously and godly in this present evil world.”

In 1788 it was agreed, in answer to a query, that every member who professes that Christ died for all mankind, and that every individual of the human race will finally be saved, ought, upon conviction, and after proper steps have been taken, to be excluded. And in the same year the Association “earnestly entreated the brethren and friends to exert all their influence in discountenancing the use of distilled liquors, both in their own families and neighborhood, except when used as medicine.”

In the Circular Letter of 1789, written by Elder Burgiss Allison, occur the following remarks: “The repentance which is not unto life and salvation, or mere legal repentance, originates in self-love, terminates in the fear of future punishment, or penal evil; and is but a transient view of that legal condemnation which is the consequence of sin; but never leads the soul to the gospel refuge. Hence, if any reformation is effected, it finally terminates in apostasy, agreeably to the Apostle’s assertion, 2 Peter 2:22. But repentance which is unto life and salvation has God for its author; and does not arise from the power of free-will, or the dictates of a natural conscience; but from the grace of God as the efficient, and the operation of the Divine Spirit as the impulsive cause; without which no means, as judgments, mercies, or the most powerful ministry, of themselves can effect it. This godly sorrow and repentance for sin is not excited merely from a view of the demerits of sin, of its evil consequences to the soul, or a fear of hell and damnation; but on account of the evil that is in sin, its contrariety to a holy God. The sinner thus convicted mourns that he has offended God, wounded Christ, and grieved the Holy Spirit. This repentance further produces an ingenuous confession of sin, and forsaking it, in bringing forth fruits meet for repentance in life and conversation. This repentance is wrought in the hearts of God’s people in order to their sanctification, that they may be qualified to enjoy the heavenly inheritance.”

In 1790 the Philadelphia Association declared: “We apprehend danger from the new system of divinity, lest by these fine-spun theories, and the consequences which are drawn from them by some, the great doctrines of the imputation of Adam’s sin, Christ’s proper atonement, imputed righteousness, etc., should be totally set aside, or, at least, the glory of them sullied. We therefore advise that great care should be taken to guard against innovations not calculated to edify the body of Christ.”—The Circular Letter of the same year, written by Elder Samuel Jones, uses strong words and arguments against the spreading “leprosy of the doctrine of universal salvation.” This doctrine is condemned “1. Because the Scripture is express against it. 2 Peter 2:17 ; Jude 13; Revelation 20:10, 14:11, 19:3; Mark 3:29; Hebrews 6:2; Jude 7; Matthew 25:41, 18:8, 25:26, 12:32. The eternal duration of the punishment of the wicked is expressed in the very same words as eternal duration in general, Daniel 2:20; in the very same words also whereby the eternal duration of the happiness of the righteous is expressed, Daniel 12:2; Revelation 22:5; John 3:16; Matthew 25:26; nay, in the very same words whereby the eternal duration of God Himself is expressed, Genesis 21:33; Psalm 40:2; Daniel 7:27; Lamentations 5:19; Deuteronomy 32:40. 2. Because there arc no Scriptures for universal salvation. No other Scriptures can contradict those just cited; and, should any seem to do so, either the texts themselves or the contexts show that they can have no such contradictory meaning. 3. Because there can be no Scriptures favoring universal salvation, since such Scriptures would be likely to do much hurt, but could do no good. If the wicked were ever to be released from hell, time enough to let them know it after they get there, and not before, to encourage them in sin. To give them so much as a hint of it in this life, would be exactly the same as if the Divine Being, when He prohibited the use of the forbidden tree, had told Adam that if he should eat of that tree He would contrive a way for his escape, of which we know that not the least item was given before the fall, and indeed than which nothing could be more unworthy the Divine Being. 4. Because if the notion of universal salvation was in some degree probable, which it is not, yet it would be much safest to reject it altogether; for if those who place dependence on it should at last find themselves mistaken, awful will be the disappointment; while those who place no dependence on it, but rattler on a better hope, would, if all should be saved, share equal benefit with others.”

The Circular Letter of 1791, written by Elder Wm. Vanhorn, treats of the final perseverance of the saints, and contains the following paragraph: “We exclude, in the consideration of this subject, all false professors of religion, of every description, whatever may be their attainments, as in the grace of knowledge, talents or tongues, and power of working miracles, who, nevertheless, are and continue destitute of tile renewing grace of God. Hence, those who have made a fair show in religion for a time, as the foolish virgins, Matthew 25. The branches who were in the true vine, either by profession only, or in relation to Abraham, John 15. Those who in a sense may have tasted of the good word of God, as the stony-ground hearers, Matthew 13; or as Herod, who heard John gladly, Matthew 6:20. Those who may have embraced the doctrine of the gospel, frequently styled ‘The Faith,’ in the New Testament, Acts 24:24; 1 Timothy 1:21; 2 Timothy 3:8; as Hymeneus and Alexander, who in time made, shipwreck thereof, 1 Timothy 1:20. Those who have been enlightened, and had the gift of prophecy, as Balaam, 1 Corinthians 13:2; or who had the gift of tongues—power to work miracles, and as such tasted of the powers of the world to come, or of the gospel dispensation, as Judas, Hebrews 6:5—all such we exclude—of all such there is no sufficient evidence that any of them were renewed by the grace of God, but of many of them the fullest testimony that they were not. We therefore cannot plead their perseverance in grace, which they never had; nor can such instances of defection, with any propriety, be produced as objections to the doctrine of the final perseverance of the saints. We assert that those only will persevere in the, way of eternal life and attain unto it, in whom the regenerating grace of God has or will take place. This fact is proved by the everlasting love of God to His people; by the covenant of grace, ordered in all things and sure; redemption by Christ Jesus; the charge He has taken of His people; the promises of the gospel; the perfections of God, His immutability, justice, power, wisdom, faithfulness and truth, all engaged to bring the heirs of grace, through perseverance therein, to glory. The doctrine of the perseverance of the saints in grace is not the doctrine of their perseverance in wickedness—is not a licentious doctrine. How shall they, who are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Romans 6:1, 2.”

The Circular Letter of 1795, written by Elder Samuel Jones, is on the twentieth chapter of the Confession of Faith—“The Gospel and the Extent of the Grace Thereof.” “Observe the difference between the law and the gospel; the law denounces wrath, the gospel publishes peace; the law convinces of guilt, the gospel brings an acquittance; the law requires satisfaction to the last mite, the gospel discovers that satisfaction has been made in full; the law knows nothing of mercy, the gospel knows nothing else; in the law, righteousness, justice and truth shine gloriously—in the gospel, love, grace, mercy, pity, condescension and compassion do also shine, and with much more resplendent glory. In the gospel we find free grace, free mercy, free pardon; faith and repentance are freely given, and with them a new heart, a new nature, new life—all is new, all is free. The gospel, as the word signifies, is good message, good news, glad tidings. Luke 2:10, 4:18, 19; Isaiah 40:1-3. The gospel brings glad tidings of good things; good things done for us; in that atonement is made for us, our debt paid, a righteousness wrought out, pardon and acceptance procured; good things wrought in us, such as regeneration, meetness for Heaven, faith, hope, and every other grace; all the good things of providence and grace that are necessary for our present use during our passage through life; and finally, the good things of Heaven itself, even all the glory and happiness of the beatific state. The gospel, in fine, contains a discovery of all good things for time and eternity, in deliverance from sin and every evil, and the full enjoyment of every bliss and happiness beyond what the tongue of men or angels can express, or the powers of the human mind conceive.—From what we have said we shall mention, by way of inference, only two useful observations First, that according to the gospel, the atonement of Christ did not extend to every individual of the human race; and secondly, that the gospel contains no conditional offers of salvation. We mention these, because some in our days seem to favor such notions, and some others that tend to mar and go a great way toward sullying the glory of the gospel. In regard to the first, if atonement was made for all, it was God’s intention that it should; that intention must have its full effect; the effect must be that all must and will be saved. If Christ answered the demands of law and justice for all, and paid the price in full, then there must be guiltless persons in hell for want of being made meet for Heaven. Christ has done His part, but the Spirit declines doing His. Why God should appoint satisfaction to be made for all, and afterward not renew and sanctify all, and bring them to Heaven, must be very strange, and utterly inconsistent with the glory and perfections of Him, who does nothing in vain, who never does a part without doing the whole, who always finishes what He begins. It is manifest from the Holy Scriptures that Christ made atonement for His people, Isaiah 53:8; Luke 1:68; His sheep, John 10:15, 26, 29, 17:9; those that were given Him, Hebrews 2:13; who were redeemed from among others, Revelation 5:9.—As to the second, to make salvation conditional would rob God of His sovereignty, and make His glory to depend on man; while at the same time it would give room for boasting. It would also convert the gospel of the grace of God into a new law. Is the law of works to be preferred to the covenant of grace? If it be of grace, says the, Apostle, then is it no more of works, otherwise grace is no more grace. What! make our happiness depend on man? If we will do part, God will do the rest. Alas! what can man do in the business of his salvation first or last, to merit or promote it? Is he altogether dependent on God? Yea, verily, that at every step, in the beginning and progress of the glorious work he may cry, Grace, grace; and whosoever glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.—But these men[20] make a distinction between natural and moral ability. What is the use of this distinction, but to evade, deceive and confuse? What can natural ability avail towards producing a supernatural effect? The effect can never exceed its cause, any more than a stream can rise higher than its fountain. Now the exercise of any and every supernatural grace is supernatural, is purely of God; for what is born of the flesh is flesh. And, besides, if man’s natural ability was competent to repent, believe, accept, obey, etc., what good could it do him, since he is never to exert it, unless God induces or influences him thereto, and, without which influence, all offers and moral suasion will prove ineffectual? If we speak of repentance, for instance, is not Christ exalted as a Prince and a Savior to give repentance unto Israel and remission of sins? If we speak of faith; what faith?, natural faith? What can this be better than the faith of devils, who believe and tremble? But if we speak of supernatural and evangelical faith, the Scripture is express. By way of distinction from the other, it is called the faith of the operation of God, the faith of God’s elect, like precious faith with us, that faith which purifies the heart, and worketh by love. And in regard to them who received Him, it is said, to them gave He power. Yea, verily, all the power, influence, and everything in the business of our salvation is entirely of God alone, and not of us, who are but perfect weakness.”

At the close of the Circular Letter of 1798, written by Elder David Jones, on the Twenty-second Article of the Confession of Faith (“Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day”), occurs this paragraph: “From the above arguments we may justly infer that the religious observance of the Lord’s Day for Divine worship is warranted by the examples of the Apostles and churches in their days. Consequently, we have sufficient grounds to believe that it was by the authority of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who is the head of His church and lawgiver to the body.”

In the Circular Letter of 1806, written by Elder William Rogers (the nineteenth century spirit of religious as well as material improvement having begun to prevail), a zealous plea is made for the modern moneyed missionary society, which is extolled far above the Protestant Reformation; and a parting rebuke is administered to those “professing Christians” who, in “their indifference or sloth or sleep,” are doing nothing for the salvation of the heathen. Yet the same letter makes the following candid admission: “It is, however, a very remarkable circumstance that in modern missions papal Rome has led the way. ‘When the Roman Pontiffs,’ says Mosheim, ‘saw their ambition checked by the progress of the Reformation, which deprived them of a great part of their spiritual dominion in Europe, they turned their lordly views towards the other parts of the globe.’ The society, which in the year 1540 took the denomination of Jesuits, or the company of Jesus, were by the pope chiefly employed, at first in India, Japan and China, after which they spared no pains in propagating their erroneous sentiments in the West Indies and on the continent of America. In the year 1556 Protestants began to feel for the nations involved in paganism. Fourteen missionaries were sent from Geneva to America. The Swedes also exerted their zeal for the conversion of the superstitious Laplanders, and both the English and the Dutch carried with them into their increasing foreign settlements the doctrines of the Reformation. Early in the last century the Moravians began to organize and exert themselves in the missionary cause. Their spheres of action have gradually increased; besides their missions in six of the West India Islands, they have settlements in Greenland, Upper Canada and South America; their missionaries are employed also at the Cape of Good Hope, on the coast of Labrador, and in the Russian part of Asia. The zeal, the afflictions and the success of these United Brethren have been great. Patronized by Christians in Scotland and in America, Elliott, Brainard, Edwards and others labored among the aborigines of our country; but it was not till about the year 1790 that the great missionary spirit which now exists began to diffuse itself. The holy, flame spread, until in the year 1792 the Baptist missionary society was formed.”

The last printed Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association are a history of the session of the year 1807. In that year the Association recommended to each church to subscribe for a copy of Gill’s “Exposition of the Old and New Testaments” for the use of their minister; and the Association urged the same course on all sister Associations. This proceeding is a demonstration that the new or Fullerite divinity or theology had, up to 1807, made but little headway among American Baptists.—The Circular Letter of 1807, written by Elder Wm. Staughton, is upon the highly important subject of the “Qualifications of a Gospel Minister.” “Every candidate for the ministry and every church should know how to discriminate between those who are in truth ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God, and those who are such only in name. As there are some things which are regarded as qualifications which in reality are not, and others that are supposed to disqualify, but from which no discouragement ought to be drawn, a few distinctions must be made. We need not prove to you that mere morality of character, powers of eloquence, or heirships to living, are insufficient; a heathen or an infidel may possess them all. But it may be necessary to state that—1. A persuasion in the mind of the subject himself is no genuine proof. Most young Christians, brought up from, the horrible pit, and taught the excellency of Jesus, feel ardent to proclaim His character to thousands. 2. The confident decisions of friends and relatives are not always to be trusted; for natural affection may usurp the seat of sober judgment. 3. Success is no satisfactory proof that a preacher is qualified of God. The glorious word of God may be quick and powerful, though its preacher be held in the bonds of iniquity.—There are, besides these, some things which are often supposed to disqualify, but do not. 1. A deep persuasion of our entire unworthiness. If only the worthy are to serve in the sanctuary, where shall they be found? Paul felt himself ‘less than the least of all saints.’ Self-abasement will aid rather than hinder in the works of God. It will trample under foot the serpent-pride, and cast the crown at the feet of Jesus. 2. Great fear and trembling of spirit, in prospect of the service, should not lead to the conclusion that requisite qualifications are not possessed. As in the cases of Moses, Jeremiah and Paul, holy fear is useful and not injurious, when it leads to greater faithfulness in the ministry, and to a more entire reliance on the Lord for His assistance. 3. The neglect or even the contempt of many who profess the name of Christ does not prove that we ought not to gird up the loins for the labors of a steward. Different measures of talent are given to different Elders, all designed for the perfecting of the saints. ‘One star differeth from another star in glory.’ 4. The discovery of no immediate or great success should not lead any of God’s servants to conclude he has never been called to his Master’s work. Few, in comparison of the multitude of his hearers, appear to have been converted under the teachings of our Lord. If we have as yet toiled and rowed and caught nothing, who can tell but that the next endeavor may bring the greatest success? Whatever be the result, like the disciples we should say, ‘At Thy word we will let down the net.’ A minister is no adequate judge of the degree of his usefulness. Seed may have been shown and harvests be rising where he suspected all was barrenness. We have sometimes discovered more of the usefulness of a minister after his decease than before. The lamp has burned when the pitcher was broken.—The essential qualifications of a gospel minister appear to be these four, godliness, knowledge, readiness of communication, and a Divine call. 1. He must be regenerated by the grace of God, the husband of one wife, ruling well his own house, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, and not to wine; not ready to strike, or attached to filthy lucre; not given to contention, not a lover of money, not self‑willed, but just and temperate—blameless in all things as the steward of God. He must take heed to himself, to his flock, and to his doctrine. Hence, 2. Knowledge is requisite. The new man is renewed in knowledge; but spiritual understanding is progressive, and in this it is required that a minister of the word abound. He should possess general views of the plan of salvation, of the doctrines of grace, and of the ‘law of the house of the Lord.’ It appears also proper that a church solemnly exhort a young licentiate brother to give attendance to reading, to exhortation and doctrine ; to meditate on these things, that his profiting may appear to all. 3. An aptness to teach is requisite—a door of utterance, a readiness to communicate the good treasures of the heart to others. 4. There must be a Divine call. No roan must take to himself the honor, unless called of God as was Aaron. How can they preach except they be sent? Christ displays His sovereignty in calling to office whomsoever He pleases. His call is delivered not by visiting angels; it is not heard from the flame of a bush, or from the lightning and clouds of a trembling mountain; nor is it an audible address from our Lord Jesus Christ. To be so called in this last sense was one of the signs of an Apostle, but is not to be applied to the vocation of ministers now. It is the still, small voice of God in the soul, saying, ‘Occupy till I come.’ The subject feels a necessity laid upon him—a dispensation of the gospel committed unto him. The souls of men appear of greater value than he had before conceived. He thirsts to be engaged in the work. He would rather be a preacher of Christ than master of all the mines in the world. This secret fire begins in the end to break forth. In his countenance, in his converse, in his prayer, in his exhortations, his exercises discover themselves. At length they engage the attention of the church of God, who watch these indications with interest, and who, after proper trial and satisfaction, set apart the divinely called and qualified brother to the work of the ministry.—Besides these leading and essential qualifications, there are several that are contributory to the improvement of the minister of God. These may be referred to two objects—the furniture of the mind and the affections of the heart. We acknowledge with gratitude and joy that every able minister of the New Testament is made such of God and not of men. He raised up Gideon from the threshing-floor, and David from the sheep-fold. The wealthy and the learned were not called to be the Apostles of our Lord, but fishermen, publicans and tent-maker. Many among the most useful of the ministers of Christ in the present day have received instruction only at the Master’s feet. The ablest preacher is but an earthen vessel, and the feeblest bears heavenly treasure. We are sensible that an ostentation of learning may be food for a weak or aspiring mind; nevertheless, as knowledge of almost every kind may be useful to a gospel minister; as in the Bible we have only a translation, behind the veil of which many a beauty is concealed; as we have no reason to expect that extraordinary assistance which the Apostles enjoyed; and as education places a minister of the gospel on equal ground with a learned adversary, to seek an acquaintance with language, history, and other similar studies, where it can be accomplished, is praiseworthy.—An increase in all the gracious affections of the heart well becomes a minister of Christ-humility, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, sincerity, sympathy, and evangelical piety‑when all is done, falling at the feet of Jesus, and crying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’—Bunyan in a few touches admirably draws the picture of a faithful preacher. The interpreter introduces Christian into a room, where he saw the picture of a very grave person hang up against the wall, and this was the fashion of it: ‘It had eyes lifted up to Heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth was written upon its lips, the world was behind his back; it stood as if it pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang over its head.’”

In a centennial discourse delivered by Elder Samuel Jones, Oct. 6th, 1807 (the Philadelphia Association being then one hundred years old), the writer begins thus: “I have had it on my mind that it would be proper for me, before I proceed, to confess openly that I am not going to preach, but to read. You may therefore perhaps have remarked that, in addressing the throne of grace, I have not dared to ask for assistance in this part of the service. I must, however, observe that I think reading is admissible on particular occasions, especially such as the present, when the chief of what is to be said is to be historical; yet such historical facts as have some relation to religion. After saying this much, I need not now be at any pains to conceal my notes. I had some thoughts of committing the whole to memory, but I did not like it very well, because I should seem to act the part of a school-boy, or, what would be worse, to play the hypocrite, by pretending to do what I did not.” Towards the close of his address he declares that he anticipates, before another such centennial occasion (that is, before 1908), the commencement of the latter day of glory, the spiritual reign of Christ on earth, when a Reformation far more thorough-going, emancipating, scriptural and heavenly than Luther’s would be effected by the Lord.

I shall now state a fact that has been highly encouraging to me, and that ought to be equally so to all spiritually minded people, especially to all true Baptists, in the United States of America. I have not found, in all human history, so close and so full a resemblance to the Divine method of the propagation of the gospel of Christ over the Roman Empire, in the manner detailed in the inspired book called the Acts of the Apostles, as I have found in the method of the original propagation of the same glorious gospel in our own blessed country. To this heathen Indian wilderness our ancestors were brought, not by moneyed religious societies, but by the providence of God, many of them fleeing from religious persecution in the Old World in order to find in the New a place where they might worship God according to the dictates of their oven consciences; so the Israelites were gathered by Divine Providence from different nations, as related in the second chapter of Acts, for the worship of God at Jerusalem. About the middle of the eighteenth century, when the modern world, like the ancient Roman world in the first century of the Christian era, was overwhelmed with the darkness and corruption of paganism and infidelity, the Spirit of God was poured out abundantly upon His people, as on the day of Pentecost, and thousands were added to the visible church by conviction, conversion and baptism. Unlearned and ignorant men, and afterwards a very few with human learning, were raised up lend called and qualified by the Spirit of God to go forth, in simple dependence upon that Spirit, and proclaim the depravity of man and the holiness of God, and the richness and power of Divine grace to give, through the Lord Jesus Christ, repentance unto Israel and forgiveness of sins.

“At first they were viewed by men in power as beneath their notice; none, said they, but the weak and wicked join them,—let them alone, they will soon fall out among themselves, and come to nothing. In some places this maxim was adhered to, and persecution, in a legal shape, was never seen. But, in many other places, alarmed by the rapid increase of the Baptists (see Exodus 1 and Acts 4 and 5), the men in power strained every penal law (especially in Virginia) to put down these disturbers of the peace, as they were called. It seems by no means certain that any law in force in Virginia authorized the imprisonment of any persons for preaching. The law for the preservation of the peace, however, was so interpreted as to answer this purpose; and, accordingly, when the preachers were apprehended, it was done by a peace warrant. ‘May it please your worships,’ said on one occasion the prosecuting attorney, ‘these men are great disturbers of the peace; they cannot meet a man upon the road but they must ram a text of Scripture down his throat.’”[21] Many of the Baptist ministers were arrested by the civil authorities, and imprisoned and threatened and forbidden to “preach the gospel of the Son of God;” but, emboldened by the Divine Spirit, they could not and would not hold their peace. “Magistrates and mobs,” says Mr. Semple, “priests and sheriff’s, courts and prisons, all vainly combined to divert them from their object; He that was for them was greater than all that were against them; they found that

‘Prisons would palaces prove
If Jesus would dwell with them there.’

There was an established religion; the Nebuchadnezzars of the age required all men to bow down to this golden image; these Hebrew children refused, and were cast into the burning fiery furnace of persecution; the Son of God walked with them there, to the utter dismay of their enemies. The decree finally went forth that none should be any more forced to worship the golden image; the Establishment was overturned.” Sometimes, during the persecution, the servants of God would sing solemn and impressive hymns in the streets, while being led from the court house to prison; and they often preached through the grated bars of the prison windows to multitudes outside, and the preaching at such times seemed to be especially accompanied by the demonstration of the Spirit and of the power, and converts to the truth were greatly multiplied, and the persecution of God’s servants resulted, as of old, to the furtherance of the gospel. In some cases high enclosures were erected around the prisons, and, during the time of service, drains were beaten and offensive substances burned outside by the ungodly; but nothing availed to stop the progress of the truth. Sometimes the imprisoned ministers were fed on rye bread and water, and not enough of those articles. Sometimes an attempt was made to suffocate them with burning brimstone, or to blow them up with gunpowder. Before retiring to sleep at night they would sing the praises of their Redeemer, and return thanks to Him that they were in a prison and not in hell, and pray for themselves, their friends, their enemies and persecutors. About thirty of the Baptist preachers in Virginia were imprisoned, some of them as many as four times each, for different periods of tune, from a few days to several months, besides a number of exhorters and companions, whose only fault was being in company with their ministerial brethren. The Baptist preachers were often insulted and abused at their regular appointments. Wicked men would come, and during their meetings play cards, and drink spirituous liquors, and curse the minister; sometimes they would ride into the water and make sport in time of baptism; and sometimes take the minister and repeatedly dip him into the water, and keep him under for a while, and almost drown him; sometimes they would throw stones at them, or beat them with whips or clubs, knock them down while preaching, and drag them about by the hair of their heads. Frequently they fabricated and spread the most groundless reports against the characters of the Baptists; and, when any Baptist fell into any improper conduct, it was exaggerated to the utmost extent. Sometimes the leading men of the Established (or Episcopal) Church would attend the Baptist meetings, and enter into arguments with the preachers, insisting that “their church was the oldest and therefore the best; that their ministers were learned men, and therefore most competent to interpret Scripture; that the better class of people, and well-informed, adhered to them, whilst none, or scarcely any, except the lower order, followed the Baptists; that they were all in peace and friendship before the corning of the Baptists, but now their houses and neighborhoods were filled with religious disputes; that the Baptists were false prophets, who were to come in sheep’s clothing. To these arguments the Baptist preachers boldly and readily replied: that if they were wolves in sheep’s clothing, and their opponents were the true sheep, it was quite unaccountable that they were persecuted and cast into prison; it was well known that wolves would destroy sheep, but never, until then, that sheep would prey upon wolves; that their coming might indeed interrupt their peace, but certainly, if it did, it must be a false peace, bordering on destruction; and to rouse them from such lethargy was like waking a man whose house was burning over him; that the effects of their coming were similar to those foretold by Christ, as arising from the propagation of His word, namely, ‘that there should be five in one house, three against two, and two against three;’ that if the higher ranks in society did not; countenance them, it was no more than what befell their Master and His inspired Apostles; that rich men in every generation, with some few exceptions, were enemies to a pure gospel; but that God had declared that He had chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith ; that it was true that most of their preachers mere unlearned, yet that they had evidences that they were called to the ministry by the will of God; that this was the most essential qualification of a minister, the want of which all the learning of all the schools could not supply. The Baptist preachers would often retort their own inconsistencies upon them; that, while they professed to be Christians, they indulged themselves in the violation of most of the Christian precepts; that their communion was often polluted by the admission of known drunkards, gamesters, swearers and revelers; that even their clergy, learned as they were, had never learned the most essential doctrine of revelation, the indispensable necessity of the new birth, or being born again; that their public discourses were nothing more than moral addresses, such as a Pagan philosopher, unassisted by the Bible, could have composed.”

“The great success and rapid increase of the Baptists in Virginia,” says Mr. Semple, ” must be ascribed primarily to the power of God working with them. Yet it cannot be denied that there were subordinate and co-operating causes; one of which, and the main one, was the loose and immoral deportment of the established clergy, by which the people were left almost destitute of even the shadow of true religion. It is true they had some outward forms of worship, but the essential principles of Christianity were not only not understood among them, but by many never heard of. Some of the cardinal precepts of morality were disregarded, and actions plainly forbidden by the New Testament were; often proclaimed by the clergy harmless and innocent, or, at worst, foibles of but little account. Having no discipline, every man followed the bent of his own inclination. It was not uncommon for the rectors of parishes to be men of the loosest morals. The Baptist preachers were, in almost every respect, the reverse of the established clergy. The Baptist preachers were without learning, without patronage, generally very poor, very plain in their dress, unrefined in their manners, and awkward in their address; all of which, by their enterprising zeal and unwearied perseverance, they either turned to advantage, or prevented their ill effects. On the other hand, most of the ministers of the Establishment were men of classical and scientific educations, patronized by men in power, connected with great families, supported by competent salaries, and put into office by the strong arm of civil power. Thus pampered and secure, the men of this order were rolling on the bed of luxury, when the others began their extraordinary career. Their learning, riches, power, etc., seemed only to hasten their overthrow, by producing an unguarded heedlessness, which is so often the prelude to calamity and downfall.”

Providence raised up, in defense of the persecuted Baptists, the celebrated Patrick Henry, the friend of both civil and religious liberty, and the orator of the Revolution, and he became their undaunted, unwavering and life-long friend and advocate. With the progress of republican principles, the Established Church was viewed as a pillar of the Monarchy. In 1776 the Legislature of Virginia suspended, and in 1779 abolished the payment of the salaries formerly allowed Episcopal ministers. In 1784 there was a bill before the Legislature for a General Assessment for the support of ministers of all denominations; many strong anti-assessment memorials and remonstrances, from different religious denominations, especially the Baptists, were sent in (old Elder John Leland taking an active part in getting up these documents, and James Madison, afterwards President of the United States, writing an able one, appended to Semple’s History); and the proposition for an assessment or taxation for religious purposes happily failed. “In 1798 the Legislature of Virginia repealed all laws vesting property in the hands of any religious sect, by which the Episcopalians were deprived of the globes; thus all religious sects in Virginia were put into a state of perfect equality.”

In New England, outside of Rhode Island, the Baptists, like other dissenters, were compelled to pay taxes for the support of the Congregational clergy. And, when they refused to pay, as they sometimes did from conscientious motives, their lands, and houses, and stock, and household and kitchen furniture, even the least and last articles, were taken from the poor, and sold sometimes for less than the tenth part of their value to pay these iniquitous dues, the Congregational minister himself sometimes becoming the purchaser. Poor men, and even women, were sometimes, for not paying these ministerial taxes, carried off from their little children, miles away, on dark, rainy or cold, snowy nights, to prison, and kept many days in the common jail. Baptist preachers were sometimes arrested and put in the stocks “for preaching the gospel contrary to law.”

With the Baptists, the Quakers also were great sufferers from religious persecution in Massachusetts and Virginia.

The Baptist preachers, as we particularly learn, emphasized the spiritual and experimental character of true religion, and believed that they were under the guidance of the Spirit of God, and sought to lean at every step upon Divine wisdom and power. When persecuted greatly in one county or State, they fled to another and preached the gospel there. And sometimes they received strong impressions and desires, sometimes accompanied by dreams or visions, as they believed from the Lord, to visit distant regions, even in other States, at a time when the country was mostly a wilderness, and when traveling was very difficult and dangerous; but they would leave their families and brethren and friends behind them and go—sent out and sustained and directed by God and not by man—and, in new and ungodly settlements, they would find respectful, and then attentive, and then interested hearers, whose hearts were moved and softened by the Divine Spirit for the reception of the seed of the word; and thus there would be large ingatherings into the gospel fold, and successful churches would be established. And sometimes messengers, or messages, or letters, would come from distant peoples, earnestly desiring the ministration of the word; the ministers of God would gladly respond to these calls, as they believed, from on high; and their Heaven-directed labors of love would be abundantly blessed, in the proclamation of the joyful sound of God’s salvation, and in removing doctrinal and practical errors from the churches, and establishing and confirming them in scriptural and eternal truth.

The similarity of these incidents to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles is almost startling. They demonstrate that God and His gospel and His ministers and His methods of propagating His gospel were precisely the same in the modern eighteenth century as in the ancient first century. And the question may well be asked why are they not the same in the nineteenth century, and why will they not be the same—as long as God and man remain the same—on to the end of time.

1. For a particular and unimpeachable confirmation of the above remark, see W. E. H. Lecky’s “England in the Eighteenth Century,” vol. i. latter part of the second chapter, and the third and fourth chapters.

2. The ablest books written in the eighteenth century against infidelity were Joseph Butler’s “Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature,” acknowledged by even John Stuart Mill to prove conclusively that the Christian religion is open to no objections, either moral intellectual which do not apply at least equally to the common theory of Deism; Nathaniel Lardner’s “Credibility of the Gospel History;” William Pale’s “Natural Theology” and “Horae Paulinae:” and Richard Watson’s “Apology for Christianity” addressed to Edward Gibbon and “Apology for the Bible” addressed to Thomas Paine (the term “Apology” in these last two titles having its old meaning of Defense or Vindication).

3. “Never,” says the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge—“Never were such elegant moral sermons preached, and never had immorality reached so high a point.” “Moral essays,” says Mr. Lecky, “were utterly incapable of transforming the character and arresting and reclaiming the thoroughly depraved.”

4. The Methodist writer, Richard Watson, the prince of Arminians, in his “Observations on Southey’s Life of Wesley,” remarks of this age: “There was something of ultra-Calvinism, and much of frigid, unevangelical Arminianism.”

5. Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, the eloquent and learned Lutheran preacher and church historian, was born about 1694, and died 1755. “His noble character,” says Hagenbach, “is just as lovely as his learning was thorough and comprehensive.”

6. All the American Episcopalians, “from the first settlement of Virginia (1607) till after the War of the Revolution, belonged to the diocese of the Bishop of London, who never visited this country, and could exercise but an imperfect supervision. All attempts to establish colonial bishoprics failed. But, after the achievement of American independence, the obstacle of the oath of allegiance previously required in England having been removed by act of Parliament, William White, of Pennsylvania (1747-1836), called the Father of the American Episcopal Church, and Samuel Provoost, of New York, received the (so-called) Apostolical succession, at the hands of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and other prelates, in Lambeth Palace, February 4th, 1787. But, on account of the doubtfulness of this result, steps had been taken to secure ordination with a broken succession, from the Lutheran Bishops of Denmark; and in 1782 White had proposed a temporary administration by presbyters”—P. Schaff.

7. Toplady did not die blaspheming and in the horror of despair, as publicly asserted by his enemies. Says Mr. Lecky, “Nothing could be more conclusive than Sir Richard Hill’s letter describing the perfect and saintly peace of Toplady’s death-bed.”

8. The marginal references to parallel passages in Scott’s Bible are exceedingly copious and valuable. My father, Elder C. B. Hassell, owned, consulted and esteemed this work: and while under deep exercise of soul I was reading Scott’s Practical Observations on verses seventeen to thirty in the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, I was blessed with the first believing, melting and adoring view of the Lord Jesus Christ suffering on the cross and atoning for my sins. Though twenty-three years ago, I, being then twenty-one years of age, I remember the time and place as distinctly as if the event had occurred but yesterday. It was Monday afternoon, August 17th, 1863 while I was alone in my own bedroom in my father’s house. The precious were blessed words thus blessed of God to me were the following: “We cannot wholly pass over this narrative of our Redeemer’s crucifixion without again reflecting for a moment on the complicated cruelties and indignities to which He was exposed; and not for any fault of His own, nay; directly contrary to His deservings. But He was wounded and scourged, that we might be healed: He was arrayed with scorn in the purple robe that He might procure for us sinners the robe of righteousness and salvation. He was crowned with thorns, that we might be crowned with honor and immortality; He stood speechless, that we might have an all-prevailing plea: He Endured torture, that we might have a strong consolation; He thirsted that we might drink of the waters of life: He bore the wrath of the Father that we might enjoy His favor; He was numbered with transgressors, that we might be made equal to angels; He died, that we might live forever! Let us then often retire to survey this scene, and to admire His immeasurable love; that we may learn to mourn for sin and hate it, and rejoice in our obligations to the Redeemer; and we may be constrained by love to live no longer to ourselves; but to Him who died for us and rose again.” I felt that the language of Zechariah 12:10 was fulfilled in me, and I wished to weep forever shed an ocean of tears for my wretched sins that had slain the Lord of life and glory. From the subsequent and permanent effects of this exercise, I was led to believe that it was the gracious work of the Spirit of God.

9. At the close of this sermon occur the following observations: “And now in applying the subject I would observe that, while numbers argue with the greatest vehemence against the points in question, and groundlessly charge them with implying the most dishonorable thoughts of God, and tending to the most pernicious consequences others are ready to say in extravagant zeal, to any one of greater moderation, ‘If you really believe these doctrines, why do you preach them so sparingly cautiously and practically?’ I would desire such a man carefully to study even St. Paul’s Epistles, and to answer the objection himself. Perhaps he may find that there is not a less proportion on such subjects in our sermons and publications than in his writings; and that he as carefully guards them from abuse, and connects them as much with holy practice, as we can do. We generally meet with a few verses in an Epistle upon the doctrines in question; a much larger proportion upon the person, love and sufferings of Christ, and on faith in Him; and whole chapters upon a holy life and conversation; and, if we do not, in like manner, proportion, guard and connect them, hypocrites will abuse them, infidels will despise them, and the weak will be stumbled. Indeed, they are not at all proper subjects to dwell on when we preach to (unconverted) sinners, to prejudiced hearers, or newly-awakened persons: and are seldom if ever found in Scripture explicitly thus addressed: yet a great part of our more public ministry is exercised among such persons. Let it not then be thought carnal policy to adapt our discourses to the occasions and wants of the hearers, while nothing inconsistent with truth is spoken nothing profitable kept back. Our Lord Himself says, I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now: and Paul writes to some who were prone to be wise in their own conceits, I could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat, for hitherto ye were not able to bear it; neither yet are ye now able; and he gives a reason for his conduct, which proves that many in most congregations are not able, namely, the prevalence of strife and contention among them.”

10. He taught that even the heathens, who do their duty according to their knowledge, are capable of eternal life, and have sometimes enjoyed communion with the spiritual world, instancing Socrates and Marcus Antoninus as examples.

11. As Wesley “grew older, cooler and wiser, he modified and softened down his doctrine of Perfection, so as almost to explain it away.”

12. “The desideratum,” says Mr. Alexander Knox, in his eulogistic “Remarks on the Life and Character of John Wesley”—“The desideratum was a precise distinction between the supposed irresistibility of Divine grace, maintained by Augustine and Calvin, and that effective energy, which is so clearly asserted throughout the New Testament, and so evidently accordant to man’s moral exigencies.” Now, who will supply this desideratum, and explain the difference between the irresistibility and the efficacy of Divine grace?

13. My father considered Edwards’ History of Redemption “worth its weight in gold;” and when the Kehukee Association first imposed upon him the task of compiling a general history of the church since the Creation, he thought that he would need no other book except this work of Edwards to assist him in his labors.

14. This practice of drawing lots, Wesley derived from the Moravians, and he afterwards abandoned it.

15. This list is as accurate and complete as I have been able to make it though there is reason to believe that a considerable number of churches have been omitted because their names and dates of organization have not been accessible to me.

16. The first “church” of Free Will or Arminian Baptists in the United States was founded by Benjamin Randall, at New Durham, New Hampshire, in 1780. These people are most numerous in the northern part of the Union, especially New England, and they extend into the British Provinces.

17. Called Second Hopewell, served for many years by Elder P. Hartwell, and now by Elder W. J. Purington.

18. “Our old ministers of the eighteenth century,” says David Benedict the New School Baptist historian, “would have denounced as unsound in the faith, as Arminians, the great mass of our community of the present day, both in Europe and America, Fuller and Hall among the rest.”

19. The exact and only meaning of the word trinity is three‑oneness. All Baptists believe in a Divine Trinity—either a Trinity of Persons or Subsistences in One God, or a Trinity of Manifestations or Functions in One God. Neither the term trinity, nor either of these additions to it, is found in the Scriptures; and thus it behooves all of us to exercise the utmost charity toward one another in the use of these terms. Creature thought and speech cannot explore the infinite mystery of the Divine Nature. To both the above methods of expression there are objections. In the case of all creatures, a distinction of person is a distinction of essence; but God cannot manifest Himself to us differently from what He is for He cannot lie; and the term person seems to be the most nearly adequate expression afforded by human speech for characterizing the relationship revealed in the scriptures and in Christian experience between the Father and the Son and the holy Ghost; still the term “person” is not used in the scriptures to designate this relationship. No Baptist is a tritheist, that is, a believer in three Gods.

20. Andrew Fuller and his followers.

21. Robert B. Semple’s “History of the Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia,” published at Richmond in 1810—the most important single authority for the early Baptist methods and sufferings in this country.

Chapter XIX. Nineteenth Century.

While there are many indications that, during the nineteenth century the sun has continued to ascend above the horizon, and while his bright beams have occasionally illuminated some parts of the British Isles and the United States, and possibly, to some small extent, parts of all the Continents and some of the Islands of the Sea; yet, originating in the chief centres of our rapid modern civilization, and extending thence nearly all over Christendom, the multiplying tapers and torches of an unscriptural, mechanical, material, unspiritual and ungodly science, philosophy and religion, are emitting such volumes of pitchy fumes as to shroud much of the Heavens with clouds of inky blackness, fearfully portending wide-spread visitations of Divine judgments, “to startle the nations into thoughts of God.”

Well does Mr. C. H. Spurgeon, of London, in his “Clew of the Maze,” say with reference to “Advanced Thought:” “It is certain that from the apostolic period to the dark ages, if the church advanced at all, it was in a backward direction. Religious thought made progress in a wretched fashion away from truth for several centuries. It is more than possible that modern thought is starting on another such progressive period.””Doubt dims and chills the day. A fog is over all things, and men move about like Egypt’s ancients when they felt the darkness.” “Men have made gods of themselves; they rely on themselves, and have no patience with talk about faith in God, and they have become their own Providence and Rewarder.” And in his sermon on Psalm 55:6, 7, he remarks: “To-day the most approved preaching makes much of man. Philanthropy, which is good enough in its place, has supplanted loyalty to Jehovah; the second table of the law is put before the first, and in that position it genders idolatry—the worship of man, which is only a form of self-adoration. All divinity is now to be shaped according to man, and from man’s point of view; and men are to think out their theology, and not take it from God’s mouth, or from the book inspired of the Spirit of God. Men are such wonderful beings in this nineteenth century that we are called upon to tone down the gospel to ‘the spirit of the age’—that is, to the fashions and follies of human thought, as they vary from day to day. This, by God’s help, we will never do—no, not by one diluting drop, not by the splitting of a hair. What have I to do with suiting the nineteenth century any more than the ninth century? We have to do with the immutable God, and with the fixed verities which He has revealed to us. Having taken our foothold upon the rock, we shall not stir from it, by God’s help, while there is breath in our body. Yet so it is; man has made man his God, and Jehovah is dethroned in his thoughts. I believe in God, the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob; if there be another god newly come up, let those worship him who will; but the stern God of the Old Testament, the loving God of the New Testament, it is evermore my resolve to magnify. Of course, he who is faithful to his God, and declares His greatness in this evil time, will to-day be stigmatized as ‘behind the times,’ and be little esteemed by those who deem themselves cultured and advanced; but of this he may make small account. I see how it is. God’s word is nothing; these new notions are everything. The modern men blot out what they like, and tear out what they please from the book; or they lay the book aside altogether; for they themselves make their own Bible, and every man is his own inspiration, and will ere long proclaim himself to be his own god. But when the soul is brought to know God, it does not question His word or His doings any longer. It sits down before a great mystery, and cries, ‘I do not understand this; I cannot measure it. O the depths! But what God says, I believe. What God does, I accept.’ Let me not deceive you by pandering to the idle prattle of the times. Men dream, and then assert that their visions are truth. It is an atrocious disloyalty to the majesty of revelation to add to it the maunderings of our poor, fallible judgments. The better thing is always to feel as a little child at his father’s knee, when we are reading the Scriptures, and to ask to be taught of the Spirit. Whatever the truth may be, I shall never quarrel with God. However terrible His acts, if I am unable to rejoice in the light of His face, yet in the shadow of His wings will I rejoice. When He seems to spread that great wing, and hide the sun, I will go and nestle beneath Him, and cry, ‘It is the Lord, and it must be right.’ O, eternal God, I do not understand Thee! If I could comprehend Thee, Thou wert not God, or I not man. The parts of Thy ways which Thou hast revealed stagger and almost slay me, but, as I fall at Thy feet as dead, my heart cries, ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’ For the Lord is good, and righteous are all His ways. Hallelujah, though the world should perish! Hallelujah, though my soul should die with fear! The Lord forever shall be extolled. Alas! many are only reconciled to the half of God, or to the tenth part of God! Indeed, I fear that many have shaped a god for themselves, and so are not reconciled to the true God at all. We want a conversion which shall make us run in parallel lines with the God who has revealed Himself by His prophets and Apostles, and by His ever-to-be-adored Son.”

Mr. W. E. Gladstone, in a recent number of the Nineteenth Century Magazine, fitly characterizes the jubilant attitude of the modern mind in burying Deity in the gulf of negation as a deep judicial darkness, an astounding infatuation, far more degrading than the ancient heathen idolatry of nature.

The nineteenth is the most composite and heterogeneous of all the centuries of the world’s history. Almost all former errors, under new names, as well as almost all former truths, have revived and are more or less nourishing in our time; and some new and direr forms of errors and evils as well as some peculiar providential blessings, have appeared.

The nineteenth is the century of the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, in a long series of bloody and demoralizing European wars; the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire by the Greek Revolution, and of the Spanish Empire by that of Mexico and South America; the repeated revolutions in France; the War of 1812 between England and the United States; the War between the United States and Mexico; the War between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union; the unification of Germany, and that of Italy; the numerous wars of England (the most warlike, self-aggrandizing, wealthy and powerful nation of modern times), for the maintenance and increase of her empire and claims, among which contests should be particularized her wars in 1839-1842, to force the impious opium trade, and missions incidentally, upon China—in 1840, with her allies, to reconquer Syria for the Turks from a rebellious vassal, just as England has repeatedly upheld the Turks in their frightful and wholesale massacres of “Christians” in the Turkish Empire and Asiatic provinces-in 1854-6, in connection with France and Sardinia, to defend Turkey from Russia—in 1857, to preserve her dominion in India from the Sepoy rebellion—in 1857-1860, to open China better to trade and missions—and in 1882, to take possession of Egypt, and foreclose, at the mouth of cannon and rifle, her mortgage on that abject and impoverished people, and to defend her shares in the Suez Canal and her shortest route to India; the course of England, during recent years, in forcing, by her fleets and treaties, the wretched liquor traffic upon India, Siam, Madagascar, Griqualand, etc., degrading the heathens far below their former condition, in order to increase her revenue; the apparent and temporary recognition, by the European nations, of a special and merciful and almighty Providence in staying the victorious career of Napoleon Bonaparte, followed by their speedy relapse into infidelity; the almost universal emancipation of slaves, and the very extensive liberation of civilized peoples from political oppression; the improvement of the manners of general society—less open indecency, intemperance, profanity and dueling; the milder character of legislation; the increase of charities and asylums for the afflicted and unfortunate; the great extension of popular education; the unprecedented progress of scientific discoveries and practical inventions, lightening physical labor, and multiplying the conveniences, comforts and luxuries of life; the discovery and mining of gold in California and Australia; the establishment of manufactures, and great increase of commerce, and excessive devotion to business and money-getting; the rapid increase of wealth, and pauperism, and demoralization, and, in most civilized countries, of recent crime; morbid sympathy for and condoning of wrong-doing; the general prevalence of quackery, puffery and dishonesty; unparalleled adulterations of foods and drinks and medicines; the increased licentiousness of theatrical performances; the great increase of gambling in old and new forms, including speculation in grain and cotton futures; the gradual but steady decay of the appreciation of the life-long sacredness of the marriage relation, the relaxation of the laws of divorce, and the alarming multiplication of divorces and of “consecutive polygamy” (the New England States of the Union occupying a miserable pre-eminence, and Protestant countries far surpassing Roman Catholic countries, in this corrupting disregard of the Divine law of marriage); the increasing frequency of obfaetation and faeticide, in place of infanticide practiced by the Pagans; the recent increasing corruption of the daily press, in the large cities, and of the use of the telegraph, expatiating upon all the details of crime, and thus helping to make crime epidemic; the infidel tendency of a large body of periodical literature and of science falsely so called; the impurity and corrupting influence of much of modern art; the fact that the nations of Europe spend, on an average, four and a half times more for war than for education—that England spends about twenty dollars per year for every man, woman and child, for spirituous liquors, and that the United States spends about seventeen dollars annually per capita for the same purpose, while spending for each inhabitant only about one dollar annually for religion and about two dollars for education;[1] the great increase of insanity and idiocy; the disruption of the Roman Catholic communion (the Old Catholics, in Europe, seceding in 1870)—the Episcopalian (the Reformed branch, in the United States, going off in 1873)—the Presbyterian (the Cumberland or Arminian Presbyterians, in the western and southwestern States of the Union, withdrawing from their Calvinistic brethren in 1810; the Free Church, in Scotland, from the Established Church, in 1843; the New School, in the United States, separating from the Old School in 1837, but re-uniting in 1869; and the Southern separating from the Northern in 1861)—the Baptist (the Old School, in the United States, separating from the New School in 1828-42;and the New School separating into Northern and Southern in 1845; the Strict Baptists, in England, separating from the Particular Baptists in 1835)—the Methodist (dividing into about a dozen sects; and, in the United States, separating into Northern and Southern in 1844)—and the Society of Friends (some Quakers, in Ireland, becoming heterodox in 1813; and the Hicksite, in the United States, withdrawing from the old Orthodox Quakers in 1827); a very extensive decay of their ancient faith among Jews, Brahmins, Buddhists, Mohammedans and Protestants (the latter almost universally abandoning their original Calvinism for Catholic Arminianism, and many going off even into Pelagianism and Universalism); the decayed and deadened condition of Greek Catholicism; the vigorous revival and blasphemous culmination of Roman Catholicism (Ultramontanism), regaining a significance and influence such as it had not had for centuries (the deadly wound being healed), in the re-establishment of Jesuitism and the Inquisition (1814)—the murder of two hundred female and nearly two thousand male Protestants in Southern France (1815)—the re-invigoration of the Propaganda Society (1817)—the founding of the Lyons Propagation Society (1822) and of numerous Colleges and Theological Seminaries-the renewed ardor of a large number of old Catholic Societies—the purchase, by the “Society for the Holy Childhood of Jesus,” of about 400,000 Chinese orphan children, at about three cents apiece, in order to bring up and “baptize” them in the Catholic communion, and the purchase of numerous pretended conversions from the lower classes of Protestants in Europe—the gathering in of thousands from the Episcopalians in England, and the very rapid increase of their numbers, in the United States, from immigration—the sending out of three thousand priests on foreign mission work, disseminating, among the heathens, the most corrupting Jesuitical casuistry and idolatry in the name of Christianity, and, at times, especially in remote islands, the most shameless French licentiousness, worse than that previously practiced by the heathens themselves—the affirmation, by Pope Pius IX., in 1854, of the sinlessness (Immaculate conception) of the Virgin Mary, “the Mother of God, and the Queen of Heaven” (thus still more than ever justifying and encouraging the increasing Roman Catholic Mariolatry, or idolatrous worship of Mary, to whom are addressed numerous prayers, beseeching her to persuade or command her son Jesus to grant the petitions of the suppliants)—the issuance by the same pope, in 1864, of the “Syllabus of Errors,” claiming still the “Church’s” power to use temporal force, and denouncing non-Catholic schools and the separation of Church and State—the declaration of the Vatican Council, July 18th, 1870, in the midst of a terrific tempest of black clouds and incessant lightning flash and thunder peal, of the Infallibility of the Pope (thus making him God on earth, the last Supreme Judge of the human race in all questions of faith and morals, from whose decision no one can deviate without loss of salvation—see 2 Thess. 2:3, 4), followed, in speedy Divine retribution, the very next day, July 19th, 1870, by the declaration of war against Germany by Napoleon III., the political supporter of the papacy, which contest in two months destroyed the Empire of France and the temporal power of the pope—and the Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII., Nov. 1st, 1885, “De Civitatum Gubernatione Christiana” (Concerning the Christian Government of States), enjoining upon all Catholics to devote all their energies to influence and control the politics of the world, and to remodel all States and Constitutions upon Catholic principles (and thus carry the world back to the midnight of the Dark Ages, and to the essentially political, as well as to the essentially formal, legal, ceremonial and conditional, religion of Pagan Rome, and to unspiritualize and corrupt Christ’s professing kingdom by making it a kingdom of this world); the appearance of fresh proof that God has a people even in Roman Catholicism, or Mystical Babylon (out of whose fellowship He calls them to come, Rev. 18:4), in the existence of true spiritual religion among a few Catholics of South Germany, leading them to feel the worthlessness of empty pomp and ceremony, the sinfulness and helplessness of man, his absolute dependence on the mercy of God, and need of an inward union with Christ through repentance and faith, provoking far more bitter hatred and persecution than even infidelity provokes from the bigoted followers of the pope—and in the existence of similar humble spirituality, looking beyond all creatures to God, and lovingly serving and spontaneously and cheerfully praising Him in the midst of life-long privations and sufferings, among some of the aged, poor and ignorant Catholics of Ireland, grievously oppressed by their English lords;[2] the remarkable outpouring of the Divine Spirit, in the first years of the century, upon England and the United States, and large ingatherings into the Protestant communions; the vast increase of the profession, in recent years, without the evident possession, of Christianity (more members having been added to the “churches” in this century, chiefly since 1850, than their entire number of members at its beginning), especially the deceiving and gathering in of large numbers of the young, particularly young females, by Sunday Schools, and by preaching loose doctrine or no doctrine, and by other myriad human means and machinery (often conducted by so-called “evangelists” at a stipulated price of from $25 to $200 per week), protracted and distracted meetings, perversions of Scripture, fabulous stories, anxious seats, mourners’ benches, affecting tunes, sobs, sighs, groans, convulsions, human resolutions, hand-shaking, etc., etc., etc.; the secularization or worldly assimilation of the professing “church;” the substitution of money-based societies for the church of God, and of human learning and human boards for the Spirit of God; the old characteristically and essentially Jesuitical principle of systematically indoctrinating the minds of the young with false[3] religion, sifting nearly the whole juvenile population through the “Sabbath School,” substituting the feeble and humanly-devised influence of the “Sabbath School” teacher for the potent and scripturally-enjoined influence of the home and the church, and resulting, in a large proportion of instances, according to the most recent and extensive and reliable investigations, in filling the youthful mind with irreverent religionism and hatred of the Bible and the church;[4] the establishing or getting control of seminaries, colleges and universities for the same proselyting purposes, (Protestants, in this as in numerous other matters, merely copying the old Catholic methods); the vile character of much of the fiction found in “Sabbath School” libraries; theatrical preaching, greeted with laughter and applause; the great increase of hireling “shepherds,” who, instead of feeding the flock, feed themselves upon the flock, caring not for the sheep (whom they hasten to leave at any time for a larger price elsewhere), and lording it over the flock for filthy lucre’s sake (Eze. 24; John 10; Acts 20:33-35; 1 Peter 5:2, 3); the multiplication of almost all species of worldly amusements in connection with the so-called “churches,” for the entertainment and retention of the young members who, having no spiritual life, cannot partake of spiritual food, and for the raising of money for pretended religious purposes—such as strawberry and ice-cream festivals, oyster suppers, concerts, burlesque hymns, comic songs, amateur theatricals, Sunday School excursions, and picnics, and banners, and emblems, Christmas trees, Easter cards, charity balls, and “church fairs” (with their rafflings or gamblings), rightly termed “abysses of horrors,” mingling sham trade with sham charity, obtaining money under false pretenses, teaching the selfish and thoughtless patrons how to be “benevolent without benevolence, charitable without charity, devout without devotion, how to give without giving and to he paid for ‘doing good,’”—thus attempting to serve God and mammon, and turning what is claimed to be God’s house of prayer into a house of merchandise and a den of thieves, and loudly calling for the Master’s scourge to cleanse the temple of its defilements (Jews, Catholics and Protestants, all practicing these abominations); the increasing tendency, as in the latter part of the Dark Ages under the teachings of the Pope of Rome, to reduce all the commandments to one, give gold, as though this were the one thing needful, and everything else were of no value, for the salvation of the soul;[5] the almost universal tendency of people to try to pull the mote out of other people’s eyes, and not to think of the beam in their own eyes-to busy themselves chiefly with the means and ways of morally improving others, without beginning with their own moral improvement, resulting in extravagances and abortions; the exhuming and deciphering of the ancient monumental records of Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia, all tending to illustrate and confirm, in the most wonderful manner, the exact truthfulness of the Old Testament Scriptures, at a time when such a confirmation seems most needed by an unbelieving world; many new translations of the Scriptures into the languages of both civilized and uncivilized peoples; the union of the Lutheran and the Reformed “Churches,” in Prussia, at the command of the king, into the “Evangelical Church,” and the revival of “Old Lutheranism” there; the Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic movement in the “Church of England,” resulting in Ritualism, Romanism and Skepticism; the formation of the Broad-Church (in addition to the High-Church and the Low-Church) party, in the “Church of England”-“so broad that you cannot see across it,” says Mr. John Gadsby, of London-“the Church of England,” says Mr. A. V. G. Allen, of Cambridge, Mass., “thus remaining open to all the tides of thought and spiritual life which have swept over the nation, and thus able to retain in its folds those whom no other form of organized Christianity could tolerate;” the appearance, in 1860, of the rationalistic “Essays and Reviews,” written by seven Oxford Episcopalian teachers, and, in 1862, of “Bishop” Colenso’s “Investigations of the Pentateuch and Joshua,” assailing the authenticity and credibility of those Scriptures with the antiquated or surrendered arguments long current in Germany, and the acquittal of the charge of heresy, both of the Essayists and of Colenso, by the Privy Council, the highest ecclesiastical court in England; the disestablishment of the Episcopal “Church” in Ireland in 1869, with its prospective disestablishment in England also, before the lapse of many years; the reunion, in 1846, of Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, New School Baptists, Methodists, Moravians, and other Trinitarian Protestants, of all countries, in an “Evangelical Alliance” (significantly apostrophized by Krummacher, in his address of welcome, “O heart-stirring mirage!”), on a doctrinal basis of Nine Articles, the chief object avowed being to oppose the progress of the papacy and of more than half-papish Puseyism;the union of nearly all Protestants in other Societies, Associations, Diets, Councils, Committees and Conferences; the organization and operation of large numbers of Bible, Tract, Missionary, Abstinence and Relief Societies, and of the so-called “Salvation Army,” with its eccentricities, profanities and delusions;the gathering of about two million communicants into the Protestant “churches” from heathen lands; the continued home and foreign missionary zeal of the Moravians, which began in 1732,—“accomplishing,” it is said, “the most extraordinary results with the fewest means,” trusting in the providence of God, choosing the poor and humble fields (not of India and China, but) of Greenland, Labrador, the West Indies, South Africa and Australia, and heroically doing rough work which others would not touch; the obliteration of almost all distinctions between the various Protestant “churches;” the cloaking of the shallowest unbelief under the popular assertions that there should be no doctrine, no creed, no church, but perfect liberty in all these matters; the notion that self-styled sincerity, no matter what one believes, any religion or no religion, is all that is necessary for salvation; the doubt, suppression or denial, by the most of Protestants, of many of the vital truths of Christianity; a diminished sense of sin, and a fainter conviction of the indispensability of the atoning blood of the Son of God and of the regenerating power of the Spirit of God; the Pharisaic principle of transforming religion from a saving inward reality into a vain-glorious outward show; the general contempt and abuse of revealed religion; a disbelief in the special providence of God extending to all the events of human life; a disbelief in the literal, verbal, plenary inspiration of the Scriptures—this species of infidelity permeating, more or less, nearly all the Protestant “churches,” unblushingly avowed by their most recent and authoritative writers, and in reality degrading the Scriptures to the level of all other books, containing a mixture of truths and errors, which it is left for the reader to discriminate, accepting what he pleases, and rejecting what he pleases; the stigmatizing of those who adhere to the old unpopular doctrinal truths proclaimed by the prophets and by Christ and His Apostles, as being “a hundred years behind the times,” and as applying the principles of the cold understanding to the language of emotion and imagination, and too literally deducing doctrines from bold types and metaphors, while at the same time the objectors admit that the old system of doctrine is made out fairly and logically enough, but too rigidly, from the language of the Scriptures; the steadfast and immovable adherence of “a very small remnant according to the election of grace” to original apostolic principles and practices (Isa. 1:9; Rom. 11:5), in the face of continual blasts of unpopularity, ridicule, slander, contempt and persecution (Matt. 5:10-12; Rom. 3:8; Acts 28:22)—only those who have eyes to see being able to discern the unworldly and spiritual motives of these despised and calumniated servants of the Most High God; the rise (or revival) of Universalism, Unitarianism, Naturalism, Anti-Supernaturalism, Unspiritualism, Undoctrinalism, Superficialism, Moralism, Philosophism, Transcendentalism, Paganism, Pantheism, Humanitarianism, Liberalism, Neologism, Campbellism, Irvingism, Darbyism, Puseyism, Mormonism, Millerism, Wine-brennerianism, Two-Seedism, Psychopannychism, Non-Resurrectionism, Annihilationism, Universal Restorationism, Pseudo-Spiritualism, Utilitarianism, Rationalism, Pelagianism, Scientism, Agnosticism, Omniscienceism, Presumptuousism, Stoicism, Materialism, Evolutionism, Fatalism, Atheism, Optimism, Pessimism, Socialism, Communism, Libertinism, Red Republicanism, Internationalism, Nihilism, Destructionism, Dynamitism, Atrocicism and Anarchism.[6]

Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, in his “History of Rationalism in Europe,” represents the nineteenth century as the age of liberty, fraternity and equality, of machinery, manufactures and commerce, of science, industry and peace, of the culminating substitution of human reason for Divine doctrine, of almost universal materialism, and of the loss of self-sacrifice, the loss of faith, and the loss of devotion to right. The brilliant day of Modern Rationalism is ending everywhere, according to its learned historian, not only in “shadow” (vol. ii., p. 357), but also (vol. ii., pp. 356, 98) in the awful midnight storm of Atheistic Materialism, when, in his own eloquent but terrible language, “every landmark is lost to sight, and every star is veiled, and the soul seems drifting helpless and rudderless before the destroying blast”—the Satanic wind of infidel doctrine.

Prof. Richard T. Ely, of Johns Hopkins University, in his “French and German Socialism in Modern Times,” pp. 186, 187, declares that “the International Association, which now appears like a little cloud on the horizon, possibly points to the darkening of the Heavens with black and heavy clouds—possibly foreshadows a tragedy of world-wide import, which shall make all the cruelty and terror of the French Revolution sink into utter insignificance—possibly portends the destruction of old, antiquated institutions, and the birth of a new civilization in a night of darkness and horror, in which the roll of thunder shall shake the earths foundations, and the vivid glare of lightning shall reveal a carnival of bloodshed and slaughter.” All the professors of political economy in the Universities of Europe and America, many of whom in Europe, at least, are infidels, admit that nothing but the gospel of Christ can efficiently remedy the tremendous evils of modern civilization, and avert even the earthly ruin of the human race.

The carnal mind regards the nineteenth century as the wisest and richest, the most glorious and magnificent, of all the centuries; but the spiritual mind cannot but consider it, in many respects, as the most Egyptian and Babylonian, the most Pharisaic and Sadducaic, of the centuries—pre-eminently abounding in worldly and ungodly wisdom and wealth, religious pretension and infidelity—the lukewarm, liberal, indifferent, sentimental, compromising, nauseating, respectable, self-sufficient Laodicean Age, full of legal and unspiritual works, proudly boasting of its natural and religious attainments and possessions, feeling no need of the grace and power of God, and not knowing its spiritual wretchedness and misery and poverty and blindness and nakedness, and, like its ancient prototypes, to be visited by the righteous and terrible judgments of God, in accordance with the stern precedents of history, and the following Scriptures: Acts 7:22; Exodus 5:9, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15; Daniel 2:33, 38, 44, 4:30-37; Luke 18:11, 13; Matthew 23; Acts 23:8; Luke 18:8; 1 Timothy 4:1-3; 2 Timothy 3:1-9, 13; 2 Thessalonians 1:6-10, 2:3, 4; 2 Peter 3:3-13; Jude 1:18, 19; Revelation 3:14-22, 13, 18, 19.

The three downward steps in the progress of modern, ungodly, Advanced Thought (Rationalism), since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, seem to me to be as follows:—

Arminianism (seventeenth century, undeification of the Spirit).
Arianism (eighteenth century, undeification of the Son).
ATHEISM (nineteenth century, undeification of the Father).

From the bottomless pit to which these steps descend, all the free will and reason and machinery, and science and philosophy and gold in the world, cannot save us; but nothing short of the sovereign and unmerited and almighty grace and power and Spirit of the living God. There never has been, there is not, and there never will be, a single individual of the human race saved from eternal death, who will not truthfully ascribe all the glory of his or her salvation unto the Lord—unto God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The secession of the Old Catholics from the Roman Catholics, in 1870, was caused by the proclamation of the doctrine of the infallibility of the pope—the opposition to Jesuitism and Ultramontanism having already been fomented in the very pale of the Roman Catholic communion by the proclamation of the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary in 1854, and by the papal Syllabus of Errors of 1864. The “Church of Utrecht,” containing the remnant of the Jansenists of Holland, united with the Old Catholics, who now claim a population of about 60,000. Some reforms have been introduced, such as the offering of the cup, as well as the bread, to the “laity” in the Lord’s Supper, the use of the native tongue in the service, and the abolition of the compulsory celibacy of the “clergy.”

The organization of the “Reformed Episcopal Church” out of and apart from the “Protestant Episcopal Church,” in 1873, was caused by the increasing high-churchism, ritualism and Romanism of the latter, and by the discovery and recognition of the irreconcilable conflict between the Romish liturgy of the English Prayer-Book, adopted in the early part of Elizabeth’s reign to conciliate her Catholic subjects, and the Protestant thirty-nine Articles of the Prayer-Book, adopted in the latter part of her reign after she had become greatly offended with the pope. Reformed Episcopalianism has revised the Liturgy to make it consistent with the Articles, and with the Protestant Reformation, and rejects the Romish doctrines of apostolical succession, baptismal regeneration, sacramentalism, sacerdotalism, and the unchurching of other denominations. They claim now about 7,000 members.

The separation of the “Free Church” from the “Established Church” in Scotland (both Presbyterian) in 1843, under the leadership of Mr. Thomas Chalmers, was a noble act of self-sacrifice for Christ on the part of 474 ministers and their congregations, in giving up an annual State endowment of about $500,000 for the purpose of rescuing the “church” from State control, and vindicating the highly important truth of Christ’s sole and supreme leadership over His church.

The cause of the separation of the New School from the Old School Presbyterians, in the United States, in 1837, was the adoption of a milder form of Calvinism by the former; but the latter having become similarly moderate, there was no bar to their reunion in 1869.

The separation of the Northern and Southern Presbyterians, New School Baptists and Methodists, was caused by a difference on the question of slavery.

The causes of the withdrawal of the Old School or Primitive from the New School Baptists, in the United States, are stated by my father in the latter part of this work; they were similar to those dividing the Strict from the Particular Baptists in England.

The fathers of nineteenth-century Unitarianism were the Presbyterians, Theophilus Lindsey, who began Unitarian services in London in 1774, and Thomas Belsham, who founded the first Unitarian Society in England in 1791; and Robert Aspland, who had been a General Baptist, became the leading promoter of English Unitarianism. The first “Unitarian Church” in America was the “Episcopal Church” of King’s Chapel in Boston, under the leadership of James Freeman, in 1783. They now claim 370 “churches” in England and 360 in the United States; and they maintain that at least 3,000 “churches” in the United States hold antitrinitarian views—including, with themselves, the Universalists, the so-called “Christians,” the Hicksite Quakers and the Progressive Friends, and “some other minor bodies.” The Arians of the fourth century held that Christ, though a creature, was a super-angelic being, who created all other things. The Socinians of the sixteenth century held that Christ might be called God, and ought to be worshiped. But the Unitarians maintain that He is a mere man, though without sin and error; that His mission into the world was to reveal the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They are Pelagians, denying the fall of the human race in Adam, and the total depravity of fallen man, and the atonement of Christ; and, in general, they are Universalists, denying the eternity of future punishment. Starting with “liberal” and “progressive” views, they have become thoroughly rationalistic. They are said to be cultured, moral and philanthropic; and they have their Sunday Schools, Theological Seminaries and Missions. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) was their most famous and influential theologian. Theodore Parker, of Boston (1810-60), a Unitarian preacher, “advanced to the most notorious, Rationalism, emancipating himself entirely from the authority of the Bible.”

Mr. W. E. Gladstone, in an address at the Liverpool College, December, 1872, declared that, since the coming of Christ, “many more than ninety-nine in every hundred Christians have with one voice confessed the deity and incarnation of our Lord as the cardinal and central truths of our religion.” “Those who have given up Christ,” says President James McCosh, of Princeton, “find that they have to give up God; and those who have given up God find that they have no sustaining morality left them, no peace, no hope of immortality.” “The history of ancient and modern Arianism,” says Mr. John Stoughton, in his “History of Religion in England from 1800 to 1850,” “shows that it cannot continue in one stay, that it is strong only on the negative side, while on the positive side it is weak as water, having nothing in it to resist the pressure of antagonistic criticism.”

Universalism, like Arminianism, originated in the first Theological Seminary, the Catechetical School established at Alexandria, Egypt, about 180 A. D., and designed to harmonize Greek Philosophy and Christianity. Clement of Alexandria was its father, and Origen was its most distinguished advocate. Clement was also the father, and Pagan Philosophy the mother, and the First Theological Seminary the birthplace, of Pelagianism and Rationalism, and of the professedly Christian denial of the sacrificial atonement of Christ, His second personal coming to the world, a general judgment, and the resurrection of the body.[7] An abundant demonstration of this statement is found in Prof. Alexander V. G. Allen’s recently published “Continuity of Christian Thought,” pages 33-68. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, of Germany (1768-1834), the modern reviver of Clement’s or the Greek Theology, and “the typical theologian of the nineteenth century,” as he is called, also rejected the fall of the angels, the personality of the Devil, the personality of God, and the doctrine of the Trinity; he was a Pantheist,[8] holding that God dwells in every man forever—like Spinoza, identifying God and the universe—and, while professing to revive and refine the Protestant orthodoxy of the sixteenth century, he held that God chose only a few to be saved in time in order that all, through their means, might be saved in eternity, thus maintaining the doctrines of universal election, universal redemption, universal regeneration, and universal salvation. “He had drunk deeply at the springs of ancient Greek philosophy,” and declared that Christianity had as close affinity with Paganism as with Judaism; that “God is the constitutional ruler of the world, responsible to the infinite righteousness which is the charter of the Divine activity; that humanity is endowed with native rights which every human government must respect; that God must rule the world for the good of all, and not in the interest of a few; that grace, no less than law, is the dispensation under which all men everywhere are living; that the Bible, being the record of a progressive revelation, must contain in its earlier portions much which is superseded, or even contradicted, by the later and higher truth; and that although evangelists and Apostles spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, it does not follow that the attribute of infallibility pertains to all their utterances.” Here comes out very plainly the cloven foot of Pantheism and Universalism—human reason set up in critical and absolute judgment of Divine Revelation. Ever since the second century, universalism has more or less affected the Catholic and nearly all the non-Catholic or Protestant communions; but it was not organized into a separate denomination until in 1751 by James Relly in London, and in 1779 by John Murray in Gloucester, Mass. Modern Universalists are Anti-trinitarians, Pelagians and Rationalists; they believe that sin will be punished after death, but not forever. They claim about sixty thousand members in the United States, and have their Sunday Schools, Theological Seminaries and Missions. The most of the denominations of the nineteenth century are extensively permeated by Universalism. Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate of England, in his “In Memoriam,” gives expression to this very prevalent feeling, which is also his own:

“Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

“Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why;
He thinks he was not made to die;
And Thou hast made him: Thou art just.

” Our little systems have their day:
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, 0 Lord, art more than they.

“O yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood:

“That nothing walks with aimless feet:
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete.

“Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

“So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

“I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,

“I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

“That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off Divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.”

“He sees,” says Mr. E. H. Capen, the Universalist College President, “the whole creation in one vast, resistless movement, sweeping toward the grand finality of universal holiness and universal love.” But the believer in the old-fashioned Bible, unmixed with Pagan Philosophy, can see no such grand finality.

A speculative Pantheism, with its system of Universal Salvation, was the leading tendency of the infidelity of the first half of the nineteenth century; and the leading tendency of the infidelity of the last half of the nineteenth century has been an evolutionist, materialistic, fatalistic, Stoic, atheistic Agnosticism. “These types,” says Prof. John Cairns, “appear successively in the most prominent unbeliever of the nineteenth century, David Friedrich Strauss,” of Germany. Change is one of the most characteristic features of infidelity. Strauss passed through three marked changes of belief. In his first edition of his “Life of Jesus,” in 1835, he was a pantheist; in his second edition, in 1864, he was a naturalistic theist, or a deist; while, in his “Old and New Faiths,” published in 1873, he has become a materialistic atheist. “His criticism thus refutes itself, and ends by pulling down the whole temple of religion on its head,” declaring that there can be no God and no religion, and that this planet, with all its works and all its inhabitants, must one day utterly vanish, and leave no trace behind. Ernest Renan, of France, is a more conservative follower of Strauss; but his “Life of Jesus” (1863) substitutes romance for history, makes the miracles of Christ spurious, and blends good and evil, in an impossible manner, in His character. John Stuart Mill (1806-73), the clearest-minded of English infidels during this century, in his “System of Logic,” strikes at the root of all spiritual, revealed religion; teaches the doctrine of universal causation, absolute fatalism, the necessity of all human character and conduct as well as of all material phenomena; but he held this system with less clearness and firmness the longer he lived. In his posthumous “Three Essays on Religion,” he leaves a little room for the supernatural; admits the validity of the argument from design; but thinks that God, though perfectly good, is not almighty (an idea common to both Pagan Philosophy and false religion); he confounds morality with religion (another idea common to false philosophy and false religion); he hopes that Jesus was a Divine messenger, and he admired His character the more he studied Him, and confesses that the Prophet of Nazareth was a man of sublime and pre-eminent genius, and the greatest moral reformer, martyr and exemplar that ever appeared on earth. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), with his chronic dyspepsia, and extreme pessimism, and worship of force and thrift, and rejection of Christianity as a Divine revelation, and still greater contempt of materialistic evolution which he called “mud philosophy,” with his “silences,” “eternities,” “infinitudes,” “realities,” “veracities,” “moralities” and “idealities,” which he substituted for God, denying the personality and fatherhood of the Supreme Being, was a sort of Pantheist, but also a Stoic, a stern and earnest teacher of morality. He professed to have wrestled with the problems of the universe, and, by the aid of Goethe, the German poet, to have fought himself free from the dragons and quagmires of Tophet into the eternal blue of Heaven, and thus to have been “converted from fear and sorrow to peace and joy;” and so John Stuart Mill professed to have been “converted from darkness to light” by reading Marmontel’s Memoirs. Herbert Spencer (born 1820), a retired civil engineer, and the most pretentious of speculators, with his materialistic and fatalistic evolution of all things, and with his “omnipresent, infinite, eternal, unknown and unknowable Power, from which all things proceed”—the Only and the Ultimate Reality, of whom or which we do not know and never can know whether he, she or it has personality, consciousness, volition, intelligence or emotion—is a simultaneous concentration of Straussism, a unique compound of Pantheism, Deism and Atheism. He traces the origin of all religions to dreams and ghosts, the latter being gradually ranked, de-materialized, de-anthropomorphized and unified,[9] as civilization advanced; and, in the concluding (sixteenth) chapter of the Sixth Part or Volume of his “Principles of Sociology,” he, if possible, out-Satans Satan himself in pouring the most horrible and blasphemous contempt upon all the fundamental, though caricatured, truths of the Bible, and upon the God of the Bible, whom he degrades below the god of the Fiji Islanders! Behold the black and bottomless depths to which modern Scientism, Philosophism and Religionism descend! For Spencer maintains that his system is a religion, although Frederic Harrison, the Positivist Philosopher, insists that there is no more religion in Spencer’s system than in the binomial theorem, the equator, a gooseberry, or a parallelopiped; and we are told that there are, in both England and America, Unitarian congregations that avow that their whole theology consists in Spencer’s religious conception—a theory which “defecates the idea of deity to a pure transparency,” and which is, therefore, virtual Atheism. Of course, if there is a God who has created finite intelligent beings, He can make Himself intelligible to them. The common sense of mankind declares that there is a Divine Creator and Sustainer of the universe, who has, in His works, revealed to His intelligent creatures not only His power, but His wisdom, benevolence and righteousness, as well as our responsibility to Him and our dependence upon Him. Atheism, in the garb of Agnosticism, as in every other garb, is “a hollow mockery to both head and heart.”

In the “Church of England,” during the first quarter of this century, there was a wide circle left untouched by evangelical influences. Mr. W. E. Gladstone, in the Contemporary Review of October, 1874, said that, in coldness and deadness, the services in that communion forty and fifty years before were “probably without a parallel in the world; that they would have shocked a Brahmin or a Buddhist.” Many of the “clergy” were devoted to field sports and fashionable gayeties and literature, to the abuse of Calvinism and Methodism and Dissenters, and to the preaching of morality; while there was a fearful number of clerical scandals. A specimen of the preaching is given by Mr. John Stoughton as follows: “The sermon lasted exactly five minutes, and was addressed to three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent The good were told they needed no advice; let them persevere in their righteousness, and the kingdom of Heaven would be their reward. The bad—but in such a congregation it was uncharitable to suppose that such a class could be found. The indifferent lost much by not exerting a little more energy, in order that their reward might not only be rendered more certain, but more brilliant.” In the same pulpit, on another occasion, a preacher of the same stamp took for his subject the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. “It was said (in this parable),” he observed, “that if any of our fellow-creatures should so fall as to stand in need of such a degrading confession as the Publican’s, let his hearers be on their guard, lest, by drawing too favorable a contrast between such outcasts and themselves, they incurred the censure pronounced on that otherwise estimable character, the Pharisee.” “People went to church on Sunday to learn to be good, to hear the commandments repeated to them for the thousandth time, and to see them written in gilt letters over the communion-table.”

Tractarianism, in the “Church of England” (so called from a series of ninety Tracts for the Times published at Oxford from 1833 to 1841), also called Puseyism (from Edward Bouverie Pusey, 1800-1882, a leader of the movement) and Anglo-Catholicism, was “a revival of mediaeval ecclesiasticism and scholasticism, in protest to evangelicalism and political liberalism;” and its doctrines were and are, “traditionalism, sacramentalism, sacerdotalism, apostolical succession, baptismal regeneration, the real presence of the body of Christ in the Eucharist, and that there is a kind of purgatory, a method of priestly pardon, a species of reverence for images and relics, and a certain form of saintly invocation;” if Mariolatry and Papal Infallibilism had been added, it would have been Roman Catholicism complete. The revival of Roman Catholic doctrine was naturally succeeded by Ritualism, the revival of all the paraphernalia of Roman Catholic worship, followed by the secession of thousands of Episcopalians to Rome. Pusey, in his Eirenicon, says: “Ever since I knew those called ‘Evangelicals’ (which was not in my earlier years), I have loved them, because they loved our Lord. I often thought them narrow, yet I was often drawn to individuals among them more than to others who held truths in common with myself. I believed them to be of the truth.”

The High-Church or Tractarian and the Low-Church or Evangelical parties in the “Church of England” subscribe to the same thirty-nine Articles of Faith, but explain them contradictorily. Between these two parties, and off to one side in the direction of Rationalism, lies the Broad-Church party, founded in 1833 by Mr. Thomas Arnold, Head-Master of Rugby School, and embracing his pupils and sympathizers, a small but brilliant band, “seeking to liberalize the Anglican communion by keeping it in friendly intercourse with Continental thought and learning,” but, of course, in this attempt, “approximating to rationalistic views of inspiration and interpretation.” Some of the most famous members of this school have been Julius Charles Hare, Frederic Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Frederick William Robertson, Alexander Ewing, and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. The Broad-Church theology, like that of Clement of Alexandria, and that of the Cambridge Platonists in the latter part of the seventeenth century, rests on Platonic[10] or Neo-Platonic forms of thought; and at least some of its advocates go so far as Clement and his pupil Origen in maintaining the final salvation of all men and devils, and even of Satan himself! This platform is, of course, broad enough for every one; and any position less broad will be stigmatized as narrow by the broadest of Broad-Churchmen.

The “Church of England” is powerless to deal with any case of doctrine or worship, as proved by the decisions of the Privy Council Committee since the beginning of the year 1850. A clergyman may Protestantize, or Romanize, or Rationalize, or Universalize, and he cannot be excluded from the Anglican communion.

The Nine Articles forming the doctrinal basis of the Evangelical Alliance (of the most of the Protestant communions) are as follows:

1. The Divine inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures.
2. The right and duty of private judgment in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.
3. The Unity of the Godhead, and the Trinity of persons therein.
4. The utter depravity of human nature in consequence of the Fall.
5. The incarnation of the Son of God, his work of atonement for the sins of mankind, and his mediatorial intercession and reign.
6. The justification of the sinner by faith alone.
7. The work of the Holy Spirit in the conversion and sanctification of the sinner.
8. The immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, the judgment of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, with the eternal blessedness of the righteous and the eternal punishment of the wicked.
9. The Divine institution of the Christian ministry, and the obligation and perpetuity of the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

The Articles, when adopted by the large assembly of eight hundred in London, in 1846, occasioned much discussion. “A day and a half were spent in debating the Eighth Article respecting the eternal punishment of the wicked. The Ninth Article also, in regard to the Christian ministry and ordinances, caused long discussion. Some lamented that the Quakers were thus excluded; but several Episcopalian ministers considered it essential, and made it a condition of their own adherence to the enterprise.”

The unionistic spirit seems for some time to have been very prevalent in the religious world. Some of the High-Church party in the Anglican communion desire fraternization with Roman Catholicism, and others with Greek Catholicism; while the Protestants seem to wish universal affiliation with each other. “A change wide and deep,” says Mr. John Stoughton, “came over the domain of religious thought during the middle of this century, different from any before, breaking down old hedges, and defacing old landmarks, so that in now walking the theological round we hardly know where we are. Even on High-Church standards, and on the top of rationalistic stocks. Evangelical growths have appeared. A new spirit has come over the Baptist denomination within the last thirty years. Up to 1850 a broad doctrinal line could be drawn between the Particular or Calvinistic and the General or Arminian Baptists; but that old distinction between the two classes of Baptists seems now nearly obliterated. For several years these two classes have been united in the same Associations and operations, and the doctrinal distinction between Calvinism and Arminianism is effaced, to a very great measure at least, in the Baptist home operations, while the distinction remains asserted in the titles of their Foreign Missions.”The same statement is true of the New School (who call themselves Regular or Calvinistic) and the Free-Will Baptists in the United States; the doctrinal distinction between them has practically disappeared, for they are all Arminians together.” These are the piping tunes of peace,” says Mr. James Strong, the leading Methodist theologian of America, in his book called “Irenics.” “Let us hope that Christians, at least, have beaten their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and that they will learn war no more.” And he labors, in a truly surprising manner, to show the “Substantial Reconcilement of Calvinism and Arminianism!” He declares that a remarkable assimilation between Calvinists and Arminians has taken place within the present century, and that they have almost ceased the wordy warfare; that a by-path has been recently discovered across the chasm heretofore thought to separate the opposing cliffs of Divine predestination and human free-agency—this by-path consisting in the resolution of the Divine decrees into the certainty arising from the uniform operation of general laws established by the great Sovereign for governing the transactions of the universe, including man’s will itself; the Divine foreordination of human actions being simply a determination on God’s part to create men with powers such as He foresaw would result in these acts, and then leave them to the free exercise of those powers. This is a position, he says, which all consistent theists, including Arminians, must admit. “God certainly did foresee such results, He did create man capable of them, and He does allow them to take place. If that is all, there is nothing to dispute about. We may wonder why God should do so, but the ultimate reason is as inscrutable to the Arminian as it is to the Calvinist. Both suppose, both believe, that it was best for man in the end, and most for the glory of God on the whole, that it should thus be; and these both are forced at last to leave it. No mortal can fully understand it or authoritatively explain it. At least this has never yet been satisfactorily done. The true reconciling position is that the Divine economy is such as to give free scope (within certain limits, of course) to bad as well as to good influences, and even to extend enabling power to the agents who bring these about. In the conversion of the sinner, there are the Divine drawing and the human yielding, the yielding being the result of grace. The Spirit, of God takes the lead, and the subject follows. It makes little or no difference, except as a matter of technical terminology, whether, with the Calvinist, we say that the man was already converted, and, therefore, yielded; or, with the Arminian, that he yielded, and was, therefore, converted. The facts remain the same, and they take place in the same order; or, rather, they are more or less simultaneous. And so, in reference to the sanctification and the final perseverance of the saints; the difference is almost wholly in name, and not in the thing. The most judicious Christians of all denominations prefer to leave to Jesus Christ the superlative pre-eminence of entire sanctification in this life. When a Christian falls from grace, Arminians admit or suspect that there was some important, if not radical, defect in the Christian character or conduct which led to so fatal a result, and they argue that Divine power alone can restrain any one from thus destroying himself. So noted a writer as Prof. Philip Schaff says: ‘Good Calvinists preach like Methodists, as if everything depended on man; good Methodists pray like Calvinists, as if everything depended on God. The five knotty points of Calvinism have lost their point, and have been smoothed off by God’s own working in the history of the church.’ The paths pursued by both are substantially parallel, and in these days of closer Christian fellowship between the two great communions represented, they have grown more and more near together. Let us cherish the ardent expectation that, when the two processions meet at the common gateway into Paradise, each will look back with glad surprise to see how really contiguous they always were.”To show at how very great a distance from the Calvinistic” path to Paradise “Mr. Strong himself is still journeying, I need but quote two of his recent utterances. 1. The last essay in his”Irenics” is on “The Divine Compassion in the Endless Punishment of the Wicked.” After declaring that most of the Scripture language in regard to the future punishment of the wicked is undoubtedly figurative, that torment will be not so much physical as mental, a separation from all worldly business and pleasure and an abandonment to evil thoughts and companions-not so much any special or vindictive affliction of Divine power as the consequence of the legitimate and necessary operation of the laws of their own being, a reaping of the harvest which they themselves have sown, the suffering, therefore, being exactly proportioned to their demerits; that a holy Heaven would be the worst hell to the wicked, and a compulsory preparation for Heaven the greatest absurdity, he concludes with these words: “We have seen that the good of all grades must applaud it that is, the endless punishment of the wicked as the only means of security and satisfaction for an injured Majesty, an outraged law, and an imperiled government. The bad themselves must confess it to be but the inevitable issue of violated conscience, debased powers and misused privileges. Above all” (and here comes the thoroughly anti-Calvinistic sentiment), “the great Sovereign and Savior, Father and Friend, who has exhausted every resource of the Godhead in order to avert the catastrophe, may reverently be said to sign with tears the death-warrant of the reprobate, as he wailed with unavailing grief over the fall of Tyre, Babylon and Jerusalem: ‘If thou hadst known in thy day the things which belong unto thy peace! but even now are they hid from thine eyes.’ Divine compassion has reached its climax in the final doom.” Thus it seems, according to Mr. Strong’s doctrine, that God cannot save the sinner; and all sinners, who are finally saved, really save themselves! 2. In his article on Arminianism in the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia, he says: “In a last analysis the precise element or force which turns the scale in favor of a new life, or otherwise, is believed by Wesleyans to be the will of the subject himself, acting freely under its own impulses, in view of, but not constrained by, motives, and yet stimulated and guided by Divine light and grace. Repentance and faith are indeed potentially the gift of God; but their actual use and exercise are the conscious, voluntary, and personal act of the man himself.” Even if there were not manifold other texts, two passages in Paul’s letter to the Philippians Philippians 1:6; 2:12,13 would annihilate this citadel of Arminianism. These passages demonstrate that God does the whole work of the sinner’s salvation—both the beginning and the consummation of it, both the willing and the doing (or working or exercising); and we know that only on this ground will He justly receive all the glory. The central substance of Mr. James Strong’s theology is precisely the same as that of Roman Catholicism, as will be seen by reference to the “Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent,” Session vi., chapter v., and the book on “Symbolism,” p. 105, by John Adam Mohler (1796-1838), the most esteemed Catholic theologian in this century; these accepted Roman Catholic authorities declare that the sinner’s salvation is determined by his “freely assenting to and co-operating with the grace of God”—his “freely yielding to and following the influence of the Spirit of God.”

In an address on “Juvenile Discipline,” at the Autumnal Session of the Baptist Union, at Bradford, England, October 8th, 1884, Mr. J. R. Wood, of London, said: “It is cheering to know that, in our times, the number of young disciples is rapidly increasing. Once believers in child-conversion were a comparative handful; now they are an ‘exceeding great army.’ Conversion is prayed for, toiled for, and expected by those who have charge of the young, in a spirit not common when Andrew Fuller was a boy. The attitude of the church is changed too; and, instead of a door doubtfully opened, or not opened at all, in most instances the youthful convert finds prompt admission and a cordial welcome. Nor, in this connection, must the remarkable multiplication of Sunday Schools be forgotten, and the undoubted increase in their efficiency. When we recall these signs of our times, there is good reason to expect that the number of young disciples during the next twenty-five years will be very much larger than during any preceding period of the history of the church. By a great variety of agencies God is bringing the lambs of His flock within the fold; and we must accept the high trust committed to us, and carefully ‘feed’ them. Let the churches have confidence in themselves for the doing of this work, and also confidence in the children. Nothing could be more unwise than to question and cross-question a child on his religious experience, as if he were a witness in court suspected of perjury. Let us rather impute what we desire to see; credit young disciples with the grace which we pray and work to communicate, and we shall not fail. Let us sing Christ into their hearts, and keep Him there, by chants, litanies, sonnets and doxologies; and not obstruct the work by making the doors of the church bristle with razors, and pitchforks, and bundles of thorns.”

As in the fourth century, the union of the professing church and the State corrupted the former by the introduction of heathen superstitions and practices, so, in the present century, the large unregenerate additions made to the membership of the Protestant communions (those memberships increasing, during recent years, in England twice as fast, and in the United States three times as fast, as the population) by Sunday Schools and galvanic revivals, have brought in numerous corruptions of doctrine and practice, so that there is scarcely the slightest difference between the professing church and the world, skepticism and secularism being almost as characteristic of the one as of the other. Mr. Alfred E. Myers, a Presbyterian minister of Owasco, New York, says in his pamphlet on “The Sociable, the Entertainment, and the Bazar:” “A church which has recently received a number of young people into active membership is the scene of a humorous entertainment. A stage is laid over the pulpit platform and over the place lately occupied by the communion-table, and there the young converts, with others, are encouraged to perform for the benefit of the church. At another entertainment a group of young gentlemen go through the form of selling at auction a young lady to the highest bidder. At another of these diversions, before people of education and refined taste, a professional musician renders a roystering bacchanalian song with startling energy. Clergymen and their wives figure in costume as George Washington and Martha Washington. One minister reads humorous selections; another sings comic songs; others make droll speeches. The pulpit is sometimes removed, and Santa Claus and his chimney occupy the platform. Again, in just such a position, along with other attractions, we have an organ-grinder, with a wealthy middle-aged citizen sustaining the dignified role of the monkey passing the hat for pennies. The superintendent of a Sunday School, chalked and painted, poses as an ancient king, and teachers amuse an audience with a semblance of stage embraces. Under the auspices of a Sunday School a college glee-club provokes great merriment by its bold allusions to the truths which, in the school, are taught as tremendous verities. In the ‘Old Folks’ Concert solemn hymns and revered tunes are sung in a drawling style to raise a laugh. At an exhibition in the lecture-room of a prominent church, a worthy gentleman of remarkable sobriety of deportment and visage, and excellent in the prayer-meeting, played ‘the sneezer,’ and another Christian gentleman feigned intoxication, with his fair and temperate face smeared with red blotches to assist the illusion. The programme of a Church Entertainment, for admission to which twenty-five cents were charged, lies before us, and is as follows: ’Part First.—Two operatic selections on the piano; three ballads; one tragic reading; one comic reading; and a Xylophon Solo. Part Second.—An exhibition of a singing-machine; a slave camp-meeting song; an old-fashioned negro melody; and a semi-classical duet. Part Third.—1. Chorus, ‘Whosoever Will.’ 2. Quartette, ‘Jesus, Lover of my Soul.’ 3. Solo and Chorus, ‘Old Log Cabin in the Dell.’ When a church enters upon a round of Entertainments, the occasions which suggest them are many and various. There is a festival for each season of the year, and for specific products of the confectioner’s art. They are for winter and summer, for old and young, for benevolence and for fun. Hardly is one of these past, and the remains of food or litter or stage-appointments removed from sight, before another is under consideration.” Says the author of “The Church Walking with the World,”

“And fairs and shows in the halls were held,
And the world and her children were there;
And laughter and music and feasts prevailed
In the place that was meant for prayer.”

In the last chapter of Mr. G. F. Pentecost’s work, “Out of Egypt,” he makes some excellent remarks on “The Mixed Multitude” of Egyptians that went up with the Israelites into the wilderness, and loathed the heavenly manna, and lusted and occasioned Israel to lust after the fish and cucumbers and melons and leeks and onions and garlic of Egypt (Ex. 12:38; Num. 11:4-7). “Their lusting was evidence of their distaste for new and spiritual things, and their longing for old and carnal things, for fleshly pleasures, practices and fellowships. The mixed multitude were not in fellowship with God, nor with His purposes of grace toward Israel. The wilderness was lonely to them. There were none in it, but God and His people. The food was heavenly; and they had no real taste for it. The occupations and conversations of the real Israelites were of a nature that did not interest them; and their old nature was starving for the delights and employments of the old life. It did not take these Egyptians long to communicate their discontent to the Israelites themselves, and the whole camp fell a lusting. Now it is not difficult to see in the church of to-day the presence and working of this mixed multitude of worldlings, and the effect of their lustings and worldly outcries upon the unsanctified natures of God’s own people, with whom they associate. It is not surprising that unregenerated people in the church do not enjoy the life that is marked out for the child of God in this world. These people complain of a too strict religious life. Their hearts are in Egypt, and they object to being led too far away from the world. Separation from the world and consecration to Christ and His service are intolerable to them. The Bible is dry and meaningless to them. Spiritual conversation does not interest them. They loathe preaching that is spiritual. All preaching that holds forth the blood of Christ as the only ground of justification with God; that insists on the necessity of being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of the incorruptible Word of God, and by the Spirit; that refuses to confound regeneration and baptism; that insists on a new creature in Christ Jesus; that exposes the difference between the religious doing of the flesh, and the real fruit of the Spirit manifested in a life that has come from God; that will not accept reformation for regeneration; that dwells much on the necessity of maintaining a real spiritual walk with God; that insists on real separation from the world—is distasteful to them. They seek out a minister who preaches ‘in harmony with the age;’ one who will give them neat essays and sermons on interesting religious topics, rather than expositions of God’s word, with a practical enforcement of it upon the heart and conscience. In numerous churches in the United States the mixed multitude have carried the carnal lustings so far that they have turned the church buildings into concert halls and places of general entertainment. There is a bazar, or a supper, or a tea, or a concert, or a company of jubilee singers, or some sixpenny show or another, going on all through the season. These things are done for two ostensible reasons: first, to get money to carry on the church; and second, ‘to afford amusement for our young people, who, you know, must have amusement, or they will not stay with us.’ The real reason is that the mixed multitude in the church have not consecrated their wealth, great or small, to the Lord; and so must resort to all sorts of miserable make-shifts to get money, by hook or by crook, to carry on ‘the church.’ Oh, the shame and disgrace of trailing the cause of God in the mire before a scoffing and unbelieving world, and of sending Christ begging among the unbelievers for a few dimes or dollars to carry on ‘religion’ with. And in order to get their money, any kind of carnal and Egyptian entertainments will be arranged, and all sorts of miserable expedients resorted to. The people will be bribed to give some money by a supper, or a cheap concert, or a show of some kind or other. It must make angels weep, and the demons in hell dance with delight, to behold the cause of Christ so degraded. The Master would not worship him on the mount, though the Devil promised to give Him all the kingdoms of the earth if He would do so. But now, with the aid of the mixed multitude, the church, the fair ‘bride of Christ,’ is draggling her robes in the dirt of the Egyptian world, bowing down to Satan, for a very small pittance of his ‘filthy lucre.’ A score of things are accomplished by the god of this world by this proceeding; among which these are some: All spirituality must disappear under such circumstances; the covetousness of the mammon-people in the church is encouraged and justified; the world is set sneering at the weakness and worldliness of the church; the carnal nature of the people of God is stirred up; young Christians (if there be any in such a church) are led away from their simplicity in Christ; and all spiritual power disappears from that body. But apart from the plea of necessity to get the money for the cause of Christ, the real reason is that the mixed multitude are lusting after the leeks and onions and garlic of Egypt. You will see all the worldly Christians eagerly aroused to the importance of a bazar, a supper, or an entertainment. And having tasted again the old Egyptian delights, and eaten flesh once more, they soon tire of the thin quality and meagre supply had under restrictions in the church, and go trooping back to Egypt for the flesh-pots. You may find them by scores and hundreds in the theatres, in the ball-rooms, at the fashionable parties and the ‘society’ routs of the day. God is not in all their thoughts; Christ is not in their hearts; spiritual things are far above, out of their sight. It is too sadly true that Egypt has found its way into the church, and more or less corrupted it in all its parts. Its doctrine is pared down or diluted to suit a carnal conscience. Its life is voted too straight. The narrow way is broadened into a highway of pleasure. The line of demarcation that divided between her borders and the world is largely obliterated; and her true children have to make the best of the way through the wilderness, as Caleb and Joshua did with that generation which lusted after Egypt and provoked God there for forty years.”

Says Mr. Howard Crosby, of New York: “The church is to-day courting the world. Its members are trying to bring it down to the level of the ungodly. The hall, the theatre, nude and lewd art, social luxuries with all their loose moralities, are making inroads into the sacred inclosure of the church, and, as a satisfaction for all this worldliness, Christians are making a great deal of Lent and Easter and Good Friday and church ornamentation. It is the old trick of Satan. The Jewish Church struck on that rock; the Roman Church was wrecked on the same; and the Protestant Church is fast reaching the like doom.”

“Quality tells far more than quantity in spiritual things,” says Mr. C. Williams, of England. “The church and the world are on better terms with each other than they were. There are among us those who think that Christians are no longer strangers and sojourners, as their fathers were, but are as much at home in Vanity Fair as in the Palace Beautiful. I fear there is increasing laxity in the churches, growing conformity to the world. The strength of the church is in its spirituality. If this be lost, we shall be ‘weak as other men.’ Only the unworldly can conquer the world. The godless suspect the sincerity of professors who are as gay, or as mercenary, or as selfish as themselves; while they respect those who refuse to walk in ‘the way of sinners,’ and are never found near ‘the seat of the scornful.’ A chief condition of church success is holiness of life. The historian, Gibbon, in accounting for the progress of the Christian religion (on natural causes), laid considerable stress upon the character of the early Christians. He described them as ‘averse to the gay luxury of the age,’ as remarkable for ‘chastity, temperance, economy, and all the sober and domestic virtues,’ as winning the good opinion of the profane by ‘the strictest integrity and the fairest dealing,’ and as practicing ‘humility, meekness and patience.’ By this character they ‘put to silence the ignorance of foolish men,’ and compelled the world to do homage to the religion they professed.” Mr. Richard Glover, President of the Baptist Union of England, says: “The church, with an unbelief almost equal to and less excusable than that of the infidel world which it dreads, is moved to fear some collapse of both the gospel and the church which rests upon it. The strangest of all unbeliefs is that of those Christians who copy the poorest of all Scripture saints, and ‘tremble for the ark of God.’ We ought to have faith in Truth, and in its power to hold its own. There is no throne so secure as that of Truth. There are no useful falsehoods nor wholesome errors. Anything that alloys our creed only impairs its gracious influence.” The author of “Modern Christianity a Civilised Heathenism,” who is supposed to be a clergyman of the English Established Church, says: “Until the world is wholly converted, which nobody yet pretends, Christ’s people must ever wage with it a deadly war. There can be no peace between two such armies as the soldiers of Christ and the servants of the Devil. His disciples must fight as their Captain fought, making themselves (if need be) an offense, a nuisance, an abhorrence to every man who is not, like them, an open confessor of His name.”

“A characteristic feature of religious culture at the present day,” says Prof. J. L. Diman, “is an aesthetical revival, seen in the general disposition to affect a more elaborate religious ceremonial, and in the extraordinary impulse given to ecclesiastical architecture. The first stained windows were brought to this country in 1827, and in the same year we find Doane urging the restoration of the cross to churches. The tendency pervades all sects; and mediaeval architecture is no longer, as it once was, a matter of principle, but simply a question of expense. The Baptist and the Methodist have learned to covet the ‘dim religious light’ and the ‘pealing organ;’ and the children of those whose early history was a stern protest against the perilous alliance of faith with any sensuous forms, and who refused, in their plain meeting-houses, to tolerate so much as the stated reading of the sacred volume, lest a spiritual worship should degenerate into a formal service, have come to listen with composure,

‘Under vaulted roofs
Of plaster, painted like an Indian squaw,’

to such artistic ‘renderings’ of holy writ as awaken a bewildered doubt whether Hebrew or Greek or Latin be the tongue employed. Whatever the defects of religious teaching a century ago, it was certainly a vigorous intellectual discipline. It is not easy to believe that the substitution of such different methods is a sign simply of a more cultivated taste.”

The Roman Catholics claim to have at the present time about 3,000 foreign missionaries, at an annual cost of $1,500,000; while the Protestants claim to have now about 3,000 foreign missionaries, at an annual cost of about $7,500,000. Thus the Catholic must be far more self-denying or less extravagant than the Protestant missionaries, since each of the former receives on an average only one-fifth as much as each of the latter—one cause of which may be that Catholic priests are not allowed to marry. John E. Gossner, of Germany (1773-1858), driven by his evangelical views from Catholicism to Protestantism in 1826, and esteemed above all the other preachers in Berlin by the church historian Neander, held that missionaries ought to follow the example of Paul in working with their own hands; and in 1836 he established missions in Australia, India, North America and Western Africa, and during his lifetime educated and sent out one hundred and forty missionaries on his self-supporting plan to these fields. The “Gossner Society” still continues his system. It is said that industrial missions, which combine preaching with practical instruction in the arts of civilized life, and medical missions, which pay special attention to the sick, have been recently organized and operated with success. In 1865 the “China Inland Mission” was established by Mr. J. Hudson Taylor and his wife, of England, “on the principle of faith and prayer, independently of all the ordinary machinery of Missionary Societies, a large proportion of the missionaries sent out being laymen who were willing to consecrate themselves to the work with no remuneration but the supply of their actual wants, and some of whom are self-supporting.” It is said that “these missionaries have met of course with hardships and privations, and have frequently been reduced to great straits, and their faith has been severely tried, but on these occasions they have left the burden with the Lord and been helped;” and while former Protestant Missions have been confined to a narrow strip on the coast, these more scriptural missionaries have found friends everywhere, and gone into all the provinces, and penetrated to the utmost boundaries of the Chinese Empire. John G. Kerr, M. D., writing in the Cincinnati “Herald and Presbyter,” of June 17th, 1885, concerning “The China Inland Mission,” says: “In our missionary societies, as organised in modern times, there is too much of the form and semblance of a business corporation, in which the agents of the church agree, with a stipulated amount of money and the required number of men, to do a given amount of work in certain mission fields._ There is a feeling in all Christian lands that a minister who enters the service of the church with his eye mainly fixed on the salary, is not the man who will be most successful in winning souls to Christ; it is even more necessary in a heathen land that the missionary should be able to convince the people, whose minds never rise above the sordid things of earth, that preaching the gospel is not with him a money-making business. The records of the China Inland Mission, as well as of other missions, show that access to the masses, in populous countries like China, is secured by works of benevolence and kindness. The managers of our missionary societies have much to learn of the power of the gospel of mercy and brotherly kindness as it was practiced on earth by our blessed Savior, and they have much to learn of the willingness of Christian people to give for these objects, and of the willingness of the heathen to aid in supporting them. The expense of hospitals, asylums and homes in heathen lands is much less than in Christian lands, and these institutions, under the management, for the most part, of laymen, will do an amount of physical good more than the equivalent of their cost; while there are also the direct and immediate spiritual results of dispelling prejudice, winning confidence, and giving living examples of the benevolent character of our holy religion. Christian people in this land are responsible for the use of a large proportion of the vast wealth which God has given to this country and this generation. While such vast multitudes of our fellow-men are in need of bodily and spiritual healings, it does not become the redeemed of the Lord to waste God’s money in self-indulgence and aggrandizement.” George Augustus Selwyn (1809-78), “the first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand,” and said to have been a laborious, self-denying and successful minister, declared at a Lord Mayor’s banquet in London, in 1854, that ”the superfluities of social life in England would supply a fund sufficient to evangelize the world;“_ and he said a few days afterwards, when it was proposed by the government to withdraw his salary, that he was entirely willing to be one of the first Bishops to try the experiment of showing how many things there are in the world, salary included, which he could do without. And yet with how infinitesimal a fraction of even their “superfluities”—three cents apiece per year—are the combined Catholic and Protestant world willing to part for the purpose of effecting this universal evangelization! How small their faith in their own schemes, or how cold their love for the poor heathen who are perishing, at the rate of 80,000 souls a day, because Christians will not contribute for their conversion the pecuniary value of their own unnecessary luxuries! Why if contrary to the scriptures (1 Peter 1:18, 19), gold could purchase the eternal salvation of a single soul that would otherwise perish, all the Christians in the world ought to be cheerfully willing to dwell in log houses and subsist upon the simplest and cheapest vegetable diet the whole period of their temporal lives in order to accomplish so glorious a result. But, for those professing Christians who believe so unscriptural and Christ-dishonoring a doctrine, and who, nevertheless, refuse to deny themselves of even scarcely the smallest part of their superfluities for the salvation of a thousand million perishing heathen souls, a monument of eternal shame should rise from the earth and pierce the skies forever! Let them contribute even one-tenth of their incomes for so great a purpose as ancient national Israel were required to give to the Lord, and we will begin to believe in the sincerity, at least, of their professions.

The New York “Weekly Witness,” of February 25th, 1886, truthfully remarks: “There is much shame and confusion of face felt by Christians generally on account of the small amount of funds contributed for the evangelization of the world. Hundreds of times as much is spent by nations, called Christian, on intoxicating drinks as upon Christian missions, and half as much more on tobacco. On foolish fashions and unnecessary finery, theatres, balls, etc., there are probably a hundred dollars spent by church members for every one given to missions. In view of these terrible contrasts, is it not a proof of God’s long-suffering mercy that the candlestick is not removed from our churches, as it was from the seven churches of Asia? The Jews, besides paying tithes to the priesthood, made many costly offerings to God, and surely Christians should not be behind the men of the old dispensation.”

It is said that a chain of Missionary Stations has been established through Central Africa from the Eastern to the Western coast; and that, instead of ninety Protestant missionaries among the Chinese some twenty years ago, there are now about four hundred. And Mr. Kichard Glover, President of the Baptist Union of England, eloquently declares: “The desolation of Africa is lifting up its gates that the King of glory may come in. India is smitten with the sacred curiosity which is saying, ‘Sirs, we would see Jesus.’ China—last to be touched by the gospel—is becoming first, and heading the nations in their return to God. If but our consecration matched our opportunity, we would at once begin to find ourselves within measurable distance of a regenerated world; and probably within a century heathenism in its worship and darkness would be dead, as it is dead here in this happy land. Shall we take our part in furthering this consummation? It seems as if God meant it to be wrought chiefly by the English people, and had set us as a nation of kings and priests unto God to rule and raise our fellow-men.” “The Anglo-Saxons,” says M. Taine, “are the most earnest, serious, Hebraic race in Europe, possessing the idea of the grand God of the Bible, omnipotent and unique.” Says the distinguished scientist, Elisee Reclus, of Paris: “England, of all civilized countries, is the one where the number of truly conscientious men, who guide their conduct by rules which they consider to be just and honorable, is the largest.” I myself believe that the Anglo-Saxons, the inhabitants of Great Britain and the United States, are now the most spiritually-blessed of all the peoples of the earth; and, more than by all possible temporal blessings would I and my brethren be rejoiced if it should please the Most High soon to pour out upon the two English nations the fullness of His quickening and sanctifying Spirit, making them indeed kings and priests unto Himself, and chosen vessels to bear His name into all the benighted regions of the globe, and to pour out of the same saving Spirit upon all the nations, making “the kingdoms of this world the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ” (Rev. 11:15). I believe that He, and no one else, has the power to do this blessed work, and that in His own best time and way He will make “a new Heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:18; Rev. 21:1).

A few words require to be said of the new denominations that have sprung up in this century.

The “Christian Connection” (or sect calling themselves “Christians”) is the resultant of three independent secession movements-the North Carolina J. O’Kelley “Republican Methodists” (1793), Vermont Baptists (1800), and Kentucky and Tennessee Presbyterians (1801). They profess to reject all creed but the Bible; and they are Anti-Trinitarian and Arminian, and congregational in church polity, and practice immersion and open communion. They have spread over the United States and Canada and England, and claim about 200,000 communicants.

Thomas Campbell (1763-1854), an ordained minister in the “Seceder Church of Scotland,” left Ireland in 1807, and came to Western Pennsylvania; his son, Alexander Campbell (1788-1866), a licentiate minister in the same “church,” followed his father in 1809. The theological views of the Campbells became “altered and liberalized, and were regarded by many as both novel and objectionable; hence they and the few who at first sided with them formed an isolated congregation, called ‘The Christian Association,’ at Brush Run, Washington County, Pa., in 1811.” Their special plea was the restoration of original apostolic Christianity, and the union of all Christians, with the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice. Becoming satisfied that immersion was the only scriptural baptism, both father and son and the majority of their members were immersed, in 1812, by Elder Loos, a Baptist minister. Alexander was thenceforth the leader of the movement. In 1813 the Brush Run “Church” joined the Redstone Baptist Association, and in 1823 the Mahoning Baptist Association. In 1827 the Baptist Churches withdrew fellowship from the followers of Alexander Campbell, and the latter were then constituted into a separate body that have called themselves “Disciples of Christ,” but have been generally known as “Campbellites,” an appellation which they indignantly repudiate at the same time that they implicitly reverence Mr. Campbell’s authority. They are extreme Arminians, and almost Pelagians,[11] and many of them avowed Universalists; they minimize the work of the Holy Spirit in the conversion of the sinner to the very lowest degree, and maximize the printed or preached word and immersion to the very highest degree, making immersion the last and an essential part of regeneration or the new birth, without which ordinance there is no pardon or salvation, though admitting that baptism has no abstract efficacy without previous faith in Christ and repentance toward God, and yet declaring that a person may believe the gospel, be changed in heart, and quickened by the Spirit, and still not be regenerate and saved without immersion (see A. Campbell’s Christian System, pp. 58, 60, 191-202, 212, 218 and 239). I have been carefully reading the most approved writings of the “Disciples” for many years; and, while glad to discover some very rare indications of spiritual-mindedness, I have been heartily pained to see, in general, their thorough and pugnacious anti-spirituality, naturalism and rationalism. Many of their views are inconsistent with each other, with Christian experience, which they ridicule, and with the Bible, which they profess to revere. Says Mr. Campbell, in the Preface to his Christian System, p. 6: “Judging others as we once judged ourselves, there are not a few who are advocating the Bible alone, and preaching their own opinions.” This seems to me to be an exact account of himself and his followers. They claim 600,000 communicants in the United States, mostly in the West and Southwest, and a few in other countries.

John Nelson Darby, of London (1800-82), at first a lawyer, and then an Episcopalian preacher, started in 1827 at Dublin, Ireland, and in 1830 at Plymouth, England, a religious assembly, afterwards developed into a sect called “Darbyites” or “Plymouth Brethren” (their greatest success being at Plymouth), and calling themselves “Brethren.” They unchurch all ecclesiastical communities, both Catholic and Protestant, holding each and all to be a Babel; and they do away with all church offices, holding that every believer has a right to preach and administer the ordinances. Their testimony is chiefly negative—their main positive doctrine being that the Lord is at hand, and, until His coming, the Holy Ghost is the sole and sufficient Sovereign in the church. Some practice and some oppose pedobaptism. They are generally strong Calvinists; are familiar with the Scriptures; and their preaching and writings are uncommonly spiritual. They are now divided into five sects; and they claim about 1,500 “meetings” in the world, of which half are in the British Isles, and about 100 in the United States, about 100 in Canada, and the remainder mostly on the continent of Europe.

In 1829 Mr. John Winebrenner, of Harrisburg, Pa. (1797-1860), who had been a minister of the German Reformed “Church,” organized a society which he called “The Church of God,” but which is generally known as Winebrennarians. They are immersionists, pre-millenarians, Arminians, and ardent revivalists. They advocate and practice feet-washing, and the administration of the Lord’s Supper to Christians only, in a sitting posture, and always in the evening. They claim 45,000 members, mostly in Pennsylvania and the West.

The Mormons, who call themselves “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” were first organized in 1830 at Manchester, New York, by Joseph Smith (1805-44), a man, like Brigham Young (1801-77), his successor, of great ignorance, cunning and impudence. Smith pretended to find, in 1827, in a hill four miles from Palmyra, N. Y., a stone chest containing a book of gold plates with curious inscriptions, and a pair of crystalline spectacles through which the inscriptions could be read in English; and in this way to have composed the “Book of Mormon,” a romance of the peopling of America by three migrations of Jews before the coming of Christ—substantially the same as a novel written, but never published, by Solomon Spalding, and placed, in 1812, in a printing office at Pittsburg, and copied by one of the printers, Sidney Rigdon, who soon after quitted the office and became a preacher of peculiar doctrines, and, in 1829, associated himself with Joseph Smith. The other text-book of the Mormons is the “Book of Doctrine and Covenants,” composed of multifarious pretended revelations to Smith and one to Brigham Young. The “Book of Mormon” repeatedly forbade polygamy; but in 1843 Smith claimed to receive a revelation authorizing it, and thus sought to justify several scandals of which he had been guilty—this pretended revelation, however, not being publicly admitted and avowed by his followers till 1852. The Mormons successively emigrated to Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and, in 1847, to Utah. They profess to believe in the Bible and in Christ, and are Arminians and Pelagians; they teach baptism (immersion) for the remission of sins and for (the salvation of) the dead; they maintain that the apostolic and prophetic offices, and the gifts of tongues and miracles are still continued in the church, and that Christ will soon come to reign in person on earth with His saints (themselves) a thousand years. They pay tithes to their so-called church, mostly for the building of temples. Like the Jesuits, they are skillfully and thoroughly organized, and are most zealous, self-denying and successful missionaries. They claim now to have a membership of 300,000 in the world, half in the United States (Utah and the neighboring States and Territories), and the other half in Europe and the Sandwich Islands. The success of their missions has been greatly increasing during recent years.

William Miller (1781-1849), a native of Massachusetts, but a resident of New York, began in 1833 to declare that the end of the world would occur in 1843, which date he arrived at by reckoning 2,300 years Dan 8:14 from B. C. 457, when Artaxerxes, king of Persia, sent up Ezra from his captivity to restore the Jewish polity at Jerusalem Dan 9:25; Ezra 7. He got some 50,000 people to follow and believe him-known as Millerites or Second Adventists. Among other dates, the years 1847, 1848, 1857 and 1861, were fixed upon by himself or his adherents for the second visible appearing of Christ. There are said to be at present about 20,000 Adventists in the United States, mostly in New England and the Northwest. They practice immersion, and many of them believe in the annihilation of the wicked, and in the sleep of the soul from the hour of death to the day of judgment (psychopannychism). Having failed so often, they have ceased to predict the exact year of the second advent of Christ, but they maintain that He will soon come in person, and reign on earth with His people a thousand years, which expected period is called the Millennium.

Edward Irving, of Scotland (1792-1834), one of the most powerful pulpit orators of this century, taught that the end of the present dispensation was rapidly approaching, and that the special offices and gifts of the apostolic church were to be revived to make ready a people for the Lord. In 1824 he preached by invitation before the London Missionary Society, and for three hours in gorgeous eloquence he depicted a grand ideal of a mission scheme after the model of apostolic times, making a burning protest against the cowardly, worldly, business spirit in which nineteenth century missions were prosecuted. “Money, money, money, is the universal cry,” said he. “Mammon hath gotten the victory, and may triumphantly say (nay, he may keep silence, and the servants of Christ will say for him), ‘Without me ye can do nothing.’” Mr. Irving was never again asked to preach before a modern missionary society. In 1835, the year after his death, the completion of the organization of the “Catholic Apostolic Church” (generally called Irvingites) was effected by the full number of twelve so-called “Apostles” being called to their office by what was considered the voice of the Holy Ghost speaking through those called “prophets.” In its hierarchical constitution and ritualistic worship, Irvingism is a combination of Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. There are about two hundred communities of this order in Europe and America.

“Spiritualism,” or “Spiritism,” originating in 1848 in the Fox family, in Hydeville, Wayne County, New York, now claims some three million adherents. It professes to be a method of communicating with the spirits of the dead by means of rappings, table-turnings, mediums, writings, drawings, pictures, stigmata, healings, lights, the apparition of spirit-hands, faces and bodies, etc.; but it is a combination of superstition, hypnotism, expectant attention, dominant ideas, epidemic delusion, ventriloquism, unconscious muscular movement, thought-reading, imagination, jugglery, etc., as the most competent scientific investigators have demonstrated. Spiritualists, in general, deny the divinity of Christ, the personality of the Devil, and the eternity of future punishment; they are extreme Arminians or Pelagians. This wretched nineteenth century delusion has “assumed the character of a new religion, with new revelations far exceeding those of the prophets and Apostles.” If any disembodied spirits aid in making these pretended revelations, they are undoubtedly evil spirits, with whom human beings should have no dealings (Lev. 19:31, 20:6; Deut. 18:11). The “Saturday Review,” of England, forcibly remarks: “It is much better to be a respectable pig, and accept annihilation, than to be cursed with such an immortality as the Spiritualists reveal to us.”

And another so-called “New Christianity,” born in the throes of the French Revolution during the last decade of the eighteenth century, and nursed into new and far more terrible life during the last half of this nineteenth century of ours, is French and German and American Communism, Socialism and Internationalism, originating in pantheistic or atheistic mammonism and materialism, indicating a fearful decay of religion and morality, ignoring God and eternity, taking the work of Karl Marx on “Capital” as its Bible, becoming daily more wide-spread and more extreme, professing to base itself on political economy, logical demonstrations and scientific facts piled mountain high, numbering its newspapers by scores, its adherents by tens of thousands, and its pupils, in Labor Unions, by hundreds of thousands, demanding free land, free tools, free money, and free love, a perfect equality of property, and the right of every one to do as he pleases, urging the purchase of powder and lead, muskets and dynamite, arming and drilling its thousands, holding up the riots of 1877, when many lives and a hundred million dollars’ worth of property were destroyed, as a feeble example, declaring that they will be far better prepared next time, and that the present generation, in the United States, shall not pass away until the whole fabric of our social order and civilization is thoroughly overturned.[12] Unless the kind and loving and self-denying Spirit of Christ be given to both rich and poor, employers and employees, the avoidance of some dreadful catastrophe, before the lapse of many years, seems impossible.

In 1813 died William Huntington (born in 1744). He was of low origin, and very poor, ignorant and dissipated; his occupation was that of a coal-heaver. He was converted suddenly and wonderfully, and became a Calvinistic Methodist preacher—a large chapel in London being built for his use. He had an extraordinary tact for spiritualizing everything; and seemed to obtain nearly all the bodily necessities and comforts for which he prayed. His numerous writings are esteemed by many sound English and American Baptists as the most deeply experimental and spiritual of any since the days of the Apostles. He appended S. S. (Sinner Saved) to his name, as a contrast to the unscriptural ecclesiastical title D. D. (Doctor of Divinity).

Robert Hall (1764-1831), of England, was one of the most eloquent of modern preachers, and almost his whole life was a lingering martyrdom from disease. He was a Baptist, a semi-Calvinist, and an open-communionist. He suffered from spinal and heart disease, renal calculus, and insanity. For more than twenty years he could not pass an entire night in bed, and had often, in a single night, to take a thousand drops of laudanum. To him one of the sweetest thoughts of Heaven was, “There shall be no more pain.” His paroxysms were most distressing, and his spirit, at death, passed away in a storm of agony.

Richard Watson (1781-1833), also of England, was the greatest and the most nearly Calvinistic of Methodist theologians. “His name is emblazoned in gold on Methodist banners.” Just before his death he said: “I am a poor, vile worm; but then the worm is permitted to crawl out of the earth into the garden of the Lord.”

“‘I shall behold His face,
I shall His power adore,
And sing the wonders of His grace
For evermore.’

“We shall see strange sights some day; not different, however, from what we may realize by faith. But it is not this, not the glitter of glory, not the diamond and topaz—no, it is God; He is all in all.”

“Methodism,” says the Episcopalian historian, A. C. Jennings “gave rise to Evangelicanism in the Established Church of England; and Evangelicanism caused the church to recover vitality; there was a reaction against profligacy and skepticism.” Says Mr. John Stoughton: “The defects of early (Calvinistic) Evangelicals are manifest. They were destitute generally of any great taste for literature and art, and used a somewhat peculiar religious dialect; also they were intolerant of other men’s opinions, questioning the religion of those pronounced unevangelical, and they were one-sided in their theological systems. They did not clearly distinguish between scientific theology and spiritual religion. The inferences of eminent divines amongst reformers, amongst Puritans, and even amongst themselves, were too often confounded with the teachings of Scripture. They repudiated all authority but that of the Bible, yet they were powerfully influenced by their own favorite authors. Yet when all this is said—and I have put the matter in strong terms—it remains true, that what they lost in breadth they gained in depth. There was a living power in their convictions, which moved their whole being, and gave incisiveness to words, boldness to work. They were an immense power for good at the commencement of this century, and a long while afterwards; they were the very salt of the Church of England, during a period when influences existed threatening decay and corruption. If not for any number of dignitaries within its circle, if not for a multitude of adherents in its ranks, yet for spiritual force, for religious efficiency, the Evangelical movement can scarcely be over-estimated.” John Newton (born 1725) died in 1807. He would preach as long as he could talk. When remonstrated with for traveling and preaching when very old and feeble and almost helpless, he would exclaim,”I cannot stop. What, shall the old African blasphemer stop while he can speak?” When near his end he said, “My memory is nearly gone; but I remember two things—that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Savior.” “Preaching Christ,” says Mr. Stoughton, “was the chief joy of those old ministers, and they lived on the sides of eternity. Richard Cecil (born 1748) died in 1810. During his last days his whole soul seemed absorbed in heavenly contemplations; and when in dying circumstances he exclaimed with great fervor, ‘None but Christ! none but Christ!’ Thomas Scott (born 1747) lived on till 1821, being all that while a pillar in the Evangelical aisle of the English Church. His ‘Family Bible’ was wonderfully popular, and was one main instrument in keeping alive evangelical sentiments and methods of interpretation. The capital excellency of the work perhaps consisted in following more closely than any other commentary the fair and adequate meaning of every part of Scripture, without regard to the niceties of human systems. Sir James Stephens, referring to Scott, says: ‘He would have seen the labors of his life perish, and would have perished with them, rather than distort the sense of revelation by a hair’s-breadth from what he believed to be its genuine meaning.’ The second coming of Christ was a favorite subject with the Evangelical clergy. Perhaps the zenith of prosperity in the Evangelical section of the English Church may be dated from 1810 to 1830; and then evangelical truth ceased to be identified with a particular school, and became,” Mr. Stoughton thinks, “much more widely diffused.” “The Independents,” Mr. S. says, “have been more conservative than the Presbyterians; and the Baptists more conservative than the Independents, and also more united than either of the other two denominations, because their denominational zeal rallied round one distinct institute (baptism), the name of which ever shone on their banners.”

During the present century about two hundred and thirty translations of the Bible have been made, about seventy of them in languages previously without a literature. The one of most interest to the readers of the present volume is the Canterbury, or Westminster, or Victorian Revision of the King James or Authorized Version—begun in 1870; the New Testament finished in 1880, and published in 1881; and the Old Testament finished in 1884, and published in 1885. This Anglo-American Revision, by sixty-seven English and thirty-four American scholars of nine different denominations, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, Methodist, Reformed, Lutheran, Unitarian and Quaker, is declared to be “the noblest monument of Christian union and co-operation in this nineteenth century.” The undertaking was inaugurated by the (Southern) Convocation of Canterbury, in the “Church of England,” but opposed by the (Northern) Convocation of York. In the Massoretic Text of the Old Testament (the Text almost universally received by both Jews and Christians) there are said to be 1,353 various readings, very many of which are merely in spelling, and do not affect the meaning; while there are said to be about 150,000 variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament, of which, however, only about 400 materially affect the sense, and of these only about fifty are of real importance, while even of these “not one affects an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching.” The Old Testament Committees were far more conservative than the New Testament Committees, and have made much fewer changes, especially in the original text, and their work is, therefore, far less objectionable. The Committees on the New Testament made about 36,000 changes, including 5,788 changes in the Greek text, based mainly on the new Greek text of Westcott and Hort, which is chiefly founded on two Uncial Manuscripts believed to have been written about the middle of the fourth century—the Codex Sinaiticus (discovered by Tischendorf in 1844 in the Convent of St. Catharine at the foot of Mount Sinai, but not used till 1859), and the Codex Vaticanus (in the Vatican library at Rome, but not critically published till by Tischendorf in 1867); the Vatican manuscript, especially, being almost superstitiously venerated by Westcott and Hort and by the Revisers, on the ground that it contains the shortest, oldest and purest text, though it contains thousands of additions by second and third hands, and though there are known to be at least 1,763 manuscripts of the New Testament, in whole or in part, including 158 Uncials and 1,605 Cursives, very few of which have been thoroughly examined. The Textus Receptus, or Received Text, of the King James Version and of the other Protestant versions (German, French and Dutch) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, usually followed Beza’s Greek text of 1589, which was based on Stephens’s text of 1550, that being derived from Erasmus’s text of 1527, and the latter derived from a few Cursive manuscripts of the Middle Ages, but traceable through the Byzantine family of manuscripts to the middle of the fourth century, and in general accord with the Alexandrine Codex (believed to have been of the fifth century) now in the British Museum, and with the Peshito, or Syriac Version, of the second century, “justly called the queen of the ancient versions;” and this text, says Prof. Philip Schaff, the President of the American Committee of Revision, “teaches precisely the same Christianity as the uncial text of the Sinaitic and Vatican manuscripts, the oldest versions, and the Anglo-American Revision.” The new version does not exhibit the real judgment of any one of the revisers, each being many times outvoted in points which he greatly valued; and its adoption is earnestly opposed by able and influential scholars, among whom the chief are Dean John W. Burgon, of Chichester, and Canon F. C. Cook, Editor of “The Speaker’s Commentary on the Bible.” Prof. Schaff himself admits that the Revision now needs another revision; and he maintains that a new revision ought to be made every fifty years. He says that about 3,000,000 copies of the Revised New Testament were sold within twelve months of its publication; but that since that time there has been a reaction in favor of the old version. “King James’s Version,” he remarks, “had a powerful rival in the Geneva Bible, which had taken strong hold on the affections of the people because it was made by the English exiles in times of fierce persecution, and under the eyes of the great Reformers, Calvin and Beza, and was accompanied with convenient explanatory notes.” In reference to the King James Version itself, Prof. Schaff, the leading authority among American Bible scholars, says: “It is the last and the best of the English versions of the Reformation period, and hence it finally superseded all its predecessors. It is the mature fruit of three generations of Bible students and translators, and embodies the best elements of the older versions. Its style is universally admired, and secures to it the first rank among English classics. It hails from the golden age of English literature. It coincides in time with the greatest and almost inspired poet of human nature in all its phases, but rises above Shakespeare as grace rises above nature, and religion above poetry. The Bible is beautiful in any language, but it is pre-eminently beautiful in the English, the most cosmopolitan of all languages. The (King James) translators called to their aid with easy mastery all its marvelous resources of Saxon strength, Norman grace, and Latin majesty, and blended these elements in melodious harmony. Their language is popular without being vulgar, and dignified without being stiff. It reads like poetry and sounds like music. It is thoroughly idiomatic, and free from Latin barbarisms. It is as true to the genius of the English as to the genius of the Hebrew and Greek. We hear, in our Bible, Moses and the prophets, Christ and the Apostles, speaking to us in our own mother-tongue. From this ‘well of English pure and undefiled,’ poets, orators and historians have drunk inspiration for more than two hundred and fifty years. It has done more than any great writer, not excluding Shakespeare and Milton, to fix the character of the language beyond the possibility of essential change, and the idiom of this version will always remain the favorite organ for the oracles of God to the English-speaking race. The King James Version is the work of the English Church in the period of the greatest revival of primitive Christianity. The sacred memories of three generations of martyrs and confessors are treasured up in its pages. No other version has such a halo of glory around it, nor is the child of so many prayers, nor has passed through severer trials, nor is so deeply rooted in the affections of the people that use it; and no other has exerted so great an influence upon the progress of the Christian religion and true civilization at home and abroad. It is interwoven with all that is most precious in the history and literature of two mighty nations which have sprung from the Saxon stock. It is used day by day and hour by hour in five continents.”

Of the numerous changes made by the recent Revisers, it may be truly said that they were all conjectural, as no one of the inspired autographs is extant; that, in the present inchoate and very imperfect condition of manuscript criticism, they were premature; that the most of them were altogether unnecessary and inexpedient; and that, if a very few had been proper and desirable, it would have been better to have put them in the margin, and left the text of the Authorized Version unchanged. I have for several years been making daily use of Eyre and Spottiswoode’s Variorum Bible for Bible Teachers, which contains, at the foot of each page, the most important of all the known various readings and renderings from the best critical and exegetical authorities; and I take pleasure in bearing the faithful testimony that there are very few of the variations that are not trivial and worthless.

There are three classes of Strict Baptists in England, represented respectively by the “Gospel Herald,” established in 1833; the “Gospel Standard,” established in 1835; and the “Earthen Vessel,” established in 1843. They are all Calvinists and Close Communionists; they do not exact rebaptism on the part of members that join them from other “churches,” though they require a relation of Christian experience; they do not practice feet-washing as a literal observance in the churches; they all have Sunday Schools, in which they teach how to read, and explain the Scriptures, but they reject the idea that the Sunday School is “a nursery of the church” or a substitute for the Holy Spirit; they all have Relief Societies for the Christian poor; and all contribute to the “Trinitarian Bible Society.” The “Gospel Herald” class of Strict Baptists also have Associations, and Tract and Missionary Societies. The “Gospel Standard” Strict Baptists most nearly of all the people in England resemble the Old School or Primitive Baptists in the United States. Their Articles of Faith are substantially the same as ours—are thoroughly sound, spiritual, and experimental, insisting, in the strongest language, upon the doctrine of salvation by sovereign, discriminating and almighty grace from beginning to end, and upon the necessity of adorning the doctrine of God our Savior with a godly walk and conversation, humility and brotherly love, and closing with these words: “And for every blessing and favor, both temporal and spiritual, we, who are as deserving of hell as the vilest of the vile, desire to ascribe all the praise to the glory of the grace of a Triune God.” They open their pulpits to all who subscribe to all their Articles of Faith, whether they are Baptists or not. They utterly condemn Theological Seminaries. They have, and sustain by voluntary contributions, the “Gospel Standard Aid Society” for the relief of aged and infirm Strict Baptist ministers and their widows; and the “Gospel Standard Poor Relief Society,” for the relief of afflicted and needy Strict Baptist ministers of any age, and of needy Strict Baptist members over sixty years of age. One of their leading members writes me: “We do not profess to have religious Associations, as the Duty-Faith Baptists have. Neither do we send out missionaries, as we cannot afford to do so; and we do not unite with the Baptist Missionary Society, as the ministers are Duty-Faith men [that is, such as declare faith to be a duty, instead of a gift]. We have no Society for the distribution of tracts, though individuals amongst us often issue tracts or leaflets in our letters.” Among the leading ministers of the Gospel Standard Strict Baptists have been William Gadsby, John Warburton, John Kershaw, John M’Kensie and J. C. Philpot. From the Memoirs of Gadsby and Philpot I will present a few interesting facts.

William Gadsby (1773-1844) was a member of a family containing fourteen children, and, when young, he was very poor, illiterate, and mischievous. He was first apprenticed to a ribbon-weaver and then to a stocking-weaver. He was converted in his eighteenth year, baptized when twenty-one, married when twenty-three, and began preaching when twenty-five years of age. He had an original and powerful mind, and was a bold and uncompromising defender of the doctrine of the Trinity and of predestination and election; though he maintained with James James 1:13 that God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man, and he declared that making God the author of sin was a diabolical doctrine. He considered and often publicly declared Andrew Fuller the greatest enemy that the church of God ever had, as Fuller’s sentiments were so much cloaked with sheep’s clothing. When informed that a meeting of dissenting ministers had decided that the best method to further the gospel was to preach in such a way that the people could not discern whether they preached free-will or free grace, he declared that Satan was the president of that meeting. He was pastor of the Strict Particular Baptist Church in Manchester from 1803 till his death. He planted forty Baptist Churches in four counties, preached from six to eight times a week, and during his life traveled more than 60,000 miles, a great deal of the distance on foot, for the purpose of preaching. He received from five to twelve hundred dollars a year, besides numerous presents; and he gave away four or five hundred dollars a year to the poor and afflicted, who have seldom had so active and devoted a friend; and yet one of his troubles in his last days was that he had done so little for the poor. In 1805 he wrote the “Everlasting Task for Arminians.” He was editor of the “Gospel Standard” from its foundation in 1835 till his death; and he wrote twenty-two works, some of which have been widely circulated. His character was irreproachable. Like Huntington, he maintained that the Gospel, and not the Law, is the rule of life for the believer; and for this he was stigmatized and persecuted as an Antinomian. When told by a Baptist minister once that such doctrines led to licentiousness, he asked: “Do they lead me to licentiousness?” “Why, no,” replied the minister, “I don’t mean you exactly.” “Well,” said Mr. G., “do they lead my church to licentiousness?” “No,” replied the minister, “I don’t say they do.” “Well,” continued Mr. G., “do they lead you to licentiousness?” “No,” replied the minister, “for I don’t believe in them.” “Well, then,” said Mr. G., “if they lead neither believers nor unbelievers to licentiousness, pray tell me who the characters are that they do so lead?” “It is an awful fact,” says Mr. Gadsby, in his “Perfect Law of Liberty,” “that we live in a day when the best name which the truth as it is in Jesus can obtain among the bulk of the professing world is that of ‘Antinomianism.’” The last ten years of his life he totally abstained from the use of spirituous liquors, though he never joined an Abstinence Society; and to a young man waiting on him in his last illness he said, “Shun wine as you would shun the Devil.” He had but little confidence in missionaries or their societies. When told that it took but three cents to convert a heathen, and three hundred dollars to convert a Jew, he said that, if the soul of the heathen was as precious in God’s sight as the soul of a Jew, the missionaries should leave the Jews to their fate, and turn their exclusive attention to the heathen. His wife was deranged the last twenty-two years of his life, and this was a terrible affliction. He preached twice on the last Sunday of his life, though he was so feeble that it took him four minutes to ascend the pulpit stairs, and he could not give out the hymns except the last. His text in the morning was Isaiah 43:2. On Tuesday morning he was attacked with inflammation of the lungs, and had to take his bed. He suffered much from pain and sleeplessness. On Saturday morning he sent for his family to come into his room, desiring also his poor wife to be present. About eight o’clock the Lord appeared to break into his soul. He had the twelfth chapter of Romans read Rom 12, and he then engaged in a broken but most solemn and affecting prayer for the church and for his family. “There is nothing too hard for Christ,” said he after the prayer; “He is the mighty God-from everlasting to everlasting. He is precious.” After sleeping, he awoke in the afternoon. “There is no religion without power,” he remarked. “Unto them which believe, Christ is precious; yes, King, Immanuel, Redeemer, all glorious. I shall soon be with Him, shouting Victory! victory! victory! forever. Free grace! free grace! free grace!” And then, without a struggle or movement, he smiled and fell asleep in Jesus. In his desk was found a slip of paper containing the following, in his own handwriting: “Let this be put on my stone:”

“Here rests the body of a sinner base,
Who had no hope but in electing grace;
The love, blood, life, and righteousness of God
Was his sweet theme; and this he spread abroad.”

Joseph Charles Philpot (1802-69) was descended by both parents from Huguenot or French Calvinistic Protestant families. His health was always delicate. He was a distinguished graduate and fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University. In 1827, while acting as the private tutor of the sons of a wealthy gentleman in Ireland, the Lord sent upon him grievous affliction, and poured upon him the Spirit of grace and supplications, taught him his sinfulness, and blessed him with a sweet hope in Christ. Returning to Oxford, he met, though still an Episcopalian, with contempt and persecution because of his inward, spiritual religion; so he left the University, and from 1828 to 1835 he was curate of Chislehampton and Stadhampton near Oxford. At this time “it was his custom on Sunday before the morning service to spend some time in the Sunday School, teaching the children the word of God, and then walk with them to meeting, where he preached extemporaneously about an hour; after the afternoon service he again went to the school and had the children assembled all around him to hear what they remembered of the sermon, and to explain to them what they could not understand of it, and then dismissed them with prayer. His day’s labor was concluded by an exposition given on some portion of the Scriptures in his own sitting room, where often quite a goodly number of his parishioners assembled to hear him.” During the week he was unwearied in his daily walking from house to house to read and pray with his people, and to attend to the temporal as well as spiritual needs of the poor. In a letter written the last year of his life he declares that, while thus laboring in the Episcopal “Church,” he was both a living man and a living minister, and that the Lord greatly blessed his ministry to the comfort of His people. But becoming satisfied of the great errors of the Establishment, he seceded from the “Church of England” in 1835, and left his income from the “Church,” and resigned his University fellowship, giving up every worldly advantage for conscience’s sake. “Like Abraham, he went forth, not knowing whither he went, but counting, with Moses, the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, and little foreseeing either what the Lord in His providence would do for him, or in His grace do by him.” About six months afterward he was baptized by Mr. John Warburton into the fellowship of the Strict Baptist Church at Allington. From 1838 to 1864 he was pastor of the two Strict Baptist Churches at Stamford and Oakham; and from 1849 to 1869 editor of the “Gospel Standard,” a very laborious and responsible position, that monthly magazine having a circulation of about 10,000 copies. He spent an hour every morning reading his Hebrew Bible, and an hour every evening reading his Greek Testament, greatly enjoying these moments; and he appreciated the writings of John Owen (especially his voluminous Commentary on the Hebrews) and of William Huntington, particularly the latter, as the most spiritual and profitable since the close of the canon of inspiration. Removing to Croyden on account of his failing health, he was pastor of the church there the last five years of his life. He was more of an experimental than a doctrinal preacher. Viewing religion as a human body, he considered “the doctrines of the gospel the bones, experience the flesh, and the Holy Spirit the life of both bones and flesh. The dead Calvinists,” said he, “have the bones without the flesh—a dry skeleton; the Arminians have the flesh without the bones—a shapeless and unsupported mass; and the daily experimentalists have the bones and flesh without life—a corpse. But the living family of God have bones and flesh and life; for they have truth in doctrine, truth in experience, and truth in life and power; and thus religion with them is a living body.” He was a strong and scriptural advocate of the eternal Sonship of Christ and of the Three-Oneness of Jehovah, and of the doctrine of predestination. “I fully believe,” says he, “that the entrance of sin into the world, and of death by sin, was according to the permissive will of God, for without it it could not have entered; but not appointed by Him in the same way as what is good, for such an assertion, reason how we may, would make God the author of sin. Sin is not a creature. Two things are very evident; first, that sin is a most dreadful evil, hateful to God, and calling down His displeasure and righteous punishment; and secondly, that there is no remedy for this dreadful evil, except through the incarnation and bloodshedding of the Son of God.” In November, 1869, he was taken severely ill with bronchitis, and suffered greatly with shortness of breath and sleeplessness. All remedies failed. As he was sinking fast, his children were called round his bed about midnight, Dec. 8th. He was perfectly conscious, knowing them all, and calmly bidding them good-by. To them he said, “Love one another. Be kind to your mother; she’s been a good wife to me, and a good mother to you all. Follow on to know the Lord. Goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life. Better to die than to live. Mighty to save! Mighty to save!” This he repeated several times. “I die in the faith I have preached and felt. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin. O, if I could depart, and be with Christ, which is far better. Praise the Lord: bless His holy name.” Just before he departed, he looked up earnestly, then closed his eyes, and said, “Beautiful!” His wife, who was close beside him, asked, “What’s beautiful?” He made no direct answer; but presently said, with his failing voice, “Praise the Lord, 0 my soul!” These were his last words; and soon after this he gently passed away at half-past three on the morning of Dec. 9, 1869.

All the latter part of the present volume is devoted to the Old School, or Primitive, or Predestinarian, or Covenanted Baptists of the United States and Canada, mostly during the present century-that part of the work having been written by my father, who enjoyed a long, intimate and extensive personal acquaintance with the people of whom he gives an account; I myself, therefore, will say but little about them here. I believe that, both in doctrine and practice, they come much nearer than any other professing Christians to the models of the apostolic and primitive churches, as described in the New Testament and in Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and in the most reliable Church Histories. At the same time, like the apostolic and primitive churches, they neither are nor claim to be perfect, only in Christ. Like those churches, they are not yet perfectly united in all points of doctrine and practice; there being still some diversity among them in the understanding[13] of the mysterious doctrinal truths of the Trinity, Predestination, the nature of Regeneration, the condition of the soul between death and the end of the present dispensation, the Resurrection of the body, and the Judgment after Death-and in the practice of Feet-Washing, the Laying on of Hands on all Baptized Believers, the Proper Attitude in Prayer, the Manner of Opening Church Conferences, and the Method and Amount of Contributions to the Temporal Assistance of the Ministry. But in the great central doctrine of Salvation by Grace alone, through the Electing Love of God the Father, the Redeeming Love of God the Son, and the Renewing Love of God the Spirit, and in the heartfelt obligation of adorning this holy doctrine with godly lives and conversations—they are perfectly agreed. In reference to other matters, not so essential now to be understood, and upon which they cannot now reach perfect harmony, it becomes them not to fall out by the way and unchristianize one another, and indulge a fleshly spirit in the use of harsh and bitter language, but to await the sunshine of new and clearer revelations in that Perfect World of Light and Peace and Love to which the saints are hastening. Then, in answer to the prayer of our great High Priest, all the redeemed family of Godall the members of His Mystical Body—shall be perfectly one, even as the Father and the Son are one (John 17:20-23).

May the God of all grace pour out upon our brethren and sisters everywhere a richer fullness of the Spirit of Christ, making them less cold, worldly-minded, covetous, unsympathetic, opinionated, theoretical, and careless of avoiding the appearance of evil, and more zealous, heavenly-minded, generous, kind, meek, practical, and careful to avoid all appearance of evil—more filled with living faith—more like our blessed Lord, who, during His earthly ministry, not only worshiped the Father in spirit, but went about lovingly ministering to the needy and afflicted in body and soul, teaching all His followers, both by precept and example, that they should both love God supremely and love their fellow-creatures as themselves. May they be forward to remember the poor (Gal. 2:10), and the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said, It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35); and may they obey the injunctions of the Scriptures not to muzzle the mouths of the oxen that tread out the corn, but cheerfully and liberally minister of their carnal things unto those who, laboring in word and doctrine, minister of their spiritual things unto them (1 Cor. 9:7-19; 1 Tim. 5:17, 18),—that thus the ministry may be able to give more “attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine, neglecting not the gift that is in them, but meditating upon these things, and giving themselves wholly to them, that their profiting may appear to all” (1 Tim. 4:13-15). May it please the Lord to revive the gifts of exhortation in the churches, and to stir up His people more to practical godliness, so copiously and impressively enjoined, in the Epistles of the New Testament, as the fitting superstructure upon the foundation of sound doctrine. May the gospel be preached to every creature in all the world, and may the Lord Jesus gather and bring into His fold all His sheep of every nation, people, kindred and tongue (Mark 16:15; Matt. 28:18-20; John 10:16, 27-30; Rev. 5:9).

It is falsely said, by those who have been charitably preaching our funeral for the last fifty years, that the number of Primitive Baptists is decreasing, and all will soon be dead and gone. Their numbers have increased, during this century, in the same proportion as the population. In 1800 there were about 10,000 of them, when the entire population of the United States was about 5,000,000; and in 1880 there were about 100,000, when the entire population of the country was about 50,000,000. It is a remarkable coincidence that this proportion—about one in 500—was about the same as that of the 7,000 who had not bowed the knee to the image of Baal, in Elijah’s time, to the entire population of the kingdom of Israel, about 3,500,000. We have now, in round numbers, about 1,500 Elders; 3,000 churches, 240 Associations, and 100,000 members[14] in the United States—the most of our membership being in the Southern and Western States.

Some of our ministers who have passed away during this century are the following: John Leland, John Boggs, Thomas Fleeson, Gideon Farrell, Daniel E. Jewett, Samuel Trott, Joshua Lawrence, Blount Cooper, William Hyman, Thomas Barton, Ichabod Moore, James Osbourn, Burwell Temple, Gabriel Conkling, D. L. Harding, John Staddler, John W. Stamper, Thomas Briggs, William Whitaker, John H. Daniel, Robert C. Leachman, Philander Hartwell, Joseph L. Purington, Robert D. Hart, G. W. Staton, Wilson Thompson, John M. Watson, Isam Cranfill, J. F. Johnson, Clayton Moore, C. B. Hassell, Gilbert Beebe, Jacob Castlebury, Samuel Danks, R. H. Harriss and Russell Tucker. My sketch of my father’s life, and Elder Gilbert Beebe’s autobiographical sketch, will be found in the Appendix to this volume. Some information in regard to others of these ministers appears in other parts of this work. Several of them traveled between one and two hundred thousand miles, preaching the gospel of Christ, in the manner of the Apostles, wherever the Spirit and providence of God directed them, and not sent out, instructed and supported by human Boards and Societies devised by Papal Rome and imitated by Protestants. Elder James Osbourn was an Englishman, who traveled and preached much, and wrote many religious books. Elder Clayton Moore, of Martin Co., N. C., was a profound thinker and instructive speaker; and he, more than any other person, urged my father to undertake and myself to complete this History. Having the published lives and writings of Elders John Leiand and Wilson Thompson, I will add some interesting particulars in regard to them.

Elder John Leland (1754-1841), a native of Grafton, Mass., was brought under conviction for sin and also concerned in regard to the ministry in his eighteenth year, experienced a hope in Christ and was baptized and began to exercise in public in his twentieth year, was married in his twenty-second year, and, during the sixty-seven years of his ministry, labored with his own hands, never solicited money for himself, went forth entirely undirected and unsupported by missionary societies or funds, preached from four to fourteen times a week, from Massachusetts to South Carolina (fifteen years in Virginia, from 1776 to 1791, and the most of the remainder of the time in Massachusetts), traveling more than a hundred thousand miles, somewhat on foot, but mostly on horseback, baptized 1,535 persons on a credible profession of faith, only one or two of whom ever attended Sunday Schools, faithfully preached the word unmixed with the doctrines and commandments of men, not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind, zealously opposed Sunday Schools, Theological Seminaries, a salaried ministry, and moneyed religious institutions, endured great and numerous persecutions, was an earnest advocate of civil and religious liberty, personally knew more than a thousand Baptist preachers, heard more than three hundred of them preach, and entertained more than two hundred of them at his house, wrote about thirty pamphlets and many hymns, including, “The day is past and gone,” and “Christians, if your hearts be warm, Ice and snow can do no harm,” never could preach without getting into the third chapter of John, declaring the necessity of being born again, and more and more felt his unworthiness the longer he lived, carefully weighing himself in the balances of the sanctuary and finding himself wanting, and feeling that his soul and all his services needed washing in the blood of the Lamb, and perfuming with the intercession of the great High Priest, and that, at last, on the verge of the grave, with hoary head, and decrepit limbs, and faltering tongue, he could but cry, “God, be merciful to me a sinner! Save, Lord, or I must perish!” He preached in four hundred and thirty-six meeting-houses, thirty-seven court-houses, several capitols, academies and school-houses, barns, tobacco-houses, and dwelling-houses, and many hundreds of times on stages in the open air, having congregations of from five to ten thousand people. In 1835 he wrote: “I have been preaching sixty years to convince men that human powers were too degenerate to effect a change of heart by self-exertion; and all the revivals of religion that I have seen have substantially accorded with that sentiment. But now a host of preachers and people have risen up, who ground salvation on the foundation that I have sought to demolish. The world is gone after them, and their converts increase abundantly. How much error there has been in the doctrine and measures that I have advocated, I cannot say; no doubt some, for I claim not infallible inspiration. But I have not yet been convinced of any mistake so radical as to justify a renunciation of what I have believed, and adopt the new measures.” In 1833 he wrote to the “Signs of the Times:” “In these days of novelty we are frequently addressed from the pulpit as follows: ‘Professors of religion, you stand in the way of God and sinners—give up your old hope and come now into the work—God cannot convert sinners while you are stumbling-blocks in the way—sinners are stumbling over you into hell. Profane sinners, I call upon you to flee from the wrath to come—come this minute and give your heart to God, or you will seal your own damnation—God has given you the power, and will damn you if you do not use it—God has done all He can for you and will do no more—look not for a change of heart; a change of purpose is all that is necessary—to pray the Lord to enable you would be presumptuous. Some of you are mourning for the loss of a friend—I tell you your friend is in hell, and has gone there on your account—had you done your duty, your friend would now be in Heaven, but for your neglect your friend is damned. My hearers, you may have a revival of religion whenever you please—begin in the work, and the work will begin among the people—continue in it and the work will continue—keep on and the work will become universal.’ Now I have not so learned Christ—I do not understand the Scriptures in that light—it is not the voice of my Beloved—it sounds like the voice of a stranger, and I dare not follow it. Societies of various kinds are now formed, with ostensible views, to extirpate drunkenness, masonry, ignorance, slavery and idolatry from the earth; and the people, from the aged to the infant, are called upon to enroll their names and take a bold stand to moralize and christianize the world. Lying, fraud, love of money, hypocrisy, gaming, dueling and licentiousness as yet seem to be considered too sacred to be meddled with, for no society is formed to check them. The missionary establishment, in its various departments, is a stupendous institution. Literary and theological schools, Bible and tract societies, foreign and domestic missions, general, State, county and district conventions, Sunday School Unions, etc., are all included in it. To keep it in motion, missionary boards, presidents, treasurers, corresponding secretaries, agents, printers, buildings, teachers, runners, collectors, mendicants, etc., are all in requisition. The cloud of these witnesses is so great that one who doubts the divinity of the measure is naturally led to think of the locusts in Egypt that darkened the Heavens and ate up every green thing on earth. This machine is propelled by steam (money), and does not sail by the wind of Heaven. Immense donations and contributions have already been cast into the treasury; and we see no end to it, for the solicitors and mendicants are constantly crying ‘Give, Give,’ with an unblushing audacity that makes humble saints hold down their heads. But I forbear. The subject sickens. I close in the words of God Himself, ‘Stand ye in the way, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls’” (Jer. 6:16). Among the other remarkable and excellent sayings preserved in his writings are the following: “That God is good, and that men are rebellious—that salvation is of the Lord, and damnation is of ourselves, are truths revealed as plain as a sunbeam.” “God sits upon a great white throne, free from every stain.” “When I was a boy, I could not understand Pedobaptist orthography; they spelt circumcision, and pronounced it baptism. And I observed that they put the cart before the horse; instead of, ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved,’ they would have it, ‘He that is baptized and believeth shall be saved!’” “Some say, ‘If you will pay me well for preaching and praying, I will do them, otherwise I will not.’ Such golden sermons and silver prayers are of no great value.” “There is no danger of your being damned, if you see yourselves bad enough to be saved wholly by grace. He that has raised you out of the grave of carnal security will loose you and let you go. He that has opened your eyes to see your dungeon and chains will also bring you out of the prison-house and set you free.” Referring to the text which many preachers seemed to take, “Schools, Academies and Colleges are the inexhaustible fountains of true piety, morality and literature,” he said that he had never been able to find it in the Bible. “In my travels I have heard much said about a Savior by the name of ‘Old Mr. Well’s You Can,’ but I have never seen him, and almost despair of ever finding him below the sun. If the salvation of the soul depends upon our doing as well as we can, who can be saved? If a man falters once in his life from doing as well as he can, the chance is over with him. Those who place the greatest hope for Heaven on doing as well as they can, are more negligent in good works than those who detest themselves as the vilest of the vile, and trust alone in the mercy of God, through the blood of Christ. Pharisees may boast of good works, but humble penitents perform them.” “The only true Missionary Society ever founded on earth was that established by Christ in Galilee more than eighteen hundred years ago, His church, to whom he said nothing about collecting money for the spread of the gospel.” “Missions established on Divine impression are no ways related to those formed by human calculation. When the Apostles traveled from Judea to Gentile regions, they collected from the Gentiles, and brought the alms to the poor saints in Judea; but now the poor saints in Judea are taxed to aid the missionaries when they go.” In 1829 he wrote: “In 1755 Daniel Marshal and Shubal Stearns, moving southward, preached and formed a church of sixteen members on Sandy Creek, Guilford County, N. C. In the south part of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky, there are more than a thousand Baptist churches, now existing, which arose from that beginning. These missionaries had neither outfit nor annuity. The providence of God, the prayers of the saints, and the benevolence of those who were taught by them, carried them through.””Children are now exhorted to cast their mites into the missionary treasury, with encouragements that every cent may save a soul.” “Bibles, Tracts and Magazines are much more abundant now than formerly; but it is a serious question whether Biblical knowledge is equal to what it was fifty years ago.” “Sabbath Schools are very fashionable, and are considered by many as the great lock-link which unites nature and grace together; but those among whom I live and labor are without them; and they say that, if the Sabbath is holy time, it ought not to be profaned by acquiring literature.” “I would never worship a day, and make a Savior of it; but worship the Lord, in spirit and truth, every day; and publicly assemble as often as duty called and opportunity served.” “Some seem to say, ‘The eleventh and great commandment, on the observance of which hang all religion and good order, is, ’Remember the first day of the week, and keep it hypocritically: the six following days may labor, laughter, lying, cheating, drinking, gaming, reveling and oppression be done, by day or by night, according to the inclination of the individuals; but on the first day of the week shall no labor or recreation be done, save only that men may salt their cows in the morning, sleep in time of service, talk about politics, fashions and prices at noontime, read newspapers after service, and pay their addresses at night.’” “For many years of my life I drank no spirits. During recent years, with increasing infirmities, I have used about a gallon per year. A spoon-bowl full is as much as I use at a time, and the times of drinking are not frequent.” “Internal religion is always the same, and always will be. So many religious novelties have lately sprung up that I have often exclaimed, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.’ But this alarm has been quieted by, ‘What is that to thee? follow thou Me.’” In 1827 he writes: “I now have eighty-two descendants living, including children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A few of my posterity have died at their respective homes; but I have never had a coffin or a death at my house.” In 1830 he writes: “Every child has left me; myself and wife keep house alone. We have neither Cuffie nor Phillis to help or plague us. My wife is seventy-seven years old, and has this season done the housework, and from six cows has made eighteen hundred pounds of cheese, and two hundred and fifty pounds of butter.” In 1831 he writes: “We have nine children, seven of whom have made a profession of religion.” “When convicted of sin, I found that I could no more believe, come to Christ, and give up my whole heart to Him, than I could create a world; that, unless I was drawn by the Father, all the exertions of my natural powers of body and mind could not bring me to the Son; that, unless I was born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God, and saved by grace, I must sink into hell.” In 1836 he writes: “Would not a new translation of some passages in the New Testament, according to our present dialect and customs, be acceptable? In Matthew 10:7 read thus: And as ye go, preach to the people, Your money is essential to the salvation of sinners, and, therefore, form into societies, and use all devisable means to collect money for the Lord’s treasury; for the Millennium is at hand. In Mark 16:16 read: He that has attended Sunday Schools, had his mind informed by tracts, contributed to support missions, and joined in societies to support benevolent institutions, shall be saved; the rest shall be damned. In Matthew 10:17 read: Be ye wise as serpents in your guile to deceive men; keep out of sight that ye have to receive part that you collect for your mendicancy; show great concern for poor benighted heathen, but let your neighbors have none of your prayers, exhortations or alms; but strive to appear harmless as doves; put on gravity and holy awe; make others believe that ye are too devotional to labor for a living, and that they must labor to support you; for if you do not appear uncommonly holy, you will not deceive the simple and get their money. In Acts 4:34-36 and 6:3 read: The convention appointed a board of directors; any man who would cast into the fund one hundred dollars should be one of them for life, to dispose of the money at discretion, and mark out the destination of the missionaries. In Acts 13:1-4 read: Now there was at Antioch a convention of Christians, and among them five directors; and as they fasted and prayed, they were moved to select two of them as missionaries; and when they had supplied them with a good outfit, and promised them liberal supplies, to make Christianity appear honorable among the heathen, they sent them away. As for Acts 20:33-35, ‘I have coveted no man’s silver or gold; ye yourselves know that these hands have ministered to my necessities and to them that were with me; I have showed you all things, how that so laboring ye ought to support the weak,’ etc.—these sentences are so little used in this day of great light, that a new translation is unnecessary. The new version of Mark 16:15 would read: Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature—if they will give you three hundred dollars a year [they would want two or three or more times that amount now]. Acts 5:42: And daily in the temple, and in every house, they ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ—for five dollars a week. Acts 11:26: And it came to pass that a whole year they assembled themselves, and taught much people—for a stipulated sum of two hundred and fifty dollars each, for the year. Acts 9:38: They sent unto him two men, desiring him that he would not delay to come to them—and they would handsomely reward him.””If any grades of collegiate education are essential prerequisites to the ministry, why does God not call those who are already in possession of those prerequisites? Is it reasonable to believe that a wise God would call a man to preach, when He knows that he cannot do the work until he has studied how to decline nouns and conjugate verbs three or four years?” “In this day of boasted benevolent institutions, which cost hard labor and millions of dollars to support (called the morning of the Millennium), but little reliance can be placed on the words of the seller, and less on the promise of the buyer.” “For nearly fourscore years I have heard a continual lamentation among the aged, crying, ‘O the times! O the manners! the customs and manners of the people are greatly depreciated from what they were when we were young.’” Elder Leiand was providentially blessed with a wife of great industry and patience, faith and fortitude, trained in the school of adversity from two years of age. Her trials were many and severe, especially during the Revolution, when she was often left alone for weeks with her little ones, far from neighbors, her husband gone, with very little prospect of pecuniary reward, and while abandoned characters were roaming through the country. “Many a long hour she plied her needle by moonlight to prepare clothing for her little ones, fearful lest the ray of a lamp from her window might attract a bloody foe.” She died in 1837. On January 8th, 1841, Elder Leland preached, from 1 John 2:20 and 27, his last sermon—a very sound and spiritual discourse. He was taken ill that night with pneumonia, and lingered six days, though with little pain. The day of his death his prospects of Heaven were clear; they had been clouded the day before. To a young preacher who called early in the evening, and said that they were going to hold a prayer-meeting, and asked whether he had any advice to give, he said: “If you feel it in your hearts, I am glad. Forms are nothing.” To the same preacher he said: “Bury me in a humble manner. I want no enconiums; I deserve none. I feel myself a poor, miserable sinner, and Christ is my only hope.” He passed away in perfect peace, January 14th, 1841.

Elder Wilson Thompson (1788-1866), a native of Hillsborough, Kentucky, is regarded as the ablest Primitive Baptist minister that ever lived in the United States. There was in his eventful experience a combination of some of the most striking features in the experiences of Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Peter and Paul, demonstrating that he was exercised by the same eternal and unchangeable Spirit as were the old prophets and Apostles. The depth, solemnity and fulfillment of his spiritual impressions prove that the God of Israel still sits upon the throne of the universe, and during this century has been carrying on His work of salvation in this country of ours, not in a new manner, but in the very same essential manner that He has been employing since the establishment of His church on earth. Especially does the solemn testimony of the Apostle Paul, in Acts 20:33-35; 2 Corinthians 11:26, 27 and Galatians 1:10-12, impressively reappear in Elder Thompson’s Autobiography.[15] He was of an old Baptist family, of English, Welsh, Scotch, Irish and German descent. When he was born it was thought that he and his mother would immediately die; but Elder James Lee, his father’s half-brother, having been called in to pray, received strong assurance at the throne of grace that the child would be spared, and would become a minister of the gospel; and when he rose from his knees he so declared, and repeated it many times in subsequent years, always with the same assurance; but this was never told the child until after he began to preach. His parents were very poor, and could give him very little education; but God, who had given him his extraordinary faculties, was equally careful to give him exactly the right and best kind of an education for his predestined and remarkable life-work. His father was a Deacon in the Baptist Church, had a special gift in discipline, prayer and exhortation, was a fine singer, and able in the Scriptures, sound in faith, interesting in conversation, and hospitable in his manners. Elder Thompson had religious impressions from his earliest recollection; and, during the first twelve years of his life, without, any instruction from any person or book, he became a thorough graduate in Arminian or Pharisaic or natural religion—“getting religion” himself by his own good resolutions and exertions, idolizing “the Sabbath,” attaining perfection in the flesh, assured that he was bound for Heaven, despising the people of God as far below himself in religious knowledge and attainments; then “falling from grace” (so-called), taking his “fill of sin” (when he thought he had not yet passed what he heard called “the line of accountability”), afterwards terrified anew by natural convictions, going to work again with more zeal than ever to ingratiate himself into the favor of God, repenting and praying more, and doing more good works, acting on the principle—Do good, and be good, and keep good, and so fit yourself for Heaven—until he got “sinless” again, and resolved that he never would commit another sin in his life! He now had no doubts and no fears, and he felt that all was well and safe with him, if he only continued to be faithful, watchful, prayerful during life, and all this he was determined to be. He rested in the persuasion of his own righteousness, with which he believed that God was well pleased. While in his thirteenth year he went to see Elder James Lee baptize some candidates, among others a small, slender girl, named Mary Grigg, who afterwards became Elder Thompson’s wife; and, while this girl was being led into the water, suddenly all nature seemed to him to be overspread with a dark, heavy, angry, threatening gloom, and he felt like one forsaken of God and man, the most loathsome and guilty wretch that lived on earth, utterly corrupt without and within, and justly exposed to the everlasting wrath of an infinitely holy God. He left the company and the water in despair, and sought a deep ravine in the wood, expecting there to die alone. While there, the darkness increased and weighed heavily upon his heart. He longed, above all things, to be holy, and felt that, above all things, he was furthest from it. For three days and nights he continued in such gloom that he did not seem to have one hopeful thought of his salvation, and, while his heart prayed all the time for mercy, if mercy were possible, he did not dare to make a formal prayer, because feeling it impossible for a holy God to pardon such a sinner as himself. Still he would seek the woods, fall upon his knees, close his eyes, and make confession of his sinfulness and of God’s justice in his condemnation. While thus engaged, on the fourth day, he was startled three times by the sudden appearance of a glittering brightness, visible only when his eyes were closed, and each time increasing in brilliancy, so that at last in amazement he sprang to his feet, opened his eyes, and saw all nature glittering with the glory of God. He was so completely captivated with the scene, and so absorbed in the contemplation of the goodness of God, that he forgot everything else. He walked about, gazing, wondering and adoring that God, who seemed almost visible in the works of His power, wisdom and goodness. The gloom and the burden of sin were gone; but he soon began to be troubled because his trouble had left him, and he feared that his heart had become too much hardened to feel sin, and he never once thought of this being conversion. He attended a prayer-meeting, and, while on his knees, there came upon him a feeling of enraptured love for God and His people, such as he had never before realized; and when the congregation arose to their feet and began singing, they seemed to him transfigured with the glory of God and the beauty of holiness—the loveliest sight he had ever beheld. He was completely filled with peace and love and happiness. On his way home he became despondent again, and sought for his burden, and repined because it was gone. But on the next day, while alone in a grove, his soul was again filled with love for Christians, and peace and comfort. He had these changes of feeling, more or less, during life. In June, 1801, he went before the church called the “Mouth of Licking,” and related the reason of his hope, and was baptized by Elder James Lee, who said, as he led him down into the water, “I am now about to baptize one who will stand in my place when my head lies beneath the clods of the valley;” many of those present knowing that he thus alluded to the convictions expressed shortly after the candidate’s birth, but the latter, knowing nothing of that, only understanding him to speak of the probability of himself living after Elder Lee’s decease. When raised from the water his first thought was, “O! that sinners could but see and feel the beauties of a Savior’s love!” And he felt a strong desire to speak of the glorious plan of salvation, but, remaining silent in language, he burst into tears, and came out of the water weeping like a child. These impressions continued, but he strove to subdue them, feeling that he was so young and ignorant, and might bring reproach upon the sacred cause. For about nine years he resisted, and at last came to the conclusion that he would rather die than try to preach. But his impressions continued to increase, and he was suddenly attacked with a disease called “Cold Plague,” and for a time his life was despaired of, and once he was thought to be dying. He was conscious, however, and his mind was exercised about preaching, and he concluded that if he should ever get well again, and feel the same weight of soul to preach Christ and Him crucified, he would make the attempt. He recovered, but still felt that, being a poor, backwoods, ignorant boy, he had no qualification for the ministry. But he began leading in prayer and exhortation in prayer-meetings and singing schools taught by himself, and eyes unused to weep would flow with tears. He was so troubled in mind, and lost so much sleep and appetite, that his parents feared he would commit suicide, and had him sleep on a bed on the floor in the same room where they slept on a bedstead. One night after all had retired, and the fire had burned down, and all was dark save a faint gleam from the brands and coals, a shadowy form seemed to approach him, bend over him, and say, “I know your trouble, and your great desire to know what you should do; and I have come to tell you. Read the sixth and tenth chapters of Matthew Mat 6; Mat 10, and to every sentence answer, ‘I am the man,’ and you will soon come to know your duty.” This was done and said three times. He believed that the appearance was not literal, but a vision (Acts 2:17, 18). The next morning he slipped off with the Bible to a secret place, and did as directed, but could not be satisfied. (The sixth chapter of Matthew, it may be remarked, emphasizes the inward, spiritual, filial, heavenly character of true religion; while the tenth chapter contains Christ’s commission to His Apostles to go, fearless of man and dependent upon God, and preach to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.) His mind became greatly exercised on the Scriptures. He finally told his feelings to his pastor, and the latter related them to the church, which at once gave him license to exercise his gifts in any way or at any time within the bounds of the North Bend Association. His first text, Feb., 1810, was John 10:2, 3. He now spoke once or twice a week, and the power of the Lord was gloriously manifested. Saints were revived; sinners were awakened; backsliders were reclaimed; and new converts began to sing and tell what great things the Lord had done for them. The still, deep and solemn work of God’s Spirit was plainly evident to spiritual minds. In May, 1810, he was married to Mary Grigg. He became deeply impressed with a conviction that God had a work for him to do in Missouri Territory, though he had never been there, and knew very little of the country or people. In his mind he could see the people there gathering in crowds to meeting, while a wonderful change for the better was going on among them. The church gave him license to preach the gospel wherever God in His providence should direct. He was very poor indeed. In a journey of great hardship, he removed, with his wife and his father’s family, to Southern Missouri, in Jan., 1811; and located seven miles from a small and very cold Baptist Church named Bethel, there being then only one other Baptist Church in the southern part of the Territory. He and his wife and parents gave in their letters, and joined Bethel Church. He had to labor hard for the support of his family, by teaching and farming, and he endured sore privations and persecutions. The people of that section were exceeding ungodly, intemperate and immoral. He preached in that and other neighborhoods. In December of the same year a very favorable pecuniary proposition was made to him to move elsewhere; but the Lord interfered and deeply impressed him with the fact that He would soon begin a great work of grace in that section. He communicated these impressions to his wife and parents. He bought fifty acres of land in the green woods, a mile and a half from Bethel meeting-house, and moved into a little cabin there with his family. A few days afterwards there were several earthquake eruptions, making deep chasms in many parts of Southern Missouri; and for three days and nights the sun, moon and stars were concealed by a heavy fog while ever and anon a hard shock would seem to threaten the world with destruction. He himself felt perfectly calm, and pursued his daily business, and, by request, began holding evening meetings. Soon an unusual effect was visible. The old brethren were revived, and engaged in prayer and short exhortations. At the regular church meeting, instead of the usual number of about twenty persons, the house was crowded on Saturday. In the conference eleven persons came forward and gave clear and satisfactory evidence of their hope. The next day the people came from twenty and thirty miles around; and the number was so great that preaching had to take place out of doors. The text used by Elder Thompson was Rom 6:23. Solemnity, deep as death, was depicted on most of the countenances of the congregation. After the sermon, some twenty or more arose simultaneously and came forward, and requested him to pray for them, poor, undone sinners. He stood dumb for a moment, and on this and similar occasions, made remarks about as follows: “My dear friends, you request me to pray for you as helpless sinners. I am as poor and helpless a sinner as any of you. I can only pray for myself or for you, when I have the spirit of supplication granted me. I can do you no good; you must not think that my prayers can save you, or move the compassion of God. I am as poor and unworthy as any of you; but I do know that there is forgiveness with God. While I am authorized to preach both repentance and remission of sins in the name of Jesus Christ, I feel willing to ask of God, in the same name, for the manifestation of that forgiveness to all of us, and in accordance to His will—let us pray.” The evening meetings continued; there were no mourning benches, but many mourning hearts, hiding from the public gaze in some dark corner, secretly imploring God for His mercy. In January, 1812, Elder Thompson was ordained by Elders Stephen Stilley and John Tanner; the latter—who was a native of Virginia, and for his fidelity to the Baptist cause had been shot and imprisoned there before the Revolutionary War—delivered the charge from John 21:17, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” The old veteran of the cross dwelt upon the specialty of the ministerial call, the omniscience of Christ, the true motive of the minister, and the proper method of feeding the lambs and sheep. “Every preacher,” said he, “should love his Lord well enough to obey Him, feeding the flock, even if he got no money for it; nay, if it cost him all he had, and even his life beside. And the flock who were fed by him should remember that he had a right to his support from them. The duty of the church was plainly laid down, and they ought not to neglect it. The flock should be fed with doctrine, well tempered with experience and exhortation. The youngest lambs love sound doctrine if it is bright with experience; and the older sheep love experience if it is according to sound doctrine. Thus all the flock will feed together.” Elder Thompson’s library consisted of a small Bible, Rippon’s Hymn Book, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; and his study was either on his little cabin hearth, with a light made from bark, or in his clearing, while his brushfires were throwing a brilliant light around him; and at the midnight hour the sound of his axe echoed through the solitary forest, and he meditated upon the deep things of God revealed in the Scriptures, and in the earth around him, and in the spangled firmament above. The good work of God continued in that section eighteen months, and Elder T. baptized there some four or five hundred persons,[16] all professing to be sinners, and to trust in Christ alone as their Savior; by the almighty power of Divine grace the barren wilderness had been made to blossom as the rose. And yet, soon after this time, he became as despondent as Elijah fleeing from Jezebel after the display of God’s glory on Carmel. He felt himself to be a poor, useless rod, that had been used by the Father for the good of His children, but was not itself a child, and was now to be cast away. He resolved never to preach again; but God comforted him and encouraged him to go on. He remained there another year, working hard for the support of his family, preaching in four different places and traveling two hundred and forty miles a month, a good deal on foot, and receiving no aid from those whom he served in the gospel—the people themselves being very poor and also negligent of their obligation as hearers. His wife became fevered and deranged, and, by the advice of the doctor and friends, he traveled with her in Kentucky and Ohio, and preached, and finally settled in Indiana. He was requested by Elder Isaac McCoy to join him in his Mission to the Indians, and he was at first disposed to do so; but, upon a thorough examination of the New Testament, he became entirely satisfied that the modern missionary system was, in all respects, directly contrary to God’s plan and to apostolic practice; and this persuasion increased the longer he lived. He moved to Lebanon, Ohio, on a call from the church at that place, and while living there he published two books, “Simple Truth” and “Triumph of Truth,” opposing Fullerism, and thus brought upon himself much persecution. Considering “person” to mean a distinct and separate individual, he objected to the saying that there were three persons in the Godhead; though he maintained the unity of God, and, at the same time, the divinity of the Father, Son and Spirit. Challenged to discuss religious questions publicly with the champions of other denominations, he displayed transcendent powers of debate. Going to Cincinnati to observe for himself a wonderful modern “revival,” he could see no evidence of any genuine work of grace. In 1834 he moved to Fayette County, Indiana, having received special direction to leave Lebanon; and he became the pastor of three churches in the Whitewater Association. There were not many additions to the churches, until in 1843 there were 247 that joined the churches in that Association. While residing in Indiana he made extensive tours of preaching in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia; and his ministerial gifts and Christian virtues shone with starry brilliancy, and numerous sinners were moved, and multitudes of saints were comforted and established in their most holy faith, remembering and mentioning with delight, as long as they lived, those wondrous ministrations of the divinely called and divinely qualified servant of God. In regard to the use and effect of the preached gospel, Elder Thompson held, with the majority of Old School Baptists, that it is not the means of imparting spiritual life to the dead sinner; that as no means can be used to give life to one literally dead, even so no means can be used to give eternal life to those who are dead in sins; that, as all temporal means are used to feed, nourish and strengthen living subjects, and not dead ones, so the preaching of the gospel is the medium through which God is pleased to instruct, feed and comfort His renewed children, and not by which He gives life to the dead sinner whom the Spirit alone can quicken; that the gospel is the proclamation of good tidings of great joy to those who have a hearing ear and an understanding heart to receive it, and to these it is the power of God unto salvation, saving them from the false doctrines of men, and feeding and making them strong in the truth. He deeply regretted that brethren in heart should suffer themselves to be divided on this subject by partisanship and ambition; and he lamented the coldness resulting from such divisions, and earnestly labored to heal the breach thus caused, though he would not compromise the truth. In a sermon preached in 1859 on 1Cor 15:54, he, among other things, said: “The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, as shown by Paul in this chapter, is emphatically a cardinal point in that heavenly message of glad tidings sent to earth, called the gospel of our salvation. If the dead rise not, then Christ is not risen, and we shall not rise, and our faith is vain, and we are yet in our sins. But if Christ be risen from the dead as the first fruits of them that slept, then all His saints, as the entire crop or harvest, shall finally rise in His likeness. Paul says that the Apostles, including himself, and more than five hundred brethren, the most of whom were living when he wrote, were personal witnesses of the resurrection of Christ; and that, as Adam represented the whole crop of his posterity, and they all died in him, so Christ represents the whole crop of His spiritual seed, and they shall all be made alive in Him, and in His heavenly and perfect likeness. Some modern Sadducees profess to believe in a resurrection, but not of this identical body. They say that when the body dies, the never-dying spirit is separated from this dying body—being mortal, it will return to its mother earth and never be resurrected; but the living spirit, which never dies, leaves the body, and in a living, spiritual body ascends up to God who gave it, and there enjoys the eternal glory. Now who does not see through the mist of this sophism? Where is any particle of the resurrection of the dead in this system? What dies? The body only; and, according to this hypothesis, that which dies never rises again, only the spirit in a spiritual body which never died. There is no resurrection of the dead in this theory; but the Apostle argues the resurrection of the dead, even these vile bodies of ours—that they shall be changed and fashioned like our Savior’s glorious body—that this mortal shall put on immortality, that this corruptible shall put on incorruption. He maintains that it is sown a natural body, but is raised a spiritual body; that it is sown in corruption, but it—yes, it is the same body—it is raised in incorruption. All this shows the identity of the body, but that this identical body shall be not only raised from the dead, but shall, in that process, be changed from natural to spiritual. Flesh and blood, in the present depraved state, shall not inherit the kingdom of Heaven, neither corruption inherit incorruption. The same body of Christ that was crucified and laid in the sepulcher, was raised again to life, and made spiritual, and ascended to Heaven. Enoch and Elijah did not leave their mortal bodies behind to decay, but they were translated or changed, in the process, from natural to spiritual. The saints who shall be alive on earth at the second coming of Christ shall not sleep, but shall be changed—not exchange these bodies for some other bodies, but these bodies shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye; from being terrestrial, they shall become celestial bodies, incorruptible, glorious and immortal. Then shall death be swallowed up in victory. Under a conditional covenant, the ministration of law and of death, Adam, with all his posterity, fell into ruin; but under the unconditional covenant of grace, ordered in all things and sure, the ministration of the Spirit and of life, all the heirs of promise shall certainly be saved, both in soul and in body, forever. A conditional plan of salvation can reach only the good, the obedient, the righteous; and, as the Bible declares there are none such on earth, such a plan can reach no member of the human family. While conditionalists are preaching to moral free agents and to the good, do let me preach the gospel to the poor, to them who are without strength, to them who are naked, and hungry, and thirsty. Let me say to the poor, ungodly sinner, ‘This is a faithful saying, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.’ Let me tell the helpless sinner that Christ is able to save to the uttermost. Though their sins be red as scarlet or crimson, let me tell them that He can cleanse them white as wool or snow. If the conditionalist can find a good, righteous man, a moral free agent, he may preach to him; for, as Christ ‘came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance,’ I have but little to say to such, and I cannot find them. Let me preach to sinners, for these I can find everywhere, and the gospel of the grace of God is the gospel of their salvation. Its language is, ‘The Son of Man is come to seek and save that which was lost.’ We learn from John 5:28, 29, that all the dead, both the righteous and the wicked, shall be raised from their graves; and, from Revelation 20:12-15, that all shall stand before God, and the books shall be opened, and another book shall be opened, which is the book of life, and that the dead shall be judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works, and that all except those who are found written in the book of life shall be cast into the lake of fire—the second death. I understand the books to be the books of the law—the five books of Moses. ‘There is one who judgeth you, even Moses in whom ye trust. They that are under the law shall be judged by the law.’ The law is the conditional system, and every conditionalist desires and expects to be judged by the books of the law according to his works. So the books and their works will be compared, and they will all be cast into the lake of fire. Such will be the final fate of all whose names were not found written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Such are the awful results of the conditional plan, which is the law, the ministration of condemnation and death. May the Lord save His people from the curse. The gospel of our salvation opens a brighter prospect before us than all the schemes and systems which philosophy, criticism, speculation or the wisdom of the world ever devised. By man came death and all its gloom; we look at it with dread and repulsive fear. Its gloom is deep and dark; not one bright star to guide, or one bright beam to cheer the lonely traveler!—all, all is gloom! But hark! in accents soft and melodious as seraphs sing, we hear it proclaimed, ‘By man came also the resurrection of the dead;’ ‘death is swallowed up in victory;’ the gloom recedes. Clothed in bright immortality and incorruption we behold the saints arise. This is the hope of the gospel.” Elder Thompson’s last sermon was preached before the Antioch Church, in Wabash County, Ind., the third Sunday in April, 1866, from 1John 5:1,2. He spoke, with his accustomed energy, nearly an hour and a half. He gently fell asleep in Jesus on the evening of the first of May, testifying in his last moments, “I have preached that which I believed to be the truth, and in prospect of death it is my only hope. For many years I have not known the fear of death, but have been waiting till my change should come, leaving the event entirely in the hands of a just God. How great a blessing it is to have a merciful and faithful God to trust in when I come to die ! My God is a God of purpose and power; He doeth all things right.”

Elder Daniel Parker, who had some following in the West and Southwest, denied the creation and fall of the angels, and the resurrection of the body; and he affirmed the actual existence from eternity to eternity of Satan, and of all the wicked as his seed in him, and of the righteous as the seed of Christ in Him. This doctrine is known as Two-Seedism, or Dualism; and it is an attempt to incorporate into Christianity the essence of Parsism, the ancient Pagan religion of Persia, which affirmed that there were two eternal Beings, Ormuzd, the God of light, the cause of everything good, and Ahriman, the God of darkness, the cause of all evil. It was a characteristic of Gnosticism and Manichaeism, and has more or less troubled the church in all countries and ages. In utter demolition of this doctrine, the Bible declares that there is but one Eternal Being, Jehovah, and that He is the Creator of all things. The most thoughtful minds admit that sin is not a creature of God, but originated in the abuse of the free-will that God first gave to His responsible creatures.

In regard to the charge of Arianism made against the first editor and some of the old correspondents of the “Signs of the Times,” my father, who was personally acquainted with the parties, was fully satisfied that the charge arose from a misconstruction of the real views of the writers; while, at the same time, it must be admitted that some of the expressions of some of the writers were unguarded, ill-advised and unscriptural.

Mr. William Cathcart, in his “Baptist Encyclopaedia,” published in Philadelphia in 1881—the largest New School Baptist book in the world—says in his article on Primitive or Old School Baptists: “Many of the Old School brethren, while they comfort saints, do not feel it a duty to warn sinners, and few conversions occur under their ministrations. They allege that God carries on His own work ‘without the least instrumentality whatever’, and that ‘all the preaching from John the Baptist until now, if made to bear on one unregenerate sinner, could no more quicken his poor, dead soul than so much chattering of a crane or a swallow.’ And it would not but for God’s accompanying Spirit. This system is not entirely new, but has prevailed at times elsewhere. It is claimed that it humbles the pride of man; but it is charged, also, that it pampers ease, lulls to sleep, and shrivels benevolence. The decline of some Baptist Churches in Great Britain is attributed by many to this contracted view of man’s duty and privilege. Many of the Old School brethren in the ministry possess decided ability as expounders of Scripture; the members of their churches are commonly persons of deep piety, and of extensive Biblical knowledge. The creed which they generally hold is the Confession most venerated by all the Regular Baptists of America, from whom they originally withdrew, and with whom they decline to hold any ecclesiastical relations.”

Mr. Richard B. Cook, in his “Story of the Baptists in All Ages and Countries,” published in Baltimore in 1884, says of the New School Baptists, of whom he is one: “A peril arises from rapid numerical growth, and this admonishes us to be careful in the reception of members, and in the training of converts. We should grow, but grow wisely. Numbers may be an element of weakness. Tacitus said that the Roman Empire was in danger of breaking down from its own greatness; and so, in our rapid increase, we may lose the strength and vigor of earlier years. Yet the cry is for more, and some churches think they are not progressing unless receiving accessions. There is a craving, in many quarters, for the feverish excitement of large ingatherings, and for pastors who will ‘draw,’ and ‘fill the pews,’ and ‘pay.’ Hence the pastor, in a large degree, is prevented from steadily laying solid foundations for the spiritual house, and finds himself almost unconsciously drifting with the popular current, seeking to please, laboring for present effect, and securing, it may be, large, but superficial, results. I apprehend that our method is wrong. There is a kind of church growth that ought to be sought first in order of time, as it is first in importance. We speak of development which is internal, not external, spiritual instead of material, in quality rather than in quantity. Progress in this direction may be slow, like the advancing hour-hand of the clock, or the maturing child, but it is steady and sure. Let this inward growth be manifest to ‘those without’ by the broadest distinction made in theory and in practice between the church and the world, and nothing be done by Christians in the pursuit of pleasure or of business that is a reproach to Christ; and mark the result. Attention thus given to that part of the commission which requires ‘teaching them to observe’ and observing ourselves the ‘all things’ ‘commanded,’ will not fail of best success. The church that attends faithfully to its own spiritual prosperity will be too active to cease to grow from without. It is spiritual strength that the churches most need, and which mere numbers cannot give.”

Says Mr. S. H. Ford, “LL. D.,” a prominent New School Baptist minister, editor and author: “With all the intellectual and social progress of the nineteenth century, all the advance in the outward, the active, and the material, where is the piety, the heart devotion, the calm thought and unshrinking faith of these elevated and enlightened times? In all the boasted progress and advance of the present day, there has been a crumbling away of basal truth. Vital doctrines have been and are ignored and even denied with levity, and often with derision, by the accredited ministers of the churches of the Reformation. Downright infidels have poured from Lutheran pulpits ridicule on the doctrines of grace preached by Luther. A Bishop of the Anglican church is in the foremost ranks of the impugners of God’s word. Dignitaries in Scotland’s Free Church have become the apologists and abettors of skepticism. In ‘evangelical’ pulpits and theological schools of almost every denomination, the full or real inspiration of God’s word has been denied. Work is the watch-word, and faith is decried. There is a lack of that rugged, steadfast, immovable faith which once distinguished the followers of the Lord. Beneath all the activity and benevolence of the present age is an emasculated, shattered, yielding theology, which places humanity above dogma—that is, a depraved nature above Divine truth, work above faith, the material above the spiritual, and the present above the future. The time has come when men will not endure sound doctrine. Well-paid musicians, and costly floral displays, and secular themes, and the sounds and sights in so-called evangelical churches, have taken the place of the glorious gospel of our blessed God. ‘As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the coming of the Son of man.’”

Says Mr. J. R. Graves, “LL. D.,” another New School or Missionary Baptist minister, editor and author, of great ability: “This is the last—the Laodicean Age of the church. Work! Work! WORK! Missions! Missions! is shouted by the agents of missionary societies and by the religious press, while the faith and order of the gospel is thrown into the background, and those few brethren who seek to maintain them in their primitive purity are opposed and frowned upon, and the prejudices of the brethren excited against them as obstructionists to the spread of the gospel! They are pointed to with a sneer as men who waste their time and energies upon unimportant subjects! when they occasionally correct the unscriptural teachings of the press and pulpit touching the Atonement, the church and its prerogatives and mission, the Lord’s Supper, the Rest of the Saints, and the Last Judgment. The presentation of any one of these and cognate subjects is called not preaching the gospel, but obstructing it and hindering missions! Who will say that there is any gospel aside from and independent of these subjects, which lie at the foundation of the gospel and of a correct faith and incentive to Christian work? Have we not enough of this masked opposition to the faith of the gospel from Pedobaptists, without hearing it from the Baptist press, and having it issued to us in printed circulars from our Missionary Boards? The mission of the Church of Christ is twofold. 1. The first and by far most important is to preserve the doctrine of Christ—the faith once delivered, in its purity, otherwise it will prove a curse; though all the world should be converted to it, no one would be saved by it. 2. The second part of the church’s mission is to preach a pure gospel, to the extent of her ability, to all nations, not for the conversion of every man and woman of any nation, but that God may thereby call out of the Gentiles a people for His name. Our zeal should be according to knowledge—even the directions given us in God’s word, and not in contravention of them.”

The number of nominal Christians at the close of each century, and in 1885, is estimated as follows:

A.D.

100,

500,000

"

200,

2,000,000

"

300,

5,000,000

"

400,

10,000,000

"

500,

15,000,000

"

600,

20,000,000

"

700,

25,000,000

"

800,

30,000,000

"

900,

40,000,000

"

1000,

50,000,000

"

1100,

70,000,000

"

1200,

80,000,000

"

1300,

75,000,000

"

1400,

80,000,000

"

1500,

100,000,000

"

1600,

125,000,000

"

1700,

155,000,000

"

1800,

200,000,000

"

1885,

410,000,000

Of this present nominal Christian population of 410,0000,000, about 200,000,000 are Roman Catholics; about 90,000,000 are Greek Catholics; and about 120,000,000 are Protestants. The Protestants are sub-divided about as follows: 45,000,000 Lutherans; 20,000,000 Episcopalians; 10,000,000 Presbyterians; 4,000,000 Congregationalists (or Independents); 16,000,000 Baptists (including Disciples); 20,000,000 Methodists; and 5,000,000 belong to minor sects—these numbers denoting, not the communicants, but the entire population, all the members of all the families of each denomination. As a general thing, the number of communicants is about one-fourth of the estimated population.

The present population of the world is supposed to be 1,500,000,000, and the numbers of those professing the different religions are reckoned as follows:

Christians,

410,000,000

Jews,

7,000,000

Mohammedans,

200,000,000

Brahminists,

175,000,000

Buddhists,

340,000,000

Taoists,

60,000,000

Confucianists,

80,000,000

Shintoists,

14,000,000

Other Pagans,

214,000,000

1,500,000,000

The membership of the Protestant denominations in the United States is estimated to have been 364,872, in 1800; 3,529,988, in 1850; 6,672,396, in 1870; and 10,065,963, in 1880. The Roman Catholic population in the United States is estimated to have been 100,000, in 1800; 1,614,000, in 1850; 4,600,000, in 1870; and 6,367,330, in 1880.

The 364,872 Protestants in the United States in the year 1800 are believed to have been sub-divided as follows: Regular Baptists, 100,000; Free-Will Baptists, 3,000; Congregationalists, 75,000; Presbyterians, 40,000; Methodists, 64,000; Episcopalians, 11,978; Quakers, 50,000; Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, etc., 20,000. And the 10,065,963 Protestants in the United States in 1880 were reckoned to have been sub-divided as follows: “Regular Baptists,” 2,296,327; Free-Will Baptists, 78,012; “Anti-Mission Baptists,” 40,000 (this is the name given to the Old School or Primitive Baptists, who numbered in 1880 about 100,000); other Baptists, 38,539; Congregationalists, 384,332; Disciples, 591,821; Dunkers, 60,000; Episcopalians, 338,333; Reformed Episcopalians, 9,448; Evangelical Association, 112,197; Evangelical Friends, 60,000; Lutherans, 950,868 Methodists, 3,574,485; Mennonites, 50,000; Moravians, 9,491; Presbyterians, 937,640 (of whom 111,863 were Cumberland); Dutch Reformed, 80,208; German Reformed, 155,857; Second Adventists, 70,000; Seventh-Day Second Adventists, 15,570; United Brethren, 157,835; Winebrennerians, 30,000; Minor Sects, 25,000.

It is believed that in the year 1800 there were less than 5,000,000 Bibles in the world; and it is said that, during this century, about 170,000,000 copies of the Bible, in whole or in part, have been printed and distributed. “At the beginning of this century,” says Mr. Daniel Dorchester, in his “Problem of Religious Progress,” “the Bible existed, in some fifty translations, in the languages of one-fourth of the earth’s population; now it exists in the languages of over four-fifths of the inhabitants of the world”—in about three hundred languages and dialects.

As to whether this world is optimist, the best possible, or pessimist, the worst possible, I believe that it is neither; but that the history of the world is a blending or alternation of day and night, light and darkness, sunshine and shadow, Summer and Winter, calm and storm, truth and error, virtue and vice, godliness and ungodliness. And I believe that this world, as well as every other, is under the absolute control of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God; who has created and preserves it; who exercises not only a general, but also a special providence over every one of His creatures, and over every moment and every event of their existences, not a sparrow falling to the ground without Him, and the very hairs of our heads being all numbered; who has wonderfully loved poor, lost sinners with an everlasting love, and has demonstrated that love in the sin-atoning death of His incarnate Son, and in the renewing power of His indwelling Spirit shedding abroad His love in our hearts; and who is abundantly able to bring order out of chaos and salvation out of ruin, and to accomplish His blessed promise to fill the whole world with His knowledge and glory (Num. 14:21; Isa. 11:9; Hab. 2:14; Zech. 14:9; Rev. 5:13, 11:15, 20:2-6, 21:1).

In regard to the moral progress of the world since the coming of Christ, Mr. W. E. H. Lecky says: “In the first two centuries (the purest period) of the Christian Church the moral elevation was extremely high, and was continually appealed to as a proof of the divinity of the creed. In the century before the conversion of Constantine a marked depression was already manifest. The two centuries after Constantine are uniformly represented by the Fathers as a period of general and scandalous vice. The ecclesiastical civilization that followed, though not without its distinctive merits, assuredly supplies no justification of the Catholic boast about the regeneration of society by the church. This period, however, though justly called the Dark Ages (of a professing Christianity), and though intellectually the lowest period in the history of mankind, was morally far superior to the noblest Pagan antiquity of Greece and Rome. The Byzantine Empire constitutes, with scarcely an exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed, its history being a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides. That the civilization of the last three centuries has risen in most respects to a higher level than any that had preceded it, I at least firmly believe; but theological ethics, though very important, form but one of the many and complex elements of its excellence. Mechanical inventions, the habits of industrial life, the discoveries of physical science, the improvements of government, the expansion of literature, the traditions of Pagan antiquity, have all a distinguished place;” some of these elements of modern civilization, however, as he elsewhere admits, both secularize and demoralize society; and he confesses that the first and second centuries were the purest period of the church. The truth I believe to be that, under the operations of Divine Providence, evil is, in general, more restrained and seeks more disguises and milder forms in modern civilized countries than in ancient or uncivilized countries (there is much truth in the saying that hypocrisy increases with so-called civilization); while nothing but Divine Almighty grace extirpates the root or love of moral evil. It is certain that in the United States, since 1850, crime has greatly increased. The ninth census gives these figures:

Year.

Prisoners.

Ratio to Population.

1850

6,737

1 out of 3,442

1860

19,068

1 out of 1,647

1870

32,901

1 out of 1,172

And the tenth census gives the following:

1880

59,255

1 of of 860

The tenth census strangely doubles the number of prisoners for 1850 and 1860. Thus, according to the figures in the ninth census, crime increased in the United States, from 1850 to 1880, four times—and, according to the figures in the tenth census, two times—as fast as the population; and it is a very remarkable and a very lamentable fact, that during the same period, from 1850 to 1880, the profession, without the evident possession, of Protestant Christianity, increased from 3,529,000 to 10,065,000—almost in a threefold proportion; while the Catholic population increased from 1,614,000 to 6,367,330—almost in a fourfold proportion. The increase of crime is attributed to the eight million foreign immigrants that came into this country from 1850 to 1880 and to the Civil War in 1861-64; but the tenth census makes crime somewhat less in 1870 than in 1860, though much greater in 1880; and it is known that murders, for instance, have terribly increased in the last four years, from 1,266 in 1881 to 3,377 in 1884; and, notwithstanding the fact that nearly all the youthful population is now sifted through the Sunday School, the age of criminals is growing constantly less.

Says Mr. M. S. Baldwin, “Bishop of Huron:” “Dark and troubled though the world may be, riven and seamed by the ghastly effects of sin, yet, after all, confusion does not reign supreme. The stars seem powdered in the sky—scattered in orderless profusion—yet astronomy reveals that harmony, not discord, prevails among them. So, too, while to the eye of sense the world appears but the arena of capricious passions, we know it is far otherwise. High over all—above the god of this world—sits One to whom all power in Heaven and earth belongs. It is the admission of this blessed fact which gives us enduring peace. For if it be true that the supreme and abiding government of the world is upon His shoulder whose right it is to reign, it follows as a natural sequence that there is a limit to all earthly power; and a gracious reason, even if we cannot grasp it, why the tumultuous forces that exist are allowed for a moment their sway. All things must subserve His glory and His people’s good. We need a ministry that believes in Jesus Christ. I mean by this, a ministry that believes in Jesus Christ against the whole world; that not merely believes that Jesus Christ is a power, or even a great power, but that all power in Heaven and earth is His; that He is before all things, and by Him all things consist; that He is not only King, but King of kings and Lord of lords; that believes, when it enters the pulpit, Bible in hand, to uplift Christ as the infinite salvation of God, a blessing not only may, but must follow, because He is the power of God, and because this is the hour when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live. This is the ministry we need: one not afraid to step out on the deep blue of God’s promise, and trust where the whole world derides; not afraid to stake the awful inviolability of Christ’s word against the despair of a nation, and to rejoice in sunlight when the whole world sees only the blackness of the storm. Oh, we need always to be wrapped round in the very folds of the Redeemer’s garments, to realize Him so personally present, that above us we can see His glorious form towering up into infinite divinity—His head crowned with many crowns, and shining above the brightness of the sun; beneath us, as the Rock of Ages, upholding the whole church with the omnipotency of His power; around us, as the hills are about Jerusalem, that we being encircled with His presence may be saved from all our adversaries, and rest in the fullness of His peace. The painful absence of such faith causes many practically to banish Christ from their discourses. To interest a congregation and stimulate their flagging attention, every unsanctified method is adopted—the arts of oratory, the questions of politics, the subtleties of science, anything, everything to accomplish the result. The truth is, men have grown ashamed of Christ, because His glorious gospel is absolutely divorced in their minds from that to which God inseparably joined it, namely, Power. We need a ministry baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire. There is no subject before the church of Christ to-day of such tremendous import as this. What the church needs most-more than gold and silver—more than social influence—more than all with which this world can dower her—is the personal power of the Holy Ghost. While lingering at Calvary, the church has forgotten Pentecost; while mourning the absence of the dear Lord, she has not rejoiced in the presence of her blessed Comforter. To use the powerful language of the late Adolphe Monod: The church has unlearned the Spirit. As a general rule, we do not see that it needs the whole work of God, the Holy Ghost, to explain and bring home to the heart the work of God, the Son. Doubtless the disciples thought none so meet as they to go forth and preach Christ at the time of His departure, but the Lord positively forbade them: ‘Tarry,’ said He, ‘in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.’ All the historical facts of our Lord’s life were clearly before them, but they did not understand their spiritual import and value. They wanted light, they wanted power; and these were supplied in the coming of the Holy Ghost. It is the same now. All the learning of the schools, however subtle, however profound, cannot supply this power. Preachers speak of a Christ, but all is dark—midnight is about them. What is needed is Light, Life, Power, and these three are in the Holy Ghost. We need a ministry courageous and outspoken for the truth. As for modern science, it is yet in its infancy; it speaks as a child, it understands as a child, it thinks as a child, and only when it has become a man will it put away childish things, and be a complete witness for the truth. Revelation is the perfect man, and cannot, therefore, in all the grandeur of its perfect evidence, chime in with the chorus of inchoate and faulty sciences. No; from their very nature they must inevitably change, while truth, like God Himself, is forever changeless and the same forever. Under no pressure whatever let us offer any compromise of the truth; any adaptations of the written word of God to suit the haughty demands of an imperious criticism or sneering unbelief. The Bible is true, generally, absolutely, verbally. It was not only inspired when it was written; it is inspired now. We may stake time and eternity on all its blessed utterances, and be at peace when the world is in throes about us. We need a ministry understanding the relative position of the church to the world. The fierce demand of the world is that we should conform to its ideas, its pleasures and its aims; the precept of Christ is that we should come out and be separate from it. The world’s cry is ‘compromise;’ Christ’s is ‘separation.’ We cannot possibly do both; and as we are not our own, but bought with a price, let us go without the camp to our Divine Master, and learn from Him how to conquer the world. And it is just as we do this, and listen to His voice who says, ‘Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world,’ that we shall not only witness a good confession, but be able in this very world to demonstrate the power of a living, conquering Christianity. Two precepts Christ gave, one at the beginning, the other at the close, of His ministry. The first was, ‘Follow me;’ the other, ‘Abide in me.’ This latter was His dying injunction. It indicates the present and eternal home of the believer; it is ‘in Him.’ Nothing could possibly be more intimate, more personal than this. The believer is not only to walk worthy of Christ, to follow Christ; he is to abide in Him. The only life of Divine fruitfulness, acceptance, sinlessness and power, is that of the man continually abiding in Christ. Holiness being that to which we are urgently called, permit me to point out what seems to be one of the greatest incentives to worldliness in the present day. I refer to the tortuous and unholy ways in which money is often raised for church purposes. Dice and gambling, lotteries and grab-bags, even theatrical exhibitions, farces and comedies, are brought into requisition now by some to advance the cause of Jesus Christ. Against them all, root and branch, I enter my most solemn and determined protest. In my judgment, they are calculated to bring down a curse rather than a blessing on the misguided people by whom they are practiced and upheld. The end is always supposed to justify the means; and the clearing off the heavy debt on some burdened church is supposed to be a result so stupendous that it fully vindicates any expedient, however extravagant, which may have been adopted. On the contrary these methods fearfully confound the church with the world, and the world with the church; they lower, below zero, the spirituality of the whole congregation; they grievously insult Him who is the Head, even Christ, and most seriously injure the body, which is the church. In order to justify my position, I will point out three glaring contradictions of the word of God which these worldly methods encourage. First, Self-indulgence. If we understand anything of the Bible, we know that one great underlying principle is that of self-denial. Is money wanted? The Bible would say, then, deny yourselves and give it. Do without some luxury, some needless refinement. Christ said to the young man, Give up everything. The modern method is, Give up nothing, but indulge the flesh. Don’t deny yourselves, but gratify yourselves. It is an act of rebellion against Him who said, ‘Whosoever will be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me.’ Secondly, these worldly methods encourage the worship of a false god. The great mistake the church is making in our age is giving the world credit for owning the silver and gold. ‘The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the Lord of hosts.’ No, says the church, they do not belong to Thee; they belong to the Rothschilds, the Astors, the Stewarts, and the Vanderbilts. And in this belief we have the ghastly spectacle of the professing Christian Church doing homage before the idol, and crying out, ‘O Baal, hear us. Give us money for our churches, money for our organs, money for our ministers, money, money, money, O Baal, hear us!’ That which is most needed in our day is not so much more money as a deeper spirituality all along the line. We ought to honor God more as holding in His sovereign hands all that is needful for the welfare of His church. We need a simpler faith, a clearer conviction both of His love and omnipotency; and just as we attain unto this, and confess that He reigns, and not man, will money cease to be the burthen that it is to-day. God will honor faith that trusts Him. At its request He will open the windows of Heaven and pour out a blessing we have not room enough to receive. Thirdly, worldliness is encouraged. Christ calls us to holiness. We are to walk in the light, as He is in the light; and if there is anything destructive to this spirituality which He enjoins, it is the worldliness which so often characterizes what are now called ‘Church Entertainments.’ They wound and rob, instead of building up and strengthening, the inheritance of the Lord. If a church needs money, let it pray much, let it believe much, let it practice much self-denial, and the money will come, providing only the object is God’s glory and the welfare of His people.”

I will now give a few extracts for the purpose of showing the manner in which a large number of recent, able, learned and highly esteemed Calvinistic writers treat the subjects of predestination and free will.

Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh, one of the noblest, ablest and most learned men of modern times, says, in his “Discussions of Philosophy and Literature,” (pp. 585-590): “Fatalism, Pantheism and Atheism, the negation of a moral Governor and of a moral universe, are essentially the same. The only valid arguments for the existence of a God, and for the immortality of the human soul, rest on the ground of man’s moral nature; consequently, if that moral nature be annihilated, which in any scheme of thorough-going necessity it is, every conclusion, established on such a nature, is annihilated likewise. An absolute commencement, required by the libertarian, and an infinite non-commencement, required by the fatalist, are equally inconceivable; but our consciousness unconditionally testifies that we are, though we know not how, the true and responsible authors of our actions, not merely the worthless links in an adamantine series of effects and causes. How moral liberty is possible in man or God, we are utterly unable speculatively to understand; but, practically, the fact, that we are free, is given to us in the consciousness of an uncompromising law of duty, in the consciousness of our moral accountability; and this fact of liberty cannot be red-argued on the ground that it is incomprehensible, for there are things which may, nay, must, be true, of which the understanding is wholly unable to construe to itself the possibility (for instance, space and time must be either limited or unlimited, while our minds, in their present condition, cannot conceive the possibility of either of these contradictory propositions, one of which must be true). It is thus shown to be as irrational as irreligious, on the ground of human understanding, to deny, either, on the one hand, the foreknowledge, predestination and free grace of God, or, on the other, the free will of man; that we should believe both, and both in unison, though unable to comprehend either even apart. This philosophy proclaims with Augustine, and Augustine in his maturest writing: ‘If there be not free grace in God, how can He save the world? and if there be not free will in man, how can the world by God be judged?’ Or, as the same doctrine is perhaps expressed even better by Bernard: ‘Abolish free will, and there is nothing to be saved; abolish free grace, and there is nothing wherewithal to save.’ Austin repeatedly declares the conciliation of the foreknowledge, predestination and free grace of God with the free will of man to be ‘a most difficult question, intelligible only to a few.’ Had he denounced it as a fruitless question, and (to understanding) soluble by none, the world might have been spared a large library of acrimonious and resultless disputation. This conciliation is of the things to be believed, not understood. The futile attempts to harmonize these antilogies, by human reason to human understanding, have originated conflictive systems of theology, divided the church, and, as far as possible, dishonored religion.”

Mr. George Park Fisher, Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Yale College, a man of exact and profound learning, says, in his recently published “Outlines of Universal History,” pp. 2-8: “The Philosophy of History.—That there is, in some sense, a ‘reign of law’ in the succession of human events, is a conviction warranted by observed facts, as well as inspired by religion. Events do not spring into being, disjoined from antecedents leading to them. Even turning points in history, which seem, at the first glance, abrupt, are found to be dependent on previous conditions. They are perceived to be the natural issue of the times that have gone before. Preceding events have foreshadowed them. There are laws of historical progress which have their root in the characteristics of human nature. Ends are wrought out, which bear on them evident marks of design. History, as a whole, is the carrying out of a plan: ‘through the ages one increasing purpose runs.’ Augustine long ago argued, that He who has not left ‘even the entrails of the smallest and most insignificant animal, or the feather of a bird, or the little flower of a plant, or the leaf of a tree, without a harmony, and, as it were, a mutual peace among all its parts,—that God can never be believed to have left the kingdoms of men, their dominations and servitudes, outside of the laws of His providence.’ To discern the plan of history, and the causes or laws through which it is accomplished, as far as our limited capacity will allow, is the object of what is called the philosophy of history.

“Freedom and Law.—It must not be forgotten, however, that man is a free agent. History, although it is not an aimless process, is, nevertheless, not subject to the forces and laws which govern in the realm of matter. Physical analogies are not a literal image of what takes place in the sphere of intelligence and freedom. Moral evil, wherever it is a factor in history, has its origin in the will of man. In respect to it, the agency of God is permissive and overruling. Through His providence, order is made to emerge, a worthy goal is at last reached, despite the elements of disorder introduced by human perversity. Nor is progress continuous and unbroken. It is often, as one has said, a spiral rather than a straight line. It is not an unceasing advance: there are backward movements, or what appear to be such. Of particular nations it is frequently evident that, intellectually and morally, as well as in power and thrift, they have sunk below a level once attained. Of the inscrutable blending of human freedom with a pre-ordained design, Guizot says: ‘Man advances in the execution of a plan which he has not conceived, and of which he is not even aware. He is the free and intelligent artificer of a work which is not his own.’ ‘Conceive a great machine, the design of which is centred in a single mind, though its various parts are intrusted to different work-men, separated from, and strangers to, each other. No one of them understands the work as a whole, nor the general result which he concurs in producing; but every one executes with intelligence and freedom, by rational and voluntary acts, the particular task assigned to him.’

“The Meaning of History.—A thoughtful student can hardly fail to propose to himself the question, ‘What is the meaning of history? Why is this long drama, with all that is noble and joyous in it, and with its abysses of sin and misery, enacted at all?’ It is only a partial answer that one can hope to give to this grave inquiry, for the designs of Providence cannot be fully fathomed. But, among the ends in view, the moral training of mankind stands forth with a marked prominence. The deliverance of the race from moral evil and error, and the building up of a purified society, enriched with all the good that belongs to the ideal of humanity, and exalted by fellowship with God, is not only an end worthy in itself, but it is the end toward which the onward movement of history is seen to be directed. Hence, a central place in the course of history belongs to the life and work of Jesus Christ. No more satisfactory solution of this problem of the significance of history has ever been offered than that brought forward by the Apostle Paul in Acts 17:27, where he says that the nations of men were assigned to their places on the earth, and their duration as well as boundaries determined, ‘that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him.’

“Physical Geography.—The configuration of different portions of the globe, with the varieties of climate, the relations of mountain and plain, of land and water, have strongly affected the character of nations and the currents of history. In regions extremely hot or extremely cold man cannot thrive, or build up a rich and enduring civilization. The occupations of a people are largely dependent on its situation—whether it be maritime or away from the sea—and on peculiarities of soil and temperature. While the agency of climate, soil and other physical circumstances may easily be exaggerated, that agency must be duly considered in accounting for historical phenomena.”

In reference to these extracts I would say that I am perfectly free to admit that the conciliation of Divine predestination and human free will is entirely above my comprehension; nor can I conceive the conciliation of the doctrine of the fallen human free will with the emphatic declaration of Christ in John 8:34-36. But I am assured, both from Scripture and observation and experience, that men are voluntary, and therefore accountable, in the commission of sin, and that they receive no internal compulsion from a holy God necessitating them to commit sin.

Says Mr. C. H. Spurgeon: “We need an antidote for the heresies and poisonous doctrines proclaimed by a large part of the public ministry of the present age. Zealous persons whose zeal for God is not according to knowledge, have gone about and gathered the gourds of the wild vine—ritualism, sacramentalism, Romanisn, liberalism, Rationalism, Arminianism, undoctrinalism, unspiritualism, naturalism—and have made a doctrinal mixture which is served out from numerous pulpits, but which cannot be taken without serious risk of soul-poisoning, for ‘there is death in the pot.’ Meal must be brought-the pure gospel of the grace of God, the truth as it is in Jesus-and cast into the pottage of wild gourds, and it will kill the poison. The surest remedy for false doctrine is preaching the truth. Lift up Christ, and lay the sinner low. Proclaim justification by faith, the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration, and the grand old doctrines of the Reformation. I am more and more persuaded that the good old Calvinistic truths, which are now kept in the background, are the great Krupp guns with which we shall blow to pieces the heresies of the day, if once more they are plainly and persistently preached in harmony with the rest of revealed truth. Like ships of war in time of peace, the glorious doctrines of grace have been laid up in ordinary, but now is the time to bring them out to the fight, and if well managed they will pour red-hot shot into the enemy! The people need gospel teaching—the soul-saving gospel of Christ.”

Says President James McCosh: “The Bible doctrine of Predestination is substantially the same as the modern scientific doctrine of the Uniformity of Nature or the Reign of Law, only seen under a somewhat different aspect—the latter from below and the former from above, the latter secular and the former spiritual, the former being vastly more comforting as it brings in the will of a good God. The ordination of nature is the preordination of God.” Of course, the ordination of the kingdom of grace is, in the same manner, the preordination of God, who “worketh all things after the counsel of His own will” (Eph. 1:11), and who “knew all His works from the beginning of the world” (Acts 15:18). “The principle at the heart of Calvinism is this,” says Mr. J. Stoughton, “that the unchangeable will of God and not the fluctuating wills of men, the purpose of the Creator and not the purposes of the creature, are the foundation of an order gracious and righteous, by which the universe is governed and the Lord of all is glorified.”

The question of the truth or falsehood of the doctrine of the Divine Predestination is the fundamental problem of both philosophy and religion. The ancient Greek tragedians and Stoic philosophers were fatalists; while the Epicureans were accidentalists. Among the ancient Jews, the Essenes were fatalists; the Sadducees were free-willers (or Pelagians), rationalists and infidels; while the Pharisees were Semi-Pelagians, or co-operationists, or Arminians, or Conditional Predestinarians. The orthodox Mohammedans are fatalists; while some Mohammedan teachers are co-operationists, and the Koran itself is a mixture of fatalism and Pelagianism. “The doctrine of predestination,” says the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge, “runs through both the Old and the New Testaments; it is corroborated by the whole scriptural teaching concerning the Divine scheme of salvation; and, in its immeasurable compass, in its infinite depth, has never lacked the testimony of the religious consciousness of the living church,” Nothing essentially new or important has been added in the discussion of this question for the last fourteen hundred years, since the controversy between Augustine and Pelagius; and it is not likely that anything new will ever be added, until there shall be a new revelation from God. Semi-Pelagianism logically or really amounts to Pelagianism, because it retains the root-principle of Pelagianism, that man has some ability to will good; and Pelagianism really amounts to Rationalism, which identifies grace and nature, and has no use for the atoning death of Christ, or the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit—in other words, no use for Christianity. Augustine maintained that grace is nothing else than predestination realized; that salvation is the work of God, in accordance with His eternal will and purpose; that His decree is the efficient cause of all good in the elect, while the cause of sin in the reprobate is the evil will of man permitted to operate voluntarily and independently of Divine grace, and thus justly left by God to go on to perdition. In reference to the acts of wicked men and devils, the Holy Spirit uses six different Greek verbs, all having the essential meaning of Permit, in eleven different passages of the New Testament:—In Mark 1:34, Aphiemi; in Mark 5:13, and in Luke 8:32, Epitrepo; in Luke 4:41, and in Acts 14:16, Eao; in Acts 13:18, Phoreo; in Romans 9:22, Phero; and in Acts 7:42, and Romans 1:24, 26 and 28, Paradidomi. In the King James and the Revised Versions, these words are rendered give leave, suffer and endure. In the seventh and last edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon, the highest present authority on the Greek language, Aphiemi means send forth, discharge, let loose, let fall, give up, hand over to, let go, loose, set free, leave alone, let pass; Epitrepo means turn over to, leave to, give up, yield, permit, suffer; Eao means let, suffer, allow, permit, let go, let alone, let be, leave alone; Phoreo means bear, suffer; Phero means bear, endure, suffer; and Paradidomi means give over to, allow, permit. In like manner, in Psalm 81:12, Shalach is rendered by Gesenius, “relax, loosen, let go, especially one who has been in any way detained; give over into the power of anything.” And, as God is unchangeable, what He does in time He eternally decreed to do. God made man “very good” (Gen. 1:31), and said to him, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat;” and He did not compel Adam to transgress this law which He had given him, but, withdrawing His restraint, He left him to his own volition, and Adam sinfully chose to disobey God’s commandment. And such is the case with every sin in the universe; instead of originating and approving it, God hates and punishes it, if unatoned for, with eternal wrath. He inflicts endless death upon the guilty unredeemed sinner—everlasting separation from His holy presence; because the Holy, Holy, Holy Lord of hosts, our righteous Creator, Governor and Judge, is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. Nay, even when the incarnate Son of God took upon Himself the sins of His chosen people, the flaming sword of Divine justice bathed itself in His bleeding heart, the Holy Father forsook the sin-atoning Son, the sinless sin-bearing Friend of sinners, the noonday Heavens and the Savior’s soul were shrouded in a midnight pall, and Jesus was numbered with the dead! And alone by this perfect sacrifice for sin can any sinner find acceptance and peace in the holy presence of God. Surely, then, it were the most dreadful blasphemy to believe that God is the author of sin or source of wickedness, and no Baptist, no Christian, no Bible Predestinarian does or can believe it. Such an idea would confound God with Satan, who is the great tempter to evil. When God says in Isaiah 45:7, “I make peace and create evil,” the prophet Isaiah himself explains, in 2:11 and 31:2, what the evil is; the same Hebrew word Ra occurs in these three verses, and is rendered “ill” in 2:11, but “evil” in the other two verses. The evil which God creates is plainly seen, in 2:11 and 31:2, to be not sin, but the very opposite—the holy punishment of sin; rendered in this sense, by Gesenius, the chief Hebrew lexicographer, “unhappiness,” “adversity,” “calamity”—the antithesis to that “peace” which God gives His people-the equivalent of that “darkness” which is the opposite of “light.” God hardened Pharaoh’s wicked heart by lifting from him the restraints which His weighty judgments had laid upon him; He chastens sinning David with the cursing of Shimei; and punishes wicked Ahab by a lying spirit in his false prophets; and uses the wicked as a sword to accomplish His righteous purposes; but He “cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man” (James 1:13). While He does not incite sinful thoughts in any heart, He is perfectly able to bend and control every sin to the furtherance of His own glory and His people’s good. His knowledge and purpose and power include all events, so that His children may, in one sense, see Him in all things, and rejoice that He will make all things work together for their good. All the highest of high Calvinists in past ages (except Thomas Bradwardine, 1290-1349, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, and a very few of his followers), have used the scriptural word permit in reference to God’s decree of sin.

John Gill, of London, the soundest, the most learned, and the most able Baptist theologian since the death of the Apostle John—the author of a complete critical Commentary on the Old and New Testaments, and of a Complete Body of Divinity—the only man that ever hunted and drove out Arminianism from the explanation of every verse in the Bible, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation—says: “Though God may be said, in some senses (for instance, to bring about a great good, or to punish other sin), to will sin, yet He wills it in a different way than He wills that which is good; He does not will to do it Himself, nor to do it by others; but permits it to be done; and which is not a bare permission, but a voluntary permission; and is expressed by God’s giving up men to their own hearts’ lusts, and by suffering them to walk in their own sinful ways, Psalm 81:12; Acts 14:16; He wills it not by His effective will, but by His permissive will, and therefore cannot be chargeable with being the author of sin. He neither commands sin, nor approves of it, nor persuades to it, nor tempts nor forces to it; but all the reverse. He forbids it, disapproves of it, dissuades from it, threatens to punish for it, yea, even chastises His own people for it; and, besides, overrules it for great good, and for His own glory.” “God hardens some men’s hearts, as He did Pharaoh’s, and He wills to harden them, or He hardens them according to His decreeing will; whom He will He hardeneth, Romans 9:18; this He does not by any positive act, by infusing hardness and blindness into the hearts of men—which is contrary to His purity and holiness, and would make Him the author of sin; but by leaving men to their natural blindness and hardness of heart; for the understanding is naturally darkened; and there is a natural blindness, hardness and callousness of heart, through the corruption of nature, and which is increased by habits of sinning; men are in darkness, and choose to walk in it; and therefore God, as He decreed, gives them up to their own wills and desires, and to Satan, the god of the world, whom they choose to follow, and to be led captive by, who blinds their minds yet more and more, lest light should break in unto them, (Eph. 4:18; Ps. 82:5; 2 Cor. 4:4); and also God may be said to harden and blind, by denying them that grace which can only cure them of their hardness and blindness, and which He, of His free favor, gives to His chosen ones, (Ezek. 36:26, 27), but is not obliged to give it to any; and because He gives it not, He is said to hide, as He determined to hide, the things of His grace from the wise and prudent, even because it so seemed good in His sight.” (Matt. 11:25, 26) In reference to the fall of Adam, Mr. Gill says that “God decreed it, but that the sin of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not owing to God, for He forbade it, was displeased with it, and resented it to the highest degree; that He gave Adam power to abstain from eating the forbidden fruit, had he made use of it, so that he could have stood if he would; that God permitted or suffered Adam to sin and fall; and that our first parents, with the full consent of their wills, and without any force upon them, took and ate the forbidden fruit.”

In regard to the statement of Moses that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, it is also to be carefully observed that Moses repeatedly says that, after God removed His judgments, Pharaoh hardened his own heart; and, as God and Pharaoh were totally distinct persons, so the acts of the two in the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart were totally distinct. Pharaoh hardened his own heart ungratefully, wickedly and rebelliously against God; while God providentially, righteously and punitively hardened Pharaoh’s heart—by calamitous providences justly punishing Pharaoh for the latter’s long and cruel oppression of Israel; and each removal of the judgment, instead of relaxing, but intensified the rebellion of Pharaoh’s heart. “As the same heat of the sun softens wax and hardens mud, so the long-suffering of God softens some hearts while it hardens others.” Much of the language of the inspired writers was designed to comfort and sustain the spirit of God’s people in the midst of the greatest trials, by teaching them that all events are perfectly foreseen by God, and, in a sense, predetermined by Him, and will be overruled for good to His afflicted ones. “His absolute and universal dominion was constantly present to the minds of the children of God in ancient days. Its effect upon the mind was solemn and impressive, and never suggested the faintest presumption of injustice in God, even when the acts that were sinful in His creatures were traced in another sense to His holy and awful will. The Scripture, accordingly, never hesitates for a moment to ascribe absolute holiness to God, and all the guilt of every sinful act to the sinner.” As for anything occurring “by chance” or without a cause, no human being can possibly believe such a thing, even if his very life depended upon it; for the human mind is so constituted by the Creator as to necessarily believe that every event has a cause; and the use of the expression “by chance” simply means that the cause is unknown to the speaker or writer, and not at all that there is no cause. The belief in universal causation is a primitive and fundamental intuition of the human mind. All secondary causes point the thoughtful mind inevitably to the Great First Cause, Omniscient, Omnipotent and Omnipresent, and to His eternal sovereign will, either efficient or permissive, in accordance with which all events occur.

“No Primitive Baptist,” says Elder J. R. Respess, in the “Gospel Messenger,” “believes that God worked sin in man; it never has, in any age, been believed by the church, that God in His word forbade a thing, and that God in His Spirit prompted disobedience to His word. That would destroy His unity. But it is sin to violate God’s word, and hence repentance is required. God the Spirit convicts the sinner for violating the word of God; shows him his guilt. But if done by God’s prompting there would not nor could there be any sense of guilt for it; for it would be no sin. An effect follows from and is to be ascribed to the last immediate cause that produced it. Thus, for instance, if I hold a book in my hand, my holding it is the immediate cause of its not falling; but if I let it go, my letting it go is not the immediate cause of its falling; it is carried down by its own gravity, which is therefore the proper and immediate cause of its descent or fall. It is true, if I had kept my hold of it, it would not have fallen, yet still the immediate cause of its fall is its cwn weight, not my quitting hold. Without God there could have been no creation; without creation, no creatures; without creatures, no sin; yet sin is not chargeable to God.”

Learning that two Primitive Baptist Churches in Texas had withdrawn their fellowship from the doctrine of the absolute predestination of all things, Elder Respess writes: “This is the first time we have ever heard of this question being made a test of church fellowship, and we are sorry to hear it, because we believe it to be more a difference about words than in spirit. It has been believed by many eminent saints amongst the Baptists for probably centuries-we know it has ever since our remembrance. We have never ourselves professed to understand it: we couldn’t understand it. We have always believed about it as Elder Rowe does [that is, that God decreed to permit sin], but it has never affected our love and esteem for those precious brethren who do believe it [that is, the absolute predestination of all things]. Because we are unable to say they are wrong about it. It is a mystery that none can explain. There is one thing we all know, and that is, that nothing has happened or can happen by chance, and that smacks so much of decree that it shuts our mouth. This single Scripture is of itself sufficient to make brethren forbear with each other about it: ‘For of a truth against Thy holy child Jesus, whom Thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together to do whatever Thy hand and Thy counsel determined [decreed] before to be done,’ Acts 4:27,28. But it is a dangerous question if unskillfully handled; dangerous on both sides. On one side is the Scylla of presumptuous sins, and on the other side the Charybdis of Arminianism and infidelity.” The danger of being wrecked on either of these extremes, as we navigate the narrow channel of truth between them, “should warn us to forbear with each other as poor creatures of a day, who know nothing. Forbearance! the noble Christian virtue of forbearance is, and always has been, necessary to the unity and prosperity of the church. Oh how careful we should be not to confuse and divide the family of God! The true mother in Solomon’s day preferred the false mother to have her child than for it to be divided by the sword. Are we sound in experience, giving all the glory of our salvation to Christ, and in church order? then why make such a question [the absolute predestination of all things] a test of church fellowship? How few, how very few, of the little ones of Christ know what they are torn up about! Alas, how few! One may be wiser than another, but his wisdom should be used for edification; and it is lawful for some to know more than others. Some of the tribes of Israel did not go as far as others; some went over into the Promised Land, whilst others remained on the other side of Jordan; but there was no falling out about it; they were all Israelites and brethren.”

Thousands who will read these pages believe that there has been no scriptural uninspired teacher superior to the late Elder Gilbert Beebe, of Middletown, New York. In the first volume does it exonerate him from accountability; this may be discovered by noticing the following examples-the crucifixion of his “Editorials of the ‘Signs of the Times,’” pp. 30, 31, Elder Beebe says: “The doctrine of Absolute Predestination, when rightly understood, does not involve the idea of man’s acting involuntarily in sin; nor of Christ (Acts 4:27 compared with Acts 2:23), the abduction of Joseph, together with many other circumstances recorded in holy writ. The brethren of Joseph had no knowledge of the purpose of God when they sold him to go down to Egypt; they meant it for evil, but God ordained it for good (Gen. 1:20). When the Jews persecuted the disciples of our Lord Jesus into strange cities, they knew not that God had ordained this very method of sending His missionaries everywhere preaching the word. ‘The wrath of man shall praise Him, the remainder of that wrath He will restrain’ (Ps. 76:10). We need only to understand this precious doctrine, and we shall most assuredly love it. The Christian exults in the thought that death and hell can do no more than what our Father please.” And on page 130 he says: “Satan himself, if he could speak truth, would tell us that he could not drown a swine without the permission of God. [Notice the scriptural word permission.] Men and devils act voluntarily in sin, without the least regard to the purpose or decree of God; of whose purpose or decree they are totally unconscious. While they act from wicked motives, God means it for good; overrules even their wicked acts and murderous designs for His glory, and the good of all such as are the called according to His purpose.” Says Prof. Philip Schaff: “Absolute predestinarianism starts from the almighty power of God, but is checked by the moral sense and kept within the limits of infralapsarianism, which exempts the holy God from any agency in the fall of the race, and fastens the guilt of sin upon man.” “God’s decrees,” says Elder John Rowe, “are not the causes of men’s sins, any more than the sun is the cause of darkness. We may feel the greatest assurance that God is just in all His dealings.”

Why God decreed to permit sin to arise and continue in the universe, when He is infinitely wise, righteous, merciful and powerful, is a mystery equally insoluble by both Predestinarian and Arminian. But, whether we can understand the mystery or not, we know that the righteous Judge of the universe doeth all things right; and it becomes us sinful and foolish creatures to be perfectly submissive to Him. Of two things we are assured, both by the Scriptures and our own consciences,—1st. That God is not the cause or author of sin, but hates and punishes it; and 2nd. That we are ourselves blamable and justly punishable for our sins. Says the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “No Pelagian ever has or ever will work a religious revolution. It has become a commonplace of historical science that, in order to do or to endure great things, men must believe in one form or other of predestination. They must feel confident that they are made use of by God to accomplish things that to Him seem worthy, and that until these be accomplished no earthly power can defeat or harm them. They must feel that their will ia embraced in the Divine and empowered by it. And it is the consciousness of their own impotence that leads men to yield themselves as instruments of the Divine power. Pelagianism is the creed of quiet times and commonplace people; Augustinianism is the inevitable faith of periods that are dangerous and eventful, and in which men must exhibit some heroism.”

“Every true Christian,” says S. T. Coleridge, “must attribute his distinction not in any degree to himself—his own resolves and strivings, his own will and understanding, still less to his own comparative excellence—but to God, the Being in whom the promise of life originated, and on whom its fulfillment depends. Thus Election is a truth of Christian experience. This the conscience requires; this the highest interests of morality demand.” “Sin is a disease and attribute of the fallen will of man, and can only be remedied by the effective power of God.”

Says Elder W. M. Mitchell, of Alabama: “Predestination enters into every rational act of every intelligent creature, and puts them to work to carry out their predestinating plans; and it enters into every act of God, the Great Fountain of Intelligence. His works in nature, providence and grace are but the development and manifestation of His predestination. Our faith and hope and every grace are wrought in us by the effectual working of His ‘mighty power, which He wrought in Jesus when He raised Him from the dead.’ In the great covenant of redemption it is said, ‘All things are ordered and sure;’ but nothing is sure when man has a part to do to make it so. The _‘sure_ mercies of David,’ which are promised to the heirs of promise, depend for their certainty, not upon what man shall do, but upon what the Lord Jesus Christ hath done.”

Mr. C. H. Spurgeon says: “The sovereignty of God in the dispensation of His grace shines throughout both the Old and the New Testaments and throughout the history of the human race, and in every case of true conversion. It was shown, for instance, in the provision of salvation, not for fallen angels, but for fallen men; in Elijah’s being sent to a Gentile widow dwelling in Sarepta, a city of Sidon; in Elisha’s healing Naaman the Syrian of his leprosy, while he cleansed none of the lepers of national Israel; in the salvation of the extortionate publican, Zaccheus, and the adulterous woman of Samaria, and the blood-thirsty Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, and of the wicked John Newton and John Bunyan, and of every other sinner who shall be saved. This doctrine of the Bible and of Christian experience is perfectly consistent with all other scriptural truths—with all the sweet promises of the gospel to every hungry, thirsty, sin-sick soul. To be sure, when applied by the Holy Ghost, it strikes dead forever all the efforts of the flesh, all Pharisaic self-righteousness—like a potent hammer, it dashes out the brains of all a man’s works, merits, doings and willings, while it pronounces over the dead carcass this sentence: It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy; but then the best thing is done for a sinner that can be done as a stepping-stone to the act of faith. When a man is weaned from self, and totally delivered from looking to the flesh for help, there is hope for him; he is just ready to trust in Christ for salvation. What! am I to set a sinner industriously to labor after eternal life by his own works? Then, indeed, am I an ambassador of hell. Am I to teach him that there is a goodness in him which he is to evolve, to polish and educate and perfect, and so to save himself? Then I am a teacher of the beggarly elements of the law, and not the gospel of Christ. Are we to set forth man’s prayers, repentings and humblings as the way of salvation? If so, let us renounce the righteousness of Christ at once, for the two will never stand together. The impenitent sinner is an Arminian, and believes that any day he likes he can turn to God and be saved; so he walks about the world as comfortably as possible, thinking it all depends on himself, and that he will get into Heaven just at the eleventh hour. But the doctrine of election teaches that he is absolutely in God’s hands, to be saved or damned as God will, and, if he believed and felt this truth, he would cry to God for mercy and find it. Election is no discouragement to seeking souls,” says Mr. Spurgeon; but I would state the truth far more strongly in saying that election is the greatest possible and imaginable encouragement to seeking souls, because it declares that every sinner, who feels the need of and longs for God’s holy salvation, is already alive from the death of sin, because he has been quickened by God the Spirit, redeemed by God the Son, and elected, before the foundation of the world, to eternal life by God the Father; and thus, notwithstanding the opposition of the flesh, the world and the devil, his everlasting salvation in glory is just as sure as that an unchanging and almighty God sits upon His throne; and, consequently, he is encouraged never to give up in despair his struggle with his spiritual enemies.

Elder John Rowe, of Columbus, Ga., is the author of an admirable work (Elder Rowe’s work may be had of him by mail for 75 cents per copy, or six copies for $3.50.) entitled, “A Practical Discourse on the Sovereignty of God,” from which I will make a few extracts. “While the blessings of the old covenant were conditional and temporal, the blessings of the new covenant are unconditional and spiritual and eternal. There would be no salvation for poor, perishing sinners, were it not secured to them some other way than by their own choice—their choice being to serve Satan instead of God. If redemption only renders salvation possible to men, and if yet it is left to their free will whether they apply for it or not, then we have less in Christ than we had in Adam; for in Adam we had freedom of will without any bias upon our minds; and if yet Satan prevailed over our free will as it was, what may we expect now since so strong a bent to evil has come upon our minds? If free will was not able to keep off the disease, surely now as it is it cannot effect a cure, especially when we love the disease and hate the remedy—this is the worst symptom of our case, and except it be removed there is no cure for us, and nothing but free and sovereign grace will remove it. Good fruit is not the condition but the evidence of a good tree; even so repentance, faith, holiness of character, etc., are not conditions but evidences of our election; and we see not why to make faith, repentance and good works an evidence of election should not be as great a motive to obedience as to make them a condition of election. The Spirit’s work in the heart is an unmistakable evidence of personal election.”

In a recent number of the “Signs of the Times,” Elder F. A. Chick, of Maryland, speaking of Satan’s question, “Doth Job fear God for naught?” says: “It seems to me that in this question is involved all the difference between him who serves God and him who serves self; between gospel obedience and legal obedience; between the religion of Christ and the religion of the world. Do we serve God from motives of policy or from principle? for reward or for the delight of the service? Do we obey God as a child, or as a slave? as water runs down hill, or as it is forced up hill? All who profess to serve God at all are ranged upon either the affirmative or the negative of these questions. According as these questions may be answered concerning us, are we actuated by the Spirit of Christ, or are we not. If a man is honest because honesty is the best policy, he is no more honest than the man who cheats and steals because he thinks that it is the best policy for him to do so. If a man is rendering obedience to any of the commands of God because he expects to gain Heaven or escape hell by it, he is in no wise any better than he that makes no pretense at serving anything but his own lusts. All natural, fleshly, Arminian religion looks at the matter just as Satan does in this question. This religion is essentially a worship of self, and a seeking to glorify self. It seeks not to honor God only but as it imagines that by so doing it can exalt and secure praise to self. Self is the great consideration and end, not God. Self is the centre around which sun, moon and stars revolve. Deity is, according to this system, only a satellite moved and controlled by the central self. This worldly religion is Satanic, therefore, in its nature. It does not attempt to serve God ‘for naught,’ and does not believe in such a thing. While professing to uphold virtue, it robs virtue of its virtuousness by holding up selfish ends always to view as the motives for being virtuous. Its votaries appeal to fear and hope as the chief reasons why men should seek the Lord and become religious. They make it a mere matter of bargain and sale, or exchange of commodities, in which man strives to get the best end of the bargain. In this plan, while the name of virtue is retained, its very substance is lost, and but the shell remains. This fleshly religion, whose spirit is from below, and whose nature is seen in this question of the Devil, ‘Doth Job fear God for naught?’ denies that there is any such thing as serving God from love, and so appeals to the lowest selfishness of man’s nature, striving to reform the outward manners, while self and pride still reign supreme within. Like Satan, it denies that there is any such thing as unselfish virtue, or that any man ‘serves God for naught.’ On the contrary, the religion of Christ presents an entirely opposite ground for obedience. It recognizes virtue for virtue’s own sake. It claims to give such a spirit to man that, if he had no hope of Heaven or fear of hell, no expectation of good in this life, or fear of temporal evil, he still would follow holiness, esteeming its possession greater riches than all other treasures. Nothing short of this can be counted as the service of God. All else is serving self. Now Satan denies that there is any such service possible. He says, and his followers say, that reward is and must be the motive appealed to in every case—that there is no such thing as holiness for holiness’ sake. Satanic religion is today the religion of the masses of men. And the religion which has Arminianism for its basis withers virtue, and takes away all but its name, just as surely as does the man who breaks in detail every commandment of the decalogue. Self-seeking is as hateful to God and as foreign to true righteousness in one form as in another. The Pharisee who thinks that what he does is gain to him, is as much the enemy of God as any publican or sinner; yea, more of an enemy. After Job was stripped of everything he still worshiped God; and thus it is made plain as noonday that there is in the religion of God our Savior power to produce unselfish obedience and disinterested service in men. And the assertion of Satan is thus given the lie. The friends of Job, too, are firm believers in the religion of self. If Job were righteous (say they) he would be blessed; being afflicted, it is evident that he is unrighteous. They plainly exhort him to seek God, to be at peace with Him, and urge as the motive, ‘Thereby good shall come unto thee.’ They make self the turning point; but the whole spirit of Job revolts at this. He knows that it is not for this reason that he serves God. He cannot see through all the ways of God, he cannot see God Himself, but yet he believes in God; and he in substance says, I do not fear God for hire. Out of his own heart’s experience he found an answer to confound all their legal reasonings, and to trample upon that system of religion which has its origin in a Satanic pride, which bids a man think he is something when he is nothing.

“In this wonderful book we see the question of Satan answered in the affirmative. Job does fear God for naught. His is not a legal service. It is the obedience of faith. Love is its substance. In this book, too, we see the question answered as to what liberty in Christ is. Christian obedience rests not upon the slavish idea of rewards and punishments, but is the large, noble freedom of a heart which loves God, and spontaneously follows Him. All else that claims to be true religion is a lie, and does credit to its author, the father of lies. Millions are deceived by it today, and its votaries have no shame in confessing that they serve God for hire. Miserable misnomen! Say rather that they are serving their own selves. Brethren, how heart-searching is the question, Do you and I serve God for hire? Do we love holiness for holiness’ sake? I have to confess feeling much legality about me yet. Still I believe that I do love the service of God for its own sake. 0 to be more like Jesus, who said it was His meat and drink to do the will of His Father in Heaven.”

Mr. George B. Taylor, a New School Baptist, in his pamphlet entitled “The Origin of the Baptists,” after showing that there have been Baptist Churches from the close of the first century to the present time, well says: “And now will you be surprised if I say that I lay little or no stress upon all this as proof that we are right? It has its value, for it is truth, and all truth is precious. It is also well calculated to encourage Baptists of the present day, and especially those who, like ourselves, have much to contend with, to see that our principles have thus fought their way through the ages, conducted by God’s own mighty hand. But it is not on the example of man that we depend, but on the word of God. Satisfactory evidence that the principles we hold and the ordinances we administer are taught in the New Testament is worth more than all human testimony or practice in their favor. Such is my conviction that Scripture is the true, the only standard, that if there were not a Baptist on earth, and I had no evidence that there had ever been one since apostolic times, finding Baptist principles and practices in the New Testament, I would leave all Christendom, and leap over the ages, contented to be found in the path of simple obedience to the word of God. I ask, then, were not the churches of the New Testament Baptist Churches? We believe that they were, being made up of believers, and believers only, who, believing in Christ and confessing their sins, were buried with Christ in baptism. I humbly claim that we originated, not at the Reformation, nor in the Dark Ages, nor in any century after the Apostles; but that our marching orders are the Commission, and that the first Baptist Church was the church at Jerusalem. And I beg you, calling no man master, like the Berean Jews, to search the Scriptures daily, whether these things be so.”

Now it is certain that the doctrines and practices, inventions and institutions originated by the Catholics and imitated, during the last hundred years, by the Protestants, including the New School Baptists, are not found in the New Testament; and, therefore, the Old School or Primitive Baptists, who have steadfastly repudiated all these religious innovations, looking above all uninspired testimony and example, appeal, with still greater confidence than Mr. Taylor and his brethren, for the Divine origin and authority of their faith and practice, to the standard of the apostolic church described in the New Testament.

The doctrine that we believe is experimentally unfolded in A. M. Toplady’s “Living and Dying Prayer,” which may it please the Lord to give all of us the grace to adopt as our own, as we personally plead with Him for salvation from sin:—

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee!
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

“Not the labors of my hands
Can fulfill Thy law’s demands;
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow,
All for sin could not atone;
Thou must save, and Thou alone.

“Nothing in my hand I bring;
Simply to Thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die!

“While I draw this fleeting breath,
When my eye-strings break in death,-
When I soar through tracts unknown,-
See Thee on Thy judgment-throne;-
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee!”

1. Mr. W. E. Gladstone, in his speech in the English House of Commons, March 5, 1880, said that it was estimated that greater calamities are inflicted on mankind by intemperance than by wars, pestilence and famine. England is the hardest drinking country in the world; about 120,000 of her people die annually from alcoholism. The 200,000 liquor saloons in the United States kill about 100,000 drunkards per year. It is officially, but I think extravagantly, computed that the results of the use of alcoholic stimulants in England are: nine-tenths of the paupers, three-fourths of the criminals, one-half the diseases, one-third of the insanity, three-fourths of the depravity of the young, and one-third of the shipwrecks-a ghastly catalogue of evils. Distillation is a product of modern civilization-unknown to the ancients and to savages. Alcohol is not a food, and rarely, if ever, a proper medicine, having been altogether abandoned by some of the most eminent and successful physicians of Europe. Alcohol is “the very genius of degeneration,”-clots the blood, overworks the heart, dilates the capillaries, retards digestion, ulcerates the stomach, substitutes an unhealthy fat for healthy tissue, chills the body, soon after being taken, two degrees below the normal temperature, so that its use has had to be discontinued in Arctic expeditions, paralyzes the nerves, crazes the brain, deadens the conscience, opens the system to the attacks of disease, and propagates its evils to the fourth generation. Itself a poison, about twenty of the rankest poisons are used to adulterate and color and expand it. In ancient Pagan Athens, a citizen seen to enter a drinking shop was disgraced for life. The Mohammedan Sultan, Soliman I., ordered that melted lead should be poured down the throats of drinkers See Axel Gustafson’s “Foundation of Death-A Study of the Drink Question,” summing up the results of three thousand books in regard to the effects of alcohol.

2. Of course, if there are some spiritual worshipers of God among the Roman Catholics, there are also some such worshipers among all the various bodies of Protestants (Rev. 5:9, 10, 7:9, 10). There may be more or less darkness in the head, while at the same time grace exists in the heart. Even inspired Apostles, while on earth, knew only in part, and saw through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 8:2, 13:9, 12). More light would give us more comfort, and cause us to give more glory to God.

3. I am myself a personal witness of the increasingly gross and ruinous perversions of scriptural truth taught in “Sabbath schools” and at “protracted meetings,” and also of the, lamentable effects of such teaching. Of course, to the teaching of the truth, in a tender and reverential manner, by any persons who know the truth, to any persons, at any becoming time and place, neither I nor any Primitive Baptist will object; but the obscuration of God’s holiness and power and of man’s sinfulness and dependence is the exact opposite of the truth, and yet such obscuration is the usual tendency of the teaching at “Sabbath Schools” and “protracted meetings.”

4. In proof of this statement, see “The Sabbath for Man” by Wilbur F. Crafts (published for $1.50 by Funk & Wagnalls, New York), pages 450-480.
Josiah W. Leeds, in his admirable little work on “The Theatre,” page 53, says: “In the report of the Howard Association, of London, for the year 1880, it was stated on the authority of the chaplain of Clerkenwell Prison, that out of fifty boys sent to the prison from the ages of nine and one-half to sixteen years, forty-eight had been Sunday School scholars, of whom forty-two had attended regularly, and twenty-nine had received prizes.”

5. In the report of the proceedings of the Presbyterian Synod of North Carolina, published in the Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star, Nov. 17, 1883, “Dr. Wison” is stated to have said: “Faith leads to prayer, and prayer is transmuted to gold, and God condescends to use gold for the conversion of the world.” In the report of the proceedings of the Baptist Home Missionary Society, held at Saratoga Springs, New York, May 28, 1885, the New York Examiner of June 4, 1885, states that Dr. MacArthur said: “If a man is not making money, and feels that he is becoming an unchristlike Christian, he must give to save his soul. If a man is making money and is becoming hard-hearted, he must give to save his soul. If a man is in neither of these conditions, but liberal, he must give in larger measure.” Says Mr. R. B. Cook, in his recently published “Story of the Baptists in All Ages and Countries:” “Instead of falling behind, we ought henceforth to lead all other denominations in our contributions for saving perishing souls.” See A. Judson’s Letter in the latter part of this volume.

6. To economize space, as I am permitted to make but the briefest allusion to the most of these matters, I have presented, in this one long sentence the most faithful photograph that I am able to draw of the chaotic nineteenth century. While there are, in the picture, many bright scenes, there are far more numerous spots and vistas of darkness. The best informed and most candid observers unite in declaring that, after all our progress, this is still a very sinful and miserable world, and man’s only well-grounded hope is in God.

7. The Scriptures are both literally and spiritually true. The prophecies of the Old Testament in reference to the coming of Christ had not only a spiritual fulfillment in every believer during that dispensation before His personal coming to the earth, but also a literal fulfillment in His First Advent to the world to redeem His people (see 1 Cor. 15:3-8; 1 John 4:3; 2 John 1:7); and, in the same manner, the prophecies of the New Testament in reference to the coming of Christ will have not only a spiritual fulfillment in every believer during the present dispensation, but also a literal fulfillment in His Second or Last Advent to the world, to raise the bodies of the dead, and change the bodies of the living, and conduct the general and final judgment, and publicly manifest His righteousness in the salvation of His people and in the overthrow of His enemies (John 5:22, 27-29; 1 Thess. 4:15-18; 1 Cor. 11:26, 15:23, 15:50-57; Matt. 11:22, 24, 25:31-46; Acts 1:11, 17:31; Rom. 2:6-10; 2 Thess. 1:7-10; Heb. 9:28; Rev 1:7, 6:14-17, 20:11-15). In Matthew 24 and Matthew 25 and Mark 13 “our Lord’s reply distinguishes, though with the obscurity of prophetical language, between a first coming in judgment during that generation, and a second coming at the end of the world, of which the time was known to none but the Father. The contrast between ‘these_ things’ (tauta),_ in Matt 24:34 and Mark 13:30, and ’that day and hour (ekeine emera kai ora), in Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32, distinctly shows the twofold application of the previous language, and the two events marked off from each other. The earthly kingdom of Christ shall be manifested to this generation: His heavenly kingdom shall come at a time which God only knows. The expression that day is elsewhere used, as here, without any expressed antecedent. to signify the Day of Judgment (see Matt. 7:22; Luke 10:12; 2 Tim. 1:12, 18, 4:8).”
The perfection of sophistry, in explaining away all the literal, and indeed nearly if not quite all the real, meaning of the eschatological predictions of the New Testament, may be seen in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and in the recent universalist book, “Mercy and Judgment,” by F. W. Farrar.
While sustained by the grace of God, I can never believe in the literal falsehood of any of the statements of the Holy Scriptures, especially of the Lord Jesus Christ, with reference either to the past or the future.

8. “Pantheism,” says H. Heine, “is really Atheism ashamed of itself, dreading not so much the thing as the shadow it flings on the wall-the name.” “In my review of all human races,” says the eminent French anthropologist, M. Quatrefages, “I have sought atheism in the lowest as well as the highest; but I have nowhere met with it, except in individuals, or in more or less limited schools, such as those which existed in Europe in last century, or may still be seen at the present day.”

9. See the Introduction to this volume, under Criticism, p. 4.

10. The Athenian philosopher Plato, a disciple of Socrates, lived 427-328 B. C. His philosophy is described in the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge as pre-eminently spiritual, theistic, teleological, ethical, religious and retributive; but devoid of proper ideas of sin and grace -deficient, not so much in the wisdom of God, as in the power of God unto salvation. This deficiency is an essential part of all Rationalism, including Arminianism.

11. They sometimes admit, and sometimes deny, the innate depravity of the human race since the Fall; and they distinctly and emphatically abandon the central doctrine of Protestantism, the justification of the Christian by faith alone, and return to the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification by faith and works (or rather work-baptism being the one great work with them).

12. See Prof. Richard T. Ely’s “French and German Socialism in Modern Times,” and “Recent American Socialism”-the latest and most authoritative works on these important subjects.

13. It is proper to remark that the great majority of Primitive Baptists understand these truths in precisely the same way, but that some few understand them differently. I am satisfied that the differences are mainly wars of words, and that they would disappear if the parties could meet in person and in the right spirit.

14. These numbers form the result of the inquiries made by myself as special agent of the United States Census Office for the census of 1880.

15. Let it be remembered that there was not the slightest particle of Arminianism in Elder Wilson Thompson’s preaching; he uncompromisingly proclaimed at this time, and at all other periods of his ministry, the scriptural doctrine of salvation by the sovereign, discriminating, efficacious grace of God. He did not, by the proclamation of false doctrine, gather into his churches a bushel of chaff for every grain of wheat; for mere numbers and dollars were in no sense his object.

16. Elder John M. Watson, in “The Old Baptist Test,” published, in 1865, a masterly “Refutation of the Manichaeo-Parkerite Heresy.” And Elder George Y. Stipp, of Henning, Ill., published in 1879 an able “Refutation of the Doctrine called ‘Two Seeds’”—a pamphlet which may be procured from the author at twenty-five cents per copy.

Chapter XX. Kehukee Association from 1765 to 1802.

History of the Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association, and of the Primitive Baptists of America.

"By Elder C. B. Hassell.
(With Occasional Matter by Elder S. Hassell, Indicated by the Initials "S. H.")

We enter now upon the task of stating some things connected with the history of one of the most remarkable bodies of Christians in America. Remarkable, we say, not for numbers, wealth or learning, but for age, simplicity, adherence to the faith once delivered to the saints, and endurance under persecution, scoff and derision almost unrivaled in the nineteenth century within the limits of the United States. She has long since become the butt of displeasure among nearly all _professed denominations called “Christian,” and, particularly so, among those who have departed from apostolic faith and practice, calling themselves “Baptists.”

As “Black-Rockism” in the Middle and Northern States has become a by-word of reproach in the mouths of religionists, so has Kehukeeism in the Southern States been regarded as a synonym of all that is heretical and immoral by many who profess to love God and His people, and especially by those who claim the ancient and honorable name of “Baptists,” but who are nevertheless endeavoring to substitute human inventions for the church of Christ, and the rudiments of the world for the principles of gospel truth.

The present and future generations of men must decide who is on the Lord’s side; and whether the churches composing the Kehukee Association are churches of Christ, walking in gospel order, and governed by the discipline laid down in the New Testament by the blessed Savior and His Apostles, or whether they are heretical bodies of only a half-century’s growth.

To the end that their good name may be vindicated, that a fungus growth may not be substituted for the tree itself, that another gospel (which is not another) may not be substituted for the gospel of Christ, and that the descendants and successors of the present Baptist family may have evidence at hand in all time to come to show conclusively that their fathers were Primitive Baptists in truth, continuing steadfastly in the Apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, the present history has been undertaken, with the fear of God, as we humbly trust, before our eyes, and His love shed abroad in our hearts.

The Kehukee Association appears to have been the fourth Association of Baptist Churches in America; Philadelphia the first; Charleston the second; Sandy Creek the third; and Kehukee the fourth. The Philadelphia was formed in 1707; the Charleston in 1751; the Sandy Creek in 1758; and the Kehukee in 1765.

In the year 1765, at a meeting-house called “Kehukee,” situated near Kehukee Creek, in Halifax County, N. C., this Association was first formed, consisting of the following named churches: 1. Toisnot, in Edgecombe County; 2. Kehukee, in Halifax County; 3. Falls of Tar River, in Edgecombe County; 4. Fishing Creek, in Halifax County; 5. Sandy Creek, in Warren County; 6. Sandy Run, in Bertie County; 7. A church in Camden County. It is said that the number seven is a perfect number. It is the leading symbolical number so often mentioned in the Scriptures, and was the identical number of churches in Asia addressed by John while in the Isle of Patmos.

If those seven churches of Asia represented or were typical of the whole number throughout the world, may it not be that these seven named above were typical of the number since belonging to the Kehukee Association and all true churches on the American Continent?

A majority of these churches, it is stated, were the descendants of the English General Baptists at first, but, before they united in an associated capacity, they were thoroughly established in the doctrine of grace, and adopted the London Articles of Faith of 1689; upon which the Philadelphia and Charleston Associations were also founded.

The churches of this order were first gathered in North Carolina by Elders Paul Palmer and Joseph Parker, who were succeeded by a number of ministers whom they had baptized. According to Morgan Edwards’ account, there were some individual Baptists in North Carolina as early as 1695; but it appears that the first church which ever existed within its bounds was gathered by Paul Palmer about the year 1727, at. a place called Perquimmons, on Chowan River, towards the Northeast corner of the State. Mr. Palmer is said to have been a native of Maryland, was baptized at Welsh Tract, in Delaware, by Thomas Owens, the pastor of the church in that place; was ordained in Connecticut, but was some time in New Jersey and then in Maryland; he at last moved to North Carolina, where he gathered the church above mentioned, with which he continued till his death.

Before these churches were organized into an associate body they held yearly meetings, wherein matters of consequence were discussed and determined.

Elders Van Horn and Miller, of New Jersey, belonging to the Philadelphia Association, were sent in 1755 into the Southern Colonies and visited these churches in North Carolina. Through their ministry the churches became better established in the doctrine of salvation by grace, and some were organized anew upon that principle, until the greater number of what few churches were gathered in North Carolina (both ministers and private members) came into the regular Baptist order.

The following is the original text of the London Articles or Confession of Faith, originally put forth by the Elders and brethren of more than one hundred congregations of Christians (baptized upon profession of their faith) in London in 1689.[1]

These articles of 1689 appear to have been a confirmation and enlargement of those adopted by seven churches of the same faith and order in London in the year 1643; so that those who now indorse the articles of 1689 may know that they stand where their brethren in London stood in 1643.

We, the Ministers and Messengers of, and concerned for, upwards of one hundred baptized congregations in England and Wales (denying Arminianism), being met together in London from the third of the seventh month till the eleventh of the same, 1689, to consider of some things that might be for the glory of God and the good of these congregations, have thought meet (for the satisfaction of all other Christians that differ from us in the point of baptism) to recommend to their perusal the Confession of our Faith, printed for and sold by John Marshall, at the Bible in Grace Church street. Which Confession we own as containing the doctrine of our faith and practice, and do desire that the members of our churches respectively do furnish themselves therewith.

Hanserd Knollys,

Thomas Vaux,

Richard Ring,

William Kiffin,

Thomas Winnel,

John Tomkins,

John Harris,

James Hitt,

Toby Willis,

William Collins,

Richard Tidmarsh,

John Carter,

Hercules Collins,

William Facy,

James Webb,

Robert Steed,

Samuel Buttal,

Richard Sutton,

Leonard Harrison,

Christopher Price,

Robert Knight,

George Barret,

Daniel Finch,

Edward Price,

Isaac Lamb,

John Ball,

William Phips,

Richard Adams,

Edmond White,

William Hankins,

Benjamin Keach,

William Pritchard,

Samuel Ewer,

Andrew Grifford,

Paul Fruin,

Edward Man,

Charles Archer

In the name and behalf of the whole Assembly.

To the Judicious and Impartial Reader.

Courteous Reader:

It is now many years since divers of us (with other sober Christians then living and walking in the way of the Lord that we profess) did conceive ourselves to be under a necessity of publishing a Confession of our Faith for the information and satisfaction of those that did not thoroughly understand what our principles were, or had entertained prejudices against our profession by reason of the strange representation of them by some men of note Who had taken very wrong measures, and accordingly others into misapprehension of us and them. And this was put forth about the year 1643, in the names of seven Congregations then gathered in London; since which time divers impressions thereof have been dispersed abroad, slid our end proposed, ill good measures answered, inasmuch as many (and some of those men eminent both for piety and learning) were thereby satisfied that we were no way guilty of those heterodoxies and fundamental errors which had too frequently been charged upon us without ground or occasion given on our part. And forasmuch as that Confession is not now commonly to be had, and also that many others have since embraced the same truth which is owned therein, it was judged necessary by us to join together in giving a testimony to the world of our firm adhering to those wholesome principles, by the publication of this which is now in your hand.

And forasmuch as our method and manner of expressing our Sentiments in this doth vary from the former (although the substance of this matter is the same), we shall freely impart to you the reason and occasion thereof. One thing that greatly prevailed with us to undertake this work was (not only to give a full account of ourselves to those Christians that differ from us about the subject of baptism, but also) the profit that might from thence arise unto those that have any account of our labors, in their instruction and establishment in the great truths of the gospel, in the clear understanding and steady belief of which our comfortable walking with God and fruitfulness before Him in all our ways is most nearly concerned; and therefore we did conclude it necessary to express ourselves the more fully and distinctly, and also to fix on such a. method as might be most comprehensive of those things we designed to explain our sense and belief of; and finding no defect in this regard in that fixed on by the Assembly, and after them by those of the Congregational way, we did readily conclude it best to retain the same order in our present Confession; and also when we observed that those last-mentioned did in their confessions (for reasons which seemed of weight both to themselves and others) choose not only to express their mind in words concurrent with the former in sense concerning all those articles wherein they were agreed, but also for the most part without any variation of the terms, we did in like manner conclude it best to follow their example in making use of the very same words with them both in these articles (which are very many), wherein our faith and doctrine is the same with theirs, and this we did the more abundantly to manifest our consent with both in all the fundamental articles of the Christian religion, as also with many others whose orthodox confessions have been published to the world on behalf of the Protestants in divers nations and cities; and, also, to convince all that we have no itch to clog Religion with new words, but do readily acquiesce in that form of sound words which hath been in consent with the Holy Scriptures used by others before us; hereby declaring before God, angels and men our hearty agreement with them in that wholesome Protestant doctrine, which with so clear evidence of Scripture they have asserted. Some things indeed are in some places added, some terms omitted, and some few changed; but these alterations are of that nature as that we need not doubt any charge or suspicion of unsoundness in the faith from any of our brethren upon the account of them.

In those things wherein we differ from others, we have expressed ourselves with all candor and plainness, that none might entertain jealousy of aught secretly lodged in our breasts, that we would not the world should be acquainted with; yet we hope we have also observed those rules of modesty and humility as will render our freedom in this respect inoffensive even to those whose sentiments are different from ours.

We have also taken care to affix texts of Scripture for the confirmation of each article in our confession, in which work we have studiously endeavored to select such as are most clear and pertinent for the proof of what is asserted by us. And our earnest desire is that all into whose hands this may come would follow that (never enough commended) example of the noble Bereans, who searched the Scriptures daily that they might find out whether the things preached to them were so or not.

There is one thing more which we sincerely profess and earnestly desire credence in, viz.: That contention is most remote from our design in all that we have done in this matter; and we hope the liberty of an ingenuous unfolding our principles and opening our hearts unto our brethren, with the Scripture grounds of our faith and practice, will by none of them be either denied to us, or taken ill from us. Our whole design is accomplished if we may obtain that justice, as to be measured in our principles and practice, and the judgment of both by others, according to what we have now published; which the Lord (whose eyes are a flame of fire) knoweth to be the doctrine which with our hearts we most firmly believe and sincerely endeavor to conform our lives to. And oh! that other contentions being laid asleep, the only care and contention of all upon whom the name of our blessed Redeemer is called, might for the future be to walk humbly with their God in the exercise of all love and meekness towards each other; to perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord, each one endeavoring to have his conversation such as becometh the gospel, and also suitable to his place and capacity, vigorously to promote in others the practice of true religion, and undefiled in the sight of God our Father; and that, in this backsliding day, we might not spend our breath in fruitless complaints of the evils of others, but may every one begin at home to reform in the first place our own hearts and ways, and then to quicken all that we may have influence upon to the same work; that if the will of God were so, none might deceive themselves by resting in and trusting to a form of godliness without the power of it, and inward experience of the efficacy of those truths that are professed by them.

And verily there is one spring and cause of the decay of religion in our day which we cannot but touch upon and earnestly urge a redress of, and that is the neglect of the worship of God in families by those to whom the charge and conduct of them is committed. May not the gross ignorance and instability of many, with the profaneness of others, be justly charged upon their parents and masters, who have not trained them up in the way wherein they ought to walk when they were young, but have neglected those frequent and solemn commands which the Lord hath laid upon them, so to catechize and instruct them that their tender years might be seasoned with the knowledge of the truth of God as revealed in the Scriptures, and also by their own omission of prayer and other duties of religion in their families, together with the ill example of their loose conversation, have inured them first to a neglect, and then contempt, of all piety and religion?. We know this will not excuse the blindness and wickedness of any; but certainly it will fall heavy upon those that have been thus the occasion thereof. They indeed die in their sins; but will not their blood be required of those under whose care they were, who yet permitted them to go on without warning, yea, led them into the paths of destruction? And will not the diligence of Christians, with respect to the discharge of these duties, in ages past, rise up in judgment against and condemn many of those who would be esteemed such now?

We shall conclude with our earnest prayer that the God of all grace will pour out those measures of His Holy Spirit upon us, that the profession of truth may be accompanied with the sound belief and diligent practice of it by us, that His name may in all things be glorified, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

A Confession of Faith.

Chapter I.—Of the Holy Scriptures.

1. The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain and infallible (2 Tim. 3:15-17; Isa. 8:20; Luke 16:29, 31;0 Eph. 2:20) of all saving knowledge, faith and obedience; although the (Rom. 1:19-21, 2:14, 15; Ps. 19:1-3) light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom and power of God as to leave men unexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and His will which is necessary unto salvation (Heb. 1:1). Therefore it pleased the Lord at sundry times and in divers manners to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto His church; and afterward for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto (Prov. 22:19-21; Rom. 15:4; 2 Peter 1:19, 20) writing; which maketh the Holy Scriptures to be most necessary, those former ways of God revealing His will unto His people being now ceased.

2. Under the name of Holy Scripture, or the word of God written, are now contained all the books of the Old and New Testaments, which are these:

Of the Old Testament.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First Samuel, Second Samuel, First Kings, Second Kings, First Chronicles, Second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.

Of the New Testament.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, The Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First Thessalonians, Second Thessalonians, First Timothy, Second Timothy, to Titus, to Philemon, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of James, the First and Second Epistles of Peter, the First, Second and Third Epistles of John, the Epistle of Jude, the Revelation. All of which are given by the (2 Tim. 3:16) inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.

3. The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of (Luke 24:27, 44; Rom. 3:2) Divine inspiration, are not part of the canon (or rule) of Scripture, and therefore are of no authority to the church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings.

4. The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon (2 Peter 1:19, 21; 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Thess. 2:13; 1 John 5:9) God (who is truth itself), the author thereof; therefore it is to be received, because it is the word of God.

5. We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church of God to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scriptures; and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, and the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, and many other incomparable excellencies and entire perfections thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God; yet notwithstanding our (John 16:13, 14; 1 Cor. 2:10-12; 1 John 2:20, 27) full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and Divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts.

6. The whole counsel of God concerning all things (2 Tim. 3:15-17; Gal. 1:8, 9) necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture; unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit, or traditions of men.

Nevertheless we acknowledge the (John 6:45; 1 Cor. 2:9-12) inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the word, and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God and government of the church common to human actions and societies which are to be (1 Cor. 11:13, 14, 14:26, 40) ordered by the light of nature and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the word, which are always to be observed.

7. All things in Scriptures are not alike (2 Peter 3:16) plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation are so (Ps. 19:7, 119:130) clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain to a sufficient understanding of them.

8. The Old Testament in (Rom. 3:2) Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old) and the New Testament in Greek, which (at the time of writing it) was most generally known to the nations, being immediately inspired by God, and by His singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore (Isa. 8:20) authentical; so as in all controversies of religion the church is finally to appeal unto them. (Acts 15:15) But because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God, who have a right unto and an interest in the Scriptures, and are commanded in the fear of God to read (John 5:39) and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they (1 Cor. 14:6, 9, 11, 12, 24, 28) come, that the word of God dwelling (Col. 3:16) plentifully in all, they may worship Him in an acceptable manner, and through patience and comfort of the Scriptures may hope.

9. The infallible rule or interpretation of the Scripture (2 Peter 1:20, 21; Acts 15:15, 16) is the Scripture itself; and therefore when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it may be searched by other places that speak more clearly.

10. The supreme Judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Scriptures delivered by the Spirit, into which (Matt. 22:29, 33; Eph. 2:20; Acts 28:23) Scriptures so delivered our faith is finally resolved.

Chapter II.—Of God and of the Holy Trinity.

1. The Lord our God is but (1 Cor. 8:6; Deut. 6:4) one only living and true God, whose (Jer. 10:10; Isa. 48:12) subsistence is in and of Himself, (Ex. 3:14) infinite in being and perfection, whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but Himself; (John 4:24) a most pure Spirit, (1 Tim. 1: 17; Deut. 4:15, 16) invisible, without body, parts or passions, who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, who is (Mal. 3:6) immutable, (1 Kings 8:27; Jer. 23:23) immense, (Ps. 90:2) eternal, incomprehensible, (Gen. 17:1) almighty, every way infinite, (Isa. 6:3) most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute, (Ps. 115:3; Isa. 46:10) working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, (Prov. 16:4; Rom. 11:36) for His own glory, most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, (Ex. 34:6, 7; Heb. 11:6) the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, and withal most just (Neh. 9:32, 33) and terrible in His judgments, (Ps. 5:5, 6) hating all sin, and will by no means clear the (Ex. 36:7; Nah. 1:2, 3) guilty.

2. God having all (John 5:26) life, (Ps. 148:13) glory, (Ps. 119:68) goodness, blessedness, in and of Himself, is alone in and unto Himself all sufficient, not (Job 22:2, 3) standing in any need of any creature which He hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting His own glory in, by, unto and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, (Rom. 11:34-36) of whom, through whom and to whom are all things; and He hath most sovereign (Dan. 4:25, 34, 35) dominion over all creatures, to do by them, for them or upon them whatsoever Himself pleaseth. In his sight (Heb. 4:13) all things are open and manifest. His knowledge is (Ezek. 6:5; Acts 15:18) infinite, infallible and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to Him contingent or uncertain. He is most holy in all His counsels, in (Ps. 145:17) all His works and in all His commands. To Him is due (Rev. 5:12-14) from men and angels whatsoever worship, service or obedience as creatures they owe unto the Creator, and whatever He is further pleased to require of them.

3. In this Divine and infinite being there are three subsistences, (1 John 5:7; Matt. 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14) the Father, the Word (or Son) and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power and eternity, each having the whole Divine essence, (Ex. 3:14; John 14:11; 1 Cor. 8:6) yet the essence undivided. The Father is of none neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is (John 1:14, 18) eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Spirit (John 15:26; Gal. 4:6) proceeding from the Father and the Son, all infinite, without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar, relative properties and personal relations; which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence on Him.

Chapter III.—Of God’s Decree.

1. God hath (Isa. 46:10; Eph. 1:11; Heb. 6:7; Rom. 9:15, 18) decreed in Himself from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably, all things whatsoever come to pass; yet so as thereby is God neither the author of sin, (James 1:15, 17; 1 John 1:5) nor hath fellowship with any therein; nor is violence offered to the will of the creature, nor yet is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather (Acts 4:27, 28; John 19:11) established, in which appears His wisdom in disposing all things, and power and faithfulness (Num. 23:19; Eph. 1:3-5) in accomplishing His decree.

2. Although God knoweth whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all (Acts 15:18) supposed conditions, yet hath He not decreed anything, (Rom. 9:11, 13, 16, 18) because he foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.

3. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, (1 Tim. 5:21; Matt. 25:41) some men and angels are predestinated or foreordained to eternal life, through Jesus Christ, to the (Eph. 1:5, 6) praise of His glorious grace; others being left to act in their sin to their (Rom. 9:22, 23; Jude 1:4) just condemnation, to the praise of His glorious justice.

4. These angels and men thus predestinated and foreordained are particularly and unchangeably designed; and their (2 Tim. 2:19; John 13:18) number so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or diminished.

5. Those of mankind (Eph. 1:4, 9, 11; Rom. 8:30; 2 Tim. 1:9; 1 Thess. 5:9) that are predestinated to life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal, immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, hath chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love, (Rom. 9:13, 16; Eph. 2:9, 12) without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving Him thereunto.

6. As God hath appointed the elect unto glory, so He hath by the eternal and most free purpose of His will foreordained (1 Peter 1:2; 2 Thess. 2:13) all the means thereunto; wherefore they who are elected, being fallen in Adam, (1 Thess. 5:9, 10) are redeemed by Christ, are effectually (Rom. 8:30; 2 Thess. 2:13) called unto faith in Christ, by his Spirit working in due season, are justified, adopted, sanctified, and kept by His power through faith (2 Peter 1:3) unto salvation; neither are any other redeemed by Christ, or effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified and saved, but the elect (John 10:26, 17:9, 6:44) only.

7. The doctrine of this high mystery of predestination is to be handled with special prudence and care; that men, attending the will of God revealed in His word, and yielding obedience thereunto, may from the certainty of their effectual vocation be assured of their (1 Thess. 1:4, 5; 2 Peter 1:10) eternal election; so shall this doctrine afford matter (Eph. 1:7; Rom. 11:33) of praise, reverence and admiration of God, and (Rom. 11:5, 6) of humility, diligence and abundant (Luke 10:20) consolation to all that sincerely obey the gospel.

Chapter IV.—Of Creation.

1. In the beginning it pleased God, the Father, (John 1:1, 5; Heb. 1:2; Job 26:13) Son and Holy Spirit, for the manifestation of the glory of (Rom. 1:20) His eternal power, wisdom and goodness, to create or make the world and all things therein, (Col. 1:16; Gen. 2:1, 2) whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good.

2. After God had made all other creatures He created (Gen. 1:27) man, male and female, with (Gen. 2: 7) reasonable and immortal souls, rendering them fit unto that life to God for which they were created, being (Eccl. 7:29; Gen. 1:26) made after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness and true holiness; having the law of God (Rom. 2:14, 15) written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it; and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was (Gen. 3:6) subject to change.

3. Besides the law written in their hearts they received (Gen. 1:17, 3:8-10) a command not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; which whilst they kept they were happy in their communion with and had dominion (Gen. 1:26, 28) over the creatures.

Chapter V.—Of Divine Providence.

1. God, the Creator of all things, in His infinite power and wisdom, doth (Heb. 1:3; Job 38:11; Isa. 46:10, 11; Ps. 13:5, 6) uphold, direct, dispose and govern all creatures and things, from the greatest even to the (Matt. 10:26, 30, 31) least, by His most wise and holy providence, to the end for which they were created, according unto His infallible foreknowledge and the free and immutable counsel of His (Eph. 1:11) own will; to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, infinite goodness and mercy.

2. Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass (Acts 2:23) immutably and infallibly, so that there is not anything befalls any (Prov. 16:33) by chance or without His providence; yet by the same providence he ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either (Gen. 8:22) necessarily, freely or contingently.

3. God in His ordinary providence (Acts 27:31, 44; Isa. 55:10, 11) maketh use of means; yet is free (Hosea 1:7) to work without, (Rom. 4:19-21) above and (Dan. 3:27) against them at His pleasure.

4. The Almighty power, unsearchable wisdom and infinite goodness of God so far manifest themselves in His providence, that His determinate counsel (Rom. 11:32-34; 2 Sam. 24:1; 1Chron. 21:1) extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all other sinful actions both of angels and men (and that not by a bare permission); which also He most wisely and powerfully (2 Kings 19:28; Ps. 76:10) boundeth, and otherwise ordereth and governeth, in a manifold dispensation to His most holy (Gen. 1:20; Isa. 10:6, 7, 12) ends; yet so as the sinfulness of their acts proceedeth only from the creatures, and not from God, who being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or (Ps. 50:21; John 2:16) approver of sin.

5. The most wise, righteous and gracious God doth oftentimes leave for a season His own children to manifold temptations and the corruptions of their own hearts, to chastise them for their former sins, or to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, (2 Chron. 32:25, 26, 31; 2 Sam. 24:1; 2 Cor. 12:7-9) that they may be humbled, and to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support upon Himself, and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for other just and holy ends.

So that whatsoever befalls any of His elect is by His appointment, for His glory (Rom. 8:28) and their good.

6. As for those wicked and ungodly men whom God, as a righteous judge, for former sin doth (Rom. 1:24, 25, 28 and Rom 11:7, 8) blind and harden; from them He not only withholdeth His (Deut. 29:4) grace, whereby they might have been enlightened in their understanding and wrought upon in their hearts, but sometimes also withdraweth (Matt. 13:12) the gifts which they had, and exposeth them to such (Deut. 2:30; 2 Kings 8:12, 13) objects as their corruptions make occasion of Sin; and withal (Ps. 81:11, 12; 2 Thess. 2:10, 11) gives them over to their own lusts and temptations of the world and the power of Satan, whereby it comes to pass that they (Ex. 8:15, 32; Isa. 6:9, 10; 1 Peter 2:7, 8) harden themselves, even under those means which God useth for the softening of others.

7. As the providence of God doth in general reach to all creatures, so after a more special manner it taketh care of His (1 Tim. 4:10; Amos 9:8, 9; Isa. 43:3-5) church, and disposeth all things to the good thereof.

Chapter VI.—Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and Oo the Punishment Thereof.

1. Although God created man upright and perfect, and gave him a righteous law, which had been unto life had he kept it, (Gen. 2:16, 17) and threatened death upon the breach thereof; yet he did not long abide in this honor, (Gen. 3:12, 13; 2 Cor. 11:3) Satan using the subtility of the serpent to seduce Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who without any compulsion did willfully transgress the law of their creation and the command given unto them in eating the forbidden fruit; which God was pleased according to His wise and holy counsel to permit, having purpose to order it to His own glory.

2. Our first parents by this sin fell from their (Rom. 3:23) original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them, whereby death came upon all; (Rom. 5:12), etc. all becoming dead in sin and wholly defiled (Titus 1:15; Gen. 6:5; Jer. 17:9; Rom. 3:10-19) in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.

3. They being the (Rom. 5:12-19; 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, 45, 49) root, and by God’s appointment standing in the room and stead of all mankind; the guilt of the sin was imputed and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation, being now (Ps. 51:5; Job 14:4) conceived in sin, and by nature children (Eph. 2:3) of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects (Rom. 6:20, 5:12) of death, and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus (Heb. 2:14; 1 Thess. 1:10) set them free.

4. From this original corruption, whereby we are (Rom. 8:7; Col. 1:21) utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do (James 1:14, 15; Matt. 15:19) proceed all actual transgressions.

5. This corruption of nature, during this life, doth (Rom. 7:18, 23; Eccl.. 7:20; 1 John 1:8) remain in those that are regenerated; and although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified, yet both itself and the first motions thereof are truly and properly (Rom. 7:24, 25; Gal. 5:17) sin.

Chapter VII.—Of God’s Covenant.

1. The distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto Him as their Creator, yet they could never have attained the reward of life but by some (Luke 17:10; Job 35:7, 8) voluntary condescension on God’s part, which He hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.

2. Moreover, man having brought (Gen. 3:17; Gal. 3:10; Rom. 3:20, 21) himself under the curse of the law by his fall, it pleased the Lord to make a covenant of grace, wherein He freely offered unto sinners (Rom. 8:3; Mark 16:15, 16; John 3:16) life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved; and (Ezek. 36:26, 27; John 6:44, 45; Ps. 110:3) promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe.

3. This covenant is revealed in the gospel, and was first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the (Gen. 3:15) seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full (Heb. 1:1) discovery thereof was complete in the New Testament; and it is founded in that (2 Tim. 1:2) eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect; and it is alone by the grace of this covenant that all of the posterity of fallen Adam, that ever were (Heb. 11:6, 13; Rom. 4:1, 2), etc.; (Acts 4:12; John 8:56) saved, did obtain life and a blessed immortality; man being now utterly incapable of acceptance with God upon those terms on which Adam stood in a state of innocency.

Chapter VIII.—Of Christ the Mediator.

1. It pleased God, in His eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus, His only begotten Son, according to the covenant made between them both (Isa. 43:1; 1 Peter 1:9, 10), to be the Mediator between God and man; the (John 6:14) Prophet (Heb. 5:5, 6), Priest and (Ps. 2:6; Luke 1:33) King (Eph. 1:23), Head and Savior, of His church, the (Heb. 1:2) Heir of all things, and (Acts 17:31) Judge of the world; unto whom He did from all eternity (Isa. 53:10; John 17:6; Rom. 8:30) give a people to be His seed, and to be by Him in time redeemed, called, justified, sanctified and glorified.

2. The Son of God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, being very and eternal God, the brightness of the Father’s glory, of one substance and equal with Him, who made the world, who upholdeth and governeth all things He hath made, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon Him (John 1:14; Gal. 4:4) man’s nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof, (Rom. 8:3; Heb. 2:14, 16, 17, 4:15) yet without sin; being conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit coming down upon her, and the power of the Most High overshadowing her, (Luke 1:27, 31, 35) and so was made of a woman, of the tribe of Judah, of the seed of Abraham and David, according to the Scriptures; so that two whole, perfect and distract natures were inseparably joined together in one person without conversion, composition or confusion; which person is very God and very man, yet one (Rom. 9:5; 1 Tim. 2:2) Christ, the only Mediator between God and man.

3. The Lord Jesus in His human nature thus united to the Divine, in the person of the Son, was sanctified and anointed (Ps. 45:7; Acts 10:38; John 3:34) with the Holy Spirit above measure, having in Him (Col. 2:3) all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, in whom it pleased the Father that (Col. 1:19) all fullness should dwell; to the end that, being (Heb. 7:26) holy, harmless, undefiled, and full (John 1:14) of grace and truth, He might be thoroughly furnished to execute the office of a mediator and (Heb. 7:22) surety; which office he took not upon Himself, but was thereunto (Heb. 5:5) called by His Father, who also put (John 5:22, 27; Matt. 28:18; Acts 2:36) all power and judgment in His hand, and gave Him commandment to execute the same.

4. This office the Lord Jesus did most (Ps. 40:7, 8; Heb. 10:5-11; John 10:18) willingly undertake, which that He might discharge. He was made under the law, (Gal. 4:4; Matt. 3:15) and did perfectly fulfill it, and underwent the (Gal. 3:13; Isa. 53:6; 1 Peter 3:18) punishment due to us, which we should have borne and suffered, being made (2 Cor. 5:21) sin and a curse for us, enduring most grievous sorrows (Matt. 26:37, 38; Luke 22:44; Matt. 27:46) in His soul and most painful sufferings in His body; was crucified, and died, and remained in the state of the dead, yet saw no (Acts 13:37 corruption. On the (1 Cor. 15:3, 4) third day He arose from the dead with the same body in which he suffered; (John 20:25, 27) with which He also (Mark 16:19; Acts 1:9-11) ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth on the right hand of His Father (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 9:24) making intercession, and shall (Acts 10:42; Rom. 14:6, 10; Acts 1:11) return to judge men and angels at the end of the world.

5. The Lord Jesus, by His perfect obedience and sacrifice of Himself, which He through the eternal Spirit once offered up unto God, (Heb. 9:14, 10:14; Rom. 3:25, 26) hath fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of Heaven (John 17:2; Heb. 9:15) for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him.

6. Although the price of redemption was not actually paid by Christ till after His incarnation, (1 Cor. 10:4; Heb. 4:2; 1 Peter 1:10, 11) yet the virtue, efficacy and benefit thereof was communicated to the elect in all ages successively, from the beginning of the world, in and by those promises, types and sacrifices wherein He was revealed, and signified to be the seed of the woman, which should bruise the serpent’s head, (Rev. 13:8) and the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, (Heb. 13:8) being the same yesterday, and today, and forever.

7. Christ in the work of mediation acteth according to both natures, by each nature doing that which is proper to itself, yet by reason of the unity of the person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes in Scripture attributed to the person (John 3:13; Acts 20:28) denominated by the other nature.

8. To all those for whom Christ hath obtained eternal redemption He doth certainly and effectually (John 6:37, 10:15, 16, 17:9; Rom. 5:10) apply and communicate the same, making intercession for them; uniting them to Himself by His Spirit; (John 17:6; Eph. 1:9; 1 John 5:20) revealing unto them, in and by the word, the mystery of salvation; persuading them to believe and obey; (Rom. 8:9, 13; Ps. 110:1) governing their hearts by His word and Spirit, and (1 Cor. 15:25, 26), overcoming all their enemies by His almighty power and wisdom; in such manner and ways as are most consonant to His wonderful and (John 3:8; Eph. 1:8) unsearchable dispensation, and all of free and absolute grace, without any condition foreseen in them to procure it.

9. This office of Mediator between God and man is proper (1 Tim. 2: 5) only to Christ., who is the Prophet, Priest and King of the church of God; and may not be either in whole or any part thereof transferred from Him to any other.

10. This number and order of offices are necessary; for in respect of our (John 1:18) ignorance, we stand in need of His prophetical office and in respect of our alienation from God, (Col. 1:21; Gal. 5:17) and imperfection of the best of our services, we need His priestly office to reconcile us and present us acceptable unto God; and in respect of our averseness and utter inability to return to God, and for our rescue and security from our spiritual adversaries, we need His kingly (John 16:8; Ps. 110:3) to convince, subdue, draw, uphold, deliver preserve us to His heavenly kingdom.

Chapter IX.—Of Free Will

1. God hath indued the will of man with that natural liberty power of acting upon choice, that it is (Matt. 17:2; James 1:14; Deut. 30:19) neither forced, nor by any necessity of nature determined, to do good or evil.

2. Man in his state of innocency had freedom and power to will and to do that (Eccl. 7:29) which was good and well-pleasing to God; but yet (Gen. 3:6) was mutable, so that he might fall from it.

3. Man by his fall into a state of sin hath wholly lost (Rom. 5:6, 8:7) all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation; so as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good (Eph. 2:1, 5) and dead in sin, is not able by his own strength (Titus 3:3-5; John 6:44) to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.

4. When God converts a sinner, and translates him into the state of grace, (Col. 1:13; John 8:36) He freeth him from his natural bondage under sin, and by His grace alone enables him (Phil. 2:13) freely to will and to do theft which is spiritually good; yet so as that, by reason of his (Rom. 7:15, 18, 19, 21, 23) remaining corruptions, he doth not perfectly nor only will that which is good, but doth also will that which is evil.

5. The will of man is made (Eph. 4:13) perfect and immutably free to good alone in the estate of glory only.

Chapter X.—Of Effectual Calling.

1. Those whom God hath predestinated unto life, He is pleased in His appointed and accepted time (Rom. 8:30, 11:7; Eph. 1:10, 11; 2 Thess. 2:13, 14) effectually to call by His word and Spirit out of that state of sin and death in which they arc by nature, to grace and salvation (Eph. 2:1-6) by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to (Acts 26:18; Eph. 1:17, 18) understand the things of God; taking away their (Ezek. 36:26) heart of stone, and giving unto them an heart of flesh; renewing theft wills, and by His almighty power determining them (Deut. 30:6; Ezek. 36:27; Eph. 1:9) to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come (Ps. 110:3; Song 1:4) most freely, being made willing by His grace.

2. This effectual call is of God’s free and special grace alone, (2 Tim. 1:9; Eph. 2:8) not from anything at all foreseen in man, nor from any power or agency in the creature co-working with His special grace; (1 Cor. 2:14; Eph. 2:5; John 5:25) the creature being wholly passive therein, being dead in sins and trespasses, until being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it, and that by no less (Eph. 1:19, 20) power than that which raised up Christ from the dead.

3. Elect infants dying in infancy are (John 3:3, 5, 6) regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when and where and how He pleaseth; so also are all other elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the word.

4. Others not elected, although they may be called by the ministry of the word, (Matt. 22:14, 13:20, 21; Heb. 6:4, 5) and may have some common operations of the Spirit, yet not being effectually drawn by the Father, they neither will nor can truly (John 6:44, 45, 65; 1 John 2:24, 25) come to Christ, and therefore cannot be saved; much less can men that receive not the Christian religion (Acts 4:12; John 4:22, 17:3) be saved, be they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature, and the law of that religion they do profess.

Chapter XI.—Of Justification.

1. Those whom God effectually calleth He also freely (Rom. 3:24, 8:30) justifieth, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by (Rom. 4:5-8; Eph. 1:7) pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as (1 Cor. 1:30, 31; Rom. 5:17-19) righteous; not for anything wrought in them or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other (Phil. 3:8, 9; Eph. 2:8, 9, 10) evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness, but by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law and passive obedience in His death, for their whole and sole righteousness; they (John 1:12; Rom. 5:17) receiving and resting on Him and His righteousness by faith, which they have not of themselves; it is the gift of God.

2. Faith thus receiving and resting on Christ and His righteousness, is the (Rom. 3:28) alone instrument of justification; yet it is not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, (Gal. 5:6; James 2:17, 22, 26) but worketh by love.

3. Christ, by His obedience and death, did fully discharge the debt of all those that are justified; and did by the sacrifice of Himself, in the blood of His cross, undergoing in their stead the penalty due unto them, make a proper, real and full satisfaction (Heb. 10:14; 1 Peter 1:18, 19; Isa. 3:5, 6) to God’s justice in their behalf; yet, inasmuch as He given by the Father for them, and His obedience and satisfaction in their stead, and both (Rom. 8:32; 2 Cor. 5:21) freely, not for anything in them, their justification is only of free grace, that both the exact justice and rich grace of God might be (Rom. 3:26; Eph. 1:6, 7; Eph. 2:7) glorified in the justification of sinners.

4. God did from till eternity decree to (Gal. 3:8; 1 Peter 1:2; 1 Tim. 2:6) justify all the elect, and Christ did in the fullness of time die for their sins, and (Rom. 4:25) rise again for their justification; nevertheless they are not justified personally until the Holy Spirit doth in due time (Col. 1:21, 22; Titus 3:4-7) actually apply Christ unto them.

5. God doth continue to (Matt. 6:12; 1John 1:7, 9) forgive the sins of those that are justified; and although they can never fall from the state of (John 10:28) justification, yet they may by their sins fall under God’s (Ps. 89:31-33) fatherly displeasure; and in that condition they have not usually the light of His countenance restored unto them until they (Ps. 32:5, 51:7-12; Matt. 26:75) humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance.

6. The justification of believers under the 01d Testament was in all these respects (Gal. 3:9; Rom. 3:22-24) one and the same with the justification of believers under the New Testament.

Chapter XII.—Of Adoption.

All those that are justified God vouchsafed in and for the sake of His only Son, Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace (Eph. 1:5; Gal. 4:4, 5) of adoption; by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and (John 1:12; Rom. 8:17) privileges of children of God; have His (2 Cor. 6:18; Rev. 3:12) name put upon them, (Rom. 8:15) receive the Spirit of adoption, (Gal. 4:6; Eph. 2:18) have access to the throne of grace with boldness, are enabled to cry Abba, Father, are (Ps. 103:13) pitied, (Prov. 14:26) protected, (1 Peter 5:7) provided for and (Heb. 12:6) chastened by Him, as by a Father; yet never (Isaiah 54:8, 9; Lam. 3:31) cast off, but sealed (Eph. 4:30) to the day of redemption, and inherit the promises (Heb. 1:14, 6:12) as heirs of everlasting salvation.

Chapter XIII.—Of Sanctification.

1. They who are united to Christ, effectually called and regenerated, having a new heart (Acts 20:32; Rom. 6:5, 6) and new spirit created in them through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, and also further sanctified, really and personally, through the same virtue, (John 17:17; Eph. 3:16-19; 1 Thess. 5:21-23) by His word Spirit dwelling in them; (Rom. 6:14) the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, (Gal. 5:14, 24) and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified; and they more and more quickened and (Col. 1:11) strengthened in all saving graces, to the (2 Cor. 7:1; Heb. 13:14) practice of all true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

2. This sanctification is (1 Thess. 5:23) throughout in the whole man, yet imperfect (Rom. 7:18, 23) in this life; there abideth still some remnants of corruption in every part, whence ariseth a (Gal. 5:17; 1 Peter 2:11) continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.

3. In which war, although the remaining corruption for a time may much (Rom. 7:23) prevail, yet through the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying Spirit of Christ, (Rom. 6:14) the regenerate part doth overcome; and so the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God, (Eph. 4:15, 16; 2 Cor. 3:18, 7:1) pressing after a heavenly life, in evangelical obedience to all the commands which Christ, as Head and King, in His word hath prescribed to them.

Chapter XIV.—Of Saving Faith.

1. The grace of faith, whereby the elect are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls, is the work of the Spirit of Christ (2 Cor. 4:13; Eph. 2:8) in their hearts, and is ordinarily wrought by the ministry of the (Rom. 10:14, 17) word; by which also, and by the administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, prayer and other means appointed of God, it is increased (Luke 17:5; 1 Peter 2:2; Acts 20:32) and strengthened.

2. By this faith a Christian believeth to be true (Acts 24:14) whatsoever is revealed in the word on the authority of God Himself, and also apprehendeth an excellency therein (Ps. 19:7-10, 119:72) above all other writings, and all things in the world, as it bears forth the glory of God in His attributes, the excellency of Christ in His nature and offices, and the power and fullness of the Holy Spirit in His working and operations; and so is enabled to (2 Tim. 1:12) cast his soul upon the truth thus believed, and also acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the (John 15:14) commands, trembling at the (Isa. 66:2) threatenings, and embracing the (Heb. 11:13) promises of God for this life and that which is to come; but the principal acts of saving faith have immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving and resting upon (John 1:12; Acts 16:31; Gal. 2:20; Acts 15:11) Him alone for justification, sanctification and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace.

3. This faith, although it be different in degrees, and may be weak (Heb. 5:13, 14; Matt. 6:30; Rom. 6:19, 20) or strong, yet it is in the least degree of it different in the kind or nature of it (as is all other saving grace) from the faith (2 Peter 1:1) and common grace of temporary believers; and therefore, though it may be many times assailed and weakened, yet it gets (Eph. 6:16; 1 John 5:4, 5) the victory, growing up in many to the attainment of a full (Heb. 6:11, 12; Col. 2:2) assurance through Christ, who is both the author (Heb. 12:2) and finisher of our faith.

Chapter XV.—Of Repentance Unto Life and Salvation.

1. Such of the elect as are converted at riper years, having (Titus 3:2-5) for some time lived in the state of nature, and therein served divers lusts and pleasures, God in their effectual calling giveth them repentance unto life.

2. Whereas there is none that doeth good and sinneth (Eccl. 7:20) not, and the best of men may, through the power and deceitfulness of their corruption dwelling in them, with the prevalency of temptation, fall into greater sins and provocations, God hath in the covenant of grace mercifully provided that believers so sinning and falling (Luke 22:31, 32) be renewed through repentance unto salvation.

3. This saving repentance is an (Zech. 12:10; Acts 11:18) evangelical grace, whereby a person, being by the Holy Spirit made sensible of the manifold evils of his sin, doth by faith in Christ humble himself for it, with godly sorrow, detestation of it, and self-abhorrency, (Ezek. 36:31; 2 Cor. 7:11) praying for pardon and strength of grace, with a purpose and endeavor by supplies of the Spirit to (Ps. 119:6, 128) walk before God unto all well-pleasing in all things.

4. As repentance is to be continued through the whole course of our lives, upon the account of the body of death and the motions thereof; so it is every man’s duty to repent of his (Luke 19:8; 1 Tim. 1:13, 15) particular known sins, particularly.

5. Such is the provision which God hath made through Christ in the covenant of grace for the preservation of believers unto salvation, that although there is no sin so small but it deserves (Rom. 6:23) damnation, yet there is no sin so great that it shall bring damnation on them that (Isa. 1:16-18, 55:7) repent; which makes the constant preaching of repentance necessary.

Chapter XVI.—Of Good Works.

1. Good works are only such as God hath (Micah 6:8; Heb. 13:21) commanded in His holy word, and not such as without the warrant thereof are devised by men, out of blind zeal, (Matt. 15:9; Isa. 19:13) or upon any pretense of good intentions.

2. These good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences (James 2:18, 22) of a true and lively faith; and by them believers manifest their (Ps. 116:12, 13) thankfulness, strengthen their (1 John 2:3, 5; 2 Peter 1:5-11) assurance, edify their (Matt. 5:16 brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, (1 Tim. 6:1; 1 Peter 2:15; Phil. 1:11) whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:10) thereunto, that having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end (Rom. 6:22) eternal life.

3. Their ability to do good works is not at all of themselves, but wholly from the Spirit (John 15:4, 5) of Christ; and that they may be enabled thereunto, besides the graces they have already received, there is necessary an (2 Cor. 3:5; Phil. 2:13) actual influence of the same Holy Spirit to work in them to will and to do of His good pleasure; yet are they not hereupon to grow negligent, as if they were not bound to perform any duty, unless upon a special motion of the Spirit, but they ought to be diligent in (Phil. 2:12; Heb. 6:11, 12; Isa. 64:7) stirring up the grace of God that is in them.

4. They who in their obedience attain to the greatest height which is possible in this life, arc so far from being able to supererogate, and to do more than God requires, as that (Job 9:2, 3; Gal. 5:17; Luke 17:10) they fall short of much which in duty they arc bound to do.

5. We cannot by our best works merit pardon of sin or eternal life at the hand of God, by reason of the great disproportion that is between them and the glory to come, and the infinite distance that is between us and God, whom by them we can neither profit nor satisfy for the debt of our (Rom. 3:20; Eph. 2:8, 9; Rom. 4:6) former sins; but when we have done all we can, we have done but our duty, and are unprofitable servants; and because, as they are good, they proceed from His (Gal. 5:22, 23) Spirit, and as they are wrought by us, they are defiled, (Isa. 64:6; Ps. 143:2) and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection that they cannot endure the severity of God’s judgment.

6. Yet notwithstanding, the persons of believers being accepted through Christ, their good works are also accepted in (Eph. 1:6; 1 Peter 2:5) Him; not as though they were in this life wholly unblamable and unreprovable in God’s sight; but that He, looking upon them in His Son, is pleased to accept and reward that which is (Matt. 25:21, 23; Heb. 6:10) sincere, although accompanied with many weaknesses and imperfections.

7. Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they may be things which God commands, and of good use, both to themselves and (2 Kings 10:30; 1 Kings 21:27, 29) others, yet because they proceed not from a heart purified by (Gen. 4:5; Heb. 11:4, 6) faith, nor are done in a right manner according to the (1 Cor. 13:1) word, nor to a right end, the (Matt. 6:2, 5) glory of God, they are sinful and cannot please God, nor make a man meet to receive grace from (Amos 5:21, 22; Rom. 9:16; Titus 3:5) God; and yet their neglect of them is more sinful and (Job 21:14, 15; Matt. 25:41-43) displeasing to God.

Chapter XVII.—Of the Perseverance of the Saints.

1. Those whom God hath accepted in the beloved, effectually called and sanctified by His Spirit, and given the precious faith of His elect unto, can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace, (John 10:28, 29; Phil. 1:6; 2 Tim. 2:19; 1 John 2:19) but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved, seeing the gifts and callings of God are without repentance (whence He still begets and nourishes in them faith, repentance, love, joy hope, and all the graces of the Spirit unto immortality); and though many storms and floods arise and beat against them, yet they shall never be able to take them off that foundation and rock which by faith they are fastened upon; notwithstanding: through unbelief and the temptation of Satan, the sensible sight of the light and love of God may for a time be clouded and obscured from (Ps. 89:31, 32; 1 Cor. 11:22) them, yet it is still the same, (Mal. 3:6) and they shall be sure to be kept by the power of God unto salvation, where they shall enjoy their purchased possession, they being engraven upon the palms of His hands, and their names having been written in the book of life from all eternity.

2. This perseverance of the saints depends not upon their own free will, but upon the immutability of the decree of (Rom. 8:30, 9:11, 16) election, flowing from the free and unchangeable love of God the Father, upon the efficacy of the merit and intercession of Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:9, 10; John 14:19) and ration with Him, the (Heb. 6:17, 18) oath of God, the abiding of His Spirit and the (1 John 3:9) seed of God within them, and the nature of the (Jer. 32:40) covenant of grace, from all which ariseth also the certainty and infallibility thereof.

3. And though they may, through the temptation of Satan and of the world, the prevalency of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of means of their preservation, fall into grievous (Matt. 26:70, 72, 74) sins, and for a time continue therein, whereby they incur (Isa. 64:5, 9; Eph. 4:30) God’s displeasure, and grieve His Holy Spirit, come to have their graces and (Ps. 51:10, 12) comforts impaired, have their hearts hardened and their consciences wounded, (Ps. 32:3, 4) hurt and scandalize others, and bring temporal judgments (2 Sam. 12:14) upon themselves, yet they shall renew their (Luke 22:32, 61, 62) repentance, and be preserved, through faith in Jesus, to the end.

Chapter XVIII.—Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation.

1. Although temporary believers and other unregenerate men may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favor of God and state of salvation, (Job 8:13, 14; Matt. 7:22, 23) which hope of theirs shall perish, yet such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus and love Him in sincerity, endeavoring to walk in all good conscience before Him, may in this life be certainly assured (1 John 2:3, 3:14, 18, 19, 21, 24, 5:13) that they are in the state of grace, and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them (Rom. 5:2, 5) ashamed.

2. This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion, grounded upon (Heb. 6:11, 19) a fallible hope, but an infallible assurance of faith, founded on the blood and righteousness of Christ (Heb. 6:17, 18) revealed in the gospel, and also upon the inward (2 Peter 1:4, 5, 10, 11) evidence of those graces of the Spirit unto which promises are made, and on the testimony of the (Rom. 8:15, 16) Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God, and as a fruit thereof, keeping the heart both (1 John 3:1-3) humble and holy.

3. This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be (Isa. 1:10; Ps. 88, 77:1-12 partaker of it; yet being enabled by the Spirit to know things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of means (1 John 4:13; Heb. 6:11, 12) attain thereunto; and therefore it is the duty of every one to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure, that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, in love and thankfulness to God, and in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience, the proper (Rom. 5:1, 2, 5, 14:17; Ps. 119:32) fruits of this assurance; so far is it (Rom. 6:1, 2; Titus 2:11, 12, 14) from inclining men to licentiousness.

4. True believers may have the assurance of their salvation divers ways shaken, diminished and intermitted; as (Song 5:2, 3, 6) by negligence in preserving of it; by (Ps. 51:8, 12, 14) falling into some special sin, which woundeth the conscience and grieveth the Spirit; by some sudden or (Ps. 116:11, 77:7, 8, 31:22) vehement temptation; by God withdrawing the (Ps. 30:7) light of His countenance, and suffering even such as fear Him to walk in darkness, and to have no light; yet are they never destitute of the (1 John 3:9) seed of God and life (Luke 22:32) of faith, that love of Christ and the brethren, that sincerity of heart, and conscience of duty, out of which, by the operation of the Spirit, this assurance may in due time be (Ps. 42:5, 11) revived, and by which in the meantime they are (Lam. 3:26-31) preserved from utter despair.

Chapter XIX.—Of the Law of God.

1. God gave to Adam a law of universal obedience (Gen. 1:27; Eccl. 7:29) written in his heart, and a particular precept of not eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; by which He bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact and perpetual (Rom. 10:5) obedience; promised life upon fulfilling, and (Gal. 3:10, 12) threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with power and ability to keep it.

2. The same law that was first written in the heart of man (Rom. 2:14, 15) continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness after the fall, and was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai in (Deut. 10:4) ten commandments, and written in two tables, the first four containing our duty toward God, and the other six our duty to man.

3. Besides this law, commonly called moral, God was pleased to give to the people of Israel ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship (Heb. 10:1; Col. 2:17) prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings and benefits, and partly holding forth divers instructions (1 Cor. 5:7) of moral duties; all which ceremonial laws, being appointed only to the time of reformation, are, by Jesus Christ, the true Messiah and only Lawgiver, who was furnished with power from the Father for that end, (Col. 2:14, 16, 17; Eph. 2:14, 16) abrogated and taken away.

4. To them also He gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any now by the virtue of that institution; their general (1 Cor. 9:8-10) equity only being of moral use.

5. The moral law doth forever bind all, (Rom. 13:8-10; James 2:8, 10-12) as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof, and that not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the (James 2:10, 11) authority of God, the Creator, who gave it; neither doth Christ in the gospel any way dissolve, (Matt. 5:17-19; Rom. 3:31) but much strengthen this obligation.

6. Although true believers be not under the law, as a covenant of works, (Rom. 6:14; Gal. 2:16; Rom. 8:1, 10:4) to be thereby justified or condemned, yet it is of great use to them, as well as to others, in that, as a rule of life, informing them of the will of God and their duty, it directs and binds them to walk accordingly; (Rom. 3:20, 7:7), etc. discovering also the sinful pollutions of their natures, hearts and lives, so as examining themselves thereby they may come to further conviction of, humiliation for, and hatred against sin; together with a clearer sight of the need they have of Christ, and the perfection of His obedience. It is likewise of use to the regenerate, to restrain their corruptions, in that it forbids sin; and the threatenings of it serve to show what even their sins deserve, and what afflictions in this life they may expect for them, although freed from the curse and unallayed rigor thereof. These promises of it likewise show them God’s approbation of obedience, and what blessings they may expect upon the performance thereof, though not as due to them by the law as a covenant of works; so as man’s doing good, and refraining from evil, because the law encourageth to the one and deterreth from the other, is no evidence of his being (Rom. 6:12-14; 1 Peter 3:8-13) under the law, and not under grace.

7. Neither are the forementioned uses of the law (Gal. 3:21) contrary to the grace of the gospel, but do sweetly comply with it, the Spirit of Christ subduing (Ezek. 37:21) and enabling the will of man to do that freely and cheerfully which the will of God, revealed in the law, requireth to be done.

Chapter XX.—Of the Gospel, and of the Extent of the Grace Thereof.

1. The covenant of works being broken by sin, and made unprofitable unto life, God was pleased to give forth the promise of Christ, (Gen. 3:15) the seed of the woman, as the means of calling the elect, and begetting in them faith and repentance; in this promise the (Rev. 13:8) gospel, as to the substance of it, was revealed, and was therein effectual for the conversion and salvation of sinners.

2. This promise of Christ, and salvation by Him, is revealed only by (Rom. 1:17) the word of God; neither do the works of creation or providence, with the light of nature, (Rom. 10:14, 15, 17) make discovery of Christ, or of grace by Him, so much as in a general or obscure way; much less that men destitute of the revelation of Him by the promise or gospel, (Pr 29:18; Isa. 25:7, 55:2, 3) should be enabled thereby to attain saving faith or repentance.

3. The revelation of the gospel unto sinners, made in divers times and by sundry parts, with the addition of promises and precepts, for the obedience required therein, as to the nations and persons to whom it is granted, is merely of the (Ps. 147:20; Acts 16:7) sovereign will and good pleasure of God, not being annexed by virtue of any promise to the due improvement of men’s natural abilities, by virtue of common light received without it, which none ever did (Rom. 1:18), etc. make, or can so do; and therefore in all ages the preaching of the gospel has been granted unto persons and nations, as to the extending or limiting of it in great variety, according to the counsel of the will of God.

4. Although the gospel be the only outward means of revealing Christ and saving grace, and is, as such, abundantly sufficient thereunto; yet that men who are dead in trespasses may be born again, quickened or regenerated, there is moreover necessary an effectual, insuperable (Ps. 110:3; 1 Cor. 2:14; Eph. 1:19, 20) work of the Holy Spirit upon the whole soul, for the producing in them a new spiritual life, without which no other means will effect (John 6:44; 2 Cor. 4:4, 6) their conversion unto God.

Chapter XXI.—Of Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience.

1. The liberty which Christ hath purchased for believers under the gospel consists in their freedom from the guilt of sin, the condemning wrath of God, and rigor and (Gal. 3:13) curse of the law, and in their being delivered from this present evil (Gal. 1:4) world, bondage to (Acts 26:18) Satan and dominion (Rom. 8:3) of sin, from the (Rom. 8:28) evil of affliction, the fear and sting (1 Cor. 15:54-57) of death, the victory of the grave, and (2 Thess. 1:10) everlasting damnation; as also in their (Rom. 8:15) free access to God, and their yielding obedience unto Him, not out of a slavish fear, (Luke 1:75; 1 John 4:18) but a childlike love and willing mind.

All which were common also to believers under the law (Gal. 3:9,14) for the substance of them; but under the New Testament the liberty of Christians is further enlarged in their freedom from the yoke of the ceremonial law, to which the Jewish Church was subjected, and in greater boldness of access to the throne of grace, and in fuller communications of the (John 7:38, 39; Heb. 10:19-21) free Spirit of God, than believers under the law did ordinarily partake of.

2. God alone is (James 4:12; Rom. 14:4) Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men (Acts 4:19, 5:29; 1 Cor. 7:23; Matt. 15:9) which are in anything contrary to His word, or not contained in it. So that to believe such doctrines or obey such commands out of conscience (Col. 2:20, 22, 23) is to betray true liberty of conscience; and the requiring of an (1 Cor. 3:5; 2 Cor. 1:24) implicit faith and absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also.

3. They who, upon pretense of Christian liberty, do practice any sin or cherish any sinful lust, as they do thereby pervert the main design of the grace of the gospel, (Rom. 6:1, 2) to their own destruction, so they wholly destroy (Gal. 5:13; 2 Peter 2:18-21) the end of Christian liberty; which is, that being delivered out of the hands of all our enemies, we might serve the Lord without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him, all the days of our lives.

Chapter XXII.—Of Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day.

1. The light of nature shows that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all; is just, good, and doth good unto all; and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in and served, with all the heart and all the soul (Jer 10:7; Mark 12:33) and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is (Deut. 12:32) instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will that He may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men or the suggestion of Satan, under any visible representations, or (Ex. 20:4-6) any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures.

2. Religious worship is to be given to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to Him (Matt. 9:9, 10; John 6:23; Matt. 28:19) alone; not to angels, saints, or any other (Rom. 1:25; Col. 2:18; Rev. 19:10) creatures; and since the fall not without a (John 14:6) Mediator, nor in the mediation of any other but (1 Tim. 2:5) Christ alone.

3. Prayer with thankfulness, being one special part of natural worship, is by God required of (Ps. 95:1, 7, 65:2) all men. But that it may be accepted, it is to be made in the (John 14:13, 14) name of the Son, by the help (Rom. 8:26) of the Spirit, according to (1John 5:14) His will; with understanding, reverence, humility, fervency, faith, love and perseverance, and with others in a (1 Cor. 14:16, 17) known tongue.

4. Prayer is to be made for things lawful, and for all sorts of men living, (1 Tim. 2:1, 2; 2 Sam. 7:29) or that shall live hereafter; but not (2 Sam. 12:21-23) for the dead, nor for those of whom it may be known that they have sinned (1 Tim. 4:13) the sin unto death.

5. The (1 John 5:16) reading of the Scriptures, preaching, and (2 Tim. 4:2; Luke 8:18) hearing the word of God, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in our hearts to (Col. 3:16; Eph. 5:19) the Lord, as also the administration (Matt. 28:19, 20) of Baptism and (1 Cor. 11:26) the Lord’s Supper, are all parts of religious worship of God, to be performed in obedience to Him, with understanding, faith, reverence and godly fear; moreover, solemn humiliation, (Ester 4:16; Joel 2:12) with fasting and thanksgiving upon (Ex. 15:1), etc.; (Ps. 107) special occasions, ought to be used in an holy and religious manner.

6. Neither prayer, nor any other part of religious worship, is now, under the gospel, tied unto or made more acceptable by any place in which it is (John 4:21; Mal 1:11; 1 Tim. 2:8) performed, or toward which it is directed; but God is to be worshiped everywhere in spirit and in truth; as in (Acts 5:2) private families (Matt. 6:11; Ps. 55:17) daily and (Matt. 6:6) in secret, each one by himself, so more solemnly in the public assemblies, which are not carelessly nor willfully to be (Heb. 10:25; Acts 2:42) neglected or forsaken, when God by His word or providence calleth thereunto.

7. As it is of the law of nature that in general a proportion of time by God’s appointment be set apart for the worship of God, so by His word in a positive, moral and perpetual commandment, binding all men in all ages, He hath particularly appointed one day in seven for a (Ex. 20:8) Sabbath, to be kept holy unto Him, which from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ was the last day of the week; and from the resurrection of Christ was changed into the first day of the week, (1 Cor. 16:1, 2; Acts 20:7; Rev. 1:10) which is called the Lord’s day; and is to be continued to the end of the world as the Christian Sabbath; the observation of the last day of the week being abolished.

8. The Sabbath is then kept holy unto the Lord, when men, after a due preparing of their hearts, and ordering their common affairs aforehand, do not only observe an holy (Isa. 58:12; Neh. 13:15, 22) rest all the day from their own works, words and thoughts about their worldly employment and recreations, but also are taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of His worship, and in the duties (Matt. 12:1-13) of necessity and mercy.

Chapter XXIII.—Of Lawful Oaths and Vows.

1. A lawful oath is a part of religious worship, (Ex. 20:7; Deut. 10:20; Jer. 4:2) wherein the person swearing in truth, righteousness and judgment, solemnly calleth God to witness what he sweareth, (2 Chron. 6:22, 23) and to judge him according to the truth or falseness thereof.

2. The name of God only is that by which men ought to swear, and therein it is to be used with all holy fear and reverence; therefore to swear vainly or rashly by that glorious and dreadful name, or to swear at all by any other thing, is sinful and to be (Matt. 5:34-37; James 5:12) abhorred; yet as in matter of weight and moment, for confirmation of truth (Heb. 6:16; 2 Cor. 1:23) and ending all strife, an oath is warranted by the word of God, so a lawful oath being imposed (Neh. 13:25) by lawful authority in such matters ought to be taken.

3. Whosoever taketh an oath, warranted by the word of God, ought duly to consider the weightiness of so solemn an act, and therein to avouch nothing but what he knoweth to be the truth; for that by rash, false and vain oaths the (Lev. 19:12; Jer. 23:10) Lord is provoked, and for them this land mourns.

4. An oath is to be taken in the plain and (Ps. 24:4) common sense of the words, without equivocation or mental reservation.

5. A vow, which is not to be made to any creature, but to God alone, (Ps. 76:11; Gen. 28:20-22) is to be made and performed with all religious care and faithfulness; but popish monastical vows, (1 Cor. 7:2, 9) of perpetual single life, professed (Eph. 4:28) poverty, and regular obedience, are so far from being degrees of higher perfection, that they are superstitious (Matt. 19:11) and sinful snares, in which no Christian may entangle himself.

Chapter XXIV.—Of the Civil Magistrate.

1. God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil (Rom. 12:1-4) magistrates to be under Him over the people, for His own glory and the public good; and to this end hath armed them with the power of the sword, for defense and encouragement of them that do good, and for the punishment of evil doers.

2. It is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate when called thereunto; in the management whereof as they ought especially to maintain (2 Sam. 22:3; Ps. 82:3, 4) justice and peace, according to the wholesome laws of each kingdom and commonwealth; so for that end they may lawfully now under the New Testament (Luke 13:4) wage war upon just and necessary occasions.

3. Civil magistrates being set up by God for the ends aforesaid, subjection in all lawful things commanded by them ought to be yielded by us in the Lord, not only for wrath, (Rom. 13:5-7; 1 Peter 2:17) but for conscience’ sake; and we ought to make supplications and prayers for kings and all that are in authority, (1 Tim. 2:1, 2) that under them we may live a quiet and peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty.

Chapter XXV.—Of Marriage.

1. Marriage is to be between one man and one woman; (Gen. 2:24; Mal 2:15; Matt. 19:5, 6) neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband, at the same time.

2. Marriage was ordained for the mutual help (Gen. 2:18) of husband and wife, (Gen. 1:28) for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and for (1 Cor. 7:2, 9) preventing of uncleanness.

3. It is lawful for (Heb. 13:4; 1 Tim. 4:2) all sorts of people to marry, who are able with judgment to give their consent; yet it is the duty of Christians (1 Cor. 7:39) to marry in the Lord; and therefore such as profess the true religion should not marry with infidels (Neh. 13:25-27) or idolaters; neither should such as are godly be unequally yoked by marrying with such as are wicked in their life or maintain damnable heresy.

4. Marriage ought not to be within the degree of consanguinity (Lev. 18) or affinity, forbidden in the word; nor can such incestuous marriage ever be made lawful by any law of man or consent of parties, (Mark 6:18; 1 Cor. 5:1) so as these persons may live together as man and wife.

Chapter XXVI.—Of the Church.

1. The catholic or universal church, which with respect to the internal work of the Spirit and truth of grace may be called invisible, consists of the whole (Heb. 12:23; Col. 1:18; Eph. 1:10, 22, 23, 5:23, 27, 32) number of the elect, that have been, are or shall be gathered into one under Christ, the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.

2. All persons throughout the world, professing the faith of the gospel and obedience unto God by Christ, according unto it, not destroying their own profession by any errors, everting the foundation, or unholiness of conversation, (1 Cor. 1:2; Acts 10:26) are and may be called visible saints; (Rom. 1:7; Eph. 1:20-22) and of such ought all particular congregations to be constituted.

3. The purest churches under Heaven are subject (1 Cor. 5; Rev. 2, 3) to mixture and error, and some have so degenerated as to become (Rev. 18:2; 2 Thess. 2:11, 12) no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan; nevertheless Christ hath had and ever shall have a (Matt. 16:18; Ps. 72:17, 102:28; Rev. 12:17) kingdom in the world to the end thereof, of such as believe in Him and make profession of His name.

4. The Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the church, in whom by the appointment of the Father (Col. 1:18; Matt. 28:18-20; Eph. 4:11, 12) all power for the calling, institution, order or government of the church is invested in a supreme and sovereign manner; neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof, but is (2 Thess. 2:2-9) Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God; whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of His coming.

5. In the execution of His power wherewith He is so intrusted, the Lord Jesus calleth out of the world unto Himself, through the ministry of His word, by His Spirit, (John 10:16, 12:32) those that are given unto Him by His Father, that they may walk before Him in all the (Matt. 28:20) ways of obedience which he proscribeth to them in His word. Those thus called He commanded to walk together in particular societies or (Matt. 18:15-20) churches, for their mutual edification and the due performance of that public worship which He requireth of them in the world.

6. The members of these churches are (Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:2) saints by calling, visibly manifesting and evidencing in and by their profession and walking, their obedience unto that call of Christ; and do willingly consent to walk together according to the appointment of Christ, giving up themselves to the Lord and one to another, by the will of God, (Acts 2:41, 42, 5:13, 14; 2 Cor. 9:13) in professed subjection to the ordinance of the gospel.

7. To each of these churches thus gathered according to His mind, declared in His word. He hath given all that (Matt. 18:17, 18; 1 Cor. 5:4, 5, 13; 2 Cor. 2:6-8) power and authority which is any way needful for their carrying on that order in worship and discipline, which He hath instituted for them to observe, with commands and rules for the due and right exerting and executing of that power.

8. A particular church gathered and completely organized according to the mind of Christ consists of officers and members; and the officers appointed by Christ to be chosen and set apart by the church so called and gathered, for the peculiar administration of ordinances and execution of power or duty which He intrusts them with or calls them to, to be continued to the end of the world, are (Acts 20:17, 28; Phil. 1:1) Bishops, or Elders, and Deacons.

9. The way appointed by Christ for the calling of any person fitted and gifted by the Holy Spirit unto the office of Bishop or Elder in the church, is that he be chosen thereunto by the common (Acts 14:23). See the original) suffrage of the church itself, and solemnly set apart by fasting and prayer, with imposition of hands of the (1 Tim. 4:14) Eldership of the church, if there be any before constituted therein; and of a Deacon, (Acts 6:3, 5, 6) that he be chosen by the like suffrage, and set apart by prayer and the like imposition of hands.

10. The work of pastors being constantly to attend the service of Christ in His churches, in the ministry of the word and prayer, (Acts 6:4; Heb. 13:17) with watching for their souls, as they that must give an account to Him, it is incumbent on the church to whom they minister not only to give them all due respect, (1 Tim. 5:17, 18; Gal. 6:6, 7) but also to communicate to them of all their good things, according to their ability, so as they may have a comfortable supply, without being themselves (2 Tim. 2:4) entangled in secular affairs, and may also be capable of exercising (1 Tim. 3:2) hospitality towards others; and this is required by the (1 Cor. 9:6, 14) law of nature, and by the express order of our Lord Jesus, who hath ordained that they that preach the gospel should live of the gospel.

11. Although it be incumbent on the Bishops or pastors of the churches to be instant in preaching the word by way of office, yet the work of preaching the word is not so peculiarly confined to them, but that others also (Acts 11:19-21; 1 Peter 4:10, 11) gifted and fitted by the Holy Spirit for it, and approved and called by the church, may and ought to perform it.

12. As all believers are bound to join themselves to particular churches when and where they have opportunity so to do; so all that are admitted unto the privilege of a church are also (1 Thess. 4:14; 2 Thess. 3:6, 14, 15) under the censures and government thereof, according to the rule of Christ.

13. No church members, upon any offense taken by them, having performed their duty required of them toward the person they are offended at, ought to disturb church order, or absent themselves from the assemblies of the church, or administration of any ordinance, upon the account of such offense at any of their fellow members, but to wait upon Christ, (Matt. 18:15-17; Eph. 4:2, 3) in further proceeding of the church.

14. As each church, and all the members of it, are bound to (Eph. 6:18; Ps. 122:6) pray continually for the good and prosperity of all the churches of Christ in all places and upon all occasions, and to further every one within the bounds of their places and callings in the exercise of their gifts and graces; so the churches, when planted by the providence of God, as they enjoy opportunity and advantage for it, ought to hold (Rom. 16:1, 2; John 3:8-10) communion among themselves for their peace, increase of love and mutual edification.

15. Cases of difficulty or differences, either in point of doctrine or administration, wherein either the churches in general are concerned, or any one church, in their peace, union and edification, or any member or members of any church are injured in or by any proceedings in censures not agreeable to truth and order; it is according to the mind of Christ that many churches holding communion together do by their messengers meet to consider (Acts 15:2, 4, 9, 22, 23, 25) and give their advice in or about the matter in difference, to be reported to all the churches concerned; howbeit these messengers assembled are not intrusted with any church power properly so called, or with any jurisdiction over the churches themselves, to exercise any censure either over any churches or persons, or (2 Cor. 1:24; 1 John 4:1) to impose their determination on the churches or officers.

Chapter XXVII.—Of the Communion of Saints.

1. All saints that are united to Jesus Christ, their head, by his Spirit and faith, although they are not made thereby one person with Him, have (1 John 1:3; John 1:16; Phil. 3:10; Rom. 6:5, 6) fellowship in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection and glory; and being united to one another in love, they (Eph. 4:15, 16; 1 Cor. 12:7, 3:21-23) have communion in each other’s gifts and graces, and are obliged to the performance of such duties, public and private, in an orderly way, (1 Thess. 5:11, 14; Rom. 1:12; 1 John 3:17, 18; Gal. 6:10) as to conduce to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward man.

2. Saints by profession are bound to maintain an holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God, and in performing such other spiritual services (Heb. 10:24, 25, 3:12, 13) as tend to their mutual edification; as also in relieving each other in (Acts 11:29, 30) outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities; which communion, according to the rule of the gospel, though especially to be exercised by them in the relations wherein they stand, whether in (Eph. 6:4) families or (1 Cor. 12:14, 27) churches, yet as God offereth opportunity is to be extended to all the household of faith, even all those who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus; nevertheless their communion one with another as saints doth not take away or (Acts 5:4; Eph. 4:28) infringe the title or property which each man hath in his goods and possessions.

Chapter XXVIII.—Of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

1. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only Lawgiver, to be continued in His church (Matt. 28:19, 20; 1 Cor. 11:26) to the end of the world.

2. These holy appointments are to be administered by those only who are qualified and thereunto called according (Matt. 28:19; 1 Cor. 4:1) to the commission of Christ.

Chapter XXIX.—Of Baptism.

1. Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized a sign of his fellowship with Him in His death (Rom. 6:2, 4, 5; Col. 2:12; Gal. 3:27) and resurrection, of his being engrafted into Him, of (Mark 1:4; Acts 26:16) remission of sins, and of his (Rom. 6:4) giving up himself unto God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life.

2. Those who do actually profess (Mark 16:16; Acts 8:37, 38) repentance toward God, faith in and obedience to our Lord Jesus, are the only proper subjects of this ordinance.

3. The outward element to be used in this ordinance (Matthew 28:19, 20; Acts 8:38) is water, wherein the party is to be baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

4. Immersion, or dipping of the person (Matt. 3:16; John 3:23) in water, is necessary to the due administration of this ordinance.

Chapter XXX.—Of the Lord’s Supper.

1. The Supper of the Lord Jesus was instituted by Him the same night wherein he was betrayed, to be observed in His churches unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance and showing forth the sacrifice of Himself in His death, (1 Cor. 11:23-26) confirmation of the faith of believers in all the benefits thereof, their spiritual nourishment and growth in Him, their further engagement in and to all duties which they owe unto Him, (1 Cor. 10:16, 17, 21) and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with Him and with each other.

2. In this ordinance Christ is not offered up to His Father, nor any real sacrifice made at all for remission of sin of the quick or dead, but only a memorial of that (Heb. 9:25, 26, 28) one offering up of Himself by Himself upon the cross, once for all, and a spiritual oblation of all (1 Cor. 11:24; Matt. 26:26, 27) possible praise unto God for the same. So that the popish sacrifice of the mass, as they call it, is most abominable, injurious to Christ’s own and only sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of the elect.

3. The Lord Jesus hath in this ordinance appointed His ministers to pray, and bless the elements of bread and wine, and thereby to set them apart from a common to an holy use, and to take and break the bread, to take the cup, (1 Cor. 11:23-26, etc.) and, they communicating also themselves, to give both to the communicants.

4. The denial of the cup to the people, worshiping the elements, the lifting them up or carrying them about for adoration, and reserving them for any pretended religious use, (Matt. 26:26-28, 15:9; Ex. 20:4, 5) are all contrary to the nature of this ordinance and to the institution of Christ.

5. The outward elements in this ordinance, duly set apart to the uses ordained by Christ, have such relation to Him crucified, as that truly, although in terms used figuratively they are sometimes called by the name of the things they represent, to wit, the (1 Cor. 11:27) body and blood of Christ, albeit in substance and nature they still remain truly and only (1 Cor. 11:26, 28) bread and wine as they were before.

6. The doctrine which maintains a change of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s body and blood, commonly called transubstantiation, by consecration of a priest, or by any other way, is repugnant not to Scripture (Acts 3:21; Luke 24:6, 39) alone, but even to common sense and reason, overthroweth the (1 Cor. 11:24, 25) nature of the ordinance, and hath been and is the cause of manifold superstition, yea, of gross idolatries.

7. Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this ordinance, do then also inwardly, by faith really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified (1 Cor. 10:16, 11:23-26) and all the benefits of His death; the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally, but spiritually, present to the faith of believers in that ordinance as the elements themselves are to their outward senses.

8. All ignorant and ungodly persons, as they are unfit to enjoy communion (2 Cor. 6:14, 15) with Christ, so are they unworthy of the Lord’s table, and cannot, without great sin against Him, while they remain such, partake of these holy mysteries (1 Cor. 11:29; Matt. 7:6) or be admitted thereunto; yea, whosoever shall receive unworthily are guilty of the body and blood of the Lord, eating and drinking damnation to themselves.

Chapter XXXI.—Of the State of Man After Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead.

1. The bodies of men after death return to dust (Gen. 3:19; Acts 13:36) and see corruption; but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately (Eccl. 12:7) return to God who gave them; the souls of the righteous then being made perfect in holiness, are received into paradise, where they are with Christ, and behold the face of God in light and (Luke 23:43; 2 Cor. 5:1, 6, 8; Phil. 1:23; Heb. 12:23) glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies; and the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torment and utter darkness, reserved to (Jude 1:7; 2 Peter 2:6, 9; Luke 16:23, 24) the judgment of the great day; besides these two places for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none.

2. At the last day, such of the saints as are found alive shall not sleep, but be (1 Cor. 15:51, 52; 1 Thess. 4:17) changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the self-same bodies and (Job 19:26, 27) none other, although with different (1 Cor. 15:42, 43) qualities, which shall be united again to their souls forever.

3. The bodies of the unjust shall, by the power of Christ, be raised to dishonor; the bodies of the just, by His Spirit, unto honor, (Acts 24:15; John 5:28, 29; Phil. 3:21) and be made conformable to His own glorious body.

Chapter XXXII.—Of the Last Judgment.

1. God hath appointed a day wherein He will judge the world in righteousness by (Acts 17:31; John 5:22, 27) Jesus Christ, to whom all power and judgment is given of the Father; in which day not only the (1 Cor. 6:3; Jude 1:6) apostate angels shall be judged, but likewise all persons that have lived upon the earth shall appear before the tribunal of Christ, (2 Cor. 5:10; Eccl. 12:14; Matt. 12:36; Rom. 16:10, 12; Matt. 25:32, etc.) to give an account of their thoughts, words and deeds, and to receive according to what they have done in the body, whether good or evil.

2. The end of God’s appointing this day is for the manifestation of the glory of His mercy in the eternal salvation of the elect, (Rom. 9:22, 23) and of His justice in the eternal damnation of the reprobate who are wicked and disobedient; for then shall the righteous go into everlasting life, and receive that fullness of joy and glory, with everlasting reward, in the presence (Matt. 25:21, 34; 2 Tim. 4:8) of the Lord; but the wicked who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments, and (Matt. 25:46; Mark 9:48; 2 Thess. 1:7-10) punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.

3. As Christ would have us to be certainly persuaded that there shall be a day of judgment, both (2 Cor. 5:10, 11) to deter all men from sin, and for the greater (2 Thess. 1:4, 6, 7) consolation of the godly in their adversity, so will He have that day unknown to men, that they may shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful, because they know not at what hour the (Mark 13:35-37; Luke 12:35, 36) Lord will come, and may ever be prepared to say, (Rev. 22:20), Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.

The following is about the form of a Church Covenant and Rules of Decorum as adopted by the early churches that afterwards composed the Kehukee Association.

Church Covenant

Forasmuch as Almighty God by His grace, has been pleased to call us (whose names are underneath subscribed) out of darkness into His marvelous light, and all of us have been regularly baptized upon a profession of our faith in Christ Jesus, and have given up ourselves to the Lord, and to one another, in a gospel church way, to be governed and guided by a proper discipline, agreeable to the word of God: We do therefore in the name of our Lord Jesus, and by His assistance, covenant and agree to keep up the discipline of the church we are members of, in the most brotherly affection towards each other, while we endeavor particularly to observe the following rules, viz:

In brotherly love to pray for each other, to watch over one another, and, if need be, in the most tender and affectionate manner, to reprove one another. That is, if we discover anything amiss in a brother, to go and tell him his fault, according to the direction given by our Lord in the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, and not to be whispering and backbiting. We also agree, with God’s assistance, to pray in our families, attend our church meetings, observe the Lord’s day and keep it holy, and not absent ourselves from the communion of the Lord’s Supper without a lawful excuse; to be ready to communicate to the defraying of the church’s expenses, and for the support of the ministry; not irregularly depart from the fellowship of the church, nor to remove to distant churches without a regular dismission.

These things we do covenant and agree to observe and keep sacred in the name of and by the assistance of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. Signed by the mutual consent of the members whose names are underneath subscribed.

Rules of Church Decorum.

Preamble. From a long series of experiences we (who hope we are) the Church of Christ at—, are convinced of the necessity of coming together as often as may be in order to hold Conference, and to discharge our duty in watching over each other as Christ hath commanded.

Ordered therefore that the following Decorum be a rule for the church to conduct herself by in her future Conferences. We will not forsake the house of God, or the assembling of ourselves together. (Neh. 10:39; Heb. 10:25).

Article I. The Conference shall be composed of the members of this church, together with any members of sister churches, that are present in fellowship, of the same faith and order, who have liberty to seats with us. (Acts 4:23, 15:6).

Article II. Conference shall be opened and closed with prayer to Almighty God. (1 Tim. 2:1; 1 Thess. 5:17, 18).

Article III. One shall be chosen to preside, who shall be addressed under the appellation of Brother Moderator; and to whom every speech shall be particularly directed. (1 Cor. 14:26-40).

Article IV. The members’ names, being regularly enrolled, shall by the Clerk be distinctly called over, and a significant mark put to the names of all absent members. (Acts 1:15; Neh. 2:18, 4:20, 5:16).

Article V. A door shall be opened (when thought necessary) for the admission of new members into this church; but none shall be admitted but by unanimous consent, and who shall first verbally relate their experience, or give an account of the work of God on their souls; and secondly, of their faith and principles (if the church shall require it); and thirdly, the church shall make diligent inquiry respecting their moral conduct, and when full satisfaction shall be obtained, the Pastor, Deacon or Moderator shall manifest the same by giving them the right hand of fellowship, thereby receiving them in form. (1 Peter 3:15; Gal. 2:19).

Article VI. No complaint shall be brought into Conference against transgressing brethren respecting crimes of a private nature, until the aggrieved party has complied with the directions given by our Lord in (Matt. 18:15-17).

Article VII. Every motion made and seconded shall come under the consideration of the Conference unless withdrawn by the member who made it. (1 Cor. 14:40).

Article VIII. Every query presented shall be thrice read; and, before it is received, the Moderator shall take a vote, and accordingly as there is a majority for or against debating it, it shall be answered or not. But the querist may withdraw it at any time-provided also that no intricate query shall be imposed or asked.

Article IX. If the minority shall be grieved, at any time, at the determination of the majority, they are hereby directed to make the same known immediately to the church; and, if satisfaction cannot be obtained, it may be necessary in that case to call for help from sister churches.

Article X. All the business of Conference shall be recorded by the Clerk, and, before Conference rises, the same shall be distinctly read and corrected, if need be.

Section 1. Any member refusing to attend Conference, the same is Disorder.

Section 2. Any member absenting him or herself from Conference, without leave, the same is Disorder.

Section 3. Any member whispering or laughing in time of a public speech, the same is Disorder.

Section 4. If two or more shall speak at one time, or any member speak without rising up and addressing the Moderator, the same is Disorder.

Section 5. Any member speaking more than three times to one subject, without leave obtained, the same is Disorder.

Section 6. Any member being grieved at anything done in Conference, and shall hold his or her peace, and shall not let the same be known until Conference rises, and shall afterward speak of the same, as it manifestly tends to confusion, it is hereby deemed Disorder.

Section 7. Any member speaking or acting in wrath or anger, or in a threatening, degrading manner, as it shames religion, wounds the cause of Christ, and grieves true Christians, it is hereby deemed Disorder.

Section 8. If the Moderator shall neglect to plainly and timely reprove any member transgressing any of these rules, or in behaving in any manner irreverently in time of Conference, the same is Disorder in him, and himself is for the same liable to be reproved.

Section 9. The woman hath not a right by the laws of Christ to usurp authority over the man, and therefore ought not to speak in the church, only in cases of conscience, or in such particular circumstances that the nature of the thing may require it.

Section 10. Amendments to these rules may be made at any time when Conference shall deem it necessary.

Some of the ministers belonging to the Kehukee Association, at its first organization, were the following named, viz.: Elders Jonathan Thomas, John Thomas, John Moore, John Burgess, William Burgess, Charles Daniel, William Walker, John Meglamre, James Abbington, Thomas Pope and Henry Abbott.

Some years subsequent to the formation of the Kehukee in 1765, trouble arose between the churches of that Association and other churches of an independent order that sprung up in Virginia and North Carolina called Separates. These Separates first arose in New England, and made their way eventually into the States of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Elders Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall were among those evangelical ministers whose labors were greatly blessed in the States above named.

These Separates objected to the Regular or Kehukee Baptists in the following particulars: 1. Because they did not require strictly from those who applied for baptism an experience of grace. 2. Because they held members in their churches who acknowledged they were baptized before conversion. 3. Because they indulged too much in superfluity of apparel. There were other objections of minor importance. The most forcible objection of all appeared to be the retention of members who had been baptized in unbelief; and this was admitted on the part of the Regulars to be a wrong; on which account several of their churches sought to correct it, by requiring all such of their members to be baptized.

This course gave offense to some other churches, who opposed the reformation; and, as a consequence, the churches at an Association held at the Falls of Tar River, in October, 1775, divided; a part of them holding their session in the house, and the others in the woods, both claiming to be the Kehukee Association. This trouble continued until August, 1777, when harmony was restored and all the churches became united, at that time, at Elder James Bell’s meeting-house, on Sapponey, in Sussex County, Va., and were thenceforth to be known as “The United Baptists.”

They adopted at that time Articles of Faith, seventeen in number, that have been retained without alteration or amendment, it appears, by the United Baptists or Kehukee Association up to the present time.

The churches thus united were ten in number, and stood as follows, viz.:

Members.

1. The church in Bertie County, N. C., under the care of Elder Lemuel Burkitt

217

2. The church at Sussex, Va., under the care of Elder John Meglamre

209

3. The church in Brunswick, Va., under the care of Elder Zachary Thompson

320

4. The church in the Isle of Wight, under the care of Elder David Barrow

142

5. A newly constituted church in Chowan County, N. C.

84

6. The church in Granville County, N. C., under the care of Elder Henry Ledbetter

70

7. The church in Bute, N. C., under the care of Elder Joshua Kelley

109

8. The church in Sussex, Va., under the care of Elder James Bell

200

9. The church at Rocky Swamp, N. C., under the care of Elder Jesse Read

130

10. The church in Edgecombe County, N. C., under the care of Elder John Tanner

100

Total

1,581

Of these churches the first six had been called Regulars and the last four had been called Separates.

Abstract of principles agreed to, in 1777, by this harmonized body of Baptists, termed then “The United Baptists,” but ever afterwards called “The Kehukee Association.” For some cause or other, the new name was lost sight of at once, it appears, and the old one prevailed onward and downward to the present time.

Articles of Faith.

I. We believe in the being of a God, as almighty, eternal, unchangeable, of infinite wisdom, power, justice, holiness, goodness, and mercy, and truth; and that this God has revealed Himself, in His word, under the characters of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

II. We believe that Almighty God has made known His mind and will to the children of men in His word; which word we believe to be of Divine authority, and contains all things necessary to be known for the salvation of men and women. The same is comprehended or contained in the books of the Old and New Testaments as are commonly received.

III. We believe that Cod, before the foundation of the world, for a purpose of His own glory, did elect a certain number of men and angels to eternal life; and that this election is particular, eternal and unconditional on the creature’s part.

IV. We believe that, when God made man at first, he was perfect, holy and upright, able to keep the law, but liable to fall, and that he stood as a federal head, or representative, of all his natural offspring, and that they were to be partakers of the benefits of his obedience, or exposed to the misery which sprang from his disobedience.

V. We believe that Adam fell from this state of moral rectitude, and that he involved himself and all his natural offspring in a state of death; and, for that original transgression, we all are both filthy and guilty in the sight of an holy God.

VI. We also believe that it is utterly out of the power of men, as fallen creatures, to keep the law of God perfectly, repent of their sins truly, or believe in Christ, except they be drawn by the Holy Spirit.

VII. We believe that in God’s own appointed time and way (by means which He has ordained) the elect shall be called, justified, pardoned and sanctified; and that it is impossible they can utterly refuse the call, but shall be made willing, by Divine grace, to receive the offers of mercy.

VIII. We believe that justification in the sight of God is only by the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, received and applied by faith alone.

IX. We believe, in like manner, that God’s elect shall not only be called and justified, but that they shall be converted, born again, and changed by the effectual working of God’s Holy Spirit.

X. We believe that such as are converted, justified and called by His grace, shall persevere in holiness, and never fall finally away.

XI. We believe it to be a duty incumbent on all God’s people to walk religiously in good works; not in the Old Covenant way of seeking life and the favor of the Lord by it, but only as a duty from a principle of love.

XII. We believe Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are gospel ordinances, both belonging to the converted or true believers; and that persons who were sprinkled or dipped while in unbelief were not regularly baptized according to God’s word, and that such ought to be baptized after they are savingly converted into the faith of Christ.

XIII. We believe that every church is independent in matters of discipline; and that Associations, Councils and Conferences, of several ministers or churches, are not to impose on the churches the keeping, holding or maintaining any principle or practice contrary to the church’s judgment.

XIV. We believe in the resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust, and a general judgment.

XV. We believe the punishment of the wicked is everlasting, and the joys of the righteous are eternal.

XVI. We believe that no minister has a right to the administration of the ordinances, only such as are regularly called and come under the imposition of hands by the presbytery.

XVII. Lastly, we do believe that, for the mutual comfort, union and satisfaction of the several churches of the aforesaid faith and order, we ought to meet in an Association way, wherein each church ought to represent their case by their delegates, and attend as often as is necessary to advise with the several churches in conference; and that the decision of matters in such Associations are not to be imposed, or in any wise binding, on the churches without their consent, but only to sit and act as an advisory council.

It was agreed at this Association that hereafter two sessions should be held in each year, one in the Spring and one in the Fall-one in North Carolina and one in Virginia; and accordingly in 1778 two were held. The first met at what was called Elder Burkitt’s Meeting-House, on Pottecasey Creek, Northampton County, North Carolina, commencing on Saturday before the third Sunday in May, and continued three days. The other met at what was called Elder Meglamre’s Meeting-House, in Sussex County, Virginia. At each of these sessions Elder John Meglamre was chosen Moderator, and Elder Lemuel Burkitt Clerk.

Some churches remained yet unreconciled, and refused to represent themselves in the Association; and the Association in 1781 adopted measures to bring about a reconciliation. Elders John Meglamre, Z. Thompson and L. Burkitt were appointed a committee to visit and confer with them as to such reconciliation, and report to the next Association, which was agreed to be held with the church at Fishing Creek, to commence on Saturday, in May, 1779.

The Association convened at the time and place appointed; but on account of the great distress in the country, occasioned by the Revolutionary War, but very few messengers of the churches met, and but little business was transacted. It was reported at this meeting that the British were at Suffolk, Virginia, and had burned the town, and their march into North Carolina was expected. Two churches were received into fellowship at this Association, viz., one in Camden County, North Carolina, and the other under the care of Elder Dargan.

For about three years there were no regular Associations held by reason of the great distress in the country, caused by the Revolutionary War; but on Saturday before the fourth Sunday in May, 1782, the churches convened in an Association capacity at Arthur Cotten’s, in Hertford County, North Carolina, with Elder Meglamre Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. The following named churches were received at this session, viz.: One in Pitt County, under the care of Elder John Page; the church at the Falls of Tar River; one in Edgecombe, under the care of Elder Joshua Barnes; and one in the county of Currituck, North Carolina, under the care of Elder James Gamewell. At this Association Rules of Decorum for the present and future government of the Association were prepared and adopted, which are as follows:

Rules of Decorum for the Association.

I. The Association shall be opened and closed by prayer.

II. A Moderator and Clerk shall be chosen by the suffrage of the members.

III. Only one person shall speak at once, who shall rise from his seat and address the Moderator when he makes his speech.

IV. The person thus speaking shall not be interrupted in his speech by any, except the Moderator, till he be done speaking.

V. He shall strictly adhere to the subject, and in no wise reflect on the person who spoke before, so as to make remarks on his slips, failings or imperfections; but shall fairly state the case and matter as nearly as he can, so as to convey his light or ideas.

VI. No person shall abruptly break off, or absent himself from the business of the Association, without liberty obtained from it.

VII. No person shall rise and speak more than three times to one subject, without liberty from the Association.

VIII. No member of the Association shall have liberty to be whispering or laughing in time of a public speech.

IX. No member of this Association shall address another in any other terms or appellation but the title of Brother.

X. The Moderator shall not interrupt any member in, nor prohibit him from speaking, till he give his light on the subject, except he break the rules of this Decorum.

XI. The names of the several members of the Association shall be enrolled by the Clerk, and called over as often as the Association requires.

XII. The Moderator shall be the last person who may speak to the subject; and may give his light on it, if he please, before he puts the matter to a vote.

XIII. Any member who shall willingly and knowingly break any of these rules shall be reproved by the Association as they shall see proper.

Upon the adoption of these Rules much discussion arose as to the power of Associations over churches, which resulted in an understanding to leave to the churches their entire independence, and permitting the Association (which is but a collection of churches) to act as an advisory council only. This appears to have been the rule of action, adopted by the Association in the beginning, and which has prevailed to the present time.

Should the churches ever allow the Association, or any body of men formed by their combination, to dictate to them against their consent, it has ever been held that their liberties in such case will have passed away, and they become no longer churches of Christ, but tools of tyrants. A church of Christ has ever been considered, by genuine Baptists, the highest ecclesiastical power on earth.

Associations are not considered absolutely necessary for the existence of a church or churches, but only as a convenient method of correspondence and intercourse among the churches, so that acquaintance and personal contact might be promoted among a larger circle of brethren than could be done in a single church or neighborhood. Much satisfaction also is found in obtaining the views and advice of each other on questions of importance in the kingdom of Christ. “In the multitude of counsellors there is safety,” has been long held as a wise adage among the people of God.

Confessions of Faith have not been held by Baptists as absolutely necessary, either. Their Confession of Faith is the Bible. Their Articles or Creed are in that blessed book. They need nothing better and nothing else for their guidance. But for the better understanding of their views by others, amid the great variety of professedly Christian denominations and Creeds extant in the world, they have found it convenient from time to time, since the Apostolic Age, to draw up a few brief particulars, in the shape of Articles of Faith; that their faith and practice might be readily known to all men. Whatever censure may attach to them on account of their faith, they are willing to meet it; they are not ashamed of their principles, neither do they wish to appear under any disguise or false robes. The doctrine which they believe is the doctrine they also preach and publicly proclaim before the world. It is the doctrine of salvation by grace and not of works. They boldly teach it everywhere, 1st. Because it is the truth; 2nd. Because they love it; 3rd. Because they wish others to receive it in the love of it; 4th. Because it feeds, comforts, strengthens and encourages exercised souls; and 5th. Because it honors God, and nothing else does.

The Association agreed at this time that she would continue to receive and answer proper queries, submitted in a proper spirit by any member of her body; and this practice has been continued to the present time; though of late years fewer queries have been presented than formerly, and the practice appears to be growing into disuse. Some of those submitted and answered, during her long and eventful history, will hereafter appear in this work.

A motion was made at this session of the Association (1782) for a division of her body on account of its size and the distance intervening between the churches. The motion did not prevail. But it was agreed that four General Conferences be held during the year, and their proceedings be submitted to the annual Association. They were to be held as follows, viz.: The first at Elder Meglamre’s meeting-house, on Saturday before the second Sunday in August; the second at Yoppim, Saturday before the fourth Sunday in August; the third at Camden, Saturday before the first Sunday in September; and the fourth at Elder Page’s, Saturday before the second Sunday in September.

This arrangement lasted only one year; for at the next Association (1783, the year in which peace was declared between the United States and the mother country), held at Davis’s meeting-house, it was agreed to be discontinued; and four “Occasional Associations” were recommended to be held in its stead. These “Occasional Associations” were to be formed by churches conveniently situated, and their proceedings were to be submitted to the annual Association.

The annual Association for 1784 was held at Sandy Run, Bertie County, on Saturday before the third Sunday in May. Elder Meglamre was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk.

At this session a church in Pitt County, under the care of Elder Abraham Baker, petitioned for membership and was received. Ministers appointed to preach on Sunday were Elders Jesse Read, John Meglamre, Phillip Hughes and David Barrow. The Association at this time opened a correspondence with the Salisbury Association in Maryland by letter and messenger. Elder Edward Mentz was appointed messenger. Elder Burkitt was requested to write letters to the Salisbury Association and to the General Committee at Dover, in Virginia. Only one “Occasional Association” was appointed to be held this year, and that was to be held at Daniels’ meeting-house on Fishing Creek, Saturday before the second Sunday in October. At this “Occasional Association” two churches were received, viz.: One in Camden County, N. C., under the care of Elder James Brinson, and the other in said county on Swift Creek.

The Association in 1785 was held with the church at Shoulder’s Hill, Nansemond County, Va., on the 14th of May. Elder Meglamre presided as Moderator, and Elder Burkitt acted as Clerk. Letters from twenty-one churches were read. Five additional churches came in at this meeting, viz.: One at the Northwest River Bridge, in Norfolk County, Va.; another at Shoulder’s Hill; another at Scuppernong, Tyrrell County, N. C.; another at Pungo, Princess Ann County, Va.; and another on Blackwater, Princess Ann County, Va. That eminent servant of God, Elder John Leland, of New England, was present at this sitting of the Association, and he and Elders Lemuel Burkitt, David Brown and Jonathan Barnes were appointed to preach on Sunday. Elder Leland was at all times very much interested for the general welfare of the people, and a bold defender of their civil and religious rights. And it was owing to his influence, in a great degree, no doubt, that the subject matter of “The Engrossed Bill” in the Virginia Legislature, respecting a general assessment for religious purposes-compelling every person to pay a tax for the support of some teacher of the Christian religion-was taken up and considered. Whereupon, at his instance, a petition of the inhabitants of Charles City County against the bill was read; and the Association advised that this petition, or one similar thereto, be adopted by the members of this Association who reside in Virginia, and be presented to the inhabitants of their respective counties for their signatures, and, where a sufficient number are obtained, then to be presented to the General Assembly of Virginia. Elder Leland and other Baptists took measures to enter their solemn protest against this corrupt alliance of Church and State.

The Association, at this time, being oppressed with a sense of coldness and barrenness among the churches, appointed a day of fasting and prayer, wherein God was to be implored for a manifestation of His loving kindness to Zion, and a revival of His work of grace among the churches. Three churches were added to the number at this session, viz.: One at South Quay, Va.; one at Bear Creek, in Dobbs County, N. C.; and one on Morattock Creek, in the upper end of (then) Tyrrell County, N. C. Some of the churches called “Regular,” yet standing aloof and separate from the Association, Elder John Meglamre and Jesse Read and brethren Charles Champion and Thomas Gardner were appointed a committee to meet the Regular Baptist Brethren in conference and endeavor to effect a reconciliation with them. Four ministers were appointed to preach on Sunday of this associational sitting, viz.: Elders David Barnes, Lemuel Burkitt, John Meglamre and Jonathan Barnes.

At this time a form was drawn up to regulate a minister’s call and ordination, somewhat after the following order:

Education is not essential to the qualifications of a gospel minister. It is a good thing in its place, and forms no objection to the character or qualifications of a minister. God calls a man to a knowledge of Christ in the pardon of sin, without human learning or with it, as seemeth good in His sight, and in like manner He calls a Christian to the gospel ministry. God is not dependent on human education in either case. If He has a use for a learned man He will call him. He never calls a man to preach and then sends him to man to be qualified. Human learning does not lead to Christ, or qualify a man to preach His gospel. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned”. (1 Cor. 2:14) And “The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1Cor 3:19). A minister must be one who is “born again,” and then called of God to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. “No man taketh this honor to himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron”. (Heb. 5:4)

When the church has evidence that a member has spiritual gifts to exercise in public, she may license him to do so. And when he has been on trial a sufficient length of time to prove his usefulness, she may go further and set him apart for ordination to the administration of gospel ordinances. In such case it is necessary that a fast should be observed, (Acts 13:3) and that a presbytery of two ministers at least should be present. The day appointed for ordination having arrived, and the church being assembled, a sermon shall be delivered by one of the ministers, suitable to the occasion. The sermon concluded, the solemnity may begin with singing a suitable hymn, and offering a prayer to God. Then one of the ministers, standing up, ought to address the candidate and church somewhat after this manner: “When the church at Jerusalem, the mother of us all, had chosen men to office, it is recorded that they set them before the Apostles to be ordained by laying on of hands and prayers; we desire therefore that this church will set before us the man whom they have chosen to the ministry.” Then let some member of the church conduct the candidate to the ministers, one of whom may address him in this manner: “The regard we pay to that sacred charge, ‘lay hands suddenly on no man,’ obliges us to use caution. Sir, we would be certified of your call to preach.” The candidate may relate his call, or present a copy of his call, and it may be read.

“We would also see your license, which may be a testimony of your good morals, and the approbation which your ministerial abilities have obtained.” Let the license be read, or let the church testify. Then add, “Hitherto your advances towards the ministry appear to be regular and fair, but we are obliged to seek for further satisfaction, which you alone are capable of giving: permit me therefore to ask you-Do you, sir, willingly, and not by constraint, out of a ready mind, and not for filthy lucre, devote yourself to the sacred office?”

The candidate shall answer, that the ministry to him is of free choice, and that his view is not lucrative.

“Do you believe that you are moved hereto by the Spirit of God, so that a necessity is laid on you to preach the gospel, and that a woe will be to you if you preach it not?” The candidate shall answer the question in the affirmative.

“Do you take the Bible to be the word of God, in such a sense as to hold yourself bound to believe all it declares; to abstain from all it forbids? Do you consider that book as the only rule of faith and practice in matters of religion; and a sufficient rule, so that there is no occasion for any other judge of controversies; or for creeds, confessions of faith, traditions, or acts of Councils, of any denominations, to supply its supposed defects? Do you hold that book as your creed, or confession of faith, and will you make it your directory, whether in preaching, administering ordinances, exercising government or discipline, or in performing any other branch of your function?”

The candidate shall confess that he owns it as the word of God, and that his resolution is to be directed by it as a Christian, and as a minister.

After this the candidate shall be desired to kneel, and then the ministers lay their hands on him and pray, each of them. Then the ministers are to withdraw their hands, and, when the ordained person rises, to salute him in the following manner:

“We honor you, dear brother, in the presence of all the people, and give to you the right hand of fellowship as a token of brotherhood and congratulation, and wish you success in your office, and an answer to these prayers which two or three have heartily agreed on earth to put up for you.” Then the solemnity is to be concluded by a charge given to the ordained minister, and a certificate of his ordination as follows:

State of North Carolina,
—County.

This may certify that A. B. (a minister of the Baptist Society, and a member of the church in the county and State aforesaid, being before proved and recommended by said church) was set apart by fasting and prayers, on the—day of —, 18—, by the imposition of hands of C. D., E. F. and G. H., ministers of the gospel, who were called as a Presbytery for that purpose; whereby the said A. B. is ordained a minister of the gospel, and entitled to the administration of all the ordinances thereof. Witness our hands, the day and date above written.

C. D.,
E. F.,
G. H.

On the 30th day of May, 1786, the Association met at brother Joshua Freeman’s, in Bertie County, N. C. Elder Meglamre was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Letters from twenty-one churches were received. Most of them complained of coldness, but about seventy members had been added by baptism. Two churches were added also to the number, viz.: One from Knobscrook, in Pasquotank County, N. C.; and one from Brunswick County, Va. At this Association it was held to be disorderly to hold communion with a church member who frequented a Free Mason Lodge. Thus it appears, that at this early period of her history, before Fullerism, Missionism, and the numerous modern auxiliaries to the church were known among Baptists, the Kehukee Association put her veto against mixing up her members with the secret societies of the world. When she reaffirmed this principle in 1827, about which there was such a hue and cry among missionaries and free-willers all over the land, it was no new thing with the Kehukee, for she had placed herself on that foundation forty-one years before!

On Saturday before the first Sunday in October, 1786, the Association met at South Quay, Va. A church at Black Creek, Southampton County, Va., was received. At this session the Association, by request of the churches, recommended the ministers to visit all the churches as often as possible. Four were designated, each of whom were requested to visit each church within her bounds twice a year. For their support, the churches thus visited were recommended to contribute as they thought it to be their duty, and report the same to the succeeding Association.

It was agreed at this time to hold two sessions a year-one in Virginia in the Spring, and the other in North Carolina in the Fall.

Accordingly, on the 19th day of May, 1787, the body met at Fountain’s Creek, in Virginia. At this sitting a church at Otterdam was received into fellowship. The churches were recommended at this time to search among themselves for such members as have useful gifts, and pressingly urge such to exercise them without delay.

On Saturday before the second Sunday in October, 1787, the Carolina Association met at Daniels’ meeting-house, on Fishing Creek. Elder Meglamre was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Skewarkey Church, in Martin County, North Carolina, under the care of Elder Martin Ross, was received into membership. The churches were again recommended to contribute voluntarily to their ministers’ support. And if a member was known to be derelict in the discharge of this duty, the Deacons ought to report him to the church, and the church in such case should deal with him for covetousness.

Another session of the Association was held on Saturday before the third Sunday in May, 1788, at Elder Meglamre’s meeting-house, in Sussex County, Va.; same Moderator and Clerk as at the previous session. Four additional churches were admitted, viz.; one at Seacock, in Sussex County, Va.; one near the Cut Banks, on Nottaway, in Dinwiddie County, Va.: one at Romanty, in same county; and one on Great Creek, in Brunswick County, Va.

The Carolina Association met at the Falls of Tar River, Edgecombe County, Saturday before the second Sunday in October, 1788; same Moderator and Clerk. A church on Newport River, in Carteret County, and one on New River, in Onslow County, under the care of Elder Robert Nixon, were received. The following extract is taken from the proceedings at this time:

It was the opinion of this Association that those bars which heretofore subsisted between the Baptists amongst us, formerly called Regulars and Separates, be taken down; and a general union and communion take place, according to the terms proposed, at brother Joshua Freeman’s, in Bertie County, May, 1786; and that the names Regular and Separate be buried in oblivion; and that we should henceforth be known to the world by the name of the United Baptists.

In May, 1789, the Association met at the Isle of Wight meeting-house, in Virginia. A church on the Meherrin, Southampton County, Va., under the care of Elder Murrell, was received into the Association.

Elder Isaac Backus, author of “Church History of New England from 1620 to 1804,” was present at this session, and invited to a seat in the Association. Also Elders John Pollard, Thomas Read and Thomas Armistead, being present, were invited to seats.

On the 10th of October, 1789, the Association convened at Whitfield’s meeting-house, Pitt County, N. C. Brother Elisha Battle was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. A church at Lockwood’s Folly, in Brunswick County, and a church in Robeson County, N. C., under the care of Elder Jacob Tarver, joined the Association. Elders Burkitt, Barrow and Read were appointed to preach on Sunday. A church in Bladen County, and one in New Hanover County, under the care of Elder William Cooper, were also received into membership. At this time the following named churches were received into membership, in order to complete the union between Regulars and Separates, viz.:

1. The church in Warren County, under the care of Elder Lewis Moore.
2. The church in Franklin County, under the care of Elder William Lancaster.
3. The church at Toisnot, under the care of Reuben Hayes.
4. The church in Johnson and Wake Counties, under the care of John Moore.
5. The church in Duplin, Wayne and Johnston Counties, under the care of Charles Hines.
6. The church in Sampson, Wake and Cumberland Counties, under the care of W. Taylor.
7. The church in Sampson County, under the care of Fleet Cooper.

Elder Burkitt, from the committee appointed to prepare a plan or constitution for the future government of the Association, reported that they had prepared a plan, which to them was thought the most advisable; which was read and debated, article by article; and amendments being made thereto, the Association resolved to adopt the following Plan or Constitution for the future government of the Association, viz.:

“The Plan or Constitution of the United Baptist Association, formerly called the Kehukee Association:

Preamble.

From a long series of experiences we, the churches of Jesus Christ, being regularly baptized upon a profession of our faith in Christ, are convinced of the necessity of a combination of churches, in order to perpetuate an Union and Communion amongst us, and preserve a correspondence with each other in our Union; we therefore propose to maintain and keep the orders and rules of an Association according to the following plan or form of government.

Article I. The Association shall be composed of members chosen by the different churches in our Union, and duly sent to represent them in the Association; who shall be members whom they judge best qualified for that purpose, and, producing letters from their respective churches, certifying their appointment, shall be entitled to a seat.

II. In the letters from the different churches shall be expressed their number in full fellowship, those baptized, received by letter, dismissed, excommunicated and dead since the last Association.

III. The members thus chosen and convened shall be denominated the United Baptist Association, formerly called the Kehukee Association; being composed of sundry churches lying and being in North Carolina and the lower parts of Virginia; who shall have no power to lord it over God’s heritage; nor shall they have any classical power over the churches; nor shall they infringe any of the internal rights of any church in the Union.

IV. The Association, when convened, shall be governed and ruled by a regular and proper Decorum.

V. The Association shall have a Moderator and Clerk, who shall be chosen by the suffrage of the members present.

VI. New churches may be admitted into this Union who shall petition by letter and delegates, and upon examination (if found orthodox and orderly) shall be received by the Association, and this shall be manifested by the Moderator giving the delegates the right hand of fellowship.

VII. Every church in the Union shall be entitled to representation in the Association, but there shall be only two members from each church.

VIII. Every query presented by any member in the Association shall be once read; and, before it be debated, the Moderator shall put it to vote, and if there be a majority for its being debated, it shall be taken into consideration, and be deliberated; but if there be a majority against it, it shall be withdrawn.

IX. Every motion made and seconded shall come under the consideration of the Association, except it be withdrawn by the member who made it.

X. The Association shall endeavor to furnish the churches with the Minutes of the Association. The best method for effecting that purpose shall be at the discretion of future Associations.

XI. We think it absolutely necessary that we should have an Association fund for defraying the expenses of the same; for the raising and supporting of which we think it the duty of each church in the Union to contribute voluntarily such sums as they shall think proper, and send by the hands of their delegates to the Association; and those moneys thus contributed by the churches and received by the Association shall be deposited in the hands of a Treasurer, by the Association appointed, who shall be accountable to the Association for all moneys by him received and paid out according to the direction of the Association.

XII. There shall be an Association book kept, wherein the proceedings of every Association shall be regularly recorded by a Secretary appointed by the Association, who shall receive a compensation yearly for his trouble.

XIII. The Minutes of the Association shall be read (and corrected if need be), and signed by the Moderator and Clerk before the Association rises.

XIV. Amendments to this plan or form of government may be made at any time by a majority of the Union, when they may deem it necessary.

XV. The Association shall have power,—

1. To provide for the general union of the churches.
2. To preserve inviolably a chain of communion among the churches.
3. To give the churches all necessary advice in matters of difficulty.
4. To inquire into the cause why the churches fail to represent themselves at any time in the Association.
5. To appropriate those moneys by the churches contributed for an Association fund to any purpose they may think proper.
6. To appoint any member or members, by and with his or their consent, to transact any business which they may see necessary.
7. The Association shall have power to withdraw from any church in the Union which shall violate the rules of this Association, or deviate from the orthodox principles of religion.
8. To admit any of the distant brethren in the ministry, as assistants, who may be present at the time of their sitting, whom they shall judge necessary.
9. The Association shall have power to adjourn themselves to any future time or place they may think most convenient to the churches; provided it be holden once in the year in the State of Virginia, and once in the year in North Carolina.”

Up to this period, October, 1789 (the year in which the Federal Constitution of the United States was agreed on), no Minutes of the Association had been printed. But at this time it was agreed that 250 Minutes for the use of the churches be printed, and that the Constitution or form of government be inserted in the same. The Association embraced at this time 51 churches and 3,944 members, being an increase of 41 churches and 1,350 members in twelve years; and the members composing the Association expressed great thankfulness to God for the happy union that had taken place between Regulars and Separates.

In May, 1790, the Association was held at Reedy Creek meeting-house, Brunswick County, Va. Elder Meglamre was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk.

A church in Portsmouth and one in Mecklenberg, Va., under the care of Elder John King, were received to membership at this Association. At this Association it was agreed for the first time in her history that a Circular Letter should be written to the churches, and Elder Burkitt was requested to prepare the same. The subject to be written on was “Sanctification.” The churches were requested to give their unordained ministers who traveled among the churches suitable letters of recommendation.

In October, 1790, the Association convened at Davis’s meeting-house, Halifax County, N. C. Elder Barrow preached the introductory sermon. Brother Elisha Battle was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Letters from fifty-four churches were read. Six churches were received into membership at this Association, making in all sixty. Those received at this time were: A church on Flatty Creek, Pasquotank County, N. C.; one near Wiccacon, in Bertie County; one on Sawyer’s Creek, Camden County; one on Hadnott’s Creek, Carteret County; one on Trent, Jones County; and one in Dobb’s County,—all in North Carolina.

Something remarkable is to be noticed in the fact that this Association has been termed, since its origin, both by friends and foes, the “Kehukee Association.” The union of Separates and Regulars, with all the solemnity of a compact, and a change in name from “Kehukee” to “United Baptists,” made not the least difference in this respect. The name “Kehukee” obtained over all others, and from first to last “Kehukee” it has been called.

Itinerant preaching was seriously considered at this Association, and a strong desire prevailed that all the churches should be supplied, to some extent at least, with ministerial aid. We copy from the Minutes as follows: A committee of five, viz., Elders Barrow and Burkitt, and brethren Battle, Lemon and Colonel Bryan, were appointed to devise ways and means for the encouragement of itinerant preaching, who reported that,-

“Whereas, It does appear to us, from a variety of circumstances, that itinerant preaching is necessary, and we hope would be a blessing; we therefore advise the Association to recommend to the several churches in the Union to signify, in their letters to the next Association, whether they approve of the following plan, viz.: 1. That the Association be divided into certain districts. 2. That a certain number of ministers be appointed by the Association to travel, attend at, and preach to each church, once at least in six months or more often. 3. That such ministers as are nominated shall have no power or superiority over the churches by virtue of their delegation or otherwise, more than to advise. 4. We would advise every church, when visited, to call those ministers to their assistance in conference about any matter of difficulty, whether it be in principle or practice. 5. That the Association do recommend the respective churches of their connection to consider what the Apostle says concerning this matter, ‘That they who preach the gospel should live of the gospel;’ and accordingly advise the churches to consider the expenses of those ministers, and use proper means in each church (which they themselves may prescribe) to answer that purpose, and voluntarily contribute to them for the defraying of such expenses.”

The boundaries had now become so large and the number of churches so great that a division seemed a matter of necessity. Accordingly, it was agreed that the churches divide and constitute two Associations. Those situated in Virginia were to be called the “Virginia Portsmouth Association,” and those in North Carolina were to retain the name of the “Kehukee Association.” There was no diversity of belief among them; they were all in perfect accord, and agreed to visit each other annually by messengers and letters of correspondence.

This arrangement left forty-two churches in North Carolina, and gave Virginia nineteen, the whole number at the time being sixty-one, and the membership 5,017. The Virginia Portsmouth took with her the same Articles of Faith which her churches had subscribed to all along as members of the Kehukee; and the Kehukee retained the same Articles that she held before the division, and adheres to them at the present time without the slightest change.

For a long time a brotherly correspondence was kept up between the two bodies, and they agreed in faith and practice. But the Virginia Portsmouth at length became wise above that which was written, joined herself to idols, became pharisaical in sentiment, changed her Articles of Faith, and consequently broke off the correspondence with her old Mother Kehukee.

In October, 1791, the Kehukee Association convened at Flat Swamp meeting-house, Pitt County, N. C. This was the first session after the division made in order to form the Virginia Portsmouth. Thirty-seven churches were represented by their messengers. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Burkitt. Col. Nathan Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Elders Barrow and Brown were received as messengers from the Virginia Portsmouth Association.

At this Association a church on Morattock Creek, Tyrrell Comity; a church at Matamuskeet; a church on Little Contentnea; and a church on Bear Creek, Duplin County, N. C., were received as members of the body.

The proposition submitted to the churches at the session in 1790, on the subject of itinerant preaching, was disapproved by a great majority of the churches, and was so signified in their letters to this Association. The Association, however, still thought itinerant preaching useful, and recommended the churches to adopt some method to encourage it.

Elders Ross and Baker were appointed messengers from this to the Virginia Portsmouth Association. Elder Read was appointed to write a Circular Letter for the next Association on the doctrine of Original Sin.

On Saturday before the second Sunday in October, 1792, the Association was held with the church at Bear Creek, Lenoir County, N. C. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Ross. The Circular Letter prepared by Elder Read was received and ordered to be printed. Nothing of importance transpired at this meeting.

On Saturday before the second Sunday in 1793, the Association was held with the church at Skewarkey, Martin County, N. C. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Thomas Etheridge. Brother Nathan Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Letters from forty-three churches were received and read. Elder Murrell was received as a messenger from the Virginia Portsmouth Association. A letter from the Georgia Association was received and read. Three churches were by petition added to the number this year, viz.: Poplar Spring and Maple Spring, both in Franklin County, and Durham’s Creek-the last named being situated in Beaufort County, N. C. The churches now numbering 49, and the number of communicants 3,440, a second division was deemed advisable.

Accordingly a separation was made, and Tar River became the dividing line. All north of it retained the name Kehukee, and all south of it were to be called the Neuse Association. It was also agreed that a regular annual correspondence should be kept up between the two bodies, by at least two messengers. Those appointed at this time to visit the Neuse were Elders John Read and Lewis Moore. Elder Lancaster was appointed to write a Circular for the next Association, on the subject of the saints’ final perseverance in grace.

On the 27th of September, 1794, the Kehukee met with the church at Sandy Run, Bertie County, N. C. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder McCabe, according to appointment. Colonel Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. This was the first meeting after the second division, and the number of churches was reduced to twenty-six. Letters from twenty-two of them were received and read in the Association. Brethren Wall, Murrell and Barnes, messengers from sister Associations, were present, and invited to seats. Elders Ross, Lancaster and Murrell were appointed to preach on Sunday of this meeting. A church on the Meherrin, formerly under the care of Elder William Parker (a General Baptist), petitioned, by letter and messenger, for membership in this body. Upon diligent inquiry and examination, they were adjudged to be now sound in the faith and order of the gospel, and were received. Elder Burkitt was appointed to write a Circular Letter for the next Association on effectual calling. The following resolution appears in the proceedings of this meeting:

_“Resolved,_ That the Saturday before the fourth Sunday in every month should be appointed a day for prayer-meetings throughout the churches; whereon all the members of the respective churches are requested to meet at their meeting-houses, or places of worship, and there for each of them, as far as time will admit, to make earnest prayer to God for a revival of religion amongst us.”

On Saturday before the fourth Sunday in September, 1795, the Association met at Yoppin meeting-house, Chowan County, N. C. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Read. Colonel Nathan Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Elder Barrow was received a messenger from the Virginia Portsmouth Association. A letter of correspondence from the Neuse Association was received and read, but the messengers failed to attend. A letter of correspondence from the Georgia Association was received and read.

The “Itinerant System” was still on the minds of many brethren, and discussed again at this Association. A committee was appointed to inquire into and report the best method of promoting it. Elders Burkitt, Barrow and Spivey constituted the committee. They recommended that four ordained ministers be appointed to visit all the churches, each church in the connection to be visited by each minister. The first was to mark out his course, and, in fulfilling it, give notice of the coming of the second in order, who was to start three months thereafter. The third was to follow the second in three months, and so on till all four of them visited all the churches in the Association. This arrangement was by no means to form a bar to other ministers visiting the same churches, as their minds might be inclined thereto. Elders Burkitt, Etheridge, John McCabe and Spivey were chosen to carry out this arrangement.

Elder Lancaster was appointed to preach the introductory sermon at next Association; and Elder McCabe to write the Circular, without any subject being given him to write on.

The next Association (1796) was held at Parker’s meeting-house on the Meherrin. Elder Lancaster preached the introductory sermon according to appointment. Elder McCabe was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Letters were received and read from twenty-two churches. Elders Brown and Morris were corresponding messengers from the Virginia Portsmouth Association. Elders Totewine and Tison were messengers from the Neuse. Elders Murrell, Barnes, Wall and McClenny, being present from sister Associations, were invited to seats.

A church at Great Swamp, in Pitt County, under the pastoral care of Elder Noah Tison, was received to membership in the body. This Association did not think proper to continue the mode adopted by the last Association for the encouragement of “itinerant preaching.” Thus it appears that all the plans for “itinerant preaching” failed, and the matter was left as it was in the beginning, viz.: For ministers to go and preach wherever and whenever the Spirit of the Lord should direct them. This was the apostolic rule.

The next Association was held at Flatty Creek, Pasquotank County, N. C., on Thursday, Sept. 21st, 1797, and two succeeding days, as was usual. Elder Spivey preached the introductory sermon. Elder McCabe was chosen Moderator, and Elder Spivey Clerk. Letters from nineteen churches were read. Elder Morris, messenger from the Virginia Portsmouth Association, took his seat, and presented to the Association a letter of correspondence and twenty-seven copies of her Minutes.

Elders William Soary and James McClenny, of the Virginia Portsmouth Association, being present, were invited to seats in this. Elder McCabe was appointed a messenger to the next Neuse Association, and Elder Ross to the Virginia Portsmouth.

On the 20th of September, 1798, the Kehukee Association assembled with the church at Cashie, in Bertie County, N. C. Elder Davis Biggs preached the introductory sermon. Brother Nathan Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Lemuel Burkitt Clerk. Letters from twenty-three churches were received and read. Messengers were received from the Virginia Portsmouth Association, Elder Browne and Jacob Gregg, with Corresponding Letter; brother Joshua Barnes with Minutes from the Neuse. Also Minutes were received from the following Associations, viz.: Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Danburry, Middle District, Stonington, Delaware, Woodstock, Ketockton, Warren, Roanoke, Goshen, Dover, Shaftsbury and Hephzibah.

A custom had prevailed to some extent of paying the expenses of visiting brethren from this to sister Associations; but at this meeting it was concluded to discontinue that practice.

The next Association was held at Fishing Creek, N. C., commencing on Saturday, the 5th of October, 1799. Brother Amariah Biggs preached the introductory sermon. Brother Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Letters from twenty-two churches were read. Elder Jesse Mercer, from Georgia, Elder Barnes, from the Neuse, and Elder Browne, from Virginia, were present and invited to seats. A newly constituted church at Quankey, in Halifax County, was received into membership. Letters of correspondence from Virginia Portsmouth, Georgia and Hephzibah Associations were received and read. Another attempt was made at this meeting of the Association to supply destitute churches, who urged their claims before the Association for something of this nature to be done for them. And the Association again undertook the task, but moved in the behalf of only one of them, viz., the church at Parker’s. Elder Harrell agreed to visit her at her quarterly meeting in November, Elder Burkitt in February, Elder Lancaster in May, and Elder Read in August.

Minutes from the following Associations were received at this time, viz.: Shaftsbury, New Hampshire, Leyden, Woodstock, Danbury, Warren, Delaware, Culpepper, Ketockton and New York.

The Association appointed Thursday, 21st day of November, as a day of general thanksgiving to Almighty God, throughout the churches, for His temporal blessings on their fields and farms, and that their country seemed happily delivered from the fearful apprehension of want and scarcity.

The Association for 1800 was held with the church at the Falls of Tar River, commencing on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. The introductory sermon was delivered by brother Joseph Biggs. Brother Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. Letters from twenty-one churches were read. Elder Lewis Moore, from Tennessee, was present at this Association. Letters of correspondence from Virginia Portsmouth and Neuse Associations were read; and their messengers, Elders Murrell, Barnes and Oliver, took their seats. Seven copies of the Minutes of the Charleston Association were received and read in the Association. Elders McCabe and Gilbert were appointed messengers to the Neuse Association, and Elders Lancaster and Read to the Virginia Portsmouth. Elders Murrell, Moore and Burkitt were appointed to preach on Sunday.

The next session of the Kehukee Association was held with the church at Great Swamp, Pitt County, North Carolina, commencing on the third of October, 1801. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Martin Ross. Brother Mayo, Moderator; Elder Burkitt, Clerk. Letters from twenty churches were read. A letter from the Virginia Portsmouth Association was received, by the hands of their messengers, Elders Browne and Grigg. A letter of correspondence from the Neuse Association was received, by the hands of their messenger, Elder Barnes. Elder Burkitt was appointed to write to the Portsmouth, Elder McCabe to the Neuse and Elder Ross to the Georgia Association. The Circular Letter, which was to have been written for this Association by Elder Etheridge, was presented in an imperfect and unfinished state; on which account it was decided that Elder Burkitt should write such an one as he thought proper, to be attached to the Minutes. In the discharge of this duty he was requested to give an account, as accurately as possible, of such revivals of religion in the different States as had come within his knowledge. “Revivals of Religion,” so-called, had about this time began to become common in various States in the Union. Elders Burkitt, Browne and Grigg were appointed to preach on Sunday. The Circular Letter in the Minutes of the Dover Association was read in this Association, and the same gave an account of a happy revival among the churches of that body. Elders McCabe and Tison were appointed messengers to the Neuse Association; Elders Burkitt and Ross to the Portsmouth. Minutes from the following Associations were read, viz.: Flat River, Dover, Ketockton, Roanoke, Middle District and Goshen. Letters from the churches reported 138 baptized the previous year. And, from the signs all around, it was stated in the Minutes of this year that a growing interest was felt in religious concerns, and a glorious revival was believed to be not far distant.

On the 2nd of October, 1802, the Association met at Elder Henry’s meeting-house, Bertie County, N. C. Elder Davis Biggs preached the first discourse. Colonel Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Spivey Clerk. Elder Jeremiah Ritter, from Virginia, was present, and on invitation took his seat. Letters from twenty churches were read. Letters from Portsmouth and Neuse Associations were received and read; and their messengers, Elders Browne, Biggs, Whitfield and Cooper, on invitation, took their seats. Elder Gilbert was appointed to write to the Portsmouth, and Elder Spivey to the Neuse Association. It was agreed at this Association to have reprinted a sermon, delivered by Elder John Leland, of Massachusetts, entitled “A Blow at the Root.” Elders Browne, Whitfield and Ross were chosen to preach on Sunday. Elders James Ross and Hollaway Morris were appointed messengers to the Neuse; and Elders Martin Ross and Read to the Portsmouth Association. Elder Lemuel Burkitt, who had acted in the capacity of Clerk to this Association for many years, was present at this session, but was so much afflicted that he had to leave; whereupon a complimentary resolution was passed in his behalf. He had not only served the Association as Clerk from near the time of its origin, but he had been useful in various capacities, and an able and faithful minister of the gospel also.

According to expectation, there had been a wonderful outpouring of God’s Spirit among the churches during the previous year, and a large ingathering was the result; 872 were added to the churches by baptism in one year.

The interest then felt in religion-the activity of ministers and members generally, the large numbers added to the churches by baptism, upon a profession of their faith in Christ-seemed to say that the day of prosperity had indeed dawned upon the churches of the Kehukee Association, after a long night of coldness and seeming indifference.

From 1789 to 1802, reports of additions by baptism had been about as follows, viz.: In 1789, 15 reported; in 1790, 446; in 1791, 99; in 1792, 192; in 1794, 57; in 1795, 19; in 1796, 33; in 1797, 13; in 1798, 43; in 1799, 72; in 1800, 129; in 1801,138; in 1802, 872.

The Lord impressed the minds of His people to crave and earnestly beseech Him to revive His work of grace in the hearts of His children, to pour fourth His Spirit abundantly on the people, and cause the ransomed of the Lord to return and come with singing unto Zion; and as a consequence those prayers were answered. The prayer indited by the Holy Spirit will assuredly be heard and answered by a covenant-keeping God, who regardeth the prayer of the destitute, and will not despise their prayer. It will be heard and answered, though apparently long delayed. For many years such petitions had gone forth from the hearts of God’s people in the bounds of the Kehukee Association, and the set time to favor Zion at length appeared, when the Lord seemed to break forth on the right hand and on the left in her behalf, and draw many sons and daughters home to the great Shepherd and Bishop of their souls.

The work was progressing considerably in 1801, during which year 138 were added by baptism. But in 1802 there was a wonderful increase. At the Association in 1801, held at Great Swamp, Pitt County, Elder Burkitt, having just returned from Tennessee and Kentucky, brought the news from Kentucky and proclaimed it from the stage, that in that State about 6,000 persons had, within about eight months, given a rational account of a work of grace in their souls and had been baptized.

This declaration seemed to have a wonderful effect on the congregation then present, so that numbers were crying for mercy, and many praising and glorifying God. All throughout that Associational year the seasons were refreshing, and nearly all the churches received additions to their number. About 1,500 were added in two years.

During this exciting time it might reasonably be supposed that some errors in practice would creep in. Too much reliance was placed at times on human means for the conversion of sinners and bringing them under a profession of religion. A degree of zeal abounded which, upon calm reflection, it must be admitted was not “according to knowledge,” not according to the New Testament, neither according to the practice in the churches composing the Kehukee Association from its origin up to this period. Of course reasonable allowance can be made for all this. While some are brought into the visible church, under such circumstances, who are not “born again,” but are deceived and deceive others, yet others are “new creatures,” and remain through life steadfast and worthy members of the church.

Union Meetings had been adopted before this period, but then obtained additional favor. They consisted in a union of a few churches that met together at stated times to confer in love about matters relating to peace, brotherly union and general fellowship. Their sessions lasted about three days. Every fifth Sunday in the month was a favorite time for them to be held, including the previous Friday and Saturday. They were not fettered with any business arrangements. Preaching was the main thing attended to. At the period under consideration there were four Union Meetings within the bounds of the Association, viz.: 1. The Eastern Union, composed of the churches of Coinjock, Camden, Sawyer’s Creek, Knobscrook, Flatty Creek, Yoppim and Ballard’s Bridge. 2. The Bertie Union, composed of the churches Bertie, Cashie, Wiccacon, Meherrin and Connaritsey. 3. The Flat Swamp Union, composed of Flat Swamp, Great Swamp, Conoho, Skewarkey and Morattock Churches. 4. The Swift Creek Union, composed of the churches at the Falls of Tar River, Kehukee, Fishing Creek, Rocky Swamp and Quankey. Some churches did not belong to any Union.

These Union Meetings were not permanent organizations; they were subject to change, so as to suit the convenience of the churches. Sometimes they would be dispensed with a while, and then afterwards be revived. The most notable case now remembered is the one called “Skewarkey Union,” which originated with the church at Skewarkey, in 1852. The old “Skewarkey Union,” which was made up of that church. Beargrass, Smithwick’s Creek and Picot, had quietly disappeared for several years, and Skewarkey took measures to revive it. She appointed a time for it to be held, and notified the other three churches to attend. They did so, and afterwards others offered to come in, and were received, until the number now is about twenty-two; extending over a very large area of territory. Large numbers of people usually attend these meetings, with more ministers than can be permitted, for the want of time, to preach. Great harmony prevails among the members; but there is no undue excitement of the passions apparent, and it is customary for the whole number of members present, both male and female, to commune on Sunday, the last day of the meeting.

No particular form or constitution for these meetings is deemed necessary; but as a matter of information, we annex the constitution adopted by the Bertie Union Meeting many years ago.

Article I. This meeting shall in future consist of the members who may attend the same, Bertie, Cashie, Wiccacon, Meherrin, and Connaritsey Churches, and members who may attend the same at their respective appointments from all sister churches and Associations.

II. This meeting shall be known by the name of the “Bertie Union Meeting.”

III. Each meeting shall have power to adjourn themselves to any time or place they may see proper, so that the different churches in the Union be equally benefited by their several appointments.

IV. When assembled they shall make choice of a Moderator and Clerk; and the Clerk of said meeting shall enter the Minutes of the Conference and transmit them to the next meeting.

V. A book shall be procured, in which all the Minutes of the different Conferences shall be inserted, from time to time, and a person appointed to record the same.

VI. In time of Conference, each member shall be entitled to liberty of speech, and shall first arise and address the Moderator.

VII. No person shall be admitted to speak more than three times to any one subject, without liberty from the Conference.

VIII. Any motion made and seconded shall come under consideration of the meeting, unless withdrawn by the person who made it.

IX. Every case or query presented in writing shall be twice read if required; and, before debated, shall be received by a majority of the meeting then present.

X. New churches, that may hereafter be constituted, or are now constituted, lying and being within the bounds of Roanoke and Meherrin Rivers, or convenient thereto, may be admitted into this Union.

XI. At the time of Conference, a door shall be opened for the admission of members by the ordinance of baptism.

XII. The ordinance of the Lord’s Supper shall be administered at the time of each Union Meeting, on one of the days which Conference may appoint.

XIII. The meeting shall be opened and closed by prayer.

So far we have traced the progress of the Kehukee Association, under the lights afforded by Elders Lemuel Burkitt and Jesse Read, who published her history from the commencement down to the year 1803.

1. All people, whether professors of religion or not, have some kind of religious belief—that is, some kind of creed either written or unwritten. A creed is a convenient summary of the religious, belief of a particular people at a particular time: and may be useful as a bond of union between those who profess to believe it, as an aid to the understanding of the Scriptures, and as a safeguard against false doctrine and practice. But let it never be forgotten that it is both the Baptist and the Protestant doctrine that the Bible is the only authoritative and infallible rule of faith and practice, and that each individual has the inalienable right, necessitated by his inalienable personal responsibility, to interpret the Bible for himself. Only the Greek and Roman Catholic so-called “Churches” and Romanizing Protestants put their creeds on a level with the Bible, and claim for them equal authority and infallibility. An increase of spiritual knowledge of course improves a creed, and makes it approximate more closely to the Bible.
To the old London Baptist Confession of Faith the Philadelphia Baptist Association added two articles on the “Singing of Psalms” and “Laying on of Hands.” The Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association, in 1777, adopted a much shorter and simpler Confession of Faith, which is given under that year in the present volume.—S. H.

Chapter XXI. Kehukee Association from 1803 to 1833.

We shall now attempt to trace the history of the Kehukee Association from 1803 to 1833, under the guidance chiefly of Elder Joseph Biggs, of Williamston, N. C., and pastor of the church at Skewarkey for many years and up to the period of his death, which occurred in 1844.

On Friday before the first Sunday in October, 1803, the Association convened, pursuant to appointment, at Conoho (sometimes called Log Chapel), Martin County, N. C. Elder John Wall preached the introductory Sermon. Elder Jesse Read was chosen Moderator, and Elder Lemuel Burkitt Clerk, who called to his assistance brother James B. Jordan. Letters from twenty seven churches were received and read; from which it appeared there had been added to them by baptism in one year 628 persons, and that there were then in fellowship 2,855 members. Visiting brethren in the ministry from sister Associations were invited to seats, when Elders Brame, Poindexter, Sorey, Bunting, Barnes and Bennett seated themselves. Letters from the Virginia Portsmouth Association, by the hands of her messengers, Elders Browne and Murrell, and from the Neuse, by Elders Thompson and Oliver, were handed in and read. Three churches were added to the number at this meeting, viz. Cross Roads, Edgecombe County; Little Coneto, in same county; and Connaritsey, in Bertie County; making now thirty churches in all. A letter was received from the Flat River Association. Elders Browne Ross and Poindexter were appointed to preach on Sunday. Elders Read and Ross were appointed messengers to the Neuse, and Elders Burkitt and Spivey to the Virginia Portsmouth Association. Minutes were received from the following Associations, viz. Virginia Portsmouth, Neuse, Flat River, Middle District, Dover, Roanoke District, New York and Kentucky Associations. The Association authorized the following paragraph, taken from the Minutes of the Philadelphia Association, to be inserted in the Minutes of this year, viz.:

“Ninety-four years have rolled on since the first meeting of this Association (the first in America), and then composed of only five churches; but viewing the state of the churches at present, our connections in this country, we perceive it to be at least at this time as the thousands of Israel, embracing numerous Associations, composed of at least (at this time) twelve hundred churches, containing more than one hundred thousand members.”

At this Association a subject was introduced in the shape of a query, which gave distress, trouble and anxiety to the minds of brethren belonging to this body for twenty-four years. Some were in favor, and others stood opposed to the measure. There never was a perfect agreement as to its merits—a feeble and tardy assent was given to it by a majority for a while, but perfect satisfaction never; and at length, in the year 1827, it was settled by discarding the subject and all measures connected with it. It was a new thing introduced to the notice of the Association, and after the body had been in existence thirty-seven years! It gave rise to contentions, heartburning, bickerings, animosities and strife, broke the peace of the brethren, and was a fire-brand in their midst. The subject was that of Missions, which was introduced by the following query, submitted by Elder Martin Ross, then a prominent minister in the Association; and at a time when the zeal and credulity of many hundreds of new converts were at their height. This was one drawback to the great revival which had just occurred within the bounds of the Association. But for the revival, so called, this new measure and great departure from the custom of the fathers would, probably, have received no favorable consideration among the staid old members of the Association. This was the query under consideration:

“Is not the Kehukee Association, with all her numerous and respectable friends, called on in Providence, in some way, to step forward in support of that missionary spirit which the great God is so wonderfully reviving amongst the different denominations of good men in various parts of the world?”

Simply to state this query is sufficient to show a settled purpose to depart from original ground, previously occupied by Baptists, and to exhibit the state and standing of the Association or church in a different light from that previously discovered in her history.

When was it known before that the Association had “numerous and respectable friends?” When had she before discovered “different denominations of good men in various parts of the world?” When had she found it necessary before this time “to step forward in support of” any work which the God of Heaven was already carrying on? If God Almighty was reviving a missionary spirit among different denominations of good men in various parts of the world, without the aid of men made missionary societies, then wherefore the necessity for their creation to enable Him to carry it on? We see none. A very few quotations will show the antagonism of their “query” to the true condition of God’s church and people.

“Why callest thou me good” there is none good but one, that is God” (Matt. 19:17). “There is none that doth good, no, not one” (Rom. 3:12). “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you” (John 15:18, 19).

“Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world, is the enemy of God” (James 4:4). “He spake, and it was done; He commanded, arid it stood fast” (Ps. 23:9). “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, arid there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me; declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure” (Isa. 16:9, 10).

The idea of “respectability” and to “be like other people” and to “help the Almighty carry on His own work” has always been damaging to the people of God, whenever entertained by them in any age of the world. It was so under the old dispensation, and has been so under the new. It was so in Andrew Fuller’s day, and was so in Martin Ross’s day. The Lord’s people have always been a poor and afflicted people. They have always been few in number—the persecuted among men in all ages—everywhere spoken against and cordially hated for their Master’s and his truth’s sake. A woe has befallen them whenever they have wrangled among themselves to see who should be the greatest, or to see how near they could be conformed to the religions of the world and still retain their identity as the peculiar people of God.

The subject matter of this query was referred to the next Association, and coming up then, in 1804, for consideration, it was agreed that the following named persons, Elders Lemuel Burkitt, Martin Ross, Aaron Spivey, Jesse Read and John McCabe, be appointed delegates to meet such as might be appointed by the Virginia Portsmouth and Neuse Associations at Cashie meeting-house, Bertie County, on Friday before the third Sunday in June, 1805, to devise ways and means to support the missionary cause. The proceedings of this meeting held at Cashie meeting-house we have not succeeded in finding; it was not reported to the Association, so as to be spread upon her minutes, but arrangements were made to enter upon a system of collecting money to aid missionary purposes.

The scheme was plausible to many; it was new and beautiful to some; it was well dressed up; it was urged by good words and fair speeches, calculated to mislead the minds of the inexperienced. Those who supported it were represented by the orators of the occasion to be warm-hearted, noble Christians; while those who opposed it were denominated cold-hearted or lukewarm Christians, who cared but little for the salvation of their fellow-creatures. And thus the new project for a season prevailed, against the warnings and opposition of a few faithful soldiers of Christ, who were ready to mark them who caused divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which they had learned, and avoid them (Rom. 16:17); but who were unable at the time to make a sufficient stand against this new thing.

In 1804, on Friday before the first Sunday in October, the Association convened with the church at Parker’s meeting-house, Hertford County, N. C. Elder Philemon Bennett preached the introductory sermon. Brother Nathan Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Lemuel Burkitt Clerk. Letters from Thirty-one churches were read, reporting an addition by baptism of 554, and the whole number to be 3,255. A letter of correspondence from the Virginia Portsmouth Association was received, by the hands of their messengers, Elders Browne and Wright. One also was received from the Neuse, by their messengers, Elders Barnes and Winstead. A letter was also received from the Georgia Association.

Six newly constituted churches were received into membership at this time, viz.: Tranter’s Creek, Beaufort County; Smithwick’s Creek, Martin County; Swift Creek, Edgecombe County; Prospect, Edgecombe County; Mearn’s Chapel, Nash County; and Sappony, Nash County. A church at Poplar Spring, Franklin County, was also received on dismission from the Neuse Association. Elders Lancaster, Browne and Ross were appointed to preach on Sunday.

Elder Ross was appointed to deliver an introductory sermon to the Convention to be held by this Association, the Virginia Portsmouth and the Neuse, at Cashie meeting-house, Bertie County, on Friday before the third Sunday in June 1805, to deliberate on missionary subjects, and Elder John McCabe was appointed his alternative. Thus Elder Ross had gotten his bantling born, and Cashie seemed to be the cradle in which to nurse it.

It was resolved at this session of the Association that the churches composing it to be requested to signify, in their letters to the next, whether they approve of another division in the same.

Elder Brame presented the Association with the Minutes of the Dover, Culpepper, Roanoke District, Goshen and Ketockton Associations, which were thankfully received.

Elder Burkitt was appointed messenger to the Neuse, and Elders Wall and McCabe to the Virginia Portsmouth Associations.

In 1805 the Association met at Daniels’ meeting-house, on Fishing Creek, Halifax County, on Friday before the first Sunday in October. Elder Lewis Whitfield preached the introductory sermon. Brother Nathan Mayo was appointed Moderator, and Elder Burkitt Clerk. A letter of correspondence from the Virginia Portsmouth, by their messenger, Elder Murrell, and one from the Neuse, by their messenger, Elder Whitfield, were received.

Two churches in Bertie County, one at the Log meeting-house, and the other at Outlaw’s Chapel, petitioned for admission as members of this Association and were received. Also a church at Ahoskey, in Hertford County, one at Lawrence’s, on Fishing Creek. Correspondence was continued with Virginia Portsmouth and Neuse Associations. Letters from thirty-nine churches were read, from which it appeared there had been baptized, since the previous session, 432 persons, and the number in Fellowship was 3,579. It was agreed at this time to have another division of the body; all those clenches on the north side of Roanoke River were to be called the Chowan Association, and those on the south side of that river were to retain the name of the Kehukee Association.

The churches on the north side were to meet at Newbiggin meeting house (formerly called Flatty Creek), Pasquotank County, on Friday before the third Sunday in May, 1800, to organize themselves into an associated body. The churches left to retain the name of Kehukee were to hold their next meeting with the church at Skewarkey, on Friday before the first Sunday in October, 1806.

It was agreed at this time that, after defraying the expenses of printing the Minutes for this year, the surplus fund be equally divided between the two Associations, and that each body correspond with the other annually. The division was only for greater convenience, as the bounds had become large and the churches numerous. This was the third division that had taken place among the churches composing the Kehukee Association. She might therefore be considered then the mother of the Virginia Portsmouth, the Neuse and the Chowan Associations—three noble daughters, who annually visited and greatly respected their mother, until their minds became poisoned with the leaven of the Pharisees, which induced them to adopt human devices as a means of saving sinners and gaining respectability among worldly societies. They fell in love more and more with the new men-made institutions, as a substitute for the atonement of our precious Redeemer; and their mother had less and less confidence in these things, and finally declared non-fellowship for them and for those who engaged in them. This produced a separation between mother and daughters, but brought peace and fellowship among the churches of the Kehukee Association, which has been but little interrupted for fifty years. The number of communicants remaining in the Kehukee Churches after this third division was 1,589.

In 1806, on the 3rd of October, the Association met with the church at Skewarkey, Martin County. Elder Nathan Gilbert preached the introductory sermon. Brother Nathan Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk. Elder Burkitt, who had been Clerk of the Kehukee for so many years, but now belonged to the Chowan Association, presented himself as a messenger front that body, and was received, with twenty-five copies of her Minutes. Letters front nineteen churches were read, from which it appears seventy-nine had been added by baptism since the last session, and the number then in fellowship was 1,736. Correspondence was kept up with the following Associations, viz,: Neuse, Chowan, Virginia Portsmouth and Cape Fear. Elder Gilbert was to visit the Neuse, Elder Biggs the Chowan, Elder Lawrence the Virginia Portsmouth, and Elder Thomas Ross the Cape Fear, all of whom were to bear letters. Elder Joseph Biggs was appointed treasurer of the Association fund, to whom Elder Burkitt paid over the amount that was in his hands. Elders Lemuel Burkitt and Aaron Spivey were requested to preach on Sunday.

On Friday before the first Sunday in October, 1807, the Association met at Haywood’s meeting-house, in Franklin County. Elder Joshua Lawrence preached the introductory sermon. Brother Nathan Mayo was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk. Letters from twenty-three churches were read, which showed 111 baptized, and whole number to be 1,640. Elder Joseph Biggs was appointed a messenger to the Chowan, and Elder Amariah Biggs to the Neuse Associations. It was at this time

_“Resolved,_ That the Wednesday before the second Sunday in December, 1807, be observed by the churches of this body as a day of general thanksgiving to God for His mercies bestowed on the labors of the husbandman, this and the past seasons;” and it was recommended to “unite in solemn prayer for the prosperity of Zion.”

Elder Moses Bennett was appointed a messenger to the Flat River Association. Elders Joseph Biggs and John Thompson were requested to preach on Sunday.

In 1808 the Association met at Cross Roads, Edgecombe County, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder Philemon Bennett preached the introductory sermon. Brother Nathan Mayo was Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother Bennett Barrow. Twenty-seven churches represented themselves by letter, from which it appeared 116 had been baptized during the past year, and then in fellowship 1,686. A letter from the Neuse Association, by Elder Dupree, their messenger; one from Chowan, by Elder Spivey; and one from the Virginia Portsmouth, by Elder Buntin, were received.

A church in Hyde County, on the south side of Mattamuskeet Lake, was received into membership at this session. Elders Spivey, Buntin and Lancaster were requested to preach on Sunday. Elder Luke Ward was appointed messenger to the Neuse; Elder Lancaster to the Chowan; and Elder Read to the Virginia Portsmouth Association.

In 1809, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October, the Association was held with the church at Morattock, Washington County. Elder Joshua Lawrence preached the introductory sermon. Elder Philemon Bennett was chosen Moderator, arid Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother Dempsey Battle. Letters from twenty-six churches were read, from which it appeared 49 had been added by baptism, and then in fellowship 1,661. A letter was received from the Chowan Association, by their messengers, Elders Martin Ross and John Wall; and one from the Virginia Portsmouth, by their messenger, Elder Murrell. A newly-constituted church at Moore’s meeting-house, Nash County, was received a member of the Association. Elder Richard Poindexter, a special messenger from the Chowan Association, appeared and took his seat. Elders Benjamin Morsely, Robert Murrell and Martin Ross were requested to preach on Sunday. Elders Amariah Biggs and Benjamin Joyner were appointed messengers to the Neuse; Elders Philemon Bennett and William Lancaster to the Chowan; and Elders Joshua Lawrence and Moses Bennett to the Virginia Portsmouth Association. Elder Benjamin Morsely was present from the South Carolina Association. An article in the Minutes of the Chowan Association, recommending the establishment of a meeting to be called “A Meeting of General Correspondence,” embracing all the Associations, either in whole or in part, that have sprung from the Kehukee Association, was presented for consideration. The matter being entirely new, it was thought best to defer it; and accordingly it was postponed until the next Association.

In 1810 the Association convened at Kehukee meeting-house, Halifax County, Saturday before the first Sunday in October. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder William Lancaster. Elder Philemon Bennett was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk who called to his assistance Elder Moses Bennett. Brethren in the ministry from sister Associations were invited to seats, whereupon Elders William Creath, Richard Dobbs, William Hatchett, Thomas Gardner, William Dossey, James Ross, John Purifoy, Thomas Ross, Thomas Dupree and Hillary Morris seated themselves. Letters from twenty-eight churches were read, from which it appeared there had been baptized the past year 66, then in fellowship 1,663. Elders Creath, Dossey and Dobbs were requested to preach on Sunday. Correspondence by letter was continued with the Red River, Raleigh, Neuse, Chowan and Virginia Portsmouth Associations.

The subject of a “Meeting of General Correspondence,” to be held in North Carolina, was again presented to the consideration of the Association, through Elder Dossey, as suggested in the Minutes of the Chowan Association; whereupon Elders Lancaster, Read, Philemon and Moses Bennett were appointed messengers from this to meet such as may be appointed by other Associations, to assemble at the meeting-house at the Falls of Tar River, on Friday before the second Sunday in June, in 1811. And thus another new thing was introduced among the Baptists of the Kehukee Association and others, unknown to them in former ages. It was deservedly of short duration, however.

In 1811 the Association was held with the church at Mearn’s Chapel, Nash County, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder Richard Dobbs preached the introductory sermon. Elder Philemon Bennett was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance Elder Moses Bennett. Letters from twenty-eight churches were received, from which it appeared 182 had been added by baptism, and 1,627 were then in fellowship. A church newly constituted at Spring Green was received at this session a member of the body. A letter of correspondence from the Red River Association was received. One from the Virginia Portsmouth, with a file of Minutes, was received; and one from the Chowan and Minutes, by the hands of her messenger, Elder Spivey, were also received. Elder Read delivered to the Association thirty copies of the Minutes of the General Convention of North Carolina Baptists. What the character of these Minutes was does not appear, but we infer that they favored men-made missionism. This proves that the Kehukee Association was implicated in this business at that time. But how much implicated in the way of financial responsibility may be gathered from the fact that the Treasurer of the Association was ordered to hand to Elder Philemon Bennett two dollars! advanced by him to defray the expenses of printing the Minutes of the Convention held in June, 1811. Elders Dobbs, Spivey and Robert T. Daniel were requested to preach on Sunday. A letter from the Neuse Association was handed in by her messengers, Elders Dupree and Robert T. Daniel. Letters were forwarded to the Virginia Portsmouth, Chowan, Red River and Raleigh Associations. The following messengers were appointed to visit sister Associations, viz.: Elder Lancaster to the Chowan, Elder Lawrence to the Raleigh, Elder Luke Ward to the Neuse, Elder Joyner to the Virginia Portsmouth, and Elder Philemon Bennett to the Merherrin. The Constitution of the General Meeting of Correspondence of North Carolina Baptists, which assembled at the Falls of Tar River in June, came under deliberation; but after being discussed it was not sanctioned. This was additional evidence that the Kehukee Association was still backward in the support of new things, and viewed this Convention with a jealous eye. The innovation was young, it is true, but it was assuming vast proportions, and the fear was that it would eventually claim dictation to the churches, and thereby destroy their liberties. Elders Lawrence, Lancaster, Philemon and Moses Bennett were appointed delegates to the next General Meeting of Baptists in North Carolina, expected to convene in the city of Raleigh in June, 1812. Thus it appears the Association, though not exactly satisfied with it, permitted it to live a while longer.

1812. The Association met this year on Saturday before the first Sunday in October, at Great Swamp, Pitt County. Elder Philemon Bennett preached the introductory sermon. He was then chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother Bennett Barrow. Letters from twenty-one churches exhibited an increase by baptism for the past year of 257, and the number then in fellowship to be 1,869. A church at Frying Pan, Tyrrell County, was received as a member of the body. A letter from the Chowan Association, with twenty-one copies of her Minutes of 1810, and twenty-five copies of 1811, by her messenger, Elder Spivey, and one from the Neuse Association, with twenty-five copies of her Minutes, by her messenger, Elder John McCabe, were received. A certificate, setting forth the appointment of Elder John Gully as a delegate from the Raleigh Association, with twenty-five copies of Minutes, was received, but Elder Gully failed to attend. A letter from the Virginia Portsmouth Association, accompanied with thirty copies of her Minutes, was received by the hands of Elder Robert Murrell. Twenty-five copies of the Minutes of the Baptist General Meeting of Correspondence in North Carolina were received. Elders Lancaster, Spivey and Biddle were appointed to preach on Sunday. Correspondence with the following Associations Was ordered, viz.: A letter to the Red River; a letter to the Chowan, Elders Read and Philemon Bennett messengers; one to the Virginia Portsmouth, Elder Benjamin Joyner, messenger; and one to the Raleigh, William Lancaster, messenger.

The Constitution of the General Meeting of Correspondence came up for consideration again, and the Association passed the following resolution, with the view, it seems, of making that body as little burdensome and dictatorial as possible:

_“Resolved,_ That the 8th, 9th and 12th Articles of the Constitution of the General Meeting of Correspondence be altered to read thus Article 8th. That a fund to defray the expenses of this body be raised by a voluntary contribution. Article 9th. That the General Meeting of Correspondence may adopt measures to extend religious acquaintance, to encourage the preaching of the gospel and to diffuse useful knowledge. Article 10th. This body shall have an annual meeting, so as to benefit the several Associations, of which the General Meeting may have been composed, but shall be considered only as an advisory council. Article 12th. That when a majority of the Associations of which the General Meeting may have been constituted shall concur in such a wish, then this Constitution may be altered or this meeting dissolved.” From the tenor of this resolution we should infer that the Association in 1812 regarded the General Meeting suspiciously, and looked forward to its probable dissolution. Elders Lancaster, Read, Lawrence and Philemon Bennett were appointed delegates to the next General Meeting of Correspondence, to be held at the Fails of Tar River, on Saturday before the fourth Sunday in July, 1813; and the Association contributed three dollars to the fund of that meeting.

In 1813 the Association met at Williams’s meeting-house, Edgecombe County, Saturday before the first Sunday in October. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder Amariah Biggs. Elder Philemon Bennett was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother Bennett Barrow. Letters from twenty-nine churches were read, from which it appeared 108 had been added by baptism, and the whole number in fellowship 1,974.

A certificate of the Raleigh Association, with thirty-one copies of her Minutes, was received by the hands of Elder Wall, their messenger. Elder Spivey, from the Chowan Association, with twenty-five copies of her Minutes, was received. Elders Spivey, Barnes and Ward were appointed to preach on Sunday. Letters to the Virginia Portsmouth, Red River, Kentucky, Chowan and Neuse Associations were read and approved; and Elders Read and Joyner appointed messengers to the Virginia Portsmouth; Elders P. Bennett and Amariah Biggs to the Chowan; and Elder P. Bennett to the Raleigh Associations. Elders P. Bennett, Lawrence, Read and Amariah Biggs were appointed delegates to the General Meeting of Correspondence to be held at Union meeting-house, Wake County, on Friday before the fourth Sunday in July, 1814, and the Association sent, by the hands of Elder Read, five dollars to the fund of that meeting. The contribution was increased a little, inasmuch as the General Meeting had been held somewhat in check by this body. It was decided at this meeting that the road leading front Hill’s Ferry, on the Roanoke River, to Tarboro, on the Tar River, should be the dividing line between the churches, and all those situated above it should be entitled to the Association one year, and those below it the next year.

In 1814 the Association was held at Morattock meeting-house, Washington County, commencing Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder Joseph Biggs preached the introductory sermon. He was chosen Clerk, and Elder P. Bennett Moderator, and brother Bennett Barrow Assistant Clerk. Twenty-nine churches were heard from; 44 baptized; whole number in fellowship, 1,964. A letter front the Red River, and Elder Dupree, messenger from the Neuse, with Minutes, were received. Letters to the Chowan, Red River, Neuse and Virginia Portsmouth were read and approved; and Elders Biggs and Ward appointed messengers to the Chowan; Elders Read and P. Bennett to the Neuse; Elder P. Bennett and brother John Fowler to the Raleigh; and Elders Joyner and Lawrence to the Virginia Portsmouth Associations. It was resolved to send five dollars to the fund of the General Meeting by Elder P. Bennett; and he with Elders Read and Lancaster were appointed delegates to the next General Meeting of Correspondence.

1815. The Association met this year at Daniels’ meeting-house, on Fishing Creek. The first sermon was preached by Elder Joseph Biggs, who was also appointed Clerk, and Elder P. Bennett Moderator. Letters were received from twenty-nine churches, showing additions to be 41, and whole number in fellowship 1,921. Messengers from sister Associations: Elders Hervey and John Roe, from the Chowan; Elders Landress and Campbell, from the Country Line (a new correspondent). Letters were also received from the Neuse, the Virginia Portsmouth and the Red River Associations. Elder Martin Ross presented to this Association thirty-one copies of the Report of the Board, at Philadelphia, of Baptist Foreign Missions, received through their agent, Luther Rice. This was the first report of the kind ever made to or accepted by the Kehukee Association, which was fifty years—just half a century after her organization. It needs no argument to show that this was the introduction of a new thing to the consideration of this body of Baptists. The committee appointed to examine the Circular Letter was requested to examine this report also, and make their report to the Association on Monday. On Monday the report came in, recommending that the Circular of the agent, Elder Rice, be read, which was done.

Brother Bennett Barrow was then appointed Corresponding Secretary of this Association, until the next annual meeting, “to write to said agent, receive payment for the pamphlets, and transmit the same to the Board or agent.”

It was thought necessary that further alterations be made in the Constitution of the General Meeting of Correspondence, and therefore,

_“Resolved,_ That the delegates from the Association be authorized to assist in making any alterations in said instrument that may be thought necessary.”

Elders Read, P. Bennett, Lancaster, and brother Barrow, and, in case of either failing, Elder Moses Bennett, were appointed delegates to the next General Meeting; and it was resolved that in future the Association would not send any of her funds to that meeting.

Ministers who preached on Sunday of this Association were Elders Roe, Spivey and Whitfield.

1816. On Saturday before the first Sunday in October of this year, the Association convened with the church at Log Chapel, on Conoho Creek, Martin County. Elder Amariah Biggs preached the introductory sermon. Elder Jesse Read was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk. Letters from twenty-five churches showed 44 added by baptism, and the whole number in fellowship, 1,834. Letters from Chowan, Red River, Little River and Flat River Associations were received. Elders Landress, Spivey and Lawrence preached on Sunday. Letters to the Neuse, Chowan, Virginia Portsmouth, Flat River, Country Line, Red River, Tennessee, and Little River, Kentucky, were read and approved. Elders Lawrence and A. Biggs were appointed messengers to the Neuse; Elders Read and Lawrence to the Chowan and Virginia Portsmouth; Elders Lancaster and A. Biggs to the Flat River; Elder Read and brother Barrow to the Country Line; and Elder Joseph Biggs was requested to forward letters to the Red River and Little River Associations. Brother Bennett Barrow was appointed the standing Secretary of this Association, to correspond with the Board of Foreign Missions. The Association, after deliberation, decided not to send any delegates to the General Meeting of Correspondence, and brother Barrow was appointed to give information of the same to said meeting, to be conveyed by Elder Read, and to send up four dollars contributed by individual churches to its fund. Thus it appears the Association dropped this “New Thing,” after trying it for a few years and finding no advantage in it. It was taken up in 1810 and laid down in 1816—lasted only six years.

1817. The Association convened this year with the church at the Falls of Tar River, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder Joseph Biggs preached the introductory sermon. Elder Bennett was chosen Moderator, and Elder Biggs Clerk. Letters from twenty-five churches were read, showing the number of baptisms to be 48, and the number then in fellowship to be 1,739. A letter from the Chowan Association, by their messenger, Elder John Rowe; one from the Red River, and some Minutes of the Flat River Association were handed in.

Correspondence with sister Associations was as follows: Elder Lawrence, messenger to the Neuse; Elders Bennett and J. Biggs to the Chowan; Elder Lancaster to the Raleigh; and Elder Amariah Biggs to the Virginia Portsmouth.

Elders Roe, Lawrence and Hyman preached on Sunday. The Association thankfully received fifty copies of the proceedings of a General Convention of Baptists in the United States, held in Philadelphia from the 7th to the 14th of May, 1817.

The churches composing the Association were requested to signify, in their letters to the next session, whether they approve of the General Meeting and wish to continue a member thereof.

1818. The Association met at Skewarkey, Martin County, Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder P. Bennett preached the introductory sermon, and was then chosen Moderator, and Elder Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother John H. Drake. Letters from twenty-seven churches showed an increase by baptism of 41, and in fellowship 1,634. Letters were received from four Associations, viz.: Neuse, Chowan, Red River and Little River. Messengers from Neuse, Elder Dupree and brother Simpson; from Chowan, Elders Spivey and Newborn.

The Association received sixteen copies of the fourth annual report of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions from the United States Convention at Philadelphia. This showed the age of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions to be four years. It was born of spurious philanthropy and false zeal in 1814. We are naturally led to inquire, How did the churches and the people of God in America get along without it till this auspicious year dawned upon the world? If it was necessary in 1814, was it not necessary in 1714, and in 1614, and every hundred years backward, through the centuries to the Apostolic Age? If it was not necessary until 1814, was it necessary then, or can it be necessary now? We find nothing of it previous to this time in the history of the American churches, and nothing of it in England previous to the days of Fuller and Cary. We cannot escape the conclusion, therefore, that the modern missionary system is an innovation and a human appendage to the church of Christ, worldly in character and insulting in its nature to the King in Zion. And, lamentable to record, the Kehukee Association was implicated in 1814 in this maneuver, and a majority of her body were led off into error by the blandishments of men to sanction this newfangled scheme.

Elders Dupree, Bennett and Lawrence preached on Sunday. Messengers to corresponding Associations were appointed: Elder Amariah Biggs to the Virginia Portsmouth; Elders Joseph Biggs and Bennett to the Chowan; and Elders Lawrence and Hyman to the Neuse. Letters were to be forwarded to the Red River and to the Little River Associations. Elder Joseph Biggs was requested to procure a blank book and record the proceedings of this Association from the termination of Elders Burkitt and Read’s history, and report the expense thereof.

1819. At Deep Creek meeting-house, Halifax County, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October of this year, the Association convened. Elder Joseph Biggs preached the introductory sermon. Elder Bennett was chosen Moderator, and Elder Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother John H. Drake. Visiting brethren in the ministry from sister Associations were Elders Newborn, Crompler and Murrell. Letters from twenty-six churches showed 49 to have been added by baptism, and the number in fellowship 1,634.

A church in Tarborough, Edgecombe County, was received into membership. Letters from the Neuse awl Little River were received, the former by Elder Riddle, their messenger, and the latter by Elder Biggs. Elders Bennett, Lawrence and Hyman were appointed messengers to the Neuse; Elder Lawrence to Virginia Portsmouth; and Elders Lawrence and Bennett to the Chowan Associations. Elders Newborn, Riddle and Lawrence preached on Sunday.

1820. The Association convened on Saturday before the first Sunday in October this year, with the church at North Creek, Beaufort County. Introductory sermon was preached by Elder P. Bennett, who was also chosen Moderator, and Elder J. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother Jesse Little. Letters from twenty-five churches were received, which showed 120 to have been baptized, and the whole number to have been 1,659. Elder Newborn, messenger from the Chowan Association, seated himself on invitation. A letter from the Red River Association was received. Elders Newborn and Hyman preached on Sunday. Elder Hyman was appointed messenger to the Neuse, and Elder Biggs to write to the Chowan, Red River and Little River Associations.

1821. The Association convened at Mearn’s Chapel, Nash County, Saturday before the first Sunday in October, this year. Elder Amariah Biggs preached the introductory sermon. Elder P. Bennett was chosen Moderator, and Elder J. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother John H. Drake. Visiting brethren in the ministry were invited to seats, whereupon Elders Spivey, Dupree, Worrell, Walke and Robbins seated themselves. A letter from the Neuse Association with Minutes was received; one from the Chowan, by their messengers, Elders Newborn and Crompler, and brother Cotton; and Minutes of the Virginia Portsmouth, by their messengers, Elders Wolford and McGlamack, were received also a letter from the Red River Association. Letters from twenty-seven churches composing the Association were received, which showed an increase by baptism of 154, and then in fellowship in all the churches, 1,746. Elder Biggs, Corresponding Secretary of the Association, presented a Circular Address from the Baptist General Convention, accompanied with a letter from James Monroe, President of the United States, to the President of Columbia College, in the District of Columbia.

Elders Dupree and Lawrence preached on Sunday. Elder Lawrence and brother Jesse Powell were appointed messengers to the Virginia Portsmouth Association. A letter to the Red River Association was read and approved; also one to the Little River, and Elder Lawrence appointed messenger. Elders Amariah and Joseph Biggs were appointed messengers to the Chowan.

The committee appointed to examine the Circular Address of the Baptist General Convention reported that they had not time to examine it, and therefore submitted it without comment. The committee was discharged. It was resolved that the Corresponding Secretary send one copy of the Association Minutes to said Board. Elder Lancaster was appointed to prepare a Circular Letter for the next Association. This custom had prevailed in the Association pretty generally since 1789. In that year Elder Burkitt was requested to prepare a Circular Letter for the next session, on the doctrine of sanctification.

1822. The Association met at Cross Roads meeting-house, Edgecombe County, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder P. Bennett preached the introductory sermon. He was chosen Moderator, and Elder Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother John H. Drake. Letters from twenty-five churches reported 94 baptized, and total number 1,522. A church in Washington, Beaufort County, was received into membership. The Association received a letter from the Chowan Association by the hands of her messengers, Elders Newborn and James Ross; one from the Virginia Portsmouth, with thirty copies of her Minutes, by her messenger, Elder Nathaniel Chambless; one from the Neuse, by her messenger, Elder Benjamin Bynum; and one from the Red River, through Elder Biggs, Clerk; and an address from the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, through Elder Biggs.

Elders Chambless, Newborn and Mastin preached on Sunday. Elders Amariah Biggs and Lawrence were appointed messengers to the Neuse; Elder Mastin and brother William Dicken to the Virginia Portsmouth; and Elders Joseph Biggs, Hyman and Bennett to the Chowan. It was recommended to the churches that the first Wednesday in the ensuing November be observed as a day of fasting and prayer to Almighty God, invoking Him for a revival of religion. The churches at Sandy Creek, Reedy Creek and Mattamuskeet having failed for some time to represent themselves in the Association, committees were appointed to visit them, inquire into their standing and their reasons for not representing themselves.

At this session of the Association it was represented that a practice prevailed, calculated to injure the feelings of the truly pious, by members of the Baptist Churches joining the Masonic Society and frequenting their lodges. The Association was then called on to advise the churches how to act in such cases. Whereupon the following select committee was appointed to draft an answer of advice, viz.: Elders Benjamin Bynum, William Dicken, Jeremiah Mastin, and brethren John W. Mayo and James S. Battle, who reported the following resolution:

“We, your committee appointed to draft an answer of advice to the churches relative to the above query, would recommend to the churches to admonish such persons thus acting to desist from attending Masonic Lodges, which we think is calculated to injure the feelings of the truly pious; and should they refuse to submit to such admonition, that it would be disorder in them, for which they should be dealt with accordingly.”

The Association concurred with the report, and ordered that the same be spread on her Minutes. This was the second rebuke given by the Association to this practice, the first having been given in 1786.

Brethren John H. Drake and Peter P. Lawrence were appointed a Committee on Finance; Elders Biggs, Bennett and Newborn to examine the Circular Letter; brother Valentine Bailey to write to the Virginia Portsmouth; brother Lewelling Bowers to the Chowan; Elder Biggs to the Red River; brother Jesse Little to the Neuse Association; and Elder Biggs to the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions at Washington City.

1823. The Association met at Lawrence’s meeting-house, Edgecombe County, Saturday before the first Sunday in October of this year. Elder Joseph Biggs preached the introductory sermon. Elder P. Bennett was chosen Moderator, and Elder J. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother Jesse Little. Brethren in the ministry from sister Associations were invited to seats, when brethren William B. Worrell and Irvin Mayo seated themselves.

Letters from twenty-six churches reported 119 baptized and 1,772 in fellowship. A church at Goose Creek, Beaufort County, and one at Red Bud, Franklin County, petitioned for membership and were received. A letter from the Neuse by her messenger, Elder Dupree; one from the Chowan, with Minutes, by her messengers, Elders Newborn and Crompler and one from the Red River Association, through Elder Joseph Biggs, were received. Brethren Jesse Powell and John W. Mayo were appointed a Committee on Finance; Elders Amariah Biggs, Newborn, Bennett and Worrell to examine the Circular Letter; Elder Lawrence to write to the Virginia Portsmouth; Elder Mastin to the Chowan; Elder Amariah Biggs to the Neuse; and Elder Joseph Biggs to the Red River Associations. Elders Bennett, Mastin and Worrell preached on Sunday. It was recommended to the churches that the last Thursday in October 1823, be observed as a day of fasting and prayer to Almighty God.

Poplar Spring Church, in Franklin County, was given a letter of dismissal to join an Association more convenient.

1824. The Association met at Great Swamp, Pitt County, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. The introductory discourse was delivered by Elder Philemon Bennett, who was chosen Moderator, and Elder Biggs Clerk. Elder Newborn was appointed Assistant Clerk. Visiting ministers, Elders Howell and Warren seated themselves. Letters from twenty-seven churches showed 160 baptized and 1,500 in fellowship. A church on the south side was admitted to membership. The Red River was heard from by letter; the Neuse, by her messengers, Elders Dupree and Biddle; the Chowan, by Elders Newborn and Rueben Lawrence, and brother William Hill Jordan. An address from the Board of Managers of the Baptist Convention of the United States was received. Elders Howell, Jordan and Biddle preached on Sunday.

Elders Joseph Biggs and Philemon Bennett were appointed messengers to the Chowan Association. A letter was to be forwarded to the Virginia Portsmouth Association. Elders Hyman, Ward, Hosea Lanier and Beattie were appointed messengers to the Neuse, and Elders Bennett and Mastin to the Raleigh Association. The messengers of the churches had been tardy in attending the Association, and the Association advised that such hereafter be appointed as would faithfully attend.

1825. The Association convened at the Falls of Tar River, Nash County, at the usual time. The first sermon was delivered by Elder Amariah Biggs. Elder Bennett, Moderator, Elder Biggs, Clerk, brother Peter P. Lawrence, Assistant Clerk. Visiting brethren in the ministry were invited to seats, when Elders Worrell, Howell, Thomas and Beattie seated themselves. Letters from thirty churches showed an increase of members by baptism to be 180, whole number in fellowship 1,798.

A church situated at the head of Pungo River was received to membership. The Neuse and the Virginia Portsmouth were heard from.

Elders Murrell, Thomas and Worrell preached on Sunday. Elders Hyman and Lawrence were appointed messengers to the Neuse, and Elder Lawrence to the Virginia Portsmouth Associations.

The churches were recommended to set apart the fourth Sunday in November and the first Sunday in March following as days of fasting, prayer and thanksgiving to Almighty God for the temporal and spiritual blessings received from Him; and that He be implored for a revival of religion at large, and more especially within the bounds of this Association.

Elders Bennett, Dupree and Murrell were appointed to examine the Circular Letter; brother Jesse Powell and James S. Battle a Committee on Finance; brother Peter P. Lawrence to write to the Chowan; Elder Hyman to the Neuse; Elder Biggs to the Red River; Elder Worrell to the Virginia Portsmouth Associations; and Elder Biggs to the Baptist General Convention at Washington City.

1826. The Association convened at the usual time (Saturday before the first Sunday in October), at Skewarkey, Martin County. Elder Philemon Bennett preached the first sermon, and he was appointed Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Assistant Clerk. Brother Amos Rayner, a visitor from the Chowan, seated himself. Letters from twenty-eight churches showed additions by baptism to be 140, and the whole number in fellowship to be 1,900. A church situated at Little Alligator, Tyrrell County, and one at Blount’s Creek, Beaufort County, were received into membership. Elder Irvin Mayo from the Neuse, and Elder James Ross and brother William H. Jordan from the Chowan Associations, appeared as messengers, with Minutes, and were seated. Elders Carrowan, Lawrence and Jordan preached on Sunday. Elders Joshua Lawrence, John Tice, and brother Mark H. Bennett, were appointed messengers to the Neuse; Elders Biggs, Bennett, Hyman and Lawrence to the Chowan Associations.

Matters were now becoming so unsatisfactory to many of the churches and brethren in regard to missionary operations, Masonic Lodges, Secret Societies generally, etc., etc., that it seemed necessary to take a decided stand against them, and thereby no longer tolerate these innovations on the ancient usages of the church of Christ by fellowshipping them. Accordingly, we notice in the proceedings of the session held at this time the following item: “A paper purporting to be a declaration of the Reformed Baptist Churches of North Carolina (read on Saturday and laid on the table until this day, Monday), was called up for discussion and was referred to the churches, to report, in their letters to the next Association, their Views on each article therein contained.”

Elders Biggs, Lawrence, Hyman, and brother Jordan, were appointed to examine the Circular Letter; brethren James Mayo and James S. Battle a Committee on Finance; Eider Lawrence to write to the Neuse and Elder Hyman to the Chowan Associations.

Elder Lawrence was requested to prepare a Circular Letter for the next Association.

1827. The Association met at Kehukee, Halifax County, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October of this year. Elder Philemon Bennett Preached the introductory sermon, and was appointed the Moderator; brother William Clark Clerk, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Assistant Clerk. Letters from thirty-five churches were read, which showed an increase, the past year, of 119 members, and the whole number in fellowship to be 1,951. A church lately constituted at Picot meeting-house, Martin County, was received into membership. A letter from the Neuse Association, accompanied by some copies of her Minutes, was handed in by Elder Benjamin Bynum, her messenger. Elders Bennett, Carrowan, Ward and Worrell were appointed a committee to examine the Circular Letter; brethren James Mayo and James S. Battle, the Committee on Finance; Elder Hyman to write to the Neuse; and Elder Lawrence to the Chowan Association. Elders Lawrence, Hyman and Carrowan were appointed to preach on Sunday. Elders Hyman, Tice and Lawrence were appointed messengers to the Neuse; and Elders Ward, Lamer amid Clark to the Chowan Associations. Thirty copies of the Minutes of this Association were directed to be sent, each, to the Contentnea and Neuse Associations.

This session of the Association was one of the most remarkable ever held by her. At this time came up for consideration the Declaration of Principles submitted at the last session to the Churches for approval or rejection. And upon a full and fair discussion of them, the following order was made, Viz.: “A paper purporting to be a Declaration of the Reformed Baptists in North Carolina, dated August 26, 1826, which was presented at last Association, and referred to the churches to express in their letters to this Association their views with regard to it, came up for deliberation. Upon examination, it was found that most of the churches had given their opinions; and after an interchange of sentiments among the members of this body, it was agreed that we discard all Missionary Societies, Bible Societies and Seminaries, and the practices heretofore resorted to for their support, in begging money from the public; and if any persons should be among us, as agents of any of said societies, we hereafter discountenance them in those practices; and if under a character of a minister of the gospel, we will not invite them into our pulpits; believing these societies and institutions to be the inventions of men, and not warranted from the word of God. We further do unanimously agree that should any of the members of our churches join the fraternity of Masons, or, being members, continue to visit the lodges and parades, we will not invite them to preach in our pulpits, believing them to be guilty of such practices; and we declare non-fellowship with them and such practices altogether.” In adopting this resolution there was not a dissenting voice. It was unanimous. Before the vote was taken there was a diversity of sentiment, and brethren freely interchanged views on the subject. Some of course were favorable to the toleration of these innovations, and pleaded for them with all their power; while those opposed to them as being contrary to ancient usage and pernicious in their consequences, boldly denounced them and contended for their abolition. On taking the vote, it was found that a large majority were opposed to these new men-made schemes; and then it was agreed to make the vote unanimous; and the same was accordingly done. It may therefore be set down as having the entire sanction of the Kehukee Association, composed of thirty-five churches, holding 1,951 members.

Those messengers of the churches in the Association at that time who favored these new things appeared before the adjournment of the body to be thoroughly convinced of their error. They gave signal demonstration of their acquiescence in the final decision, embraced the brethren who took opposite views, fell upon their shoulders, and seemed to be overwhelmed with joy. Never perhaps in the whole period of her existence, either before or since that time, did such a melting scene occur in a session of the Kehukee Association as did then. All present seemed to be fired with love for each other, and thankfulness to God that He had conducted the controversy to such a happy issue.

The Moderator, Elder Philemon Bennett, adjourned the Association with an affectionate address and prayer. Here was a stand taken against corruptions which had sprung up in the American churches about twenty-five years before, and had taken rapid hold on many of them, so that they were exceedingly loath to give them up.

It was a noble stand taken by the Kehukee Association, and would have done honor to bold defenders of the faith in any age of the world. The men of that day were renowned in Zion. Their memories will be cherished by future generations. They emancipated the churches with which they were connected from priestcraft and religious fetters that were becoming more and more intolerable every year.

This was the first and great decisive stand taken by the Baptists on American soil against worldly institutions, as being necessary for the propagation of the gospel and the salvation of men. Some had resisted them at the very outset, and all along through their progress; but now they could be borne with no longer, and it was resolved to cast the entire trumpery overboard. This example of the Kehukee Association, then sixty-two years old, was encouraging to other similar bodies; and from 1827 to 1840 there was a stir among churches and Associations all over the land, and many followed the example of old Mother Kehukee.

In September, 1832, a number of churches belonging to the Baltimore Association convened with the church called “Black Rock”, in the State of Maryland, and took the position that had been taken by Kehukee; so that, in the Northern States, Primitive or old-fashioned Baptists were called “Blackrockers,” and in the Southern States they were known and stigmatized as “Kehukeeites.”

The Country Line Association withdrew her fellowship from these things, their aiders and abettors, in August, 1832, in session with Deep Creek Church, Alamance County (then Orange County); and so one Association after another in North Carolina and in other States threw off the despotic yoke of priestcraft and idolatry, and asserted their entire disconnection with these things. They declared non-fellowship for these new men-made institutions, and resumed their ancient order. A war of words was the result of these divisions; and in every instance those leaning over toward these new things were sure to predict the speedy extinction of those whom they left behind. Those brethren contending for the ancient landmarks of Zion were denounced by their fashionable brethren of the New School party as being old-fashioned, ignorant people, who would all soon die out and give place to the younger, fashionable, educated men, who expected soon to occupy the whole land, and gather in their tithes without any murmuring or complaint on the part of those who were being fleeced, or any one else who should defend their rights.

One thing is generally set off against another. In the commencement of these troubles in the Kehukee Association there was a Martin Ross, of Martin County, to originate them, to plead and apologize for them, with the eloquence almost of an Apollos. He gained converts to his cause one after another, men of energy and talents; who so zealously and so continuously portrayed their great advantages, that for years opposition was overcome, in a measure, and their plans were encouraged by the Association. But eventually a Joshua Lawrence, of Edgecombe County, arose into public notice; and being fully convinced by experience of the mischievousness, sinfulness, and desire for filthy lucre, shown in the management of these extraneous societies, he placed the whole force of his reasoning powers, eloquence and influence against them. He strengthened those who were already with him; he gained accessions to the cause of primitive usage, and never gave up the contest until 1827, when victory perched upon his banner, and he saw the churches free from all these human entanglements. He was the author of the “Declaration of Principles” submitted to the churches in 1826 by the Association, which brought up the whole subject for consideration at her session held in 1827. So that while there were others equally faithful to the principles of the gospel kingdom, Elder L. in this contest was considered leader among them, and they looked to him a great deal for direction and advice during this trying period.

Elder Lawrence was a man of limited education—was in fact almost destitute of any literary attainments; but such were the strength of his genius, his originality of thought, and the force of his native eloquence, that he could move individuals or masses to a wonderful degree. Elder Lawrence was one of the most remarkable and influential men ever raised up within the bounds of the Kehukee Association. He was a gifted minister of the gospel and a forcible writer, so that his ministry and publications were eagerly sought, and both seemed to carry conviction to the minds of many that his views were correct.

Very soon after the close of the session of 1827 some of those who were present during that session, and at first defended the cause of missions, etc., but finally yielded their advocacy of them, with a great deal of apparent good feeling, had by consulting with outsiders, it is supposed, gone back to the occupancy of their old ground; and when the Minutes were printed and distributed, they charged upon the Clerk that the Minutes did not speak the truth. The Moderator, Elder Philemon Bennett, was included among the fault-finders, and objected to the truth of the record; and this continued the trouble to some extent until 1828 and 1829, when the position taken in 1827 was reaffirmed. In the meantime some of the churches divided, and heartburnings and distress prevailed wherever such was the ease; and all this trouble and distress was caused by the introduction of missionary and kindred projects among them early in the nineteenth century. It is contrary to matters of fact and the truth of history to deny this assertion; or to say that these men-made institutions of the current century always existed, as auxiliaries to the church of Christ, since it was established by its great Founder over eighteen hundred years ago on the plains of Palestine.

The history of the Kehukee Association, in this respect, is but the history of all Associations throughout the length and breadth of this broad land that were similarly situated. They can therefore sympathize with her, and she with them, and all can bear testimony to the wiles of the enemy, and to the falling away both in doctrine and discipline of those who claim to be Missionaries or New School Baptists. With a departure from the ancient usages of the church went a departure from the faith also once delivered to the saints; so that at the present time there is scarcely one of their ministers in a hundred who preaches the gospel of Christ, or salvation by grace alone. One may as well expect to hear Christ preached as the Way, the Truth and the Life among Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Quakers, Campbellites or Catholics, as to hear such preaching among New School or Missionary Baptists. They have evidently departed from the faith of the gospel, and given heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils, as much so as any of the numerous sects with whom they so cordially fraternize. The same schemes are adopted by them to excite the passions of men, women and children that put in operation by the Wesleyan Methodists, a sect that arose in England during the eighteenth century under the leadership of John Wesley, who was a communicant of the Established Church, so called, of England.

The whole body of “Missionaries” stand as excommunicated by the genuine Bible Baptists of America and of the world wherever found. They are widely separated, with no prospect of a reunion, except as the Missionaries occasionally become well established in the doctrines of grace, and return to the true fold of Christ by repentance, faith and baptism. Some valuable acquisitions have been made to the church in this way already, and more are expected. The sons and daughters of Zion gladly welcome all who come to them from the Missionaries or elsewhere, bringing fruits meet for repentance—all who give evidence of repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, renouncing the hidden things of dishonesty and all fellowship with idolaters. Those who fall down and worship the idols which they have made themselves are justly termed idolaters. The Kehukee Association bias remained firm and unwavering from 1827 to the present time.

1828. The Association was held with the church at North Creek meeting-house, Beaufort County. Elder William Hyman preached the introductory sermon. He was also appointed Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk. Elder Philemon Bennett, who had been chosen Moderator for so many years, was absent at this session, and among the malcontents. Elder Amos Rayner, from the Chowan, and Elder Whitford, from the Neuse Associations, seated themselves as messengers. Letters from twenty-two churches were read, which showed the number of additions by baptism to be 119, and the number in fellowship to be 2,004. here was a falling off of thirteen churches in the representation.

North Creek was inconveniently situated for most of the messengers to attend; yet there was the same number baptized as was the year before, and more members belonging to all the churches than twelve months previous. Churches unrepresented at Associations are put down in the table as they stood the year previous. Three churches were added to the number at this session, viz.: One at Grindel Creek, Pitt County; one at Old Ford, Beaufort County; and one at White Plains, Beaufort County. A letter was received from the Neuse Association, by Elder Dupree, her messenger. Elders Hyman, Carrowan and Dupree preached on Sunday. Elders Carrowan, Ward, Lawrence, and brother Enoch Brickhouse, were appointed messengers to the Neuse Association. Elder Joseph Biggs was appointed to write a letter to the Chowan Association, and attach the signatures of the Moderator and Clerk, and send her the usual number of Minutes, to be conveyed by Elder William Clark, and brethren Enoch. Brickhouse, Benjamin F. Eborn and Robert F. Lanier.

The temporary dividing line, for holding the Associations, was again changed, so as to have it run from Hamilton on the Roanoke along the main road to Greenville on the Tar River. The following extract is taken from the Minutes of 1828:

“It was made known at this Association that some persons had suggested that the decision of the last Association, found in the fourteenth article of the Minutes, concerning Missionary and Bible Societies, Theological Seminaries and Masonic Fraternities, was not correctly stated; and whereas many members of this Association were members of the last; it was resolved that the article as it appeared in the Minutes contained the true spirit of the decision, and that the Association did not approve of any alteration thereof, bat advised the churches to strictly adhere thereto.”

1829. The Association convened at Little Coneto Creek meeting-house, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder William Clark. Elder William Hyman was appointed Moderator, and brother Benjamin F. Eborn Clerk, who called to his assistance brother Joseph D. Biggs. This was the first Association that the [senior] author of this work attended after being baptized. He was baptized by Elder Joseph Biggs, pastor of the church at Skewarkey, near Williamston, in Martin County, on the eleventh of March, 1828, and became a member of that church in the nineteenth year of his age. His membership without interruption has continued in that church from that day to this (1880), a period of fifty-two years.

It was then (1829) the first time that he became acquainted with the differences in opinion prevailing among Baptists in regard to modern inventions; hitherto supposing that all were agreed as to faith and practice, in the bounds of the Kehukee Association at least. Neither did he at that time obtain much information on the subject, but was gradually led into a knowledge of it, as his experience with church matters increased.

Elders Mayo and Congleton, from the Neuse, and brother Rayner, from the Chowan Associations, were invited to seats at the session of 1829.

Letters from thirty-four churches were received and read. They showed additions by baptism for the previous year to be 198, and the number in fellowship to be 2,150. A church at Beargrass, Martin County, was received into membership at this session. A letter from the Neuse Association, by their messengers, Elders Dupree and Bynum, was received and read. A letter was presented from the Minutes of the Chowan Association by Elder Rueben Lawrence. A letter from the Raleigh Association, by her messenger, Elder P. W. Dowd, was received and read. The Association resolved to open correspondence with the Raleigh Conference and Nauhunty Association; and Elder Joshua Lawrence was appointed to write and carry a letter to the former, and Elder William Hyman to the latter.

Elders Hyman, Lawrence and Clark were appointed a committee to draft the resolution and decision in regard to the fourteenth article of the session of 1827 in more explicit terms. The committee obeyed the request, and reported as follows, viz.: “That they view with regret the incorrect inferences which have been drawn from the decision of this body in 1827; which have arisen in part from the misrepresentation of those who were affected by that decision, arising from the conviction that it would ultimate in the prostration of their fondest hopes of personal aggrandizement; and we are sorry to perceive, in the words of the decision, that it affords the semblance of justification.

“We do deeply regret the influence which we perceive it has had upon our sister Associations, but we do not, we cannot, and we will not recede from those measures in which we believe are involved the glory of God, the happiness and prosperity of this Association, and the destiny of unborn millions. We however owe it to ourselves to make such explanations as will present to our brethren, in clear and unambiguous terms, the attitude which this Association has assumed, and which by the help of God she will sustain.

“We disclaim any right, and, consequently, any intention, either directly or indirectly, of meddling with the internal government of any Association but our own. We do not assume to ourselves the right of saying that any member without the bounds of our Association shall or shall not do any act. They are accountable to their own respective Associations, or churches, and not to us. But we do claim a right, in the bounds of this Association, to prescribe (under the authority of the churches) such rules and regulations as are indispensably necessary to promote what we think will be for the peace and harmony of the churches within our bounds; and to discountenance such practices among us as are calculated to interrupt our harmony. Therefore your committee do recommend the adoption of the following resolution and explanation: First. We will not hold in our churches any member who is in the practice of visiting the Masonic Lodges, or who on any occasion conforms to their custom of parades; nor will we countenance any such individual who may reside or come among us in the character of a preacher. Second. We will not countenance any preacher who travels within the bounds of this Association, establishing societies for the collection of money, or who may be himself collecting money to support any institution whatever. We do not attempt to circumscribe the liberty of conscience; every person has a right to think and draw his own conclusions. We do not attempt to suppress the liberty of speech; every individual has a right to speak or express the convictions of his own mind. We do not attempt to restrain the liberty of any man; he may give his money when and to whom he pleases. We do not object to the spread of the Bible by all fair and honorable means, but pray for its extension by means which God may bless and own. We do not object to the support of the ministry on the gospel plan, but earnestly recommend it to the direct and immediate attention of all the Deacons in this Association; whose business God has made it to see to this matter, as well as all the moneyed concerns of the Christian community. We do not object to the general diffusion of intelligence and literature in the Baptist community, but wish its extension, But we do object to the education of men to the ministry by establishing seminaries for that purpose, believing that preaching would thereby become a lucrative employment; like the law, physic, etc. If any minister, although he be a Missionary, without the bounds of our Association, comes among us to preach the gospel, and not to make collections, we do not reject him.”

The report being read twice, was adopted, and ordered to be spread on the Minutes. The committee appointed to examine the Circular Letter reported that they approved of it; it was then read and ordered to be attached to the Minutes. Elders Lawrence, Dupree and Worrell preached on Sunday. It was ordered that twenty-five copies of the Minutes of this year be sent to the Chowan and Raleigh Associations, each.

1830. The Association was held at Morattock meeting-house, Washington County, two and one-half miles from the town of Plymouth, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. The [senior] author at that time resided in Plymouth as assistant in a mercantile establishment, and paid some attention to the proceedings of this session of the Association. He saw more clearly the gospel principles on which the faith of Baptists was founded, and the departure which some had made and others were making from those principles.

Elder William Hyman preached the introductory sermon. He was also chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Assistant Clerk. Letters from thirty-two churches reported 120 baptisms, and the number in fellowship 2,225.

A church at Coinjock, Currituck County, was received a member of the body, after satisfactory reasons were given for her withdrawing from the Chowan Association. A letter from the Little River Association, in North Carolina, accompanied with twenty-five copies of her Minutes, by her messenger, Elder Burwell Temple, and one from the Nauhunty Association, by her messenger, Elder Benjamin Bynum, with thirty copies of her Minutes, were received.

A letter to the Association from Elder James Osbourn, of Baltimore, Md., was received and read, and Elder Lawrence was appointed to answer it. And it was ordered that said letter be spread on the Minutes for this year, and that a copy be forwarded to him. Elders Temple and Lawrence preached on Sunday. Elder Hyman amid brother John H. Daniel were appointed messengers to the Little River, and Elders Luke Ward and William Dicken to the Nauhunty Associations.

The proceedings at this session of Kehukee showed the loss of correspondence with two Associations, viz., the Neuse and the Chowan, and the gain of two others, viz., the Little River and Nauhunty. This was on missionary and kindred grounds. The Chowan and Neuse, though daughters of the Kehukee, had no further use for her, when they became thoroughly convinced that she would not encourage their humanly devised schemes any longer. The Little River and the Nauhunty, on the other hand, having set themselves steadfastly against these things, were glad to open correspondence with the Kehukee. The subject of continuing the Kehukee History from the period where Read and Burkitt left it in 1802 was taken up and discussed in the Association. And it was finally resolved at this session that Elder Joseph Biggs, of Williamston, N. C., and pastor of the church at Skewarkey, be appointed to write a continuation of her history, from the termination of the one published by Burkitt and Read; and Elders Joshua Lawrence, William Hyman, Green Carrowan, Micajah Ambrose, and William B. Worrell were appointed a committee to collect such necessary information as might be within their reach, and the churches were requested to afford all the aid in their power.

1831. The Association convened at Flat Swamp meeting-house, Pitt County, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder Joshua Lawrence preached the introductory sermon. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, and Joseph D. Biggs Assistant Clerk. Letters from forty-two churches showed 429 baptisms for the previous year, and the number in fellowship 2,683.

The Neuse Association having divided on the subject of the modern missionary schemes, a portion of her churches took the name of Contentnea, and planted themselves on original ground, and affiliated with the Kehukee, and do to this very day. In 1831 she sent her messengers to the Kehukee in the persons of John Atkinson and Mark H. Bennett. Another church from the Chowan Association was received into membership, viz., the one at Powell’s Point, in Currituck County, and her messengers, James Nelson and Willoughby Sawyer, were received also, who reported twenty members belonging to it. Elders Green Carrowan and Joshua Lawrence preached on Sunday.

The churches at Sappony, Sandy Creek, Maple Spring, Red Bud, Peach Tree, Rocky Swamp, Quankey, Mearn’s Chapel, and Fishing Creek petitioned for letters of dismission from this body to form another Association, on the score of convenience, with some Churches from the Raleigh and Flat River Associations; disclaiming all intention of forming a “Missionary” body or departing from apostolic doctrine; whereupon their petition was granted. Elder Joshua Lawrence was requested to write a letter of dismission and give to them, with the signatures of the Moderator and Clerk attached.

Here was a loss of nine churches at a dash, which, for convenience, were to form another Association of the same faith and order as the Kehukee, but nearly all of whom came under the influence of “Missionaries,” and in forming an Association, called the Tar River, yielded to the wire-workers and schemers of that day.

Seven of these churches remained away, and never corresponded with the Kehukee Association afterwards. Two of them, viz., Sappony and Rocky Swamp, returned to the Kehukee.

During part of the years 1845 and 1846 the [senior] author of this work resided in the neighborhood of these seven dismissed churches, and occasionally visited some of them. The old members among them were generally sound, and desired him to preach in their houses; but the young members, as a general thing, who were brought into a profession of religion under modern excitements, such as protracted meetings and their accompaniments, did not wish to hear him preach. But he almost invariably did try to preach to them, on visiting them, and gave satisfaction to some few of them. He saw, however, that a majority of the members of each church were Arminians and were wedded to their idols. The leaders held all in bondage, as are Hagar and her children to this day, so that there is no prospect of their ever returning to orthodox principles.

These churches constituted the fourth lot that the Kehukee had dismissed to form other Associations, and at the present writing she receives no credit or respect from either of them.

Brethren John H. Daniel and Edmond Andrews were appointed messengers to Contentnea, and brethren John Ward and James S. Battle to the Little River Associations. A letter from James Osbourn, of Baltimore, was received and read. In regard to an additional history of the Association up to this time, the committee appointed the previous year to collect information reported some progress, but that much more was necessary to be obtained, and that it was the wish of many that the old history and the new should be embodied in one volume. Whereupon the Association resolved that the committee and the compiler be requested to arrange the materials as they may think proper, and that Mr. George Howard, of Tarboro, be authorized to publish the same on his own responsibility; and the printer of the Minutes was requested to forward to the different churches subscription lists.

1832. The Association met this year with the church at Log Chapel, or Conoho, Martin County, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder Joseph Biggs preached the introductory sermon. Elder Hyman was chosen Moderator, and Elder Biggs Clerk, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Assistant Clerk. Letters from twenty-nine churches reported 97 baptized and 2,414 in fellowship. Elders Thomas Dupree and Mark H. Bennett were received as messengers from the Contentnea Association. A church at North Mattamuskeet, in Hyde County, and another at Hunting Quarters, in Carteret County, were received into membership.

Elders Dupree, Lawrence and Bennett preached on Sunday. Letters to the Contentnea and Little River Associations were read and approved, and Elders Lawrence and Hyman appointed messengers to the former, and brethren James S. Battle and Joseph S. Battle to the latter.

The publication of the History was deferred another year, and subscription papers were to be sent again to the churches.

1833. The Association convened at the Falls of Tar River on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Elder Hyman preached the introductory sermon, and was chosen Moderator. Elder Biggs was appointed Clerk, and his son, Joseph D. Biggs, Assistant Clerk. Brethren in the ministry from sister Associations were invited to seats, when Elders Philemon Bennett Mark H. Bennett, Thomas Dupree, Benjamin Bynum, Burwell Temple and Eli Holland seated themselves. Letters from thirty-three churches reported 34 baptized and 1,740 in the whole number.

A church on Cedar Island, in Carteret County, was received into membership. Contentnea and Little River Associations represented themselves. Elders Temple, Lawrence and Dupree preached on Sunday. Messengers were appointed to the Little River and Contentnea Associations; Elders Luke Ward and Micajah Perry anti brother William Thigpen to the former, and Elders Lawrence and Biggs to the latter.

The publication of the History was again inquired into, when finding, upon examination of the subscription lists, that a sufficient amount had not been subscribed to justify the undertaking, a collection was taken up in the body on the same terms as heretofore proposed; and the result being favorable, the Association resolved that the work be put to press as early as practicable.

The former committee was then discharged and another appointed, consisting of Elders Joshua Lawrence, William Hyman and Luke Ward, and brethren Thomas Biggs, Joseph D. Biggs and Cushing B. Hassell, whose duty it was to examine the manuscript which Elder Joseph Biggs was requested to prepare.

The churches at Grindel Creek, Pitt County, and Tranter’s Creek, Beaufort County, having failed to represent themselves for some time past, and information being given that they had departed from the faith on which they were constituted it was resolved that they be struck from the list of churches composing this Association. This Association disapproved the course pursued by some members of the churches at Old Ford and Smithwick’s Creek, who had departed from the faith, and attempted to establish other churches (so called) of another order at those places in opposition to the churches already there.

Chapter XXII. Modern Religious Inventions.

In the commencement of this chapter we have thought proper again to recur to the circumstances and causes of the great division among those calling themselves Baptists, in connection with the Kehukee and other Associations in this country.

The Kehukee, at her session in 1829, explained and confirmed the position taken by her in 1827, and this action appeared to draw the line of demarcation distinctly between the old and the new order of Baptists then and until the present time. The barriers were then permanently erected between those who opposed and those who favored the man-made institutions of that day and this, as being aids and even superior to the church of Christ. The Kehukee Association, with her numerous churches, stood firm and unyielding in this great battle from 1829, and even from 1827, and onward. She did not have to go off or withdraw, even from the apologists for human wisdom and human righteousness; but they departed and went out from her, to make it manifest that they were not in principle with her. She remained steadfast in the Apostles’ doctrine and in fellowship and in breaking of bread and in prayers; while those who left, whether of her own churches or those of other Associations, departed first from the Apostles’ doctrine (salvation by grace alone), then from fellowship, then from breaking of bread, then from prayers.

One departure made way for another. Imbibing false doctrine led to false practice. The idea of salvation by works caused a dependence on works for salvation. When once confidence in God was lost, then it was placed on man. As soon as a religionist believes that God is unable or unwilling to save sinners, then he sets about the work himself, and soon concludes that he can do it alone without God’s assistance. So soon as disbelief in God’s word entered the mind of Eve she believed the lies of Satan, and that belief in his false statements produced the action, on her part, of reaching forth and partaking the forbidden fruit. So soon as Baptists in America, during the present century, imbibed “Fuller’s gospel”—all complete, they were ready to carry it out in practice, by the examples set them in England by Carey and Fuller.

So that we feel called on to state it as a historical truth, not successfully to be denied, that wherever Missionary Societies, Bible Societies, Tract Societies, Sunday Schools, Dorcas Societies, Mite Societies, Religious Fairs and Festivals, Temperance Societies, Sectarian Schools and Theological Seminaries in America prevail, there the doctrine of Phariseeism (modernly called Arminianism) prevails, there the doctrine of saving the souls of men from sin and from hell by works which men may do for themselves and for each other prevails. There the mark of the Beast and there persecution prevail. There fraternization with these in all sects and societies (Pedobaptists included) where salvation is reckoned of men prevails. In all these new things, comminglements and fraternizations, the New School party disprove their identity with Primitive Christians, and repudiate the faith and practice of the Apostles of the Lamb.

The Virginia Portsmouth Association went off with similar Articles of Faith to those of the Kehukee, but it is presumed they did not last her long, as she has long since been identified with the isms and worldly contrivances of the present century.

The Chowan Association, which organized under the Kehukee Articles of Faith, soon repudiated them—adopted others more suitable to her doctrinal notions, then changed them, we understand, and finally thought it more consistent with her free-will doctrines to have none at all.

The Neuse Association also adopted the Articles of her old mother when she was dismissed, but renounced them and eventually abandoned her organization.

The churches that were dismissed to form the Tar River Association went off professing undeviating faith in the old Articles, but, in organizing, lost sight of them, and fell completely under the influence of the work-mongers.

For twenty or thirty years after the separation among Baptists, and the departure of the “Do and Live” party from those who stood by the ancient landmarks, the contention was pretty sharp, each party denouncing the other in no very gentle language. It seemed lamentable that the old soldiers of the cross, instead of preaching Jesus and the resurrection all the time, did take up a good portion of their time in defending the faith and denouncing those who had brought in these heresies.

The other party treated the Old School with a great deal of contempt on account of the paucity of their numbers, their old-fashioned creed, their experience of grace, their want of education, and general deficiency in human polish. And they declared wherever they went (supposing no doubt it would be so) that the Old Party would soon become extinct—out of the way entirely, and give them no further trouble. Various names were applied to the Old School by the New, such as “Hard Shells,” “Straight Jackets,” “Ignoramuses,” “Lawrenceans,” “Osbournites,” “Antinomians,” etc., etc. After thirty or forty years’ experience, since the separation, however, it was ascertained that the Old School were not all dead, that some were still in existence, and by some unaccountable means they were in a state of outward prosperity to all human appearance. This so astonished the New School that they, supposing a good name was becoming popular, and might be some cause for success, suddenly changed their tactics, and assumed the name of “Old School or Primitive Baptists” to themselves, which they had themselves given to the Bible Baptists, and had for many previous years been aspersing and holding in the greatest contempt!

For some few years now prior to the writing of this history, their ablest minds, through the medium of pulpit and press, have been endeavoring to prove themselves the veritable Primitive Baptists of the nineteenth century! It is likely their affliction will increase as the prosperity of Zion becomes more and more manifest, and the well established among themselves forsake them and go where they rightfully belong, to the citizenship of the saints and the household of God.

This claim on the part of the New School has been set up by some of them, perhaps, since the year 1870. Lectures have been given, sermons delivered, newspapers have teemed, magazines have been filled, and books have abounded with argument, declamation and sophistry, to prove that the New School are the Old School—that the Old School are the New School—that white is black, and black is white—that the Pharisaical, money-loving, money-hunting, money-begging, mesmerizing, passion-exciting, “do and live” Baptists of the present day are the Simon—pure, old-fashioned, Primitive Baptists of a hundred years ago; and that Kehukeeites and Black-Rockers need not lay claim to any such title at all! Thus it is seen after all what advantage there is thought to be in a good name. It was for this reason, we suppose, that seven women were to “take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel; only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach”. (Isa. 4:1) What a pity that some people now desire to eat their own bread (the doctrine of the Pharisees), and wear their own apparel (self-righteousness), and yet greatly desire to be called “Primitive Baptists!” Primitive Baptists in reality are they who are “of the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.”

We proceed now to prove the Missionaries, so-called, of the present day, to be the New School party; that their worldly institutions, under the garb of religion, have divided the Baptists—that they are only about fifty to seventy-five years old in the United States, and that they have gone away from the original fold or church of Christ, and have made it manifest that they were not with her in faith and practice. Also that the constant tendency of the Missionaries is from the doctrine of predestination and election as set forth in the Bible to the doctrine of a Conditional Salvation, made sure only by man; that they have abandoned the true church of Christ, and made a confederacy with the daughters of Babylon and of Papal Rome; and that the Mother of Harlots herself has as good a doctrine[1] to preach to the millions of her deluded followers as have a large number of the Missionary Baptists, so-called, either of Europe or America. The more is the pity and the more is the shame, because these people, as Baptists, had a noble origin. They never belonged to Babylon—they did not come out of her. Their predecessors from the beginning fought against and denounced Antichrist as the great spiritual evil in the world, that was poisoning the minds of men with false doctrine and destroying hecatombs of victims from generation to generation. They denounced her till the Reformation, so-called, under Luther and Melancton, Zuinglius and Calvin; they denounced her since the Reformation; they denounced her daughters, the Established “Churches” of Germany, Switzerland and England, whose hierarchies hated and persecuted Baptists as they hated and threatened Rome. Baptists stood independent of all other religious organizations and acted their part nobly, until in England they succumbed to the principles and practices of Rome (save her persecutions) under the leadership of Fuller and Carey, and in America under that of Judson and Rice. Now, therefore, we behold those calling themselves Baptists, and recently calling themselves “Primitive Baptists,” fused with numerous other sects and societies, and with the non-professing world also, in order to carry to a successful issue their craft and schemes of aggrandizement, born of worldly wisdom.

1. In the first place, we take it to be a self-evident truth that a project never submitted to the consideration of the Kehukee Association for the first thirty-seven years of her existence, when it was submitted, was then a new project to her. The subject of Missions was proposed to her by Martin Ross in 1803; it was never proposed before that time. The Association was constituted in 1765, and was therefore thirty-seven years old before the subject was brought to her notice. The subject was therefore new to her then, and those originating it must of course be called a “new_ order” or ”New_ School Baptists.” Then and there (at Conoho, in 1803) originated the “Missionary” cause, so far as the Kehukee Association and all within the bounds of the State of North Carolina were concerned. The age of the concern, therefore, in its incipient state, in North Carolina, is much less than a century.

Younger and younger still are those who, from time to time, have since then set up for themselves—unfurled their “Missionary” banners to the breeze—joined the armies of the aliens, and made war against the old original panel, the church of Christ.

We do not see how such organizations as these can with any degree of propriety be called churches of Christ; because those of them who departed from the original fold were excommunicated from church privileges and gospel fellowship. Whatever they did thereafter was done in a state of disorder, whether it was to form churches, adopt creeds, baptize persons, or administer the elements at communion season. All was in disorder, and consequently should not be reckoned by the true church as legal or valid. Whatsoever has sprung from this impure source of course must be impure also; and their baptisms, as well as their false doctrines, must be rejected and disowned by the true church of Jesus Christ.

That portion of Baptists who have not departed from the faith, or who have been properly constituted into churches under the faith and order of Baptists of a hundred years ago, to say nothing of the Apostolic Age, must be the true church of Christ. It was unto the true church of Christ that the keys of the kingdom of Heaven were committed, with which to bind or loose, as she thought proper. And, by virtue of this Divine authority, she has loosed, withdrawn from and excommunicated these disorderly brethren, and therefore has no fellowship for them.

If there is to be union again it must be by a return of the excluded and their converts to the original fold. The door has all along been open and still is open for them to do so, upon repentance and faith—in the same manner as other people are received. And, on these terms, they are now welcome to the fellowship and the name of “Primitive Baptists.”

2. We adduce the testimony of “Missionaries” themselves to prove their projects to be innovations on original Baptist faith and practice, and consequently new things to the Baptist family.

David Benedict (1779-1874), of Connecticut, wrote a History of the Baptists, which was published in two volumes in 1810, and was well received by all regular Predestinarian Baptists throughout the land. This was done before the Division. He also wrote another history of the denomination, which was published in one volume, in 1848.[2] This was subsequent to the Division; and he then being a “Missionary,” advocating all the new schemes of the day, took decided ground against the Primitive Baptists, of course, treated them quite unceremoniously, and declared they were so few and worthless that they would likely become extinct before his book reached his more distant subscribers. He is therefore so committed to the “Missionary” cause that he must be considered by “Missionaries” good authority in all matters that pertain to them and their numerous projects for evangelizing the world.

This same author afterwards wrote another book, entitled “Fifty Years Among the Baptists,” which was published in 1860 by Sheldon & Co.; New York. In this book, and while at an advanced age, he relates his experience among the Baptists for fifty years—commencing nearly with the present century. If we are to look anywhere among his writings for truth and candor, we should think it would be here. Then we proceed to prove by this witness, who cannot be objected to by “Missionaries,” that the Missionary system, with all its adjuncts, such as Sunday Schools, Bible Societies, Tract Societies, Theological Seminaries, and the reading or preaching of free-will sermons, are new things among the Baptists.

Says this author: “Should any one inquire of the Missionary cause, among American Baptists, fifty years ago, the account is soon rendered; and the total amount of their doings up to that time may be thus stated; a few small societies for domestic missions had been established in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and a few other places, by the aid of which missionaries were sent out, under temporary appointments, to destitute regions. The society in Boston was the oldest and most efficient of those bodies; there, and I think elsewhere, Female Mite Societies were among the principal contributors to these small organizations. In a few cases these efforts were directed toward the moral and spiritual benefit of the aboriginees of our country” (see pages 22, 23). Again he says: “A number of our oldest State Conventions grew out of the early societies for domestic missions. The Tract Cause was still more in its infancy than that of missions, if its existence had now commenced, although our Boston brethren made early movements in this line, as some of the old, untrimmed and rough looking documents of this sort published by them give evidence. ‘Give me the little book,’ I well remember was the familiar language of Dr. Baldwin, in an Association at an early day, while recommending these minor publications, which were then beginning to circulate among our people. The Bible Cause, in the modern sense of the term, was not engaged in by any religious community in this country at the period now under review. The British and Foreign Bible Society was formed in 1804, and it was twelve years later before the old American institution arose, with which a portion of our people became identified. Sunday Schools and Bible classes, and all the other institutions of modern times, for objects of Christian benevolence and moral reform, which are now in such successful operation with us and other communities in the land, were wholly unknown in my early day” (pp. 24, 25).

Again, says our author: “When I look back I can hardly realize the changes which have taken place in our denomination, in my day, in the means of intelligence and benevolence. It seems almost incredible that a society which so lately was so slow to engage in any new enterprise, and was so jealous of any collegiate training for its ministers, should at this early period have so many colleges and kindred institutions spread over the land; that such a flood of periodicals of different kinds should so soon be added to the old Magazine; that so much should have been done by this people in the Home and Foreign Mission departments, in the Bible cause, in the publication of Baptist literature, in Sunday Schools and Bible classes, and in kindred labors of various kinds; and all since I first began to collect the scanty and scattered materials for their history” (p. 27).

In regard to the Convention for Foreign Missions, our author says on page 47: “And here” (in Philadelphia) “also was founded the Convention for Foreign Missions in 1814, then the most important institution of the kind which existed among the American Baptists, and here for a long time after was the centre of its operations.” In regard to the old Confession of Faith, he further says: “The Baptist Philadelphia Confession of Faith, so called because it went out from this city, was a document of high authority among all the old Baptist Churches in this part of the country and generally throughout the South and West, when I first traveled in those regions. This document was published here and was printed by Dr. Franklin” (p. 47).

As to reading sermons, he says: “Fifty years ago it was as unconstitutional and unusual for ministers of our order to preach by note as it was for the old Scotch Seceders and many others; but extempore speaking was the almost universal practice. There was no established rule on the subject, but so decided and strong were the prejudices of the people against written discourses that very few of our ministers ever presumed to use them” (p. 55). And again: “With very few exceptions, in my early day, our most distinguished preachers pursued the extempore mode.—A large majority of Baptist preachers in early times had no inclination to offend the people with written sermons, had they been capable of producing them; but as a new generation came up, with more education, a change gradually took place, not always for the better, however, in the view of the old members, in whose mind a broad distinction was still kept up between reading and preaching.—When the new race, with permission or without it, had surmounted the old extemporaneous barriers, which had stood in the way of their predecessors, they found it more convenient to trust to their eyes than their memories; and, as Baptists are more tolerated in this business than the Covenanters, the reading of sermons has been about as common with Baptists as Pedobaptists in many parts of the country. And what is a little singular, while many of our ministers are going into the practice with increasing expedition, many in old dynasties are going out of it as fast as possible” (pp. 57, 58).

Again, says our author: “Fifty years ago the ministers of our order were generally a hardy and active set of men. Then we never heard of a very prevalent disease of modern times, nor was it common to go on distant voyages for the restoration of health. Instead of this they often sallied out on horseback into remote and distant regions as evangelical pioneers. This was done in many cases by ministers under pastoral engagements, who, after spending a few weeks or months in such services, would return to their pastoral stations. How it happened that the ministers of that age, who were exposed to so many hardships and privations, who so often preached in log cabins and in other pent-up places, or in the open air, should have so much better organs of speaking, stronger lungs, and firmer constitutions than their successors, whose labors are so much less severe, and who are so much better cared for, I could never fully understand.—At the period now alluded to, it was a very uncommon thing for any of our ministers to give up preaching or relinquish pastoral stations for the want of support. Instead of that they would devise some way to support themselves and keep on their work; and what may seem a little singular, I have always found our ministers of property among the self-supporting class, rather than among those who are cared for by their people.—A considerable number of our preachers in this age were physicians, some kept school, others followed trades, or were engaged in mercantile pursuits of different kinds; but by far the greater part of them, throughout the whole range of our country, were literally farmer preachers; and in my extensive travels among them I was somewhat disappointed in finding such a large proportion of these laborious men, in their spiritual vocation, in such comfortable circumstances as to their worldly concerns” (pp. 58-60).

Again he says: “The great mass of our ministers then had no settled income for their services, and, where moderate sums were pledged, in too many cases they were slowly paid, if paid at all. Under these circumstances the zeal and assiduity of so many laborious men is the wonder of the present age. Their perseverance in their ministerial work in the midst of so much ingratitude and neglect on the part of the numerous churches which they planted, and the poverty and privations which they endured through the whole of their ministry, are matters of high commendation and grateful remembrance. In that early age we seldom heard of any one retiring from a pastorship into ministerial inactivity on account of the parsimony of the people; and very few non-preaching Elders were then to be found” (p. 62).

Again, to show the recent origin of men-made missionism, our author says, on page 65: “Voting supplies for the churches which were destitute of all pastoral aid was an important item in the doings of our old Associations. This method was pursued before any arose for the promotion of missionary labors of the most limited and temporary kind.”

In regard to ministerial changes, revivalists and animal excitements, Mr. Benedict, on pages 67 and 68, says: “The causes of ministerial removals and changes, a half-century since, were not so numerous or pressing as they have been for many years past. Then the vehement spirit of numerical gain in the churches, and the restless desire for available ministers for the augmentation of congregations, had hardly begun to show itself. The old staid churches had more respect to the sound and certain teachings of their ministers than to anything merely captivating in their discourses. Again, the numerous excitements of modern times about matters foreign to the work of ministers of the gospel, in which not a few of our more modern pastors have been involved, and by means of which many have been run off the track, were unknown in my early intercourse with the Baptists.”

“Once more: The influence of restless Deacons to effect pastoral changes was then but feeble compared with later years. It was indeed felt more or less in some few churches, but it was afterwards greatly increased; and many an embarrassed pastor has been obliged to succumb to its controlling sway.”

“Finally, a scanty income was not always a sufficient reason for a ministerial change in the public mind, or in that of the minister himself; but often he would hold on year after year, under the most embarrassing circumstances, rather than leave his flock in a pastorless condition.”

“In those days, while church members were generally quite poor, and as many of them had come from the Pedobaptists of different parties, they were exposed to opposition and reproach of a painful nature; and on these accounts there was a very strong sympathy and affection on the part of the pastor towards these poor and despised people, and a reluctance to leave them without an under-shepherd, stronger than is now felt by many ministers in their sudden changes.”

As Primitive Baptists occupy the ground to this day which Benedict says Baptists occupied early in the nineteenth century, and those standing with him are far removed from said ancient position; what better evidence do we require to show that the fast traveling, free-will “Missionaries” have departed from the ancient order of Baptists, and are the new party, just sprung into existence during the present century?

Here comes a crushing declaration; and the money-hunting “Baptists” of today may well quail before it. Benedict, on page 59, says: “Fifty years ago, not an agent for collecting funds for any object of benevolence or literature was to be seen in the whole Baptist field.” The Italics are ours. And further, he says: “No one dreamed of so soon seeing such an array of agents in the field for so many different objects, and that the business would become a distinct vocation of indispensable necessity for carrying forward our benevolent plans and for performing our denominational work” (p. 70).

As to church discipline, and the distinction between church and world, our author says: “Fifty years ago it was contrary to Baptist rules for their members to seek such places of amusement as multitudes of them now resort to without any official censure or complaint. Our people then made a broad distinction between the church and the world, and if any of their members went over the line to the world’s side, they were at once put under church discipline. Then the Baptists sternly prohibited the practice of brother going to law with brother, under any circumstances whatever. All matters in offense or complaint of wrong-doing must be laid before the body according to gospel rule. And if rash or inexperienced members hurried their complaints there, without taking gospel steps, as the phrase was, they were required to retrace their course and go first to the offending member. Achans in the camp were then much dreaded, and church members were assiduously taught not to suffer sin upon a brother” (pp. 77, 78).

Our author further says: “Fifty years ago Baptists were noted for their familiarity with the Scriptures” (p. 81). Here is where the Old Baptists are today, but where are the New ones? What do they know about faith or the Scriptures, except as they learn it from the lips of their hireling priesthood?

In regard to the new-fashioned pew-rents among Baptists, our author says: “In my earliest examination into Baptist affairs, I did not find one society in the whole connection which made much dependence on pew-rents for ministerial support in Boston. In a few cases the remnants of pews which remained unsold were rented, and the funds thus obtained formed an item of the minister’s income. Free pews or benches were then the general rule. The idea of paying anything for seats in a Baptist meeting-house, much less of having the annual rent of them defray the expense of the establishment, ministers and all, had not entered the minds of our people; and as their meeting-houses were, nothing of the kind could have been done if they had attempted it” (pp. 82, 83).

We can but ask, Where are the Missionaries on this subject now? Gone, gone into the religious traffic with Babylon’s daughters.

As to Associational proceedings, our author says: “These were the only great meetings we had in my early day, as the age of our present anniversaries was far ahead. The whole number of Associations then in all America was about seventy-five, where there are now upwards of 600. The manner of conducting those which I attended, while young, was more devotional and less formal than now, in many places; and there was more preaching and exhortation, more freedom for men of less brilliant powers of speaking to take a part in devotional exercises, and an entire absence of agents to bespeak the good will of the people in favor of their different objects” (pp. 86, 87).

As genuine, old-fashioned, predestinarian Baptists were at the time alluded to by our author, so they are now. Their Associations are conducted in the same way, and so on; but where are the “Missionaries” at the present time? Gone into almost every conceivable device, thereby rendering their Associations worldly institutions, gotten up for the promotion of worldly objects; and they more resemble disorderly legislative assemblies than Baptist Associations.

In regard to an exchange of pulpits, our author says, on pages 94 and 95: “At that time” (about fifty years before his book was published, that is, in 1810) “the exchange of pulpits between the advocates and opponents of infant baptism was a thing of very rare occurrence, except in a few of the more distinguished churches in the Northern States. Indeed, the doctrine of non-intercourse, so far as ministerial services were concerned, almost universally prevailed between Baptists and Pedobaptists.” Question: Who has departed from this ancient order of things, Baptists or “Missionaries?” Answer: “Missionaries.” Then “Missionaries” are the New School party, who affiliate with Pedobaptists; while Primitive Baptists are the Old School party, who have not changed their course in this respect for fifty years, but stand where their fathers stood, a separate and distinct people from all others.

As to ministerial education, our author says, on pages 98 and 99: “The clergy of the standing order, so called, were generally men of collegiate training; and as the Baptists had often been grievously oppressed for their support, ministerial education itself, by many, was lightly esteemed. This came from the incorrect reasoning of our people. But there were other things which caused a strong dislike, on their part, of the ministers of the old order, among which we may mention their sacerdotal airs, the dullness of their performances, their cold and, in some cases, their contemptuous treatment of all without their pale, whether Baptists or others; all these things combined to produce, in the minds of our old-fashioned members, a settled aversion to the whole Pedobaptist concern, its priesthood, lay-membership, and all. And the urgent need of college learning for ministers they decidedly denied; and this sentiment was strengthened by observing the less formal, more animated and, to them, more edifying preaching of their own uneducated ministers.”

Where now has our author conducted us? To a scene in Baptist history, in his early day, when Baptists denied the necessity of collegiate education for their ministers, looked on college-trained ministers with indifference, and remembered that it was from an educated clergy that their heaviest oppressions and persecutions arose.

Here is where genuine Baptists stand this day. They are not opposed to education itself, and admire it as a necessary earthly acquirement; but they are opposed to educating men for the ministry, by means of Theological Seminaries or other human contrivances, thereby substituting human learning for the grace of God and the Spirit’s teachings. Here is where the Baptists stood in the early days of David Benedict, according to his own showing. But where stand the Missionaries on this subject since their departure from the faith? Is it not self-evident that they are head and ears involved in ministerial education by means of religious schools; and from their mills are grinding out young preachers yearly by scores, who are to spread over the land, like the locusts of Egypt, in search of a support from the people without any manual labor on their part? Such was not the case in the olden time. Yet these men, who have gone into this religious training during the present century, with all the zeal and eagerness of the Church of England, so called, or that of Rome itself, have the presumption to call themselves “Primitive Baptists!” David Benedict proves their claim to be a false one, and David Benedict they dare not contradict.

In regard to Foreign “Missions,” our author says they were in his early day exceedingly unpopular. Says he: “The idea of sending men and money out of the country, for the purpose of attempting the conversion of heathen in foreign lands, in the view of these men, was a most preposterous one, a project as they said not only visionary in its design, but impracticable in its nature.”

Here is evidence that in their origin Foreign “Missions” were considered an innovation on Baptist usage, and were opposed by regular Baptists.

Again he says: “About forty years ago (1814) the dormant energies of our denomination in this country began to be aroused in favor of some systematic efforts in favor of sending the gospel to the heathen. The cause of this movement may be traced to the conversion of Adoniram Judson and Luther Rice to the sentiments of the Baptists, while on their way to India as missionaries under the patronage of the Pedobaptists.”

“This unexpected change in these two young men, as a matter of course, made no small stir in the Pedobaptist ranks, as might be naturally expected. Mr. Judson, at the time of his baptism in Calcutta, preached a sermon on the baptismal controversy, which was republished and widely circulated in this country. Mr. Rice soon returned to America to solicit pecuniary aid for assisting in establishing Baptist Missions in the East, and to select suitable persons for an undertaking to which the attention of American Baptists was now directed in a sudden and unexpected manner.”

“Up to this time, this large and increasing body (the American Baptists) seemed to have had no idea that they had either the call or the ability to send out missionaries to foreign lands” (pp. 111, 112).

So far from claiming apostolic authority for Foreign “Missions,” and tracing its history back into the ages of antiquity, Mr. Benedict acknowledges that it took its rise about forty years before he wrote his “Fifty Years Among the Baptists,” say about the year 1814. Not only so, but that it took its rise in a sudden and unexpected manner, by the conversion of two young men, Judson and Rice, from Pedobaptist to Baptist sentiments, while on their way to India. Who ventures now to say, in contradiction to this statement of Mr. Benedict, the great Missionary Baptist historian, that there is Bible authority for Modern Missions, and that they had been kept up by the church from the days of the Apostles till now? All such claims and pretenses are overwhelmingly refuted by this great leader, writer and preacher among Missionary Baptists. This statement was made near the close of his life, and under the influence of long years of experience.

Mr. Benedict informs us that Luther Rice was the principal agent to arouse the Baptists in America to a favorable view of this “Missionary” enterprise; so that soon societies of various kinds arose, in all directions, for the promotion of this new undertaking; and thus a foundation was laid for the formation of the Old Baptist “Triennial Convention;” which body, says our author, “was organized in Philadelphia in May, 1814, and under its direction all Baptist affairs pertaining to Foreign Missions were managed for about thirty years, when the name of this body was exchanged for that of the American Baptist Missionary Union. This change was made in New York in 1845. This was a time of great trial and difficulty with the old convention, which was seriously threatened with dissolution on account of questions which for a number of years had been agitated in a very unpleasant manner. The perplexing discrepancies which arose between the Northern and Southern wings of a body which was spread over all the States, was the principal cause of the troubles here alluded to.”

“The Missionary Union came into being in a very amicable manner at first, but soon objections from some quarters were started against some parts of its constitution, as not conformable to Baptist principles and usages; and these objections still exist in the minds of many, and added to these, complaints from various quarters against the management of the men at the missionary rooms have become loud and widespread, and now (March, 1857) very serious difficulties are apprehended at the approaching anniversary of this important Baptist Institution” (pp. 116, 117).

Thus we have a clear and concise account of the origin and progress of the Foreign Missionary Society among Baptists in the United States, which then (1857), being only forty-three years old, was tottering to its foundation by intestine commotions, and likely to be abandoned even by its originators. What an apology for Bible and apostolic authority for an institution forty-three years old! How much does this advance the claim of these men, who made or cling to this society, to the title of “Primitive Baptists?” Primitive Baptists! How Primitive? Why primitive as far back as the year 1814. Born then, and consequently forty-three years old in 1857. Renounced the church of Christ in 1814, and denounced her as an old-fashioned, worn-out concern; and yet, in sixty years afterwards, turn round and claim the very title which they had aspersed, and declare publicly that these new inventions, tricks and enterprises of men were always found in the church of Christ from its origin! “0 consistency, thou art a jewel.”

Mr. Benedict frankly admits that this “Missionary” business did not go on harmoniously. On page 130 he says that he, “from the letters and journals of Mr. Hough, etc., became somewhat familiar with the management of missionary affairs, both at home and abroad, and was sorry to find that serious complaints were made, both by the home managers and the foreign laborers; on the part of the managers the principal complaints were of too independent action in the foreign field, of disobedience, insubordination, and of thinking too much for themselves.”

“On the other side, the terms, partiality, favoritism, prejudice, neglect, dictation, etc., were not unfrequently employed by the missionaries. I learned more in detail, in these matters, than was ever published in missionary documents, or that I am disposed to repeat. Let oblivion rest upon them all.” Is not this a nice repast to which the public and Old School Baptists are invited? How unreasonable for Missionaries to denounce genuine Bible Baptists for their opposition to such a system of avarice and ambition as is herein set forth by Mr. Benedict as being known to himself! And much more he knows that he is unwilling to make public.

In regard to a departure from the ancient Baptist faith, and a turning over to the doctrines of free will by the “Missionaries” of the United States, we propose quoting extensively from Mr. Benedict, who is the standard author with them, and who now comes in to prove that to be true which has been charged upon them, since the Division, by the genuine Baptists of our land, viz., that they are not only “Missionaries,” but Arminians also. Benedict says: “Forty years ago (1817) large bodies of our people were in a state of ferment and agitation in consequence of some modifications of their old Calvinistic Creed, as displayed in the writings of the late Andrew Fuller, of Kettering, England. This famous man maintained that the atonement of Christ was general in its nature, but particular in its application, in opposition to our old divines, who held that Christ died for the elect only. He also made a distinction between the natural and moral ability of men. Dr. John Gill, of London, was in his day one of the most distinguished divines among the English Baptists; and, as he was a noted advocate for the old system of a limited atonement, the terms ‘Gillites’ and ‘Fullerites’ were often applied to the parties in this discussion. Those who espoused the views of Mr. Fuller were denominated Arminians by the Gillite men, while they, in their turn, styled their opponents Hyper-Calvinists. Both parties claimed to be orthodox and evangelical, and differed but little on any other points except those which have been named. On election, the Trinity, etc., they all agreed.”

“In the age when the discussion arose among the American Baptists, as none of the modern subjects of agitation had been introduced among their churches, the speculative opinions, thus briefly described, for a number of years were the occasion of unhappy debates and contentions in many locations.”

“Our old Baptist divines, especially those of British descent, were generally strong Calvinists as to their doctrinal creed, and but few of them felt at liberty to call upon sinners in plain terms to repent and believe the gospel, on account of their inability to do so without Divine assistance. They could preach the gospel before the unconverted, but rousing appeals to their consciences on the subject of their conversion did not constitute a part of their public address.”

“In expatiating on the strong points of their orthodox faith, they sometimes ran Calvinism up to seed, and were accused by their opponents of Antinomian tendencies.”

“In that age it was customary for many of our ministers to dwell much on the decrees and purposes of God, to dive deep, in their way, into the plans of Jehovah in eternity, and to bring to light, as they supposed, the hidden treasures of the gospel, which they in an especial manner were set to defend. In doing this they discussed with as much confidence as if they were certain that they were not wise above what was written, but had given a true report of the secrets of the skies. This extreme of orthodoxy has been followed by laxity and indifference.”

“The Philadelphia Confession of Faith, published in that city in 1742, was the standard of most of the oldest Baptist churches in this country, especially in the Middle and Southern States. This Confession was copied mostly from one published by the Baptists in London in 1689, and this again agreed in its doctrinal sentiments with the Westminster Confession (of the Presbyterians). The oldest Baptists in New England, although for the most part they held, with their brethren elsewhere, the doctrines of depravity, election, Divine sovereignty, final perseverance, etc., were not in the habit of enforcing them so strongly as were those in New York, Philadelphia, and further South.”

“That class of Baptists which arose out of the Newlight stir in New England, which, as I have before stated, sent colonies into all the Southern States, and, in the second generation, over the mountains into the West, were Calvinists of a still milder type. Indeed, their orthodoxy was often called in question by the old school party in Virginia, the Carolinas and Kentucky.”

“These zealous reformers, in their public performances, dwelt mostly on the subject of Christian experience and practical religion, while the strait Calvinists labored much to explain the strong points of their system.”

“The kind of preaching now much in vogue, at the period and among the people here had in view, would have been considered the quintessence of Arminianism, mere milk and water, instead of the strong meat of the gospel. Then and with our orthodox Baptists, a sermon would have been accounted altogether defective which did not touch upon election, total depravity, final perseverance, etc.”

“In my early day the associated Baptists were all professedly Calvinists in their doctrinal sentiments. The term however was not agreeable to many, as they did not subscribe to all the sentiments of John Calvin; but they submitted to it for distinction’s sake, and in contradistinction from those whose views were less orthodox on predestination, etc. Beside the people of our order in the Associations, the Free Will and Seventh Day Baptists were then coming into notice, and they with but few exceptions among the Sabbatarians were decidedly opposed to some of the distinguishing doctrines of the Calvinistic Creed.”

“The Methodists, too, who often came in contact with the Baptists, and with whom I frequently associated in my early travels, were extremely severe in their feelings and comments on the orthodox faith, so far as election, etc., were concerned. Some of their circuit-riders of that age conducted as if they considered themselves predestinated to preach against predestination.”

“And some of our illiterate Elders were about a match for them against the Wesleyan Creed. And the cry of fatalism on the one hand, and of salvation by works on the other, was continually sounded by the parties.”

“I was often not a little surprised at the bitterness of feeling which in many cases was displayed by the anti-Calvinists against the doctrine of election, and their readiness, in season and out of season, to assail it by reason and ridicule. Many could hardly be civil towards their opponents, who were silent all the while.”

“But for many years past the asperity of feeling above described has been a good deal modified, so that the differing men can meet together without taunting each other with their offensive creeds. On this subject I lately remarked to a Free Will Baptist minister, ‘Your side has been coming up and ours has been going down, till the chasm between the two parties is by no means so great as formerly.’”

“On the introduction of the Fuller system, a very important change followed on the part of many of our ministers in their mode of addressing their unconverted hearers on the subject of repentance and believing the gospel. Hitherto they would use circumlocution in their discourses on these matters, instead of direct appeals and exhortations to those whose conversions they desired. They would describe the lost condition of sinners, and point out the duty of all men to repent and believe the gospel, but beyond this, their views of consistency with the doctrine which ascribes the whole work of salvation to God alone would not permit them to go. As a general thing, the discourses of that age were very dull and monotonous, and were greatly deficient in the pathos and fervor of that class of evangelical preachers who were not tramelled by such rigid rules in their theological creed.”

“Church members then received much more attention from our public speakers than those who stood without its pale. At times men of more than ordinary zeal would overleap the bounds of their restricted rules, but with studied caution in their use of terms; and I well remember with what ingenuity and dexterity this class of preachers would so manage their addresses to their unconverted hearers as to discourse to them much in the style of reputed Arminians, and yet retain the substance of the stereotyped phraseology of their orthodox creed.”

“The Fuller system, which makes it consistent for all the heralds of the gospel to call upon men everywhere to repent, was well received by one class of our ministers, but not by the staunch defenders of the old theory of a limited atonement. According to their views, all for whom Christ suffered and died would certainly be effectually called and saved. These conflicting opinions caused altercations of considerable severity, for a time, among the Baptists, who had hitherto been all united on the orthodox side. The Gillites maintained that the expositions of Fuller were unsound, and would subvert the genuine gospel faith. If, said they, the atonement of Christ is general in its nature, it must be so in its effects, as none of His sufferings will be in vain; and the doctrine of universal salvation will inevitably follow this dangerous creed. While the dispute went on, it was somewhat difficult for the Fullerites to pass muster on the score of orthodoxy with the Old School party, or be on terms of entire cordiality with them. But so great has the standard of orthodoxy been lowered, even among those who are reputed orthodox, from former times, and so little attention do many of our church members of the present day pay to the doctrines which are advanced by their ministers, that this whole story will probably be new to most of them except of the older class.”

“A few persons may now be found, in most of our congregations, who are so well informed, and who pay so much attention to the preaching they hear, that they are able to detect any unsoundness in the doctrines advanced; but this is not so generally the case with the great mass of our members as it was in a former age.”

“At present the modes and manners and the eloquence of their ministers engage more of the attention of our people than their doctrinal expositions; and most of all they look for those attractions which are pleasing to young people, and which will collect large assemblies and enable them to compete with their neighbors in number and style.”

“With this end in view, nothing that will sound harsh or unpleasant to very sensitive ears must come from the preacher; the old-fashioned doctrines of Predestination, Total Depravity, Divine Sovereignty, etc., if referred to at all, must be by way of circumlocution and implication.”

“As a general thing now our people hear so little in common conversation, in their everyday intercourse with each other, on doctrinal subjects, before, at the time, and after they become church members, and are so much accustomed to vague and indefinite references to them, that, different from former years, they have but little desire to hear them discussed. Indeed, many of them would sit very uneasy under discourses in which the primordial principles of the orthodox Baptist faith should be presented, in the style of our sound old preachers of by-gone years.”

“As for themselves, some of them, might bear this tolerably well, but they would be thinking of others, and of the adverse remarks of outside hearers and weaker members.”

“In the business of ordinations, how little scrutiny is made of candidates as to their belief in the strong points of our system, compared with ages past!”

“While our Creed, like the thirty-nine Articles, remains the same, this moderating still goes on in theological training, in ministerial functions, and in public sentiment, and to what point of moderation we shall in time descend, it is difficult to foretell.”

“An English statesman once said of his own church, ‘We have a Calvinistic Creed, a Roman Ritual, and an Arminian clergy.’ This in time may apply to us, minus the Ritual in some cases” (pp. 135-144).

We hope the reader has not become tired in reading, or impatient with us for quoting so extensively from Benedict’s “Fifty Years Among the Baptists.” How could we omit to notice a work so appropos to our cause? Here is proof to the uttermost that our charges against the “Missionaries” are true. There is no use in their denying them any longer. Here is evidence, produced by their own great historian and leader, that they have departed from the faith, and consequently are no longer entitled to identity with the old Baptist family. Just exactly where Benedict says the Old Baptists were fifty years before his book was published, there they are to this day, firm, steadfast and immovable. And just where the New School party were then, in their origin, there they are now, except that they have become more bold and determined in their Arminianism and works of self-righteousness.

Evidence to sustain a position has seldom been more conclusive; and the mouths of “Missionaries” claiming to be “Primitive Baptists” should be forever closed after this exposure. [Benedict’s “Fifty Years Among the Baptists” was not popular enough with the Missionaries to pass to a second edition, we believe, and has long been out of print. The very publishers, in a recent letter to the writer, seem to have forgotten that they ever issued such a book. We would be pleased if these extracts should lead to a call for a second edition.—S. H.]

Let us consider for a moment some of the marks which Mr. Benedict gives of old-fashioned Baptists, in this lengthy extract, and also the marks of the new-fashioned or Fullerite party.

The signs denoting Old Baptists are;

1. They believe that Christ died for the elect only.
2. They were called Gillites.
3. They preached the gospel before the unconverted, but rousing appeals to their consciences on the subject of their conversion did not constitute a part of their public addresses.
4. They were accused by their opponents of Antinomian tendencies.
5. They dwelt much on the decrees and purpose of God, and dived deep, in their way, into the plans of Jehovah in eternity, and thereby brought to light, as they supposed, the hidden treasures of the gospel.
6. The Philadelphia Confession of Faith was their standard for an orthodox Creed.
7. They were all professedly Calvinistic in their doctrinal sentiments, yet did not like the name “Calvinist,” because they did not hold to all the doctrines of that reformer.
8. They ascribed the whole work of salvation to God alone.
9. They addressed themselves, in their discourses, more to church members than to those outside.
10. They were staunch defenders of a limited atonement, and would not entertain the general atonement system of Andrew Fuller.
11. They taught that all for whom Christ died would certainly be called and saved.
12. They were careful not to ordain a man to the ministry unless he was sound in the ancient faith.
13. They were slow to engage in any new enterprise, and were jealous of collegiate training for their ministers.
14. They were called “Old Baptists,” and were opposed to ministers reading their sermons, favoring extemporaneous discourses altogether.
15. They were a hardy race of men, and pursued other callings for a living, besides preaching; the most of them were farmers, but some were merchants, some physicians, some teachers, etc., etc.
16. They adhered to their flocks, and seldom relinquished their pastoral stations for want of support; but would devise some way to support themselves and keep on their work.
17. They had no settled income for their services.
18. Their ministers, when once called to preach, continued in their fields of labor, and there were very few non-preaching Elders among them.
19. Revivalists, who were to play upon the passions, please the carnal mind, and augment the number of the visible churches, were unknown among them.
20. There was not an agent for collecting funds for any object of benevolence or literature among them.

The foregoing marks or signs apply as well to the Old School Predestinarian Baptists of today as they did to a description of them by Benedict fifty years before his book was written. Just what he said of them then, the world says of them now.

The signs given by him of the Arminian or “Missionary” party are about as follows:

1. They believed in a general atonement.
2. They charged orthodox Baptists as being Hyper-Calvinists.
3. They caused divisions and debates by their new doctrines.
4. They did not dwell in their discourses on the doctrine of depravity, election, Divine sovereignty, final perseverance, etc.
5. They were very bitter in their feelings against the doctrine of election, and readily assailed it, in season and out of season, by reason and ridicule.
6. Their method of preaching changed into the above-named order by the adoption of the Fullerite doctrine.
7. They lowered the standard of orthodoxy, and taught their hearers to pay no attention to the doctrines which are advanced by their ministers.
8. They sought, by the modes and manners and eloquence of their ministers, to engage the attention of the people, more than by their doctrinal expositions.
9. They sought to bring forward those things which were pleasing to young people, and which would collect large assemblies, and enable them to compete with their neighbors in numbers and style.
10. Their preachers refrained from preaching the old-fashioned doctrine of predestination, etc., because it sounded harsh to sensitive ears and was unpopular with the people.
11. They were opposed to hearing the primordial principles of the orthodox faith discussed.
12. While consenting, at times, to an orthodox creed, they were moderating its principles and stripping it of all force and meaning.
13. Old staid preachers were removed to give room for those of captivating discourses, which excited the passions of their congregations, and so augmented the number of converts.
14. They founded the convention for Foreign “Missions” in Philadelphia in 1814.
15. They threw aside the ancient jealousy of the fathers against ministerial education, and soon filled the land with schools for religious training.
16. They formed Bible Societies.
17. They introduced Sunday Schools and Bible Classes.
18. They set up departments which they called “Foreign and Home Departments.”
19. They created “Missionary” Societies to promote “Missionary” labors, when, before that, the Associations occasionally voted supplies to destitute churches.
20. They introduced organs as a part of their church service, and pew-rents as a foundation to meet church expenses, and various excitements about matters foreign to the accustomed work of ministers of the gospel.

These marks point unmistakably to the “Missionary” Baptists of today. Is it possible to better define them than has been done by our author?

According to the showing of their own great historian, they must, in the judgment of the world, stand condemned as the mischievous innovators, who have set up idols and brought in heresies among Baptists, causing the great Division that has been made among them in the nineteenth century, and prostituted that honorable and venerable name to the sanction of means and measures disgraceful to the Christian religion.

We must follow our author a little further to show other evidences of a departure by “Missionaries” from the customs and practices of ancient Baptists. On page 165 he says: “In my early day among by far the largest portion of the Baptists, the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ were in common use in the everyday conversation of these people, when speaking to or of each other. A great change has indeed taken place in this business, in some locations, where much less of this old-fashioned familiarity of speech is heard than formerly; and this change is the most apparent in the older and more populous parts of the country, where forms and fashions have produced such a worldly conformity on the part of the Baptists that their language relative to church association is as cold and formal as that of worldly people.” This extract shows another departure on the part of the “Missionaries;” for while they address each other with the terms “Mr.,” “Mrs.” and “Miss,” Old School Baptists adhere to the ancient custom of speaking to each other or of each other as “brother” or “sister.”

As to the term “Elder,” our author says: “The term ‘Elder,’ as a proper distinction for our ministers of all grades, old or young, in my early day, was, and indeed from time immemorial it has been, the usual title for them. But there has been a great change in this respect among the more fashionable class of Baptists in many parts of the country, where the term Reverend has taken the place of the old and favorite cognomen above referred to.” “Missionaries” have made this change; they alone call their ministers “Reverend” while the Old School still call theirs “Elders.”

On Revivals of Religion our author says: “As far back as my recollection and researches extend, these seasons, for the most part, were like angels’ visits, few and far between. From Backus and others I learn that during the great religious movement under the labors of Whitefield, Tennant, Finley, and others, usually denominated the New Light Stir, a few Old Baptist Churches participated in that extraordinary work, which however prevailed mostly among the Pedobaptists.”

“In the early part of the present century, and up to the age of the excitements, which, as I have already stated, had a paralyzing influence on the better feelings of Christians, conversions and additions, among our people, were, in many cases, of the most exhilarating and encouraging nature. This golden age of our denomination lasted about a quarter of a century, and the increase of our communicants was often a matter of astonishment to our people at home and our friends abroad. During all this time scarcely any of the new measures of more modern times were adopted. In some locations where the Methodists were numerous and their customs prevailed, rising for prayers began to be practiced to a limited extent. But as a general thing the old way of conducting meetings, whether in seasons of revivals or declensions, was pursued, and all attempts to produce a high state of feeling among the people were carefully avoided. Depth of feeling was the main thing desired by our most efficient men, whether in the pulpit or the conference room. They also made much dependence on the silent workings of the Divine Spirit on the hearts of the people.”

“On these agents the Baptists made much more dependence than on multitudinous gatherings and bodily exercises.”

“At length protracted meetings began to be much talked of far and near, and so many reports were circulated concerning the wonderful effects of them, that by many they were thought to be the very thing for promoting religious revivals. For some time four days was the amount of time allotted them, but soon these meetings began to overrun this time, and the original term was exchanged for meetings of days, without any limit as to their number.”

“In connection with these meetings came along a new sort of preachers, who went into the business of conducting them by new rules of their own. In process of time, the Baptists became a good deal engaged in these peculiar gatherings, and many of them seemed much pleased with them.”

“The revival ministers, as they were called, soon became very popular; they were sent for from far and near, and in many cases very large additions were made to our churches under their administrations.”

“But in some cases the old ministers and churches demurred, and were unwilling to have these new men, with their new notions, introduced among them. They were jealous of these wonder-working ministers, in this business, and of a new machinery in the work of conversion. It was always customary with our old pastors to have other ministers to assist them in times of universal attention to religion, but they never gave up the helm of the ship to new pilots for the sake of more rapid speed. Whenever this experiment was made, with rare exceptions, it worked badly, and many a good and well settled pastor was, by its operation, either crowded out of his place, or else made uncomfortable in it, in consequence of the introduction of the new measures above alluded to, and the indiscretions of revival preachers.”

“To see converts coming into a church by wholesale was a pleasing idea to many members; and although they had been well satisfied with their pastor heretofore, yet now they began to think that the new man, who had been so active and successful in gathering in new members, would do much more for them than they could expect from the one in office; that he would soon fill their ranks, repair their meeting-house, pay off their church debt, and place them in circumstances as flourishing as those of their neighbors.”

“But another class of members had fearful forebodings for the future, under the ministry of the new man. They had rather continue their old way of doing business than to place a mere revivalist in the pastoral office, and make the radical changes in their operations which he and his ardent admirers considered of so much importance. Hence arose discussions at first; next, disputations; and in the end not unfrequently, painful and injurious divisions” (pp. 200-204).

This scrap of history is given:

1. To prove our assertion true, that religious excitements, produced by protracted meetings, etc., are of recent origin among Baptists.

2. That those who now engage in such things, as do the “Missionaries,” must be considered the new school party, who have departed from the practice of the regular Baptists.

3. To convince those, among the Missionaries, who have been born again—who have honest hearts, and are anxious to know the truth, that they have been sadly deceived in uniting with the “Missionaries” and engaging in their new-fangled schemes to make proselytes to their cause.

Mr. Benedict now tells them of the origin and motive of these meetings, the first of which is recent, and the second of which is shameful, so that no sound, upright man should feel willing to fellowship such things any longer. Old School Baptists, it is well known, reject these things altogether, and yet are ready to receive to their communion all those who renounce them and are sound in the faith.

In regard to the business of Associations, Mr. Benedict says there has been a great change. He says: “When I first began to attend these yearly meetings they were conducted with great simplicity, and were very interesting to all who were identified with them, and to many who repaired to them as spectators of their doings. In that early age, and for a long time after, these institutions, which are peculiar to the Baptists, were wholly devoted to religious exercises and the care of the churches of which they were composed.”—“Before the rise of modern benevolent institutions, our Associations were at full liberty to attend to their own proper work, without any interference from any quarter; but as soon as agents began to visit them from different directions, and for different objects, a great change very soon took place. These new visitors, often in considerable numbers, came to these annual assemblies, full of zeal in the speaking line, and sought to be heard in favor of their various objects. Mr. Rice was the pioneer in this business, and such was the native eloquence of the man, together with the novelty of his theme and the ardor of his pleadings, that his addresses for a while excited an unusual interest among the people. But in the course of a few years, the visits of even this man became less welcome; and as new societies arose and new agents were sent abroad, some Associations were burdened with their number and importunity.”—“At an earlier period of our benevolent operations, complaints began to be made of the undue cost of agents for the collection of funds to sustain them, and I have seen some very alarming figuring in this business, which ought to have aroused the Baptist public to devise some remedy for this most palpable evil. But it has remained from year to year without much comment, only on the complaining side” (pp. 222, 225, 226).

Now, in view of this extract, what are the facts of the case? As the Associations were conducted in Benedict’s early day, with simplicity, with interest to all concerned, wholly devoted to religious exercises and the care of the churches, so are they now conducted by Primitive Baptists. But “Missionaries” have brought about a great change. Their Associations are burdened with numerous projects before them, and numerous advocates pleading for money to carry into execution their various schemes. When one object or scheme becomes a little stale, they start up another, so as to keep the minds of the people sufficiently excited to part with their money to these greedy beggars, who keep much of the money they get, as Benedict intimates, to pay themselves for begging, and the object for which they beg is but little cared for.

Is it a difficult matter to decide between these people and determine who are Old School and who are New School—who are standing in the ways, and seeing, asking for the old paths and the good way, wherein they may walk and find rest to their souls, and those on the other hand who are despising the old way and searching for new ways, in which they may walk to gratify their fancies and gain the applause of the world?

We will dismiss Mr. Benedict from the witness stand, after hearing a little more testimony.

In regard to the construction of the old “Missionary” Convention, our author says: “The whole business of Foreign Missions came somewhat suddenly upon the Baptist denomination; the ministers of any public spirit entered into the thing with a commendable zeal; but as the mass of the people were rather slow in coming into the measure, how to raise the needful funds was at first an embarrassing question. A direct appeal to them would most likely have been a failure; some other plan must therefore be devised, and this led on to the money qualification for membership, which worked very well at first, except with the poor churches and ministers; and in that direction there often appeared some very hard cases, where men, who were much better qualified for a seat in the Convention than many who appeared there, were excluded by the money rule. Some of this class of men had friends in the more wealthy churches, who would think of them and have them returned as members on the strength of the contributions of their own churches; but many able men in counsel, and who would have been glad of a seat with their brethren, with whom they had been accustomed to act in all other meetings, were not thus favored; and of course they either staid at home, or else were registered as visitors merely, all for the want of one hundred dollars per annum.”

“The close figuring to ascertain this point, between the committees on membership and those who wished to secure seats for their friends, often partook too much of the nature of commercial transactions for religious assemblies” (pp. 232-234).

Question. What would Peter and John have thought of such a society as this, and if they had desired admission into it, how could they have obtained it?

It is near kin to blasphemy to claim Divine authority for such an institution as this, and yet there are many persons who claim Divine authority for it, and maintain the position that such things existed among Christians in the Apostolic Age of the world, and have existed ever since their day! Here was a society organized in the nineteenth century of the Christian era, ostensibly for the purpose of getting money to convert heathens to Christianity, and yet its projectors had neither the courage nor honesty to beg the money wanted directly from the people. Jesuitism was brought into requisition. A highly honored institution among men was created, and in order to secure the honor of being a member of it an initiation fee of one hundred dollars must be paid down. The higher the fee, of course the more honor conferred. Poor ministers, or those representing poor churches, could not enter for the want of money, but must sit down on the door-sill or be reckoned as visitors only, although they might be talented and wise; while any loquacious upstart, being backed up with one hundred dollars, though he might be destitute of grace or sense, could enter and claim the right to manage this great mammoth concern. Then came the “close figuring” to get some of these poor men in. Here was a spectacle indeed for angels and men, sufficient to make both weep if they had the love of God in their hearts, and were jealous for His honor, to witness such an abuse of His holy religion. Benedict says this was a new thing, and came suddenly upon the Baptist denomination. Who will dare contradict his declaration? Yet “Missionaries” boast of this institution as they do of their home “Missions,” their Bible Societies, their Tract Societies, their Theological Schools, their Sunday Schools, their Mite Societies, their Festivals and Fairs, as being means to be used for the salvation of sinners from sin and from hell.

On pages 297 and 298 Benedict informs us that, in his early day, the Baptists had a prejudice against theological learning, and would not tolerate it in their ministers. They believed the sentiments they uttered came right down from Heaven. They said, “If the Lord has called men to preach, they will and must preach.” “Open your mouth and I will fill it,” were terms frequently heard in his early years. But he says: “As these old members passed off the stage and a new race took their places, who required more cultivation in their preachers, etc., they began to look round for the best means of attaining it.” The necessity for a change in this respect, he says, became daily more apparent, and soon a new dispensation in this business was introduced among them. Now we would ask, Where are the Old School and where are the New on the subject of this ministerial training in schools of human learning for qualifications to preach the gospel of Christ? Benedict decides the question, and declares this new business never got a fair start until some of the old members passed away. Primitive Baptists of today are just where he says the Old Baptists were in his early day on this subject.

Let us hear what our author says about Sunday Schools, on pages 310 and 311.

“Fifty years ago, when I began my ministry in Pawtucket, being then a licensed preacher and student in college, I found a quiet little company of poor factory children, under the care of the village schoolmaster, who had a moderate compensation for his services from a few factory owners, for the children all were free. The main object of this juvenile seminary was to impart the rudiments of a common school education, but from the day on which it was kept it was called a Sunday School.”

“This benevolent undertaking was set in motion seven years before this time by the late Samuel Slater, of Corson Mill notoriety, for the benefit of the poor, ignorant and neglected children who had gathered round his mill, then the only one in the place. Pawtucket, at this time, was a small village, with but few meeting-going people in it, without any church or settled minister on the ground. The first Baptist Church was formed in 1805. We had heard of Raikes’s enterprise in England, in the Sunday School line, and his plan was copied by the new American institution, which still lives on an improved platform in a numerous pedigree in Pawtucket and vicinity. This sacro-secular concern was moulded into the shape of modern Sunday Schools about forty years ago,” etc., etc. In this extract we have given us the origin of one of the first Sunday Schools in America, and the character of it. It was copied from one formed in England by Robert Raikes. No reasonable objection could be raised against either the original or the copy, so long as they remained in subjection to the purpose of their creation; which was to take poor needy children from the streets, from the factories, or elsewhere, who were sent to no other school, and teach them cleanliness and good manners, teach them the alphabet and the rudiments of an English education. This was true benevolence and a praiseworthy enterprise. But so soon as the hands of a Jesuitical priesthood touched this thing, it was changed immediately into a different institution. Not the poor and the needy, not the ragged urchins of the lanes and streets of cities and villages, destitute of any learning whatever, were so much sought after as were the educated children of well-to-do and wealthy parents. These were brought in under a show of literature, it is true, but chiefly for the purpose of making professors of religion of them and swelling the numbers of their churches, so called. These children are taught to exalt themselves and despise others, and especially are they taught to hate the doctrine of the gospel. Nearly every sect of Protestants in America, including “Missionary” Baptists, has its Sunday Schools, which are kept pruned and in order as nurseries for the churches, so called. They idolize their Sunday Schools, and look to them chiefly for filling up and perpetuating their churches. The great scrambling is here seen among the sects for gathering in large numbers of children; for once within the pale of their Sunday School, they count them sure for church membership. This eagerness for Sunday School scholars and shrewd electioneering to obtain them are based on the principle, we suppose, that it is easier to bias the youthful mind in favor of their respective religions than it is to convert old, hard-hearted sinners, and bring them to the support of their various crafts.

Let it be borne in mind that Primitive Baptists reject the whole concern, in its present shape, and turn from it with disgust as an engine of priestcraft, and one of the sure marks of the Beast. We conclude now to dismiss our author from the witness stand for the present; we may have use for him again hereafter.

We suppose no man among the Missionary Baptists could be named, whose opinions and declarations are entitled to more respect than his.

He published one history of the Baptists in 1810, and another in 1848; an abridged edition of Robertson’s History of Baptism in 1817; a History of All Religions, published in 1824; and his Fifty Years Among the Baptists, in 1860.

In order to show utter departure by “Missionaries” from the doctrine of the Bible and the London and Philadelphia Confessions of Faith, we will submit one or two quotations from a very famous “Missionary” document.

First. In a letter addressed to the ladies of America nearly fifty years ago by “Doctor” Adoniram Judson (1788-1845), a “Missionary” to Burmah, we find in two paragraphs these remarkable words:

“3. In the posture you have assumed, look up and behold the eye of your benignant Savior ever gazing upon you with the tenderest love—upon you, His daughters, His spouse, wishing above all things that you would yield your hearts entirely to Him, and become holy as He is holy, rejoicing when He sees one and another accepting His pressing invitation and entering the more perfect way; for on that account He will be able to draw such precious souls into a nearer union with Himself, and place them at last in the higher spheres, where they will receive and reflect more copious communications of light from the great Fountain of light, the uncreated Sun.”

“4. Surely you can hold out no longer. Thanks be to God, I see you taking off your necklaces and ear-rings, tearing away your ribbons and ruffles and superfluities of head-dress, and I hear you exclaim. What shall we do next? An important question, deserving serious consideration. The ornaments you are renouncing, though useless, and worse than useless, in their present state, can be so disposed of as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, relieve the sick, enlighten the dark-minded, disseminate the Holy Scriptures, spread the glorious gospel throughout the world. Little do the inhabitants of a free Christian country know of the want and distress endured by the greater part of the inhabitants of the earth. Still less idea can they form of the awful darkness which rests upon the great mass of mankind in regard to spiritual things. During the years that you have been wearing these useless ornaments, how many poor creatures have been pining in want; how many have languished and groaned on beds of abject wretchedness; how many children have been bred up in the blackest ignorance, hardened in all manner of iniquity; how many immortal souls have gone down to hell with a lie in their right hand, having never heard of the true God and the only Savior! Some of these miseries might have been mitigated; some poor wretch have felt his pain relieved; some widow’s heart have been made to sing for joy; some helpless orphans have been rescued from hardened depravity, and trained up for a happy life, here and hereafter; some, yea, many, precious souls might have been redeemed from the quenchless fires of hell, where now they must lie and suffer to all eternity, had you not been afraid of being thought unfashionable, and not like other folks! had you not preferred adorning your persons and cherishing the most seductive feelings of vanity and pride! 0 Christian sisters, believers in God, in Christ, in an eternal hell! can you hesitate and ask what you shall do? Bedew these ornaments with the tears of contrition; consecrate them to the cause of charity; hang them on the cross of your dying Lord. Delay not an instant; hasten with all your might, if not to make reparations for the past, at least to prevent a continuation of the evil in the future. And be not content with individual exertion. Remember that union is strength. Take an example from the Temperance Societies, which are rising in their strength, and rescuing a nation from the brink of destruction. Unite, Christian sisters of all denominations, and make an effort to rescue the church of God from the insidious attacks of an enemy which is devouring her very vitals. As a counterpart to the societies just mentioned, may I respectfully suggest that plain-dress societies be formed in every city and village throughout the land, recognizing two fundamental principles: the one based on (1 Tim. 2:9); All costly attire to be disused; the other on the law of general benevolence; the avails of such articles, and the saving resulting from the plain-dress system, to be devoted to purposes of charity. Some general rules in regard to dress, and some general objects of charity, may be easily ascertained and settled. Minor points must of course be left to the conscience of each individual, yet free discussion will throw light on many points at first obscure. Be not deterred by the suggestions that in such discussions you are conversant about small things. Great things depend on small; and in that case, things which appear small to short-sighted man are great in the sight of God. Many there are who praise the principle of self-denial in general, and condemn it in all its particular applications, as too minute and scrupulous and severe. Satan is well aware that if he can secure the minute units, the sum total will be his own. Think not anything small which may have a bearing upon the kingdom of Christ, and upon the destinies of eternity. How easy to conceive, from many known events, that the single fact of a lady divesting herself of a necklace for Christ’s sake, may involve consequences which shall be felt in the remotest parts of the earth, and in all future generations to the end of time; yea, stretch away into boundless eternity, and be a subject of praise millions of ages after this world and all its ornaments are burnt up.”

The false doctrine and blasphemy contained in these quotations are so apparent that it is almost unnecessary to criticise them. Yet the reply to them by Elder G. Beebe, editor of the “Signs of the Times,” then of New Vernon, New York, is so appropriate, that we do not feel excused from withholding it. It is as follows:

“We consider the foregoing extracts fraught with the most glaring and blasphemous heresy perhaps ever published by any man professing to rely on the finished righteousness and atonement of Christ for salvation.”

“Can it be possible that Mr. Judson, with his Bible before him, can think that the adorable Lamb,, who is in the Bible emphatically called ‘The mighty God, The everlasting Father,’ etc., that He in whose hands is vested all power in Heaven and on earth, that He should give eternal life to as many as the Father hath given Him, is so very deficient in power after all as to be dependent on the American females for ability to draw souls into union with Himself, or that on their works, good or bad, His rejoicing depends? Be astonished, 0 Heavens! and awfully afraid, 0 earth! when, by the impudence of such men as Mr. Judson, the Lord Jesus Christ is set forth robbed of His crown and stripped of His eternal power and Godhead, pressing His invitations, and urging His earnest solicitations upon creatures whose breath is in their nostrils.”

“But in his fourth item Mr. Judson’s doctrine goes to supersede the work of Jesus Christ entirely, and he ascribes to his ‘golden calf’ not only temporal blessings, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc., but also the spreading of the gospel and the salvation of souls.”

“Instead of saying with an inspired Apostle, ‘Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid,’ namely, Jesus Christ, ‘grinning defiance’ to the Apostle’s doctrine, he says that ‘some, yea, many, precious souls might have been redeemed from the quenchless fires of hell, had you not been afraid of being thought unfashionable,’ etc.”

“But let us consider how Mr. J’s redemption is to be made. First, Aaron-like, he, as an high priest, demands that the daughters of Israel shall strip themselves of their ornaments. Secondly, consecrate them to the cause of charity, by bedewing them with the tears of contrition, etc. Thirdly, hang them in the Savior’s stead upon the cross; offer them on the same altar on which the Divine sacrifice was offered, and then join with him in the shout, ‘These be thy gods, 0 Israel!’ etc., and as gods sound their praise millions of ages after this world and all its vanities are consumed.”

“One object of Mr. Judson cannot well be disguised, namely, that of blending the church and the world together in opposition to the express command of God, ‘Unite, Christian sisters of all denominations.’ Christ has established but one denomination of Christians on earth; all other denominations are harlots, and he that is joined to a harlot is one flesh. Thus Mr. J. identified himself with all the daughters of the old mother of harlots; and having placed himself at the corners of the streets for the seduction of the simple, in the language of the harlot he says, ‘Cast in thy lot with us, and we will have one purse.’”

“‘May I respectfully suggest,’ says Mr. Judson, ‘that plain-dress societies be formed in every city and village throughout the land.’ We answer. Yes, if you can bring a precept and example from the word of God. But this he does not attempt. He gives himself as authority, and says, Delay not an instant, and points to the Temperance Societies for an example.”

“Such precepts and examples may do for those who teach for doctrines the commandments of men; but the followers of the Lamb will never join in such unhallowed connections with Antichrist. They will hear His (Christ’s) voice and follow Him, but a stranger will they not follow. Many professors of religion, including perhaps all nominal and worldly minded professors, may unite. Pilate and Herod may make friends; the mother of harlots and all her daughters may join in unison. But thus saith the Lord, ‘Associate yourselves together, and ye shall be broken in pieces.’ And to His children the Lord says, ‘Say not a confederacy to all whom this people shall say a confederacy, neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid.’”

“We cannot suppress our astonishment that even Mr. Judson should imagine that his golden calf will be a subject of praise in the world to come, although we must confess that this theory is consistent with his faith in a plurality of saviors; for if the single fact of a lady divesting herself of a useless necklace has a bearing on the eternal destiny, and the united exertions of a plain-dress society can save many souls from the quenchless fires of hell, where without these exertions they must lie and suffer to all eternity, it would be perfectly consistent to praise them for their God-like power to save. However beautiful this doctrine may sound in the ears of the gay and fashionable religionists of this day, there is no comeliness in it to those who believe that Jesus is God, and besides Him there is no Savior. Such souls as know the Lord confidently hope, through the blood of their incarnate Lord, to be permitted to join in the song of His redeemed, and in eternal anthems of everlasting worship swell these heavenly notes, ‘Not unto us, not unto us, but to Thy name be the glory. Forasmuch as we know that we are not redeemed with such corruptible things as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot; who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, for you, who by Him do believe in God,’ etc. The Apostle Paul says, ’ But though we or an angel from Heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.’”—“Signs of the Times,” January 16, 1833.

Thus much for the doctrine of “Missionaries” about fifty years ago. And be it remembered that this letter of Mr. Judson’s was approved cordially by the Missionaries and their periodicals throughout the land. The “Baptist Repository” boasted of the great number of jewels this letter had brought into the treasury of the Lord. The “Missionaries” advocate the same God-dishonoring, Mammon-deifying doctrines today.

1. This statement of father’s is a strong one; but, as I have demonstrated in the previous part of this volume, the doctrine of salvation by works, instead of salvation by grace, is the essence of Greek and Roman Catholicism, and has unfortunately come to be the essence of nearly all Protestantism as well. Of course, Protestants have a great advantage over Catholics in being emancipated from innumerable degrading superstitions.
The Holy Spirit declares to us by the Apostle Paul (Rom. 11:5, 6) that salvation is either all of works, or all of grace.—S. H.

2. Benedict’s History of the Baptists is still the standard authority with the “Missionary” Baptists of America.—S. H.

Chapter XXIII. Kehukee Association from 1834 to 1885.

The Association was held in 1834 at Cross Roads, Edgecombe County, commencing on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. And as before the first Sunday in October in each year from that time to the present has been the day on which the Association has met, closing on the Monday following, it will be unnecessary to mention the time of the in each year hereafter.

Elder George W. Carrowan delivered the introductory sermon. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, and Joseph D. Biggs Assistant Clerk. Visiting ministers were invited to seats, whereupon Elders Mark Bennett, Thomas Dupree and Temple seated themselves. Letters from thirty churches were showing the number of baptisms to have been, since the last session, 25: and the number in fellowship 1,705. Messengers from sister Association were Elder Thomas Dupree from the Contentnea, and Elder B. Temple from Little River. Elders B. Temple, Joshua Lawrence and Joseph Biggs preached on Sunday. The following committees were approved viz.: Elders Joseph Biggs, Joshua, Lawrence and Mark Bennett to examine the Circular Letter; brethren James S. Battle and Edward Andrews on Finance; brother R. M. G. Moore to write to the Contentnea Association, and brother Stephen Outterbridge to write to the Little River.

Elders Joshua Lawrence and William Hyman were appointed messengers both to the Little River and Contentnea Associations.

1835. The Association was held with the church at Skewarkey, Martin :County. Elder Joshua Lawrence preached the introductory sermon. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, brethren Joseph D. Biggs and R. M. G. Moore Assistant Clerks.

Elder Thomas Dupree appeared as messenger from the Contentnea Association; Elders Jesse Adams and Eli Holland from the Little River. Letters from thirty churches were read, which showed 15 baptisms and 1,647 in fellowship.

A church at Flatty Creek, Pasquotank County, was received as a member of this Association. Elders William Hyman, Thomas Dupree, Joseph Biggs, Mark Bennett and Jesse Adams were appointed to examine the Circular Letter; brethren Lewelling Bowers and Joseph John Pippin were appointed a Committee of Finance; brother Richard E. Reives to write a Corresponding Letter to the Contentnea; and brother Joseph John Pippin to write to the Little River.

Elders Joshua Lawrence, Thomas Dupree and Jesse Adams preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to sister Associations were Elder John Ward and brother Richard E. Reives to the Contentnea, with letter; Elders Micajah Perry and Humphrey Stallings, with letter, to the Little River.

1836. The Association convened at Great Swamp, Pitt County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder Joshua Lawrence. Eider William Hyman was chosen Moderator, Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, and brethren Joseph D. Biggs and R. M. G. Moore Assistant Clerks.

Letters from thirty-four churches were read, showing the number baptized to be 12, and in membership 1,513. Messengers received from sister Associations were Eider Thomas Dupree from Contentnea, and Elder Josiah Smith from the White Oak. A letter was received from the Little River Association.

Elders Joshua Lawrence, Thomas Dupree and William Hyman were appointed a committee to examine the Circular Letter. Elders Josiah Smith, Joshua Lawrence and Thomas Dupree preached on Sunday. Messengers appointed to visit Associations were as follows: Elders John H. Daniel and Micajah Perry to the Little River; Joshua Lawrence and William Hyman to the Contentnea; Elders William Hyman and Richard E. Reives to the White Oak.

Elder Biggs, the Clerk, was as usual requested to prepare the Minutes for the press, have 1,000 copies printed and distributed, place a copy of the same on the Association Record, and be allowed fifteen dollars for his services.

1837. The Association convened with the church at Lawrence’s, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder Joseph Biggs. Elder William Hyman was appointed Moderator, Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, and brethren Joseph D. Biggs and R. M. G. Moore Assistant Clerks. Brethren in the ministry from sister Associations were invited to seats, when Elders Mark Bennett, James Griffin, Parham Puckett, Thomas Gibson, James Wilder, Jesse Adams, Josiah Smith and Willoughby Hudgings seated themselves.

Letters from thirty-one churches represented 6 baptisms and 1,547 in fellowship. Three churches were received as members of the body at this Association, viz.: Sappony, Nash County; Rocky Swamp, Halifax County; and South Quay, Southampton County, Virginia. Messengers from sister Associations as follows were received: From Contentnea, Elder Mark Bennett; from White Oak, Eiders Josiah Smith and Parham Puckett; from Little River, Elder Jesse Adams; from Country Line, Elders Wilder and Gibson. The following committees were appointed, viz.: James S. Battle and Coffield King on Finance; Elder William Hyman to write to the Contentnea Association; and brother Joseph D. Biggs to write to the White Oak. Elders Joshua Lawrence, Parham Puckett and Willoughby Hudgings preached on Sunday. Eiders Joshua Lawrence and Humphrey Stallings were appointed messengers to the Contentnea Association; brethren James S. Battle and Robert Sorey were appointed messengers to the Little River; mid Elders William Hyman and John H. Daniel and brother Richard Harrison were appointed messengers to the Country Line Association. Elder Joshua Lawrence was requested to prepare a Circular Letter for the next Association.

1838. The Association convened at Spring Green, Martin County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Eider William Hyman, who was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brethren Joseph D. Biggs and R. M. G. Moore. Brethren in the ministry, Elders Burwell Temple, Mark Bennett and John Stadler, were received as visitors.

A church at Sandy Grove, Nash County, was received into membership. Messengers were received from the following Associations, viz.: Lewis J. Puckett from the White Oak; Elder Mark Bennett from the Contentnea; and John Stadler and George T. Coggin from the Country Line.

Letters from thirty-one churches were received, representing 13 as having been baptized, and 1,116 communicants. The following committees were appointed, viz.: Brethren James S. Battle and Joseph J. Pippin on Finance; James S. Battle to write a letter to the Contentnea Association; Joseph J. Pippin to the White Oak; Richard E. Reives to the Country Line; and John Stadler, Burwell Temple and William Hyman to examine the Circular Letter.

Elders Burwell Temple, Mark Bennett and John Stadler preached on Sunday.

The church at Hunting Quarters was by request dismissed in order to unite with another Association of the same faith and order.

1839. The Association was held at Bethel, Beaufort County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder William Hyman, who was then chosen Moderator, and Eider Joseph Biggs Clerk, anti brethren R. M. G. Moore and Stephen Outterbridge Assistants.

Letters from thirty churches were read, showing 24 baptisms, and whole number in fellowship to be 1,498.

The church at Fishing Creek (Daniels meeting-house), that had been dismissed to form another Association, petitioned for readmission, and was received a member of the Kehukee again. Corresponding members received from Associations: Josiah Smith front White Oak; John Stadler from Country Lane; Minutes only from Contentnea and Abbot’s Creek Union Associations. Elders Wilder, Stadler and Hyman preached on Sunday. Messengers appointed to visit different Associations were as follows: To Country Line, Elders John H. Daniel, William Hyman and brother Richard Harrison; to White Oak, brother Richard E. Reives; to Contentnea, Eiders John Ward, Humphrey Stallings, William Hyman and William Whitaker; to Little River, Elder John H. Daniel and brother Richard Harrison.

Elders Wilder, Stadler and Adams preached on Sunday. The Circular Letter written by Elder Joseph Biggs was received and approved Correspondence with the Abbot’s Creek Union Association was sanctioned, and twenty-five copies of the Kehukee Minutes ordered to be sent them.

1840. The Association met at South Quay, Southampton County, Va. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder John H. Daniel. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brethren Joseph D. Biggs and R. M. G. Moore. Letters from thirty-one churches were received; 58 baptized; whole number in fellowship 1,635.

A church at Sawyer’s Creek, Camden County, was received as a member of the Association.

Visiting Elders were invited to seats, when James Wilder, John Stadler, Ichabod Moore and Jesse Adams seated themselves.

John Stadler, James Wilder and Jesse Adams preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders John H. Daniel and William Hyman, and brethren Richard Harrison and James S. Battle to Country Line; brother Richard E. Reeves to White Oak; Elders Blount Cooper, Humphrey Stallings and John H. Daniel, and brethren Joseph D. Biggs, Richard Harrison and William Thigpen to Contentnea; brethren Wallace Andrews, James S. Battle and Richard Harrison, and Elder Humphrey Stallings, to Little River. Twenty-five copies of Minutes were sent to the Abbot’s Creek Union Association.

It was resolved at this Association not to countenance “Missionary” preachers who should visit our churches, whether they came begging money or not, either directly or indirectly.

A biography of Elder Micajah Perry was handed in by brother C. B. Hassell, read, approved, and ordered to be spread on the Minutes.

1841. The Association was held at Little Coneto, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Blount Cooper. Elder William Hyman was appointed Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, and brethren Joseph D. Biggs and R. M. G. Moore Assistant Clerks.

Visiting Elders were John Stadler, Samuel Moore, David I. Mott, Parham Puckett, Thomas Dupree, James Wilder and Mark Bennett.

Letters from the churches represented 88 baptisms, and the number in fellowship to be 1,200.

A great storm of rain and wind prevailed on Sunday, yet there was preaching in the meeting-house by Elders Stadler and Wilder, and at the residence of Elder John H. Daniel by Elders Puckett and Martin.

Messengers from sister Associations were recognized, viz.: Parham Puckett and D. I. Mott from White Oak; John Stadler and James Wilder from the Country Line; Mark Bennett, Lemuel Moore and Thomas Dupree the Contentnea,

Messengers were appointed to visit sister Associations as follows, viz.: To Country Line, Elders William Hyman and Blount Cooper, and brethren Richard Harrison and James S. Battle; to White Oak, brethren Richard E. Reives and William Thigpen; to Contentnea, Elders William Hyman, Blount Cooper and Humphrey Stallings, and brethren Richard E. Reives and Joseph D. Biggs; to Little River, Elder Humphrey Stallings, and brethren Robert D. Hart and James Eleanor; to Abbott’s Creek Union, twenty-five copies of Minutes.

The name of the church at Old Ford meeting-house, Beaufort County, was stricken from the list of churches, because it had been regularly dissolved, and the members had united with the church at Smithwick’s Creek.

1842. The Association assembled with the church at Skewarkey, Martin County. This was the year in which the memorable rain storm on the 14th and 13th of July prevailed in Eastern North Carolina, the force of which, added to that of two subsequent storms in the Fall, of a milder nature, came near producing a famine for bread in that part of the land. Some brethren feared the Association could not be accommodated, and suggested a postponement of it for a year; but a majority declined interfering with the arrangement already made, and the meeting was held according to appointment. The number in attendance was as large as usual, and no inconvenience, appeared to have been sustained by any one for the want of accommodation both for man and beast.

Elder James Osbourn, front Baltimore, Md., preached the introductory sermon. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and Elder Joseph Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brethren Joseph D. Biggs and R. M. G. Moore.

Visiting brethren in the ministry were John Stadler, James Wilder, Parham Puckett, Mark Bennett and James Osbourn. Letters from thirty five churches were received; 96 baptized, 1,420 in fellowship.

A church at Potecasa, Northampton County, called “Primitive Potecasa” was received into membership. Messengers from sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders John Stadler and James Wilder from Country Line; Parham Puckett from White Oak; I. Leach from Little River; and Mark Bennett from Contentnea. Elders James Osbourn and John Stadler preached on Sunday. Messengers sent, to sister Associations were as follows viz.: Elder John H. Daniel and brother Sovereign Purvis to White Oak; brethren C. B. Hassell and Robert D. Hart to Contentnea; brethren A. B. Bathes, Jr., and Isaac Strickland to Little River; Eiders William Hyman and John H. Daniel, and brethren Richard Harrison, Robert D. Hart, Lemuel B. Bennett and James S. Battle to Country Line; Minutes to Abbott’s Creek Union.

A biography of Elder Micajah Ambrose was handed in by brother Charles Blount, which was read and ordered to be attached to tile Minutes. Also a biography of brother Richard Davis was handed in by brother S. Clark, read and ordered to be attached to the Minutes.

1843. The Association was held with the church at the Falls of the Tar of River, Nash County. The introductory sermon wits preached by Elder Blount Cooper. Elder Hyman was chosen Moderator, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brother C. B. Hassell.

Elder Joseph Biggs, father of brother Joseph D. Biggs, was by reason of infirmity and old age absent at this meeting. He had been long and usefully connected with the Association, and had served her in capacity of Clerk for thirty-six years, he had for a number of years been assisted in his work by his son Joseph, and the Association thought proper to call his son to that office upon the retiring of his father.

Visiting brethren in the ministry present were John Stadler, Jesse Adams, James Wilder, Parham Puckett, D. J. Mott, James Osbourn, Josiah Smith, and William Bass. Letters from thirty churches were received and read, which showed the number of baptisms in one year to be: 92, and total number 1,804. Corresponding messengers received were Elder Jesse Adams and Burwell Temple from the Little River; Stadler and James Wilder from the Country Line mid Abbott’s Creek: Union; William Bass from Contentnea and Elders Josiah Smith, P. Puckett and D. J. Mott from White Oak Associations.

The following committees were appointed, viz.: Brethren James S. Battle and Joseph S. Battle on Finance; Elders James Osbourn, John Stadler, Jesse Adams and C. B. Hassell to examine the Circular Letter.

Brother Joseph D. Biggs was appointed to write to the White Oak Association; Elder B. Cooper to Contentnea; and Elder J. H. Daniel to Little River.

A biography of Elder Joshua Lawrence was handed in, read, approved, and ordered to be printed with the minutes. He died in January of this year.

Elders Osbourn, Wilder and Stadler preached on Sunday. The messengers to sister Associations were am follows, viz.: Elders William Hyman and John H. Daniel and brother James Eleanor to Contentnea; brethren A. B. Baines, Jr., and James Eleanor to Little River; Elders Edwin Harrison and Blount Cooper, and brethren Sovereign Purvis and F. N. Hooker to White Oak; Elders Blount Cooper and William Hyman, and brethren James Eleanor and Joseph D. Biggs to County Line; Minutes only to Abbott’s Creek Union.

The last Saturday in November was designated as a day of fasting and prayer, to be observed by the churches composing this Association, wherein all the members thereof were requested to beseech Almighty God, if consistent with His will, to visit them in their destitute situation, and cause It revival of pure and undefiled religion in the hearts of His people.

The Association, at its last session, had been appealed to by a, committee front the Chowan Association for a revival of correspondence. At this session brother C. B. Hassell was appointed to write the committee of the Chowan in response to the suggestion, and acquaint them with the reasons for declining to revive said correspondence. And it was agreed that the letter of brother Hassell, before sent off, should be examined by a committee consisting of Elder William Hyman and brother James S Battle

At this sitting the churches were recommended to increase their future contributions—specifying how much is intended for the Association fund, how much towards defraying the expenses of their messengers, incurred in visiting sister Associations of like faith and order.

The Association realizing the need of a Hymn Book suitable to the wants of the churches, recommended Elder Osbourn, of Baltimore (who in the habit of having works issued from the press), to prepare a suitable book, to the best of his ability, for the use of the churches and on his own responsibility; to which he (being present) gave his consent.

In regard to Elder Lawrence,[1] whose biography was handed in at session, it may be here stated that he was born the 10th of September 1778, and commenced in preaching when about twenty-three years old. In 1803 he was sent as a messenger to the Association held at Log Chapel, and heard the query of Elder Martin Ross propounded, which gave rise eventually to so much angry discussion, strife and contention, and finally resulted in the great Division among Baptists, of which so much has already been written.

1844. The Association convened with the church at Kehukee, Halifax County. Elder Edwin Harrison preached the introductory sermon. Elder Hyman was chosen Moderator, and Brother Joseph Biggs, Clerk, C. B. Hassell Assistant Clerk. Visiting brethren in the ministry were Josiah Smith, James Osbourn, S. J. Chandler and Jesse Adams. Letters were handed in from thirty-one churches; baptisms 69, total 1,329. Messengers from the following Associations were received, viz.: Jesse Adams, and J. J. G. Woodall from Little River; Jesse Knight from Contentnea; S. J. Chandler and E. Marrow from Country Line; and Josiah Smith from White Oak. Minutes were received from Abbot’s Creek Union.

Elders S. I. Chandler and James Osbourn preached on Sunday. Messengers to Associations were as follows, viz.: Elder John H. Daniel and brother Sovereign Purvis to White Oak; brethren Robert D. Hart and James S. Battle to Little River; Elder William Hyman and brother William Thigpen to Contentnea; Elders William Whitaker, L. B. Bennett and C. B. Hassell, and brethren Richard Harrison, James Eleanor and Joseph D. Biggs to Country Line; twenty-five copies of Minutes to Abbott’s Creek Union.

The Hymn Book gotten up by Elder Osbourn was noticed and recommended to the churches.

The biography of Elder Joseph Biggs was handed in at. this session, and accepted and ordered to be attached to the minutes. It appears he was born on the 12th of November, 1776; experienced the pardon of sin in his twenty-fifth year; joined the Methodists first and preached for them; went against conscience for three years; received a member of Baptist Church at Skewarkey on the 7th of August, 1795, and was baptized two days thereafter by her pastor, Elder Martin Ross; ordained in February, 1796; took the pastoral care of Flat Swamp Church, and during the years 1802 and 1803 baptized for that church over one hundred persons; returned to Skewarkey in 1806, and took the pastoral care of it; remained pastor of it till his death; chosen Clerk of the Association in 1806, and missed attending the sessions of the Association only about three times thereafter until his death; principal founder of Union Meeting’s among the churches; brought the Kehukee History down from 1803 to 1833. He was forty-eight years a Baptist; professor of religion fifty-two years; stricken with paralysis in November, 1843; lingered seven months, and died the 30th of May, 1844, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

1845. The Association convened at Cross Roads, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Eider C. B. Hassell. Elder Hyman was chosen Moderator, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance Elder C. B. Hassell. Visiting brethren in the ministry seated themselves, viz.: Elders John Stadler and James Wilder from Country Line; Ichabod Moore from Contentnea; Josiah Smith and Edward W. Cox from White Oak.

Letters from thirty churches showed 43 baptized and 1,252 in fellowship. Corresponding messengers were received from sister Associations as follows: Elders Josiah Smith and E.W. Cox from White Oak; Elders John Stadler and James Wilder from County Line; Elder Parham Puckett, Jesse B. Knight and James Griffin from Contentnea.

Elders Wilder, Smith and Stadler preached on Sunday. Messengers were appointed to sister Associations tis follows, viz.: Elder Robert D. Hart and brother James S. Battle to the Little River; Elders William Hyman and John H. Daniel, and brethren John Bryan and William Thigpen to Contentnea; Elders John H. Daniel, C. B. Hassell and George W. Carrowan, and brother Wilson W. Mizell to Country Line Minutes to Abbott’s Creek Union.

The fund left in the hands of the Treasurer to defray the expenses of messengers to different Associations, by order of this Association was to be handed back to the churches that contributed it.

Elder C. B. Hassell was requested to write a Circular Letter for the next Association.

1846. The Association met at Williams’s, Edgecombe County. Elder Blount Cooper preached the introductory sermon. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance Elder C. B. Hassell.

Visiting brethren in the ministry from sister Associations were Elder John Stadler from the Country Line; Elders Josiah Smith and D. J. Mott from White Oak; Elders Ichabod Moore and John Smith from the Contentnea and Burwell Temple from the Little River.

Letters from thirty-one churches showed 29 baptized, and total 1,154.

Messengers were Elder Josiah Smith from White Oak Association; Elder John Stadler from Country Line; Elders Ichabod Moore and John Smith from Contentnea.

Objections having been made by brethren at a distance to the sentiments set forth in the Circular of tile Kehukee Association for 1844, this session adopted the following preamble and resolution:

“Whereas, That portion of the Circular Letter attached to our Minutes for the year 1844, treating on the subject of ministerial support, has, not been well received by some of our brethren, who have construed it differently from others; therefore,

“Resolved, That we wish it distinctly understood by all that we disown any intention in said Circular to either build up or encourage a gospel ministry by unlawful means; and that it is foreign to our design to predicate a preached gospel on a moneyed foundation; and as such seem to have been the inference drawn by some, we now frankly say to such that we intended to declare no such sentiments by the adoption of said Circular Letter.

_“Resolved,_ That we believe the minister of the gospel to be the steward and ambassador of God, and as such must look immediately to his Lord and Master for all kinds of support and reward while in the exercise of his vocation. But as, in the wisdom of God, He designs to give temporal support to His ministering servant through the medium of the church (not supernaturally, as He does spiritual aid), therefore the minister may indirectly look to the church for that kind of encouragement; and it is the bounden duty of the church to attend to it, being thereunto required by the laws of her King. Individual members of the church are moved by the Holy Spirit of God to administer to the temporal necessities of His ambassadors, not by constraint or grudgingly, but of a ready and willing mind. He by so doing acts under the direction of the Almighty, whose they are and whom they serve. And the minister thus receiving a portion of his reward, receives it, it is true, directly from the church, but indirectly from God, who is the great author of the whole movement.”

The name of the “Sound side” Church was changed to that of Bethlehem.

Elders Stadler, Temple and Hassell preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elder Blount Cooper and brethren Robert D. Hart and John Bryan to White Oak; Elder John H. Daniel and brethren R. D. Hart and J. S. Battle to Little River; Elder J. H. Daniel and brethren William Thigpen and R. D. Hart to Contentnea; Elder L. B. Bennett and brother Hart to Country Line. Twenty-five copies of Minutes were sent to Abbot’s Creek Union. Committees were appointed to visit the following-named churches, inquire into their standing, and report to the next Association, viz.: Sandy Grove, Little Alligator, Scuppernong and Blount’s Creek.

The Circular Letter prepared by Elder C. B. Hassell was handed in, read and approved, and ordered to be attached to the Minutes. This was the last appointment made by the Association of any one to write a Circular Letter. Exceptions heretofore had been taken to one or two of such letters after their publication, and this Association concluded to dispense with them for the future, unless some particular occasion seemed to call for it.

1847. The Association was held with the church at Spring Green, Martin County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder William Hyman. Elder Hyman was then chosen Moderator, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and Elder C. B. Hassell Assistant Clerk.

Visiting brethren were seated, viz.: Elders Stadler, Chandler, Temple, Smith, Holt and Sydburg.

Letters from thirty-four churches showed 26 baptized, total 1,376. Messengers received were Elder B. Temple from Little River; Samuel Holt and Asa Sydburg from White Oak; Elders John Stadler and S. I. Chandler and brother Lotta from Country Line; Elder John Smith and brethren J. C. Knight, Benjamin Knight and John R. Moore from Contentnea. A file of Minutes was received from the Abbott’s Creek Union and Fisher’s River Association.

Elders John Stadler and S. I. Chandler preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders John H. Daniel and D. J. Mott to White Oak; Elder C. B. Hassell and brother A. B. Baines to Contentnea; Elders B. Cooper and D. J. Mott and brethren John White and Robert D. Hart to Country Line; Elders John H. Daniel and Blount Cooper and brethren James S. Battle and Robert D. Hart to Little River.

A letter from Elder James Osbourn, then in England, was received and read, and ordered to be attached to the Minutes. The committee appointed at the previous session to visit and report the condition of four churches made their report and were discharged. The churches were retained in fellowship.

The Association passed a resolution of encouragement in regard to a periodical called “The Primitive Baptist,” and Elder Burwell Temple agreed to assume the editorial control, and remove the place of publication to his residence near Raleigh.

The Association recommended the churches to set apart Friday before the third Sunday in November ensuing as a day of fasting and prayer to God, supplicating Him at a throne of grace for an outpouring Spirit to revive His work of grace in the hearts of His people throughout the borders of Zion—support truth and overthrow and send forth more faithful laborers in His vineyard—cause love to flow from breast to breast—and also cause many who in darkness to sec great light.

1848. The Association met at Great Swamp, Pitt County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance Elder C. B. Hassell.

Visiting brethren from sister Associations were invited to seats, whereupon Elders John Stadler, Josiah Smith, James Griffin and Benjamin Bynum and brethren Simpson Lotta, Arthur Thompson, Jesse C. Knight, Shadrach Pate and J. Nelson seated themselves.

Letters from thirty-five churches showed 41 to have been baptized, total number 1,358.

Messengers received from sister Associations were Elder John Stadler from Country Line; Josiah Smith from White Oak; Elder James Griffin and J. C. Knight, brethren Shadrach Pate and J. Nelson from Contentnea; and brother Arthur Thompson from Little River; and minutes the Abbot’s Creek Union.

Elders John Stadler and James Griffin preached on Sunday.

Messengers chosen to visit sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Blount Cooper and James Potter and brethren Sovereign Purvis and Noah Gaskill to White Oak; Eider John H. Daniel and brother William Thigpen to Contentnea; Elders C. B. Hassell, William Whitaker John H. Daniel and brother John Bryan to Country Line; Elder Blount Cooper and brethren James S. Battle and Joseph D. Biggs to Little River.

Brethren Robert D. Hart and James S. Battle were appointed a committee on Finance. Brother Robert D. Hart was appointed to write a letter of correspondence to the White Oak, and Elder C. B. Hassell to the Contentnea Association.

A Petition, Memorial and Remonstrance to the Legislature of North Carolina and one to the Congress of the United States against the incorporation of Religious Societies, and against creating Chaplains in the Army and Navy and in Congress, were submitted, debated and adopted. They were signed by the Moderator and Clerk of the Association, and a Committee appointed to take them to the State and Federal Legislatures.

In order that the reader may be posted as to the views of Baptists in 1848 on certain subjects, we submit the Memorials:

To the Legislature of North Carolina:

“To the Honorable, the Legislature of North Carolina, the ministers delegates representing the churches composing the Kehukee Baptist Association, in conference assembled with the church at Great Swamp, Pitt. County, North Carolina; Feeling as they conceive a high regard for the purity of the Christian religion, the liberty of conscience, and the happiness of mankind; but viewing with distrust the rapid encroachments of ecclesiastical power and clerical corruption in these United States, but more particularly in the State of North Carolina, most respect, fully and humbly desire to lay before your body this their earnest petition, memorial and remonstrance:

“1. They remonstrate against the passage of any laws in this State favoring religious societies or churches of any cast or denomination; since the kingdom of Christ is not of this world.

“They beg that you grant no monopolies or exclusive privileges to any sect or denomination of religious persons, whether Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Pagan or Mahometan; and that you pass no acts of incorporation for the benefit of any religious society or convention whatever.

“2. They humbly conceive that in the passage of laws heretofore, incorporating purely sectarian institutions, societies, conventions, academies and colleges, and exempting from taxation property owned by religious denominations, the provisions of our State Constitution have been transcended, and a strict regard to equal rights and privileges among the people has been overlooked; and that wisdom, justice, and a jealous regard for peace, harmony and equal rights, require that all such laws, promises or enactments should be repealed, especially that one contained in the forty-seventh chapter of the Acts of the Assembly, passed in 1844, entitled ‘An Act to Amend the Revised Statutes entitled Religious Societies.’

“Your memorialists require no legislation for their special benefit, since the fundamental law of our land guarantees to all the high privilege of worshiping God according to the dictates of their own consciences, and think furthermore that all other citizens should rest contented with the privileges already conferred on them by the Constitution and laws, without seeking to augment them at the expense of others.

“Priestcraft, they fear, is endeavoring to regain its ancient foothold in this country, and to establish its tyranny over the bodies and consciences of men. In the infancy of our Government our forefathers, having thrown off the yoke of oppression and clerical rule, ordained in the thirty-first section of our State Constitution ’That no clergyman or preacher of the gospel, of any denomination, shall be capable of being a member of either the Senate, House of Commons or Council of the State, while he continues in the exercise of the pastoral function.: This provision was evidently made, in the wisdom and honesty of the founders of our liberty, to avoid the influence of the clergy, and to prevent the passage of such laws by them as might he repugnant to the equal rights of man; but all this your memorialists consider of little avail, since other sections of our Constitution are set at naught, and the true spirit and meaning thereof totally violated.

“The thirty-fourth section of our State Constitution declares that. there shall be no establishment of any one religious church or denomination in this State in preference to any other.

“But your memorialists believe that the spirit of this section has been grossly violated in the establishment by law of religious societies, schools and colleges, that were created and controlled by those belonging exclusively to one particular denomination.

“To establish a society, convention or school, of any one denomination, is to give aid and influence to that denomination, and to give it privileges and favoritism denied to others; and while this state of things is permitted and encouraged, it is clearly evident that a ‘Religious Establishment’ is down upon us, and one which of course is unequal and partial in its character.

“Your memorialists suggest that it will be more for the happiness of the people of this State and the good of society, and more congenial to the Constitution thereof, for the Legislature to pass no laws and adopt no resolves in relation to religion except to repeal all such as have been already enacted on that subject.

“They beg leave most respectfully to remind you that Christianity in its infancy needed not the puny arm of man or human laws to sustain it; but on the contrary it was ushered into the world contrary to the will of man, and, in despite of all opposition, it hath marched onward and still onward, amid the combined anathemas and denunciations of Jews, Gentiles, Pagans and Mahometans, through fire, famine, blood, etc.; and having, by the grace of God alone, attained to near the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, it still stands in the strength of omnipotent Jehovah, and rests alone upon His arm, seeking no alliance with flesh and blood, the aid of human laws, or gold that perisheth, to establish its dominion in the hearts of men, since its Founder is an infinite Being, ‘whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and whose kingdom is from generation to generation.’

“Whatever therefore seeks to unite itself with the State, and trusts in the aid of human enactments for existence, your memorialists most respectfully suggest, is not and cannot be the religion of Jesus of Nazareth; and, though it have the form of godliness, is destitute of the power thereof.

“By order October 2nd, 1848.

“Joseph D. Biggs, Clerk. William Hyman, Moderator.”

To the Congress of the United States:

“The ministers and delegates representing the churches which compose the Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association, assembled in Conference with the Baptist Church at Great Swamp, Pitt County, North Carolina, the Saturday before the first Sunday in October, A. D. 1848.

“To the Honorable, the Congress of the United States of America:

“Viewing with distrust the rapid strides of priestcraft now being made in these United States, and dreading for themselves and posterity that worst of all scourges, an ecclesiastical despotism, your memorialists most respectfully beg leave to submit to your honorable body this their memorial, petition and remonstrance.

“1. They beg and entreat that you will, in your wisdom, abolish all laws, provisions or resolutions, now in force by authority of your honorable body, ’ Respecting the establishment of religion,’ whereby Chaplains to Congress, the Army, Navy, and other public stations, are employed by the General Government to exercise their religious functions, and are paid for their services out of the public treasury; and whereby religious teachers are employed and religious schools established at the expense of Government.

“2. Your memorialists respectfully suggest that the Christian religion is of Divine authority; that it came down from Heaven to earth unceremoniously, asking no favors of and begging no emoluments from earthly Sanhedrins, Senates, principalities or powers. That it came to men, contrary to the will of men ‘of flesh and of blood, but according to the will of God;’ and having made its way to near the middle of the nineteenth century through persecution, and being upheld and supported by God Almighty, needeth not now the aid of human laws for its further existence or advancement, but will prosper as heretofore, in defiance of human enactments, opposition or persecution; and that all attempts to promote the happiness of man by uniting it to human governments, in by-gone days, have signally failed, and served but to establish an ecclesiastical despotism, totally a~ variance with the simple laws, mild reign and spiritual kingdom of the King of kings and Lord of lords, who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will.

“Your memorialists, therefore, for the sake of Christ, the purity of His religion, and the honor of His cause, as well as the happiness and liberty of themselves, those whom they represent and thousands yet unborn, beg you to legislate no further on the subject of religion; but entreat you to undo what they humbly conceive has been prematurely, wrongfully and unconstitutionally done.

“All ministers should attend to the heavenly injunction recorded in the second chapter of the first epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy, viz.: ’ To pray and intercede for kings and for all that are in authority.’ And this can be done as effectually in the closet or in family prayer, in America, Asia, Europe or Africa, for the well being of the American Congress, or its members, as if the minister were in the immediate presence of those for whose special benefit he may intercede; since the Creator and Preserver of mankind is an infinite and omnipresent Being.

“And in conclusion they further suggest, that if ministers cannot preach and pray for the Army, the Navy, for Congress, and the Indian tribes, for the love of Christ, without conferring with flesh and blood and a salary in filthy lucre, stipulated and agreed upon before services rendered, then they cannot acceptably to God do so with his salary, for such constitutes them hirelings to all intents and purposes, in whom there is no dependence, and in whose counsels there is no safety.

“By order 2 October, 1848.

“Joseph D. Biggs, Clerk. William Hyman, Moderator.

These memorials were transmitted respectively to the Legislature of North Carolina and the Congress of the United States, but met with no favorable response at the time; yet it was afterwards seen that the one sent to Congress was remembered, was alluded to, and its influence felt in subsequent deliberations. So a hired chaplaincy was dispensed with for a season in that body, and ministers from different denominations were requested to open the services therein by prayer without charge.

1849. The Association was held this year at Morattock meeting-house, Washington County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder Blount Cooper. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and Elder C. B. Hassell Assistant Clerk. Visiting brethren, James Osbourn, John Stadler, James Griffin and J. C. Knight, took seats in the Association. Letters were received from thirty-five churches, showing baptisms to have been 94, and the whole number 1,312. A church called Bethlehem, in Pasquotank County, was received into membership.

Messengers from sister Associations were Elder Stadler from Country Line; Elder James Griffin and brother J. C. Knight from the Contentnea. A letter was received from the Little River Association, and letters and Minutes from Abbot’s Creek Union and White Oak.

Elders Osbourn and Stadler preached on Sunday.

Messengers were appointed to sister Associations as follows, viz.: To White Oak, Elder Blount Cooper and brethren John Bryan, Charles Mabry, Turner Bass and Archibald Staton; to Contentnea, brethren R. D. Hart, R. M. G. Moore and William Thigpen; to Country Line, Elder Lemuel R. Bennett and brother Robert D. Hart; to Little River, Elder B. Cooper and J. H. Daniel, and brethren James S. Battle and R. D. Hart.

Elder C. B. Hassell handed in a biographical sketch of the life of brother Joshua Robertson, deceased, and a biography of brother James Potter was also handed in, and both approved and ordered to be attached to the Minutes.

1850. The Association convened with the church at Lawrence’s, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell. Elder W. Hyman was chosen Moderator, and brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance Elder C. B. Hassell.

Letters were received from thirty-six churches, showing 88 to have been baptized, total 1,426.

Visiting members from sister Associations were Elders John Stadler, Benjamin Bynum, James Griffin, John H. Kennedy, James Wilson and Aaron Davis and brethren Moses Baker, Jesse C. Knight and Jacob Proctor.

A church at Peach Tree, Franklin County, was received a member of the body.

Messengers received from sister Associations were Elders John W. Kennedy and James Wilson from Little River; Elders James Griffin and Benjamin Bynum and brethren Moses Baker, Jesse C. Knight and Jacob Proctor from Contentnea; Elder John Stadler from Country Line; Elder Aaron Davis from White Oak; and forty copies of Minutes from Abbot’s Creek Union.

Elders John H. Kennedy, Benjamin Bynum and John Stadler preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders William Hyman, Blount Cooper, Lemuel B. Bennett, Robert D. Hart and John H. Daniel and brethren John Bryan, Irwin Page, William Thigpen, James S. Battle and R. M. G. Moore to Contentnea; Eiders C. B. Hassell and Blount Cooper and brethren Joseph D. Biggs and Archibald Staton to Country Line; Elders Blount Cooper, R. D. Hart, Clayton Moore and William Whitaker and brother James S. Battle to Little River.

On motion it was agreed that an address[2] to the Regular Baptists in the United States, prepared by Elder Wilson Thompson, be appended to the Minutes of this session.

The church at Blount’s Creek, Beaufort County, was dismissed to unite with the churches of the Contentnea Association.

The Clerk was ordered to prepare and have printed one thousand copies of the Minutes of the Association, distribute to the churches composing the same, to the Associations with whom we correspond, record one copy on the record, and receive for his services $10. An order similar to this had prevailed at former sittings, and has continued to be made to the present time, by varying the number of copies printed according to circumstances. Of late years the number has usually been two thousand.

1851. The Association was held at Peach Tree, Franklin County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Blount Cooper. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance Elder C. B. Hassell. Visiting brethren were seated, viz.: Elders James Wilson, Ichabod Moore, B. J. Pollard, Aaron Davis, John Stadler, John T. Coggins, Benjamin Bynum and Grigg M. Thompson and brethren A. J. Leach, Jesse C. Knight, Pitt, Duggan and Atkinson. Letters from thirty-four churches represented 74 baptisms, and whole number 1,399.

Messengers from sister Associations were Elder James Wilson and brother A. J. Leach from Little River; Elder Ichabod Moore and brother Jesse C. Knight from Contentnea; Elders B. J. Pollard and Aaron Davis from White Oak; Elders John Stadler and George T. Coggins from Country Line; Elder Benjamin Bynam and brethren Duggan, Pitt and Atkinson from Contentnea. Files of Minutes were received from the, Abbot’s Creek Union and Fisher’s River Associations; Elder Burwell Temple was also received as a messenger from the Little River Association.

Elders Coggins, Thompson and Stadler preached on Sunday. Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elder Blount Cooper and brother A. Staton to the White Oak; Elders Blount Cooper, John H. Daniel and William Whitaker and brethren David House, James H. Highsmith and Joseph D. Biggs to Contentnea; Elders John H. Daniel and William Hyman and brethren Richard Harrison and Jesse P. Parker to Country Line; Elders Blount Cooper and John H. Daniel and brethren James S. Battle and A. B. Baines to Little River.

The church known as Sappony, Nash County, was dropped from the Minutes. The church at Sawyer’s Creek, Camden County, and the church at Cedar Island, Carteret County, were dismissed to join the White Oak Association.

1852. The Association was held at Conoho, Martin County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder Wilson Thompson, of Indiana. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, and Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and Elder C. B. Hassell Assistant Clerk. Visiting brethren were invited to seats. Letters from thirty-one churches were read, showing additions by baptism to have been 128, and the whole number in fellowship 1,497.

The church at Sappony was again received a member of the body.

Messengers from sister Associations were Elder B. Temple from the Little River; brethren John S. Duggan, J. R. Croom, J. C. Knight, Noah Gaskill and John Smith from Contentnea; Elder John Stadler and brethren Richard Jones and Q. A. Ward from Country Line; Elder Aaron Davis, N. H. Wiley and Josiah Smith from White Oak; Elder R. W. Hill from the Mayo; Elder Wilson Thompson from White Water, Indiana; Elder Grigg M. Thompson from Tate’s Creek, Kentucky.

The following committees were appointed, viz.: Elders Robert D. Hart and Clayton Moore on Finance; Elder C. B. Hassell to write a letter of correspondence to the White Oak Association; and Elder Robert D. Hart to write to the Contentnea Association.

Elders John Stadler, Wilson Thompson and Grigg M. Thompson preached on Sunday.

The church at Goose Creek, Beaufort County, was dismissed with privilege to join the Contentnea Association. Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders Blount Cooper, Clayton Moore, William Whitaker, Eli McGaskey and brother John Bryan to White Oak; Elders Clayton Moore and John H. Daniel and brethren James W. Satchwell and Benjamin Flemming to Contentnea; Elder Blount Cooper and brethren Richard Harrison, James S. Battle, William Jackson and Coffield King to Country Line.

1853. The Association was held at Flat Swamp, Pitt County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and Elder C. B. Hassell Assistant Clerk. Letters from thirty-three churches were received, representing baptisms to be 105, and number in fellowship 1,410.

Corresponding messengers from sister Associations were Elder John Stadler and brethren William Benson and Richard Jones, Henderson Evans and Alfred Blalock from Country Line; Elder Lanier Griffin and brethren J. C. Knight, B. P. Pitt, John S. Duggan, E. Johnson, Willis Flemming and John Smith from Contentnea; Elders Aaron Davis and N. H. Wiley from White Oak; Elder Gilbert Beebe from Warwick, New York; Minutes from Abbot’s Creek Union and Fisher’s River Associations.

Elders Stadler and Beebe preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elder Eli McGaskey and brother David House to Contentnea; Elders Blount Cooper, John H. Daniel and William Whitaker and brethren William Thigpen and Irvin Page to Contentnea; Elders C. B. Hassell and John H. Daniel and brethren Coffield King, William Jackson, J. D. Biggs, Richard Harrison and Turner Bass to Country Line; Elders Blount Cooper and Robert D. Hart and brethren J. S. Battle and Coffield King to Little River; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River and Warwick Associations.

The Association withdrew connection with the church at Rocky Swamp on account of disorder.

There were at this time ordained ministers in the Association, seventeen; licentiates, nine.

1854. The Association convened at Deep Creek, Halifax County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Philander Hartwell, of Hopewell, New Jersey. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and Elder C. B. Hassell Assistant Clerk. Letters from thirty-three churches represented 93 baptized, total number 1,488. The church at Rocky Swamp was again received into membership through the representation of her messenger, Lemuel B. Bennett. Messengers from sister Associations were Elders John Stadler and Andrew H. Hall and brethren Richard Jones, Jefferson Horner, Henderson Evans and Alfred Blalock from Country Line; Elder G. M. Thompson from Association not stated; Elder P. Hartwell from Delaware River, with a file of Minutes from Warwick; brethren Jesse C. Knight, Bennett P. Pitt, Robert N. Johnson and Willis Flemming from Contentnea.

Elders Thompson, Stadler and Hartwell preached on Sunday.

Elder Robert D. Hart voluntarily presented a letter designed for a Circular for the Association, and a committee consisting of Elders William Hyman, P. Hartwell, John Stadler, G. M. Thompson, R. D. Hart and C. B. Hassell were appointed a committee to examine the same and report.

Messengers were appointed to sister Associations as follows, viz.: Elder William Whitaker and brother James W. Satchwell to White Oak; Elders John H. Daniel and William A. Ross and brethren John W. Purvis, William Thigpen and James Highsmith to Contentnea; Elders Robert D. Hart and Eli McGaskey and brethren Augustus Bass, William Jackson, Archibald Staton, Bryant Bennett, John W. Purvis and William Thigpen to Country Line; Elders J. H. Daniel, Robert D. Hart and William Whitaker and brethren Charles Mabry and Nathan Pitt to Little River; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Warwick and Delaware River Associations.

Elder Alvan B. Swindle, of South Mattamuskeet Church, made confession of the wrong and disorder in the church of which he was a member, shown in retaining in fellowship, for such a long time, the notorious George W. Carrowan, whose conduct was disgraceful, and yet whose influence as pastor of the church was so great as to escape expulsion until he was tried and condemned for murder and committed suicide.

The Association forgave the wrong, but signified great disapprobation of such disorder, and hoped it would never be repeated by any church belonging to the Kehukee Association.

The Circular Letter was reported favorably on, received and ordered to be attached to the Minutes.

There were in the churches composing the Association at this time twenty ordained ministers; licentiates, eleven.

1855. The Association was held at Coneto, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell. Elder William Hyman was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and Elder C. B. Hassell Assistant Clerk. Letters from thirty-six churches showed baptisms 81; total membership, 1,469.

Messengers from sister Associations were Elder John Stadler and brethren Jefferson Horner, Henderson Evans, Albert Blalock and B. L. Morton from Country Line; Elder E. W. Cox from White Oak; Elders Shadrach Pate and William Bass and brethren Jesse C. Knight, B. P. Pitt, R. A. Johnson, William W. Armstrong, Samuel D. Proctor, Theophilus Atkinson, Benjamin May, Allen Nettle, James Barnes, William W. Barnes, F. Proctor and John Smith from the Contentnea; from Connasauga Association, Georgia, Elder G. M. Thompson. A file of Minutes from the Abbot’s Creek Union, and Little River of North Carolina, and Thomas L. Daniel from the Obion, Tennessee.

Elders Thompson, Daniel and Stadler preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders Aaron Davis, William A. Ross and David House and brother John W. Purvis to the White Oak; Elders William Hyman, E. W. Cox, John H. Daniel and William A. Ross and brethren William J. Armstrong, S. T. Price, John W. Purvis, James Carney, Henry Hyman, Coffield King and James Highsmith to the Contentnea; Elders J. H. Daniel, Aaron Davis, William A. Ross and Robert D. Hart and brethren John W. Purvis, Charles Mabry, James S. Long, James Carney and Henry Hyman to Country Line; Elders William Whitaker and William Reynolds to Little River; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Warwick, Delaware River, Obion and Connasauga Associations.

A biography of Elder Thomas Biggs was handed in by Elder Clayton Moore, which was read, received and ordered to be attached to the minutes.

1856. The Association was held at South Quay, Southampton County, Va. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Clayton Moore. Elder Hyman was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and Elders C. B. Hassell and Robert D. Hart Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-three churches showed 67 baptized, and whole number in fellowship to be 1,471. A church at Providence, Currituck County, through her pastor, Elder Hodges Gallop, was received a member of the Association. Messengers received from sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elder John Stadler and brethren Jefferson Horner and Henderson Evans from Country Line; brethren Pitt, Atkinson and Griffin from Contentnea; Elder William J.Purington from Washington City; Joseph L. Purington from Lexington, New York; and Minutes from Warwick and Connasauga.

Elders John Stadler, Joseph L. Purington and William J. Purington preached on Sunday.

The following messengers were appointed to visit sister Associations, viz.: Elders William A. Ross, Clayton Moore, Edward W. Cox and brother John W. Purvis to White Oak; Elders William A. Ross, Clayton Moore, David House, brethren John W. Purvis and Benjamin Flemming to Contentnea; Elders William A. Ross, Robert D. Hart, C. B. Hassell, brethren John W. Purvis and William Thigpen to Country Line; Elders R. D. Hart and John H. Daniel to Little River; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Warwick, Delaware River, Obion and Connasauga Associations.

The church at Joyner’s, Northampton County, was dropped for disorder and a departure from the faith.

A portion of the members of the church at Washington, Beaufort County, having departed from the faith and encouraged the preaching of erroneous doctrines by one Jacob Swindle, the Association withdrew her connection from such disaffected portion of said church, including said Swindle, and warned the churches against his pernicious influence. The faithful members of said church were recognized as the true church there, and their Clerk and messenger, James W. Satchwell, received as their representative.

1857. The Association was held at the Falls of Tar River, Nash County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and brother Bryant Bennett and Elder Robert D. Hart Assistant Clerks. Elder William Hyman, who had been chosen Moderator for so many years, was by reason of age and infirmity unable to attend this meeting. Letters were received from thirty-three churches, showing baptisms to have been during the year 51, and the number in fellowship 1,486.

A church at Sparta, Edgecombe County, was received a member of the body.

Messengers from sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elder John Stadler and brethren Richard Jones, Henderson Evans and B. F. Morton from Country Line; Elder Aaron Davis and brethren Jabez Smith from White Oak; Elder B. Temple and brother Isaac Wright from Little River; Elder P. Hartwell from Delaware River; Elder G. Beebe from Warwick; Elder William J. Purington from Washington City; and Elder Joseph L. Purington from Georgia; brethren J. C. Knight, B. P. Pitt, Theophilus Atkinson, R. A. Johnson, Hilliard Taylor, Allen Nettle, F. Proctor, Jacob Proctor and S. D. Proctor from Contentnea. Files of Minutes from Abbot’s Creek Union and Connasauga Association.

Elders Hartwell, Stadler and Beebe preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders A. B. Swindle, William Whitaker, J. H. Daniel and David House and brethren Benjamin Flemming, A. Shivers, James Carney and Joseph O’Berry to Contentnea; Elder R. D. Hart and brother John W. Purvis to White Oak; Elders R. D. Hart, William A. Ross and C. B. Hassell and brethren John W. Purvis and James Carney to Country Line; Elders J. H. Daniel and Robert D. Hart to Little River; Elder R. D. Hart to Delaware River and Warwick; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union.

1858. The Association convened at Lawrence’s, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder Clayton Moore. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and brother Bryant Bennett and Elder Robert D. Hart Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-two churches received, which represented 71 to have been baptized and 1,484 in fellowship.

Messengers from sister Associations were Elder John Stadler and brethren Jefferson Horner and Henderson Evans from the Country Line; Elder J. H. Kennedy from the Little River; brethren Jesse C. Knight, B. P. Pitt, R. A. Johnson and J. D. Proctor from Contentnea; Elder Aaron Davis from the White Oak; Elder William J. Purington from Baltimore; Elder John Ward from Hatchie River, Tennessee; Minutes from Abbot’s Creek Union.

Elders Purington and Stadler preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders William A. Ross, David House, brethren James Carney, J. F. O’Berry, John Bryant, John W. Purvis and Coffield King to Contentnea; Elders J. H. Daniel, E. W. Cox, brethren J. F. O’Berry, James Carney and Joseph D. Biggs to White Oak; Elders R. D. Hart, W. A. Ross, J. H. Daniel, David House, brethren J. F. O’Berry, James Carney and Coffield King to Country Line; Elders J. H. Daniel, R. D. Hart, William Whitaker and brother John W. Purvis to Little River; Elders Robert. D. Hart and Cushing B. Hassell to Delaware River and Warwick; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union and Fisher’s River.

1859. The Association convened with the church at Skewarkey, Martin County. The introductory discourse was delivered by Elder Robert D. Hart. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and Elder R. D. Hart and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-six churches were received, showing 48 to have been baptized, and total membership 1,462.

Messengers received from sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders John Stadler, A. N. Hall, brethren Jeff. Horner and Albert Blalock from Country Line; Elder G. Beebe, with a file of Minutes, from the Baltimore Association; Elder P. Hartwell from Delaware River; Elder G. Beebe from Warwick; Elder Aaron Davis from White Oak; brethren Theophilus Atkinson, B. P. Pitt, John Smith, William Armstrong, R. Johnson and N. P. Daniel from Contentnea; Elders R. C. Leachman and Samuel Trott from Corresponding Meeting of Virginia; Minutes from Abbot’s Creek Union. Elders Hartwell, Beebe, Trott and Stadler preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders William A. Ross, David House, J. H. Daniel, R. C. Leachman, brethren John W. Purvis, William Billups, James Carney and Edward Cobb to Contentnea; Elders W. A. Ross, David House, Gilbert Beebe and brother John W. Purvis to White Oak; Elders W. A. Ross, Robert D. Hart, C. B. Hassell, brethren J. W. Purvis and James Carney to Country Line; Elders J. H. Daniel, William Reynolds and William Whitaker to Little River; Minutes to the following Associations, viz.: Warwick, Delaware River, Baltimore and Corresponding Virginia.

The church at Sandy Grove, being represented as in a cold and destitute condition, the following named Elders and licentiates agreed to visit her during the year, at the time of her regular monthly meetings, viz.: Elder William A. Ross in November, brother J. W. Purvis in December, Elder John Stadler in January, Elder William Reynolds in February, Elder David House in March, Elder L. B. Bennett in April, Elder John H. Daniel in May, Elder C. B. Hassell in June, Elder William Whitaker in July, Elder Clayton Moore in August, and Elder William B. Perry in September. This was one of the largest and most interesting gatherings that the Kehukee Association had realized in many years. The number of ordained ministers within her bounds at this time was twenty-one, and licentiates, seven.

1860. The Association was held at Cross Roads, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Clayton Moore. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, and Elder Robert D. Hart and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerks.

Letters from thirty-five churches represented 64 as having been baptized; total membership, 1,494.

Messengers from sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elder B. Temple from Little River; brethren James Scoggins, D. R. Moore, Jeff. Horner and Albert Blalock from Country Line; brethren Lemuel Hardy, John A. Smith, Bennett P. Pitt, Theophilus Atkinson, Noah Adams and Josiah Nelson from Contentnea; files of Minutes from the Delaware, Warwick and Baltimore Associations, and the Corresponding Letters in each read before the Association. Elder Philander Hartwell was present from the Delaware River Association, with Minutes and a Corresponding Letter, which was read.

Elder Hartwell and brother James Scoggins preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to sister Associations were Elder D. House and brethren J. D. Biggs and C. A. Scott to Contentnea; Elder John W. Purvis and brethren James S. Satchwell and C. A. Scott to White Oak; Elders R. D. Hart, William A. Ross, John W. Purvis, William F. Bell and Clayton Moore to Country Line; Elders J. W. Purvis and W. A. Ross and brethren C. A. Scott and William Thigpen to Little River; Minutes to the following Associations, viz.: Warwick, Delaware River, Delaware, Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Baltimore and Corresponding Virginia.

At the request of the church at Sandy Grove, which was still in a destitute condition, the following brethren in the ministry consented to visit her, as follows, viz.: William F. Bell in October, John W. Purvis in November, John Stamper in December, Russel Tucker in January, William A. Ross in February, William Gray in March, C. B. Hassell in April, John H. Daniel in May, David House in June, L. B. Bennett in July, Clayton Moore in August, R. W. Peacock in September.

Elder John Stadler, of Bush Arbor Church, Caswell County, departed this life on March 8, 1860. He had been appointed by the Country Line Association messenger to the Kehukee for twenty-one consecutive years, commencing in 1838, and never failed to attend the Kehukee but once in all that period of time. His presence, advice and ministry were very acceptable to the brethren of the Kehukee, and he was looked on and up to almost the same as one of her own ministers. She therefore resolved to request her Moderator and Clerk to draft a notice of his services and death, and have the same attached to the Minutes of this session, which was done.

At this Association the question of bringing up the history of the Association from the year 1838, where it was left by Elder Joseph Biggs, was considered and referred to the churches for their approval or disapproval.

1861. The Association met at Williams’s, Edgecombe County. The introductory discourse was preached by Elder C. B. Hassell. Elder C. B. Hassell was appointed Moderator, brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, Elder Robert D. Hart and Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-one churches showed baptisms 39; total membership, 1,468.

Messengers received from sister Associations were Elder C. E. Holland and brethren Pitt, Proctor and Armstrong from the Contentnea; Elder Aaron Davis from White Oak; Elders A. N. Hall and R. D. Moore and brethren Horner and Ellis from Country Line; Minutes from Little River, Abbot’s Creek Union and Mayo Associations.

Elders R. D. Moore and A. N. Hall preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to sister Associations were Elders John H. Daniel and Russell Tucker and brother C. A. Scott to Contentnea; Elders J. H. Daniel and John W. Purvis to White Oak; Elders J. H. Daniel, W. A. Ross and R. D. Hart and brethren Russell Tucker, C. A. Scott and James S. Long to Country Line; Elders William B. Perry and William Reynolds and brother C. A. Scott to Little River. Minutes were sent to Corresponding Virginia, Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River and Mayo Associations. Some brethren in the ministry agreed to visit the churches at Fishing Creek and Sandy Grove.

The matter of continuing the Kehukee History was taken up and debated, and it was agreed to defer the subject for the present. The war between the States, called the great Civil War in America, began in April, 1861, and was at the time of the sitting of this Association assuming large proportions and causing much distress in the land. A military line was drawn between the North and South, beyond which citizens from either side were not suffered to pass. Communication by mail and ingress and egress were entirely cut off. Maryland and all North of her were held by the Northern Power, or Federal Army, while Virginia and all South of her were held by the Southern Power, or Confederate Army. The brotherly intercourse that had for so many years existed between Baptists North and South was prohibited, and not one of the faces of the Northern brethren was seen at the Kehukee Association this year. Their feelings, affections and sympathies, with a trifling exception, were with their Southern brethren during the whole continuance of the war, and the same was proven to be true immediately after the cessation of hostilities by the eagerness and devotion with which they came together again. While Primitive Baptists thus held together in affection and faith, as the undivided church of God should have done throughout all that bloody struggle, other denominations of professed Christians were torn asunder and engaged in the unhallowed work of defaming and butchering each other, which clearly proved them not to be the church of Christ.

By reason of this great calamity, the Association at this time adopted the following resolution, viz.:

_“Resolved,_ That in view of the present oppressed and distressed condition of our country, brought about by the existence of war in our midst, we do recommend to the churches that the second Thursday in November next (being the fourteenth day of said month) be observed as a day of fasting and prayer to Almighty God; and that the members of the churches meet at their respective places of worship on that day for religious devotion.”

Only one thousand Minutes were ordered to be printed this year. Ordained ministers in the bounds of the Association, twenty-four; licentiates, twelve.

1862. The Association met at Spring Green, Martin County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Robert D. Hart. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, Elder R. D. Hart and B. Bennett Assistant Clerks. Letters from eighteen churches received, showing 8 baptized, total membership 1,437.

Civil War prevailed in the land. The Northern forces held possession of Plymouth, on the Roanoke River, and a large portion of Eastern North Carolina, and it was feared by many that they would send their boats up the river and throw shells among the people while holding the Association; but they did not do so, and those who were at the meeting were unmolested during the entire three days.

Intelligence from sister Associations was as follows, viz.: Brother B. P. Pitt, messenger from Contentnea, and a file of Minutes from the Little River.

In the absence of ministers from other Associations, she had to select preachers from her own body. Elders C. B. Hassell and William A. Ross occupied the stand on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders J. H. Daniel and William F. Bell and brethren Russell Tucker, A. B. Baines and John Bryan to Contentnea; letters to the White Oak to be placed in the hands of the messengers to Contentnea; Elders R. D. Hart, William A. Ross and William F. Bell and brother Turner Bass to Country Line; Elder John H. Daniel and brother A. B. Baines to Little River; Minutes ordered to the Corresponding Virginia, Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River and Mayo. The following resolution was adopted:

_“Resolved,_ That in view of the present distressed and disturbed condition of our country, brought about by the existence of war in our midst, we recommend to the churches that Friday before the second Sunday in November next be observed as a day of fasting and prayer to Almighty God; and that members of the churches meet at their respective places of worship on that day for religious devotion.”

This intention was not carried into execution, by reason of the presence of a large Federal army occupying the country where many of the churches were situated, carrying dismay into the hearts of the people and destruction in their progress, during the week preceding the contemplated meetings of the churches.

A biography of Elder William Hyman was submitted by brother Asa Biggs, and read and ordered to be attached to the Minutes. Elder Hyman was considered the last one of those who steadily opposed the missionary innovations—who was present in 1827, when the Kehukee threw the useless lumber overboard, and who stood firmly to the last opposed to all the men-made schemes, intended to corrupt the gospel of Christ and lay another foundation for salvation than that which had already been laid by Christ and His Apostles. Elder Hyman was indeed a man of the olden time. He was so constituted by nature as to gain the respect and affection of all classes and professions of men, notwithstanding his extraordinary candor and stability in the faith once delivered to the saints. He was chosen Moderator of the Association in 1828, and served her in that capacity till 1857, with perhaps the exception of one year, making a period of nearly thirty years. He was remarkably efficient as Moderator, and his good advice and parting addresses will long be remembered by those who survive him.

1863. The Association convened at Great Swamp, Pitt County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder R. C. Leachman, of Corresponding Meeting, Virginia. Elder Leachman had been handled roughly by the Federal Army. His house had been burned down, he had been taken prisoner and thrown in jail in Alexandria, and then imprisoned with other political prisoners in the old Capitol in Washington City, and finally released, and became a refugee in North Carolina for some years during the war.

Elder Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Biggs Clerk, and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerk.

Letters from sixteen churches were received, 11 had been baptized; total in fellowship, 1,402.

The great Civil War in the country still prevailed, with awful consequences attending it. This Association was held near Tar River, and it was feared by some that the Federal Army would make a descent upon the meeting, and capture the horses, if nothing more. But they came not, and the third Association during the war passed off uninterrupted.

Messengers and Minutes from sister Associations were as follows: A letter and file of Minutes from the Little River; two files of Minutes from the White Oak; brother Jefferson Horner and a file of Minutes from the Country Line; Elders Noah Adams and Josiah Nelson and brethren B. P. Pitt, John Smith and William Stokes from Contentnea; Elder R. C. Leachman from Corresponding Meeting.

Elders c. B. Hassell and R. C. Leachman preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders W. A. Ross, David House, J. H. Daniel and R. C. Leachman and brother Benjamin Flemming to Contentnea; Elders William A. Ross, David House, John H. Daniel and brethren Joseph D. Biggs and William Thigpen to Country Line; Elders R. D. Hart, Russell Tucker and brother A. B. Baines to Little River; letter to White Oak; Minutes to Fisher’s River, Abbot’s Creek Union and Mayo Associations. Only one thousand copies of Minutes were printed this year. At this time there were belonging to the churches, ministers ordained, twenty-one; licentiates, ten.

1864. The Association was held at Coneto, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder David House. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerk.

Letters from twenty-two churches were received, showing 38 to have been baptized, and total membership 1,325.

This made the fourth session held during the war, which was raging fiercely, and deepening the distress and anguish in North Carolina and the Southern States generally.

Messengers received from sister Associations were Elder Noah Adams and brethren B. P. Pitt, James Parker and John Thorn from Contentnea; Elder Andrew N. Hall from Country Line; Elder R. W. Hill from Mayo; Elder R. C. Leachman (still a refugee) from Corresponding Meeting, Virginia; letter and Minutes from Little River. Elders Hall and Leachman preached on Sunday.

Messengers to sister Associations were Elder William A. Ross and brother William Thigpen to Contentnea; Elder William A. Ross to White Oak; Elders William A. Ross, John H. Daniel and C. B. Hassell to Country Line; Elder William B. Perry to Little River; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River and Mayo. A biography of Elder William Pittman was handed in, read, and ordered to be attached to the Minutes. Only five hundred Minutes were ordered to be printed this year. This was the last session held during the war. Through the mercy of God, neither of them had been interrupted by either of the belligerent forces.

1865. The Association was held at Kehukee, Halifax County. This was the centennial year of its existence; just one hundred years before it was organized and held at this same place.

The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell, who was also chosen Moderator, and brother Bryant Bennett Clerk, in the absence of brother J. D. Biggs.

Letters from twenty-one churches were received; baptisms 13; total membership 1,303. Ordained ministers, twenty-four; licentiates, six.

Messengers received from sister Associations were Elders A. N. Hall, David R. Moore and brother Q. A. Ward from Country Line; brethren B. P. Pitt and Redmond R. Dupree from Contentnea; Elders Hall and Moore preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders John W. Purvis, William A. Ross, J. H. Daniel, William F. Bell, Russell Tucker and brother James Carney to Contentnea; letter and Minutes to White Oak; Elders William A. Ross, C. B. Hassell and David House and brethren S. T. Price and James Carney to Country Line; Elders John H. Daniel and Russell Tucker to Little River; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River and Mayo.

The war between the States had ended in April preceding this session of the Association, so far as actual hostilities extended; but the Southern States were overpowered and held in subjection by the Northern States, and were in a destitute and impoverished condition. North Carolina and the people living within the bounds of the Kehukee Association formed an exception to this widespread ruin and degradation. But something remarkable might be noted here. There was no strife, discord, or ill feeling, either before the war, during its continuance, or at its close, between Northern and Southern Old School or Primitive Baptists; while “Missionary” Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Disciples, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, both Episcopal and Protestant, etc., etc., were torn asunder by the questions of the war, and indulged in severe denunciations of each other—were found fighting and killing each other during the war, and abusing each other after the war.

Primitive Baptists in the South, seeing their States, their homes and firesides invaded by a deadly foe, took up arms in self-defence and joined the Confederate Army, but they met no Primitive Baptists in the Federal ranks, according to the best information obtained by the author. Primitive Baptists North took about the same view of the war as did their Southern brethren, and kept out of the army whenever money or other lawful excuse would keep them out. And the sons of Primitive Baptists, as a general thing, refused to take up arms and invade the Southern States. And just so soon as the war closed, and the way became open for a meeting of those long separated brethren, they flew to each other’s arms, and their love for each other appeared to be stronger than ever before.

All during the war the brethren in the Northern States for the most part, at the risk of their reputation, property and lives, stood firm on the principles of the gospel kingdom and sound political economy. This was evidenced by the articles in their only denominational paper, then published by Elder G. Beebe, in Middletown, Orange County, New York.

The [senior] author well remembers the warm reception given himself by Primitive Baptists North in 1865, soon after the close of the war. And he also remembers well the warm reception given him and other Southern brethren by the brethren North from that day to this; and also the strong reciprocal feeling existing in the hearts of Southern brethren toward Northern brethren when the latter have visited the South. All this appears to evidence a kingdom which cannot be divided—a church that the gates of hell cannot prevail against. The gospel kingdom has not been destroyed, divided or moved. It has remained firm and intact; and this constitutes a forcible reason why the undivided Primitive or Old School Baptists constitute the church of God. Other denominations, called Missionary Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Disciples, Christians, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc., etc., were divided, rent and torn to pieces by the causes and effects of the late war. It follows of course that neither of these can be the church of God, if this reasoning is sound. Say—

1. The kingdom of Christ cannot be divided;
2. But these denominations named were divided;
3. Therefore these denominations cannot be the kingdom of Christ.

And again:

1. The kingdom of Christ cannot be divided;
2. The Primitive Baptists were not divided in principle by the surges of the late civil war;
3. Therefore the Primitive Baptists constitute the visible kingdom of Christ.

1866. The one hundred and first session of the Association was held with the church at the Falls of Tar River, Nash County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder R. C. Leachman. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, and brother Bryant Bennett Clerk, and Elder Robert D. Hart and brother Sylvester Hassell Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty churches were handed in, showing the number of baptisms to have been 70, and the whole number in fellowship to have been 1,221. Ordained ministers, twenty-four; licentiates, six.

Corresponding messengers from sister Associations were brethren B. P. Pitt from Contentnea; brethren Q. A. Ward, A. Blalock, B. F. Morton, Horton Blalock and Joseph Wyatt from Country Line; Elder Aaron Davis from White Oak; Elder R. C. Leachman from Corresponding Meeting, with a letter from his meeting; Elder Aldridge Parton, brethren J. C. Barbour, James H. Wilson, W. A. Myatt and Arthur Thompson from Little River; Elder L. I. Bodenhamer from Mayo; files of Minutes from Baltimore, Delaware River, Warwick and Abbot’s Creek Union. Elders R. C. Leachman, L. I. Bodenhamer and Aaron Davis preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were brethren James Carney and A. B. Baines to Contentnea; Elders John H. Daniel and John W. Purvis to White Oak; Elders John H. Daniel, William A. Ross, William Whitaker and C. B. Hassell and brethren B. Flemming and B. Bennett to Country Line; Elders John H. Daniel, William A. Ross, Russell Tucker and William B. Perry to Little River; files of Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Baltimore, Delaware River, Warwick and Corresponding Virginia. Eight hundred copies of Minutes were printed.

1867. The Association was held at Conoho, Martin County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder L. I. Bodenhamer. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, Elder R. D. Hart and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerks.

Letters from twenty-nine churches were received, showing 47 baptized; total membership 1,182. Ordained ministers, twenty-three; licentiates, seven. Whole number of churches, thirty-eight.

Corresponding messengers from sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elder James H. Sasser from Little River; Elder David R. Moore and brethren B. F. Morton and William H. Gordon from Country Line; brethren B. P. Pitt, Noah Adams and R. R. Dupree from Contentnea; Elder G. Beebe from Baltimore and Warwick; Elder P. H. Hartwell from Delaware River; Elder L. I. Bodenhamer from Mayo; a file of Minutes from Delaware.

Elders Beebe and Hartwell preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders John H. Daniel and William F. Bell, with letter, to Contentnea; Elder John H. Daniel, with letter to White Oak; Elders R. D. Hart, Russell Tucker and John H. Daniel to Country Line; Elder C. B. Hassell to Salisbury; Elder C. B. Hassell and brethren Joseph D. Biggs, Archibald Staton and William Harris to Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River and Warwick; files of Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo and Corresponding Virginia. One thousand Minutes were printed.

1868. The Association convened with the church at Great Swamp, Pitt County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder P. Hartwell. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, Elder R. D. Hart and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-four churches were received, showing 72 baptisms and 1,196 in fellowship. Ordained ministers, twenty-four; licentiates, nine.

Messengers received from sister Associations were Elder Partin, with Minutes, from Little River; brother A. C. Howard from Country Line; Elders Noah Adams, Archibald Jones, Thomas Goodwin, Josiah Nelson, brethren B. P. Pitt, John Smith, C. C. Bland, James McDaniel, R. R. Dupree and Benjamin Smith from Contentnea; Elder P. Hartwell, with Minutes, from Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick and Salisbury; Minutes from Mayo and Corresponding Virginia.

Elders P. Hartwell and A. Partin preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to sister Associations were Elders John W. Purvis, John H. Daniel, C. B. Hassell, Russell Tucker, brethren A. B. Baines, S. T. Price, Jethro Edwards and Edward Cobb to Contentnea; Elder J. H. Daniel to White Oak; Elders John W. Purvis, John H. Daniel, brethren R. H. Harris, S. T. Price and A. B. Baines to Country Line; Elders C. B. Hassell, Russell Tucker and William A. Ross to Little River; Elders R. D. Hart and Philander Hartwell to Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River and Warwick; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo and Corresponding Associations.

The Association agreed to correspond by Minutes with the following Associations in Georgia and request correspondence from them, viz.: Upatoie, in Macon County; Ocmulgee, in Newton County; and Etcheconnee, Wilkinson County.

The name of the church at Scuppernong was dropped from the Minutes, and her few remaining members were advised to unite with some other church of the same faith and order.

1869. The Association met at Flat Swamp, Martin County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder Silas H. Durand, of Chemung Association, Pennsylvania. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, Elders R. D. Hart and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-six churches showed 140 to have been baptized, total in fellowship 1,251. Ordained ministers, twenty-three; licentiates, nine. Number of churches in all, thirty-seven.

Corresponding messengers from sister Associations were Elders A. N. Hall and David Moore from the Country Line; brethren William A. Myatt and E. Stewart, Elder Noah Adams, brethren B. P. Pitt and R. R. Dupree from Contentnea; Minutes from Salisbury, Corresponding, Delaware River, Warwick, Delaware and Baltimore were presented by Elders P. Hartwell and S. H. Durand. Minutes were also received from the Upatoie and Ocmulgee, of Georgia, and Abbot’s Creek Union, of North Carolina.

Elders Hall, Hartwell and Durand preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders John H. Daniel, William A. Ross, R. D. Hart, A. N. Hall, David Moore and brother Stephen W. Outterbridge to Contentnea; Elders John H. Daniel and John W. Purvis and brother James Carney to White Oak; Elders J. W. Purvis, J. H. Daniel, William A. Ross, C. B. Hassell, Russell Tucker, brethren James Carney and R. H. Harris to Country Line; Elders William Reynolds, Russell Tucker and John H. Daniel to Little River; Elders P. Hartwell and S. H. Durand to Salisbury; Elders Hartwell, Durand, C. B. Hassell and brother Asa Biggs to Baltimore; Elders C. B. Hassell, P. Hartwell and S. H. Durand to Delaware; Elders C. B. Hassell, P. Hartwell and S. H. Durand to Delaware River; Elders C. B. Hassell, P. Hartwell and S. H. Durand to Warwick; Minutes to the following, viz.: Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding, Upatoie, Etcheconnee and Primitive Ebenezer. The following named brethren in the ministry agreed to visit the South Quay Church in Southampton County, Virginia, during the year, one in each month, viz.: C. B. Hassell, John W. Purvis, William Reynolds, William A. Ross, J. H. Daniel, R. D. Hart, Clayton Moore, David House and R. W. Peacock. Two thousand Minutes were ordered to be printed this year. The Moderator was requested to prepare a Corresponding Letter to be attached to the Minutes. Elder Clayton Moore was requested to write a biography of Elder William B. Perry and have it attached to the Minutes.

1870. The Association was held at Deep Creek, Halifax County. The introductory discourse was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell. Elder Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, Elder R. D. Hart and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-five churches represented 149 to have been baptized, total 1, 359. Whole number of churches were thirty-seven. Ordained ministers, twenty-five; licentiates, seven.

Corresponding messengers received from sister Associations were Elder Q. A. Ward and brethren Hasting Blalock, F. Ellis, A. Blalock, Ellis Morton, J. G. Cannady and J. L. Money from Country Line; Elder A. Partin, with letter and file of Minutes, from Little River; brethren B. P. Pitt, R. D. Dupree and C. S. McDaniel from Contentnea; Elder L. I. Bodenhamer from the Mayo; Minutes from Salisbury, Warwick, Baltimore and Delaware Associations, through Elder Hassell; Minutes from the Upatoie (Georgia) through Elder J. H. Daniel; Minutes from the Delaware River Association presented by brother A. S. Cook; Elder A. St. John from the Chemung Association.

Elders St. John, Bodenhamer and P. D. Gold preached on Sunday.

Messengers to sister Associations were appointed as follows, viz.: Elders John W. Purvis, P. D. Gold, William A. Ross, J. H. Daniel and brethren James Carney, Thomas O’Berry, A. B. Baines, William Thigpen and S. W. Outterbridge to Contentnea; Elder R. D. Hart to White Oak; Elders John H. Daniel, P. D. Gold, William A. Ross, David House and William F. Bell, and brethren James Carney, Thomas O’Berry, R. M. Harris and William Warren to Country Line; Elders J. W. Purvis, J. H. Daniel and Russell Tucker, brethren A. B. Baines and James Carney to Little River; Elders R. D. Hart and P. D. Gold and brother A. S. Cook to Salisbury; Elders R. D. Hart and P. D. Gold and brother A. S. Cook to Baltimore; Elders R. D. Hart, P. D. Gold and brother A. S. Cook to Delaware; Elders R. D. Hart, P. D. Gold and brother A. S. Cook to Delaware River, and the same three persons to Warwick, Chemung and Conference of Western New York; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding, Upatoie, Ocmulgee, Etcheconnee and Primitive Ebenezer.

The following named ministers agreed to visit the South Quay Church, alternately, during the coming year, viz.: C. B. Hassell, John W. Purvis, William A. Ross, Henry Peal, Levi Rogerson, J.H. Daniel, W. F. Bell, Clayton Moore, David House, R. D. Hart, L. B. Bennett and Lawrence Whitehead.

Elder N. H. Harrison was appointed to prepare a biography of Elder R. Peacock and submit to next Association. Elder R. D. Hart was requested to write a Corresponding Letter, which was done and approved, and ordered to be attached to the Minutes. Two thousand copies of the Minutes were ordered to be printed.

1871. The Association was held at Lawrence’s, Edgecombe County. Elder C. B. Hassell delivered the introductory discourse. He was then chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, Elder Robert D. Hart and brother Bryant Bennett Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-three churches were received; 98 were baptized, and the number in fellowship was 1,335. Whole number of churches, thirty-seven. Ordained ministers, twenty-six; licentiates, eleven.

Messengers received from sister Associations were Elder Q. A. Ward and brethren C. A. Howard and J. G. Cannady from Country Line; Elder B. P. Pitt and brethren R. D. Dupree, James S. Woodward and A. J. Moore from the Contentnea; brethren Jesse Brown and Joseph Barber from Little River; Minutes from Baltimore, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Western Conference, Abbot’s Creek Union and Mayo Associations.

Elders Ward, Bodenhamer and Gold preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders John W. Purvis, Thomas O’Berry and D. W. Topping and brethren James Carney and William Thigpen to Contentnea; Elders P. D. Gold, D. W. Topping, N. H. Harrison, Clayton Moore and brother R. H. Harris to Country Line; Elders R. D. Hart, William F. Bell and P. D. Gold to Little River; Elder C. B. Hassell to Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung and Western Conference; Minutes to Salisbury, Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding, Upatoie, Ocmulgee, Etcheconnee and Primitive Ebenezer.

The question submitted by the church at Jamesville, viz., whether colored members should be dismissed to from churches of their own color, to which all of them might become attached, or remain as they were with the white members, came up for discussion, and was finally referred to the churches to consider and report to the next Association.

1873. The Association was held at Cross Roads, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder Clayton Moore. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother, Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and brethren Bryant Bennett and A. B. Baines Assistant Clerks. Letter from thirty-five churches were handed in and read; 126 baptized; total membership, 1,398. Churches altogether, thirty-seven. Ordained ministers, twenty-six; licentiates, four.

Messengers from sister Associations were Elders B. P. Pitt, P. D. Gold and S. Pate and brethren James S. Woodard, A. J. Moore, B. C. Pitt, R. R. Dupree, C. C. Bland, John H. Smith, S. D. Proctor and D. C. Mercer from Contentnea; Elders James S. Dameron, D. R. Moore and Q. A. Ward and brother James Harris from Country Line; Elder Aaron Davis and brethren Job Smith and J. C. Hewitt from White Oak; Elder J. E. Adams and brother William Hilliard from Little River; Elder A. St. John from Chemung and Western Conference; Elder William J. Purington from Delaware River; brother Owen Smith from Union Association, Georgia, was present; Minutes from Warwick, Salisbury, Delaware, Baltimore and Corresponding.

The appointment of a Committee of Arrangements the year before was confirmed at this session.

Elders Bodenhamer, St. John and Purington preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to sister Associations were Elders J. W. Purvis, W. A. Ross and brethren S. W. Outterbridge, Asa Biggs, A. B. Baines and William Hodges to Contentnea; Elders Thomas O’Berry, D. W. Toppings, and brethren Archibald Staton, William Hodges and Nathan Pitt to country Line; Elders John W. Purvis, William A. Ross, John L. Ross, Russell Tucker and brethren A. B. Baines and C. J. Walker to Little River; Elders L. I. Bodenhamer, A. St. John and William J. Purington to Baltimore, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung and Western Conference; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding, Upatoie, Ocmulgee, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer and Union in Georgia; Elders A. St. John and D. W. Topping and brother Archibald Staton to White Oak.

The question proposed by the church at Jamesville last year was discussed and on hearing from the churches on the subject the Association decided that the colored people should remain as they are. Twenty-five hundred copies of Minutes were ordered to be printed.

This Association was held about eight miles east of Tarboro, and the number of persons assembled on the occasion were supposed to be at the least calculation ten thousand. Some good judges estimated them at thirteen thousand.

It was probably the largest gathering ever seen at a session of the Kehukee Association before or since.

1874. The Association was held at the Falls of Tar River, Nash County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and brethren Bryant Bennett and A. B. Baines Assistant Clerks. Letters were received from thirty-three churches; 229 baptized; 1,563 in fellowship. Number of churches thirty-eight. Ordained ministers, thirty; licentiates, four.

A church at Hickory Rock, Franklin County, was received a member of the Association on petition, the Moderator giving their messengers, brethren L. Bartholomew and W. B. Uzzell, the right hand of fellowship.

Another at Castalia, Nash County, was also received into the connection, the right hand of fellowship being given their messengers, brethren Samuel Lancaster and Joseph Harper.

Corresponding messengers from sister Associations were Elder Aaron Davis from White Oak; Elders A. N. Hall, D. R. Moore, James A Burch and James S. Dameron and brethren Blalock and Gilliam from Country Line; Elders P. D. Gold, A. J. Moore, William Woodard, B. C. Pitt and brethren James S. Woodard, Hines Proctor, Dupree, Thorne, Griffin, Fred, Braswell, Hill, Powell and Jackson from Contentnea; Elder Joseph E. Adams and brethren Seth Woodall, L. D. Bailey, Robert Hatcher, Bennett Bullock and J. D. Smith from Little River; Elder L. I. Bodenhamer from Abbot’s Creek Union; Elder P. Hartwell and brother J. T. Blackwell from Delaware River; Minutes from Warwick, Corresponding Chemung, Delaware, Baltimore, Salisbury and Mayo.

Elders L. I. Bodenhamer, P. Hartwell and A. N. Hall preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were Elders A. H. Harrison and Aaron Davis to Contentnea; Elder William Warren and brethren J. W. Andrews and Richard Alsbrook to White Oak; Elders C. B. Hassell, William A. Ross, David House, Thomas O’Berry and William F. Bell to Country Line; Elder James S. Dameron and brother Asa Biggs to Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung and Western Conference; brother Asa Biggs to Salisbury; Minutes to Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding, Upatoie, Ocmulgee, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer, Union Stone’s River and Cumberland.

Elder Sylvester Hassell was appointed to write a Corresponding Letter to be attached to the Minutes.

The question submitted to the churches in regard to changing the time for the meeting of the Association was responded to; and it appearing that no change was desired, it was resolved that the body meet as heretofore, on Saturday before the first Sunday in October. Two thousand copies of Minutes were ordered to be printed.

1875. The one hundred and tenth session of the Association was held with the church at Williams’s meeting-house, Edgecombe County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell, who was chosen Moderator, brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, and brethren Bryant Bennett and S. W. Outterbridge Assistant Clerks. Letters from thirty-six churches were received and read. 185 had been baptized; total membership, 1,707. Whole number of churches, thirty-nine; ordained ministers, twenty-nine; licentiates, four.

Corresponding messengers received from sister Associations were Elders James S. Dameron, J. A. Birch, brethren J. G. Cannady, W. E. Bullock, J. B. Green and J. W. Gilliam from Country Line; Elder Aldridge Parton from Little River; Elders B. P. Pitt, Andrew J. Moore, James S. Woodard, William Woodard, B. C. Pitt, P. D. Gold, brethren R. Dupree, W. R. Wiggins, William Dupree, William Barnes, C. B. Killebrew, W. W. Flowers, E. O. Turner, A. W. Jackson and Jesse Braswell from Contentnea; Elders Aaron Davis, James Cavenaugh, brethren Spicer Padgett and Riley Jones from White Oak; Minutes from Delaware River, Baltimore, Delaware, Corresponding, Chemung, Warwick and Mayo; letter from Ocmulgee, through Elder Gold.

Elders James S. Dameron, Sylvester Hassell, P. D. Gold and James S. Woodard preached on Sunday.

Messengers appointed to sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders Clayton Moore, William A. Ross, David House, brethren William Thigpen, William A. Thigpen, S. W. Outterbridge and George D. Roberson to Contentnea; Elders J. W. Purvis, P. D. Gold, J. A. Burch and brother J. W. Bass to White Oak; Elders William A. Ross, Clayton Moore and C. B. Hassell to Country Line; Elder Thomas O’Berry, brethren C. J. Johnson and William B. Uzzell to Little River; Minutes to the following Associations viz.: Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Western Conference, Salisbury, Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding, Upatoie, Ocmulgee, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer, Union, Stone’s River and Cumberland.

In regard to the contemplated history of the Association, the following resolution was adopted:

_“Resolved,_ As the judgment of this Association, it is desirable to continue the history of this body. Therefore the Moderator and Clerk, Elder Clayton Moore, and brethren William Thigpen and Asa Biggs, be appointed a committee to inquire and report at the next Association fully in regard to the publication of a history.”

Brother Asa Biggs was requested to write a letter of correspondence to be attached to the Minutes. Elder C. B. Hassell was requested to write a biography of Elder William Whitaker, and present to the next Association. Two thousand copies of Minutes were ordered to be printed.

1876. The Association convened with the church at Bethel meetinghouse. Mattamuskeet Lake, Hyde County. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder William A. Ross. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, and brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brethren Bryant Bennett and S. W. Outterbridge.

Letters were received from thirty-six churches; baptized, 174; total membership, 1794; whole number of churches, thirty-nine; ordained ministers, twenty-eight; licentiates, three.

Corresponding messengers from sister Associations were Elder James S. Dameron from Country Line; Elders B. P. Pitt, William Woodard, P. D. Gold, John R. Rowe, brethren Hyman, Beachman, C. B. Killebrew, J. G. Sadler, Benjamin Cowper, Josiah Daniel, William Voliver and J. L. Goodwin from Contentnea; Elder B. H. Wooten from White Oak; Minutes from the following Associations, viz.: Abbot’s Creek Union, Chemung, Delaware River, Delaware, Warwick, corresponding, Baltimore, Salisbury, Ocmulgee and Upatoie.

The following report on the subject of the contemplated history of the Association was received and read, and the following committee appointed to report in full on Monday of this sitting viz.: Elder Clayton Moore and brethren William Thigpen and Asa Biggs:

“To the Kehukee Association, now in session with the church at South Mattamuskeet:—Your committee appointed at the last session of your body to examine into and report on the practicability of republishing, or bringing up, the history of said Association to the present date, etc., and obtaining such necessary material and helps as they possibly could, beg leave to report that they have had a meeting on the subject and fully discussed the matter, and that as the result of said consultation they have come to the following conclusions: That the Association owes it as a debt of moral and Christian obligation to the young membership of the churches composing her body, to their children and to the rising generation, to publish a history of some 500 pages, giving an abridged but faithful and impartial historical account, reaching as far back into the past as reliable history casts its light, of the faith and government or discipline of the Baptist church; especially that body of them known as ‘Particular’ in England, who composed and constituted the Philadelphia, Charleston and Kehukee Associations in the United States, before the Revolution which severed the Colonies from the Mother Country. From thence, giving a sketch of the Kehukee Association down to the great division that took place in the churches composing its body, etc.; and here give a faithful, impartial and unpartisan account of the true causes that produced those unhappy division, viz., change in doctrine and practice, Fullerism, Missionism, and then follow the foot-prints of old Mother Kehukee down to the present time. They do believe such a work is greatly needed, and therefore unanimously agree to most respectfully recommend to the Association its publication.”

(Signed)Clayton Moore, In behalf of the Committee.

The committee appointed on Saturday in regard to the history reported on Monday as follows. viz.: “The committee to whom was referred the Report of the Committee appointed at the last session of this Association, in reference to the publication of a history, have had the matter under consideration and beg leave to report. We conclude it is very desirable to have an authentic history of the Baptists as early as practicable, from the earliest period; and as preliminary thereto, it was necessary to obtain the consent of some prominent person to prepare said history. Upon conference with Elder C. B. Hassell, the Moderator of this Association for about twenty years, he has consented to prepare such a history, if suitable arrangements can be made by which he can obtain a fair and reasonable compensation for the labor and time necessary to prepare such a history, which will probably require one or two years before it can be published.

“Your committee recommend that Elder Hassell be requested and authorized to commence the preparation of the history, and to provide for the expenses of such preparation and the publication thereof, the Clerk of this Association be authorized to have printed suitable subscription papers, 500 in number, to be distributed to the Clerks of all the churches of this Association and of all the Primitive Baptist Associations of this State, proposing to publish a book not exceeding 600 pages, for the sum of not exceeding two dollars per copy, with a probability that it may not exceed one dollar and fifty cents (which will be dependent to some extent on the number of subscriptions obtained). If the publication can be secured at the last named sum, it being the object of your committee that the book may be furnished to all who desire it at the mere cost of the preparation and publication; and that said subscription papers, in addition to naming number of copies proposed to be taken, shall have a column in which each subscriber may state the amount he is willing to contribute in cash to secure the publication. And we further recommend that the Clerk of this Association have suitable notices inserted in ‘Zion’s Landmark’, ‘Signs of the Times’, ‘Primitive Baptist’, ‘Baptist Watchman’ and ‘Primitive Pathway’, giving public information of the proposed publication, and requesting any one desiring a copy to give notice to him.

“We would recommend that all the subscription papers so distributed be returned to the Clerk on or before the first of September, 1877; and that the Clerk report his action to the next session of this Association, with all the information in his power on the subject.

“All of which is respectfully submitted”

(Signed)

Asa Biggs,
William Thigpen,
Clayton Moore,
Committee.

This report was accepted by the Association and its recommendations agreed to.

Elders James S. Dameron, William Woodward, P. D. Gold and C. B. Hassell preached on Sunday.

Corresponding messengers appointed to visit sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders William A. Ross, Russell Tucker, brethren J. J. Barnes, E. Taylor and William Thigpen to Contentnea; Elder R. H. Harris to White Oak; Elders J. L. Ross, William F. Bell, C. B. Hassell, brethren William Hodges, S. W. Outterbridge and J. C. Hoard to Country Line; Elder P. D. Gold to Little River; Minutes to the following Associations, viz.: Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Western Conference, Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding, Upatoie, Ocmulgee, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer, Union, Stone’s River and Cumberland. Two thousand copies of Minutes were ordered to be printed.

1877. The Association met at Peach Tree, Franklin County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell, and the meeting was organized by appointing him Moderator, and brother J. D. Biggs Clerk, who called to his assistance brethren Bryant Bennett and S. W. Outterbridge.

Letters from thirty-two churches were received, showing 141 to have been baptized during the past Associational year, and the whole membership to be 1,907. Whole number of churches, thirty-nine. Ordained ministers, twenty-six; licentiates, eight.

Messengers received from sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elder F. A. Chick from Baltimore, with a file of Minutes; Elders J. S. Dameron and Alfred Blalock from Country Line, with a file of Minutes; brethren J. B. Smith and Bennett Bullock from Black Creek (a young Association), with a file of Minutes, requesting correspondence; Elders J. S. Woodard, William Woodard, P. D. Gold, A. J. Moore, B. P. Pitt, and brethren C. B. Killebrew, Lewis Braswell and Isaac Farmer from Contentnea, with Minutes; Elders B. H. Wooten and Isaac Jones from the White Oak, with Minutes; brethren G. B. Powell, Drewry Partin and A. J. Lowrey from the Little River, with Minutes.

A letter was received from the Ocmulgee Association, Ga., with a file of Minutes for 1876. Minutes were received from Delaware River, Upatoie, Fisher’s River and Etcheconnee for 1876; Abbot’s Creek Union, Chemung, Warwick, Delaware, Salisbury and Etcheconnee for 1877.

Brother Asa Biggs was appointed to write a letter of correspondence to be attached to the Minutes.

Brother S. W. Outterbridge was appointed to write to the Contentnea, and brother M. T. Lawrence to write to the White Oak.

A biography of Elder John Stamper was handed in, read and approved, and ordered to be attached to the Minutes.

Elder C. B. Hassell, historian, made the following report: “The undersigned, having agreed to prepare a History of the Kehukee Association, at its session in 1876, begs leave to report that he has made slow progress in the prosecution of the undertaking. Most of his time last winter was taken up in the perusal of works bearing on the subject. During the past spring and summer he has devoted what time he could spare from other engagements to writing; and when what has been written and referred to is copied, so as to be in order for the press, there will be about three hundred pages in the manuscript. This, it is supposed, will not be over one-third the number of pages in all; and if no more rapid progress is made hereafter than has been heretofore, two years will elapse from this time before the work is ready for the press. The work is expected to embrace: 1. A history of the church in all ages. 2. A history of the Kehukee Association. 3. Causes and history of the great division among Baptists within the present century. 4. Statistics of Baptists in the United States and Canada at the completion of the work.”

(Signed)C. B. Hassell.

Brother J. D. Biggs, Clerk, reported about 1,088 copies of the work subscribed for, and $364.10 in contributions to insure the forthcoming of the work, if he rightly understood the intention of the contributors. And he was requested to send out additional subscription papers for the work.

Elders James S. Woodard, F. A. Chick and P. D. Gold preached on Sunday. Elder B. H. Wooten opened the services.

The Clerk was requested to write and forward a letter, with file of Minutes, to the Ocmulgee Association.

Brother S. W. Outterbridge, by request, prepared a letter to the Contentnea Association, and brother M. T. Lawrence prepared one to the White Oak.

Brethren appointed messengers to sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders William A. Ross, R. H. Harris, brethren Edmund Sykes, William Hodges, William G. Wheeless, William B. Uzzell, William Faithful and Standly Overton to Country Line; brethren W. C. Trevathan and J. J. Barnes to Little River; Elders William A. Ross and John L. Ross to Black Creek. Minutes were ordered to be sent to the following Associations; Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Western Conference, Stone’s River, Cumberland, Abbot’s Creek Union, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding Virginia, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer and Union. Two thousand copies of the Minutes were ordered to be printed.

1878. The Association was held with the church at Kehukee, Halifax County. The introductory sermon was delivered by Elder C. B. Hassell. He was then chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, brethren Bryant Bennett and S. W. Outterbridge Assistant Clerks.

Letters from thirty-eight out of the thirty-nine churches were read which showed baptisms to have been 183, and the number in fellowship 1,982. Ordained ministers, twenty-eight; licentiates, nine.

Brethren J. H. Pippen and A. B. Baines were appointed a Committee on Finance.

Corresponding brethren from sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders Dameron, Moore and Cannady from Country Line, with Minutes; Elders A. J. Moore, J. S. Woodard, P. D. Gold, B. C. Pitt, B. P. Pitt, brethren Killebrew, Warren Woodard and Jesse Braswell from the Contentnea, with Minutes; Elder J. S. Collins from Mud Creek, Alabama; Elder J. D. Scott, with Minutes, from Black Creek; letter and file of Minutes from Ocmulgee, Georgia; Elders Wooten and Jones from White Oak, with Minutes; Elder William M. Smoot from Corresponding Virginia, files of Minutes from Mayo Fisher’s River, Chemung, Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Salisbury and Upatoie; letter and file of Minutes from Little River; Elder S. J. Lackey and A. J. Cassell from Smith’s River.

Brother Stephen W. Outterbridge was appointed to write the Corresponding Letter. Elder Clayton Moore was appointed to write a letter to the Contentnea Association; brother J. H. Pippen to the White Oak; and brother George W. Roberson to the Black Creek.

Elders William M. Smoot, James S. Dameron, J. S. Collins and Pleasant D. Gold preached on Sunday.

Elders R. D. Moore, P. Snider, Cassell and Wooten also preached during the meeting.

Messengers appointed to sister Associations were as follows, viz.: Elders William A. Ross, J. W. Johnson, brethren R. Alsbrooks, W. E. Green, J. H. Pippen, S. W. Outterbridge, N. Cutchen, M. D. Alsbrooks, J. H. Howard, William Hodges, William Faithful, w. Trevathan, W. B. White and B. I. Alsbrooks to Contentnea; Elder P. D. Gold and brother M. T. Lawrence to White Oak; Elders W. A. Ross, David House and R. H. Harris to Black Creek; Joseph E. Adams to Abbot’s Creek Union; Elders William A. Ross, J. E. Adams, Clayton Moore, David House and brethren J. E. Moore and S. W. Outterbridge to Country Line; Elder J. E. Adams and brethren W. Trevathan and W. E. Green to Little River. Minutes were ordered to be sent to the following Associations, viz.: Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Western Conference, Stone’s River, Cumberland, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Corresponding, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer and Union.

Elder Clayton Moore was appointed to write a letter to the Ocmulgee Association, Georgia, to be sent with a file of Minutes.

Elder C. B. Hassell made the following report on the History: “The undersigned, who was requested to prepare a history of the Kehukee Association, at its session in 1876 begs leave to report that he has completed the history proper of said Association from its origin tot he present time; but there is yet to be added a few articles on different subjects. Also a separate history of all the churches composing the body; then a statistical table of all the Associations in America; and lastly a history of the church in all ages from the fall of man to the present period.

“This will require at least another year to arrange and the undersigned craves further indulgence.

“Respectfully submitted.”

(Signed)C. B. Hassell.

We again quote from the Minutes:

“Our Clerk, brother Joseph D. Biggs, reported about 1,450 copies of the history subscribed for up to the present time; and this number not being thought sufficient by the Association to justify the printing of the work, he was requested to send out with the Minutes additional subscription papers to the churches of our own Association and all the Associations with which we are in correspondence.”

“Resolved, That we call the special attention of our brethren, composing the churches of this Association and the various Associations with which we are in correspondence, as well as all the Associations of our faith and order in the United Sates, to the history of the church in general, and our Association in particular, that we have now in progress of preparation; and earnestly invite their co-operation in obtaining additional subscriptions for the work.

“We hope it will be ready for the press in about one year from this time, but think we shall need subscriptions for about 3,000 copies before it is put to press.”

This was the one hundred and thirteenth session of the Association, and Elder Hassell prefaced his introductory sermon with a short sketch of her history form her origin to the present session, and particularly form 1827 onward; showing the goodness and tender mercy of a covenant keeping God toward this body of Christians from generation to generation; and especially the peace and prosperity that had attended her since the entire renunciation of all the men-made missionary operations of this nineteenth century.

With the church at Kehukee the Association was formed in 1765; with this church in 1827 the Association renounced fellowship with human institutions, as aids to the church of God; with this church the centennial meeting of the Association was held in 1865; and with this church its session was held in 1878. This church was in a prosperous condition in 1878, and stood highly honored among her sister churches as at the beginning.

1879.[3] The Association met with the church at Spring Green, in Martin County. Elder Russell Tucker preached the introductory sermon from Romans vii 9. Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, brethren Bryant Bennett and Stephen W. Outterbridge Assistant Clerks.

Elders T. K. Pursley and James S. Dameron preached on Saturday; Elders S. H. Durand, F. A. Chick and Gilbert Beebe on Sunday; and Elder S. H. Durand, followed in a brief way by Elders Pursley, Gold, Moore, Rowe, Partin, Dameron, Taylor and Chick, on Monday.

The following committees were appointed: On Arrangements for Preaching, Elder C. B. Hassell, brethren Joseph D. Biggs, S. W. Outterbridge and George D. Roberson; on Finance, brethren A. B. Baines and J. H. Pippen. Letters from thirty-seven churches were received and read. Two churches were admitted into the Association: Lebanon, on East Lake, Dare County, by their messengers, Elder J. D. Wicker and brother Daniel Johnson, reporting seventeen members; and Hopeland, Nash County, by their messengers, brethren N. K. Pippen and J. H. Pippen, reporting ten members.

The following correspondence was received: From Warwick Association, Elders Gilbert Beebe and S. H. Durand, with Minutes; from Chemung, Elder S. H. Durand, with Minutes; from Upatoie, a letter through Elder S. H. Durand; from White Oak, Elders B. H. Wooten and Isaac Jones, with Minutes; from Contentnea, Elders P. D. Gold, A. J. Moore, William Woodard, Joshua T. Rowe and L. H. Hardy, and brethren Warren Woodard, J. T. Lewis, C. B. Killebrew, Howell Joyner, G. T. Daniel, with Minutes: from Harmony (Ga.), Elder T. K. Pursley; from Black Creek, brethren J. B. Smith and B. A. Scott, with Minutes; from Little River, Elder A. Parting, with Minutes; from Country Line, Elder James S. Dameron, with Minutes; from Mountain, Elder B. E. Caudill; from Center District, Elder A. J. Taylor; from Delaware, Delaware River, Corresponding Virginia, Salisbury, Abbot’s Creek, Fisher’s River and Ocmulgee, Minutes; from Baltimore, Elder F. A. Chick, with Minutes.

Elder Clayton Moore was appointed to write a letter of correspondence to sister Associations, to be attached to the Minutes; brother M. T. Lawrence to write a letter to the Contentnea; brother A. B. Baines to the White Oak; and brother John S. Reives to the Black Creek Associations. The messengers appointed to visit the Associations were: To the Contentnea, Elders William A. Ross, J. W. Johnson and brethren William C. Trevathan, A. B. Baines, S. W. Outterbridge, J. H. Pippen and William Thigpen; to the White Oak, brethren M. T. Lawrence Frederick Whitehead, William Jenkins and Leonidas Flemming; to the Black Creek, Elders William A. Ross, John W. Purvis, Russell Tucker, and brethren J. H. Pippen, A. B. Baines and E. Sykes; to Country Line, Elders Clayton Moore, R. H. Harris, J. E. Adams, and brethren L. Bartholomew, William Faithful and William C. Trevathan; to Little River, Elder J. E. Adams; to Abbot’s Creek Union, Elder J. E. Adams; to Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Western Conference, Corresponding Virginia and Salisbury, Elders Gilbert Beebe, S. H. Durand and F. A. Chick. Minutes were ordered to be sent to the above Associations, and also to the following: Mountain, Center District, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer and Union.

Brethren in the ministry agreed to visit South Quay Church during the ensuing year.

Elder C. B. Hassell reported that he had still to write the general church history from the creation to the present time, and that he supposed it would take him six months, with the permission of Providence, to accomplish this task.[4] As fewer than two thousand copies had been subscribed for, it was ordered that papers should be sent out to request further subscriptions.

At this time the Kehukee Association contained forty-one churches and 2,067 members; twenty-five ministers and ten licentiates. During the year there had been 161 baptisms. Two thousand copies of the Minutes were ordered to be printed, and fifteen dollars to be allowed the Clerk for his services.

1880. The Association convened with the church at Morattock, in Washington County. Elder Sylvester Hassell preached the introductory sermon from John iii.6. He was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and brethren Bryant Bennett and S. W. Outterbridge Assistant Clerks. The Moderator and Clerk and Elders N. H. Harrison and Joseph E. Adams were appointed a Committee on Arrangements for Preaching, and brethren A. B. Baines and J. H. Pippen on Finance.

Elders John S. Brinson and A. L. Moore preached on Saturday; Elders P. G. Lester, F. A. Chick and J. S. Dameron on Sunday; and Elders P. D. Gold, John D. Scott and F. A. Chick on Monday.

Letters from thirty-six churches were received and read. The following correspondence was received: From Ocmulgee Association, a letter and Minutes; from Little River, a letter and Minutes; from Abbot’s Creek Union, Mayo, Fisher’s River, Chemung, Warwick, Delaware, Delaware River and Salisbury, Minutes; from Black Creek, Elder J. D. Scott and brethren Jonas Lamm and William S. Ross, with Minutes; from the Country Line, Elder J. S. Dameron, with Minutes ; from Baltimore, elder F. A. Chick, with Minutes; from Contentnea, Elders P. D. Gold, John Rowe, Joshua T. Rowe, A. J. Moore and brethren C. B. Killebrew, G. T. Daniel, John Rowe and L. H. Hardy, with Minutes; from White Oak, Elder John S. Brinson, with Minutes; from New River, Elder P. G. Lester.

Elder M. T. Lawrence was appointed to write a Corresponding Letter to be attached to the Minutes; Elder R. H. Harris to write a letter to Contentnea; brother J. G. Reives to White Oak; and Elder G. D. Roberson to Black Creek Associations. The following messengers were appointed to visit sister Associations: To Contentnea, Elders William A. Ross, David House and brother John G. Reives; to White Oak, Elder S. Hassell; to Black Creek, Elders W. W. Windley, Russell Tucker, William A. Ross and J. E. Adams; to Country Line, Elders S. Hassell, W. W. Windley and J. E. Adams; to Little River, Elder J. E. Adams; to Abbot’s Creek Union, Elder J. E. Adams; Minutes to be sent to the Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Western Conference, Corresponding Virginia, Salisbury, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, primitive Ebenezer, Union, Mountain and Center District.

Brethren in the ministry agreed to visit South Quay Church during the following year.

The Clerk reported that there were 2,363 subscribers to the Church History. Elder C. B. Hassell, the historian, having departed this life April 11, 1880, his son, Elder Sylvester Hassell, was appointed to complete the work.

Number of churches, forty-one; members, 2,016; Elders, twenty-five; licentiates, five; baptisms, 111. Two thousand copies of Minutes printed.

1881. The Association met with the church at Smithwick’s Creek, in Martin County. Elder Russell Tucker preached the introductory sermon. Elder S. Hassell was appointed Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and brethren Bryant Bennett and S. W. Outterbridge Assistant Clerks. The Moderator and Clerk, and Elder Henry Peal and Levi Rogerson, were appointed a Committee of Arrangements on Preaching; and brethren A. B. Baines, and J. H. Pippen on Finance.

Elders David R. Moore and Joshua T. Rowe preached on Saturday; Elders S. Hassell, F. A. Chick and P. D. Gold on Sunday; and Elders D. A. Mewborn and J. S. Dameron on Monday.

Letters from thirty-four churches were received and read. The following correspondence was received: From the Ocmulgee Association, a letter; from Little river, Chemung, Warwick, Delaware, Delaware River, Salisbury, New River, Virginia Corresponding, Upatoie and Mountain District, Minutes; from Black Creek, brethren D. A. Scott and W. M. Boykin; from Country Line, elders J. S. Dameron and D. R. Moore, with Minutes; from Baltimore, Elder F. A. Chick, with Minutes; from Contentnea, Elders P. D. Gold, J. R. Rowe, J. T. Rowe, brethren C. B. Killebrew, G. T. Daniel and John Rowe with Minutes; from White Oak, Elder D. A. Mewborn and brother K. F. Pringle with Minutes. Elder G. D. Roberson was appointed to write a Corresponding Letter to be attached to the Minutes; brother B. L. C. Bryan, a letter to Contentnea; brother I. W. Bass, to White Oak; and Elder R. H. Harris to the Black Creek Associations.

The following messengers were appointed: To the Contentnea Association, Elders S. Hassell and W. W. Windley, and brethren A. B. Baines, W. C. Trevathan, William Hodges, J. H. Pippen and I. W. Bass; to White Oak, Elders P. D. Gold and William E. Bellamy; to Black Creek, Elders W. A. Ross, John L. Ross, J. E. Adams, J. W. Johnson, brethren W. B. White and A. B. Baines; to Country Line, R. H. Harris, M. T. Lawrence, W. W. Windley and brother William Hodges; to Little River, Elder J. E. Adams; to Abbot’s Creek Union, Elder J. E. Adams; to the Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Western Conference, Corresponding Virginia, Salisbury, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer, Union, Mountain, Center District and New River Associations, Minutes.

Ministering brethren agreed to visit South Quay Church during the ensuing year.

The Association instructed Elder S. Hassell to call upon such subscribers to the Church History as were willing to prepay the value of the books for which they had subscribed, in order to secure the publication of the work.

The number of churches at this time in the Association was 41, members, 1,951; Elders 26, licentiates, 7, baptisms during the past year, 65; 2,000 Minutes were printed.

The Minutes of 1881 contain obituary notices of Elder Cushing Biggs Hassell who died April 11, 1880, who had been Moderator of this body twenty-one years, and whose biography by his son, Elder S. Hassell, published in the Minutes, also appears in the Appendix to this volume; Elder John William Purvis, who was born August 5, 1811, and died May 20, 1880; Elder C. T. Crank, who was born August 17, 1821, and died September 20, 1880; and Elder Gilbert Beebe (of Warwick Association, New York), who was born November 25, 1800, and died May 2, 1881, whose autobiography is appended to this volume.

Elder Purvis was baptized in 1851, by Elder Blount Cooper, into the membership of the church at Conoho, Martin County, of which he remained a member till his death; he was licensed in 1855, and ordained to the ministry in 1860 by Elders C. B. Hassell and William A. Ross. He was an industrious farmer, an honorable man, and a comforting experimental preacher of the word. During the latter part of his life he suffered greatly with dropsy, but he bore his afflictions with a spirit of Christian resignation.

Elder Crank joined the church at Elim, in Currituck County, in 1852; was licensed in 1867, and ordained in 1872. He was an honest and kindhearted man, delighting to minister to the poor and afflicted, and greatly beloved by all who knew him well. He contended boldly for the faith once delivered to the saints.

Elder Gilbert Beebe, of Middletown, N. Y., has had few equals, since the days of the Apostles, in natural and spiritual abilities, in bold and faithful defense, both by tongue and pen, of the great fundamental truths of the Scriptures, and in the extensiveness of his ministerial labors. During his long ministry of sixty-three years he is believed to have preached about 10,000 sermons and traveled about 200,000 miles—sent forth, not in the manner of the nineteenth century, by “Missionary Funds”, but in the manner of the first century, by the God of grace and providence, who supplied all his necessities; thus exhibiting to this materialistic, unbelieving age, a life of Divine faith and Divine support. In 1832 he founded a semi-monthly periodical called the “Signs of the Times,” which he continued to issue till his death, and which is still published by his sons, Elder William L. Beebe and brother Benton L. Beebe, at Middletown, N. Y. In accordance with repeated solicitations, Elder Gilbert Beebe published two volumes of “The Editorials of the Signs of the Times,” and a very highly approved Hymn Book.[5]

1882. The Association met with the church at Tarborough, Edgecombe County. Elder S. Hassell preached the introductory discourse from Hebrews 10:23-25. He was appointed Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and brethren S. W. Outterbridge and William Slade Assistant Clerks. The following committees were appointed: On Arrangement of Preaching, the Moderator and Clerk, and Elder William Warren and brother James Hodges; and on Finance, brethren A. B. Baines and J. H. Pippen.

Elders James S. Dameron and William M. Smoot preached on Saturday; Elders F. A. Chick, William J. Purington and William L. Beebe, on Sunday; and Elders P. G. Lester, W. J. Purington and P. D. Gold on Monday.

Letters from thirty-six churches were received and read. The correspondence from sister Associations was as follows: From Fisher’s River, Mountain District, Centre District, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, Salisbury, Delaware, Chemung, Minutes; from Contentnea, Elders P. D. Gold and A. J. Moore and brethren C. B. Killebrew, William Fly, William Barnes, Samuel H. Thorne and Jesse Braswell, with Minutes: from White Oak, Elder B. H. Wooten, with Minutes; from Black Creek, brother B. Boswell, with Minutes; from Warwick, Elder William L. Beebe, with Minutes; from Delaware River, Elder W. J. Purington, with Minutes; from Corresponding Virginia, Elder William M. Smoot, with Minutes; from Baltimore, Elder F. A. Chick, with Minutes; from Little River, brother B. A. Woodall, with Minutes; from New River, Elder P. G. Lester; from Country Line, Elder J. S. Dameron, with Minutes. Brother John G. Reives was appointed to write a Corresponding Letter to be printed in the Minutes; Elder B. Greenwood to write a letter to the Contentnea; brother B. I. Alsbrooks to the White Oak; and Elder Joshua T. Rowe to the Black Creek Associations. The following messengers were appointed: To the Contentnea, Elders B. Greenwood, J. S. Dameron, F. A. Chick and W. J. Purington; to White Oak, Elders W. T. Lawrence and J. E. Adams; to Black Creek, Elders William A. Ross, R. H. Harris, S. Hassell, and brethren A. B. Baines, I. W. Bass and N. W. Strickland; to Country Line, Elders R. H. Harris and J. E. Adams and brethren William Hodges, B. L. C. Bryan and I. W. Bass; to Little River, Elder J. E. Adams; to Abbot’s Creek Union, Elder J. E. Adams; to Corresponding Virginia, Elders S. Hassell and B. Greenwood and brother S. W. Outterbridge; to Baltimore, Delaware River, Warwick and Chemung, Elders S. Hassell and B. Greenwood and brother J. H. Pippen; to the Western Conference, Salisbury, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer, Union, Mountain District, Centre District, New River and Delaware, Minutes.

The ministering brethren agreed to visit the South Quay Church during the months of the coming year.

Elder S. Hassell reported that the sickness in his family and faculty, together with the vastness and difficulty of the work, had made it impossible for him yet to complete the Church History in an accurate and reliable manner, but that he hoped to be enabled by Divine Providence to finish the work during the following year.

In the Association at this time were 41 churches, 1,930 members, 26 Elders, 9 licentiates; 77 baptisms during the year. Two thousand copies of the Minutes printed.

The Minutes of 1882 contain the biography of Elder Clayton Moore, prepared by his son, brother James E. Moore, of Williamson, N. C. Elder Clayton Moore was born in Martin County, N. C., August 14, 1814, and died at the house of his son, in Williamson, December 27, 1881. He had serious religious impression in early life and experienced, while young, a hope in Christ. In 1840 he was married and joined the Methodists, and was licensed to preach, and began a circuit; but, being a diligent student of the Bible, he became satisfied, before the end of the same year, of the great truths of God’s sovereignty and predestination and election, and withdrew from the Methodists, and soon afterwards joined the Primitive Baptist Church at Picot (afterwards removed to Jamesville), of which he became and remained pastor till his death. His worldly business was that of a farmer. He had a clear and profound mind, improved by careful reading and reflection. He thoroughly mastered a few well-chosen books, mainly of a religious and historical character; and he was the earliest and most earnest advocate of the preparation of the present work. On disputed points he liked to read all said by the ablest minds on both sides, and bring all to the test of what he called the “straight edge” of Bible truth, holding fast that which accorded therewith, and rejecting as wood, hay and stubble all else. He was one of the ablest ministers of the New Testament during the present century, and at times truly eloquent. His utterances were always fresh and instructive, and continued to increase in interest during his extended ministry of more than forty years. He suffered much during the last few months of his life, but endured his afflictions with great fortitude and patience. As death approached, his faith but strengthened and brightened. He loved to dwell upon the truths of the Scriptures, and the perfect security of all who trust in Christ. On the Sunday before his death he exhorted some of the members of his church to hold fast to the doctrine that he had tried faithfully to preach to them for so long a time, and to dwell in peace and fellowship, and to endeavor to walk in the light of the truth, and to avoid errors of doctrine by which they would surely be surrounded. On Tuesday afternoon, while his strength was fast failing, his son, kneeling by his bedside, asked him if his Christian faith and hope were still as bright and strong as ever, and received the answer: “Oh yes, I know in whom I have trusted;” and the dying servant of God began to talk of the reality and certainty of the Christian’s hope and life beyond this, and continued to talk until his speech became inaudible, His last audible words being “the counsel of peace.” He then quietly fell asleep in Jesus.

1883. The Association met with the church at Flat Swamp, in Martin County. Elder S. Hassell delivered the introductory discourse from Acts iv. 8-12. He was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, and brother S. W. Outterbridge and Elder M. T. Lawrence Assistant Clerks. The Moderator and Clerk, and brethren J. A. Robertson and D. A. Jenkins were appointed a Committee on Arrangement of Preaching, and brethren A. B. Baines and J. H. Pippen on Finance.

Elders D. R. Moore and Y. I. Chandler preached on Saturday; Elders F. A. Chick, P. D. Gold and S. Hassell on Sunday, Elder B. Greenwood closing the exercises; and Elders J. A. Williams, L. H. Hardy and Isaac Jones on Monday.

Letters from thirty-eight churches were received and read. The following correspondence was received: From the Ocmulgee Association, a letter; from Mayo, Abbot’s Creek Union, Mountain District, Little River, Upatoie and Salisbury, Minutes; from White Oak, Elders Isaac Jones, L. H. Hardy and brother Wiley Jones, with Minutes; from Country Line, Elders D. R. Moore and Y. I. Chandler, with Minutes; from the Virginia Corresponding, Elder P. D. Gold, with Minutes; from Chemung, Baltimore, Warwick, Delaware and Delaware River, Elder F. A. Chick, with Minutes; from Contentnea, Elder P. D. Gold, brethren C. B. Killebrew, J. A. Williams, William Barnes and H. B. Tucker, with Minutes; from Black Creek, brother W. M.

Boykin, with Minutes; from Center District, Elder B. Greenwood, with Minutes. Elder B. Greenwood was appointed to write a Corresponding Letter to sister Associations, to be printed in the Minutes; brother S. W. Outterbridge to write a letter to White Oak; Elder M. T. Lawrence to Contentnea; and brother Benjamin I. Alsbrooks to the Black Creek Associations.

The following messengers were appointed: To the Contentnea Association, Elders M. T. Lawrence, William A. Ross, Albert Cartwright, brethren John Singleton, W. G. Bailey, John L. Ward, Simon D. Ward, J. A. Robertson and John Peal; to Black Creek, Elders William A. Ross, Russell Tucker, brethren William Hodges, A. B. Baines, J. H. Pippen, Edward Sykes, J. H. Alsbrooks and William C. Trevathan; to White Oak, Elders M. T. Lawrence and William E. Bellany; to Country Line, Elders R. H. Harris, J. E. Adams, S. Hassell, William A. Ross, brethren William Hodges and J. B. Vick; to Little River, Elder J. E. Adams; to Abbot’s Creek Union, Elder J. E. Adams; to Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick and Chemung, Elder Henry Peal; To Corresponding Virginia, Western Conference, Salisbury, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer, Union, Mountain District, Center District and New River, Minutes.

The brethren in the ministry agreed to visit the South Quay Church during the year.

Elder S. Hassell thought that he would be able, with the Divine blessing to put the manuscript of the Church History to press during the following winter.

It being suggested that the Association change the time of its session to the week, instead of embracing Sunday, it was resolved that the churches should be requested to state in their letters next year whether they approve of such change.

The Clerk was requested to insert hereafter, in the table of churches, the Sundays of each regular church meeting.

At this time the Association contained 41 churches; 1,866 members; Elders, 25; licentiates, 13; baptisms during the year, 59; 2,000 copies of the Minutes printed.

1884. The Association met with the church at South Quay, in Southampton County, Va. Elder B. Greenwood preached the introductory sermon from 2 Peter i.29. Elder S. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs Clerk, Brother S. W. Outterbridge and Elder M. T. Lawrence Assistant Clerks. The following committees were appointed: On Arrangement of Preaching, the Moderator and Clerk and brethren Jesse Johnson and G. A. Johnson; and on Finance, brethren J. H. Pippen and B. I. Alsbrooks.

Elders B. H. Wooten and John D. Scott preached on Saturday; Elders P. D. Gold, F. A. Chick and Jesse Baker on Sunday; and Elders John R. Rowe and N. P. Reed on Monday.

Letters from thirty-six churches were received and read. The following correspondence was received; From White Oak Association, Elders B. H. Wooten and L. H. Hardy, with Minutes; from Baltimore, Elder F. A. Chick, with Minutes; from Contentnea, Elder J. R. Rowe, brethren C. B. Killebrew and S. Gray, with Minutes; from Black Creek, Elders P. D. Gold, William Woodard, J. D. Scott, Jesse Baker, brethren G. T. Daniel, David Scott, Jethro Howell and William Barnes, with Minutes; from Virginia Corresponding, brother Joseph Broadus, with Minutes; from Mountain District, Warwick, Salisbury, Delaware, Delaware River, Chemung and Upatoie, Minutes. Elder S. Hassell was appointed to write the Corresponding Letter to be attached to the Minutes; Elder B. Greenwood to write a letter to the White Oak; Elder William E. Bellamy to Contentnea; and Elder G. D. Roberson to Black Creek Association. The following messengers were appointed: To the Contentnea, Elders William A. Ross, Joshua T. Rowe and A. Craddock; to Black Creek, Elders William A. Ross, J. W. Johnson, S. Hassell, brethren William Hodges, J. H. Pippen and Henry Alsbrooks; to Country Line, Elder G. D. Roberson and brother William Hodges; to Little river, Elder M. T. Lawrence; and to Abbot’s Creek Union, Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware river, Warwick, Chemung, Corresponding Virginia, Salisbury, Fisher’s River, Mayo, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer, Mountain District, Center District and New River, Minutes.

Brethren in the ministry agreed to visit South Quay Church during the coming year. Such of the ministry as were able to do so were requested to visit the church at Sappony, in Nash County, N. C.

Elder S. Hassell reported that, owing to protracted and severe illness in his family, he had not yet been able to complete the Church History, but hoped to do so soon.

At this time the Association contained 41 churches; 1,905 members; 27 Elders; 11 licentiates; 71 baptisms during the year; 2,000 Minutes printed.

1885. The one hundred and twentieth annual session of the Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association was held with the church at Beargrass, in Martin County, N. C., Saturday, Sunday and Monday, October 3rd, 4th and 5th, 1885. Elder Sylvester Hassell delivered the introductory discourse from Isaiah 1:9: “Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.” After a short intermission, and praise and prayer by Elder P. D. Gold, Elder S. Hassell was chosen Moderator, brother Joseph D. Biggs clerk, brother S. W. Outterbridge and Elder M. T. Lawrence Assistant Clerks.

The following committees were appointed: On Arrangement of Preaching, the Moderator and Clerk, brethren W. G. Bailey and Kinchen Taylor; and on Finance and Examination and Distribution of Corresponding Minutes, brethren J. H. Pippen and B. I. Alsbrooks.

Elders A. J. Moore and L. H. Hardy preached on Saturday; Elders John R. Rowe, F. A. Chick and D. N. Gore on Sunday; and Elders P. D. Gold, D. N. Gore and F. A. Chick on Monday.

Letters from thirty-six churches received and read. The following correspondence was received: From White Oak Association, Elder L. H. Hardy, with Minutes; from Baltimore, Elder F. A. Chick with Minutes; from Contentnea, Elders J. R. Rowe and A. J. Moore, with Minutes; from Black Creek, Elder P. D. Gold; from Mill Branch, Elder D. N. Gore (visitor); and from Mountain District, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Salisbury, Upatoie, Ocmulgee, Virginia Corresponding, New River and Country Line, Minutes. Elder Jordan W. Johnson was appointed to write a Corresponding Letter to our sister Associations to be printed in the Minutes. The writing of special letters to the Contentnea, White Oak and Black Creek Associations was dispensed with. The following messengers were appointed to sister Associations: To Country Line, Elders B. Greenwood and William A. Ross; to White Oak, Elder P. D. Gold; to Contentnea, Elders William A. Ross and B. Greenwood; to Black Creek, Elders William A. Ross and B. Greenwood; to Little River, Elders M. T. Lawrence, G. D. Roberson and brother William Hodges. Minutes were ordered to be sent to the Ocmulgee, Abbot’s Creek Union, Baltimore, Delaware, Delaware River, Warwick, Chemung, Corresponding Virginia, Salisbury, Mayo, Fisher’s River, Upatoie, Etcheconnee, Primitive Ebenezer, Mountain District, Center District and New River Associations.

Brethren in the ministry agreed to visit South Quay and Sparta Churches during the months of the coming year.

Elder S. Hassell reported that he hoped to be able to carry the manuscript of the Church History to press in the month of January, 1866.

A letter received from the Colored Primitive Baptist Church at Peter Swamp, in Martin County, requesting membership in the Kehukee Association, it was unanimously agreed to postpone indefinitely it being thought better, as in the cases of all the Primitive Baptist Associations in the United States, so far as known, for white and colored churches to be in separate Associations.

To the church at Peach Tree, in Franklin County, a letter of dismission was, upon application, granted, to join the new Toisnot Association, for the sake of convenience.

The Kehukee Association at this time contained 41 churches, 1,891 members, 32 Elders; 4 licentiates; and 53 baptisms reported during the year. Two thousand copies of the minutes were ordered to be printed, and fifteen dollars to be allowed the Clerk for his services.

The obituaries of Elders Robert H. Harris and Russell Tucker appear in the Minutes of 1885.

Elder Harris was born in Person County, N. C., January 1832, and died, of typhoid pneumonia in Edgecombe County, N. C., May 1884. He made Edgecombe County his home soon after the late war. When young he united with the Methodists, and felt satisfied with them until it pleased the Lord to show him the exceeding sinfulness of his heart. After moving to Edgecombe County he experience a pungent conviction of sin and a bright manifestation of Christ as his Savior, and he was baptized by Elder J. W. Purvis into the fellowship of the church at Cross Roads, by which he was soon licensed, and afterwards ordained under the hands of a presbytery consisting of Elders David House and John Stamper. He was called to the pastoral care of the same church, and retained that position while he lived, at the same time traveling and preaching a great deal in the neighboring churches and Associations. He firmly believed and boldly proclaimed the doctrine of salvation by sovereign and almighty grace. At the Skewarkey Union Meeting, in session with Hopeland Church, March 29, 1884, his sermon, upon John vi. 37, was a very clear and able presentation and defense of that Bible doctrine. He advocated strict discipline in the churches. As he lived, so he died, strong in the faith of God’s elect.

Elder Tucker was born in Nash County, N. C., February 20, 1820 and died in the same county, November 12, 1883. When about twenty years of age he experienced a hope in Christ, and was baptized by Elder Thomas Crocker into the fellowship of the church at Peach Tree. After speaking as a licentiate several years, he was in 1860 ordained to the ministry by Elders John H. Daniel and Robert D. Hart, and was soon called to the care of Peach Tree Church, which he retained for more than twenty years, also preaching much of the time for Sandy Grove, Hickory Rock and Castalia Churches. He was a good farmer, a kind neighbor, an excellent citizen, industrious, economical and liberal, a diligent student of the Scriptures, and a plain and earnest preacher of Christ and Him crucified as the only and all-sufficient Savior of sinners.

1. In his youth Elder Joshua Lawrence was a great sinner but he found a great Savior who called him by his grace, and made him one of the ablest and boldest ministers of the New Testament in modern times. For more than forty years he advocated powerfully and fearlessly, both from pulpit and press, liberty of conscience, the specialty, spirituality and efficacy of God’s salvation, and the unscripturalness and corruption of all the money based religious institutions of the nineteenth century, notwithstanding storms of slander and vituperation, and threats against his life, and during the latter part of his life, great physical debility and suffering. He was profoundly acquainted with the Scriptures and church history. Few men could command larger audiences, or so enchain the attention of hearers. He was sometimes known, while asleep, to give out a hymn, sing, pray, or preach a long sermon, without remembering anything of it when he awoke. He was pastor of several churches. His church at Tarborough experienced, in his last days, a glorious revival, for which he had long prayed. Just before his death, Jeremiah 31:33, and Ephesians 1:4-12, were powerfully and meltingly applied by the Spirit of God to his soul, abundantly comforting and establishing him more fully than ever in the eternal truth of that doctrine of rich and reigning grace, which had been taught to him, as to Paul in his own experience and which, for two-thirds of his life, it had been his meat and drink to proclaim to poor sinners. He occupied his last days in warmly exhorting his ministering brethren who visited him to be on their guard against corrupting and distracting religious innovations, and to contend earnest for the faith once delivered to the Saints.—S. H.

2. This address was issued by Elder Thompson in July 1847. It briefly reviewed the history of the church since the coming of Christ, showing the continual persecutions of the true people of God, and the rise and progress of the First and the Second Beasts and powerfully appealed to all the faithful soldiers of Christ to contend unitedly, earnestly and fearlessly for Apostolic doctrine and practice.—S. H.

3. The History of the Kehukee Association for 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884 and 1885 was written by Elder Sylvester Hassell.

4. No one who has not himself written a careful and conscientious history of thousands of years has any adequate idea of the enormous labor of such an undertaking. Both my father and myself were greatly mistaken, both before and after beginning the preparation of this work, as to the time that would be required for its completion.

5. These books can be obtained by addressing G. Beebe’s Sons, Middletown, Orange County, N. Y. The Editorials, at $2.30 per volume, and the Hymn Books at $1.50 for large type, and $1 for small type, or $9 per dozen of the small type.

Chapter XXIV. Queries.

It appears that Queries have been common among Baptists for a long period of time, and have appeared in the proceedings of their Associations, Union Meetings and monthly church meetings. We proceed to notice some of those that have appeared in the proceedings of the Kehukee Association since it was organized. They may be both interesting and instructing to the reader, as showing the views of brethren, on various subjects, at different periods of time. The first we notice was submitted in the year 1777.

Query 1 (from the church in Chowan): Suppose a man to be a member of the Presbyterian Church, and therein ordained a minister of the gospel, and administrator of the ordinances thereof, with approbation of them in their way, afterwards submits to believers’ baptism,—is his ordination valid to the Baptists? Answer: No.

Query 2 (from the church in the Isle of Wight): What shall a church do with a minister who labors to make them believe that difference in judgment about water baptism ought to be no bar to communion? Answer: Such a practice is disorderly, and he who propagates the tenet ought to be dealt with as an offender.

Query 3 (from brother Thompson’s church): What shall a church do with a member who is suspected to be guilty of a fault and denies it, and no plain proof can be had, and yet circumstances appear very plainly that he is guilty? Answer: That if the church shall think the circumstances are good, they ought to act accordingly and deal with him.

Query 4 (1778): By what rule shall a church approve or disapprove of a minister’s gifts, who thinks he is called to the work of the ministry? Answer: We give it as our opinion that if the following things attend the ministry of a brother, the church may approve of his gifts, and encourage him to go on in the work: 1. If he preach the truth. 2. If his preaching tends to the conviction and conversion of sinners. 3. If it be instructive and consolatory to the people of God; and, if need be, we advise the church to call other ministers to the examination of his call to that work.

Query 5: Is the marriage of servants lawful before God, which is not complied with according to the laws of the land? Answer: Yes.

Query 6: Is it duty to hold a member in fellowship who breaks the marriage of servants? Answer: No.

Query 7: Suppose a member is accused of a fault and denies it, and a person who is not a member, and is not interested in the matter has made oath before a Justice of the Peace that he is guilty—what shall a church do in that case? Answer: That the church shall judge of the veracity of the person who swore, and the circumstances attending it, and act accordingly.

Query 8 (1782): Is washing feet an ordinance of Christ’s church which ought to be continued in the church? Answer: We look upon it a duty to be continued in the church.

Query 9: Has a church of Christ any right to try causes of a civil nature? Answer: We look upon it that the church has a right from God’s word to try all causes which may arise amongst themselves.

Query 10: Has a church any right to suspend a member from communion who has been guilty of a crime, and still hold him as a member of the church? Answer: As our Lord, in the eighteenth of St. Matthew’s gospel, has given a sufficient rule to deal with offending members, we generally think there is no degree of church censure to be inflicted on an impenitent member, after a public hearing in the church, besides excommunication; which we believe consists in putting him out of communion and membership.

Query 11: Has a church any authority from God’s word to lay it upon their minister to get up in a congregation and publish the excommunication of a disorderly member? Answer: We think that the offending member, being dealt with in a public conference, is sufficient without any more publication.

Query 12: What way is thought best for a church to act in supporting their minister? Answer: That each member ought to contribute, voluntarily, according to his or her ability, and in no wise by taxation or any other compulsion.

Query 13: What method shall be taken with a member who shall rend himself off from his own church and join another? Answer: We think it is disorderly for a member to rend himself off from his own church, and disorderly for a church to receive him.

Query 14: What shall a church do with a member who shall absent himself from the communion of the Lord’s Supper? Answer: That it is the duty of the church to inquire into the reason of his thus absenting himself from the communion, and if he does not render satisfactory reasons, the church shall deal with him.

Query 15: Is it agreeable to God’s word for Christians to marry unconverted persons? Answer: We do not know that God’s word does actually forbid such marriages, but we would advise the members of our churches to comply with Christian marriages, as nearly as they can judge, for their own comfort and satisfaction.

Query 16: What shall the master of a family do with his slaves who refuse to attend at the time of public prayers in the family? Answer: We think it is the duty of every master of a family to give his slaves liberty to attend the worship of God in his family, and likewise it is his duty to exhort them to it, and endeavor to convince them of their duty; and then leave them to their own choice.

Query 17: Is it thought regular for a church to restore a Deacon, upon repentance, from suspension to office, as well as to membership? Answer: It is our opinion that if the church he fully satisfied with his conduct in executing his office before, they may restore him to office again, as well as to membership.

Query 18: What way is thought best for a church to put members upon a trial of their gifts who think they are called to the work of the ministry? Answer: We judge it necessary that all ministers should be called of God to preach the gospel, and when any member thinks he has a call to preach, he ought to inform his church of it; and then we would advise the church to deal very tenderly with him, and give him all the encouragement necessary; and we would advise that brother to follow the direction of the church with respect to the manner of beginning to preach.

Query 19: What shall a church require of a person for satisfaction, who had been excommunicated from another church at a great distance, and now, being removed convenient to them, desires fellowship with them? Answer: That such a person ought (if possible) by a letter of recommendation from the church where he lives, apply to the church from which he was excommunicated, and regain fellowship with them, and then take a letter of dismission from them and join the church amongst whom he lives.

Query 20: What are the essentials of church communion? Answer: That a person shall, before being admitted to commune, give a satisfactory account of being savingly converted to the Lord Jesus Christ, and publicly declare the same by being regularly baptized by immersion.

Query 21 (1784): Is it thought that a Bishop or Pastor of a church stands upon the same footing in the church as any other member with respect to his having a right to a dismission at his request? Answer: It is our opinion that as a member he is accountable to the church, and as a minister he is accountable to God.

Query 22: Is it agreeable to gospel rule and order to call a minister to take the pastoral care of a church without the unanimous consent of the members of said church? Answer: We think they ought to be unanimous.

Query 23: Has a woman any right to speak in the church in matters of discipline unless called upon? Answer: We think they have no right unless called upon, or where it respects their own communion.

Query 24 (1786): Is it legal to administer the Lord’s Supper to a single person, in case of inability to attend worship? Answer: We believe it may be lawful in some cases.

Query 25: Is it orderly for a church to hold communion with a member who frequents the Free Mason Lodge? Answer: We think it disorderly.

Query 26: Has a church a right to excommunicate a member on the single testimony of a worldling, in a single case? Answer: Not unless corroborating circumstances be sufficient to induce the church to believe the testimony to be true.

Query 27: What number of ministers are sufficient to compose a Presbytery. Answer: Two or more.

Query 28: What measures shall a Deacon take who sees the necessity of the minister’s support, and his conscience binds him to do his duty, in consequence of which he frequently excites the brethren to their duty; yet after all, he finds they neglect their duty? Answer: It is our opinion that it is the members’ duty voluntarily to contribute to the minister’s support; and if the Deacon discovers any member remiss in his duty that he shall cite him to the church; and if the church finds him negligent in his duty, we give it as our advice that the church should deal with him for covetousness.

Query 29(1788): What is the real work of a Deacon? Answer: We think there ought to be such officers in the church as Deacons, and that their work is to serve tables. That is the table of the Lord; the table of the minister; and the table of the poor. And to see that the church makes proper provision for them.

Query 30: How far can a church that has no pastor or ordained minister (though they have some other ordained officers) proceed in discipline to receive or turn out members, and be orderly in their proceeding? Answer: We think that such an organized church has full power to receive persons to baptism, and call upon an authorized minister to baptize them; and that such a church has full power to excommunicate disorderly members.

Query 31 (1789): Is it the duty of a minister to take little children in his arms (at the request of their parents or others) and name them and pray to the Lord to bless them? Answer: We think it duty for ministers to pray for infants as well as others, but not to take them in their arms at that time.

Query 32: Is it orderly for a minister to withdraw from a church he is pastor of, and refuse to preach or administer the ordinances amongst them because they do not pay him? Answer: By the law of Christ ministers are required to watch for souls as they that must give an account, and their hearers are required to communicate unto them in all good things. Heb. 13:17; Gal. 6:6. We believe that no minister can justly refuse to feed the flock he had taken the charge of, without either having their consent therefore, or else referring the case to the judgment of impartial brethren.

Query 33 (1797): What shall a church do when one member brings an accusation against another member, and he denies the charges; shall the testimony of the accuser, unsupported by any other evidence, be received by the church or not? Answer: No.

Query 34 (1799): Is it not wrong for a man who is a member of a church and the head of a family, wholly to neglect family worship on account of the smallness of his gifts in prayer? Answer: It is wrong.

Query 35: Ought not Deacons to be regularly ordained before they use the office of a Deacon in any respect? Answer: Yes.

Query 36: Would be the one submitted by Elder Martin Ross at Conoho in regard to the organization of “Missionary” Societies; but this has already been noticed in a previous part of this History, and need not be repeated.

Query 37: Are professors of religion, whose children live with them as members of their families, justifiable in allowing or even suffering them to go to dances, or associating with those who delight in that evil practice and its concomitants? Answer: Let parents under such circumstances not forget the case of old Eli (1 Samuel), nor the express word of God elsewhere; that children should be trained up in the way they should go, and brought up in the admonition of the Lord; for we think it inconsistent with their religious professions to indulge their children in that which they cannot allow them to participate.

Query 38: Is it right for a church in this Association to hold in fellowship a member who openly avows the Arminian tenets, or that person should be appointed a delegate to the Association to represent the church in its deliberations? Answer: We suppose it is not right to hold such person in fellowship, and therefore of course it would be improper to appoint him a delegate to the Association.

Query 39: Is it right for a church, in our connection, repeatedly to send her letters to this Association without representing herself by delegates? Answer: It is not regular.

Query 40 (1807): Is it right for the ministers or the members of the Baptist denomination to publish meetings for preaching for such whose religious principles or practices they have no fellowship with? Answer: No.

Query 41 (1809): Is it thought disorderly in a member of one of our churches to attend the preaching of such persons as may be excommunicated from other churches of the same faith and order? Answer: The Association give it as their opinion that, as it highly favors confusion, it would be disorderly.

Query 42 (1819): When a church has made an order for a letter of dismission for a member, and he, before he receives it, proves guilty of misconduct which breaks fellowship, ought the letter to be given by the person appointed? Answer: We think members of churches, being once so, are always so, until excluded, or when joined to another church of the same faith and order; wherefore a member who has received a letter, or is about to receive one, is still amenable to the church, and if fellowship is broken the letter should be withheld; or if given, regained.

Query 43 (1821): What shall a church do with a member who believes himself called to preach, when, after hearing him for twelve months or more, she receives no edification; shall she stop him or not? Answer: As a direct question requires a direct answer, we therefore say such member ought to be stopped.

Query 44 (1822): How shall a church proceed, who knows that two of her members are not in fellowship with each other? Answer: Let the parties comply with the directions given in the eighteenth chapter of St. Matthew’s gospel; and should they refuse to comply, and yet be unreconciled, let them be called before the church, and the church enter into an investigation of the subject or matter of difference, and deal with the parties as they appear to deserve.

Query 45 (1823): Is it thought proper to retain in fellowship a member who clears out race-paths, or suffers it to be done on his land, or who erects five batteries? Answer: No.

Query 46 (1824): Is it agreeable to gospel order for members of a Baptist Church to withdraw themselves from the church to which they belong, or join another of the same faith and order, without a regular dismission? or for another church to receive such members without such dismission? Answer: On gospel principles we think that in each case it is wrong.

Query 47 (1834): Is it according to gospel order for any member or church of our Association to invite into our pulpits, to preach, any minister of any other order? Answer: No.

Query 48 (1835): Can the Lord’s Supper be rightly or scripturally administered by any man but an ordained minister of the gospel? Answer: No; as he who does so acts unscripturally.

Query 49 (1845): Is it agreeable to the word of God for a church that has no male member to ask visiting brethren to assist them to hold a conference and receive and baptize members? Answer: Yes.

Query 50 (1853): Does this Association think it right for an Old Baptist Church to receive a member on a written experience, written out by a “Missionary,” when the member is present, and refuses to relate his experience? Answer: No.

Chapter XXV. A Church—Education—Itinerancy—Romanizing of Protestants—Societies—Sunday Schools—Persecution—Feet-Washing.

1. As to what constitutes a Church.—According to the Kehukee fathers, “a church of Christ is a congregation of men and women, publicly professing faith in Christ Jesus, and being regularly baptized by immersion, who have covenanted together, given themselves up to one another in the Lord, to be governed by His word, and to be guided by a regular and proper discipline, agreeable to the Holy Scriptures.”

“The customary way in which the Baptist Churches in the Kehukee Association receive members into church fellowship is for the person who desires admission into the church to attend at church conferences, and when conference sits, to come into the church (meeting house) and signify his intention to the minister, or some of the members; and the church then sitting, the party who applies shall relate his experience, setting forth how the Lord awakened him, and brought him to a sense of his lost state by nature; how he had seen the insufficiency of his own works to save him; and how the Lord had revealed to him the way of life and salvation through Jesus Christ; and the reasons he has to believe that he is interested in this glorious plan; and the evidences that he has become a new creature. If any doubt remains, the minister, or any of the members present, ask such questions as are necessary relative thereto; and satisfaction being obtained, then the minister usually asks the church respecting the life and conversation of the candidate (or applicant). And if there be general satisfaction, the minister and members give him the right hand of fellowship (as a regular candidate for baptism). Then a time is appointed for his baptism; and being assembled at the side of some convenient water, after singing and prayer, the minister takes the candidate by the hand and leads him into the water; and at the same time having hold of the hands of the party to be baptized in one of his, and the other hand holding by a handkerchief tied fast round his head, shall dip him directly backwards, all under water, expressing these words, or some similar thereto: ‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the authority of our office, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’ After the solemnity is performed, they both, coming up out of the water, join the congregation in singing (some suitable hymn). At the water the newly baptized person is met by the brethren, who sometimes salute him thus, ‘You are welcome to the cross, dear brother.’”

“As to the number sufficient to constitute a church, we do not know (that) the Scriptures point out. Some suppose it is necessary there should be thirteen, because James and the twelve Apostles were present at the first celebration of the Supper. Others descend to seven; Tertullian to three. Our Lord says, ‘Where two or three are gathered together, in my name, I will be in the midst of them;’ and we read of churches being in some houses or families, as was the case with Priscilla and Aquila (Rom. Xvi.5; I Cor. Xvi.19). Also that of Philemon (verse 2); the church in thy house. Yet notwithstanding we are left at any uncertainty to know how many were in these families; nor can we suppose that any particular number is intended by our Lord. We judge that where there are a sufficient number to carry on church discipline, with suitable church officers, it is sufficient to constitute a church.”

A church, with its Clerk, and some one of its members to act as Moderator, is considered competent for the transaction of business and the exercise of discipline, and such should meet together regularly at stated times, whether they have a minister or not; but in case of baptism an ordained minister must be present to perform the work; and in case of communion there must be one or more Elders to officiate at the table, and one or more Deacons to pass round the elements to the communicants.

Baptist Churches in America usually, in country places, meet together monthly and embrace two days in their devotional exercises, viz., Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday they have preaching and conference, connected with singing and prayer; on Sunday they have singing, praying and preaching. If any are to be baptized, that is done in the morning before preaching; and if there is to be communion, that is attended to after preaching. Their communion seasons are quarterly, as a general rule.

In cities and large towns, if there be any churches therein, their meetings are held weekly for preaching on Sunday, and on other days for business—usually about the middle of some week in the month. The time to commence meeting in the country is usually 11:00 A.M., and in the cities about 10:00 A.M. In cities and large towns they usually have, in addition, afternoon or evening services. But genuine Baptist Churches are seldom found in cities, and, when found in such localities, are apt to be in a sickly condition. The forms and fashions, the parades and shows of city life, are very uncongenial to the staid habits and to the faith and practice of old-fashioned Baptists.

2. As to Articles of Faith.—These are not held to be essential to the existence of a church, but of much importance to its order and stability. The churches composing the Kehukee Association, as well as all others in America, perhaps, of like precious faith, have articles enrolled, which are occasionally read for the instruction and benefit of the members in their church meetings.

Primitive Baptists stand by their Articles; they read them, they believe them to be true, and they preach the doctrine contained in them; and hope that themselves and their successors will continue to do so even to the end of the world. And this they do with great pleasure, though well aware that such a course is disapproved by nearly all other professed Christians in America. While some denominations have creeds more or less orthodox, yet it is lamentably true that they are almost universally disregarded by the ministers and members of nearly all of the religious sects and societies in the land. Evidently the tendency for the last hundred years, especially in the United States, has been to leave the ancient landmark of salvation by grace and move in the direction of salvation by works. Human efforts, human means, human passions and human zeal are greatly relied on for the conversion of the world by vast multitudes of professors, who almost entirely ignore the wisdom, power, goodness and mercy of God in the salvation of men. In this awful day of degeneracy, Baptists should adhere the more steadfastly to the Apostles’ doctrine, which induces to fellowship in Christ, to communion and prayers; in order that the distinction between the church and world might appear greater than ever before, if possible.

3. As to Education.—Kehukee Baptists and those of like faith throughout the United States, we feel assured, are in favor of human learning and to the utmost of their ability are not behind other people in patronizing the schools of the country. They are not opposed to education in the least degree, but are charged with such opposition by their enemies, simply because they are opposed to Theological Seminaries as a means to make ministers of the gospel. They believe when a man is called of God to preach the gospel, that God qualifies him by His Spirit for that work immediately, and that the man thus called should go at once, without the circumlocution of a collegiate course of training. The world is made up of learned and unlearned men; and if the Almighty has a use for a learned one He calls him to the work, or of an unlearned one, He calls him. Paul and Peter are alike useful in the spiritual kingdom as ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ, and both may feed the sheep of his pasture, and preach the unsearchable riches of Christ to the Gentiles. Paul was learned in human sciences, Peter was not. But it is preposterous to suppose that God only calls a man to go to a Theological School, and leaves the matter entirely with that school to teach him how to preach, and then assign him his field of labor. Such a thought is dishonoring to God, and such a course would usurp His authority, rob Him of His glory, and make Him subservient to the wisdom of men.

All persons “born again” are conducted into the school of Christ, where they are taught spiritually, and whether ministers or private members, they receive their instruction there. God there reveals Himself to them, reveals His Son to them and in them, and the Holy Ghost takes the things of Jesus and shows the same to them. “All thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children.”—Isaiah liv.13. “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in Heave.”—Matt. Xvi.17. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”—1 Cor. ii.9, 10.

4. As to Itinerancy.—Ministers of the gospel belonging to the Kehukee Association have from the beginning been a traveling and preaching people. Those ordained among them almost invariably have charge of one or more churches, and yet often leave home and go preaching among the churches of their own Association and those of other Associations, sometimes in their own State and sometimes in States very remote; just as they feel moved by the Holy Ghost to move in various directions in obedience to the great command of their Lord and Master, “Go ye.”

In thus traveling and preaching they are not restricted to Christian congregations or to Baptist meeting-houses, but preach wherever there is opportunity, at private residences, groves, or elsewhere. And this appears to be the habit of ministers belonging to all other Associations in the land of the same faith and order.

Many are constantly going in some direction or another, through love to God and love to men. They go as the servants of God, believing He will provide for them and their families while in His service. They therefore go in faith; not as hirelings of men, with a promise of earthly reward, but as those sent of God, upon whom a woe is laid if they preach not the gospel. They are not afraid to trust in God, but are willing to leave the event with Him, and be submissive to His righteous and holy will in all things.

And when clothed with this authority, they speak as those having authority, and not as the scribes or hirelings of men, who seek to please the people and gain human applause.

God’s ministers in all ages have been a traveling people. They constitute an order of His own creation, whose mission shall be useful to men and honorable to Him. This body of men, as an ecclesiastical power on earth, is not left to chance or the caprices or shrewdness of men for its organization or perpetuity. God Almighty is the author and supporter of it, and it shall accomplish that which He designs, though the Heavens fall. Neither men nor devils can successfully impede or push forward their work. It is of Divine authority, and rises superior to all finite control. Their work is not to raise the dead or create a world, but it is to preach Christ and Him crucified, which though it may be unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness, yet to them who are called, both Jews and Greeks, it is the power of God and the wisdom of God.—1 Cor. 1:23,24.

In imitation or mockery of this Divine arrangement, many people are engaged in the work of choosing men for ministers of the gospel, educating them for that work, begging money to give them an outfit, and then sending them to preach wherever they think proper, either within the bounds of their own country or in foreign lands. The object of sending them to preach is, according to their own testimony, to save souls from hell. Their preaching is to bring dead sinners to life, and then teach them how to cherish and maintain that life which the preacher has given them. The quickening of the Holy Spirit and the redemption that is in Christ Jesus are almost entirely ignored.

It is a question whether any good has inured to the human race by the multiplication and sending forth of these men-made missionaries, from the origin of the system to the present time. If a man is not in possession of the gospel himself, how is it possible for him to preach it to others? If a man does not preach the gospel at home, is it reasonable to suppose he will preach it abroad? If he does not preach it among civilized people, will he do it among Pagans or the uncivilized? It is a well-settled matter, in the minds of good judges of gospel preaching, that nearly all these men-made preachers do not preach the gospel at all anywhere, but endeavor to substitute another gospel, so called, for the gospel of Christ.

The Philadelphia Baptist Association is the oldest, most honored and authoritative “Missionary” Baptist Association in America. The Minutes of that Association from 1707 to 1807 have been published in one volume. In the Circular Letter adopted by that Association in 1806 (p. 429 of the Minutes), it is frankly admitted that “in modern missions Papal Rome has led the way, the Society of Jesuits, formed in 1540 [1534], being the first missionary society.” Thus it is certain that Protestants copied their “modern missions,” not from the inspired Apostles of the first century, but from the Roman Catholic Jesuits of the sixteenth century. Now Protestants are universally agreed in denouncing the idolatrous corruptions and heathenish abominations of Roman Catholic Jesuits of the sixteenth Century. Now Protestants are universally agreed in denouncing the idolatrous corruptions and heathenish abominations of Roman Catholic “Missions”; but volumes of evidence have been published in demonstration of similar, if not altogether so horrible, corruptions and abominations practiced by Protestant “Missionaries” among the heathens of the nineteenth century. In India, Africa, the West Indies, the Sandwich Island, Tahiti, etc., such enormities as the following have been perpetrated in this century by Protestant “Missionaries:”—The gathering of congregations by the police with whips and rattans; the “missionaries” using the poor heathens as mules or oxen to draw to draw the families of the ““missionaries” to their religious meetings (or even on pleasure excursions), whipping them if they travel too slowly, and hitching the heathens out of doors, like beasts of burden, while the “missionaries” go into the house to preach their pretended “gospel;” the willful deceiving of the ignorant heathens into an external profession of Christianity after they learn to answer a few questions in the “Catechism,” and selling them, for money, monthly tickets as passports to Heaven, and the “missionaries” thus realizing large revenues, besides the amounts paid them by their employers at home; willfully false reports of success sent by the “missionaries” to their employers for the purpose of retaining and increasing their pecuniary incomes; capturing and confining the heathens in order to “convert” them; and the great increase of vice and crime, dishonesty, theft, drunkenness and licentiousness among the heathens after the introduction of this spurious Christianity into their midst. In proof of these statements, see the abundant testimony of competent witnesses (including government officers and ministers of the gospel, published in Griffin’s “History of the Primitive Baptists of Mississippi,” Elder Jesse Cox’s “Exposition of Revelation,” and the past volumes of the “Signs of the Times,” the “Christian Doctrinal Advocate and Monitor,” the “New York Sun,” the “Baptist Register,” etc. We would now ask the candid reader, Are not the above-mentioned Protestant “Missionary” abominations nearly equal to the Roman Catholic sale of indulgences to sin, and of priestly pardons, in the early part of the sixteenth century? Who can for a moment suppose that God is the author of such iniquities? Behold the corrupt fruit of a corrupt tree—the Roman Catholic and the Protestant departure from the perfect apostolic model of preaching the gospel exhibited in the New Testament!

Says Griffin, in his “History of the Mississippi Primitive Baptists:” “If the reader can see any authority in the New Testament for begging money in the name of the Lord, to send the gospel to the heathen, his perception is much keener than ours. Indeed, the very reverse is taught as a duty. ‘For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things.’ The only object set forth in the collecting of these contributions was to supply the necessity of the saints; but the ‘missionaries’ have reversed the rule, and beg money for the heathen. Paul calls it ministering to the saints; but the ‘missionaries’ minister to the heathen. Paul instructed the churches for each member to lay by him in store upon the first day of the week; but the ‘missionary’ rule is to contribute money every Sunday. Paul encouraged the collection of contributions for a specific purpose, but the ‘missionaries’ for every purpose which their vain and fruitful imaginations can invent and call benevolent. Paul’s object was to minister to the saints in carnal things, but the object of the ‘missionaries’ is to minister to the heathen in spiritual things. The apostolic purpose was to save the saints from starving, but the ‘missionary’ purpose is to save the heathen from perdition. The Apostle calls the contribution carnal things, but the ‘missionaries’ call it the power of Christ. ‘For a moment,’ say they, ‘think of the power which the mighty Savior can call into action in this manner.’

“For the purpose of accumulating the power here alluded to, many plans are put in operation. One is to send out begging agents, and give them a certain per cent, on all they can obtain. Another is to have ‘missionary’ sermons preached on stated occasions, when the most skillful sophist is selected to play upon the sympathies of the people and obtain money under false pretenses. On these occasions it is usual the speaker to represent the heathen as crying for help to save them from perdition. But we have given ample testimony to show that, instead of this, they cry, as an oppressed people, against the tyranny of the anti-Christian crusaders.

“We might here with propriety say that there is not one instance, by precept or example, to be found in the New Testament, of taking up a contribution for sending the gospel from one country to another. But on the contrary, it is positively forbid. The only rule laid down by Christ or His Apostles (the first rule of Christ on the subject) for this purpose is: ‘Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purse, now scrip for your journey, etc. But into whatsoever city ye enter and they receive you not, go your way out into the streets of the same, and say, Even the very dust of your city which cleaveth on us, we do wipe off against you.’

“But the ‘missionaries,’ though they profess to know God, yet in works they deny Him. They set at naught the rules and regulations laid down by the King of Zion, and practice plans invented by their own evil imaginations. Instead of contributing to the necessities of the poor, as the Lord has commanded, they would beg them from them their last cent, and then brag behind the curtain of their success, thus glorying in their own shame. This they do under pretense of enforcing Christian duty; and though they have no Scripture authority for such conduct, yet they are enabled to lead ‘silly women’ astray and consequently the men, through the influence of a pious conclave associated together in one common cause. They make merchandise of the people, under false pretenses, by first corrupting public opinion on the subject, and then bringing it to bear upon them, thus forcing them to give merely to avoid censure. And this is all done in the name of the Lord; and that too for the avowed purpose of saving the heathen from perdition.

“But it would be easy to prove, by a fair mode of reasoning, that though they may have an outside accumulating faith on the subject, yet they have not an internal conscientious faith. The manner and purposes for which they spend money is alone ample proof on this subject. The disbursing of ‘missionary’ funds among the officers and agents has become a source of loud complaint by those who support the cause. The following from the ‘Boston Investigator’ will somewhat illustrate the views and objects of the ‘missionary’ leaders who live in the large cities and control the funds:

“‘We never had any doubt but what there were some who supported religion from the best motives; but we believe that many support it with about the same object in view that the multitude had when they followed Jesus, namely, ’for the loaves and fishes.’ This making a trade of religion is a shocking evil. We find tract societies established, charitable institutions set on foot, new plans devised to meliorate our condition, new buildings erected, new laws devised, new improvements suggested, and when we follow them up and see them organized, we shall find the pious, humane and totally disinterested projectors filling the lucrative places of presidents, scribes, agents, clerks, printers, etc.,—a son here, a brother there, and religion is made to answer the purpose of private gain, under the specious pretext of public good. As an instance in point, the ‘Missionary House’ in this city pays four secretaries a salary of six thousand dollars yearly; and out of more than ten thousand dollars raised the last year by the Foreign Evangelical Society, not less than six thousand were expended in agencies, etc. This is the principle upon which religious teachers, as a class, conduct their performances. They labor for money just as much as a mechanic who builds a house or a ship. The only difference is, the ‘missionaries’ are not half as honest as the mechanic, inasmuch as they pretend not to work for money, which in fact amounts to a system of cheating, or as they say in law, ‘obtaining goods under false pretenses.’

“‘Society requires reform, there is no doubt, but it cannot be effected by these money-making, pious schemers. It must be done by precept and example, by justice, generosity, mild persuasions, disinterested benevolence, unmitigated love and kindness, and not got up under the shape of contributions for ’missionaries,’ tract societies, etc.

“‘On every side we see new schemes to obtain money for religious purposes—converting the heathen, sending ’missionaries’ abroad, building churches, holding religious fairs, buying up theaters for the purpose of private speculation, establishing pious newspapers, etc.

“‘These sums, which could be converted to objects of charity, to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, are taken from those who cannot afford to spare them, to constitute a fund which is to be expended under the superintendence of certain men. The annual amount raised for such purposes in this country is immense, and we are feeling the force of it, not in substantial and wholesome reforms, but in the meddling interference with private concerns—invading the sanctity of domestic retirement, and attempting to hold public opinion and public will in a thraldom almost as oppressive as the Inquisition itself. We are told that this is all for real goodness and sincere piety; and he who objects to it is no friend of benevolence and true religion. Let us beware of fanaticism, of bigotry and intolerance; they are the curses of human society, and always assume some plausible shape to deceive and beguile. Men do not always practice as they preach; and when we see profit introduced under the panoply of spiritual guides, we can see no grounds for believing that a system of religion which thus encourages hypocrisy is of any utility in promoting human happiness.’”

In order to show a specimen of the pride, worldly-mindedness and inconsistency of ‘missionaries,’ our author (Griffin) further says:

“Again we quote the ‘Portland Boat,’ published in the State of Maine:

“’The pews in Calvary Church, New York, were lately sold at auction for forty thousand dollars; and it is said that the society, in addition to a salary of five thousand dollars per year, has given its rector fifteen thousand dollars, furnished a pastorage house, and insured his life to the amount of ten thousand dollars!

“‘This church is rightly named; it was at Mount Calvary that the body of Christ was crucified; and, at this New York Calvary, this mountain of pride and sin, He is ’crucified afresh and put to an open shame.’ Just think of Christ, with a little band of fishermen, going up and down the world doing good, without where to lay His head, preaching from fishing boats, among the poor, the sick and the afflicted, gathering grain and rubbing it out of the chaff with His hands to appease His hunger; eating with the poor; tarrying at night with those most despised of the world; without popularity, despised, hated, reviled, persecuted; without salary, asking none, yet continuing to do good, even to His enemies; and in His last breath asking forgiveness for those who nailed Him to the tree. Just think of Him and His humble course, through poverty and abuse, and then think of the ‘Right Rev. Dr.’ H—, of New York, the professed disciple of the lowly Master, in his forty thousand dollar church, with a present of fifteen thousand dollars in his pocket, and a yearly salary of five thousand more! With his life insured in the amount of ten thousand dollars. Verily, if this be the religion of Jesus, it has wonderfully changed, since first preached on the mountains and by the seaside, eighteen hundred years ago.

“‘A forty thousand-dollar church built with money gained by cheating, lying, grinding the faces of the poor, robbing the widows and the fatherless! A fifteen thousand dollar present, and a five thousand dollar salary, the money gained by the same means! Now who is there in this broad land that does not know that such a religion must be a curse and nothing else but a curse to all concerned? Who has not sense enough to see that this is as directly opposite to the religion of Jesus as darkness is to light? and yet, my friend, whether you believe it or not, this church is no worse at heart than nearly all other churches in the land; but give them the means, and small is the number of such as would not wander just as far from the truth, and be just as ready to crucify Christ afresh, and put Him to open shame. Is it surprising that there are infidels in the world, and that the number increases, while the professed followers of the meek and lowly Jesus manifest such monstrous hypocrisy?’”

To this Griffin adds the following remarks: “Is it possible that these people, who make such a lavish expenditure of money for such purposes, do, in the sincerity of their hearts, believe that that money could have been instrumental in saving souls from perdition? If so, do they not act grossly, yea, fiendishly inconsistent with their faith? Yet saving the heathen from perdition is the theme of all these ‘missionary’ denominations, and begging money as a power to accomplish this end! Yea, they would beg the last dime from the poor and needy, who, according to the letter and spirit of the gospel, should be objects of their charity. And when thus blasphemously obtained in the name of the Lord, for unwarranted purposes, it is huddled together in large sums, to be disposed of by certain men in our large cities.”—Griffin’s “History of the Primitive Baptists in Mississippi” (pp. 59-67)

Kehukee Baptists and those of like faith, we think, all over the world, believe that modern “missionism’ is humanly devised and entirely unauthorized by the Scriptures; and not a word of authority for such a movement can be found in the Bible; and that the colossal fabric—foundation, superstructure and cap-stone—thus raised by”Mystery Babylon” and her “Daughters,” is in violation of God’s command, derogatory to His wisdom, power, mercy and truth, and has resulted in the demoralization of nations and immense woes to the human race.

5. As to Secret Societies.—Kehukee Baptists have, from the early periods of their existence as a body, objected to their members uniting with secret orders of men; not that they opposed or waged any war against secret societies, whether civil, religious or political, but because they thought it unbecoming in a Baptist to turn his back upon his brethren and hide himself away in the cloisters of a secret society, where the eyes of his brethren could not rest upon him, so as to judge of his actions, pledges or communings, whether right or wrong. They think a Baptist should be “open-faced,” and desire to see and be seen by his brethren at all times.

6. As to Temperance or Moral Societies.—Kehukee Baptists believe that the church of God is the best Temperance or Moral Reform Society in the world. And therefore if a member of the church attaches himself to one of these, he lowers the standard of his morality, and casts a reflection upon the wisdom and goodness of God in not making His church superior to any combination of men.

7. As to Sabbath Schools.—These were unknown to the church for about 1,800 years of its existence. And when first started by Robert Raikes, of England, they were considered unobjectionable, and genuine Baptists in America sanctioned them at first, but so soon as they were made an engine of priestcraft, with which to manufacture members of churches, so called, belonging to various denominations of professed Christians, the true church withdrew her encouragement and would have nothing more to do with the invention. These schools, though so recently established, are reckoned now by all false churches to be indispensable to their growth and prosperity.

8. As to Persecution.—Kehukee Baptists believe that the true church of Christ never persecutes, but is always persecuted. If persecution is seen emanating from any body of men towards their fellow-creatures, we may take it for granted that that body of men is not the church of Christ. It is absurd to suppose that sheep persecute the wolf, or the dove the hawk. God’s people are prefigured by sheep and doves.

Abel never killed Cain, but Cain has always been killing Abel since the first murder on earth was committed. The patriarchs and prophets were persecuted—many of them even unto death. Christ was persecuted and finally crucified. John the Baptist was shut up in prison and finally beheaded. The Apostles were persecuted; whipped, stone, imprisoned and slain, many of them for their witnessing to the truth. The early Christians of the first three centuries were persecuted and slain by tens of thousands by Jews and Gentiles. After the ascension of Constantine the Great to the imperial throne of Rome, the church in a short time was persecuted until the Lutheran Reformation, then by both Catholics and Protestants, first in the Old World and then in the New, until the present day, there having been no complete cessation of it during the whole course of the Christian dispensation for 1,885 years.

Genuine Baptists, from the days of the Apostles, as has been already shown, have ever been opposed to persecution; opposed to a union of Church and State; opposed to the jurisdiction of the magistrate in ecclesiastical matters. They have ever been in favor of soul liberty, and have the honor of founding the first Colony or State in the world that imparted this blessing to all its citizens.

That religious liberty which is so freely enjoyed by all religious denominations in the United States at this day, may be said to be the out-growth from that root of religious liberty found embedded in the soil of Baptist principles in all ages.

9. As to Feet-Washing.—This appears to be an open question among Baptists, some approving and others disapproving the literal observance as a church ordinance or rite, and all getting along harmoniously together.

We had nothing of it in the Acts of the Apostles or among the churches in ancient times,[1] but of late it has assumed importance, and has been more or less observed within the bounds of the Kehukee Association for the last hundred years.

Some of the Kehukee churches have never observed it at all; others have occasionally observed it upon motion of some one in Conference, and attended to it during some week day at the meeting-house, or at some private house at night, and this at long intervals. Others observe it annually, and connect it with communion or the Lord’s Supper; while others repeat it quarterly, and in every instance connect it with communion, which almost invariably occurs on Sunday, after the preaching service are ended.

The irregularity, we must confess, shows more difference among orthodox Baptists than all other practices or observances adhered to by them put together. Some are ready to conclude on the account of this diversity that they are not one people; that they are divided and cannot walk together. But this is a wrong conclusion; they are one people still, and do not allow the observance or non-observance of this rite to affect their fellowship with each other. The churches composing the Kehukee Association will perhaps represent, on this subject, all the churches in the United States, some engaging in the practice of feet-washing more or less, and others not at all. We conclude, therefore, if the discordant views on this subject have not broken fellowship among the dear children of God for the last hundred years, that they never will; and that the faithful in Christ Jesus will continue to press onward, hand in hand together, “toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus,” through the remaining portion of the Christian dispensation. It would be deplorable and contrary to ancient usage among Baptists if any one or more should at any time hereafter, on either side of the question, set up a bar of communion between themselves and those who differ with them on this subject. Such a dogmatical or dictatorial spirit should not be encouraged or even tolerated in the household of faith. It would look selfish and out of place.

The argument in favor of the observance of feet-washing, either regularly or irregularly in church meeting, is about as follows, viz.; In the thirteenth chapter of John it is recorded that the Savior, in rising from supper, took a towel and girded Himself, poured water into a basin, washed the feet of His disciples and wiped them with the towel, and then said to them, “Ye call me Master and Lord; and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.”

Here is a command, it is urged, binding on the disciples and on all who should believe in the Lord Jesus Christ till the end of time. That it should be literally observed, too, as it was literally instituted. That its literal import cannot be dispensed with or construed away as being only figurative, no more than can Baptism and the Supper be dispensed with literally or be construed as merely figurative. And some on this side of the question also urge that, as the washing immediately followed the Supper, so it should now be attended to immediately after communion, either quarterly or annually. While some recognize it as a duty only, others hold it as an ordinance inseparably connected with the Supper, and that it should be held just as sacred.

Those on the other side of the question hold that the washing of the disciples’ feet by the Savior was intended to be restricted to them, or at farthest to the Jewish Christians in the East. They hold that it was a custom of long standing among the Jews to wash their own feet, or have some one else to do it for them when weary and resting in the day time, or before retiring at night. They either went barefooted or wore sandals in traveling, as a general thing, so that their feet were soiled and required washing. These argue that something beyond the literal washing was intended, because the Savior said to Peter on the occasion, “What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.’ They also instance the entire absence of anything of the kind in the Acts of the Apostles; and say that the allusion to it in First Timothy 5:10 clearly shows that the washing was of a domestic nature, and not in a church capacity:”If she have brought up children, if she have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints’ feet, if she have relieved the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every good work.” These, it is urged are private and household duties and virtues, and do not refer to the ordinances or public proceedings in the church of Christ. They regard the act of washing the disciples’ feet as entirely figurative of that love, humility, burden-bearing and stooping to the necessities of each other, which should characterize the chosen people of God throughout the world until time should be no more.

A great deal more has been said on both sides of this question than is here noticed, but what is here repeated, it is thought, will suffice.

The [senior] author of this work has always, since his connection with the Baptists, supposed this to be an open question among them and has had the like feelings of regard and fellowship for those who did and those who did not literally observe the practice of feet-washing. He has a number of times, since his church membership (a period of more than fifty years), united with brethren in feet-washing, and has had some pleasant seasons on these occasions. He never made a move in that direction himself for a public feet-washing, but always sanctioned it when made by others, feeling at all times willing to wash a brother’s feet, either the meeting-house or in a private house, either by day or by night. He has united with brethren in this rite at a private house by night, where the brethren occupied one room and the sisters another. He has engaged in it, with the members of his own church and others, when occasionally they have agreed to enter into it; and he has united in the literal observance with some who adhere to the custom annually.

The discussion on the subject of feet-washing on both sides has been characterized by a true Christian spirit, worthy of great commendation; and has had the appearance of washing each other’s feet all the time, while the question was mooted in the Baptist periodicals. Such will likely be the condition of things even to the end.

It would be a sad day for the church, were the observance or non-observance of this rite ever to be set up as a bar to fellowship. So far from this to the present, it has been customary with the churches in the Kehukee Associations to excuse any or all who did not feel disposed to unite with them on such occasions.

1. The references in Church History to the ceremonial washing of feet, or pedilavium, or lavipedium, are very scanty. I find that the ceremony was observed, just after baptism, in the Visigothic churches of Gaul (France) and Spain during the third and fourth centuries, and has been occasionally observed, especially on “Maunday Thursday” (Thursday before “Easter”), in the Greek and Roman Catholic “Churches” ever since. Among the Mennonites, or “Anabaptists,” or Baptists, of the sixteenth century and since, it was practiced by some, and not practiced by others, and always placed among things indifferent, and never made a test of fellowship. The Tunkers, the River Brethren, the Winebrennerians and some Mennonites still practice it. The ceremony has been rarely observed among the Baptists in England. The English Strict Baptists do not at all observe it. It is the final result of all my researches among the Old School or Primitive Baptists of the United States that about one-half do, and one-half do not, practice the washing of feet as a church ordinance or rite. See Smith and Cheetham’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, Vol. I., pp. 158, 159; Vol. II., pp. 1160, 1161; J. H. Blunt’s Dictionary of Doctrinal and Historical Theology, pp. 397, 398; McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, Vol. III., pp. 615, 616; Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature, Vol. I., pp. 936, 937; the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. I., p. 823; and J. M. Cramp’s Baptist History, pp. 265 and 389.—S. H.

Chapter XXVI. History of the Churches Composing the Kehukee Association in 1885.

1. Beargrass, Martin County.—This church is situated in Martin County, about seven miles southwest of Williamston. She was for several years a branch of the church at Skewarkey. A meeting-house was built by the brethren and neighbors not far from a water course by the name of Bear Grass, from which the name was derived. Conferences were held and gospel ordinances administered for several years by Elder Joseph Biggs, pastor of the church at Skewarkey. In the year 1829 the members of the church at Skewarkey, convenient to this place, petitioned for dismission to form a constitution, which was granted, and Elders Joseph Biggs and Jeremiah Biggs and Jeremiah Leggett constituted a church at this place with thirty members. She then called on Elder Biggs, who consented to serve her as occasional pastor, and did so until 1832, when, from age and infirmity, he declined. After this time Elder John Ward served her as occasional pastor for some years.

In 1833 William Whitaker, being a member of this church, was licensed to exercise his gifts. In 1838 he was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by a presbytery composed of Elders Joseph Biggs and Humphrey Stallings. He was then very soon called to the pastoral charge of the church, and continued to fill that office to the period of his death which took place on November 23, 1874. After his decease the church called Elder Levi Rogerson, whose membership was at Smithwick’s Creek, to take the pastoral charge of her, and he continues in that capacity till this day, giving much satisfaction to the church. This church is now in a prosperous condition, having a goodly number of brethren to transact the business thereof. She has been favored, besides the services of her regular pastors, with the ministerial labors occasionally for the last forty years of Elders C. B. Hassell, Thomas Biggs, Henry Peal, William Gray, David House, William A. Ross, John L. Ross and Levi Rogerson. Her monthly meetings occur on the third Sunday and Saturday before in each month. Her number of members at present (1885) is forty-eight.

2. Bethlehem, Tyrrell County.—This church is situated about three miles southeast of Columbia, the capital seat of the county. It was at first called “Sound Side.” The members originally composing this church came mostly from the church at Scuppernong. The church was constituted in 1824 by Elders Micajah and James Ambrose.

She united with the Association in the same year, with twenty-seven members. Elder James Ambrose was called to the pastoral care, in which capacity he served the church until his death, which occurred in 1830. After his death she was served by Elder Micajah Ambrose until he died. She was then for a long period without any regular pastor, but was served by ministers from sister churches.

In 1842 William Reynolds became a member of this church, and in 1852 he was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by a presbytery composed of Elders Clayton Moore and Eli McGaskey. He was immediately called to the pastoral care of the church. In that capacity he served the church until October, 1878, when he departed this life while on his way home from the session of the Association held with the church at Kehukee, Halifax County, that year.

Her Deacons’ names in 1842 were Abraham I. Swain and William Kemp. Her next were William and James M. Barnes, then William R. Liverman, then Benjamin Reynolds and William Voliva-the last two were ordained in 1874. This church has had her peace much disturbed by “missionary” agents and Arminian Baptists; yet she stands firm in the faith once delivered to the saints. Her monthly meetings are now held on the third Sunday and Saturday before in each month. Her number of members is twenty-seven.

3. Bethlehem, Pasquotank County.—This church was constituted August 22d, 1849, by Elders George W. Carrowan and Samuel Tatum, from Coinjock Church, Currituck County. The meeting-house is situated half a mile from Elizabeth City, N. C. Elder Samuel Tatum was the first pastor (chosen in 1850), and Elder Charles Meads is the present pastor (chosen in 1876). William Forbes was the first Deacon, and Thomas Miller succeeded him. There have been six Clerks, as follows: D. B. Pendleton, John Tatum, William Forbes, William F. Sanders, William Greaves and Joseph B. Cooper, who was chosen in 1876, and is the present Clerk.

The present number of members is fourteen. The monthly meetings take place the first Sunday in each month and Saturday before.

The pastor, Elder Charles Meads, informs the present writer that this church is now in a very low state—the house of worship being so dilapidated that meetings can be held only in warm weather. May the Lord revive His blessed work of grace in the membership and in the neighborhood of this church.—[S. H.]

4. Beaverdam, Beaufort County.—This church was formerly called “Washington,” but changed her name in 1872. The house of worship is now situated about six miles below the town of Washington, in Beaufort County. The church was constituted in 1822, by Elders Joseph Biggs and Jeremiah Mastin. Elder Mastin took the pastoral care of the church, and served in that capacity until his death, which occurred in 1825. In 1837 Elder William Smaw took the care of the church. After his death Elders Miles Everett and Arnot Waters preached for the church. In March, 1866, Elder William B. Perry took the pastoral care of the church. In 1871 Elder Archibald Jones was chosen pastor. In 1873 Elder N. H. Harrison took the pastoral care of the church, and served her in that capacity several years.

Her Deacons have been Thomas McKeal, Levin Wallace and J. B. Litter.

Her Clerks have been Miles Everett, J. B. Archibald, George Elliot, W. G. Cooper, Jacob Swindel, James Satchwell, W. D. Singleton, J. V. Litter and Durden Aligood, who (the last named) remains in office to the present time. The regular meetings of the church are held on the second Sunday in each month and Saturday before. Membership at present, six.

5. Briery Swamp, Pitt County.—The church at Grindell Creek (now called Briery Swamp) was constituted about October 24,1827, of members dismissed from the church at Tranter’s Creek. The meeting-house was situated very near Pactolus, in said county. Names of persons at its constitution are as follows, viz.: William Cooper and William dark, both licentiates; Robert F. Lanier, Benjamin F. Eborn, Beazer Barrow, Lucilla Eborn and Penelope Lloyd, Louisa P. Clark and Eleanor Barrow (whites), and Tom Boston, Clarissa Easton and Hannah—(colored). Elders William J. Mewborn and Thomas D. Mason assisted in the organization. Trouble in the church arose on account of the new-made institutions of that day, under a religious garb, and the church eventually split and became scattered for ten years. In 1847 the meetings were revived, by the recommendation of Elder James Griffin and others, when the following names appeared on the church book, viz.: Elijah Langley, Willis Crandel, Benjamin F. Eborn, Joseph H. Langley, Nancy Spier, Elizabeth Langley, Elizabeth Little, Madliss Bishop, Susan Dudley and Jinney Moore (whites), and Prince Eborn, Bessey Carson and Jinney Staton (colored).

In 1852 Elder James Griffin, who had been serving the church until 1852, after its reorganization was then excused on account of inconvenience, as he lived so far away from the place of meeting; after which Elder William A. Ross, of Great Swamp Church, took the pastoral care, and continued in that capacity several years, and was succeeded by his brother, Elder John L. Ross, who is still her pastor.

The old meeting-house went to decay, and the land reverted to the original owners, so that the church held her meetings for several years in a school-house near the same place. Joseph H. Langley is her present Clerk.

A few years ago the place of meeting was transferred to a place six miles from Pactolns, a new meeting-house built, and the name of the church was changed from Grindell Creek to Briery Swamp. She has her meetings on the second Sunday and Saturday before in each month; and her present number of members is twenty-four.—[Last paragraph by S. Hassell.]

6. Castalia, Nash County.—This church was constituted April 17,1874, by Elders Bennett Pitt and William Woodard. Brethren Samuel Lancaster and William Odom served her as Deacons until brother Odom took a letter of dismission and joined the church at the Falls of Tar River. Brother Lancaster still serves. Elder Russell Tucker served as pastor from June, 1875, until November, 1876, when Elder B. C. Pitt took the pastoral charge and served her several years. Elder William E. Bellamy has been serving her for some time. This church united with the Association in 1874, Samuel Lancaster and Joseph Harper being her messengers to represent her in that body at that time. Her monthly meetings are on the fourth Sunday and Saturday before. Her present number in fellowship is eighteen.

7. Conoho, Martin County.—This church was formerly a branch of the church at Flat Swamp. She was dismissed from that body and constituted an independent body in 1794. Shortly thereafter she called on Elder Amos Harrell (then a member of the church at Sandy Run, Bertie County) to take the pastoral care, which he accepted, and continued her pastor for several years. After Elder Harrell’s death, Elder Benjamin Joyner served her as pastor some time, and was succeeded by Elder Jonathan Cherry. After his death she was without a settled pastor for several years, Elder William Hyman serving her as occasional pastor for a number of years. In 1852 Elder Blount Cooper was chosen her pastor, and this office he filled very acceptably to the time of his death, which occurred in or about July, 1854. He had, however, been preaching for them since 1839. For some years then she was without a pastor. In 1860 two of her members, viz., William F. Bell and John W. Purvis, were ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by a presbytery composed of Elders C. B. Hassell and William A. Ross. And as the church would make no choice between them, they both acted in the capacity of pastor until Elder Bell took his membership to another church, and then the church called on Elder Purvis to take the pastoral care. He served them till his death, in 1880. Elder M. T. Lawrence, a grandson of Elder Joshua Lawrence, has been their pastor since. He was licensed in 1878, and ordained in 1880. This church has been greatly blessed by ingatherings, so that it is now a large body. Besides those named already, this church has received the ministerial labors of Elders William W. K. Philpot, C.B. Hassell, David House, William A. Ross, John Stamper, R. H. Harris and John H. Daniel. Her stated meetings are the third Sunday and Saturday before in each month. Her yearly meetings are in September.

For many years John Bryan was considered the leading member in this body as a disciplinarian, and was not thought to be surpassed in this respect by any one belonging to the churches of the Kehukee Association. He died in July, 1865. Elder Blount Cooper and wife were received members of this church in 1839. At the December meeting, 1851, Elder J. W. Purvis was received to membership, and in November, 1853, licensed to exercise his gifts.

Elder C. B. Hassell was called on to serve the church as pastor in 1854; he declined to accept, but agreed to serve her until a pastor could be had. Elder Bell was received a member of this church from Lawrence’s in May, 1858. Brother Archibald Staton was for many years Clerk of the church. Brother Joseph C. Hoard is the present Clerk. The members have a well-built and spacious meeting-house in which to worship, seven miles west of Hamilton, measures for the building of which were first adopted in 1850. Benjamin Martin and S. R. Harrell were Deacons for many years. The present number of members is one hundred and ten.

8. Conetoe, Edgecombe County.—This church is situated about eight miles southeast of Tarborough, and was formerly a branch of the church at Flat Swamp. While the latter was under the pastoral care of Elder Joseph Biggs, he attended this branch quarterly. On the Saturday before the fourth Sunday in July, 1803, this branch was constituted an independent body by Elders Joseph Biggs, Jonathan Cherry and Joshua Barnes. At that time the church called Thomas Ross, one of her members, to take the pastoral care of her, which he did not then accept; but on Saturday before the fourth Sunday in September following he was ordained by Elders Joseph Biggs, Jonathan Cherry and Luke Ward, and took the pastoral care of the church, in which office he officiated until his removal to Tennessee. She was then without a regular pastor for some time. Elder Thomas Dupree served her from about 1820 to 1845. In course of time Elder John H. Daniel, one of her members, acted as pastor for many years. His mind becoming impaired long before his decease, Elder William A. Ross accepted the pastoral care in February, 1856, and Elder David House took the pastoral charge thereof in September, 1873, and continues to serve as pastor to the present time.

Elder Daniel was baptized in December, 1829, ordained Deacon in July, 1831, licensed to exercise his gifts in October, 1833, and ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances in July, 1837.

This church has been uncommonly blessed by the visits of brethren in the ministry during the last thirty or forty years, among whom might be named Luke Ward, William Hyman, William Philpot, William Clark, William Dicken, John R. Moore, John Land, Blount Cooper, Jesse Baker, C. B. Hassell, John W. Purvis, Aaron Davis, B. P. Pitt, Thomas O’Berry, Clayton Moore, William Warren, William F. Bell and R. H. Harris, besides those previously named. A query was submitted to the Conference of this church in March, 1834, and answered, which may be worth noticing, viz.: “Is it right or not right for a gospel minister to attend and preach funeral sermons over the dead? Answer: We believe it an institution of man, and therefore not right.”

This church, though of long standing and sound in the faith, has but a small membership at present (fifteen). She had for many years in her body a good disciplinarian and a warm and affectionate exhorter in the person of William Thigpen, who died June 2, 1885. He maintained a high position in society and in the church, and was considered one of the most efficient, active and industrious, of his age, of any within the bounds of the Kehukee Association. Here is an instance well worth recording, where a warm and edifying exhorter for many years never aspired to the public ministry of the word. He was baptized in September, 1828, chosen Deacon in February, 1829, and served as Clerk nearly all the period of his membership. John Price was also ordained Deacon in July, 1837.

9. Concord, Washington County.—This church was constituted by Elders Micajah Ambrose and Amariah Biggs in the year of our Lord 1810, with fifty-eight members dismissed from the church at Scuppernong. Elder Ambrose accepted the pastoral charge of the church first, and after him Elder James Ambrose, George W. Carrowan, David I. Mot, William Gray, William Reynolds and Steven Biggs, three of whom held their membership with the church. Elder Biggs is pastor at present. Her Deacons have been Daniel Clifton, John Biggs, William Furlaugh, Jesse Sawyer, Darius Phelps, Steveu Biggs, Henry Bateman, Jordan Phelps, W. P. Jethro, James J. Ambrose and Isaac Furlaugh. Her Clerks have been Jacob Hassell, Maxey Tatum, Jesse Sawyer, Samuel Lewis, Jordan Phelps, James W. Clifton and Woodson S. Ambrose. This church is situated in the lower part of Washington County, and is some distance from any other church. The members, however, are sound in the faith, enjoy their meetings, and those who visit them enjoy them also. Their monthly meetings occur on the fourth Sunday and Saturday before. Her number of members is forty-seven.

10. Coinjock, Currituck County.—This church was first constituted in 1782, and revised in 1822. The number of males at her constitution was eleven; the number of females does not appear. Elder Henry Abbot was first pastor. Elder Malachi Corble was chosen pastor in 1824, Elder Samuel Tatum in August, 1825, Elder Hodges Gallop in 1851, Elder John D. Wicker in February, 1869, Elder Charles Mead in 1874, Elder Caleb T. Crank in October, 1876.

Deacons in 1808 were John Tatum and Joseph Baxter; in 1825, Foster Jarvis was appointed; in 1851, Abel Palmer; in 1852, Franklin Jarvis and Peter L. Tatum; in 1868, William Tatum; in 1877, John T. Hampton.

Clerks. In 1821 William Daxey was Clerk; in 1837 John Jarvis was chosen; in 1868, Dempsey Walker; and in 1874, William A. Parker, who is Clerk at the present time.

The church declared non-fellowship with the “Missionaries” in 1841. Number of members at present, twenty-three. The monthly meetings occur on the second Sunday and Saturday before. The house of worship is situated near Currituck Court House.

11. Cross Roads, Edgecombe County.—This church is situated about eight miles east of Tarborough, where two public roads cross each other. It was constituted on the Saturday before the second Sunday in July, 1803, by Elders Joseph Biggs and Jonathan Cherry, with members from the churches at Flat Swamp and Conoho. On the same day Elder Cherry was called to the pastoral care of the church, which he accepted, and continued in the discharge of that trust until his death, which took place in the year 1818. After Elder Cherry’s death Elder William Hyman was called to officiate as pastor, who accepted the call, and continued to fill that office until the day of his death, which occurred October 31, 1861. After his decease the church was served for a number of years by Elder John H. Daniel, and then by Elder David House, the former belonging to Great Swamp and the latter to Conetoe. Elder John W. Purvis and others preached for the church occasionally. In November, 1870, R. H. Harris, a Deacon of this church, was licensed to exercise his gifts; in April, 1875, he was set apart for ordination, and on the second Sunday in May, 1875, was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by a presbytery composed of Elders John Stamper and David House. He was then chosen pastor, and served the church in that capacity till his death in May, 1884. Elder William Hyman, who served this church for thirty-six years, was a most remarkable man for integrity, candor and popularity among all classes of people, and his decease ended the line of the worthies who had fought the great battle with the “Missionaries,” and gained the victory by creating peace in the churches and drawing the line distinctly between Old and New School Baptists.

Her Deacons have been Wallace Andrews, James Long and James W Andrews. Her Clerks have been Joseph H. Pippen, James S. Long and R. H. Harris. Her monthly meetings are on the second Sunday in each month and Saturday before. Her membership is seventeen.

12. Daniel’s, Halifax County.—This church, called for a while Fishing Creek, was constituted in 1755. Some of the pastors have been Elders Charles Daniel, Thomas Daniel, Silas Mercer, Joshua White, Halloway Morris, Philemon Bennett, John H. Daniel and Robert D. Hart. The number of members in 1803 was one hundred and twenty. The present number of members is eleven. The church has had no meeting-house for several years. The meetings are held, near Enfield, the second Sunday in each month and Saturday before. Elder William E. Bellamy serves the church.—[S. H.]

13. Deep Creek, Halifax County.—This church was constituted probably early in the present century by members from neighboring churches, and was formerly called Coneconary. The early records of the church before 1849 are lost. Elder Lemuel Bennett was chosen pastor in 1849; John Stamper in 1856; William F. Bell in 1872; and Jordan W. Johnson, the present pastor, in July, 1877. Lawrence Whitehead was ordained as Elder in 1863; and William E. Bellamy in May, 1881. Marcellus Pope was made Deacon in 1858; and W. B. White in 1879. Elijah Pope was chosen Clerk in 1852; Marcellus Pope in 1859; W. B. White in 1875; and W. P. Robertson, the present Clerk, in July, 1876. The number of members is thirty-eight. The meeting-house is about seven miles from Scotland Neck. The monthly meetings occur on the first Sunday and Saturday before.—[S. H.]

14. Elim, Currituck County.—This church was formed probably early in this century by members from Coinjock Church. The meeting-house is three-quarters of a mile from the post-office called Powell’s Point. The pastors have been Foster Jarvis, Samuel Tatum, Caleb T. Sawyer, Hodges Gallop, John D. Wicker and Avery J. Austin, the present pastor. The Deacons have been B. Owens, James Melson, Hodges Gallop, Stinson Sawyer, Caleb T. Crank, Graham Gallop, Jordan Snow, Edward Etheridge, Willoughby Sawyer, Benjamin Evans, William Owens, William Snow, Caleb Sawyer, John M. Jarvis, Ivy Dowdy, William M. Shaddick and Caleb C. Aydlett. The present number of members is thirty-six. The monthly meetings occur on the second Sunday and Saturday before. This church united with the Kehukee Association in 1831, having previously been a member of the Chowan Association.—[S. H.]

15. Falls of Tar River, Nash County.—The house of worship belonging to this church is situated on the North side of Tar River, a short distance from the Falls. This church is an ancient body of Christians, and was one of those that first formed the Kehukee Association.

From the best information that can be obtained, she was constituted on Swift Creek, by Elders C. Daniel and John Moore, in the year 1757. Whether constituted on the free-will or regular Baptist order, we are not able to say. Elder John Moore was her pastor for many years, while she was on the regular plan. In the year 1780 he took a dismission, and removed out of the neighborhood. After this, Emanuel Skinner, a worthy member, being raised up and ordained in the church, officiated as pastor, but was never called by the church to that office. In September, 1797, he took a dismission and removed to Cumberland, in Tennessee. In August, 1795, Elder Nathan Gilbert, an ordained minister, joined this church on a letter of dismission from the church at Scuppernong, and on Elder Skinner’s departure he supplied his place. In the year 1798 the church unanimously requested Elder Gilbert to take the pastoral care, but he did not accept of it until the year 1802. He continued the pastoral care until his death, which took place on the first of August, 1808. In 1802 eighty members were added to the church by baptism, and in 1808 seventy-four more were added. Eighty members were dismissed the same year to form a church on Town Creek.

After the death of Elder Gilbert the church called on Elder Joshua Lawrence to serve her, and he became successor to Elder Gilbert. Elder Lawrence was a young minister, eminent for his gifts and zeal, and had been ordained by Elders Burkitt and Read, at Fishing Creek, now Lawrence’s meeting-house. In the course of a year or two a large number of persons were added to the church by baptism, under his ministry. He baptized as many as twenty-two on one occasion, mostly young men and women; and in two years there were upwards of one hundred added to the church. Since the constitution to the year 1833 (the close of Elder Biggs’s history) there had been six hundred and thirty-five members of it. Eight ministers within that period had been raised up in it, viz.: Emanuel Skinner, Jordan Sherrod, Lewis Wells, John Atkinson, Elisha Battle, Jesse Andrews, Dr. John Gilbert, son of Elder Nathan Gilbert, and Josiah Crudup-the last four of whom were baptized by Elder Lawrence. The Battle family, in former years particularly, were very much identified with this church, and many of them have been leading and useful members in the church, as well as ornaments to society. James S. Battle, long a worthy member of this church, not only contributed liberally, while living, to meet the church expenses, but bequeathed in his will that the interest on $1,250 should be annually given to the pastor thereof, without limit as to time. And this amount has been faithfully to the present time handed to the pastor of said church by Mr. William S. Battle, son and executor of brother James S. Battle.

On Saturday before the second Sunday in 1830 Elder Lawrence resigned the pastoral charge of the church, and she then had no regular pastor until March, 1846, at which time Elder Blount Cooper took charge as pastor. During the interval between 1830 and 1846 Elder Lawrence attended occasionally, as did Elders Jordan Sherrod, William Hyman, Mark Bennett and others. Elder Cooper served as pastor from 1846 to 1854, in which year he was released by death from his ministerial labors.

Elder Robert D. Hart accepted the pastoral care in 1856, and held the office till his death, which occurred on the 24th of September, 1873. For several years, however, before his death, by reason of infirmity, he did not serve the church regularly.

After the death of Elder Hart, Elder P. D. Gold was chosen pastor, and fills the office to the present time. Her Deacons since 1830 have been Joseph Battle, Robert Sorey, Bennett Barnes, A. B. Baines, William Armstrong, James Odom, William Odom, William Trevathan and William E. Green.

Her Clerks have been, since 1830, James S. Battle, Willie Ricks, A. E. Ricks, Robert Ricks, John W. Vick and I. W. Bass. The last named was chosen in June, 1875, and still holds the office. Large congregations usually have attended the meetings of this church. An incendiary set fire to their house of worship some years ago and it was utterly consumed. But the zeal and public spirit of the church and her friends soon erected another in its stead, of a much larger capacity. It is thought to be larger by far than any other house of worship belonging to the churches of the Kehukee Association. Her monthly meetings occur on the second Sunday and Saturday before. Her present number of members is one hundred and eighty-three.

16. Flat Swamp, Martin County.—This church is situated near a swamp, from which it derives its name, near the Pitt County line, and was formerly in Pitt County. About the year 1766 the Spirit of the Lord began to breathe upon some of the dry bones in the valley of Flat Swamp and the Conetoe settlement, and several persons were seriously impressed with a sense of their lost condition and a desire for salvation; and accordingly an invitation was given to Elder Jonathan Thomas (pastor of the church at Toisnot, now called Wilson, Edgecombe County) to visit and preach to them, which he accepted, and his labors among them were greatly blessed. Numbers received gladly the doctrine of salvation by grace. Several persons were received to baptism upon an experience of grace, and became a branch of the church at Toisnot (Wilson).

In the year 1771, Elder Thomas informed them that he thought they were ripe for constitution, prepared a plan, and set them on the business, which was nearly effected, when Providence put a stop to it by calling this man of God out of time, and removing him to his eternal rest. In the beginning, however, of the year 1776, this church was constituted, with the assistance of the father and brother of the deceased minister; and at the same time John Page, one of her members, was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances. Elder Page took the pastoral care of the church, and labored with great zeal and success.

Shortly afterwards a branch of this church was established at Skewarkey, in Martin County; another at Great Swamp, in Pitt County; another at Conoho, Martin County; and another at Little Conetoe, Edgecombe County. In the year 1787 the branch at Skewarkey petitioned for dismission to be constituted, and after some delay it was granted in 1794. The branch at Conoho petitioned for dismission for the same purpose, which was granted in 1795. Some time previous to this the church had experienced great difficulties; as the love of many began to wax cold, it gave an opportunity for the enemy of souls to sow seeds of discord among them. The church seemed to go down to ebb tide, while errors were spreading and extending in the doctrines of Arminianism and Universalism. There were no ingatherings for several years, and the Lord was pleased to call their pastor to his rest in 1795; and although there had been raised up in this church several preachers, yet at this time she was entirely destitute of ministerial gifts. In this destitute situation she raised her cries to the Lord to send forth laborers, and to raise up one to go in and out before her. In answer to these cries, it appears the Lord was pleased to send her Elder Joseph Biggs, who had been lately received a member at Skewarkey. The church gave him a call to take the pastoral care in February, 1796, but according to his request ordination was deferred until February, 1797. The church being in a cold state and abounding with disorders, there were no additions, many excommunications, very little decorum, and conferences thinly attended. Often did her young pastor sit in conference with only seven or eight members. The few that did attend endeavored to stir the rest up to a sense of their duty, but their labors proved almost unsuccessful; and often did their pastor have reason to cry, “My leanness, my leanness! and who hath believed our report?” and would seriously think of giving over the pursuit. But being preserved and supported by an invisible hand, he held on his way, through many trials and sore conflicts, looking unto the Lord, and hoping God’s time to favor Zion was not far distant. He prevailed on brethren of different churches to visit each other and pray with and for one another, and Zion’s God heard their cries and answered their petitions.

In the latter part of the year 1800 there were several added to the church, and the work gradually progressed until the spring and summer of 1801 and 1802, when the gates of Zion seemed truly to be crowded with converts. In order to hear all that were desirous to tell what they thought the Lord had done for their souls, and who wished to offer for membership, the church found it expedient to divide and sit in two different places in the meeting-house at the same time; and surely the cry of heaven-born souls was then heard in the assembly of the saints. The congregations had now much increased in size, and the convicted from all quarters were calling on the ministers to pray for them. This church in about three years had an addition of about one hundred and forty-two members.

Elder Biggs served her about ten years, then took a dismission from her, and received the pastoral care of the church at Skewarkey. Shortly afterwards Elder Luke Ward joined this church on a letter of dismission from Skewarkey, and became her pastor, and continued in that office some years.

Elder William W. K. Philpot succeeded Elder Ward, until he died in November, 1860. The church was then without a pastor, but was attended by Elders David House and William A. Ross until 1872; and then by brother, afterwards Elder, John L. Ross, until 1880, when Elder J. L. Ross was dismissed to join the church at Briery Swamp (formerly Grindell Creek). In 1880 Elder David House was called to the pastoral care of the church, and still serves her in that capacity.

Her Deacons, of late years, have been James Highsmith, Standly Overton, 0. C. Gray and H. D. Jenkins. Samuel Keel was Clerk for many years until 1855; then James Highsmith until 1860; and, since that time, J. H. Robertson. Her monthly meetings are on the first Sunday and Saturday before. Her number of members is forty-nine.—[Last two paragraphs by S. H.]

17. Flatty Creek, Pasquotank County.—This church was constituted in 1790 from Camden Church, in Camden County, N. C. It has borne different names at different times-Flatty Creek, Newbiggin, Salem, and then Flatty Creek again. A majority of Salem Church became infected with the modern spirit of innovation, and the minority withdrew from them in 1833 and formed a separate body, and resumed the first name of the church with great appropriateness. At the separation the minority consisted of about a dozen members, and Joshua Markham was the Moderator of the first Conference. Elder Stanton Meads was chosen pastor April 25, 1869; and Elder Charles Meads was chosen pastor January 25, 1879, and is still the pastor. Dempsey B. Pendleton and Benjamin Pendleton and Stanton Meads have been Deacons of the church; and Thomas Markham and John S, Meads are the present Deacons. The Clerks have been as follows: John Westfield, Francis Fletcher, William F. Banks, A. B. Palmer, Joseph Sanders, Charles Meads, Benjamin H. Brothers and Henry C. Boyd, the present Clerk.

The meeting-house is near Nixonton, in Pasquotank County, N. C.; and the monthly meetings are the fourth Sunday in each month and Saturday before. The number of members at present is twenty-five. This church was admitted into the Kehukee Association in 1835.—[S. H.]

18. Great Swamp, Pitt County.—About four miles north of Greenville is situated the house where this church worships. She was formerly a branch of the church at Flat Swamp, and was called the Tar River Church. Upon petition she was dismissed in 1795, and shortly afterwards constituted and took the name of Great Swamp, from a certain water course of that name not far off.

She called on Elder Noah Tyson, a member of the church at Red Banks, in said county, to take the pastoral care, which he did, and served them until his death. He was a man much under bodily affliction, yet the church was not neglected among the families of Israel. The Lord remembered her, and gave zeal to her pastor and others, so that the word was preached and the ordinances duly administered.

After the death of Elder Tyson the church called on Elder James Ewell to take the pastoral care, who served them several years. She was afterwards served by Elder Luke Ward, and then by Elder Atkinson.

In June, 1840, Elder John H. Daniel agreed to become her pastor. In 1849 Elder Lanier Griffin accepted the pastoral care. In November, 1853, two of her own members, William A. Ross and David House, were ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by a presbytery composed of Elders John H. Daniel and Lanier Griffin, and since that period the church has been served by these two ministering brethren faithfully, without preferring either as pastor to the exclusion of the other. Elder House was received to baptism in July, 1847, and Elder Ross in June, 1849. Elder House was licensed in 1847; Elder Ross in 1851.

William Shivers was chosen Clerk in November, 1851, and continued in that capacity till his death.

Her Deacons in 1852 were Benjamin Flemming and Hardy Whichard, and in August, 1872, John T. Whichard was ordained to that office.

In 1850 the church became a member of the Skewarkey Union. Among the number of ministers visiting this church we notice the names of C. Bland, John L. Ross, Joseph E. Adams, besides those already named as pastors. Her monthly meetings are on the fourth Sunday and Saturday before; and her present number of members is thirty-two.

19. Hickory Rock, Franklin County.—Brethren from Peach Tree, Falls of Tar River and Toisnot met at Hickory Rock, in said county, on November 5, 1874, and appointed Elder Gold Moderator, and A. B. Baines Clerk. Six members were received—five on profession of faith and one by baptism. Brethren D. L. Aycock and William B. Uzzell were chosen Deacons, and were ordained by Elders P. D. Gold and Russell Tucker. Elder Tucker was chosen pastor, and filled that office several years.

This church was received a member of the Kehukee Association at its session held with the church at the Falls of Tar River in 1874. Her meetings are on the second Sunday and Saturday before; and she has nineteen members.

20. Hopeland, Nash County.—This church was constituted April 4, 1879, at Whitaker’s, N. C., and was first called the Church at Whitaker’s, but the name was afterwards changed to Hopeland. The Conference which formed the church was composed of Elders P. D. Gold and Andrew J. Moore and brethren C. B. Killebrew, Calvin Woodard, J. H. Pippen, N. K. Pippen, Lawrence Billups, Robert Armstrong, Norfleet Cutchin and others, and met in Elder Andrew J. Moore’s Academy at Whitaker’s. Elder Gold was chosen Moderator, and brother J. H. Pippen Clerk. The following seven members, all from Williams’s, first composed the church: Brethren N. K. Pippen, Lawrence Billups and J. H. Pippen, and sisters S. E. Pippen, Carrie E. Pippen, Mary Cherry and Martha Billups. At the following meeting (in May, 1879) Elder Andrew J. Moore was chosen pastor, and brother J. H. Pippen Deacon. Brother Pippen had been Deacon at Williams’s since 1873. The monthly meetings are the first Sunday and Saturday before. The church, which now has eighteen members, continued to meet in the Academy until the year 1881, when it met for the first time in a new and commodious house of worship erected near the Academy. Hopeland Church joined the Kehukee Association in October, 1879.—[S. H.]

21. Jamesville, Martin County.—This church was originally called Picot, and the meeting-house stood on the road leading from Williamston to Jamesville, about seven miles from Williamston. The body was for some years a branch of the church at Skewarkey, and was attended by Elder Joseph Biggs. Church discipline was attended to and gospel ordinances administered, and when ripe for constitution she petitioned the church at Skewarkey for dismission to form a constitution, which was granted, and in the year 1827 she was constituted by Elders James Ross and Joseph Biggs, with upwards of fifty members, and joined the Association the same year.

Elder Biggs accepted the pastoral care (occasional) of the church, and served her until about the year 1831, when from age and infirmity he resigned, and Elder Micajah Perry, of the church at Smithwick’s Creek, served as occasional pastor for some five or six years. Upon his moving into Washington County, Elders John Ward and Humphrey Stallings agreed to serve alternately as occasional pastors, which service they continued to render till their removal to Tennessee. Before they left the State, at a yearly meeting of the church held on the third Sunday in August, 1840, and two days preceding, Clayton Moore, a young man raised up in the neighborhood of the church, and who for about five years had been exercising as a local preacher among the Methodists, applied for membership in the church, and being received, was baptized in Roanoke River, at the Old Field, one mile above Jamesville, Sunday morning, by Elder John Ward. Being urged forward by the members of the church, the young member soon began to speak in public as a licentiate in that church, where his mother had held membership from its constitution.

He, was urged to accept ordination, but put it off till late in the year 1847. He was at length made willing to yield under a severe spell of sickness, and upon recovery passed under the hands of a presbytery composed of Elders C. B. Hassell, Thomas Biggs and William Whitaker. He was then called to the pastoral care of the church, and continued to serve the church as such until his death, in December, 1881. He was the first regular pastor the church has had, and the only one who ministered to her as pastor that came from her own membership. He was a gifted, able, interesting and instructive minister of the gospel, and a profound thinker. He was the first and most earnest advocate of the preparation of the present History.

Brother William B. Perry, son of Elder Micajah Perry, was licensed by this church to exercise his gifts in 1852, and in about three years thereafter was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by Elders C. B. Hassell and Clayton Moore. He was zealous in the cause of his blessed Master, and was firmly established in the doctrine of salvation by grace from first to last. He departed this life in 1867. He died as he had lived, strong in the faith.

Her Deacons have been Joshua Robertson, Kenneth Lanier, Septimus B. Williams, James Ward, William B. Perry and William Jones; at present, Hoyt N. Waters, Martin Jackson and James Williams.

Her Clerks have been John G. Smithwick, William B. Perry, John R. Mizell and others; at present, John Reddick. Brother James Hinson was licensed to preach by this church, and did so for five or six years.

Brother Joshua Robertson was also licensed to exercise his ministerial gifts, and did so with great satisfaction to the brethren some few years, till he died, which occurred in 1848. He was not ordained, but sound in the faith, and held a high reputation, with the world even, as a man of veracity and honor. The chief theme in his discourses was Faith.

Elder Joshua T. Rowe was for several years the faithful and acceptable pastor of this church. Her meetings are on the first Sunday in each month and Saturday before; and her present number of members is thirty-three.—[Last paragraph by S. H.]

22. Kehukee, Halifax County.—This is considered the mother church of the Kehukee Association. The Association was organized and held with this body in 1765, and derived its name from this church. She was first gathered and constituted, in 1742, with members who had been received on the free-will plan; but on being visited by Elders Vanhorn and Miller, from the Philadelphia Association, she was established on the regular order, and joined in covenant in the year 1755. She was, after her regular organization, under the care for some years of that eminent servant of our Lord Jesus Christ, Thomas Pope. After the death of Elder Pope she was under the care of Elder Meglamre for some years. Elder Meglamre removed to Sussex, in Virginia, and resigned the pastoral care to Elder William Burgess, who was raised in Camden County. Elder Burgess continued to officiate as pastor until called home to rest from his labors.

The church had now grown very cold, and by reason of deaths, ex-communications and removals was greatly decreased in number. Elder Silas Mercer occasionally attended her meetings. After his removal to Georgia she was for a while attended by Elder Joshua White. After his removal to the West, Elder Lemuel Burkitt visited her. After his death she was attended by Elder Joshua Lawrence for a number of years.

From about 1830 to 1860 there appears to have been no regular pastor. On the tenth of May, 1860, Elder John W. Stamper was called, and took the pastoral charge of the church. He served her faithfully until his death, which occurred July 9, 1876. From 1830 to 1876 her monthly meetings were held on the second Sunday and Saturday before. When the church was so long without a pastor she was not neglected by the ministry; but was served occasionally and alternately by Elders Joshua Lawrence, William Hyman, William Dickens, Lemuel Bennett, Lawrence Whitehead, William F. Bell, John H. Daniel and C. B. Hassell.

On the second Saturday in December, 1876, the monthly meeting was changed from the second to the first Sunday, and Elder P. D. Gold was called to take the pastoral care. On the first Saturday in January, 1879 (Elder Gold having resigned), the time of meeting was changed to the third Sunday in each month, and Elder Andrew J. Moore was chosen pastor, and so continues to the present time. General Young was Clerk of the church from June meeting, 1823, to July meeting, 1833; John Shields from then till about October, 1858; Jethro Edmonds from then till about August, 1871; M. D. Alsbrooks from then till May, 1872; Turner Bass from then till his death; and B. I. Alsbrooks from April, 1874, to the present time.

Thomas Brewer was Deacon from July meeting, 1826, to April meeting, 1835; General Young from then to March meeting, 1843; Turner Brewer from then until September meeting, 1857; Jethro Edmonds from then until August 12, 1872; M. D. Alsbrooks from then until the present time, and J. H. Alsbrooks from second Sunday in May, 1874, to the present time.

Previous to 1871 the church was much reduced in the number of members, and could not for a long time conduct the business of conference without the assistance of other churches; but since that time she has been greatly blessed with additions. The Lord has been pleased to visit her with seasons of refreshing, and added to her numbers such as He would have to be saved, and such as we believe He will own and bless in a coming day. Her membership now amounts to one hundred.

23. Lawrence’s, Edgecombe County.—This church was formerly a branch of the church at Kehukee, and until the year 1805 they were both represented in the Association. But a committee having been appointed to inquire into its standing, Lawrence’s was found to have been a constituted church for many years; so that she joined the Association as a new member in 1805. She was then under the pastoral care of Elder Joshua Lawrence. She had ninety members when she joined the Association, but by dismissions, deaths, removals, etc., she became greatly reduced in members afterwards. This church is named after Elder Joshua Lawrence, who was a member of it, and it is to be regretted that the church book for about eighteen years (from 1831 to 1849) is lost. He served this church as pastor long and faithfully, but we cannot determine as to the exact time. In 1849 Elder Blount Cooper was pastor, and the church enjoyed some seasons of refreshing under his ministry. He served till December, 1853, after which he was called home. Afterwards Elder John Stamper was called, and served till May, 1872. In April, 1873, Elder William F. Bell was called, and he served till May, 1877. In October, 1877, Elder James S. Woodard, of Wilson, N. C., consented to serve the church as her pastor, and continued to do so in a very acceptable manner till May, 1882. After this, Elder R. H. Harris served her a short time as pastor till his death in 1884. Elder M. T. Lawrence has been visiting her occasionally since.—[S. H.]

One of her own members, brother William T. Staton, after having been licensed several years to exercise his gifts, was ordained to the ministry in 1885; and another member, brother William Hearn, has for some years been licensed to exercise his gifts.—[S. H.]

Deacons: Brethren Charles Mabry and John White were ordained Deacons in May, 1849. Brother Mabry served a great many years. Brother White was dismissed by letter in 1857. Brother Turner Bass was ordained in May, 1853; dismissed by letter in 1872. Brother William Faithful was ordained in October, 1869, and served the church till his death, in 1885. Brother William Hodges was ordained in August, 1872, and yet serves the church. Brother M. G. Weathersbee was ordained in February, 1879, and served till 1881.

Clerks: Brother Turner Bass was appointed Clerk in February, 1849, and served till April, 1869. Brother Nathan G. Pitt was appinted in 1869, and served till January, 1879. Brother J. M. Howell was appointed in January, 1879, and serves to the present time.

Brother Richard Harrison was long a member of this church, and, to show his care for it, before he died, willed to it five hundred dollars, the interest on which was to be paid to the pastor thereof yearly, without limit.

This church became a member of the Skewarkey Union, at Flat Swamp, in June, 1850. She is now in a very healthy condition, and numbers eighty members. Her monthly meetings are on the fourth Sunday and Saturday before.

24. Lebanon, Dare County.—This church was formed from Providence Church, May 10, 1879. Elder J. D. Wicker, of Kitty Hawk, Currituck County, was chosen pastor; Lamb Basnight and Wilson Turiford, Deacons; and Manlif Turiford, Clerk. The church contains twenty-one members, and has its meetings on the third Sunday in each month and Saturday before.—[S. H.]

25. Morattock, Washington County.—The house of worship for this church is situated about three miles southwest of Plymouth, near a creek of the same name. This church has a singular history. It was first gathered through the instrumentality of Elders Silas Mercer and John Page, and they were succeeded by Elder Martin Ross. A few persons were at first connected in church relationship, but some of them were unworthy members, and hastened her downfall, so that she in a little time became extinct. Others of her number, however, delighted in church fellowship, and became members of the church at Skewarkey (a great distance off), then under the pastoral care of Elder Martin Ross. They attended the meetings quarterly at Skewarkey until 1791, when they petitioned the church for dismission to be again constituted, which was granted. The body was then small, and passed through another night of coldness and spiritual darkness. She was attended by Elder Ross until his removal to Yoppim, and then by Elder Amariah Biggs. In the years 1801 and 1802 she experienced some refreshing showers, and called upon Elder Amariah Biggs to take the pastoral care, which he accepted, and took a letter of dismission from the church at Scuppernong and joined this church, and continued to officiate as pastor until his death, in 1827.

In 1830 Elder Micajah Ambrose took the care of the church. Silas Murray was licensed in September, 1836. Elder Ambrose was succeeded by Elder Barnes, who took the pastoral care in September, 1836, and he was succeeded by Elder Micajah Perry, who was chosen November 20, 1841. Elder Perry was succeeded by Elder Miles Everett, who was chosen pastor December 17, 1842, and Elder Everett was succeeded by Elder Arnot Waters on January 16, 1847. Elder William Gray was licensed to exercise his gifts January 15, 1848, was ordained January 19, 1850, by a presbytery composed of Elders Miles Everett and Arnot Waters, and took the pastoral care of the church in November, 1853. Elder R. W. Peacock was licensed in March, 1860, and ordained January 20, 1866, by the laying on of the hands of Elders William Gray and Jonathan Wallace. Elder N. H. Harrison was liberated to exercise his gifts in public in January, 1866, and ordained by Elders William Gray, William B. Perry and G. T. Tuggle, February, 1867. Elder A. Craddock was licensed in November, 1871, and ordained April 20, 1872, by a presbytery composed of Elders Gray and Harrison.

Elder Joseph E. Adams united with the church on June 17,1876, upon a letter of dismission from the church at Fellowship, Johnston County, N. C. Elder Gray died March 6, 1879, and since his death there has been no choice made of a pastor to succeed him. The church has now among her members four ordained ministers, viz., Harrison, Adams, Craddock and J. T. Rowe, and, in addition to these and other visiting Elders, she had for several years the services of that able and faithful minister of God, Elder Clayton Moore, of Jamesville, who for a long period visited almost regularly at her monthly meetings.

Deacons of the church have been, since 1830, about as follows, viz.: Charles Blount, William Gray, Thomas H. Turner, Daniel Leggett, E. W. Ayers, Edmond Harrison, James A. Harrison and Asa R. Allen.

Her Clerks have been Malichi Corprew, W. W. Mizell, Charles Blount, Daniel Leggett, D. T. Ayers, T. S. Latham and E. G. Peacock; the last named continues to fill the office to the present time.

The time of her monthly meetings occurs on the third Sunday and Saturday before. The number in fellowship is ninety-five.

26. North Creek, Beaufort County.—The house of worship belonging to this church is situated near North Creek, in said county. Near this church there was formerly a society of the free-will order, of which one Elder Winfield was pastor; but it pleased the Lord that the gospel should be preached here, and many persons embraced the truth and were constituted into a church. Elder James McCabe took the pastoral care, and continued in that office until his death in the year 1807. This church was formerly called Pungo, but the name was changed from that to North Creek. Elder Lemuel Ross had the pastoral care of the church from 1824 to 1837.

Elder Miles Eorest then served the church a few years, after which Elder Arnot Waters became pastor until 1855. Then Elder Albin B. Swindelle served as pastor until 1861. From that year to 1866 the church had no regular pastor, when Elder Bryan Whitford, of Craven County, was chosen, and has been pastor ever since; but of late years he visits the church only once or twice annually, while Elder D. W. Topping, who was ordained in June, 1870, by Elders N. H. Harrison and Bryan Whitford, has been serving the church monthly. In 1868 the membership increased to about seventy, but a season of coldness followed. The present number in fellowship is twenty. John Satchwell and William Ross were among the first Clerks. Ira H. Topping, father of Elder D. W. Topping, was Clerk from March, 1868, till his death in March, 1883. The present Clerk is William Baynor, and the Deacon is J. S. Sadler. The regular meetings occur on the third Sunday in each month and Saturday before.—[Last paragraph by S. H.]

27. Peach Tree, Franklin County.—This church was constituted on Saturday before the fifth Sunday in April, 1850, by Elders John H. Daniel, Blount Cooper and Robert D. Hart.

The house of worship is situated on the road leading from Louisburg to Nashville, about ten miles below Louisburg.

William Jackson and Dempsey Bowden were ordained Deacons of the church at the time of her organization, and their successors were brother Yelvington and brother Calvin J. Walker.

Elder Hart served the church as pastor from the period of her organization to November, 1859. She was then without a pastor until 1862, at which time Russell Tucker, one of her members, was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by a presbytery composed of Elders John H. Daniel and John W. Purvis, and was then called on and accepted the pastoral care of the church. He still served her faithfully, for more than twenty years (with a short exception), even under much bodily affliction, until his death, November 12, 1883.

This church is situated on the borders of the Association boundary, and is surrounded by great numbers of “missionaries;” but she remains firm and steadfast in the Apostles’ doctrine, unshaken in the least by the high winds of error that sweep all around her. Her membership deserve high commendation from their brethren everywhere for the noble stand taken by them and maintained in the cause of their blessed Master. Her meetings occur on the third Sunday in each month and Saturday before. She has thirty-nine members at present.

28. Providence, Currituck County.—Providence Church, North Banks, Currituck County, was constituted on August 26, 1854, by a presbytery composed of Samuel Tatum and C. T. Sawyer, with eight members, four of them females. Elder Hodges Gallop was called to the pastoral care of the church; brethren Enoch F. Beals and Jasper Toler were the first Deacons, and brother Hezekiah W. Beasley the first Clerk.

Elder Gallop served the church as pastor until his death, which occurred in February, 1877. In May, 1877, Elder John D. Wicker was chosen pastor, and continues in that office to the present time. He was ordained in January, 1866. In 1870 George Scarborough was ordained Deacon in place of Jasper Toler. Brother H. W. Beasley resigned the office of Clerk, and brother William Wicker was appointed in his place; and in January, 1872, brother Wicker resigned, and brother William C. Beals was appointed in his place. Brother Samuel J. Harris succeeded him, and died in April, 1878. He was succeeded by the present incumbent, brother William J. Morse. The present standing of the church is about as follows, viz.:

Elder J. D. Wicker, pastor; Elder H. W. Beasley; licentiates, A. J. Austin and John Rogers; Deacons, Enoch F. Beals, George W. Scarborough and Willis Morse; Clerk, William J. Morse. Aggregate, four ministers, three Deacons, one Clerk, forty-nine members in all. Her monthly meetings occur on the fourth Sunday and Saturday before. She has forty-nine members.

29. Pungo, Beaufort County.—This church was constituted in the year 1824, with members dismissed from North Creek Church, and became a member of the Association in 1825, with fifteen members. Her meeting-house is situated near the head of Pungo River. She was many years ago troubled a good deal by the preaching of the doctrines of the general atonement, etc., which produced some dissension among her members, and in order to restore harmony she had to expel several members.

Among her occasional and regular pastors were Elders Ross Carrowan, Miles Eorest, G. W. Carrowan and A. B. Swindelle. During the war the church had no pastor, and got into a low condition. In 1866 Elder N. H. Harrison was chosen pastor, and served the church until 1879, when Elder Daniel W. Topping was chosen pastor, and still continues to serve the church in that capacity.

The number of members is twenty-four. H. L. Davis is the present Clerk, and Daniel Paul the Deacon. Two of the members of this church, David Carter and Aquila Paul, have been licensed to exercise their gifts in public.

The regular meetings of this church take place the second Sunday in each month and Saturday before.—[Last three paragraphs by S. H.]

30. Rocky Swamp, Halifax County.—Some time during the year 1767 Jesse Read was brought to see himself a sinner justly condemned; but by the grace of God he was enabled to believe in Christ as the Savior of his soul. There were then no Baptists in the settlement. Brother Read began to read Whitefield’s sermons in public, feeling, as he did, a desire for the salvation of his fellow-mortals. But the Lord of the harvest soon sent forth some of His servants into this part of His vineyard. First Elder Charles Daniel; then Elder Jeremiah Walker; also Elder John Tanner. The Lord was pleased to bless the labors of His faithful ministers. Very soon several persons made public profession and were baptized, and were considered a branch of the church at Daniel’s meeting-house, on Fishing Creek. Soon afterwards the meeting-house was built where it now stands, on a piece of land which Elder Read gave for that purpose. On July 11, 1774, the church was constituted with the assistance of Elders Walker, Tanner and Joseph Anthony. There were only eight members at the constitution.

The same year the church sent messengers and letter to the Separate Baptist Association, which was held that year in Amelia County, Virginia, and was received a member of that body.

After this union with the Separate Baptist Association, brother Read began to exercise his gifts to the satisfaction of his brethren, and was finally set apart for ordination. He was ordained on May 5, 1775, by Elders Samuel Harris and Joseph Anthony. He was then called to the pastoral care of the church, and continued to serve her as pastor until old age and weakness of mind prevented his doing so. He died about the year 1820. He, with Elder Lemuel Burkitt, compiled the first history of the Kehukee Association, reaching down to 1803.

Rocky Swamp was one of the ten churches which joined the Kehukee Association after she became established on her present basis. She was constituted with eight members in 1774, and between that time and 1803 two hundred and sixty persons had been baptized into her communion. But by reason of dismissions, removals, deaths and other causes, she held in fellowship in 1803 only about one hundred members.

This church has been wonderfully blessed by the services of visiting brethren in the ministry. After the death of Elder Read she gave Elder Philemon Bennett a call to the pastoral care, which he accepted, and continued to serve her until about 1833, when from old age and other causes he failed.

About the year 1831 the church experienced some trouble by obtaining a letter of dismission to unite with others in the formation of a new Association. But when the new Association was formed (called the Tar River Association) it proved to be a “missionary” body; so that the church had to retrace her steps and again unite with the Kehukee. This reunion took place in 1837. After this event the church had very little preaching for about two years. In 1839 the Lord was pleased to send Elder Blount Cooper to preach for her, and he continued to do so until 1842. Brother L. B. Bennett became a member of this church in 1833; was liberated to exercise his gifts in January, 1841, and in 1843 (February 19) was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by a presbytery composed of Elders John H. Daniel and Blount Cooper. He took the pastoral care of the church after his ordination, and continued to serve her in that capacity till May, 1880. Elder J. W. Johnston was chosen pastor in July, 1880, and still serves her in that capacity. This church has met with much opposition and persecution from the “missionaries,” but remains firm in the faith to the present time. Her stated meetings are on the fourth Sunday and Saturday before in each month. She has forty-two members.

31. Sandy Grove, Nash County.—This church was constituted in 1813, with the name of Antioch, with about twenty-three members, on what was known as Turkey Creek, in said county. These members came from the church at Sappony. They chose for their pastor Elder Jordan Sherwood, and for their Deacons brethren John Rice and Osborne Strickland, for their Clerk William Jordan. These brethren built them a house and held their meetings monthly, and the Lord blessed them and increased their numbers considerably.

About the year 1835 a gentleman by the name of Lemon gave them a site in the neighborhood of what is now called Stanhope, on which they built a house, and called it “Lemon’s Meeting-house.” They continued to worship in this house until it decayed, when they put up a new house on the same lot of land, and gave it the name of Sandy Grove. Elder Sherwood remained pastor until his death. For a long time after the death of Elder Sherwood the church had no regular pastor. Shortly after the death of the two old Deacons (brethren Rice and Strickland) James M. Baines and Isaac Strickland were appointed Deacons, and A. B. Baines Clerk, who continued in office until a division took place in the church in regard to missions, when about half the members left the old landmarks; the rest remain until this day contending for the faith once delivered to the saints.

Elder Russell Tucker served as pastor several years. Elder Bernard Greenwood, a native of Germany, and at present a resident of Wilson, N. C., has been, since 1881, a member and the pastor of Sandy Grove Church.—[S. H.]

Her meetings are on the fourth Sunday and Saturday before in each month. She has forty members.

32. Sappony, Nash County.—The house of worship belonging to this church is situated about twelve miles west of Rocky Mount and seven miles south of Nashville. The church was constituted on August 7, 1804, by Elders Nathan Gilbert, Henry Hunt and Francis Winstead. It was composed of twenty-six members, who received letters of dismission from the church at the Falls of Tar River. At the first Conference, which was in August, Elder Jordan Sherwood was called, and accepted the pastoral care of the church. Elder Vick was chosen Clerk; John Poland and Edward Ballard Deacons.

The Lord granted refreshing seasons to this little band of brethren until their number soon increased to sixty. Elder Sherwood continued the pastoral care until his death, which took place on December 10, 1842. Shortly after his death Elder Sherwood Williams was chosen pastor, and continued for several years, and then left them and moved to the State of Georgia, since which time the church has had no regular pastor, except for a very short space of time.

In 1812 John Poland resigned his Deaconship, and brother Matthew Joyner was appointed in his place, and continued Deacon until his death. After the death of Deacon Ballard, brother Isaac Vick was appointed in his stead; and at the death of brother Vick, brother A. B. Baines was appointed, and continued in office until he joined the church at the Falls of Tar River. Shortly after brother Baines joined the Falls Church, brother Joel Barnes was appointed Deacon, and holds said office at the present time.

The church has for several years been in a cold and drooping state; yet we think there are some precious jewels there, and some whoso ears have been opened to hear the joyful sound of salvation by grace when proclaimed by the under-shepherds. For a few years past brethren Cooper Pitt, Wiggins, B. Greenwood and other brethren have been preaching for them, but they have no regular pastor. Her stated meetings are on the third Sunday and Saturday before in each month. She has fourteen members.

33. Skewarkey, Martin County.—This church was originally a branch of the church at Flat Swamp, then under the care of Elder John Page, who visited this branch for several years, and under whose ministry the cause of truth flourished. Some time afterwards Martin Ross, one of the members of this church, was licensed to speak in public. The members subsequently petitioned the church for dismission to form a constitution. After some delay it was granted, and she was constituted by Elders Lemuel Burkitt and John Page, and her young preacher ordained in 1787. For several years she had some additions, but, like other churches, a time of coldness came on, and she experienced a considerable portion, although her pastor served her regularly and preached a great deal elsewhere.

About 1791 some members in the neighborhood of Morattock petitioned for letters of dismission to form a church at that place. In 1796 Elder Ross took a letter of dismission to join a church at Yoppim, and at the same time Joseph Biggs, a young member, took a letter of dismission to join the church at Flat Swamp. It was with reluctance they were granted, as that would strip her of ministerial gifts. She therefore groaned under her afflictions until the kind hand of Providence favored her in raising up Elder Luke Ward, a member of said church, to the work of the ministry. In 1799 he was ordained by Elders Joseph and Amariah Biggs. The Lord has been pleased to raise up quite a number in this church to the work of the ministry, viz.: Martin Ross, Aaron Spivey, Joseph Biggs, Luke Ward, Abram Tice, Harrell Cherry, John Bennett, James Daniel, John Tice, John Ward, C. B. Hassell, Thomas Biggs and Sylvester Hassell.

In the year 1803 thirty-four members were dismissed from this church to form one at Smithwick’s Creek, and about the same time about twenty more were dismissed to form a church at Tranter’s Creek. In the year 1827 she dismissed about fifty members to form a church at Picot meeting-house, and also upwards of twenty members to form a constitution at Beargrass. About the year 1806 Elder Luke Ward took a letter of dismission and joined the church at Flat Swamp, and about the same time Elder Joseph Biggs returned from Flat Swamp to this church and took the pastoral care thereof, and continued in that capacity until his death, which occurred May 31, 1844. After Elder Biggs took the pastoral charge the church was in a very cold condition, and had become much reduced in numbers. By death she had lost her Deacons and Clerk, and Elder Biggs had to officiate as Minister, Deacon and Clerk, in the year 1816 this church experienced some additions, and the same continued more or less for many years.

After the death of Elder Biggs, in 1844, Elder C. B. Hassell was chosen pastor in November following, and continued to act in that capacity till his death, April 11, 1880. He was baptized in 1828, licensed in 1842 (January 8), and ordained in 1843 (December 5). Elder C. B. Hassell was ordained by Elders William Hyman, William Whitaker and James Osbourn. He was baptized by Elder Joseph Biggs on March 13,1828, at a place called “Back Swamp Bridge,” about two miles west of Skewarkey meeting-house. Some years after his ordination, Thomas Biggs, a member of this church, and a nephew of Elder Joseph Biggs, was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances; but, being much afflicted with rheumatism, he never took the pastoral care of any church or baptized any person. He was sound in the faith, and for many years sat in a chair in the pulpit when delivering his discourses. He visited other churches also, and was very useful as a minister and as a disciplinarian.

In 1864 Sylvester Hassell, son of Elder C. B. Hassell, was baptized by his father in Roanoke River. In 1871 he was licensed to exercise his gifts, and in August, 1874, was ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances by Elders C. B. Hassell, William Whitaker and David House. Since 1881 he has been pastor of the church at Skewarkey.

A long line of Deacons might be named as having belonged to this church; the two officiating at the present time are Melton Bennett and William Slade. Brother Joseph D. Biggs, son of Elder Joseph Biggs, united with this church in 1826, and has served the church as Clerk ever since September, 1828. He has also served the Association as Clerk ever since the death of his father, who had served in that capacity for many years up to the period of his death. Asa Biggs, son of Elder Joseph Biggs, was also a member of this church, and one of the most useful and exemplary that she ever had. He was a public man to a great extent, filling many offices in the course of his life. He was an eminent lawyer, colonel of a militia regiment, member of both branches of the Federal Legislature, Federal and Confederate Judge, besides filling other honorable stations. He was born in 1811, baptized by Elder C. B. Hassell in 1853, and died in 1878.

Skewarkey meeting-house stands about one mile from Williamston, on the Washington road. Her meetings from the beginning, we believe, have been held on the second Sunday and Saturday before in each month.

Her Clerks, besides the present one, have been Jacob Morris, John Ferrill, H. Biggs, Nathan Ross and Daniel Biggs. Her Deacons, besides the present incumbents, have been William Biggs, Reuben Ross, James Hardison, Starling Rogers, Alfred Moore, Stanly Duggan and William Melson.

Elder Joseph Biggs, member of this church, by authority of the Kehukee Association, brought the history of said Association from 1803 down to 1833; and Elder Sylvester Hassell was similarly authorized to revise and complete said history to the present time.—[S. H.]

Elder C. B. Hassell baptized for this church more than one hundred and fifty persons, and her present membership is ninety-six.

34. South Mattamuskeet, Hyde County.—This church held her meetings originally on the south side of Mattamuskeet Lake, but now on the north side. It is the only church in the county, but there are several meeting places scattered around for convenience to the members. The constitution of this church does not appear, but in 1802 she was under the pastoral care of Elder William Carrowan, and consisted of about sixty members.

After the death of Elder Carrowan she was served by Elder John Bray. Elder Green Carrowan, son of Elder William Carrowan, was raised up to the ministry in this church and ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances. He took the pastoral care of her, and continued in the discharge of that office until he moved into Beaufort County and gathered a church on Goose Creek. Elder George W. Carrowan succeeded Elder Green Carrowan; Elder A. B. Swindelle succeeded him, and Elder Albert Cartwright succeeded Elder Swindelle. Elder Cartwright is pastor of the church at present, and is a very useful and worthy minister of the gospel. The church is in a prosperous condition. Her monthly meetings are on the first Sunday and Saturday before. She now has one hundred and fourteen members.

35. South Quay, Southampton County, Va.—At a conference held on the first day of March, 1775, Holland Darden and Solomon King were chosen Deacons, and Elisha Darden chosen Clerk of the church (as it was then considered, though without a constitution), and Elder David Barrow pastor. The membership at that time was composed of twenty-three whites, male and female, and nineteen blacks, making forty-two total.

In 1779 Solomon King was removed from the office of Deacon, and John Bowers appointed in his stead. From 1775 to 1785 the church was simply an organized body. At a conference held on September 3, 1785, a motion was made for a regular constitution of the church, and the adoption of a church covenant and rules of decorum; at which time Holland Darden and John Bowers were ordained by the imposition of hands as Deacons of the church, and Elisha Darden chosen as Clerk.

From 1798 to 1809 there seemed to be no regular pastor of the church. In 1809 Elder John Bowers took charge as pastor, with Jacob Darden as Clerk and Deacon. In 1817 Elisha Darden was chosen Deacon of the church, and ordained by Elders Jones and Darden; and Elder John Harrell was called to the pastoral care of the same. He remained pastor until 1826, when Simon Murphey was ordained a minister of the gospel by a presbytery composed of Elders Mitchell, Chambliss and Woodson, and Hardy Cross was ordained Deacon. Elder Simon Murphey remained pastor of the church until 1835, when a division took place among the members in regard to “missionary” societies, Sabbath Schools, and all kindred institutions of men as appendages to the church of Christ. The “missionaries” being in the minority, thought proper to remove their place of meeting across the Blackwater River into Nansemond County; while the majority, being established upon the old foundation of the Apostles, and adhering faithfully to the doctrine of salvation by grace, remained where they were and in the occupancy of the old meeting-house.

About the year 1837 this church united with those forming the Kehukee Association, and Edwin Harrison was chosen pastor. Elder Harrison continued pastor until about the year 1848, when he was removed, and Jonathan Lankford was chosen in his place, and filled the office until about 1856, when he was removed by death. Brethren Joseph J. Lawrence and A. L. Gardner were also chosen Deacons, and served the church until removed by death. Jesse B. Johnson is the present Deacon. This church has been served, for a number of years, by brethren in the ministry from various churches belonging to the Kehukee Association, all of which were located in North Carolina and at a considerable distance from the church, situated in Southampton County, in the State of Virginia.

In 1872 Elder Thomas O’Berry, of Tarborough, N. C., took the pastoral care of this church, and served her satisfactorily for some years. This church has greatly excited the sympathy of her sister churches of the Kehukee Association, because she was so far removed from most of them—was in another State, and was so completely surrounded by false churches, false teachers and false doctrines, that continually threatened to overwhelm her, and substitute in her place one of the daughters of Babylon. Her monthly meetings occur on the first Sunday and Saturday before; her number of members is nineteen.

36. Sparta, Edgecombe County.—In the year 1855 friends of the Primitive Baptists in and near the village of Sparta donated money and land, erected a house, and invited the Baptists to take charge of it and have regular meetings therein. On January 10, 1856, brethren and friends met there, also several ministers of the gospel. After preaching, the Elders and brethren met in council and appointed Elders Jesse Baker and John Stamper a presbytery, who constituted the church at this place with five members, three from the church at Conetoe, one from the church at Tarborough, and one from the church at Autrey’s Creek, all of whom had previously taken letters of dismission from their respective churches to form one at Sparta.

On Saturday before the fourth Sunday in April, 1856, they met in Conference and chose James Carney Deacon, and J. R. O’Berry Clerk; in July following brother Carney was ordained to the Deaconship by Elders William Hyman, Jesse Baker and William A. Ross. The church had no regular pastor from her ordination till 1859, and during this period she was served by Elders in the ministry, Edward Cox, William A. Ross, Jesse Baker, William Hyman, John Stamper, and others.

In August, 1859, Elder Edmund Edwards accepted the pastoral care of the church, and brother Edward Cobb was ordained Deacon at the same time by Elders John H. Daniel and Edward Cox. Brother Cobb filled the office of Deacon well; and with an upright walk and a godly conversation obtained the approbation of his brethren until he fell asleep in Christ, which occurred on May 1, 1870. Since May, 1873, the church has had no Deacon of her own, and has been served by visiting Deacons from neighboring churches. Elder Edwards continued to have the pastoral charge of this church until his death, which occurred February 6,1862. During his care of the church she was in a healthy condition, and in October, 1858, was received a member of the Kehukee Association. Elder Edwards was one of the most remarkable ministers ever raised up to that calling. He was very illiterate, and made use of broken language, but was one of the most spiritual of men; his preaching reached the hearts of his hearers, brought tears to their eyes, comforted their hearts, and convinced them of the mighty power of God dwelling in him thus to sway the hearts of the people and spread the feast of fat things before them. His ministry was short and precious to the saints.[1]

In 1873 the church called Elder Thomas O’Berry to her pastoral care, but there seems to be no record of his acceptance. At any rate he served the church both previous and subsequent to his call for a period of about six years. During recent years other ministers, both from the Kehukee and Contentnea Associations, have visited this church. Her monthly meetings are on the fourth Sunday and Saturday before. She has thirteen members.

37. Smithwick’s Creek, Martin County.—This church was at first a branch of the one at Skewarkey. While in that condition the members met for worship at the residence of brother Joshua Roberson, and had Elder Joseph Biggs to preach for them, and the church was eventually constituted in brother Roberson’s House. About the year 1803 or 1804 the members built them a meeting-house on Hay’s Branch, between two prongs of Smithwick’s Creek, from which creek the church derived its name, and still requested Elder Biggs to serve them as pastor, which he consented to do, and served them as such until about the year 1820.

Abraham Tice, a member of this church, exercised a ministerial gift, but was never ordained to the administration of gospel ordinances. Some years afterwards Hosea Lanier, a member of this church, after preaching several years, was ordained by Elders Joseph Biggs and Luke Ward; yet, notwithstanding the church requested it, he never gave his consent to take the pastoral care of her. He, however, served her in preaching and administering ordinances until about the year 1827 or 1828, when he took a letter of dismission from her and moved to the State of Tennessee, and settled on Hatchie River. Then Humphrey Stallings and Micajah Perry, both members of this church, commenced preaching, and being approved of by the church, they were at her request ordained by Elders Joseph Biggs and Lemuel Ross. Elder Stallings moved to Tennessee, and Elder Perry did not live many years to serve the church in a ministerial capacity, but was sound in the faith, and was quite gifted in spiritualizing all subjects that were presented to his mind.

Elder Jeremiah Leggett served this church at one time, but he embraced Arminian or free-will tenets, and led off several of the members into error. A division eventually took place, when the errorists were rejected by the Association, and those members holding to the old Articles of Faith and the ancient practice of the church were held to be the true church of Christ at Smithwick’s Creek.

The church then went down into a low, cold state for many years, with but very few members, small congregations and irregular preaching. Elder William Whitaker, whose membership was at Beargrass, was considered pastor of this church for many years, but he preached for them but seldom, and his attendance was very irregular. Elder C. B. Hassell and others visited the church occasionally while in this cold state, and the preaching, praying, sighing and groaning of God’s people were not all in vain, for the Lord broke forth at last in their behalf, and a season of refreshing from His presence was experienced by the saints at this place. Simon D. Ward, a young man about seventeen years old, was called from darkness to light and desired to join the church. His father, John Ward, and his brother, John L., sought to prevent it, fearing he was beside himself, and would harm himself and the church also. He was only kept back about one month, and was received and baptized in May, 1851. This was the commencement of joyful seasons. In July following his brother, John L., and others were received into the church, and for two or three years the church was blessed with the addition of about forty members, nearly all of whom have proved useful to her and the community in which they lived.

Her Clerks since 1830 have been H. Stallings, David Singleton and John L. Ward. Her Deacons have been, since then, John Hodges, Bethel Leggett, William Daniel, Eason Lilly and David Hardison.

Her ministers, raised up in her own body, have been Henry Peal and Levi Rogerson, who were licensed to exercise their gifts in June, 1860, and ordained in March, 1864, by Elders C. B. Hassell and William B. Perry, and in December, 1874, were both chosen pastors of the church in the place of Elder William Whitaker, deceased. Besides these named, Elders Thomas Biggs, John Ward, Clayton Moore, William Gray and William B. Perry have supplied this church by preaching for them in years past. And Elder Gray moved his membership to it from Morattock in April, 1876, where it remained to the period of his death in 1879.

38. Spring Green, Martin County.—This church was constituted in the year 1811 with about seventeen members, who were dismissed from some of the adjacent churches. Her house of worship is situated on the road leading from Williamston to Tarborough, about nine miles from Williamston. Shortly after her constitution she called on Elder William Hyman, whose membership was at Cross Roads, to serve her as pastor, which call he accepted, and continued to serve her until John Tice moved into the neighborhood and became a member thereof. He was received a member of this church upon a letter of dismission from Skewarkey. He had been preaching by permission of the church at Skewarkey; and after uniting with the church at Spring Green, he was ordained, and she called him to the pastoral care. After his removal in 1828 the church received the services of Elders William Hyman, Luke Ward and Joseph Biggs. Elder Blount Cooper preached for this church for several years, more or less uniformly, until perhaps about the year 1846. She has been blessed with preaching pretty much ever since she was organized, but up to 1880 had but one ordained minister who was raised up in her midst, and he was soon cut off from her communion and never restored. One of her members, brother George D. Roberson, after being licensed for several years, was ordained to the ministry in 1880. He is quite promising, and bids fair to become a useful minister and a satisfactory expounder of the word.

About the year 1840 Elder C. B. Hassell commenced visiting this church, and till the spring of 1845 was frequently at her meetings. Most of the years 1845 and 1846 he was absent from the county, but about the first of 1847 began again to serve her regularly and with very little exception until his death in April, 1880. He was her pastor for a long number of years. He baptized into her communion one hundred and twenty persons.—[S. H.]

Ministers visiting this church, besides those named, have been William W. K. Philpot, Luke Ward, David House, William A. Ross, John L Ross, Clayton Moore, William F. Bell, Edward Cox, John H. Daniel, P. D. Gold, R. H. Harris, John W. Purvis, Jordan W. Johnston, Henry Peal and Joseph E. Adams. This church shows signs of prosperity. Her membership is warm, and much devoted to the cause of her Lord and Master.

Her present Deacons are S. W. Outterbridge and R. D. Matthews. Brother S. W. Outterbridge was ordained in February, 1870, and brother R. D. Matthews in November, 1871. Brother Bennett was ordained long before (in 1852). Brother Bryant Bennett, a most lovely and exemplary Baptist, was Clerk and Deacon of this church for many years. He took great interest in the success of this History. He was most painfully afflicted with a cancer on his face about half of his life, and bore his sufferings with Christ-like resignation, and entered into rest in 1884. Brother Outterbridge has served as Clerk since 1868.—[S. H.]

This church is a member of the Skewarkey Union. Her monthly meetings are held on the fourth Sunday and Saturday previous; and her membership now is one hundred and three.

39. Tarborough, Edgecombe County.—This church was constituted on February 7, 1819, by Elders Joshua Lawrence, Martin Ross, Thomas Billings and Thomas Meredith. For a number of years previous to this preaching was occasionally heard in Tarborough, especially from the lips of that eminent servant of Christ, Elder Nathan Gilbert. He also endeavored to form a church there, but failed, as he could not induce a sufficient number of members to leave their churches for that purpose.

Subsequently Elder Joshua Lawrence frequently visited this place and preached. About two years before the constitution of this church, Elder Lawrence was heard to say that he was powerfully impressed with this passage of Scripture: “And God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.” He renewed his ministerial exertions and commenced preaching there monthly, and shortly after this the church was formed. Elder Lawrence consented to continue his ministerial labors with the church; and in a few years, by letters of dismission from other churches and by baptisms, her number increased to about forty members, although there were only six at the formation. The church enjoyed much peace and harmony, and mutual love and fellowship seemed to prevail.

When Elder Lawrence first preached at this place he found much difficulty in procuring a house in which to preach. He often preached in a joiner’s shop belonging to Mr. McWilliams, and at other times in the Academy. At length the brethren and friends succeeded in erecting a meeting-house.

The good feeling existing in this church was at length destroyed for a season. About the year 1826 or 1827 serious threats were made against Elder Lawrence’s life; and he was warned by two or three messages in one week not to go to town on the succeeding Saturday to his appointment, as his life would be in danger. But he went to his meeting at the time appointed and preached to the church and people, speaking his mind freely. He, however, after this, for six or eight months, absented himself from this church, and during his absence the church called on Elder P. W. Dowd, of Raleigh, to preach for them, as he was spending much of his time in Tarborough. The difficulties arose in this church somewhat in this wise: Some of the members and also some of the visiting ministers frequented Masonic Lodges and parades, to the grief of those who were opposed to such things. And the course pursued by the advocates of “Missions” also caused grief in the minds of such as were opposed to new inventions and substitutes for the religion of Christ. In a short time parties were formed, and the most unpleasant occurrences took place. The members divided, and a small majority (nineteen to sixteen) appeared in favor of discountenancing these new things, and might have retained possession of the house, but Elder Lawrence had declared he would preach in that house no more, and the church followed him to the old public meeting-house belonging to the town. Here Elder L. and other ministers visiting Tarborough preached for many years.

The church represented herself as usual in the Association in 1829. She excluded her disaffected members afterwards; dismissed Elder Dowd from the pastoral care, putting Elder Lawrence in his place, and put William B. Collins as Clerk in the place of R. S. Long. On January 3, 1830, brother Coffield King was ordained Deacon by Elders Joshua Lawrence and Mark H. Bennett. Deacons afterwards appointed were R. D. Hart, Thomas O’Berry and James Hodges. After the resignation of W. B. Collins the following served in order as Clerk, viz.: Eli Porter, R. D. Hart, Coffield King, Asa Biggs and Joseph J. Porter.

James Elleanor was licensed to exercise his spiritual gifts in August, 1843, and died January 26, 1845, without ever being ordained. Robert D. Hart was received to baptism in July, 1841; licensed in September, 1843; and ordained in December, 1849. Daniel Land, a member of this church, was licensed in November, 1843, and ordained in May, 1848, by Elders Blount Cooper and John H. Daniel. Elder Blount Cooper, whose membership was at Conoho, took the pastoral care of this church in May, 1844, and held it till his death, which occurred about March, 1854. Elder Joshua Lawrence, former pastor, died Monday, January 23, 1843, aged sixty-five years, four months and thirteen days. Elder C. B. Hassell was requested in April, 1854, to accept the pastoral care of the church, but he declined in May following; yet he was with her at the August and November meetings of that year, and with slight exception visited the church at her May meetings until his death in 1880. Elder R. D. Hart took the pastoral care of the church in November, 1856. Elder Thomas O’Berry was licensed in September, 1860, and ordained in February, 1871. Elder Robert C. Leachman, a refugee from Virginia, preached a good deal for this church during the war between the States with ability and much satisfaction to the members. Elder I. N. Vanmeter, of Illinois, made a visit to North Carolina in 1874, and visited this church at her May meeting of that year.

Elder William Warren was ordained in November, 1873, chosen pastor in July, 1877, resigned his pastoral charge in September, 1878, and Elder P. D. Gold, of Wilson, was chosen in his place, and in January, 1879, accepted the call, and has served ever since in that capacity. Brother Joseph J. Porter was baptized in June, 1874, appointed Treasurer in place of C. King, deceased, in February, 1877, and is Clerk of the church at the present time. Her monthly meetings are the first Sunday and Saturday before. She has fifty-eight members.

40. White Plains, Beaufort County.—This church was organized by members dismissed from Beaverdam, a branch of the church at Washington. Her house of worship is situated between the towns of Washington and Plymouth. Upon her organization Elder Miles Everett, one of her own members, accepted the pastoral care of her. She was received a member of the Association in 1828, with about twenty members.

In March, 1840, Elder Jonathan Wallace took the pastoral care of the church, and Elder Arnot Waters was often with him in preaching for the church. Elder Wallace died in 1862, and Elder Waters continued preaching for the church until his death, which occurred April 24, 1866, aged about seventy years. In July, 1866, Elder Redding W. Peacock took the pastoral care of the church, and so continued to serve her until his death. In 1870 Elder N. H. Harrison took the pastoral care of the church, and served in that capacity several years.

Deacons: In 1828 brethren Asa Oden and George Harris were ordained Deacons. In 1835 John Haborn was ordained. In 1850 Levin Osbourn was ordained. In 1872 Langley R. Bowen and Thomas H. Wallace were ordained, and remain in office to the present time. Clerks: John Windley was chosen Clerk in 1828, Levin Osbourn in 1840, and James G. Bowen in 1850; the last named brother continues serving the church to the present time. Monthly meetings are held on the first Sunday in each month and the previous day. Number in fellowship, forty-eight.

41. Williams’s, Edgecombe County.—This church joined the Association in 1809, with thirty-five members. The name, originally, was Prospect Chapel, but in 1811 it was thought best to change the location of the house, and it was then called Williams’s, because Mr. John Williams donated to the church the land on which the house is erected. The church was constituted on Thursday before the fourth Sunday in August, 1804, by Elders Moses Bennett and Philemon Bennett, with members dismissed from Fishing Creek. After constitution. Elder Philemon Bennett served her as pastor, and continued to do so until 1820.

Under Elder Bennett’s ministry she experienced prosperous times, and in 1811 a season of refreshing came down upon her, during which about one hundred and ten persons were added by baptism. Brethren John George and James Elleanor were permitted by this church to exercise their spiritual gifts. After Elder Philemon Bennett ceased to serve the church, his son, Elder Mark H. Bennett, consented to take the pastoral care of her, January, 1830, and continued to do so till March, 1842.

After this time the church was visited by Elders R. D. Hart, J. H. Daniel, J. W. Stamper, and others, but had no pastor until September, 1876, when Elder Jordan W. Johnston was chosen to that office. This church has had three of her members ordained to the ministry, Willie Pittman, Blount Bryan and Jordan W. Johnston. Her Deacons have been David Bradley, Willie Pittman, Henry Pittman, Noah Leggett, S. B. Bradley, J. H. Pippen, Lawrence Johnston and William Vick.—[Last paragraph by S. H.]

1. He was born October 20, 1816; joined the church at Autrey’s Creek June, 1853; was licensed to exercise his gift in March, 1856; and ordained to the ministry June, 1857. He had the care of four churches, and held out faithful to the end. He preached his last sermon on his bed eight hours before his death, and then said that his work was finished.—S. H.

Chapter XXVII. Predestinarian Baptists of Canada and the United States.

First: The Covenanted Baptists of Canada.

Their own statement handed the [senior] author of this work:

Record of the Covenanted or Particular Baptist Church of Christ in Ontario.—Dated A.D. 1820

The said church are desirous of recording an outline of their rise and progress, together with a brief sketch of the articles of their faith and practice, and mutual covenant, as the professed disciples of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; hoping the same may be of benefit, through the blessing of God, to future generations, if it be His holy will to preserve a remnant to bear testimony to the truth as it is in Jesus, and recorded by the pen of inspiration, and understood only by the teaching of the Holy Ghost.

It is a cause of grief that many errors abound in the present generation in doctrine, principles and practice under a mask of religion; with such we cannot, we dare not associate, nor hold communion in church fellowship; although despised and spoken against as hard-hearted, and narrow, contracted in our views. Yet our principles and practice, in the following formula, stand or fall to none but the word of God alone. Faith and holiness are our professed principles, with a desire as far as possible to be at peace with all men, especially with those who love the Lord in sincerity, although they differ from us in name, yet rejecting Him in their practices, based on traditions or commandments of men, not countenanced by the law of Christ nor practiced by the Apostles; and so those that desire to agree by the way must be of one mind and judgment to avoid schisms or divisions, which are attended with evil consequences. So we resolve, through the grace of Almighty God to help us, while our frail life continues, to take His holy word as our guide, observing all things whatsoever He has commanded His Apostles to teach, praying the Lord to strengthen us so to do, and to His name be the praise. Amen.

Daniel McArthur, a young man of Cowal, in the west of Scotland, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, was converted by grace, and immediately commenced to preach the gospel to his countrymen with fervency and zeal, the Lord working with him, so that his fame went far and near in that country, and multitudes flocked to hear the word, a great awakening being among the people, and the great power of God was felt, and many added unto the Lord.

He, being desirous to follow the rules laid down in the holy word of God, saw it his bounden duty to forsake the prevailing customs and be baptized according to the apostolic mode; and after much search found Elder McFarland, a Baptist minister in Edinburgh, who preached the doctrine of grace in its purity, who baptized him, and ordained him pastor over the church. A number of faithful men was raised up, among them such as Daniel Whyte, who was ordained Elder, and emigrated to North Carolina. His labors there were much blessed, and gathered a large church, among the members of which were Alexander McArthur, James McKellar, James McKirdy and Hugh Beaton. The last mentioned, Hugh Beaton, Elder McArthur ordained over the church in Scotland. Elder McArthur, after enduring much hardship and suffering many persecutions from the established clergy, was apprehended by their authorities, and put on board of a war vessel, carried to England, put in dungeons; they changed his name often, so that his friends had much ado to find him. When found, he was brought to Edinburgh, and tried before the lords of session, and released. His adversaries were fined four thousand pounds sterling. After that he emigrated to New York State, and there he died in the full assurance of faith.

Deacon Dugald Campbell, of North Knapdale, emigrated to Canada in 1818, settled in Aldboro, Elgin County, commenced preaching the gospel, the Lord blessing his labors and opening the hearts of many to receive the truth, as formerly in Scotland under Elder McArthur’s preaching. Numbers were added to the church. Then he was ordained to the pastoral office by the regular Baptists of Canada, many of whom at that time were sound in the faith. But after some time, they departing from gospel order and sentiment, he withdrew from their communion, and organized what is now known as the Covenanted or Particular Baptist Church in Ontario. After which the Lord raised up several faithful men, who labored with him in the gospel, viz.: Duncan McCallum, Duncan Lamond, Neil McDonald and Thomas McColl. Elder Campbell’s health having begun to decline, Neil McDonald was ordained Elder to assist him, who officiated with him for some time in the pastoral office.

Upon Friday, the fifth day of November, 1852, the church met in Aldboro for the purpose of examining Thomas McColl and setting him apart for the work of the gospel ministry. After relating his experience and call to the ministry he was approved of, and ordained by the laying on of the hands of the presbytery, which consisted of Elders Dugald Campbell and Neil McDonald and Deacon Duncan McCallum, which was done upon Saturday, the sixth; and the day following the Lord’s Supper was administered.

After a few years Elder Campbell’s health became so impaired that he could not attend the meetings. Elder Thomas McColl was called to the pastoral care of the church, which at that time consisted of five branches, viz., Aldboro, Dimwick, Lobo, Ekfird and (Duart) Orford.

The church here stood alone, and would not fellowship any in the country, and it supposed there were none on the Continent of America that it could fellowship, until Elder McColl received a number of the “Signs of the Times” from Jane McGregor, a friend of his with whom he corresponded in Delaware County, New York, who was a hearer of Elder Isaac Hewitt. She still kept sending the “Signs,” until the account was given in them of Elders Beebe, Dudley and Johnson visiting Dundas, Ontario, to ordain Elder William Pollard. After seeing this notice in the “Signs,” Elder McColl wrote to Elder Pollard to visit the church at our quarterly meeting, held in Lobo the first Sunday in February, 1857, which he did. The doctrine he preached was well received by the church. The following Spring Elder McColl invited Elder Beebe and others to our meeting in June. On the invitation Elder Beebe came, accompanied by Elders Thomas Hill, E. A. Meadows and William Pollard. All the visiting Elders preached during the meeting, and the truth proclaimed by them was cordially received by the church here, and an unbroken fellowship has existed between them and the church here ever since. Elder Campbell was still alive, but so infirm from age that he could not attend the meeting. And when he was told by the brethren of the truth he loved being preached by the strangers who visited us, he rejoiced and wept tears of joy. This man of God fell asleep in Jesus the following Fall.

Elder McColl continued in the pastoral office until he became so infirm that he could not serve the church in administering the ordinances, when he resigned his charge with the unanimous consent of the church to Elder Pollard, who is still our pastor, and now assisted by Elder William L. Beebe in the work of the ministry here. Elder McColl departed this life in the full assurance of faith on October 17, 1870.

At our yearly meeting in June, since 1857, and at some of our other quarterly meetings, we have been visited by ministering brethren from the States, as follows: Elders Beebe, J. F. Johnson, C. B. Hassell, S. H. Durand, J. L. Purington, J. A. Johnson, William J. Purington, J. H. Gammon, and others.

Articles of Faith.

We believe that there is but one only true God, and that there is none other than He.— John 17:3; Deuteronomy 6:4.

We believe that this God is Almighty, Eternal, Invisible, Incomprehensible.—1 Timothy 1:17.

We believe that this God is unspeakably perfect in all His attributes of Power, Wisdom, Truth, Holiness, Justice, Mercy and Love.

We believe that in the Godhead there are three Persons, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.—1 John 1:5, 7.

We believe there will be a resurrection of the dead, both of the Just and of the Unjust. —John 5:25, 29.

We believe that because God in His own nature is holy and just, even so He is good and merciful; therefore all having sinned, none can be saved without the means of a Redeemer.—Job 33: 24; Hebrews 9:15.

We believe that Jesus Christ Himself is Lord and Redeemer.—1 Peter 1:18, 19.

We believe the great reason why the Lord did clothe Himself with our flesh and blood was that He might be capable of obtaining the Redemption, which before the world was ordained for us.—Hebrews 2:15,16, 9:15; Ephesians 2:10.

We believe that the time when He clothed Himself with our flesh was in the days of the reign of Caesar Augustus. Then, and not till then, was the Word made flesh.—Luke 2:1, 2.

We believe therefore that this very child, as afore is testified, is both God and man, the Christ of the living God.—Luke 1:26-34.

We believe therefore the righteousness and redemption by which we that believe stand just before God, as saved from the curse of the law, is the righteousness and redemption that consists in the permanent acts and performances of this child Jesus, this God-man, the Lord’s Christ; it consists in fulfilling the law for us to the utmost requirements of the justice of God.—Matthew 1:21; Daniel 9:24; 1 Corinthians 1:30.

We believe that for the completing of this work He was always sinless, did always the things that pleased God’s justice; that every one of His acts, both of doing and suffering and rising again from the dead, was really and infinitely perfect, being done by Him as God-man; the God-head, which gave virtue to all the acts of the human nature, was then in perfect union with it when He hanged upon the cross for the sins of His people.—Romans 3:22; Hebrews 10:14.

We believe that the righteousness that saveth the sinner from the wrath to come is properly and personally Christ’s, and ours but as we have union with Him, God by grace imputing it to us.—1 Corinthians 1:30; Philippians 3:8, 9.

How Christ is Made Ours.

We believe that being sinful creatures in ourselves, no good thing done by us can procure of God the imputation of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, but that the imputation thereof is an act of grace, a free gift, without our deserving.—Romans 3:24-27; 2 Timothy 1:9.

We believe also that the power of imputing righteousness resteth in God only by Jesus Christ.—Romans 4:6-8.

Predestination and Election.

We believe that God has freely ordained all things that come to pass, which doctrine is called Absolute Predestination.—Isaiah 46:9, 10; Acts 4:27, 28, 2:22, 23.

We believe that election is free and permanent, being founded in grace and the unchangeable will of God.—Romans 9:11, 11:5, 7; Ephesians 1:4, 5.

We believe that the decree of election is so far from making works in us foreseen the ground or cause of the choice, that it containeth in the bowels of it not only the persons, but also the graces that accompany salvation.—Ephesians 2:5, 10; 2 Timothy 1:10.

We believe that Christ is He in whom the elect are always considered, and that without Him there is neither election, grace nor salvation.—Ephesians 1:5-10; Acts 4:12.

We believe there is not any impediment attending the elect of God that can hinder their conversion or eternal salvation.—Romans 8:30-33, 11:7.

We believe no man can know his election but by his calling.—Romans 9:21-23; 2 Peter 1:10.

Of The Scriptures.

We believe that the Holy Scriptures of themselves, without the addition of human inventions, are able to make the man of God perfect in all things, and thoroughly to furnish him unto all good works.—2 Timothy 3:16, 17.

We believe that they cannot be broken, but will certainly be fulfilled in all the prophecies, threatenings, promises, either to the salvation or damnation of men.—Acts 13:41; Matthew 5:17; Psalm 9:8.

We believe that God made the world and all things that are therein.—Genesis 1:31, 2:2; Colossians 1:16.

Of Preaching.

We do not believe that sinners dead in trespasses and sins should be urged to believe savingly in the Lord Jesus Christ; but we hold it right to preach to such their lost and ruined condition, and point out the only way of escape from the wrath of God, which is through the finished work of the Savior.

We do not therefore believe that the general call or use of general invitations and exhortations is preaching the gospel.

Of Baptism.

We believe that believers are the only fit subjects of baptism.—Mark 16:16; Acts 2:41, 8:37.

We believe that immersion is the only scriptural mode of administering the holy ordinance of baptism.—Matthew 3:15, 16; Acts 8:37-40.

We believe that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are to be administered by lawfully ordained Elders only.—1 Corinthians 11:23, 26; Titus 1:5; Ac 14:23.

We believe that baptized believers only are fit communicants.—Acts 2:42, 43.

We believe that converts ought to relate their religious experience before the church only.—Psalm 66:16; Matthew 7:6.

We believe in close communion.—Song 4:12; 2 Corinthians 6:14-16.

We believe that all matters of importance ought to be settled, conducted, transacted, only before the church.—1 Corinthians 6:1-8; Acts 6:6, 15:6, 7, 12, 19, 22, 23.

We believe that the children of God ought not to frequent meetings, nor associate with any sect professing religion, who maintains error either in doctrine or principle.—2 John 1:10.

We believe that the first day of the week is proper to be observed as a day of worship, and that no work or worldly business ought to be transacted thereon.

We believe that brethren ought not to go to law with each other before the unbelievers.—1 Corinthians 6:1-7.

Primitive Baptists in the United States.

Alabama.

Beulah Association.—This body was organized in the year 1837, but at what place we are not informed. The Minutes for that and the succeeding year do not appear. In 1839 the Association convened with the church at Fellowship, Tallapoosa County, Alabama, and held her session four days, to wit, October 26, 27, 28 and 29. Elder John Blackstone was Moderator, and James Richards Clerk. Ordained ministers belonging to the body at that time were J. M. Duke, J. Blackstone, F. Swint, E. Jackson, J. M. Pearson. Churches numbered eighteen. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder Blackstone.

At the eighth session of the body Elder Blackstone was still Moderator, and Elder W. M. Mitchell Clerk. Elder Mitchell afterwards officiated alternately as Clerk or Moderator for twenty years. His ministry and usefulness have abounded to a very considerable extent down to the present period. He has traveled in a number of States and made numerous personal acquaintances; his preaching is much approved by brethren in general, and his able communications for Baptist periodicals for a number of years have been both comforting and instructive to the household of faith.[1]

In 1844 delegates with a letter from a “Missionary” body called Liberty appeared before the Association, seeking reconciliation, etc., but failed, as none was effected.

This body has stood firmly and nobly aloof, to the present day, from the men-made institutions of the nineteenth century, and is worthy the confidence and esteem of her sister Associations throughout the United States. In 1877 she had twenty-three churches, thirteen ordained ministers and 908 members.

Clay Bank Primitive Baptist Association.—This body was first constituted at Smyrna meeting-house, Coffee County, Ala., on November 23, 1845, on the Articles of Faith adopted by the Conechee River Association. The Presbytery for the organization was composed of Elders Daniel Dayier, Robert Warren and Jesse Tomlin. She was constituted with six churches, viz., Smyrna, Mount Pleasant, Bethany, Hephzibah, Zion’s Hill and Mount Olive; Joel Pate Moderator, and M. W. Helms Clerk.

At her second session she embraced seven churches, containing 173 members. At her session in October, 1876, she numbered thirteen churches, with 262 members.

Her Moderators have been Joel Pate, Giles Bryan, Cary Curry, Daniel Davis, William Dismuke and A. Driskell—Giles Bryan most of the time.

She corresponds with Conechee (or Conecuh) River, Chocktawhatchie and Antioch Associations.

Hillabee Primitive Baptist Association.—This Association was organized on October 15, 1870, at Bethlehem, Tallapoosa County, Ala., with twelve churches and 368 members; Elder J. J. Cleavlin Clerk. Her present number of churches is thirteen, and number of members 426. Elder R. W. Carlisle has been her Moderator.

Mount Zion Association.—This Association includes within its bounds Blount and Marshall Counties in North Alabama, on the head waters of Warrior River, and not very far from the Tennessee River.

It was formed about the year 1822, but we cannot state accurately as to the number of churches or members, or who was present at its organization. It is thought the following ministers were present, viz.: Elders William Case, Bazzle Rhoden, Hosea Halcomb, Solomon Murphree and William Murphree.

Some years after the organization the Association divided on the “Missionary” question, and Elder Hosea Halcomb went to the “Missionary” side. Elder Martin Putman, who joined this Association in 1836, has been Moderator of it about twenty-five years, and who is now about seventy-two years old, says that he came in after the division, and found all in peace and harmony among the churches; but subsequently some trouble arose on account of new things being introduced, but not of a very serious nature. Some few of the churches, of late years, received a few “Missionaries” without baptism, which caused dissatisfaction, and in the Fall of 1877 ten or eleven of the churches set up non-fellowship resolutions against such baptisms (by New School), and against all the institutions of the day, secret or otherwise. And in so doing the churches have been revived, and two churches and two ministers from the “Missionaries” have been received and baptized into the fellowship of Mount Zion. Among the ministers who now belong to Mount Zion, and have since 1836, may be mentioned Jeremiah Dayley, St. Clair, Oden, Lawery, Hendrix, Calvert, Musgrove, D. F. Allgood, S. C. Allgood, G. F. Balew, J. C. Shelton, C. Farris, Tidwell and Smith.

Elder Bazzle Rhoden served as Moderator a few years, and Elder D. F. Allgood is now Moderator. The number of churches is eighteen, and the membership 600 or 700.

Mud Creek Association of Primitive Baptists.—This Association was organized on the third Saturday in November, A. D. 1821. Delegates from nine churches convened at Mud Creek meeting-house, Jackson County, Ala., and after a sermon had been delivered by Elder Isaac Reed from Joel, second chapter and part of first verse (“Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, sound an alarm in my holy mountain”), they chose Elder Isaac Read Moderator, and brother Josiah Cann Clerk.

They then proceeded to organize the Association by adopting a Constitution, Principles of Union and Rules of Decorum conformable to the rules of older Associations of Primitive Baptists.

Churches and delegates in the organization (Elders not distinguished):

Mount Gilead.—John Kelley, Shadrach Herron, Samuel Wilson.

Mud Creek.—John Horn, Andrew Estes, Josiah Cann.

Providence.—Hugh Gentry, John Owens, Levi Isbell.

New Hope.—Elisha Blevins, Haden Williams, John Blevens.

Hopewell.—David Bryant.

Blue Spring.—James Dotson, John Jones, David Settle.

Friendship.—Richard Wilson, Daniel Paten, John Morris.

Paint Rock.—John Williams, John Reed.

Union.—Samuel McCee.

This Association has passed through some sore conflicts, but stands firm upon the eternal base—the grace of God and the gift by grace.

She stands aloof from all men-made institutions or auxiliaries. She is in correspondence with Flint River, Elk River, Collin’s River and Mount Zion Associations. She holds to the doctrine of eternal election, and is willing to stand or fall by that. She now numbers sixteen churches, with a membership of about 600. Present Moderator, Elder Peter Mapes, and Elder J. S. Collins Clerk. Her sessions are held in September of each year.

Pilgrims’ Rest Association.—This Association was constituted in 1837, with 499 members in the churches composing it, but the number of churches does not appear. From various causes since the year 1838, when she numbered 559, her membership has gradually decreased, until her table of statistics in 1877 showed only eight churches, with about 100 members.

Missionary and kindred institutions have annoyed her to a great extent, and she has had to withdraw from time to time from those advocating such innovations, which have presented many unpleasant scenes. It is to be hoped that order will be restored, faithfulness be shown by all, both ministers and private members; that God in her case will revive His work, in the midst of these years of coldness and declension, make known His will and her duty, and in wrath remember mercy; until her ancient peace and prosperity be restored.

Her present Moderator is R. F. Ellis, and her present Clerk is H. J. Redd.

List of Primitive Baptist Associations in Alabama as far as heard from. The first column shows the date of their constitution. The second, the name of the Association. The third, the name of the county in which they are sometimes held. The fourth, the number of churches. The fifth, the number of members, and the sixth, the number of Elders. The author claims pardon of his brethren for all inaccuracies that may occur in this and the following tables for the different States. He has done his best to arrive at correct conclusions and names, numbers and figures, but in this he may often have failed, as the information had to be gained from other persons, and not set down as from his own personal knowledge.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Alabama.*

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

Antioch

Monroe

1825

Buttahatchie

New River

21

572

7

1837

Beulah

Lee & Tallapoosa

23

908

13

Conechee

1850

Cane Creek

Randolph

11

359

1845

Clay Bank

Coffee

13

262

Chocktawhatchie

Barbour

22

656

9

1827

Ebenezer

Montgomery

24

1,033

Flint River

Harmony

1870

Hillabee

Clay

13

426

6

Little Vine

Marion

Mussle Shoals

Colbert

7

174

Macedonia

Cherokee

1821

Mud Creek

Jackson

16

600

8

1822

Mount Zion

Blount & Marshall

18

650

North District

Clark & Mason

1837

Pilgrims' Rest

Pickens

8

100

Tombigbee

Blount

1842

Wetumptka

18

602

Willis Creek

DeKalb

Yellow Creek

Lynn & Macon

Zion's Rest

*Associations, 23; churches as stated.

Arkansas.

Ouachita Primitive Baptist Association.—On Saturday, the eleventh day of November, 1848, seven churches that had obtained letters of dismission from the South Arkansas Association, together with three churches recently constituted, met in Convention with the church at Shady Grove, Union County, Ark., for the purpose of organizing themselves into an Association, to be known as the Ouachita Primitive Baptist Association.

The Convention organized by appointing Elder C. B. Landers Moderator, and E. Moseley Clerk. There were ten churches represented. A committee was appointed to draft a Constitution, Articles of Faith and Rules of Decorum, which were submitted on Monday and adopted; and they are in strict accordance with those of Primitive Baptist Associations throughout the country.

The Minutes of the Convention fail to show the number of ordained ministers, and also the total membership in the constitution. At the session of 1849 two churches petitioned and were admitted. At this time there appear to be three ordained ministers, and an aggregate of 239 members. In 1850 two other churches were received into union. In 1851 the Association received correspondence from South Arkansas, Little Hope and Louisiana Associations. There were then eight ordained ministers within her bounds. At the session in 1852 one church was received. The following were the ordained ministers within her bounds at that time, viz., T. J. Foster, C. R. Hoge, W. P. Welch, S. Berry, E. Y. Terrill, C. B. Landers, James Taylor, T. McAdams and J. Shelton.

In 1854 there was the same correspondence; aggregate membership, 262. At the session of 1855 Elder T. J. Foster was chosen Moderator, which place he has faithfully filled (one or two years excepted on account of inability to attend) down to this time. At this session four churches were granted letters of dismission. In 1856 two churches were received into union. In 1859 one church was received, and also one in 1861. During the years 1862-4, although the Association held her regular sessions, yet, owing to the distracted state of the country, nothing of interest transpired.

In 1865 she had correspondence from South Arkansas, New Hope and Louisiana; aggregate number in fellowship, 342. In 1866 another church was received into union. In 1868 two churches were granted letters of dismission. The corresponding ministers were Elders D. B. Alman, J. S. Barrow. Z. Thomas and H. B. Howard. In 1869 two more churches were admitted. From that time the body has had regular correspondence with South Arkansas, New Hope and Louisiana Associations. In 1871 T. J. Foster, D. B. Alman, H. Archer, G. Boyett and B. L. Landers were the ordained ministers. Three churches were received on petition. Aggregate number, 427; baptized the previous year, 39. In 1872 one church was received, also one in 1874. In 1876 the aggregate number in fellowship was 513. Aggregate number baptized in 1875 and 1876 was 72.

Since the year 1854 or 1855 the Association has enjoyed uninterrupted peace. Her sessions have been harmonious, the preaching all in unison, and the members and correspondents have enjoyed a good degree of the presence of the Lord.

Ordained ministers at present are Elders T. J. Foster, H. Archer, B. L. Landers, M. C. Parker, J. B. Lewis, N. C. Yarbrough and E. J. Dean.

Cadron Regular Predestinarian Baptist Association.—This Association was organized in 1872, composed of six churches, five of which came from the Point Remove Association. They left the Point Remove Association because that body permitted her members to belong to and visit Masonic Lodges. The names of the churches first constituted are Mt. Pleasant, Mt. Zion, Hopewell, Antioch, Cadron and Salem. The names of her ordained ministers at that time were W. S. Helms, J. W. Hester, A. J. Singleton and J. C. Chastien. In 1877 J. M. Freeman and J. Winborn also appeared in her Minutes as Elders. Her membership then was 104, and churches, seven.

This is a young and very small Association, but the truth is in her midst, and wisdom of a high order abounds there.

South Arkansas Primitive Baptist Association.—This Association was organized in 1842, but with what number of churches is unknown, because the Minutes for about ten years have been lost or mislaid. The following preamble and agreement, however, made at the formation of the body, and copied by a brother into another book, have been preserved viz.:

“Whereas, We, the Baptist Churches of Christ in the State of Arkansas, having in time past enjoyed peace and harmony, but that peace being now destroyed by the introduction of a ‘Missionary’ Society in South Arkansas, assisted by some of the Baptist preachers, and believing it to be a duty we owe to our God and to our posterity to withdraw from those who are called Baptists, who have fellowship with ‘Missionary’ Societies and other societies tributary thereto; therefore we have agreed to come into a Constitution and Rule of Decorum.”

The Constitution referred to is the same, we are informed, as that usually governing Old School Baptist Associations.

In 1852 there were sixteen churches in the Association, and 262 members. In 1853 one church was added. In 1854 one added. In 1863 three churches added. During the war several churches failed to represent themselves, and some lost their identity by removals and death. At the close of the war only nine churches represented themselves, some having taken letters to unite with other Associations. In 1873 the body withdrew fellowship from four churches on account of disorder in them. A portion of the members of two of said churches have since been restored to order in the Association.

The body now numbers fifteen churches, with a membership aggregating about 210. She has eleven ordained ministers, has unanimity in doctrine, and good order, peace and harmony prevail throughout all the churches.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Arkansas.*

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

Cash River

Jackson

1872

Cadron

White

7

150

4

New Hope

Drew

14

180

4

1848

Ouachita

Ouachita

17

513

7

Point Remove

Yell

1843

Salem

Johnson

15

210

10

1842

South Arkansas

Ouachita

13

210

10

1837

Washington

Washington

Washitaw

Union

Pine Light

Pulaski

6

104

4

*Associations, 9; churches, as far as heard from, 63; members, 1,224; Elders, 36.

California.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in California.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1843

O. S. Baptist Cor. Meeting

Sonoma

3

Delaware.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Delaware.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1795

Delaware

Kent

7

197

1

Florida.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Florida.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1871

Mount Enon

Hillsborough

8

212

5

Ochlochnee

Lowndas

Suwannee

Bradford

14

451

5

Georgia.

Euharlee Primitive Baptist Association.—This Association was constituted in 1839, by Elders Joel Colley and Josiah Gresham, of the Yellow River Association, and Meshech Lowery and William Mosely, of the Towaliga Association, who formed the presbytery for the constitution. At that time there were thirteen churches and 264 members, embracing the counties of Polk, Bartow, Floyd, Chattooga and Gordon. But since the organization of this body the Marietta, Little River and Connasauga Associations have been constituted around it, and several of its churches have been dismissed to unite with them.

The Euharlee has at this time sixteen churches, containing 398 members, eight Elders, and six licensed ministers of the gospel. She stands firm on the principles of Divine truth, and keeps aloof from the religious men-made institutions of the day. She has had some trouble in regard to corresponding with some of the neighboring Associations, on account of their tolerating these new, unscriptural inventions; but a better feeling seems now to prevail, and it is to be hoped that brethren will throw their idols as well as their prejudices to the moles and to the bats, and come together with one accord as in days of old; thus proving that they have but one Lord, one faith and one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in them all.

Harmony Primitive Baptist Association.—This Association was formed A.D. 1839, with the church at Sharon, Muscogee County, Ga., after the separation for the most part had taken place among Baptists in this country on account of the introduction of “Missionary” and kindred societies. Allusion to these things does not appear to be found in her Minutes, and is only occasionally found in some of her Circular Letters. The line of separation was clearly drawn at first, and there has been no attempt at amalgamation since. Nothing special occurs in her history.

Elder Stephen Parker was first chosen Moderator, and served the Association in that capacity until the Fall of 1853, when Elder Allison Culpeper was chosen, who served until 1857. In the Fall of 1857 Elder Isaac Brooks was chosen Moderator, and served until 1859, when he was succeeded by Elder Abner Belcher, who held the office until 1862. In 1862 Elder James P. Ellis was chosen Moderator, who was succeeded by Elder J. R. Teate in 1867, and he was succeeded by Elder T. K. Pingley in 1874. In 1876 Elder Pingley was succeeded by Elder W. Hubbard, who continues Moderator to the present time.

Her Clerks have been James P. Ellis, Isaac R. Teate, J. J. Davis and James M. Woodall, and the last named holds the office of Clerk to the present time.

This Association embraces twenty churches, 500 members and nine Elders.

Primitive Ebenezer Association.—This Association, it appears, withdrew from the “Fullerites,” or “Missionaries,” in the year 1836, while in session with Beersheba Church, in Twiggs County, Ga. Since that time she has enjoyed peace and prosperity with a very little exception. She comprises twelve churches, 397 members and twenty-seven ordained ministers.

Union Association.—This Association was formed by churches formerly belonging to the Suwannee Association, most of whose churches were in Florida. A division was agreed to, making the State line the dividing line between the two Associations; and in 1856 the Association was constituted with twelve churches, meeting at Union, by a presbytery composed of Elders J. E. W. Smith, W. A. Knight and J. B. Smith. Her ministers were Elders W. A. Knight, M. Westberry, A. Parish, J. D. Hutto and E. J. Williams, with perhaps two licentiates. Harmony prevailed for a number of years, and the progress of the Association was upward and onward. Some errors crept in after a while.

In 1869 she was forced to withdraw from one of her churches for unsoundness. In 1870 an effort was made by some influential persons to lead the churches off into error, but the attempt failed, and the body stands firm.

Yellow River Primitive Baptist Association.—This Association was constituted in 1824 by a presbytery composed of members of the Ocmulgee and Sarepta Associations. The place of constitution was Harris Spring, Newton County, Ga. There were thirteen churches at first; seven others were added, which made twenty in all. They were constituted upon the Articles of Faith generally adopted by all Old School Baptist Associations.

In 1825 she corresponded with the Georgia, Ocmulgee, Sarepta, Flint River, Tugulo and General Associations. The “General Association” was a body composed of the different Associations. In 1828 she had thirty-seven churches and 2,439 members. A proposition at that session was made for her to join the Baptist State Convention, which she declined to do.

In the Circular of 1830, written by brother Lumpkins, we find the following: “That many were zealously engaged in instructing, enlightening and evangelizing the world. The means resorted to are primarily the following: 1st. As far as possible give the word of God, the Bible, to all the world. 2nd. To aid to send a preached gospel to all people. 3rd. To distribute religious instruction and teaching through the medium of small, cheap, well-written tracts; and with a view to promote these objects, the instruction and improvement of the ministry is and has been deemed an object of much concern and importance.”

“Hence the origin of Bible Societies, Sunday Schools, Missionary Societies, foreign and domestic, General Associations, State Conventions, etc. The plans themselves must have been defective, or they must have been unskillfully conducted. So far it is believed these religious efforts amongst the Baptists in this State have produced more discord than union. We not only find one for Paul and another for Apollos, but we find mere novices in theology setting up their puny standards, as if they were aspiring to make themselves the rallying points of a wide-spread Christian denomination.”

In 1835 the Association dropped correspondence with the Georgia Association, because the Georgia had opened a correspondence with a body in disorder, called the Central Association.

In 1836 she dropped correspondence with the Sarepta Association, because that body at its last session had agreed to become a member of the State Convention, a body unauthorized by the Scriptures either by precept or example.

In 1838 the Division took place in the Association. She numbered at that time forty-five churches, holding 2,127 communicants. The number was too great; a reduction was necessary. There is more danger and trouble with a large number of professors than with a small number. Christ’s flock or church is never too small.

A resolution was adopted at this session declaring non-fellowship with all the men-made religious institutions of the day, such as State Conventions, Bible Societies, Temperance Societies, Abolition Societies, Sunday School Unions, Theological Seminaries, and all other institutions tributary to the “Missionary” plan then existing in the United States. This resolution was carried by a vote of fifty-five in the affirmative. The minority consisted of six churches, who did not vote, but immediately left the house. The Circular of that year says truly: “The cause, no doubt, that has produced this distracted state of things, is overlooking the pure and vital principles and doctrine of God our Savior, and introducing or attempting to introduce in their stead a system of faith and practice unknown to the Scriptures.”

In 1842 the Circular written by Elder H. Rambo congratulates the churches on the general peace and harmony that prevailed among them—showing at length the causes of the trouble through which they had passed, the removal of the causes, and the brotherly love that followed and was likely to continue.

God has favored this Association with unanimity for a long number of years, so that she can say with the psalmist, “Not unto us, 0 Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name be all the glory given.”

She now numbers twenty-six churches, 914 members and twelve Elders.

Ochlochnee.—The Ochlochnee Primitive Baptist Association was organized in September, 1827, with seven churches and 138 members; Elder Flemming Bates Moderator, and Theophilus Hardy Clerk. Ordained ministers were B. Manning, H. Milton, T. Hardie and M. Albritton. Licentiates-M. Thigpen and Lewis St. John. In 1828 six more churches were added; same Moderator and Clerk; membership 314. In 1829 same Moderator and Clerk; five more churches were added. In 1830 Matthew Albritton Moderator, same Clerk; one church added; membership 536. In 1831 same Moderator and Clerk; two churches added; membership 684. In 1832 same Moderator and Clerk; two churches added; membership 750. In 1833 same Moderator; Henry Milton Clerk; twelve churches added; membership 1,010. The total number of churches this year was thirty-five. In 1834 same Moderator and Clerk; three churches added; and eight dismissed to form a new Association.

Year.

Moderator.

Clerk.

1835,

Henry Milton,

Henry E. Howe.

1836,

"

W. C. Lester.

1837-9,

"

Prior Lewis.

1840,

"

B. Manning.

1841,

"

Prior Lewis.

1842,

Prior Lewis,

E. O. Hawthorn.

1845-6,

"

Daniel B. Douglas.

1845,

"

M. P. Cooper.

1846-50,

"

James P. Singletery.

1851,

Eli Holland,

"

1852,

B. Manning,

"

1853-4,

"

Willie Pierce.

1855-7,

"

William C. Lester.

1858,

"

T. G. Barrow.

1859-60,

Eli Holland,

"

1861-4,

Prior Lewis,

"

1865-7,

Alison Deckle,

J. R. Battle.

1868-9,

"

H. G. Fuller.

1870-1,

J. R. Battle,

"

1872-4,

Peter T. Everett,

"

1875,

"

C. Surles.

1876,

"

H. K. H. Horn.

1877-8,

H. C. Tucker,

David F. Chapman.

In 1873 J. R. Battle, with two churches, was dropped from the Association on account of his desire to receive members from the “Missionary” Baptists without baptism. In 1874 churches were dropped for the same cause. In 1876 Alison Deckle was charged with advocating heresy, for which his church and two others were dropped.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Georgia.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

Alapaha

Wayne

Chester

Union

1839

Euharlee

Polk

16

398

8

1827

Etcheconnee

Crawford

18

730

11

1839

Harmony

Clay

20

488

7

Lower Canoochee

Bullock

Lookout Mountain

1859

Marietta

Cobb

23

472

10

New Hope

Campbell

27

649

8

Oconee

Clark

15

535

4

1827

Ochlochnee

Miller

26

634

6

1867

Hopewell

Lafayette

9

229

4

Ocmulgee

Jones

18

633

4

1836

Primitive Western

Pike

19

551

4

Primitive Pulaski

Pulaski

13

313

4

1836

Primitive Ebenezer

Twiggs

12

397

7

1856

Union

Echols

18

624

5

1836

Upatoie

Macon

22

777

6

1829

Upper Canoochee

Washington

9

318

4

1824

Yellow River

Walton

26

914

12

Springfield Primitive

Warren

Illinois.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Illinois.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1830

Bethel

Hamilton

12

385

5

Collins River

Grundy

1837

Concord

Green

7

207

5

1809

Illinois

Randolph

11

64

4

1830

Kaskaskia

Bond

12

231

5

1823

Little Wabash

Clay

Little Fork

Muddy River

Hamilton

1842

Mount Gilead

Schuyler

7

188

5

United Baptist

Macoupin

15

310

5

1832

Morgan

Morgan

10

258

7

1840

North Western

Ogle

8

91

3

1832

Okaw

Coles

5

109

2

1823

Sangamon

Sangamon

15

377

8

1834

Salem

Adams

8

225

6

1850

Sandy Creek

Grundy

9

204

6

Salt Creek

Skillet Fork

Hamilton

1831

Spoon River

Schuyler

14

400

8

Southern Illinois

1831

Vermillion

Vermillion

6

161

4

1802

Wabash District

Edgar

16

364

6

Indiana.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Indiana.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1816

Blue River

Jefferson

11

749

3

1829

Conn's Creek

Tipton

11

338

5

1827

Danville (Reg'r Predestinarian)

Parke

5

198

4

1828

Danville (Regular Baptist)

Clinton

24

2,301

14

1824

Eel River

Putnam

10

285

5

Greenville

Lebanon

Henry

13

283

4

1840

Little Zion

Dubois

8

225

4

Lost River

Washington

1869

Mount Salem

Elkhart

7

228

5

1844

Paint Creek

Carroll

9

187

5

1822

Salem

Posey

16

1,246

8

1831

Sugar Creek

Montgomery

8

228

4

1838

Mississinewa

Henry

7

309

6

West River

1809

White Water

Fayette

17

749

4

1821

White River

Greene

12

338

7

1824

Predestinarian Baptist

Putnam

10

289

5

Marion

Iowa.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Iowa.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1841

De Moines River

Henry

8

193

4

Hazel Creek

Appanoose

10

209

10

1854

Mount Pleasant

Shelby

12

247

5

1859

Siloam

Wayne

5

79

6

1858

Turkey River

Brewer

6

142

3

1851

Western

Clarke

12

232

8

Kansas.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Kansas.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

Elk River

Greenwood

5

61

Euachita

Kaw Valley

1868

Turkey Creek

Allen

4

78

2

Kansas

Atchison

4

66

3

Kentucky.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Kentucky.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1830

Barren River

1845

Bethel

Graves

16

632

6

1820

Drake's Creek

Warren

1819

High Land

McLean

9

263

4

1809

Licking

Anderson

15

518

8

1838

Otter Creek (as in 1840)

Breckenridge

13

502

1842

Solder Creek (1845)

Graves

6

196

2

1811

Red River

Christian

106

Predestinarian

1793

Tate's Creek

Madison

1785

Salem

Boone

1817

Burning Spring

Louisiana.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Louisiana.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

Louisiana

Union

Louisiana Primitive

1849

Ouachita

Union

17

479

3

Washita

Jackson

13

284

2

Maine.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Maine.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1831

Maine Predestinarian Conf.

York

2*

125

1

1830

Maine O. S. Baptist Association

Sagadahoc

3

80

1

*One of these churches is at Woburn, Middlesex County, Mass., and contains about twenty members; the other is at North Berwick, York County, Maine.—S. H.

Maryland.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Maryland.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1793

Baltimore

Baltimore

7

145

2

1782

Salisbury

11

300

1

Baltimore Association.—The first meeting of the Baltimore Baptist Association (called in its printed Minutes “The Baptist Association on the Western Shore of Maryland”) was held at Frederick Town, August 10, 11 and 12, 1793. There were then six churches represented, viz.: Harford, 106 members; Frederick Town, 36; Hammond Branch, 29; Taney Town, 27; Seneca, 52; and Huntington, in Pennsylvania, 16; total, 226 members.

Elder John Davis preached the introductory sermon, from 2 Corinthians 8:23. Elder Absalom Bainbridge was chosen Moderator, and Thomas Beatty was chosen Clerk. Most of the time was occupied in preaching and other religious exercises. At this meeting a committee was appointed consisting of John Davis, James Beatty, Howard Griffith, William Clingham and Absalom Bainbridge, to prepare a Constitution and Rules of Decorum. On motion by A. Bainbridge, the Association agreed to alter its name, so that in future it should be called the Baltimore Association. In 1794 the Association consisted of seven churches, two of them in Pennsylvania; membership, 251. After a delightful season the Association adjourned to meet in the town of Baltimore August 8th, 1795. The church in Baltimore at this date had a membership of sixty-five.

The Association met in Baltimore, according to appointment. The church in Baltimore, having been dismissed from the Philadelphia Association, petitioned and was received a member of this Association, after giving the Association satisfaction that she was orthodox in principle and practice. Brother Richards proposed a correspondence with sister Associations, and the Philadelphia, Salisbury and Ketockton were selected as most convenient. The time of holding the Association was changed to September, and the next was to be held in that month with the church at Taney Town, September 24, 1796. The next was to be held in August with the church at Seneca. The membership at this time was 345. The body met at Tuscarora, August 3, 1798; membership, 367. Met at or near Reisterstown, Baltimore County, May 24,1799. The next meeting we find mentioned was at old Seneca, in 1802; membership, 668. Met at Harford in 1803. The Circular Letter of this year contains the following statement: “From the letters laid before us we gather the pleasing intelligence that the cause of Christ within our bounds is generally flourishing; some of almost every age have been made willing in the day of Divine power to lay down their arms of rebellion and bow to the sceptre of King Immanuel.” The addition this year was 126.

The Association was held at Side Hill, Pa., in October, 1804. The Minutes for 1805 are missing. In October, 1806, the body met with the church at Conoloway’s, Bedford County, Pa. Three newly constituted churches came in at this time, viz., Gunpowder and Saters, in Baltimore County, and Upper Seneca, in Montgomery County, Md. In October 1807, the Association was held at Pleasant Valley, Washington County, Md. In the Minutes of this year appear for the first time the names of First and Second Baltimore churches. The Association was composed of sixteen churches, viz.: Harford, First Baltimore, Frederick Town, Taney Town, Tuscarora Valley, Old Seneca, Huntington, Hammond Branch Sideling Hill, Pleasant Valley, Washington City, Conoloway, Gunpowder, Saters, Upper Seneca, and Second Baltimore.

The ministers in the Association were John Davis, Lewis Richards, Absalom Butler, William Perkinson, William Gillmore, William Clingham, John Welch, Thomas Runyon, John Cook, Samuel Lane, Benjamin Green, O. B. Brown, George Grice, Edward Chote and John Healy—fifteen in all; and membership, 748. A committee, composed of brethren Richards, Griffith and Polk, was appointed to prepare an address to Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States. The address was presented and reply received.

The session of 1809 was held in Baltimore; in 1810, with Harford; in 1811, with Gunpowder. At this last named Association a resolution was adopted that each church should establish a “mite” society, each member to pay one cent per week to raise a fund to meet the ordinary expenses of the church. Here was a new thing brought in, which proved the germ of “missionism”—nothing heard or seen of such trash before this.

In 1812 the Association was held at Saters; in 1813 with the Second Church in Baltimore. The time of holding was again changed to September. In 1814 met at Upper Seneca. In 1815 met with Old Seneca; in 1816 at Pleasant Valley; total membership, 1,016. In 1817 met at Sideling Hill, Pa., at which time a new church was received called Mill Creek. In 1818 met with the church at Patapsco; 107 added this year; total membership, 1,228. In 1819 met at Alexandria, D. C., in May; and in 1820 with the First Church in Baltimore. In 1821 met at Warren, Baltimore County. In 1822 met with the Pleasant Valley Church; in 1823 at Taney Town; in 1824 with the Ebenezer Church in Baltimore; in 1825 with church at Bethel; in 1826 with the church at Harford; in 1827 with the church at Pleasant Valley; in 1828 with the church at Black Rock, Baltimore County; in 1829 with the church in Washington City; in 1830 with the Upper Seneca; in 1831 with the church at Frederick Town; and in 1832 with Warren Church.

After the adjournment of the Association at Warren in 1832, it was proposed that ministers and messengers should form themselves into a meeting, for the purpose of consulting about the present state of the cause of Christ, and the best means of advancing the interests of the Baptist cause. Elder Reis in a short address thanked God that He had opened the eyes of the brethren to see these evils that had come upon them; and that they were now ready to oppose all those inventions of men, and denounce “Missionary,” Bible and Tract Societies, Sunday Schools, etc., as they were the progeny of Arminianism.

The Clerk of the Association, Elder J. H. Jones, also addressed the meeting at the close of Elder Reis’s remarks, and inquired if Elder Reis had stated correctly the design of the meeting; if he had, then he (Jones) could not act with the meeting, much less as its Clerk. That as to every society Elder Reis had named, he (Jones) was their decided advocate and supporter. Elder Jones afterwards wished all to know that he was the first man to oppose Black-Rockism.

The call was made by this meeting for all Old School Baptist Churches to send delegates to a convention to meet at Black Rock, Baltimore County, on the following September, from which emanated that memorable address, upholding the principles of genuine Christianity, and denouncing the Arminian men-made societies that had so rapidly increased in number and influence within a few years, and which seemed designed to supplant the church of God itself, and scatter to the winds the faith and practice and all the ancient landmarks of God’s chosen people.[2]

In 1833 the Association met with the Pleasant Valley Church; in 1834 with the Black Rock Church. At this time there were sixteen ministers and 831 members. In 1835 met with the Ebenezer Church; in 1836 with the Black Rock Church, Baltimore County, May 12th.

This was a meeting long to be remembered by the friends of the Baltimore Association and all true friends of our Baptist Zion throughout the land. On Friday morning the following resolution was offered by Elder Polkinhorn:

Whereas, A number of the churches of this Association have departed from the practice of the same, by following cunningly devised fables, uniting with and encouraging others to unite in worldly societies, to the great grief of other churches of this body, as there cannot be fellowship between principles so essentially different; therefore,

Resolved, That this Association cannot hold fellowship with such churches, and all that have done so be dropped from our Minutes.

After preaching the resolution was further discussed, and was adopted by a vote of sixteen for and nine against it. Whereupon the following churches withdrew: Rockville, Pleasant Valley, Singamore, Second Baltimore, Mount Zion and Frederick Town. It was also resolved that the church at Gunpowder be dropped from the Minutes. And it was also resolved that whereas the Philadelphia, Hudson River and New Jersey Associations had departed from the faith and practice as formerly held by them and all Particular Baptists, correspondence with said Associations be dropped.

The above-named withdrawn churches met with the Second Baltimore Church (so-called), and resolved to maintain the name of the Baltimore Baptist Association, and appointed to meet in Washington September 1, 1836. But this was presumption; for as they were fairly excluded by the Baltimore Association, having departed from her ancient principles, they had no moral right to take that venerable name to themselves.

The meetings of the Association since 1833 have been harmonious and edifying for the most part. The author has attended several of them, and enjoyed the preaching and the society found at these meetings very much.

Gifted ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ from North, South and West are generally in attendance at those meetings, and the principles of the gospel kingdom are, on such occasions, at least, ably proclaimed.

We have been thus minute in describing the origin and progress of this old Association down to 1836 because of her position taken against the modern men-made religious institutions of the present century, and because of the anathemas of the North that have been hurled against her from then till now as a counterpart to those in the South hurled at the Kehukee Association.

What is Black-Rockism? Simply a stand taken by an Association of churches to adhere to their ancient faith and practice, while their adversaries and denouncers are those who have left the ancient landmarks which their fathers established and gone off into the wild vagaries of a new-fangled Pharisaic religion.

Reminiscences of some churches in the original bounds of the Baltimore Association:

The first Baptist Church in Maryland of which we have any account is that of Chesnut Ridge, afterwards Saters, Baltimore County. It has passed away into the hands of the New School Party, not having at present among its members, as is supposed, but one Old School Baptist—a brother Burnham, who is, if living, over one hundred years old.

Mr. Sater came from England in 1709. The church was constituted in 1742 with fifty-seven members, and bore the name of General Baptists.

The oldest church bearing the name of Particular Baptist in the Baltimore Association was called Winter’s Run, afterwards Harford, Harford County.

It is said that about the year 1747 some of the members of Chesnut Ridge being inclined to the sentiment of the Particular Baptists, invited their ministers to preach amongst them, who continued their visits until fourteen persons had embraced their sentiments, and these were constituted into a church in 1754, by the assistance of Benjamin Griffith and Peter Vanhorn, and the church was that same year received into the Philadelphia Association. In 1772, besides the main establishment at Winter’s Run, the church consisted of three other branches; one near Chesnut Ridge, which met for worship in the house belonging to the General Baptists; the second was at Patapsco; and the third near Winchester; and there was, in all, at this time, a membership of 138.

Elder John Davis continued in the pastorate of the church for more than fifty years; and established the First Baltimore, Taney Town, Gunpowder and Sater’s Churches. The First Baltimore was established in 1795 with eleven members, all of whom except Elder Lewis Richards were dismissed from Harford Church. The second church of Baltimore was constituted by Elder John Healy and a few English Baptists, and their meeting-house built in 1797. This church may be called, in the Baltimore Association, the mother of preachers, as Harford was called the mother of churches. The first licensed in this church was Elder Daniel Dodge, after him was Lawrence Greatrake, William Brinkers, Joseph Trapnell, W. Curtis, William Reck, Joseph Cone, Bartholomew T. Welch and Joseph H. Jones.

In 1822 Seneca Church had thirty members, under the pastoral care of Elder Francis Moore. This church became in favor of “missionism.” Elder P. Waters constituted about fourteen of her members into a church called Upper Seneca (Old School). Patapsco contained at this time about thirty-one members, with Elder Edward Chote as her pastor.

The Second Church in Washington City contained twenty members (without a pastor), most of whom had been members of the First Church; after her reception into the Association she was supplied by Elder P. Waters; occasionally by Elder Thomas Barton. Her numbers increased, so that in 1830 she had 115 members. The church at Black Rock was constituted March 29,1828, with fourteen members dismissed from the church at Patapsco. Elder Edward Chote was her pastor. Their letter of dismission is dated February 27, 1828.

Mississippi.

Brief sketch of the origin of some of the Associations in Mississippi, as gathered from Griffin’s History of the Primitive Baptists in that State.

Bethany.—In August, 1844, delegates from seven churches met, pursuant to previous arrangement, at New Bethel Church, Leake County, for the purpose of organizing an Association. Elder E. Wilbanks was called to the chair as Moderator, and J. G. Crecelius to act as Clerk. The letters from the several churches having been read, and the names of the delegates enrolled, the Convention proceeded to appoint committees, and then adjourned till Monday. The Convention met pursuant to adjournment, and the Constitution and Articles of Faith having been read and adopted, the Moderator declared the Association duly organized. A hymn of praise was sung, and the right hand of fellowship extended to the delegates. The Association then convened and chose the same Moderator and Clerk. Correspondence was arranged with two Associations, viz., the Primitive Baptist and Noxubee. Their reasons for withdrawing from the Mount Pisgah Association, having been drawn up, were read and adopted. Those reasons were because the Mount Pisgah had embraced the numerous isms of the day. The Bethany held her regular sessions till 1850 inclusive, in harmony and love, nothing special transpiring, except that she signified her disapprobation of her members uniting with Free Masons or visiting their lodges. Griffin’s History closed with the year 1850.

Lusascoona.—In May, 1840, delegates from four churches (formerly members of the Yalobusha Association) met in convention at Mount Carmel, Yalobusha County, for the purpose of forming an Association. Elder J. Robbins was chosen Moderator, and J. Barton Clerk. Having gone through with the ordinary preliminary arrangements, the Association duly organized; and the right hand of fellowship having been exchanged by the delegates, the Convention adjourned sine die.

1840. In September the Association convened with the church at Hopewell, Pontotoc County; five churches represented. Elder J. Robbins was chosen Moderator, and J. Barton Clerk. In 1843 seven churches were registered; nine churches in 1844; ten in 1845; fourteen in 1846; thirteen in 1847; and fourteen in 1850. In the year last named her correspondence was with Tallahatchie, Primitive, Buttahatchie and Tombigbee Associations. She has remained to the present time steadfast in the faith once delivered to the saints, and adhered to the rules and regulations usually observed by all genuine Primitive Baptist Associations.

Primitive Baptist.—This Association was constituted in 1839. The Convention for the purpose of forming a new Association convened according to previous arrangement at Rocky Spring Church, in Holmes County, Miss., on Friday before the fourth Sunday in April, 1839. After preaching by Elder S. Parks, the Convention was called to order by Elder N. Morris. Brother S. Parks was chosen Moderator, and brother A. Erwin Clerk. The following churches were represented by delegates, who, being called on, presented their church letters. Names of churches and delegates, viz.: Hickory Spring, Holmes County, Elder Simpson Parks, Joseph Erwin, Granderson Harris and Abner Erwin; Yazoo, Holmes County, Elder Nathan Morris, William Grisom, John Bennett and Hilliard Fatheree; Rocky Spring, Holmes County, Silas Mercer, Anderson West, H. Brister and Samuel Cook; Lebanon, Attala County, Elder J. A. Scott, D. Stephens, Z. B. Gess and R. Weeks.

The Convention, being duly organized, appointed brethren N. Morris, S. Parks, S. Mercer and Z. B. Gess a committee to draft a Constitution, Articles of Faith and Rules of Decorum, and then adjourned till Saturday morning at 10 o’clock. Met pursuant to adjournment, and unanimously adopted the Constitution, Articles of Faith and Rules of Decorum. These were sound and all in accordance with Baptist usage. In October, 1839, the Association convened again; this time at Hickory Spring, Holmes County; five churches represented. Elder S. Parks preached the introductory sermon. Elder Nathan Morris was chosen Moderator, and A. Erwin Clerk. Correspondence with three Associations, viz.: Tallahatchie, Pilgrims’ Rest and Buttahatchie. Nine churches represented in 1840 at the October session. Two sessions were held in each year, viz., in April and October. In October, 1841, fourteen churches were represented and four Associations corresponded with. In 1842 seventeen churches were represented. In 1843 sixteen churches. In 1845 eighteen churches. In 1847 there were twenty churches. In 1849, nineteen. In 1850, sixteen. In 1851, seventeen, and in 1852, sixteen churches.

This Association declared against the practice of church members visiting Masonic Lodges. And it was at the solicitation of this body that brother Benjamin Griffin, of Holmes County, was induced to prepare a History of the Primitive Baptists of Mississippi—an undertaking which he went through with in a very able and satisfactory manner. This body has stood steadfast in the Apostles’ doctrine from her origin to the present time.

Tallahatchie.—This Association was constituted in 1837 on a Constitution and Articles of Faith similar to those of the Primitive Baptists in general.

The first Minutes we gather are for the year 1839. In October of that year the Association convened with the church at New Hope, Marshall County; nine churches represented. Elder E. A. Meaders preached the introductory sermon. Elder W. West was chosen Moderator, and S. M. Caruthers Clerk. Correspondence was held with the Primitive and Mississippi River Associations. Sardis Church withdrew from the body because of this resolution adopted by the Association, viz.:

“Therefore resolved that we declare an unfellowship with all who may join the Bible, Tract, Temperance or Missionary Society or Sunday School Union.”

After this there appears to have been no further trouble among the churches about “missionism.”

In 1845 there were in the body seventeen churches; and in 1850, fifteen churches.

Noxubee.—In October, 1841, delegates from eight churches met with the church at Bethesda, Oktibbeha County, for the purpose of organizing an Association.

The introductory sermon was preached by Elder G. Woodruff from Exodus 25:40; after which the delegates from the several churches assembled together in Convention, and chose Elder B. Holbrook Moderator, and brother A. C. Abbot Clerk. The letters from the several churches were read and the names of the delegates enrolled. An invitation having been given by the Moderator to ministering brethren of our faith and order, Elders Cook and Gunn took seats in the Convention. Having appointed a committee to draft a Constitution, Abstract of Faith and Rules of Decorum, the Convention adjourned till the next day. Next day they met pursuant to adjournment, and unanimously adopted the Constitution, Abstract of Faith and Rules of Decorum prepared and presented by the committee, and then adjourned sine die.

The Convention having adjourned, the Association immediately formed, consisting of the delegates of the Convention, who were authorized by their respective churches to meet in Association. Elder B. Holbrook was chosen Moderator, and E. Page Clerk. Correspondence was arranged with Pilgrims’ Rest, Buttahatchie, Zion’s Rest and Primitive Associations.

In September, 1842, the Association convened with the church at Mount Nebo, Noxubee County; thirteen churches represented. In 1843 there were twelve churches. It is said of her in 1846, by Griffin, that “about this time this Association fell into disorder, as we learn from the Minutes of Old School Baptist Associations which declined her correspondence.”

What was the nature of that “disorder” we have not ascertained. The Association certainly started well, and seemed to stand firmly on the fundamental principles of the gospel, and what intervened to bring about “disorder” we cannot tell, and do not know whether the Association is still in existence, or, if so, what her principles now are.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Mississippi.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1844

Bethany

Leake

18

413

5

Amite

Amite

4

24

4

Hopewell

1858

Little Black

Oktibbeha

7

132

2

1840

Lusascoona

Yalobusha

14

1839

Primitive

Carroll

10

1841

Mount Zion

Jackson

7

244

4

New Hope

Tishomingo

11

202

4

1841

Noxubee

Oktibbeha

12

Tallahatchie

Marshall

7

177

2

1836

Zion Rest

Lauderdale

8

125

8

Missouri.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Missouri.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1821

Bethel

Reynolds

4

63

2

Center Creek

1823

Fishing River

Clay

20

594

16

Cuivre Siloam

Pike

7

201

4

1841

Mount Zion

Henry

9

241

8

1849

Nodaway

Andrew

7

198

8

Panther Creek

1854

Ossage River

Laclede

11

115

2

Ozark

Greene

11

167

11

1827

Salem

Callaway

17

539

3

1859

Siloam

Putnam

8

186

7

1841

Two-River

Marion

8

258

2

Turkey Creek

Yellow Creek

Linn

12

350

5

Western Corresponding

Buchanan

6

151

3

1836

Mount Pleasant

Audrain

New Jersey.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in New Jersey.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1835

Delaware River

Mercer

5

429

3

New York.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in New York.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1825

Lexington

Delaware

14

607

7

1791

Warwick

Orange

8

321

4

North Carolina.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in North Carolina.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1815

Abbot's Creek Union

Davidson

10

219

5

1832

Bear Creek

Stanly

15

204

3

1876

Black Creek

Wilson

11

530

4

1840

Contentnea

Wilson

28

1,138

20

1805

County Line

Caswell

24

1,037

8

Fisher's River

Stokes

11

404

7

1765

Kehukee

Martin

40

2,000

25

1826

Little River

Johnston

25

705

9

1798

Mayo

Stokes

15

427

5

1870

Mill Branch

Columbus

6

172

4

1799

Mountain District

Alleghany

20

1,193

8

1790

Yadkin

Davidson

13

417

1833

White Oak

Duplin

17

389

7

1844

Union

New River

1853

Centre District

Ashe

11

525

8

Three Forks

Seven Mile

1844

Toisnot

Wilson

7

320

5

A few notes in regard to some of the Associations in North Carolina.

Mayo Association.—This body is supposed to have been organized in 1798, but with how many churches we are unable to say. It seems to have stood aloof from the schemes of those called effort Baptists from the first, and has refused all connection or correspondence with them down to the present period. It is a little singular that they could never make any inroads upon this Association, or induce her to give the least countenance to their schemes or flatteries. Very few Associations have entirely escaped their coils.

Clear Spring Church, belonging to this Association, bears a very ancient date. It existed years before the Revolutionary War. Its place of worship originally was twelve miles north of Germanton—now only seven miles from that town. Elder R. W. Hill is the present pastor of this church, and has been since 1844. His great-uncle, William Hill, was pastor of the same church, and the father of William Hill, of Raleigh, who was Secretary of State for a number of years.

The first Minutes of this Association that we hear of were dated in 1809, when the Association was held with the church then called Red Cabin, now called State Line. It appears, therefore, to have been an ancient body of believers and a very stable one.

Bear Creek Association.—This Association is situated in the counties of Anson, Union and Stanly, N. C. It was formed in 1832 as follows: Elder George Little, Ezekiel Morton and J. Jones, with other brethren, delegated by the following churches, viz., Bear Creek, Meadow Creek, Freedom and Coldwater met together for the purpose of forming an Association, which they did at Bear Creek meeting-house in 1832, as above said. The body declared at once non-fellowship for all “missionary” institutions and inventions.

The number of members composing the churches at the time was about 128. In 1836 the number was 240; and in 1846, 314. Having undergone various changes since in consequence of the unsoundness of men who crept into the ministry, her numbers have been reduced to about 200.

Among the most prominent of those who caused the distress were E. L. Davis and S. Snider. These men in about 1845 turned “missionaries” and exerted themselves, doing all the damage they could, causing much distress. Since that time one Calvin Helmes, a minister about 1866, endeavored to bring into the Association “missionary,” or Arminian heresy, which resulted in much trouble and declension.

Ministers usually attending this Association have been George Little, William M. Rushing, Philip Snider, Hosea Preslar, Archibald Harris and Jacob Helms.

Ministers belonging to the Association at the present time are three ordained and one licentiate—Elder S. C. Little being one of the ordained.

Little River Association.—This Association was formed in part of churches formerly belonging to the Raleigh Association. That Association had plunged so deeply into modern idolatry that some of the faithful brethren could stand it no longer, and withdrew. They had to break off all connection with an Association that had joined the Daughters of Babylon. With some of course it was hard to part, but faithfulness to God and His cause required it. They came out by faith, but, somewhat like the father of the faithful, they knew not where they should go. Nevertheless He in whom they trusted directed them. They left the Association in September, 1825, and met together at Middle Creek meeting-house, in Wake County, and with the church at that place formed themselves into a Conference; and, after brotherly conversation, unanimously agreed that a combination of churches, when properly organized, was best calculated to promote that harmony, union, peace and love so desirable among professors of vital religion. They then agreed to meet again at Hannah’s Creek, in Johnston County, in April, 1826. They accordingly met at that time and place, and, after preaching, prayer having been made to God for His Spirit to guide and direct them in the pathway of truth and love, the brethren united together in Conference, and the proceedings were characterized by a spirit of brotherly love to each other and devotion to God. They agreed that their proceedings should be conducted in the same manner as those of an individual church, and that the Conference should have no power to lord it over God’s heritage. They agreed that the meeting should be known by the name of The Reformed Baptist Conference.

They next met in October, 1826, at Salem meeting-house, Johnston County. Eleven churches were represented by letter and delegates. They then gave some of their reasons for withdrawing from the Raleigh Association, which we present in their own language. Say they:

“First. Having for several years past observed the proceedings of the Raleigh Association upon the subject of missions, and from a belief that the system was lucrative and not supported by the word of God, or example in the purest ages of the church, our feelings have been, therefore, wounded to see our brethren pursuing a system that was both impure and untenable. But from a disposition to bear and forbear, we have borne with these things until new or other things were resorted to, if not by the Association in an Association capacity, yet by a part of the same men, acting in a distinct manner, and sitting as a ‘missionary’ board where the voice of the Association could not be heard, there to hire preachers from among themselves, at certain fixed salaries, say one dollar per day for preaching; and also to employ others as agents at forty dollars per month to beg money to pay those hirelings with. Also for continuing in fellowship, without reproof, those of her members who have joined themselves to and attend the Free Mason Lodges, which we believe to be contrary to Scripture.”

They go on then to quote a large number of passages in the Scriptures as a justification of their course and belief.

As “The Reformed Baptist Conference,” these brethren held a meeting at Cross Roads meeting-house, Johnston County, N. C., commencing Friday before the second Sunday in October, 1829. At that time and place Elder Joshua Lawrence, of the Kehukee Association, met, as a messenger, with them, and advised them, inasmuch as some of their churches were situated on or near the Little River, to adopt the name of that stream for their own, which they did. Their correspondence has been with the Kehukee, Contentnea, Country Line, Abbot’s Creek, White Oak, Staunton River, Mayo, Fisher’s River, Mill Branch and South Carolina Associations.

Elders Burwell Temple, George Nance and Nathan Gulley stood boldly in the defense of the truth in the battle of the division; and since then Elders John H. Kennedy, James H. Sasser, Jesse Adams, Jonathan Wood, N. B. Barber, Lewis Peacock, A. B. Peacock, James R. Barber, Stephen Hicks, Josiah Coates, Eli Holland, William Wall and James Wilson have been ministers in their midst who have bravely defended the cause of God and truth. Great unanimity has prevailed among the churches of this Association since its origin to the present time.

White Oak.—This Association was formed, as it appears, at Stump Sound, Onslow County, on Saturday before the third Sunday in October, 1833. Elders at her organization were Josiah Smith, Jabez Weeks, John Gornto and Lemuel Hardison. Several of her churches came out from that old corrupt body, the Neuse Association, which after separating from the Kehukee had gone into idolatry. The churches composing this Association at first were Hunting Quarters, Newport, Hadnott’s Creek, White Oak, Muddy Creek, Riley’s Creek, Wilmington, Stump Sound, Southwest, Yopp’s and Slocum Creek.

Ohio.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Ohio.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

Clover

Highland

5

137

3

Fountain Creek

Greenville

Preble

1868

Indian Creek

Greene

12

135

3

1812

Mad River

Van Wert

7

71

4

1797

Miami

Butler

11

448

7

1842

Mount Pleasant

Lawrence

10

352

10

1811

Muskingum

Perry

13

393

20

New Market

1835

Owl Creek

Morrow

9

355

11

Predestinarian

18

535

5

1840

Sandusky

Hancock

10

358

7

1805

Sciota

Hocking

13

535

6

Walhounding

Licking

Siloam Association.—The Siloam Association of Regular Predestinarian Baptists was constituted on Friday before the first Sunday in October, 1849, with only three churches, Hillsborough, Molalla and Little Bethel. Elder William Simpson was the only Elder present. Elder Isam Cranfill was prevented from being present, having been badly burned in trying to put out a fire that had caught in his mill-dam. Elder Joseph Turnage was at the time in the gold mines of California. Brother John T. Crooks prepared Articles of Faith and submitted to the body, which were adopted and remain in full force to this day. They are ten in number, and may be seen by reference to the published Minutes for 1875. They are considered sound, and such as are generally adopted by Predestinarian Baptist Churches and Associations everywhere. The three churches had forty-four members only, and yet, as small in number as they were, there was a Fullerite element among them, which opposed the adoption of the Articles. At the second meeting, in June, 1854, Fullerite Articles were presented and their adoption urged, but without success. The Circular Letter, written by brother Crooks, was chiefly on the special atonement of Christ; and the Fullerites, concentrating their force against it, defeated it; consequently there was no Circular for that year printed. One new church was received into fellowship, called Pleasant Hill. At this meeting there were three ordained ministers present, viz., William Simpson, Isam Cranfill and Joseph Turnage, though the latter had not then united with either of these churches. Sixty-two members were enrolled this year. The Circular for 1851, written on the same subject by the same person, was much opposed, but finally adopted.

The Fullerites, being thus defeated, increased in hostility and denunciation towards the orthodox party. They were eventually dealt with by the churches and excluded. At this meeting (1851) the Little Flock Church was received into membership, with Elder George Wills; making the total membership 86. Peace prevailed after this.

In 1852 there were four ordained Elders and three licentiates, viz., J. Stipp, James Bassette and William Offield; membership, 109. At this meeting Elder Cranflll was chosen Moderator, instead of Elder William Simpson, who had been a leader in the Fullerite cause.

In 1853 the Mount Zion Church united. Elder J. Stipp had been ordained, and Elder John Mansfield had united with the Hillsborough Church, so that there were six ordained Elders and two licentiates, with 130 members. Elder Ezra Stout attended this meeting, having just arrived in the country.

In 1854, six Elders present, 121 members-a falling off in numbers, owing to the exclusion of Elder William Simpson and those who went off with him. Between this and 1873 there were but few changes. The Pleasant Hill Church was dissolved; Elder James Bassette was ordained. The name of the Hillsborough Church was changed to Siloam. The Mount Moriah Church was constituted and united. In 1857 there were 157 members and five Elders; there was an obituary notice of Elder Joseph Turnage published in the Minutes of that year. In 1859 Elders William Offield and John Gribble were ordained; membership, 144. In 1860 the Umpqua Church had been constituted with only six members.

In 1863 Elder Andrew Gregg moved from Wisconsin to Oregon and united first with the Little Flock Church; then removed and became a member of the Little Bethel Church, and commenced stirring up strife and bad feeling towards the Siloam Church, because of her having received a member into fellowship who had formerly resided in Missouri, and whose character Elder Gregg charged was bad. Elder Gregg gained the favor of Elders Cranfill and Wills, and induced them to aid him in the strife, and the result was a split in the Association, taking off over one-half the churches in the Siloam Association, and dividing other churches, so that the cause of the poor Old Baptist Churches in Oregon looked very gloomy indeed. The brethren could look nowhere else for relief but unto the Lord; He heard their cries and came to their relief.

In the Fall of 1865 a goodly number of Baptists and Baptist ministers moved to Oregon. Elder Gregg was about the first to visit them and urge them to join his party, but seldom succeeded; as a general thing, they obtained the proper information first, and then united with the Siloam Churches. In 1866 the Siloam Association began to look up again, and from that time a general improvement has been going on; the Lord has revived His poor and afflicted Zion, and she has come forth as gold tried in the fire.

Elder Cranfill discovered his error, left the Gregg party, and returned to the fellowship and vindication of the Siloam Association. In a little paper that he published called “Zion’s Messenger,” he acknowledged his error in yielding to Elder Gregg. Said he: “I am thoroughly convinced that it was the greatest error of my Christian life, and I am not ashamed to acknowledge it. It is always a pleasure to me, when I can keep the old man in subjection, to acknowledge my faults. I did wrong in yielding, and more so in suffering myself to be used as a cat’s-paw, and writing and saying many things about brother Gibson and Siloam Church that I ought not to have done. And I hereby take back and retract all I have written and said against them and the Association to which they belong; and will honestly acknowledge that my course in the difficulty has caused me more trouble of mind than all my missteps of my Christian life.”

This acknowledgment, so genuine, so Christian-like, raised him greatly in the estimation of his brethren, and they seemed to love him more than ever.

The senior author of this work takes this occasion to say that he esteemed Elder Cranfill one of the purest, most kind and affectionate Christian ministers in the country. His acquaintance with him by correspondence had been of several years’ duration, and increased in interest till the period of Elder C.’s death. Elder Cranfill had commenced making a Table of Associations in the United States, and with his failing health and the author’s announcement of engaging in such a work, Elder C. transmitted his manuscript and numerous packages of Minutes to him as aid in the work, without charge.

Those churches that left the Siloam Association under Elder Gregg’s influence are said to be in a scattered condition, and only one or two now that deserve the name of churches. This schism is the more to be lamented because of the talents and orthodox principles of Elder Gregg; and on this account the more astonishing also. The trouble arose from a mere matter of church discipline.

The Associations that corresponded with the Siloam before the split dropped correspondence with her and the other party also for a few years, but all have renewed except the Quivre Siloam, of Missouri. Five Associations and one Corresponding Meeting correspond with her now. She embraces at the present time 15 churches, 20 Elders, and 229 members, and is the only Old School Baptist Association in Oregon. Elders belonging to this Association who have departed this life were Joseph Turnage, Joseph Hartley, Ezra Stout, Isam Cranfill, A. T. Beebe and G. W. Hail.

Oregon.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Oregon.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1849

Siloam

Washington

15

229

20

Pennsylvania.

Notes on Elk River Association, named in table on next page.

This body was constituted in August, 1808, upon the doctrine contained in the old Philadelphia Articles of Faith. About the year 1825 she numbered about thirty-four churches, with about 3,000 members. At this time trouble arose from the preaching, by some of her ministers, of the doctrine of a conditional salvation; and in 1826 there was a division, about one-half the churches going off on this question, and known as Separates, or Free-wills.

After this another trouble arose, chiefly in the matter of correspondence with Associations who were affected by “missionism;” and eventually some of her churches, coming under this malign influence, dropped off, which made a second reduction, about the year of our Lord 1838.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Pennsylvania.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1796

Chemung

Bradford

6

201

2

1835

Delaware River

Bucks

5

422

3

Juniata

Huntingdon

3

115

1

1776

Redstone

Greene

4

119

2

South Carolina.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in South Carolina.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1839

South Carolina Primitive

Kershaw

4

41

2

1871

Mill Branch

7

230

2

Prince Williams

Hampton

5

213

3

Tennessee.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Tennessee.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

Bethel

Weakley

19

595

7

Big Sandy

Buffalo

Hickman

1830

Clark's River

Henry

10

377

5

Cumberland

Williamson

11

316

5

1808

Elk River

Lincoln

16

545

7

1838

Forked-Deer

Gibson

10

254

3

Fountain Creek

Lincoln

1826

Hiwassey

Roane

8

321

1830

Nollachuckey

8

167

1827

Obion

Henry

8

261

3

1816

Powell's Valley

Granger

17

603

16

Red River

Christian

7

106

2

1837

Round Lick

Macon

13

527

10

1810

Stone River

Sumner

9

339

2

Sequatchy Valley

Marion

1801

Tennessee

Blount

8

240

5

West Tennessee

Dickson

About the year 1846 Parkerism made inroads upon various Associations in Middle Tennessee, and this among the others. Many brave ones who were enabled to resist the innovations of the past fell before the fatal blows of this last ism, and in 1852 there was a third reduction in the number of churches of this venerable body. Since 1852 the Association, though much reduced in numbers, continues with unabated zeal to honor and glorify God, and has enjoyed comparative peace and harmony. She now contains about sixteen churches, 545 members, and seven ordained ministers. She is the mother of several Associations, some of whom she continues in correspondence with to the present time. She is perhaps the second or third Association formed in Middle Tennessee.

Round Lick.—Round Lick Association was constituted on Friday before the third Sunday in November, 1837, at Cedar Creek meeting-house, Wilson County, Tennessee. The following churches were represented at its formation, viz.:

Churches.

Messengers.

No. Members.

Salt Lick,

Miles West, Robert Green, and others.

151.

Round Lick,

Sion Bass, Thomas Philips.

124.

Spring Creek,

Josiah Smith, Daniel McBride.

29.

Mount Pleasant,

Jonathan Wiseman, Fred Wist.

35.

Testament,

Collin Stuart, Anderson Bratton.

27.

Elder Miles West was chosen Moderator, Elder Sion Bass Clerk, and brother John Bass Assistant Clerk. Visiting brethren were invited to seats, whereupon brethren Lemuel Taylor and Samuel Denny, from Bradley’s Creek, Elder Jacob Melton and brother John Edwards, from Union, brother Philip Srart, from Stone’s River Associations, seated themselves. Elder John Cummings, who had been excluded from the church at Fall Creek for his opposition to the Baptist State Convention, was recognized in order, and seated himself also.

A Committee of Arrangements was appointed, consisting of Jonathan Wiseman, Jonas Bradley, Thomas Harding, Collin Stuart, Thomas Philips, with the Moderator and Clerk, to prepare Articles of Faith, etc. On Saturday Elder John M. Watson and brother John Snead, from Stone’s River Association, appeared and took seats in the Association.

The committee reported Articles of Faith, Covenant and Decorum, which, upon examination, were found orthodox and according to Baptist usage, and adopted.

The Association has adhered to her original principles to the present time; and, although a small body, stands well with sister Associations throughout the State and country.

Texas.

Having received of Elder Ben Parker, of Texas, some account of the rise and progress of the first Old School Baptist Association in that State, we proceed to give it as follows:

The present Pilgrim Church, in Anderson County, now a member of this Association, was first constituted in the State of Illinois, Crawford County, on the 26th day of July, 1833, by the authorities of four churches that were members of the Wabash District Association, and moved to Texas in the Fall of the same year, holding their meetings in the road as they journeyed on. About a dozen families constituted the company, and Elder Daniel Parker, the father of Elder Ben Parker, was considered their leader. This was considered the first regularly constituted Old School Baptist Church in Texas, which State then belonged to the Government of Mexico, and the Roman Catholic was the established religion of the country. Texas was then a sort of wilderness land, but few settlers in it, and only now and then a child of grace to be found. As emigration increased, however, other churches were formed, so that on the 11th day of October, 1840, four churches by their representatives met with the church at Hopewell, near Douglas, in Nacogdoches County, in the Republic of Texas, and formed the Union Association.

1. Pilgrim, with messengers. Elders Daniel Parker, Garrison Greenwood, William Brittain, brethren Eli Bowen, Richard Eaton and John Grigsby, with fifty-six members.

2. Mount Pleasant, with messengers. Elder Allen Samuels and brethren J. W. Parker and Ransom Alphin, with twenty-five members.

3. Hopewell, with messengers, Moses Waters, Josiah T. Cook, Eli Kassell, John H. Russell, John N. Elliot and Boley Waters, with sixteen members.

4. Boggy Bayou, with messengers, Elder John Ray and James Jordan, with twenty-five members.

This was the first Association ever formed in Texas, and the churches were wide apart. One of these (the Boggy Bayou), in the State of Louisiana, was about 300 miles off, and as other churches were added, some west of the Colorado River, they were 500 miles off from the place of first meeting. Messengers to the Associations, bearing their epistles of love, had frequently to stake or hobble their horses and spread their blankets on the ground for a bed at night, with the starry Heavens for a covering, trusting in God to protect them from their savage foes. The Indians were numerous and hostile in many parts of Texas at that time. Many were the trials and sufferings of the faithful in establishing, as far as in them lay, the true church in that wilderness land; yet they went through all with patience, and esteemed their hardships light when compared with the martyrs of old.

Peace has abounded in their midst, and steadfastness prevailed. She now corresponds with eight other Associations of the same faith and order. She now numbers seventeen churches holding 300 members, and by the formation of other Associations, with churches dismissed from her, her boundary now is about 120 miles from north to south, and 100 miles from east to west.

There is one of her churches in Houston County; five in Anderson; three in Henderson; one in Vanzandt; and one in Kaufman; all these being east of the Trinity River; then two in Freestone County; two in Leon County; and two in Limestone County.

At the Sulphur Fork Association, held with the church at Mount Gilead, Upshur County, Texas, in October, 1872, the Union Association was charged with holding the doctrine of Two-seedism, and correspondence at first rejected; but the correspondence was continued after her delegates answered all the following questions in the affirmative, viz: 1. Were all the human race created in Adam? 2. Did any but the elect fall under the law? 3. Is God alone self-existent? 4. Is God the Creator of all things? 5. Will the dead, both righteous and wicked, be resurrected at the last day? 6. Will our very actual natural bodies be raised spiritual bodies?

Providence Association.—Elder J. W. Shook sends a sketch of the history of this Association, from which we glean the following facts: The Association was first composed of three churches which had belonged to the Union Association, viz., Friendship, Providence and Plum Creek, meeting in convention with Providence Church, Bastrop County, Texas, May 31, 1850. Elder Josiah Harper preached the introductory sermon from Isaiah 12:2—“God is my salvation,” etc. The messengers of Friendship Church, Josiah Harper and Abner Smith, reported seventeen members; the messengers of Providence Church, Jesse Gage, James Johnson and Moses Gage, reported thirty-two members. The Articles of Faith and Constitution of Union Association were adopted, and there has been no substantial change in the same to the present time. The first session was held with Plum Creek Church, Caldwell County, Texas, September 7, 1850. Five churches were represented, two new ones, Mulberry and Little Flock, having been received; entire membership, eighty-seven. The Rules of Decorum of Union Association were adopted. Correspondence with that Association was petitioned. Elder A. Smith preached the introductory sermon and was chosen Moderator, and Elder Garrison Greenwood Clerk. Elder A. Smith was re-elected Moderator till 1861, except in 1858, when Elder William S. Smith filled that position. Elder George Daniel was Moderator in 1861, 1862 and 1869; Elder R. W. Ellis in 1863; Elder J. O. Barnett in 1864 and up to 1873 (except in 1869); Elder J. M. Baker in 1873 and up to 1880; and Elder Jesse Davis in 1880. Elder G. Greenwood was Clerk up to 1855; and since that time the Clerks have been Elder J. J. Gage, Richard Cole, John H. Perkins, Elder W. C. Purcell, G. W. Cole and Elder J. W. Shook.

In 1851 two other churches were received, Zion and Buckner’s Creek; total membership, 105 in seven churches. In 1852 two more churches were received, Bethel and Sulphur Spring; nine churches, 138 members. In 1854 twelve churches, 167 members; in 1856, 171 members; in 1857, 190 members; in 1858, 244; in 1859, 222; in 1860, 238; in 1861, 224; in 1880, 310.

At the seventh session, held with Bethel Church, in Caldwell County, Texas, October, 1856, the Providence Association denounced the doctrines of an Eternal Devil, Eternal Union, Eternal Children and Eternal Justification as heresies, contrary to the gospel of Christ; and, on this account, Plum Creek and Mount Olive Churches, and a part of Zion Church, withdrew from the Association, and have never, in proper order, applied for readmission.-S. H.

Concord Association.—The following is a sketch of the Concord Association of Texas, as authorized by her body at the session held in July, 1879-drawn up and forwarded to the senior author by Elder J. C. Denton, Clerk of said Association:

A brief history of the origin and progress of the Concord Association of Primitive Baptists in Middle Texas. (By Elder J. C. Denton, who was appointed by said Association to write this history.)

The Minutes of this Association show that it was constituted in October, 1858, with six churches and three ordained ministers. Elders S. Wheat, W. S. Smith and Jesse Graham.

The Minutes show nothing of unusual importance as having occurred until 1864, when a division took place on account of practical and doctrinal disorders.[3]

The Minutes show that there were seven churches and nine ministers in the Association at the time of the division. Four churches and four ministers, Elders McDonald, Whitley, Wheat and Allen, remained with the Association proper. Elders Wheat and Allen soon died. At this period the prospects of the Association were apparently gloomy, but she has continued to prosper from then until now. The Lord has evidently helped her.

At her session of 1877 she raised her protest against the Two-Seed heresy, in its different phases.

This Association is at this time composed of thirteen churches, and has in her body ten ordained ministers and three licentiates. She corresponds with no other Association in Texas, though she regards the majority of the most of them as being of the same faith with herself. But having suffered from both Two-Seedism and Arminianism, she thinks it best to dwell alone until her sister Associations in the State shall have thoroughly cleansed themselves of these heresies. She is ready and anxious to receive the correspondence of as many as shall do this.

Address Of Ministers.

M. H. Denman, Belton, Bell County, Texas.
Martin Whitley, Crossville, Bell County, Texas.
A. V. Atkins, Salado, Bell County, Texas.
J. W. P. Harrell (exhorter), Salado, Bell County, Texas.
William Thomas, Harrisville, Bell County, Texas.
J. W. Norton, Coke, McLennan County, Texas.
J. A. Norton, Coke, McLennan County, Texas.
G. W. McDonald, Maysfield, Milam County, Texas.
L. G. Aspley, Groesbeck, Limestone County, Texas.
J. T. Seely, Wortham, Freestone County, Texas.
W. C. Edmondston (licentiate), Corsicanna, Navarro County, Texas.
P. G. Bray (licentiate), Corsicanna, Navarro County, Texas.
J. W. Meredith (licentiate), Bryan, Brazos County, Texas.
J. C. Denton, Bryan, Brazos County, Texas.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Texas.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1850

Providence

Washington

12

310

7

1858

Concord

Bell

13

276

10

Little Hope

Panola

16

311

10

Pilot Grove

18

300

6

1847

Southeast

Tyler

8

139

3

1845

Sulphur Fork

Upshur

16

341

6

1858

Trinity River

Parker

5

84

7

1839

Union

Freestone

18

300

6

1879

Harmony

Coryell

6

95

5

Virginia.

Ketocton Association.—Next to the Kehukee, the Ketocton is the oldest Primitive Baptist Association in the United States. It is the oldest Baptist Association in Virginia, and, until the beginning of the Revolutionary War, contained all the Regular Baptists in the State. It was organized in 1766, and named from the church with which it then sat, Ketocton, in Loudoun County, Va.

In 1808 Elder William Fristoe, its Moderator and one of its ablest and soundest ministers, published, at Staunton, Va., “A Concise History of the Ketocton Baptist Association” (a 16-mo. of 162 pages), from which I shall make some interesting and instructive extracts. Elder Fristoe was born in Stafford County, Va., in 1748, and died in 1828. He was a strong predestinarian, and vigorously condemned Arminian doctrines and methods. Though not versed in the learning of the schools, he had uncommon natural and spiritual abilities. For sixty years he was an earnest, solemn, laborious minister of Christ, serving from three to five churches monthly, one being forty and another seventy miles from his residence, at a period when almost all riding was on horseback, and when most of the country was a wilderness. He was a man of extraordinary scriptural knowledge, and of unblemished character, and adorned the doctrine of God his Savior.

In his preface he remarks: “The inhabitants within the bounds of this Association, prior to the Baptist preachers coming among them, were in a state of great ignorance respecting the vitals of religion; nothing or very little said about the fallen, guilty and depraved state of mankind; of the necessity of regeneration, of redemption by Jesus Christ, pardon of sin by His blood, of justification by His righteousness, of receiving at present an earnest of the heavenly inheritance, and the final exaltation and glorification of the bride, the Lamb’s wife, and such important subjects.

“The blessing (through Divine goodness) was reserved for our day, it being the set time to visit Zion, and a wonderful time it was, when the day-spring from on high visited us, an Almighty and irresistible arm made bare, and a people called out of the world by rich, free, irresistible and unfrustrable grace; wonderful indeed that so barren a desert should become a fruitful field; the minds of many that were blind, made to see; and tongues that were dumb, stimulated to adore and praise the riches of Divine grace. In a little time a number of congregational churches were constituted, so mightily grew the word of the Lord and prevailed.”

Elder Fristoe, in the course of his small but interesting volume, describes three classes of religious errorists in Virginia during his time: “1. The priests of the Established ‘Church.’ These ridiculed the idea of the necessity of spiritual conversion, and told poor, sin-laden souls that they were low-spirited, and that, by indulging such religious melancholy, they would become useless to their families and the community and themselves; that they ought to cheer up, and go into merry company and pleasant recreations, be honest, kind and industrious, speak the truth and come to ‘church,’ and no doubt all would be well, and they would go to Heaven when they died. 2. The Wesleyans. These were anxious to increase their numbers, and, under a great appearance of sanctity, flattered blind and depraved human nature with the delusion that salvation is conditional-that man is so far restored that it is in his power to embrace or reject the Lord Jesus, and that it rests with him to go to Heaven or hell; and therefore that the sinner should discard the doctrine of sovereign, irresistible and unfrustrable grace, and salvation by the imputed righteousness of Christ, and should betake himself to praying diligently and fervently, and should go to meeting, and yield to the exhortations and prayers that he hears there, and get our good religion, which was founded by the best man that ever lived, and so recently that we do not have to ransack antiquity or even the Bible for our doctrines and precepts, as an unerring system has been laid down by our progenitor, and adopted by our people, that makes the way plain and easy for all of us, so that we are in a flourishing condition; and we beg of you, dear creature, to join in with us; we will hover round you; we will put forth all our strength; we will exercise ourselves in many different ways, and throw ourselves into different positions, that will affect your passions, and agitate your bodies, and reduce you to a state of insensibility; then, upon reflection returning, we hope you will be one of us, and we will proclaim another soul converted. 3. Some few called Baptists. These have departed from the simplicity of the gospel, and from the example of Christ and His Apostles and the primitive saints, and have introduced human inventions and contrivances for the avowed conversion of souls. The preacher, after ending his sermon, comes down from the pulpit and passes through the congregation, singing a hymn on some tender and affecting subject, with a tune of mournful sound, or, if thought proper, according to the mood of the people, with a tune of lively, cheerful sound, accompanying the singing with a shaking of hands and exhortations, with a great appearance of affection; working upon the passions by fabulous stories, and, by clash and noise and excitement, confounding the reason, and obtaining a soul-injuring ascendency over their hearers; then asking whether some do not desire to be prayed for, and, after prayer, asking if they feel no better—whether some change has not taken place—whether some comfort has not been afforded to the mind; and then follows a loud-toned exhortation, until weak minds and soft, tender passions have been reduced to a state unaccountable to themselves. How easy for persons so confounded to be persuaded that they are converted, and to be lulled into the embraces of a strong delusion! Christ, though Wisdom itself, gave no such directions for bringing souls to Him. Besides, we have lived to see that these men-made converts are but of short duration; their seeming grace or religion passes away as the morning cloud or as the early dew. It becomes the children of light to guard against every imposition, and every device of impostors, and follow no man any farther than he follows Christ. Take heed that none beguile you with a perverted gospel, and not the gospel of Christ.”

The general manner in which the approved Baptist ministers preached is described by Elder Fristoe essentially as follows: “God is a holy and spiritual Sovereign, and His law, which is an expression of His mind and will, is also holy and spiritual, and justly requires of all His creatures a complete, perpetual, and uniform obedience to all its commands, in thought, word and deed. All men are continual transgressors of the holy and spiritual law of God, and justly deserve the infliction of His heavy judgments upon them. In the day of God’s power, the spiritual law shines in the sinner’s heart, and makes him sensible of his depravity and poverty, and his lack of both will and power to do anything in the great matter of salvation-that he cannot make himself spiritually alive, or remove the burden of guilt from his conscience, or cleanse his heart from pollution, or keep the law, or act faith in the Lord Jesus, or comply with any conditions of salvation, or make hay stubble answer for lively stones in the spiritual temple built by God. He becomes thoroughly convinced that nothing but omnipotence can deliver him—none but Christ can do him any good. To such laboring and heavy-laden sinners we proclaim the glad tidings of a free and full salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, who has perfectly fulfilled all the law for you, who has atoned, in the bloody, dying agonies of Calvary, for all your sins, and wrought out a spotless and everlasting righteousness for you, who has accomplished all the prophecies of the Old Testament in your behalf, who is the grand source of all spiritual life, in whom all fullness dwells, and all grace is deposited, who is the foundation on which His church is built, who has all power in Heaven and earth, and is able to save to the uttermost all that come to God by Him, seeing He ever lives to make intercession for them, whose blood cleanseth from all sin, with whom is fullness of redemption, so that God can justify a sinner through Christ without infringing on His law or impeaching His justice. Ye hungry and thirsty souls, ye poor, lame, halt and blind, come to the gospel supper, the feast of fat things, and take wine and milk without money or price; look to Jesus, from whom all saving virtue flows; view Him on the cross as the great atonement for sin; view Him rising triumphant over death, and ascending to Heaven, to give repentance and remission of sin. Put all your confidence, repose all your trust in Him alone. When enabled thus to believe in Him, be buried with Him in baptism, and arise with Him to newness and true holiness of life. Identify yourselves with His poor, despised people; follow Him through evil as well as through good report; feed upon the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby. Exalt the great Jehovah above the Heaven of Heavens, and consider all His creatures, in competition with Him, as”less than nothing and vanity. Walk humbly with Him all the days of your life. Regard Christ as the prophet, priest and king of His church, the sum and substance of the gospel, the unfailing Surety of the eternal salvation of all His people. Live in loving compliance with all His holy and blessed commands, and thus manifest the glory of your Father in Heaven. Be careful to show forth the fruits of the Spirit of Christ in all your conduct and conversation, and to maintain those good works in which God has ordained you to walk. Clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the widow and the fatherless in their affliction, forsake not the assembling of yourselves together for the worship of God; be in constant waiting at a throne of grace, and pray without ceasing. Thus your fellow-creatures will be profited, and God will be honored. Always take the Bible as your unerring guide.”

In regard to the support of the ministry, Elder Fristoe says that the wages received by the first Baptist preachers in Virginia were sneers, ridicule, reproach and contempt, bonds, afflictions, persecutions and distress; and that afterwards the most of them received some worldly help from brethren and friends, without which they would not have been able to travel and preach so much as they did; but still they were obliged, in order to support their families, to accustom themselves and their children to farming, or some mechanical business, or some other honest course of industry. “He that labors with one hand for his daily bread, and with the other hand holds out the gospel of Christ,” says Elder F., “is entitled to double honor; but how trifling the honor conferred by man in comparison with the honor which comes from God. The Great Shepherd will one day appear and bestow a crown of life, and welcome all His faithful servants into the joy of their Lord.”

With reference to the worldly circumstances of the Baptists, Elder Fristoe observes that, as in the days of Christ and His Apostles, the members were generally poor and ignorant and unpretentious; it was the common people that heard the truth gladly-the poor to whom the gospel was preached-babes unto whom heavenly things were revealed-the poor, weak and base things that were chosen of God to confound the rich, mighty and wise, that no flesh should glory in His presence. Thus was human pride brought down, and all the glittering world abased. All natural knowledge is nothing in comparison with the wisdom that comes down from Heaven, the teachings and illuminations that the soul receives from God. “Not only is the glory of God conspicuous,” says Elder F., “in the effectual calling and enlightening of the poor of this world, but it is much more promoted by them, generally, in their manner of life and conduct afterwards. They have much fewer business cares and anxieties and plans and strivings after wealth and show than the rich; much less of gay, worldly company and frivolity; more solitude and opportunity for spiritual reflection and self-examination and devotion and reading of the Scriptures and attendance upon the public worship of God. The devout soul accounts one day in the house of the Lord better than a thousand elsewhere; for, while inquiring in the temple, he beholds the beauty of the Lord, and his soul is made like the chariot of Amminadab. He is willing to contribute of his worldly property for the honor of his Lord and Master. He is grave and cautious in company, having the fear of God before his eyes. Happy the man, though poor in this world, who is rich in faith and an heir of the kingdom of Heaven.”—S. H.

New River Association.—This Association was set off from the Strawberry Association in 1793, and organized at Stoney Battery, Montgomery County, Va., on the first Sunday in September, 1794, She has had thirty-four churches represented in her counsels. The date opposite the name of each church shows, from the best information obtained, either the year of its constitution or its first representation in the New River Association, as follows, viz.: Bethel (New River), constituted in 1774; Catawba 1780; Salem, 1784; Meadow Creek, 1785; Greasy Creek (New Hope), 1789; Greenbrier, 1781; Indian Creek (1st), 1792; Canawha, 1796; Sinking Creek, 1796; Big Levels, 1796; Pine Creek, 1803; West Fork, 1803; Jack’s Creek, 1804; Long Branch, 1825; Harmony, 1832; Concord, 1836; Green Hill 1836, Centre, 1837; Camp Creek, 1840; Cedar Grove, 1840, Indian Creek (2nd) 1844; Laurel Fork, 1846; White Oak Grove, 1847; Fellowship, 1848; Laurel Creek, 1855; Pilgrim’s Rest, 1858; Little Flock, 1871; Little Vine, 1872; Mount Zion, 1877.

Represented in the Association: Walker’s Creek, in 1794; Roanoke, 1794; Smith’s River (Charity), 1815; Union, 1822; Liberty, 1822.

In 1807 the Greenbrier Association was constituted out of the northern churches of the district; and in 1843 the Indian Creek Association was set off from the northern portion of the district. A few churches were dismissed and some dissolved, leaving New River in 1857 with the twenty churches named below, viz.:

New River (Bethel),

Salem (Little River),

Meadow Creek,

Pine Creek,

New Hope (Greasy Creek),

West Fork,

Harmony,

Jack's Creek,

Concord,

Charity (Smith's River),

Indian Creek (2nd),

Union,

Laurel Fork,

Liberty,

White Oak Grove,

Long Branch,

Fellowship,

Green Hill,

Laurel Creek,

Centre.

It was thought necessary at this time to form the district into two Associations for the sake of convenience, and the same was accordingly done. The ten first named churches were to retain the name of New River, and the ten last mentioned churches were to be known as the Smith’s River Association.

New River (Bethel Church) dissolved in 1873—100 years old—the members taking letters of dismission and joining other churches in the district. By the constitution of the last four churches within its bounds, New River Association is now composed of thirteen churches, with their names and numbers as follows, viz.: Meadow Creek 11 members; New Hope, 99; Harmony, 42; Concord, 83; Indian Creek 57, Laurel Fork, 29; White Oak Grove, 62; Fellowship, 62; Laurel Creek, 42; Pilgrim’s Rest, 17; Little Flock, 45; Little Vine, 52; and Mount Zion, 20.

Said Association, when organized, adopted the Constitution and Rules of Decorum generally adopted by regular Baptist Associations, with slight exception, and still retains them.

She was originally composed of what were Regular and Separate Baptists. The Northwestern members were of the Regular element, and the Southwestern portion were of the Separate element. Both were tinctured with Arminianism. But after a final expunging of “missionism” from their midst, their position was defined in opposition to all such doctrines and institutions, so as to secure perfect peace and tranquility in that respect.

This Association took up correspondence with other Associations about as follows: The General Committee, in 1794; Strawberry Association, 1794; Holston, 1794; Greenbrier, 1809; Mayo, 1809; Mountain, 1813; Pig River, 1825; Fisher’s River, 1835; Staunton River, 1842; and Indian Creek, 1844.

In 1868 she offered correspondence, by Minutes, with the Kehukee, Staunton River and Country Line Associations; and, besides these, her present correspondence is with the Smith’s River, Pig River, Mayo, Fisher’s River, Mountain and Indian Creek Associations. Ordained ministers belonging to this Association are Jacob Corell, Thomas Dickens, John C. Hall, Amos Dickerson, John Vass, Isaac Webb, Allen Thomas, Isam Surratt, Isaac Rigney, James M. Jennings, Posey G. Lester and James M. Allen. Licentiates: R. M. Mabry, John B. Cochran, R. S. Collins, William Simmons and Stephen Hughett. Her last Moderator was Elder Thomas Dickens, and her last Clerk was brother John C. Hall.

Staunton River.—This Association was formed of churches that came out from the Roanoke Association in the year 1841. We quote from the proceedings as follows:

Proceedings of a meeting held at Whitehorn meeting-house. Be it known to all before whom this may come, that in compliance with a request from Whitehorn Church, in the County of Pittsylvania, and State of Virginia, we, the delegates and representatives of the churches known by the names of Mount Ararat, Strawberry, Upper Banister, Whitehorn, Union, Sycamore, Johnson’s Creek and Seneca; all of which churches are of the same faith and order of the United Baptists of Virginia; having convened ourselves on the eighth day December, 1841, at Whitehorn Church, and after singing and prayer by Elder Henry Finch, the following proceedings took place:

1. Elder Joel T. Adams was appointed to act as Moderator; brother James Riddle as Clerk.

2. It was moved and seconded that a committee be appointed to show, in behalf of said churches, the reasons which have caused them to withdraw from the Roanoke Association; also to draw up rules and resolutions by which the said churches propose to be governed for the time to come, if approved by them.

Whereupon Elder Joseph T. Adams, Thomas Lovelace, Henry Finch, and brethren Hezekiah Smith, James Riddle and James Hodorett, were appointed a committee for this purpose.

3. After singing and prayer, the meeting adjourned over till next day at 11 A. M.

4. Met again on the 9th, agreeably to appointment. After singing and prayer, the representatives, after being organized, proceeded to business in the following order: 1. The committee to whom the subject was referred, reported the reasons and resolutions hereunto annexed:

**"COMMITTEE'S REPORT.**

“We, the Committee, though not disposed to speak in derogation of any fraternity, do yet feel free to say that we believe the societies of the day, known by the names Missionary, Bible, Temperance and Tract Societies, together with all the institutions thereunto pertaining, have been and are the causes of discontent, confusion and division amongst the Baptists belonging to the Roanoke District Association and the adjoining Associations; and indeed have been the cause of much disquietude and dissension, together with splits and divisions among the Baptists throughout the United States.

“And we confess that we deeply regret the deplorable and unhappy condition into which the Baptist people have been brought by reason of the aforesaid societies. Nevertheless we deem it our privilege as well as our duty to look and trust in the Lord to enable us to adopt rules and enter into resolutions whereby, if strictly attended to and governed by, we may, through the blessing of God, for time to come, enjoy more peace and harmony among ourselves and live unto Jesus, who died for us; and also for other churches or members of other churches who may concur with us and conform to the resolutions hereby entered into as follows:

1. Resolved, That we, the aforesaid churches, do withdraw from the Roanoke Association, and form ourselves into an Association which shall be called by the name of Staunton River Association.

2. Resolved, That we will neither correspond nor commune with any church or Association belonging to or favorable to the ‘Missionary’ Societies. Neither will we receive any member in our churches who is favorable to the said institutions; nevertheless those who are at this time members in our churches, who have manifested a favorable disposition towards such societies, shall be at liberty to remain with us, provided they submit to the resolutions entered into by the churches.

3. Resolved, That no member amongst us shall invite any ‘Missionary’ preacher, or any that is favorable to it or advocates the cause, to preach in any of the above-named churches, as we deem it out of order.

4. Resolved, That we appoint an Association to be (held) with the church at Whitehorn meeting-house, in Pittsylvania County, to commence on Friday before the fourth Lord’s day in April next, and Elder Joel T. Adams to preach the introductory sermon. Elder Finch his alternate.

Their fifth and sixth resolutions were in regard to section meetings; their seventh in regard to the number of copies of their proceedings to be printed and distributed; their eighth in regard to the number of messengers each church should have in the sittings of the Association; their ninth in regard to calling upon Old School Baptists, especially ministers, to visit them in their Association sessions; and their tenth requested Hezekiah Smith to prepare the Covenant and Rules for their Association.

These proceedings were signed by Joel T. Adams, Moderator, and James Riddle, Clerk, and also by Henry Finch, Thomas Lovelace, Hezekiah Smith and James Hodorett.

The Staunton River is from the Roanoke, and the Roanoke from the Middle District Association. The first session of the Roanoke was held in 1788, at Miller’s Ferry, Dan River.

The following is a list of the churches constituting the Staunton River at present:

Names of Churches.

Constituted.

By Whom Planted.

Whitehorn

1791

M. Bates.

Mill

1770

J. Creel.

Mount Ararat

Upper Banister

1773

S. Harris.

Strawberry

Union

1789

R. Elliott.

Staunton River

Stone Wall

Springfield

Seneca

1804

J. Jenkins.

Cane Creek

Stone Road

Burton's Creek

Sycamore

Virginia Corresponding Meeting—Elder William M. Smoot furnishes the following account of this body:

“The Virginia Corresponding Meeting was organized at a meeting held with the Occoquan Church, Prince William County, Virginia, in October, 1836. The brethren composing the meeting represented churches that had withdrawn from the Columbia Association on account of their connection with the New School party. Another object in the organization of this Meeting was to do away with the assumed authority sometimes exercised over the churches of their membership by constituted Associations. The order observed in the annual meetings is of the simplest character. The pastor of the church with which the meeting is held is the Moderator of the meeting, and the Clerk of that church is the Clerk of the meeting; either, however, has the privilege of securing an assistant or requesting another brother to serve in his place. The time occupied in the session is almost exclusively devoted to the preaching of the word in the public worship of the Most High. At this writing (December, 1881) the Corresponding Meeting is composed of ten churches, one of them in Berkeley County, W. Va., and the remaining nine in Loudoun, Prince William, Fauquier and Fairfax Counties, and in Alexandria, Va.”

The names of the churches are Upper Broad Run, Mt. Zion, Quantico, Alexandria, Frying Pan, Ebenezer, Bethlehem, New Valley, Mill Creek and Occoquan.

The ministers belonging to the Corresponding Meeting and their post-office addresses are as follows:

Elder J. N. Badger, Aldie, Loudoun County, Va.
Elder E. V. White, Leesburg, Loudoun County, Va.
Elder Joseph Furr, Hamilton, Loudoun County, Va.
Elder William M. Smoot, Occoquan, Prince William County, Va.—S. H.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Virginia.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1828

Ebenezer

Madison

13

720

8

1766

Ketocton

Stafford

12

350

6

1793

New River District

Carroll

12

604

8

1825

Pig River

Franklin

19

700

5

Smith's River

1842

Staunton River

Pittsylvania

14

263

2

1838

Virginia Correspondi'g Meet'g

Prince William

10

370

4

West Virginia.

Indian Creek Association.—The origin of this Association is about as follows: The Indian Creek Church, in Monroe County, West Virginia (the second oldest church in the State), was organized with three other churches out of the New River Association in 1800 into the Greenbrier Association, and continued with the Greenbrier until the inventions of men got into that body. Then in 1840 the Indian Creek Church separated from the Greenbrier with about eighty members, including two ordained ministers, named Johnson Keaton and Joseph Ellison, and attached themselves to their mother Association, the New River. The labors of those two ministers were greatly blessed, so that in the course of about two years they constituted two other churches, and these two with Indian Creek formed an Association in 1842, called the Indian Creek Primitive Baptist Association, with 162 members.

Those two Elders still labored faithfully, amid great opposition from florid professors of religion, for about ten years, and then passed away into that rest that remaineth to the servants of God beyond this vale of tears, leaving the churches without any pastors. The Lord, however, provided for them. Elder John C. Hubbard, of Patrick County, Va., soon moved into the bounds of this Association; has been a faithful defender of the truth, and her excellent Moderator, ever since. This Association, like many others, has been surrounded by the enemies of truth, but the Missionary Baptists, so-called, have been the most inveterate.

She numbers now 15 churches, 710 members, 16 Elders, and 4 licentiates.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in West Virginia.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

1842

Indian Creek

Monroe

15

710

16

1827

Patterson's Creek

Hampshire

7

105

3

1835

Pocatalico

1838

Tygart's Valley

Randolph

9

120

3

Wisconsin.

Consti-
tuted.

Names of Associations
in Wisconsin.

Counties.

No.
Churches.

No.
Members.

No.
Elders.

The First Northwestern

Layfayette

4

117

4

1. Elder W. M. Mitchell, of Opelika, Ala., was baptized in 1842, began preaching in 1843, was ordained in 1845, and from July in that year to the close of 1850 served as pastor of the four churches—Mt. Olive, Enon, Macedonia and Canaan. His great sufferings from spinal disease, caused by lifting when fifteen years old, prevented him from serving churches and preaching much from the close of 1850 to near the close of 1854. He has never been connected with any religious sect or institution except the Primitive Baptists, and never had a desire to be, either from principle or curiosity. He has now for several years been associate editor (with Elder J. R. Respess, of Butler, Taylor County, Ga.,) of the “Gospel Messenger.” The Primitive Baptists have no more esteemed minister or writer in the United States than Elder Mitchell.—S H.

2. This meeting was held September 28, 29 and 30, 1832. Elder Samuel Trott, of Virginia, preached the introductory sermon from Daniel 2:34, 35. Elder John Healy, of Baltimore, called me meeting to order. Elder William Gilmore, of Virginia, was elected Moderator, and Elder Gabriel Conkling, of New Jersey, Clerk. The committee appointed to prepare the address to the Baptists of the country were Elders Trott, Healy, Poteet, Barton, Beebe, Gilmore and Conkling.—S. H.

3. It is thought proper here to omit the extended account of these disorders, as they seem to have been caused by one or two persons, and not to be of general interest.—S. H.

Appendix.

Life of Elder C. B. Hassell.

At one o’clock Sunday morning, April 11,1880, my dear father, Elder Gushing Biggs Hassell, at his house in Williamston, N. C., after an illness of forty-two days, and in the seventy-first year of his age, gently fell asleep in Jesus.

For forty years he had been a minister, and for about twenty-five years, perhaps, the leading minister of the Primitive Baptist Church in North Carolina.

He was born near Williamston, N. C., October 14,1808. His father, Joshua N. Hassell, was an honest and hospitable man, but made no profession of religion, and died in 1824, leaving his family penniless. His mother, whose maiden name was Martha Biggs, was a woman of remarkable sagacity, energy, and decision of character. She was a zealous member of the Primitive Baptist Church. For some thirty years previous to her death, in 1860, she was generally confined to her bed with rheumatism, and was wonderfully resigned and cheerful.

Father was sent to school at irregular intervals from his third to his fifteenth year, and while in business studied the classical languages under different teachers. At fifteen, his father having died, he stopped school to labor for the support of his mother and her family. While at school he was noted above his schoolmates for aptness at learning, steady, moral habits and serious disposition. He even then esteemed his reputation and good name as better than riches. When he attained his eighteenth year he entered into five excellent resolutions, to which he steadfastly adhered the remainder of his life: To abstain from the use of intoxicating liquors, tobacco, gaming and profanity, and to be strictly honest, truthful and upright in all his dealings. He at an early period entered upon a mercantile career, which he followed through life. His business was large and generally prosperous, though he suffered many heavy losses from his debtors not fulfilling their promises to him; and in this manner, as he used to say, he helped materially to support at least five hundred different families. He preferred to suffer loss rather than grind the faces of the poor. At his death he had enough solvent credits to pay all his debts, and leave his entire real estate to his family.

He was twice married. First in 1832, to Mary Davis, who bore him seven children, of whom my oldest sister and myself survive. His wife died in 1846, and in 1849 he married, in Warwick, N. Y., Martha Maria Jewett, the widow of Elder Daniel E. Jewett, the founder and conductor of the “Christian Doctrinal Advocate and Monitor.” Of their four children, a daughter and two sons survive, all grown and married. To illustrate his usefulness to the world, it may be stated that he energetically and successfully filled the following positions for many years: Trustee of the Williamston Academy; Founder, Secretary, Treasurer and Librarian of the Williamston Library Association; Trustee and member of the Board of Examiners of the University of North Carolina; Agent of the Chairman of the Board of Superintendents of Common Schools of Martin County, transacting all the laborious and difficult work of that office; Clerk and Master in Equity for Martin County; President of the Roanoke Steam Navigation Company; Treasurer of the County of Martin, only four votes in the county being cast against him; was chosen delegate to the State Convention, February, 1861; and he served as delegate to the important Constitutional State Convention of 1875.

In the Winter of 1827-8 he felt himself arrested by some supernatural power, and exceedingly distressed on account of the original depravity of his heart, and the consequent impure streams constantly flowing from this corrupt fountain. He was at first a religious skeptic, and read the Bible simply in order to demonstrate its inconsistencies and absurdities; but the words of Divine truth proved as barbed arrows to his heart, and convinced him of the utter insufficiency of his own righteousness, and his awful condition in the sight of a holy God. It was at a time of religious excitement in the community, and he tried to hide his heart-troubles from the world. He fled to the law for refuge and safety; he resolved and re-resolved to live a still more moral life, but he found that all his fine resolutions and deeds were but as filthy rags, dross and abomination in the eyes of Infinite Holiness. While he was thus despairing of salvation by the deeds of the law, and saw no way of escape and deliverance from sin and its awful consequences, and while bowed in secret at the throne of grace, on the thirteenth of January, 1828, Christ Jesus was presented to the eye of his understanding as being the end of the law for righteousness to the believer, so that the believer in Jesus is freely justified from all things from which he could not be justified by the law of Moses; that thus the perfect obedience of Christ is imputed without money or price to every poor convicted soul that abandons all creature dependence, and trusts entirely in the mercy of Omnipotence. Then and there he felt the burden of sin removed, and he experienced a sensation of joy unspeakable and full of glory. He was at this time living in Halifax, N. C., where there was no Baptist Church. He was deeply impressed with his duty to be baptized. Availing himself of the first opportunity, in March of that year he went down to Williamston, and was received into the fellowship of Skewarkey Church, and baptized by Elder Joseph Biggs on the thirteenth of that month. The great evangelical doctrine of the election, total depravity, particular redemption, effectual calling and final perseverance of the saints to glory, was at this early period immovably settled in his mind. In 1833 he was chosen a Deacon of Skewarkey Church. In that year General William Clark, an ex-member of Congress, a man of wealth and talents, and a minister of one of the churches in the Kehukee Association, withdrew from her communion, and wrote a defamatory pamphlet against that Association. Father drew up a reply of sixty pages, which was adopted by the Association, and extensively circulated. Clark was silenced, and went southwest.

Father took an active part in prayer meetings and church conferences, and in 1840 he was licensed to preach, and in 1842 he was ordained by a presbytery composed of Elders James Osbourn, Joseph Biggs and William Whitaker. He was chosen pastor of Skewarkey and Spring Green Churches, which he visited every second and fourth Saturday and Sunday, going to other churches generally on the other two Sundays in each month. He rarely failed to attend the Skewarkey Union Meeting every fifth Sunday. In 1859 he was chosen Moderator of the Kehukee Association, and was continually re-elected till his death. He was always present at the session of the Association. He often visited other Associations in this State and in the Middle States, and went twice on a preaching tour into Canada, and once for the same purpose through the Southern States to Arkansas. During his ministry he assisted at twenty-five ordinations, baptized three hundred and thirty persons, and married ninety-six couples. For the first ten years of his ministry he would receive no donation from any one; but he then concluded that both for the donors and himself such a course was wrong, and during the last thirty years of his life he received for marriage fees and preaching an average of $83.92 a year, an amount scarcely sufficient to pay his traveling expenses. Certainly it was not for filthy lucre that he labored in the cause of his Master. His own donations to others amounted to large sums.

As far back as I can remember he was in the habit of assembling his family around the family altar every morning and evening, to read a portion of Scripture, sing a hymn of praise, and to pour forth in the most humble and reverent manner his thanksgivings and supplications at the throne of grace. I can truly say that these were the most affecting, happy and blessed seasons of my life. They are evergreen spots in memory’s waste, forming the nearest approach to Heaven that I have ever realized on earth. He sang well, and taught his children to sing. On Sunday morning, after prayers, he took great delight in instructing his children in Scripture history and the plan of salvation, and continually, both by precept and example, he strove to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I have often felt and said that I would rather have such a father than all the riches, honors and pleasures of the world. For some generations the Primitive Baptists of Williamston held prayer meetings at each other’s houses every Sunday night; since the war my father has had all these meetings at his house. His spirit was singularly attuned to prayer and praise. I never knew a man who could more truthfully say with David, “I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth.” Few excelled him in extemporaneous oratory. All his sermons were preached without a particle of written preparation, and frequently without opportunity for forethought; though he preferred, when he could, to search the Scriptures before preaching. In order and method, in neatness and cleanliness of person and attire, in self-control and evenness of temper, and in untiring industry, I have never seen his equal. He wrote his autobiography up to 1847, and kept a full diary of his life ever afterwards. He recorded in blank books, with interesting particulars, all his ordinations, baptisms, texts, marriages, and the donations made to him. In addition to his large and multifarious business, he had a most extensive and laborious correspondence. He rarely retired before eleven or twelve o’clock at night, and almost invariably rose at four or five in the morning. He frequently said that he would rather wear out than rust out, and that he wished to live so that he would be missed when he was gone. He literally worked himself to death. Appointed, in 1876, by the Kehukee Association, to write a history of that body, and of the church of God from the creation to the present time, he devoted to this work about seven hundred hours, mostly in the year 1879. At the time of his death he had completed the history of the Kehukee Association, and of the churches composing it, a statistical table of all the Old School Baptist Associations in America, a series of articles on our distinctive tenets and practices, and a history of the church for 4,350 years, from the creation to A. D. 350.

At father’s advanced age, his close confinement in 1879 to the preparation of this history gave the finishing blow to his excellent constitution. He studied and wrote on it almost incessantly, feeling that his time was short. It was with him a labor of love, but it was too excessive. For at least six months before his death he had been visibly failing. His mind dwelt almost entirely upon heavenly things. He earnestly exhorted his brethren to show their faith by their works; to be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. The churches that he served were not composed of dead members. Spring Green Church, a year before his death, built a large new house of worship, and Skewarkey meeting-house was being thoroughly repainted during his last illness. The dear brethren and sisters in these churches, as well as his family, feel that they are irreparably bereaved. He preached at Skewarkey for the last time on February 8, 1880. His text, No. 2,096, used on that occasion, was (Eph. 4:4-6), especially the words, “One Lord, one faith, one baptism.” He spoke an hour and a quarter. He preached at Spring Green for the last time on February 22. His text, No. 2,097, used then, was (2 Cor. 5:1-4): “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved,” etc. He preached fifty-five minutes. Though not able to travel, he went to the Skewarkey Union Meeting at Conoho, Martin County, February 27, and preached fifty minutes, the introductory sermon, from (Heb. 2:17, 18): “Wherefore, in all things, it behooved Him to be made like unto His brethren,” etc. Thus his last public discourse was upon the most precious object of his affections—the Lord Jesus Christ. His favorite hymn was,

“Thou dear Redeemer, dying Lamb,
We love to hear of Thee.”

And through life his favorite motto, often quoted, was “Jehovah Jireh:” “The Lord will provide.” In communion at the Union Meeting on Sunday afternoon, with eyes mostly directed towards Heaven, he dwelt, in strains that seemed almost inspired, upon the sufferings of Jesus for sinners, and upon the Divine and eternal glory of His church. That night (February 29), at brother S. W. Outterbridge’s, he was taken with a severe pain in his right side, proceeding from an enlarged and indurated liver. Nothing could give him much relief. At his request, Hicks’ Farewell (No. 623, Lloyd’s Selection), beginning,

“The time is swiftly rolling on
When I must faint and die,”

was sung. Next morning he got into his buggy, and his wife drove him home. He obtained temporary relief from the pain by a light dose of calomel. On the evening of Sunday, the twenty-first, he had himself taken down stairs into the prayer meeting room, and addressed those assembled in the most tender and loving manner, as though he knew it was for the last time. On the evening of the twenty-eighth he was also taken there, but seemed to have strength enough only to say, “Sing on.” He kept declining in flesh and strength. His whole nervous and digestive apparatus seemed utterly exhausted, and gave way. On March 31 the same pain returned in his right side, and under the repetition of the mercurial treatment it was one day and two nights before it left him. After that he had no more pain, but kept weakening to the last. Six physicians visited him, but he was beyond human restoration; God was about to call His aged and faithful servant home. I was by his bedside almost constantly, day and night, for a week. In all his illness he never manifested the least anxiety in regard to his future state. Not a cloud dimmed his prospect of a blessed immortality. A little before the last he said, “I am passing to a better world. I am going from the land of the dying to the land of the living. To live is Christ, and to die is gain. It is far better to depart and be with Christ than to stay in this sin-defiled world. It may be a disadvantage to those he leaves, but it is an advantage to the Christian to die. He exchanges this state of sin and sorrow for the perfect peace and happiness of the paradise of God. There are some things that we do not know, and that it is best for us not to know; but there are some blessed things that we do know. We do know that when our earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved, we shall have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens. We do know that when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall we also appear with Him in glory. We do know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose. We do know that though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear no evil; for God will be with us, His rod and staff will comfort us even there. Nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. 0 what a good and a faithful God! Bless the Lord, 0 my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name. Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. No other one is worthy of our trust. Others will disappoint your expectations; but God cannot deny Himself—He will be perfectly faithful to all His blessed promises. Love one another. Walk in the way of His holy commandments. Trust in God. Be perfectly resigned to His holy will, which must be done, and ought to be done, and is always best. Bury me in a plain wooden coffin, and without display, or ceremony, or preaching, in the simple manner of the apostolic age. I have never engaged in funeral preaching. Just let my friends gather in silence around, when my body is deposited in its last resting place. Bury me at Skewarkey, by the side of my children.”

For almost every one that called to see him he seemed to have a special message and some heavenly advice. His family and friends, brethren and sisters, crowded around him, and were loth to lose a single word. He seemed to me a Christian patriarch dispensing his dying blessing to his children. His last words to me were: “The Lord’s blessing and a father’s blessing go with you and yours, my dear son, through life, and bring you to a better world.” His most frequent expression during his illness was, “Bless the Lord, 0 my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name.” On the last day, when he was too weak to say scarcely anything, he often repeated, “All right! all right!” When quite restless and tossing about, towards 12 o’clock Saturday night, April 10, he was asked if he wanted anything, and he said, “Nothing in this world.” He seemed conscious to almost the very last, and about 1 o’clock Sunday morning, without a struggle, a sigh, or a gasp, his spirit quit its mortal tenement and ascended to the bright mansions of rest. A placid and heavenly smile rested upon his countenance. In his last will, written in 1879, he had said, “I resign my body to the dust, from whence it came, and my spirit to God who gave it, confidently expecting a happy reunion beyond the grave.” Death had no terrors for him. He is

“Asleep in Jesus! peaceful rest!
Whose waking is supremely blest.”

Monday, April 12, was a bright, cold day. Numbers of sympathizing friends began soon to gather at my father’s house. At half-past two P. M. the procession started for the cemetery at Skewarkey, a mile distant. Every store and shop in Williamston was closed. Almost the entire population of the town and surrounding country, of all parties and denominations, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, issued forth and respectfully accompanied the remains to the grave. In tearful and almost reverential silence they gathered around the body of their father and friend, and looked for the last time in this world upon the loved features. The coffin was gently lowered into its receptacle by the hands of dear brethren, and noiselessly covered with earth. On the morning of the last day the body thus sown in weakness and dishonor will be raised in power and glory, and rejoin its companion spirit; and the devoted servant of Christ will be welcomed to a blissful and everlasting association with his God. May Divine grace prepare us to follow him to that sinless and tearless state.

Sylvester Hassell.

Autobiography of Elder Gilbert Beebe.

Mr. Slawson:—In fulfillment of my promise, I will state some of the most important incidents of my life. I was born in the town (now city) of Norwich, Conn., on the 25th day of November, 1800. At a very early period, and as far back as my memory extends, I was seriously impressed with a solemn conviction of my sinful and lost condition as a sinner, and of the necessity of being “born again,” to qualify me to see the kingdom of God. When, I think, from my best remembrance of the date, I was not more than seven or eight years old, I was made to hope and rejoice in God as my Savior, and to feel His love shed abroad in my heart. I think that at that tender age I was taught of God to know, what no other being could teach me, that “Salvation is of the Lord.” From that hour I have had no confidence in the power of men to effect or help in the least to effect the salvation of a sinner. In 1811 I was baptized by Elder John Sterry, and received as a member of the Baptist Church in Norwich. This was many years before the division of the Missionary or Fullerite Baptists from the Primitive order, and before any organized religious societies or institutions were known or tolerated in the Baptist denomination in our country.

In 1816 I came to the city of New York, and afterward became identified, by letter, with the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where I was called to exercise my gift, and was finally licensed to preach the gospel; this was about the year 1818. I then traveled in several States as an itinerant preacher, and supplied the Third Baptist Church in Baltimore three or four months in about 1821-2, but it suited my mind better to be traveling. I never failed to find places where I was well received, and without any support from missionary arrangement I was fully sustained, so that I could say as did the disciples whom Jesus sent out without purse or scrip, when they returned, that I had lacked nothing.

In 1823, February 4, I was married in the city of New York, and in the same year was ordained to the pastoral care of the Baptist Church of Ramapo, in Rockland County, N. Y., and continued with them until May, 1826, when I accepted a call to the pastorate of the Baptist Church at New Vernon, N. Y. This church was constituted about 1786, and my predecessor, Elder Benjamin Montanye, had served them as pastor thirty-three years. He died in December, 1825, and I succeeded him the following May. So it will be seen that this ancient church has been supplied for the last eighty-three now eighty-eight years by but two pastors. During the fifty years of my connection I spent the principal part of three years and a half in Alexandria, and Upper Broad Run, Va., and the Shiloh Church in Washington, D. C., but continued to visit New Vernon regularly during the time, and finally removed to New Vernon in April, 1840.

For about forty years I have also served the Middletown & Wallkill Church, in connection with my labors in and with New Vernon.

During the half-century all the members of both churches have been called to their inheritance above with the exception of about four or five. The two churches contain a membership now of about one hundred and eighty, nearly all of whom have been gathered into the fold, besides many others who have been called away, since I have been with them.

The division, or separation of the Missionary Baptists in these parts, from those of the old order, took place about forty years ago. I stand today rooted and grounded in the faith and order on which the whole Baptist denomination in our country stood when I united with them sixty-five years ago. I have found no occasion to depart from either the faith or order of the church of God, as organized on the day of Pentecost. I cannot find by sixty years of careful and prayerful searching of the Scriptures, that those primitive saints who gladly received the word at Pentecost and continued steadfastly in the Apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, had any religious organizations as auxiliaries to the church of God, existing among them. No Mission Boards for converting the heathen or for evangelizing the world; no Sunday Schools as nurseries to the church; no schools of any kind for teaching theology or divinity or for preparing young men for the ministry; no pious rehearsals of the “Melodies of Mother Goose” or “Jack Horner” or the “cow jumping over the moon,” among the institutions of Christ or His Apostles. I am content to be considered all of eighteen hundred and forty three years behind the progressive religious doings of the more popular religionists of the present time. I nave never been identified with, nor have I had any fellowship for, any religious rites, forms, fashions or customs which cannot be found in the laws of Christ, and practice of the Apostles and primitive saints. I do not denounce those who differ with me in regard to these things; to their own masters they stand or fall; nor do I dispute that there are among them some of God’s quickened children; that is not my province. “The Lord knoweth them that are His,” and He can bring them out of their idolatry in His own good time. But while I live I expect to protest solemnly, soberly, but not with unkind or malicious feelings, against their spiritual wickedness in high places.

The “Signs of the Times,” as you are aware, has been published by me nearly forty-four years. During all this time it has been devoted to the defense of what my eternal destiny rests upon as the truth as it is in Jesus. My warfare is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, and against the rulers of the darkness of this world.

My race is nearly run. I am now in the seventy-sixth year of my age. My voice will soon be silenced in death, my pen will pass into the hands of another, and I hope abler writer, but the eternal truth for which I have so long contended will be lasting as the days of eternity. And when all the deceptive and luring doctrines and institutions of men shall be exposed, and all who have trusted in a refuge of lies shall bewail their folly and call for rocks and mountains to hide them from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the presence of the Lamb, those who know and love the truth shall in the truth rejoice forevermore.

Gilbert Beebe.

Middletown, N. Y., April, 1876.

Elder Gilbert Beebe’s Editorial on Ecclesiastical History and Church Creeds.

“Signs of the Times,” Middletown, N. Y., August 15th, 1881.

It is important for us to know to what extent the history of the past, in regard to religious events, and the uninspired creeds which have been written, may be beneficial to the people of God at the present day. We know that the inspired psalmist “considered the days of old, the years of ancient times.” He says, “I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search.”But this solemn retrospection was not to subserve an idle curiosity or vain ambition to acquire that knowledge of past events which serves only to inflate the mind with pride; for his mind was sorely perplexed with the soul-trying inquiry, “Will the Lord cast off forever? and will He be favorable no more?” “Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath He in anger shut up His tender mercies?” It was when under these trying circumstances that he said, “I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the works of the Lord: surely I will remember Thy wonders of old. I will meditate also of all Thy work, and talk of Thy doings.” (Ps. 77:5-12). He was not searching for some record of what he had done for the Lord, nor of what he had done for himself, nor yet for what men or angels had performed. A knowledge of what men or angels had done or could do could not reassure his faith that the mercy and truth of God were built up forever, and his faithfulness established in the very Heavens.—(Ps. 89:2). For these blessed assurances are not found among the uninspired records of men, but in the sacred archives of the eternal counsel of God, and revealed by the Holy Spirit to the sons of God and heirs of eternal glory. To look back to the rock whence they are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence they are digged, is confirming to their faith and confidence in the God of their salvation. As the ancient patriarchs and saints sometimes set up monuments and Ebenezers as reminiscences of God’s special favors towards them, so it is profitable for the children of God at the present time to remember all the way in which the Lord their God has led them, and with gratitude and praises to acknowledge that His goodness and mercy have followed them all their days. But while we fully appreciate God’s wonderful works of old to usward, and to the children of men, we should rely alone on what the Lord has taught us by His word and Spirit, and read with great caution the religious history of uninspired men.

Since the Apostles of the Lamb have finished their course with us in the flesh, no history of the church of God should be allowed to lure us from the doctrine which they taught, the judgments they have recorded, the ordinances they have enjoined; nothing is to be added nor aught diminished from the perfect standard of faith and order they established, which is confirmed by all the valid authority of earth and Heaven. What they have bound on earth is bound in Heaven, and what they have loosed on earth is loosed in Heaven. The question with us now is not or should not be, What was believed or practiced in the church one hundred or a thousand years ago? but rather, What was the faith which was once delivered to the saints? We are not now to ask, Are our ministers by succession of ordination, through the dark ages of papal abominations, traceable to the Apostles? but rather let it be asked, Are they such men as the Holy Ghost commanded the church to separate to the work whereunto He had called them?

Much is said at the present time, both by Catholics and Protestants, of what they claim to be a regular succession from the Apostles, as establishing their claim to be the true church of Christ. But the fallacy of their vain boasting is clearly apparent when we compare their faith and order with that by which the primitive church was distinguished in her original organization at Jerusalem. The constituent members of the church at Pentecost were such as had by the outpouring of the Spirit and the preaching of the word been pricked in their hearts and made to feel their wretched, guilty and helpless condition, and gladly to receive the word, and to repent, or turn away from their former delusions, and be baptized and added to the church, and of them it is said, They continued steadfastly in the Apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.—(Acts 2:37-42). This church of the First-born was built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto a holy temple in the Lord.—(Eph. 2:20, 21). They held no other doctrine than that of the Apostles, aspired to no other religious fellowship, rested on no other foundation or chief corner stone; but these all, to Christ the Lord coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God and precious, were, as lively stones, quickened by their immortal and life-giving foundation, built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.—(1 Peter 2:4-6). In seeking for the kingdom of God and His righteousness it is expedient for those who are called by grace and born from above (as none but such can see it) to look as far back as to the description of the church as faithfully given in the New Testament. Not even in the history of the first century of the gospel church are we to look for a perfect rule for our faith and practice as disciples of our Savior Jesus Christ; for while the Apostles were still in the flesh carnality was detected in the church at Corinth, heresy and witchcraft in the churches of Galatia, and dissensions at Antioch; and in the days of the Apostle John there were many antichrists which went out from the church because they were not of them. And Paul, Peter and Jude admonished the saints that many should depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. And even of the Elders who wept and fell on Paul’s neck, because he had told them they should see his face no more, should men arise speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them. The primitive saints could only abide in the Apostles’ fellowship as they continued steadfastly in their doctrine; they were allowed to follow no man only so far as they followed Christ. Can it then be safe for us to accept of the usages or traditions of the church, or of any organization claiming to be the church, as a standard of faith or rule of practice, which have existed since the time the Apostles were in the flesh? If in the days of their sojourn on earth no church was perfectly free from defect, at what period from that to the present time have any of the churches surpassed the primitive churches in purity? We have a more sure guide and directory. The doctrine, examples and precepts of God our Savior, as given us in the New Testament, and written by the Holy Spirit in the heart of all who are born of God, alone are reliable. To them only are we exhorted to give heed, as unto a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns, and the day star shall arise in our hearts. A faithful record of the history of the church of God through the intervening ages which have elapsed since the Scriptures were written, could such a history be produced, would only be valuable in showing the long-suffering, tender kindness and boundless faithfulness of our covenant-keeping God in being merciful to our unrighteousness, and in warning us to beware of and avoid every error or departure from the divinely inspired rule, into which the church has been lured or betrayed at any time. In no age or period of the existence of the church has it been any less expedient to test her faith and practice by the unerring rule than at the present time. Individuals and churches have perhaps as frequently been drawn into error by tradition as by any other influence. Things which have been held as sacred by pious parents, esteemed preachers and learned instructors, are too often accepted by the unsuspecting disciples for truth, which will by no means bear the scrutiny of investigation in the light of the Scriptures. The saints can only be redeemed from their vain conversation, received by tradition from their fathers, by the cleansing blood of Christ; and even those who by Him do believe in God, and have purified their souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit, are admonished to stand fast: “For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.”—(1 Peter 1:22; 2 Peter 2:20, 21). We cannot obey the truth if we give heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils; and all spirits are seductive which would divert us from following our Lord, and tempt us to accept any other religious oracle than the Holy Scriptures which He has given as our infallible guide; and all religious doctrines or practices that are not approved by our Lord Jesus Christ and authorized by Him, are doctrines of devils. All that He has taught and commanded is obligatory on His disciples, while all that He has not taught or commanded is forbidden.

Written creeds also, as embodying the opinions of men, or the decisions of prelates and councils on religious subjects, are to be treated with the utmost caution, and accepted only so far as they are sustained by the inspired Scriptures. A brief statement or summary of what we believe is taught in the Bible may be useful in distinguishing the church of God and children of His kingdom from others who profess to believe the Scriptures, and yet reject what we believe them to establish as the truth of God; but when such professions of faith assume the form of edicts, of improvements upon the Scriptures, or as infallible interpretations of them, or as an absolute standard of orthodoxy, their tendency cannot fail to be pernicious. If they claim to be more plain, clear or reliable than the Scriptures, they are sacrilegious and blasphemously insulting to the infinite wisdom of God. To receive them as anything more than a belief of what the Scriptures teach, is to ignore the Scriptures and take the open ground of rank infidelity. However sound and orthodox written creeds or articles of faith may be, they can only express the convictions of uninspired men, who are liable to err; and when written only to express our convictions or understanding of the Divine testimony, we should explicitly state that nothing in them shall be construed as in any wise binding on the saints, only so far as by a close and prayerful investigation they shall be fully sustained by the Scriptures. While therefore we give an expression of what we believe is taught in the Scriptures, great care should be taken lest we make our views or understanding of them the test of fellowship, instead of the Scriptures themselves. It is true the saints are admonished to be of one mind and one judgment, to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and any palpable departure from the faith of the gospel must unavoidably affect our fellowship; but such a departure must be ascertained and determined by the unerring standard of the Scriptures, and not by any humanly-devised creed, for every written creed or abstract of the faith which we may have accepted, as well as the questionable theory to be settled, must be tested alike by the Scriptures as the only reliable and infallible standard. If we set up our creeds or traditions above the inspired word, we make ourselves wise above what is written, and may fall under the rebuke of Him who charged the Jews with making void the law of God by their traditions, and of whom He said, “In vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.”—(Matt. 15:9). The repudiation of long cherished traditions, or the ignoring of creeds, can only amount to heresy so far as the repudiation or ignoring party can be convicted of departure from the doctrine and precepts of our Lord and His Apostles, as given to us in the New Testament.

In more than three score years of our labors in the gospel ministry we have never demanded or required of any candidates for baptism that they should sign any pledge to adhere to any other standard of faith or practice than that which is given in the Scriptures. We have said to them, “If thou believest in the Lord Jesus Christ with all thy heart, thou mayest.” After hearing from them a satisfactory relation of what we believe to be a genuine experience of the new birth, we have usually asked them if they believe the doctrine and order held and preached by the Old or Primitive Baptists, so far as they understand it, and if their experience is in harmony with it. Upon receiving an affirmative reply, we bid them welcome to the ordinance, and hold ourselves ready, if need be in the same hour of the night or of the day, to administer that sacred ordinance. We know of no Divine authority for delaying the administration for a more convenient season, or to first bury a father, or take leave of those we are to leave behind us. As every one who is born from above, and who loves the precious Savior, is commanded to take His yoke, bear His cross and follow Him, and as baptism is the first act of obedience of the Heaven-born child, no other duty or religious privilege can be in order until this is performed. But upon this subject of baptism we may hereafter write, if the Lord shall so permit.

[As this is the last editorial left by our dear father, and written but a few days before he was called home, the one contemplated in the last sentence was not written. May not this fact imply a reproof to those who love and hope for salvation through our Lord Jesus, yet wait for something more than His plain command to urge them to obey Him in following His great example?—G. Beebe’s Sons.]

Predestination.

[In accordance with the request of Elder G. Beebe’s Sons, the publishers of this book and of the “Signs of the Times,” I append the last editorial of Elder Gilbert Beebe on the subject of Predestination, showing in full his views, and those of the present proprietors of the “Signs of the Times,” and of a large number of the subscribers of that periodical, in regard to God’s absolute yet sinless and righteous predestination of all things. These views are, in general, substantially the same as those expressed in the Third Chapter of the old Philadelphia and London Confessions of Faith (see pages 670 and 671 in this volume). I believe, and I think that every Bible Baptist believes, that God is the All-Mighty, All-Wise and All-Holy Sovereign of the Universe; that He could have prevented the entrance of sin into the world; that He perfectly foreknew the fall and all the wickedness of men; that He had a purpose worthy of Himself, however inscrutable to us, in regard to the entrance of sin, as well as in regard to all things else; that by His supreme power and decree He restricts all the rage and malice of wicked men and devils to do no more nor less than what He will overrule for the good of His people and for His own glory; that men act voluntarily when they commit sin, and are neither tempted nor compelled by God to sin; that God hates sin with a perfect hatred, forbids and resents and punishes it, unless properly atoned for and repented of, with an everlasting curse. As the sinful will of man is but the expression of his sinful nature, so I believe that the holy will of God is but the expression of His holy nature or character, which is essential, infinite, eternal and unchangeable holiness, the very impersonation of His holy law, as well as of His holy and merciful gospel, and the eternal standard of all holiness in the universe. I further believe that, while the sinner has destroyed himself, all his salvation, from first to last, is of the pure, unmerited, almighty and unchanging grace of God.

I am informed by Elder G. Beebe’s Sons that their father did not, neither do they, accept the use of the word “permission” in reference to God’s decrees.

The "Signs of the Times" is not, in the slightest degree, responsible for a single sentiment expressed in this book, except for those contained in the quotations from its columns.—S. H.]

Absolute Predestination of All Things.

(Last editorial on the subject by the late Elder Gilbert Beebe, in the “Signs of the Times,” October 1, 1880.)

The Old School or Primitive Baptists in former years have been very definitely identified and distinguished from all other religious or ecclesiastical organizations as Predestinarian Baptists, and as such have borne reproach and vituperation from those who hold more limited views of what we regard as the absolute and all-pervading government of God over all beings, all events, and all worlds. With deep solicitude and painful concern we have witnessed in the preaching and writings of some of our brethren a disposition to so yield or modify the doctrine as to limit its application to such things as the carnal mind of man can comprehend or the wisdom of this world can approve. While some will concede that all things that they regard as pure and holy are ordained or predestinated of God, they deny that the absolute government of God does dictate by absolute decree the wicked works of wicked men and devils, for that, they say, would make God the author of sin. They therefore set up their judgment, and set bounds for Infinite Wisdom to be restricted to, and beyond which limitation He must not extend His government, without subjecting Himself to their censure as an unjust God and the author of sin. But how lamentable is the infatuation of poor, blind mortals, when

“The vain race of flesh and blood
Contend with their Creator, God;
When mortal man presumes to be
More holy, wise or just than He.”

There are undoubtedly many of the dear people of God who feel jealous for the glory of God, and who, without any aspiring ambition to be wise above what is written in the sacred Scriptures, from inability to comprehend the two great parallel mysteries of godliness and of iniquity, have felt a commendable concern lest in our weakness we should impute to God aught that would reflect on His adorable perfections, or withhold from Him that which He has ordained for the manifestation of His glory. It certainly becomes us, as finite beings, to speak of Him and of His government with fear and trembling. He is the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, and His name is Holy. His attributes are veiled in that infinity which no finite being can by searching find out. He keepeth back the face of His throne, the place and power of His government, and spreadeth His cloud upon it. As the Heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s ways higher than our ways, and His thoughts higher than our thoughts. The standard of infinite purity and holiness is the will of God. There can be no higher law than the will of God, for only to the standard or counsel of His own will and pleasure does He Himself conform. “He worketh all things after the counsel of His own will.”—(Eph. 1:11). “Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.”—(Isa. 46:10). In this connection He says, “I am God, and there is none like me.” And in the revelation of the Lamb in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells, “The four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat upon the throne, and worship Him that liveth forever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory, and honor, and power: for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.”—(Rev. 4:10, 11). “O the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been His counsellor? or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things: to whom be glory forever. Amen.”—(Rom. 11:33-36).

When God created the Heavens and the earth no other power than His own was employed, no wisdom but His own was consulted, nor was there any other than His own will to dictate what, how, or for what purpose anything should be created. As a potter has power over the clay, it is his right to form his vessels as he please; and if he forms of the same lump vessels to honor and vessels to dishonor, who shall dispute his right to do so? The prophet says God is the potter and we are the clay; then, “What if God, willing to shew His wrath, and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had afore prepared unto glory.”—(Rom. 9:21-23). Dare any of us poor, finite worms of the dust dispute the sovereign right of God to do all His pleasure in the armies of Heaven and among the inhabitants of earth? “Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” How appropriate and forcible are the words of Job, “Hell is naked before Him God, and destruction hath no covering. He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing. He bindeth up the waters in His thick clouds, and the cloud is not rent under them. He holdeth back the face of His throne, and spreadeth His cloud upon it. He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end. The pillars of Heaven tremble and are astonished at His reproof. He divideth the sea with His power, and by His understanding He smiteth through the proud. By His Spirit He hath garnished the Heavens; His hand bath formed the crooked serpent. Lo, these are parts of His ways: but how little a portion is heard of Him? but the thunder of His power who can understand?”—(Job 26:6-14).

Can we contemplate the awful majesty, profound wisdom, deep and unsearchable counsel, infinite goodness, unerring workmanship in all that He has condescended to let us know of His great and marvelous works, from the spreading abroad and garnishing of the wide Heavens, down to the formation of the crooked serpent, and still stand in doubt of His predestinating power and unrestricted government over all beings, all worlds, and all events?

Are death and hell and all things naked before Him, and destruction uncovered to His all-seeing eye, and yet unlimited by His power and wisdom? Has He stretched out the north, and balanced the earth upon nothing, without any design, purpose or decree concerning their subsequent destiny? Has God bound up the waters in His thick cloud, and “given to the sea His decree, that the waters should not pass His commandment” (Prov. 8:29), and yet left all to the vagary of chance? When He set His throne above the Heavens, was it to be the place of no power in controlling the destiny of all things in Heaven and earth and hell? For about six thousand years the sun, moon and stars have with exactness filled their respective orbits, and without the variation of a second of time from their creation made all their revolutions, in obedience to the decree of the Creator. Is it by chance that “The Heavens thus declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork?”

But say some to whose minds the doctrine of the universal government is obscure, We admit that God has predestinated some things, but do not admit that He has predestinated all things which come to pass. Let us see how this partial or limited government would accord with the Divine record. Suppose that in what we have been contemplating of the Heavens we should find the sun and moon, and all the stars but one, held firmly to their orbits by the irresistible will and decree of God, and that one solitary star, without any fixed orbit, is allowed to range the infinity of space, wandering with more than lightning velocity, guided only by chance; where would be the safety of all the other stars? what would become of the predestination of those heavenly bodies intended to be preserved from hazard by the decree of God?

To us it has been a comforting thought that God has set the bounds of our habitation on the earth, and the number of our months is with Him, and our days are appointed to us as the days of an hireling, who cannot pass His bounds; but what assurance of safety would that afford, if He has left murderers and bloodthirsty men or devils unrestricted by His predestinating decree? To our mind, either everything or nothing must be held in subjection to the will and providence of God. Even the wickedness of ungodly men is restricted by predestination, so that “the wrath of man shall praise God, and the remainder of wrath He will restrain.”

“Pains and deaths around us fly—
Till He bids we cannot die;
Not a single shaft can hit
Unless the God of Heaven sees fit.”

For death and hell can do no more than His hand and counsel have determined shall be done. Does this make God the author of sin? or, in other words, does this make Him a sinner, or charge on Him an imputation of impurity? By no means. Against whom is it possible for God to sin? Is He amenable to any law above Himself? If so, by what law can He be indicted, in what court can He be tried or convicted? How preposterous! It is His eternal right to do all His pleasure, “Nor give to mortals an account, or of His actions or decrees.”

It savors of atheism to deny that He is the self-existent, independent God who has created all things for His own sovereign will and pleasure. And if it be admitted that He had a right to create the world, and all worlds, it must then be also admitted that He had a right to create them according to His own will and pleasure. Worms cannot charge Him with error because He did not assign them a more exalted place in the creation, or for creating them worms instead of men. Men cannot justly charge Him for not creating them angels, nor angels because He did not make them Gods. The world, with its infinite variety of living creatures, from the minutest insect to the most huge monster, as well as man, were all made for the pleasure of their Maker, and all must subserve the exact purpose for which they were made. Even the crooked serpent, as well as the harmless dove, all were pronounced good in their respective places; not good in the sense in which God is good, but good because they were precisely what He intended or predestinated them to be. Had the serpent been straight, or the dove crooked, or if the things made had been different from what the Creator intended, there would have been a defect in the workmanship. We cannot, with such exalted views as we entertain, think that God has ever failed to secure the perfect accomplishment of His own design or purpose in anything He has ever done. The entrance of sin into the world, and death by sin, which by the offense of one man has passed upon all mankind, was no unprovided-for event with Him, to whose eyes sin, death and hell have no covering. The eternal purpose which God had purposed in Himself before the world began was sufficiently perfect and comprehensive to include all that could or can possibly transpire, or He would not have declared the end of all things from the beginning. “Known unto God are all His works from the beginning of the world.”—(Acts 15:18).

But there are many who admit the foreknowledge of God, and yet deny His determinate counsel, on which the certainty of all the events of time depends. Men may have a limited foreknowledge of things which God has made certain by His determinate counsel and irrevocable decrees, as it is said, “The living know that they must die;” but God’s foreknowledge depends on nothing outside of Himself, for He has challenged the universe to tell with whom He has taken counsel, or who has instructed Him. To us it seems perfectly clear that nothing could be foreknown that was undetermined, and that the foreknowledge and determinate counsel of God are inseparable.

It is also generally admitted that in the salvation of His people, “Whom He did foreknow, them He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Rom. 8:29); but that the well-beloved Son of God was delivered into the wicked hands of men to be crucified by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, is not so readily admitted. The wicked works of those who crucified the Lord of glory were not foreknown by His murderers; but it was foreknown and determined of God, Peter said, to those whom he charged with the wickedness of killing the Prince of life. “I wot that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers. But those things, which God before had shewed by the mouth of all His prophets, that Christ should suffer, He hath so fulfilled.”—(Acts 3:17, 18). “For of a truth against Thy holy child Jesus, whom Thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, for to do whatsoever Thy hand and Thy counsel determined before to be done.”—(Acts 4:27, 28).

The wickedness of men in betraying and crucifying our Lord had been positively predicted from the days of Abel, in what God spake to the fathers by the prophets, and by what was signified by all the offerings which were made under the former dispensation. The pieces of silver for which He was betrayed were counted and declared hundreds of years before Judas was born; and the dividing of His garments, and the lot cast for His seamless robe, was determined of God and declared by the prophets. The history of Joseph, and the wickedness of his brethren, was in fulfillment of his dreams, and in accordance with the purpose in which Joseph said, God meant it for good.

It has been said by some that these great events which God has overruled for good were ordered of the Lord, but that the smaller matters, and the wickedness of men, were not predestinated. Our Savior has informed us that the determinate counsel of God in His all-pervading providence numbers the hairs of our head, so that not a hair can fall to the ground without Him; even the little sparrows are protected, and the ravens are provided with food by His determinate counsel. And Paul assures us that “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.”

It seems to us unreasonable, as well as unscriptural, to say that the government of God directs and controls some things, and that other things are left to the control of men or devils. If God’s government extends only to the good deeds of men, then is His absolute government totally excluded; for “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”—(Rom. 3:10-12). We would not limit the government of our God, nor, because we cannot comprehend His designs, dare to say He has no designs.

“He in the thickest darkness dwells,
Performs His work, the cause conceals;
But, though His methods are unknown,
Judgment and truth sustain His throne.

“In Heaven, and earth, and air, and seas,
He executes His firm decrees;
And by His saints it stands confess’d
That what He does is always best.”

Men act voluntarily when they commit sin; they have no more knowledge of or respect for the purpose of God, than Joseph’s brethren or Potiphar’s wife had in his case, for there is no fear of God before their eyes. It is even so with the princes of this world; if they had known Jesus, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But it as needful that Joseph should be cast into prison, and it was expedient that Christ should suffer; therefore that knowledge was withheld from the persecutors of Joseph and of Jesus, until they should fill up the cup of their wickedness. And it is thus in the wisdom of God that the world by wisdom shall not know Him. Yet such is the wisdom, power and righteous government of our God that He can and does set the exact bounds by which the wickedness of men and devils is limited, and beyond which they cannot go. Satan is bound a thousand years with a great chain, and after the thousand years he shall be loosed for a short time. With all his rage and malice he is restricted by the supreme power and decree of God, to do no more nor less than what God will overrule for the good of His people and for His own glory. And thus also, “God, willing to shew His wrath, and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction,” as in the case of Pharaoh and the Egyptians, hardening the heart of Pharaoh until all the plagues and judgments were accomplished, and His own almighty power and glory were then made known in delivering the Hebrews, and in overwhelming Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea. “Therefore hath He mercy on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will He hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth He yet find fault? For who hath resisted His will? Nay but, 0 man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” (Rom. 9:17-22).

The Apostle, fully aware of the disposition of the carnal mind to cavil and reply against the sovereignty of God in the execution of His pleasure, did not attempt to apologize for God, or so to modify the doctrine as to render it less objectionable to the carnal mind; but he called attention to the infinite disparity between the infinitely wise, holy and omnipotent God, who holds our everlasting destiny, and by whose long-suffering we are permitted to live, and poor, finite, depraved, short-sighted man, and the daring presumption and extreme folly of questioning the justice or wisdom of God in working all things after the counsel of His own will. We regard it as a very serious matter to charge that God cannot govern the world, by His own determinate counsel, wisdom and power, according to the eternal and immutable design or purpose purposed in Himself before the world began, without subjecting Himself to the charge of being the author of sin. Sin is the transgression of a law under which the transgressor was justly held amenable, and to the penalty of which he is subject. But we have endeavored to show that God is under no law but that of His own will and pleasure, and therefore He doeth His pleasure in the armies of Heaven and among the inhabitants of earth. He could by no law be held under obligation to leave the affairs of this world or any part of them to be governed by chance, or by the will of men. As He is in one mind, and none can turn Him, His purposes are eternal, like Himself. His decrees being perfect from everlasting, admit of no improvement or change. If He had not the right to predestinate all things pertaining to the events of time before He created the world, we ask what right has He acquired subsequently to execute the orders of His throne? If it had been His pleasure to have prevented sin from entering into the world, can we doubt His power or wisdom or ability to have done so? If sin has entered this world in opposition to His will, or because He had not the wisdom and power to prevent its entrance, what assurance have we that it will not also enter the world to come? But it is to our mind far more consistent with what God has graciously made known to us of His being and attributes to believe that God had a purpose worthy of Himself, however inscrutable to us, in regard to the entrance of sin, as well as in regard to all things else. He bids us “Be still, and know that He is God.” To our feeble mind the conclusion is unavoidable, that the predestination of God either controls all things or nothing.

We look at a vast complicated machine, with its ten thousand wheels. We cannot comprehend or understand its workings, but we are told that the machinist has a perfect knowledge of all its parts save one; there is a definite use for every wheel and spring, but one is held in the machine which has no certain motion or definite use. How long could that machine run in safety, with the unruly part liable at any moment to throw the whole into confusion? We cannot see how any part of the government of God can be absolute and secure, if God has not the undivided government of the whole in all its parts; and if He has today the full control, had He not the same control yesterday and forever? If He has not the full control today, is there any certainty that He will have tomorrow or at any future period? If we admit that God absolutely governs all things according to the counsel of His own will, and that He is immutable, then we must admit that He has determined what shall and what shall not transpire in time or in eternity. But to deny His universal control of all things, including all principalities and powers, thrones and dominions, things present or to come, whether they be visible or invisible, is to deny that He is the God of the whole earth, and virtually deny His eternal power and Godhead. If He has not the power and wisdom to determine all events, how can He cause all things to work together for good to them that love Him?

But while we hold that He is supreme in power, and that He works all things after the counsel of His own will, we are certain that He reigns in righteousness, and that there is no unrighteousness with Him. To admit the universal government of God, is to admit the predestination of all things, from the falling of a sparrow to the dissolution of a world. In the absence of predestination, with what certainty could the Holy Ghost inspire the holy prophets and Apostles to foretell all that should ever come to pass? If it were undetermined in the purpose of God, how could the Apostles tell us of perilous times that should come in the last days, of apostasy from the faith, and spiritual wickedness in high places?

But we will submit these remarks to the consideration of our readers, and desire that what we have written may be carefully tested by the infallible standard, the Scriptures, and received only so far as they are sustained by the word and Spirit of our God.

The Celestial Railroad.[1]

Not a great while ago, passing through the gate of dreams, I visited that region of the earth in which lies the famous city of Destruction. It interested me much to learn that by the public spirit of some of the inhabitants a railroad has recently been established between this populous and flourishing town and the Celestial City. Having a little time upon my hands, I resolved to gratify a liberal curiosity by making a trip thither. Accordingly one fine morning, after paying my bill at the hotel, and directing the porter to stow my luggage behind a coach, I took my seat in the vehicle and set out for the station house. It was my good fortune to enjoy the company of a gentleman-one Mr. Smooth-it-away-who, though he had never actually visited the Celestial City, yet seemed as well acquainted with its laws, customs, policy and statistics as with those of the city of Destruction, of which he was a native townsman. Being, moreover, a director of the railroad corporation, and one of its largest stockholders, he had it in his power to give me all desirable information respecting this praiseworthy enterprise.

Our coach rattled out of the city, and at a short distance from its outskirts passed over a bridge of elegant construction, but somewhat too slight, as I imagined, to sustain any considerable weight. On both sides lay an extensive quagmire, which could not have been more disagreeable, either to sight or smell, had all the kennels of the earth emptied their pollution there.

“This,” remarked Mr. Smooth-it-away, “is the famous Slough of Despond-a disgrace to all the neighborhood; and the greater that it might so easily be converted into firm ground.”

“I have understood,” said I, “that efforts have been made for that purpose from time immemorial.”

“Very probable-and what effect could be anticipated from such unsubstantial stuff?”cried Mr. Smooth-it-away. “You observe this convenient bridge. We obtained a sufficient foundation for it by throwing into the Slough some editions of books of morality, volumes of French philosophy and German rationalism, tracts, sermons, and essays of modern clergymen, extracts from Plato, Confucius, and various Hindoo sages, together with a few ingenious commentaries upon texts of Scripture; all of which, by some scientific process, have been converted into a mass like granite. The whole bog might be filled up with similar matter.”

It really seemed to me, however, that the bridge vibrated and heaved up and down in a very formidable manner; and spite of Mr. Smooth-it-away’s testimony to the solidity of its foundation, I should be loth to cross it in a crowded omnibus, especially if each passenger were encumbered with as heavy luggage as that gentleman and myself. Nevertheless, we got over without accident, and soon found ourselves at the station house. This very neat and spacious edifice is erected on the site of a little Wicket Gate, which formerly, as all old pilgrims will recollect, stood directly across the highway, and by its inconvenient narrowness, was a great obstruction to the traveler of liberal mind and expansive stomach.

A large number of passengers were already at the station house, awaiting the departure of the cars. By the aspect and demeanor of the persons, it was easy to judge that the feelings of the community had undergone a very favorable change, in reference to the celestial pilgrimage. It would have done Bunyan’s heart good to see it. Instead of a lonely and ragged man with a huge burden on his back, plodding along sorrowfully on foot while the whole city hooted after him, here were parties of the first gentry and most respectable people in the neighborhood, setting forth toward the Celestial City as cheerfully as if the pilgrimage was merely a summer tour. Among the gentlemen were characters of deserved eminence, magistrates, politicians, and men of wealth, by whose example religion could not but be greatly recommended to their meaner brethren. In the ladies’ apartment, too, I rejoiced to distinguish some of those flowers of fashionable society, who are so well fitted to adorn the most elevated circles of the Celestial City. There was much pleasant conversation about the news of the day topics of business, politics, or the lighter matters of amusement; while religion though indubitably the main thing at heart, was thrown tastefully into the background. Even an infidel would have heard little or nothing to shock his sensibility.

One great convenience of the new method of going on pilgrimage I must not forget to mention. Our enormous burdens, instead of being carried on our shoulders, as had been the custom of old, were all snugly deposited in the baggage car, and, as I was assured, would be delivered to their respective owners at the journey’s end. Another thing, likewise, the benevolent reader will be delighted to understand. It may be remembered that there was an ancient feud between Prince Beelzebub and the keeper of the Wicket Gate, and that the adherents of the former distinguished personage were accustomed to shoot deadly arrows at honest pilgrims while knocking at the door. This dispute, much to the credit as well of the illustrious potentate above mentioned, as of the worthy and enlightened directors of the railroad, has been pacifically arranged upon the principle of mutual compromise. The Prince’s subjects are now pretty numerously employed about the station house, some in taking care of the baggage, others in collecting fuel, feeding the engines, and such congenial occupations; and I can conscientiously affirm, that persons more attentive to their business, more willing to accommodate, or more generally agreeable to the passengers, are not to be found on any railroad. Every good heart must surely exult at so satisfactory an arrangement of an immemorial difficulty.

“Where is Mr. Great-heart?” inquired I. “Beyond a doubt the directors have engaged that famous old champion to be chief conductor of the railroad?”

“Why no,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a dry cough; “he was offered the situation of brakeman; but to tell you the truth, our friend Great-heart has grown preposterously stiff and narrow in his old age. He has so often guided pilgrims over the road on foot, that he considers it a sin to travel in any other fashion. Besides, the old fellow had entered so heartily into the ancient feud with Prince Beelzebub, that he would have been perpetually at blows or ill language with some of the Prince’s subjects, and thus have embroiled us anew. So, on the whole, we were not sorry when honest Great-heart went off to the Celestial City in a huff, and left us at liberty to choose a more suitable and accommodating man. Yonder comes the engineer of the train; you will probably recognize him at once.”

The engine at this moment took its station in advance of the cars, looking, I must confess, much more like a sort of mechanical demon that would hurry us to the infernal regions, than a laudable contrivance for smoothing our way to the Celestial City. On its top sat a personage almost enveloped in smoke and flame, which (not to startle the reader) appeared to gush from his own mouth and stomach as well as from the engine’s brazen abdomen.

“Do my eyes deceive me?” cried I. “What on earth is this? A living creature? If so, he is own brother to the engine he rides upon.”

“Poh, poh, you are obtuse,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a hearty laugh. “Don’t you know Apollyon, Christian’s old enemy, with whom he fought so fierce a battle in the Valley of Humiliation? He was the very fellow to manage the engine, and so we have reconciled him to the custom of going on pilgrimage, and engaged him as chief engineer.”

“Bravo, bravo!” exclaimed I, with irrepressible enthusiasm. “This shows the liberality of the age. This proves, if anything can, that all musty prejudices are in a fair way to be obliterated. And how will Christian rejoice to hear of this happy transformation of his old antagonist. I promise myself great pleasure in informing him of it when we reach the Celestial City.”

The passengers being all comfortably seated, we now rattled away merrily, accomplishing a greater distance in ten minutes than Christian probably trudged over in a day. It was laughable while we glanced along, as it were, at the tail of a thunderbolt, to observe two dusty foot travelers in the old pilgrim guise, with cockle shell and staff, and their mystic rolls of parchment in their hands, and their intolerable burdens on their backs. The preposterous obstinacy of these honest people in persisting to groan and stumble along the difficult pathway, rather than take advantage of modern improvements, excited great mirth among our wiser brotherhood. We greeted the two pilgrims with many pleasant gibes and a roar of laughter; whereupon they gazed at us with such woful and absurdly compassionate visages, that our merriment grew ten-fold more obstreperous. Apollyon, also, entered heartily into the fun, and contrived to flirt the smoke and flame of the engine, or of his own breath, into their faces, and envelop them in an atmosphere of scalding steam. These little practical jokes amused us mightily, and doubtless afforded the pilgrims the gratification of considering themselves martyrs.

At some distance from the railroad, Mr. Smooth-it-away pointed to a large, antique edifice, which he observed was a tavern of long standing, and had formerly been a noted stopping-place for pilgrims. In Bunyan’s road-book it is mentioned as the Interpreter’s House.

“I have long had a curiosity to visit that old mansion,” remarked I.

“It is not one of our stations, as you perceive,” said my companion. “The keeper was violently opposed to the railroad; and well he might be, as the track left his house of entertainment on one side, and thus was pretty certain to deprive him of all his reputable customers. But the foot-path still passes his door, and the old gentleman now and then receives a call from some simple traveler, and entertains him with fare as old-fashioned as himself.”

Before our talk on this subject came to a conclusion, we were rushing by the place where Christian’s burden fell from his shoulders at the sight of the cross. This served as a theme for Mr. Smooth-it-away, Mr. Live-for-the-world, Mr. Hide-sin-in-the-heart and Mr. Scaly-conscience, and a knot of gentlemen from the town of Shun-repentance, to descant upon the inestimable advantages resulting from the safety of our baggage. Myself, and all the passengers indeed, joined with great unanimity in this view of the matter; for our burdens were rich in many things esteemed precious throughout the world; and especially, we each of us possessed a great variety of favorite habits, which we trusted would not be out of fashion, even in the polite circles of the Celestial City. It would have been a sad spectacle to have seen such an assortment of valuable articles tumbling into the sepulchre. Thus pleasantly conversing on the favorable circumstances of our position as compared with those of past pilgrims, and of narrow-minded ones of the present day, we soon found ourselves at the foot of the Hill of Difficulty. Through the very heart of this rocky mountain a tunnel has been constructed of most admirable architecture, with a lofty arch and a spacious double track; so that unless the earth and rocks should chance to crumble down, it will remain a lasting monument of the builder’s skill and enterprise. It is a great though incidental advantage that the materials from the heart of Hill Difficulty have been employed in filling up the Valley of Humiliation; thus obviating the difficulty of descending into that disagreeable and unwholesome hollow.

“This is a wonderful improvement indeed,” said I. “Yet I should have been glad of an opportunity to visit the Palace Beautiful, and be introduced to the charming young ladies-Miss Prudence, Miss Piety, Miss Charity and the rest-who have had the kindness to entertain pilgrims there.”

“Young ladies,” cried Mr. Smooth-it-away, as soon as he could speak for laughing. “And charming young ladies! Why, my dear fellow, they are old maids, every soul of them-prim, starched, dry and angular-and not one of them, I will venture to say, has altered so much as the fashion of her gown since the days of Christian’s pilgrimage.”

“Ah, well,” said I, much comforted, “then I can well dispense with their acquaintance.”

The respectable Apollyon was now putting on the steam at a prodigious rate, anxious perhaps to get rid of the unpleasant reminiscences connected with the spot where he had so disastrously encountered Christian. Consulting Mr. Bunyan’s road-book, I perceived that we must now be within a few miles of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, into which doleful region, at our present speed, we should plunge much sooner than seemed at all desirable. In truth, I expected nothing better than to find myself in the ditch on one side, or the quag on the other. But, on communicating my apprehensions to Mr. Smooth-it-away, he assured me that the difficulties of this passage, even in its worst condition, had been vastly exaggerated, and that, in its present state of improvement, I might consider myself as safe as on any railroad in Christendom.

Even while we were speaking, the train shot into the entrance of this dreaded valley. Though I plead guilty to some foolish palpitations of the heart during our headlong rush over the causeway here constructed, yet it were unjust to withhold the highest encomiums on the boldness of its original conception, and the ingenuity of those who executed it. It was gratifying, likewise, to observe how much care was taken to dispel the everlasting gloom, and supply the defect of the cheerful sunshine, not a ray of which has ever penetrated these awful shadows. For this purpose the inflammable gas, which exudes plentifully from the soil, is collected by means of pipes, and thence communicated to a quadruple row of lamps along the whole extent of the passage. Thus a radiance has been created, even out of the fiery and sulphurous curse that rests forever upon the valley; a radiance hurtful, however, to the eyes, and somewhat bewildering, as I discovered by the changes which it wrought in the visages of my companions. In this respect, as compared with natural daylight, there is the same difference as between truth and falsehood; but if the reader has ever traveled through the dark valley, he will have learned to be thankful for any light that he could get; if not from the sky above, then from the blasted earth beneath. Such was the red brilliancy of these lamps that they appeared to build walls of fire on both sides of the track, between which we held our course at lightning speed, while a reverberating thunder filled the valley with its echoes. Had the engine run off the track (a catastrophe it is whispered by no means unprecedented), the bottomless pit, if there be any such place, would undoubtedly have received us. Just as some dismal fooleries of this kind had made my heart quake, there came a tremendous shriek careering along the valley, as if a thousand devils had burst their lungs to utter it, but which proved to be merely the whistle of the engine on arriving at a stopping place.

The spot where we had now paused was the same that our friend Bunyan-a truthful man, but infected with many fantastic notions-has designated, in terms plainer than I like to repeat, as the mouth of the infernal region. This, however, must be a mistake, inasmuch as Mr. Smooth-it-away, while we remained in the smoky and lurid cavern, took occasion, to prove that Tophet has not even a metaphorical existence. The place, he assured us, is no other than the crater of a half-extinct volcano, in which the directors had caused forges to be set up for the manufacture of railroad iron. Hence also is obtained a plentiful supply of fuel for the use of the engines.

Whoever had gazed into the dismal obscurity of the broad cavern mouth, whence, ever and anon, darted huge tongues of dusky flame, and had seen the strange, half-shaped monsters, and visions of faces horribly grotesque into which the smoke seemed to wreath itself, and had heard the awful murmurs, and shrieks, and deep shuddering whispers of the blast, sometimes forming itself into words almost articulate-would have seized upon Mr. Smooth-it-away’s comfortable explanation as greedily as we did. The inhabitants of the cavern, moreover, were unlovely personages, dark, smoke-begrimed, generally deformed, with misshapen feet, and a glow of dusky redness in their eyes, as if their hearts had caught fire, and were blazing out of the upper windows. It struck me as a peculiarity that the laborers at the forge and those who brought fuel to the engine, when they began to draw short breath, positively emitted smoke from their mouth and nostrils.

Among the idlers about the train, most of whom were puffing cigars which they had lighted at the flame of the crater, I was perplexed to notice several who, to my certain knowledge, had heretofore set forth by railroad to the Celestial City. They looked dark, wild and smoky, with a singular resemblance, indeed, to the native inhabitants, like whom, also, they had a disagreeable propensity to ill-natured gibes and sneers, the habit of which had wrought a settled contortion on their visages. Having been on speaking terms with one of them-an indolent, good-for-nothing fellow, who went by the name of Take-it-easy-I called to him, and asked what was his business there.

“Did you not start,” said I, “for the Celestial City?”

“That’s a fact,” said Mr. Take-it-easy, carelessly puffing some smoke into my eyes. “But I heard such bad accounts that I never took pains to climb the hill on which the city stands. No business doing, no fun going on, nothing to drink and no smoking allowed, and a thrumming of church music from morning till night. I would not stay in such a place, if they offered me house-room and living free.”

“But, my good Mr. Take-it-easy,” cried I, “why take up your residence here, of all places in the world?”

“Oh,” said the loafer, with a grin, “it is very warm hereabouts, and I meet with plenty of old acquaintances, and altogether the place suits me. I hope to see you back again some day soon. A pleasant journey to you.”

While he was speaking the bell of the engine rang, and we dashed away after dropping a few passengers, but receiving no new ones. Rattling onward through the valley, we were dazzled with the fiercely gleaming gas lamps, as before; but sometimes, in the dark or intense brightness, grim faces, that bore the aspect of individual sins or evil passions, seemed to thrust themselves through the veil of light, glaring upon us and stretching forth a great dusky hand, as if to impede our progress. I almost thought that they were my own sins that appalled me there. These were freaks of imagination, nothing more, mere delusions, which I ought to be heartily ashamed of; but all through the dark Valley I was tormented and pestered, and dolefully bewildered with the same kind of waking dreams. The mephitic gases of that region intoxicate the brain. As the light of the natural day however began to struggle with the glow of the lanterns, these vain imaginations lost their vividness, and finally vanished with the first ray of sunshine that greeted our escape from the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Ere we had gone a mile beyond it, I could well-nigh have taken my oath that this whole gloomy passage was a dream.

At the end of the Valley, as John Bunyan mentions, is a cavern, where, in his days, dwelt two cruel giants. Pope and Pagan, who had strewn the ground about their residence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims. These vile old troglodytes are no longer there; but into their deserted cave another terrible giant has thrust himself, and makes it his business to seize upon honest travelers, and fat them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes and sawdust. He is a German by birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalism; but as to his form, his features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant, that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe them. As we rushed by the cavern’s mouth, we caught a hasty glimpse of him, looking somewhat like an ill-proportioned figure, but considerably more like a heap of fog and duskiness. He shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology that we knew not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted.

It was late in the day when the train thundered into the ancient city of Vanity, where Vanity Fair is still at the height of prosperity, and exhibits an epitome of whatever is brilliant, gay and fascinating beneath the sun. As I proposed to make a considerable stay here, it gratified me to learn that there is no longer the want of harmony between the townspeople and pilgrims, which impelled the former to such lamentable mistaken measures as the persecution of Christian, and the fiery martyrdom of Faithful. On the contrary, as the new railroad brings with it great trade and a constant influx of strangers, the lord of Vanity Fair is its chief patron, and the capitalists of the city are among the largest stockholders. Many passengers stop to take their pleasure or make their profit in the Fair, instead of going onward to the Celestial City. Indeed, such are the charms of the place, that the people often affirm it to be the true and only Heaven; stoutly contending that there is no other, that those who seek further are mere dreamers, and that, if the fabled brightness of the Celestial City lay but a bare mile beyond the gates of Vanity, they would not be fools enough to go thither. Without subscribing to these, perhaps, exaggerated encomiums, I can truly say that my abode in the city was mainly agreeable, and my intercourse with the inhabitants productive of much amusement and instruction.

Being naturally of a serious turn, my attention was directed to the solid advantages derivable from a residence here, rather than to the effervescent pleasures, which are the grand object with too many visitants. The Christian reader, if he have had no accounts of the city later than Bunyan’s time, will be surprised to hear that almost every street has its church, and that the reverend clergy are nowhere held in higher respect than at Vanity Fair. And well do they deserve such honorable estimation: for the maxims of wisdom and virtue which fall from their lips, come from as deep a spiritual source, and tend to as lofty a religious aim, as those of the sagest philosophers of old. In justification of this high praise, I need only mention the names of the Rev. Mr. Shallow-deep; the Rev. Mr. Stumble-at-truth; that fine old clerical character, the Rev. Mr. This-to-day, who expects shortly to resign his pulpit to the Rev. Mr. That-to-morrow; together with the Rev. Mr. Bewilderment; the Rev. Mr. Clog-the-spirit; and last and greatest, the Rev. Mr. Wind-of-doctrine. The labors of these eminent divines are aided by those of innumerable lecturers, who diffuse such a various profundity, in all subjects of human nature or celestial science, that any man may acquire an omnigenous erudition, without the trouble of even learning to read. Thus literature is etherealized by assuming for its medium the human voice; and knowledge depositing all its heavier particles-except, doubtless, its gold-becomes exhaled into a sound, which forthwith steals into the ever open ear of the community. These ingenious methods constitute a sort of machinery, by which thought and study are done to every person’s mind, without his putting himself to the slightest inconvenience in the matter. There is another species of machine for the wholesale manufacture of individual morality. This excellent result is effected by societies for all manner of virtuous purposes: with which a man has merely to connect himself, throwing, as it were, his quota of virtue into the common stock; and the president and directors will take care that the aggregate amount be well applied. All these, and other wonderful improvements in ethics, religion and literature, being made plain to my comprehension by the ingenious Mr. Smooth-it-away, inspired me with a vast admiration of Vanity Fair.

It would fill a volume, in an age of pamphlets, were I to record all my observations in this great capital of human business and pleasure. There was an unlimited range of society-the powerful, the wise, the witty, and the famous in every walk of life-princes, presidents, poets, generals, artists, actors and philanthropists, all making their own market at the Fair, and deeming no price too exorbitant for such commodities as hit their fancy. It is well worth one’s while, even if he had no idea of buying or selling, to loiter through the Bazaars, and observe the various sorts of traffic that were going forward.

Some of the purchasers, I thought, made very foolish bargains. For instance, a young man, having inherited a splendid fortune, laid out a considerable portion of it in the purchase of diseases, and finally spent all the rest for a heavy lot of repentance and a suit of rags. There was a sort of stock or scrip, called Conscience, which seemed to be in great demand, and would purchase almost anything. Indeed few rich commodities were to be obtained without paying a heavy sum in this particular stock, as a man’s business was seldom very lucrative, unless he knew precisely when and how to throw his hoard of Conscience into the market. Yet, as this stock was the only thing of permanent value, whoever parted with it was sure to find himself a loser in the long run. Thousands sold their happiness for a whim.

Gilded chains were in great demand, and purchased with almost any sacrifice. In truth, those who desired, according to the old adage, to sell anything valuable for a song, might find customers all over the Fair; and there were innumerable messes of pottage, piping hot, for those who chose to buy them with their birthrights. A few articles, however, could not be found genuine at Vanity Fair. If a customer wished to renew his stock of youth, the dealers offered him a set of false teeth and an auburn wig; if he demanded peace of mind, they recommended opium or a brandy bottle.

Tracts of land and golden mansions, situate in the Celestial City, were often exchanged, at very disadvantageous rates, for a few years’ lease of small, dismal, inconvenient tenements in Vanity Fair.

Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity, my manners and deportment became more and more like those of the inhabitants. The place began to seem like home; the idea of pursuing my course to the Celestial City was almost obliterated from my mind. I was reminded of it, however, by the sight of the same pair of simple pilgrims at whom we had laughed so heartily when Apollyon puffed smoke and steam into their faces, at the commencement of our journey. There they stood amid the densest bustle of Vanity-the dealers offering them their purple, and fine linen, and jewels; the men of wit and humor gibing at them; a pair of buxom ladies ogling them askance; while the benevolent Mr. Smooth-it-away whispered some of his wisdom at their elbows, and pointed to a newly erected temple; but there were these worthy simpletons, making the scene look wild and monstrous, merely by their sturdy repudiation of all part in its business or pleasures.

One of them-his name was Stick-to-the-right-perceived in my face, I suppose, a species of sympathy and almost admiration, which to my own great surprise, I could not help feeling for this pragmatic couple. It prompted him to address me.

“Sir,” inquired he, with a sad, yet mild and kindly voice, “do you call yourself a pilgrim?”

“Yes,” I replied, “my right to that appellation is indubitable. I am merely a sojourner here in Vanity Fair, being bound to the Celestial City by the new railroad.”

“Alas, friend,” rejoined Mr. Stick-to-the-right, “I do assure you, and beseech you to receive the truth of my words, that that whole concern is a bubble. You may travel on it all your lifetime, were you to live thousands of years, and yet never get beyond the limits of Vanity Fair! Yea, though you should deem yourself entering the gates of the Blessed City, it will be nothing but a miserable delusion.”

“The Lord of the Celestial City,” began the other pilgrim, whose name was Mr. Go-the-old-way, “has refused, and will ever refuse, to grant an act of incorporation for this railroad; and unless that be obtained no passenger can ever hope to enter His dominions. Wherefore, every man who buys a ticket must lay his account with losing the purchase money-which is the value of his soul.”

“Poh, nonsense!” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, taking my arm and leading me off; “these fellows ought to be indicted for libel. If the law stood as it once did in Vanity Fair, we should see them grinning through the iron bars of the prison window.”

This incident made a considerable impression on my mind, and contributed with other circumstances to indispose me to a permanent residence in Vanity; although, of course, I was not simple enough to give up my original plan of gliding along easily and commodiously by railroad. Still I grew anxious to be gone. There was one strange thing that puzzled me; amid the occupations and amusements of the Fair, nothing was more common than for a person-whether at a feast, theatre, or church, or trafficking for wealth and honors, or whatever he might be doing, and however unseasonable the interruption-suddenly to vanish like a soap bubble, and be never more seen of his fellows; and so accustomed were the latter to such little incidents, that they went on with their business as quietly as if nothing had happened. But it was otherwise with me.

Finally, after a pretty long residence at the Fair I resumed my journey towards the Celestial City, still with Mr. Smooth-it-away by my side. At a short distance beyond the suburbs of Vanity we passed the ancient silver mine, of which Demas was the first discoverer, and which is now wrought to great advantage, supplying nearly all the coined currency of the world. A little further onward was the spot where Lot’s wife had stood for ages, under the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious travelers have carried it away piecemeal. Had all regrets been punished as rigorously as this poor dame’s were, my yearnings for the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have produced a similar change in my own corporeal substance, and left me a warning to future pilgrims.

The next remarkable object was a large edifice, constructed of moss-grown stone, but in a modern and airy style of architecture. The engine came to a pause in its vicinity with its usual tremendous shriek.

“This was formerly the castle of the redoubted giant Despair,” observed Mr. Smooth-it-away; “but, since his death, Mr. Flimsy-faith has repaired it, and now keeps an excellent house of entertainment here. It is one of our stopping places.”

“It seems but slightly put together,” remarked I, looking at the frail, yet ponderous walls. “I do not envy Mr. Flimsy-faith his habitation. Some day it will thunder down upon the heads of the occupants.”

“We shall escape, at all events,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away; “for Apollyon is putting on the steam again.”

The road now plunged into a gorge of the Delectable Mountains, and traversed the field where, in former ages, the blind men wandered and stumbled among the tombs. One of these ancient tombstones had been thrust across the track by some malicious person, and gave the train of cars a terrible jolt. Far up the rugged side of a mountain I perceived a rusty iron door, half-overgrown with bushes and creeping plants, but with some smoke issuing from its crevices.

“Is that,” inquired I, “the very door in the hillside which the shepherds assured Christian was a by-way to hell?”

“That was a joke on the part of the shepherds,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a smile. “It is neither more nor less than the door of a cavern, which they use for a smoke house for the preparation of mutton hams.”

My recollections of the journey are now, for a little space, dim and confused, inasmuch as a singular drowsiness here overcame me, owing to the fact that we were now passing over the enchanted ground, the air of which encourages a disposition to sleep. I awoke, however, as soon as we crossed over the borders of the pleasant land of Beulah. All the passengers were rubbing their eyes, comparing watches, and congratulating one another on the prospect of arriving so seasonably at their journey’s end. The sweet breezes of this happy clime came refreshingly to our nostrils; we beheld the glimmering gush of silver fountains, overhung by trees of beautiful foliage and delicious fruit, which were propagated by drafts from the celestial gardens. Once, as we dashed onward like a hurricane, there was a flutter of wings, and the bright appearance of an angel in the air, speeding forth on some heavenly mission. The engine now announced the close vicinity of the final station house, by one last and horrible scream, in which there seemed to be distinguishable every kind of wailing and woe, and bitter fierceness of wrath, all mixed up with the wild laughter of a devil or a madman. All through our journey, at every stopping place, Apollyon had exercised his ingenuity in screwing the most abominable sounds out of the whistle of the steam engine; but in this closing effort he outdid himself, and created an infernal uproar, which, besides disturbing the peaceful inhabitants of Beulah, must have sent its discord even through the celestial gates.

While the horrid clamor was still ringing in our ears, we heard an exulting strain, as if a thousand instruments o£ music, with height, and depth, and sweetness in their tones, at once tender and triumphant, were struck in unison, to greet the approach of some illustrious hero, who had fought the good fight and won a glorious victory, and was come to lay aside his battered arms forever. Looking to ascertain what might be the occasion of this glad harmony, I perceived, on alighting from the cars, that a multitude of shining ones had assembled on the other side of the river to welcome two poor pilgrims who were just emerging from its depths. They were the same whom Apollyon and ourselves had persecuted with taunts and gibes, and scalding steam, at the commencement of our journey, the same whose unworldly aspect and impressive words had stirred my conscience amid the wild revelers of Vanity Fair.

“How amazingly well those men have got on!” cried I to Mr. Smooth-it-away. “I wish we were secure of so good a reception.”

“Never fear, never fear!” answered my friend. “Come, make haste; the ferry-boat will be off directly, and in three minutes you will be on the other side of the river. No doubt you will find coaches to carry you up to the city gates.”

A steam ferry-boat, the last improvement on this important route, lay at the river side, puffing, snorting, and emitting all those other disagreeable utterances, which betoken the departure to be immediate. I hurried on board with the rest of the passengers, most of whom were in great perturbation; some bawling out for their baggage; some tearing their hair and declaring the boat would explode or sink; some already pale with the heaving of the stream; some gazing affrighted at the ugly aspect of the steersman; and some still dizzy with the slumbering influences of the Enchanted Ground. Looking back to the shore I was amazed to discern Mr. Smooth-it-away waving his hand in token of farewell.

“Don’t you go over to the Celestial City?” exclaimed I.

“Oh, no!” answered he, with a queer smile, and that same disagreeable contortion of visage which I had remarked in the inhabitants of the Dark Valley. “Oh, no! I have come thus far only for the sake of your pleasant company. Good-by. We shall meet again.”

And then did my excellent friend, Mr. Smooth-it-away, laugh out-right, in the midst of which cachinnation a smoke wreath issued from his mouth and nostrils, while a twinkle of lurid flame darted out of either eye, proving indubitably that his heart was all of a red blaze. The impudent fiend! to deny the existence of Tophet, when he felt its fiery tortures raging in his breast! I rushed to the side of the boat, intending to fling myself on shore; but the wheels, as they began their revolutions, threw a dash of spray over me so cold-so deadly cold, with the chill that will never leave those waters until Death be drowned in his own river, that, with a shiver and a heart-quake, I awoke. Thank Heaven, it was a Dream.

Final Notice.

There is not a single intentional misstatement in this volume. I shall be thankful to any person who may discover errors, and who can prove them to be errors, to address me at Williamston, Martin County, North Carolina, and inform me of such discovery and proof, in order that mistakes may be eliminated from future editions.

Sylvester Hassell.

Biography of Elder Sylvester Hassell.

Those who were contemporary with Elder Sylvester Hassell can best inform us of his life as a minister, historian, and teacher. First, an account of his life compiled by the later Elder S. B. Denny is given. Elder Denny of Wilson, North Carolina, and pastor of the church there for over 25 years, was a close associate of Elder Hassell in his latter years. The following account, much of which appeared in Biographical History of Primitive or Old School Baptist Ministers published in 1909 by Elder R. H. Pittman, was included in the pamphlet published in 1946 in observance of the 190th Anniversary of the Wilson Primitive Baptist Church.

Elder Sylvester Hassell was by any standard one of the most distinguished gentlemen ever to be intimately associated with the life of the Toisnot Primitive Baptist Church or of the Town and County of Wilson. A son of Elder Cushing Biggs Hassell and wife, Mary Davis, he was born at Williamston in Martin County on July 28, 1842, and died there on August 18, 1928. His funeral was conducted by Elders Julius C. Moore and S. B. Denny, and a request was made that the 103rd Psalm be read. His father was a planter and merchant of considerable wealth and intellectual attainments who filled many public and private offices of great importance and also served for seventeen years as Moderator of the Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association, an honor that was enjoyed by the subject of this sketch during the forty-eight years from 1880 to 1928.

Elder Hassell was from childhood “very moral in his habits” and intensely interested in the contemplation of spiritual things. His preliminary education was received at the Williamston Academy, after which he attended the University of North Carolina from July of 1858 to August of 1861, leading his Class from the beginning and graduating with the highest honors. He became a member of the Phi Society and of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. Excessive study had undermined his constitution to such an extent that he was in six separate examinations declared unfit for service in the Confederate Army. However, he managed to serve for three weeks as secretary to Colonel Samuel W. Watts of the Martin County Militia at Fort Hill, near Washington, prior to the fall of Roanoke Island on February 8, 1862. Otherwise, his time was spent in assisting his father in his business and in the instruction of his younger brothers and sisters.

From 1865 to 1868 Elder Hassell was Principal and taught at the Williamston Academy, and in 1867 the University of North Carolina honored him with the degree of Master of Arts. On September 4, 1869, he married Mary Isabella Yarrell, daughter of Julius S. Yarrell of Martin County, and they had a son Paul Hassell, who died at the age of fifteen years. In 1869 he became Professor of Ancient Languages at the State Normal College in Wilmington, Delaware, and from 1870 to 1871 he acted as Principal of the William Penn Public Schools at Newcastle, Del. The tragic loss of his young wife in the last year caused him to return to North Carolina, where in 1872 he was persuaded to become Principal of the Wilson Collegiate Institute, which he conducted successfully until 1886 when, “his health having failed by reason of his duties there combined with his arduous labors on the Church History, he retired and returned to his old home in Williamston.” This was a Junior College in which the boys received sufficient preparation to enter advanced classes in the leading colleges. In the Summer of 1873 he instituted what proved to be the first Summer Normal School for teachers in the State of North Carolina, and he was Principal of the State Normal School at Wilson in the Summers of 1878 and 1881. He was again Principal of the Williamston Academy from 1886 to 1890. In July of 1881 he gave lectures on Astronomy at the State Normal School of the University of North Carolina, and in 1891 and 1893 he was the Supt. of Public Schools in Martin County, and as such he conducted examinations of teachers in order to determine their classification.

On May 3, 1876, Elder Hassell married Frances Louisa “Fannie” Woodard, daughter of Calvin Woodard and wife, Winifred Exum of Wilson County. She was born on October 13, 1859, and died on January 6, 1889. Seven children were born to this union: (1) Mark Hassell died in infancy; (2) John Hassell died in infancy; (3) Francis Sylvester “Frank” Hassell was born on August 27, 1881, and married Blanche Gary; (4) Charles Hassell was born on November 22, 1882; (5) Mary Hassell was born on August 14, 1885; (6) Calvin Woodard Hassell was born on August 7, 1887; and (7) Frances Winfred Hassell was born on December 9, 1888.

Having experienced the hope of salvation in Jesus Christ on August 17, 1863, Elder Hassell joined the Skewarkey Primitive Baptist Church on January 7th, and was baptized in Roanoke River by his father on January 10th. He was liberated to preach by this Church on December 10, 1871, and was ordained to the ministry on August 9, 1874, by Elders C. B. Hassell, William Whitaker, and David House. In 1876 the Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association appointed the senior Hassell to write its third history “and to combine with it a history of the Church from the Creation,” but he had hardly completed the first part of the assignment when death took him on April 11, 1880.

Consequently, Elder Sylvester Hassell was appointed by the Association to complete and publish the book. Not only was he accomplished in several languages but also had assembled a personal library of over five thousand volumes that included the best Church Histories that could be found in America and Europe. After nearly six years of exhaustive research and frequent consultation with twenty eminent American authorities on the subject, he finally issued in 1886 the monumental “History of the Church of God, From the Creation of A.D. 1885; Including Especially the History of The Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association” in 1008 pages of small print.

The two earlier published histories of the Kehukee Association were of moderate length and limited to the immediate subject, while Elder Hassell made in the preliminary portions of his voluminous work a comprehensive and non-sectarian survey of the development of the worship of God by religious groups in various parts of the world. Elder R. H. Pittman states with pardonable warmth in 1909 that “he stands among the foremost thinkers and writers of the United States,” and in 1924 Dr. George Washington Paschal of Wake Forest College, the other great historian of North Carolina Baptists, declared that the volume was, “In my opinion, the greatest piece of historical work ever done in North Carolina.”

In 1881 Elder Hassell became the pastor of Skewarkey Church in Martin County, serving it as late as 1928. He held other pastorates during this period at Conetoe, Jamesville, Great Swamp, and Hamilton Primitive Baptist Churches, and traveled extensively on preaching tours among other Churches of this denomination in the United States, and even in Canada upon several occasions. In 1892 he became associate editor of the Gospel Messenger, a Primitive Baptist paper published by Elder J. R. Respass of Butler, Georgia. He purchased the publication in 1896, the year after the death of Elder Respass, and continued to edit it under the highest standards of scholarship and doctrinal purity until a few years before his own death.

In the year 1925 the Trustees of the University of North Carolina saw fit to bestow upon Elder Hassell the degree L. L. D. as a token of their appreciation of the splendid work he rendered to his State as a Minister, Teacher and Writer, and Governor Angus McLean stated that in bestowing the degree upon Elder Hassell that the University was not only honoring him but they were honoring the State of North Carolina.

S. B. Denny

Elder R. W. Thompson characterized him in these words: “Brother Hassell is one of the most humble, loving, gentle, kind, and estimable men among men; yet he is strong, firm, fearless, and able in defense of the truth for truth’s sake, the glory of God, the good and comfort and peace of all the redeemed and saved in the Lord, for whom he has the greatest concern and the most tender regard. He is considered one of the ablest, wisest, and safest exponents of the literal and spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures we have, holding them unmixed with the doctrines and new-born theories of men, zealously opposing all departures in doctrine of practice, defending the purity of the gospel church in its apostolic doctrine and practice.”

The following is from the pen of Elder R. H. Pittman, Editor of the Advocate and Messenger, and was published in the September, 1928 issue of this periodical:

Brother Hassell is dead! These sad words were first heard by me as they were whispered in my ear during the morning service at the Ketocton Association Sunday, August 19, 1928, and as the news spread many hearts were saddened and tears of sorrow shed. And upon reaching home Sunday night I found a telegram from Charles Hassell awaiting me, and regret very much that I could not attend the funeral services of this dear man of God. He was very near and dear to me. For thirty-five years we have been very close friends, and during the last years of his life we were closely and intimately connected. His editorial service on the Advocate and Messenger was a blessing to thousands and an inspiration to his co-workers, with whom he was in perfect harmony. The writer was last with him in January in a meeting in which he labored for reconciliation of estranged brethren; and on July 16th—his last letter to me-he said “I would be glad to see you again.” But no more shall we meet in this life. He has been called up higher; and heaven to me is a little dearer, because of his going. He was ready to be offered, and the time of his departure was at hand. He fought a good fight, finished his course, and kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for him a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give him at that day; and not to him only, but to all them also that love His appearing. “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; neither shall there by any more pain.”

Elder Sylvester Hassell, of Williamston, N.C., minister, historian, teacher, was doubtless the best authority on church history in North Carolina, and possibly in this age. He stood among the foremost thinkers and writers of the United States. His ancestors came from England to North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century. His parents were Elder C. B. Hassell and his first wife, Mary Davis. He was born in Williamston, N.C., July 28, 1842, and died there Aug. 18, 1928, having reached the ripe age of 86 years and 20 days. He was educated at the Williamston Academy and the University of North Carolina, taking a high stand at both, and graduating with honors. He was proficient in several languages; was principal of a school for young men in Wilson, N.C., and professor of languages in a northern college for some years. He published, in 1886, the Church History, the most complete work of its kind ever published by our people, and a monument more lasting than granite to him and to his father, who began the work. In 1892 he became associate editor of the Gospel Messenger, and in 1896 its proprietor and managing editor, which position he retained nearly twenty years, when the paper was sold to Elder Z. C. Hull, of Atlanta, Ga., from whom it was purchased by the writer in 1923, and all this time Elder Hassell has been on the editorial staff.

Truly he was a prince in Israel. As I am able to judge, it has not been my privilege to know one who bore more marks of real greatness. In manners, humble and retiring as a little child; in general information, he has been called “a walking encyclopedia;” in service, untiring and unselfish; in character, irreproachable and unstained; in deportment, gentle, kind, tender. More than any man I ever knew he suffered long and remained kind; envied not; was not puffed up; did not behave himself unseemly; sought not his own; was not easily provoked; thought no evil; rejoiced not in iniquity, but rejoiced in the truth. His motto as historian, editor, preacher and teacher was “Speaking the truth in love,” and this he did uncompromisingly with error in friend or foe. Neither the tie of blood nor the bond of fellowship was sufficiently strong to draw him from the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And the Bible was, to him, God’s literal, spiritual and eternal truth, and he defended its truths with tongue and pen possibly more valiantly and ably than any man in this age. Spurgeon is reported to have said that Hassell’s History contained less error than any book he ever read. A professor of language in Wake Forrest College recently said that all of us shall have to go to Hassell’s History of the Church for authoritative information on this subject. And thus it is true that “though dead he yet speaketh,” and will continue to speak (certainly among the people called Baptists) so long as there is love for principles and practices upon which the Apostolic Church was founded. God does not raise up many such men; “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.” But He does call some, and our precious Brother Hassell, who has gone home to glory, was one of them. We shall miss him; his churches will miss his loving service; the Kehukee Association, which he has for thirty-five years served as moderator, will miss his wise counsel; and thousands of readers will miss his timely, instructive and spiritual editorials. Worldly wisdom and human efforts can never fill his place; only God can prepare and send another such servant to labor in His vineyard. May we all pray that this He will do.

The funeral services were conducted by Elder J. C. Moore, of Whitakers, N. C., a son of the late Elder Andrew J. Moore, who was a lifelong friend and associate of Elder Hassell. It was his wish that this son of his nearest friend in life perform the simple rites for the dead when his day of rest had come. Elder Moore was visibly moved by the solemnity of the burden laid upon him, but after reading the 103rd Psalm he feelingly and beautifully spoke of the deceased and of their love and fellowship. Other ministers who spoke briefly included Elder N. S. Harrison, of Washington County, Elder S. B. Denny, of Wilson, and Elder A. B. Denson, of Rocky Mount. Two hymns, both favorites of Elder Hassell, were used; “Rock of Ages” at the beginning of the services and “How Firm a Foundation” at the conclusion. Almost every Primitive Baptist minister in eastern North Carolina attended the services; also Congressmen Lindsay Warren, a lifelong admirer and personal friend of Elder Hassell; Josephus Daniels, whose youthful schooling was had at his hands and whose admiration and affection for him began from that day and has never ended; R. O. Everett, of Durham, John D. Gold, of Wilson; and scores of others from over the entire eastern end of the state were there. Three sons of Elder Hassell-Frank, Charles and Calvin-all of prominence, are left of his immediate family to mourn the loss of a loving father.

The casket was borne through the throng of sorrowing friends to the waiting hearse. The long walk from the house to the street was lined on either side with flowers. The march to the grave was begun, and there, with simple rites, the casket was lowered into the grave. “For this corruption must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”-R. H. Pittman

Elder C. H. Cayce, Editor (1905-1945) of The Primitive Baptist included the following editorial in the October 1, 1928 issue of his paper:

We were made sad on learning of the death of Elder Sylvester Hassell… Elder Hassell was truly a great and wonderful man. He was a man of great talent and learning, and was truly great in true humility and devotion to the cause of the Master…

Elder M. L. Gilbert of Dade City, Florida, Associate Editor of Zion’s Landmark, wrote in the October 1, 1928 issue of that paper:

“Unquestionably, he was one of the meekest and humblest, withal one of the most conservative ministers of God in this age. His wise counsel and peace-loving work have ever been a benediction to the people of God during all the years of his ministry. Were all our preachers imbued with a spirit like unto Paul and Hassell, peace, union, and prosperity would reign in all the churches of God.”

John D. Gold, Publisher of Zion’s Landmark and son of Elder P. D. Gold, included the following memorial in the October 1, 1928 issue of Zion’s Landmark:

Elder Sylvester Hassell departed this life at his home in Williamston, N. C., Saturday, the 18th of August, after a short illness. He died as he had lived, quietly breathing out his life on the bosom of his Saviour whom he loved so well and served all the days of his stay on earth.

The funeral was conducted from the residence Sunday afternoon, by Elder J. C. Moore of Whitakers, assisted by Elders S. B. Denny of Wilson, A. B. Denson of Rocky Mt., N. H. Harrison of Pinetown, and the Baptist minister of Williamston. All of these paid high tribute to him as a minister, teacher, Editor and citizen.

Elder Hassell leaves three children, Messrs. Charles Hassell of Florida, Calvin Hassell of Washington, D. C., and Frank Hassell of Wilson.

Elder Hassell formerly lived in Wilson and conducted the Wilson Collegiate Institute. It was a successful institution until he gave it up in order to write the church history, a most remarkable literary production, containing probably as much information regarding matters of religion as any book that has ever been published.

Later on he became Editor of the Gospel Messenger which he conducted with great ability until he sold it to Elder Pittman of Luray, Virginia, and it was merged with his paper. He was associate editor of that paper at the time of his death.

Elder Hassell was one of the best men that has ever lived. He was kindly, generous, hospitable, well educated, well informed, and a soul that desired to help every one.

At one time his school was the leading institution of learning in eastern North Carolina, and many of the older people of Wilson and this section sat under the sound of his voice and received instruction from his saintly lips. It was the pleasure of this writer to be his pupil, and never will I forget the splendid elements of his character and his great learning and nobleness of soul.

He was a man of peace, and seemed to carry with him that peace which passeth all understanding, and that peace that is given from on high to those who trust in Him.

He has gone home to glory, for his passing was that of one who falls on sleep, to awake in the land of the blest in the presence of His Saviour and his God whom he loved to trust, serve, and obey, and whose work in this world it was his pleasure to adorn with a Godly conversation and a life which left its impress upon all with whom he came in contact.

Peace to his ashes and may his life be a benediction to all, for his example was one worthy of constant emulation.

J. D. Gold

The following excerpts are from an editorial written by the Hon. Josephus Daniels, Publisher of the Raleigh News and Observer, Raleigh, N.C., in recognition of the 190th anniversary of the Wilson, N.C., Primitive Baptist Church. Mr. Daniels (1862-1948), served as Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1921 in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet and as ambassador to Mexico from 1933 to 1942.

It has long been a tenet of the Primitive Baptists that, along with belief in predestination, any man who had the call to preach should be heard whether he had gone to college or not. Some of their preachers-and some of the best-lacked college instruction, but some others were like Elder Hassell. He read the New Testament in the original Greek every day but never felt superior to his brother preacher who could read it only in English…

It was because I had been privileged to be a student of Elder Hassell, and was permeated by the traditions of that faith by upbringing with associates of that church, and owe more than I can ever repay to the Primitive Baptists, that I was honored with an invitation to have a part in the celebration of the 190th anniversary of the Wilson Primitive Baptist Church…

It was fitting that the Wilson Primitive Baptist Church held this anniversary celebration in this town which owes so much to the spirit of the Primitive Baptists for two centuries. They have left their mark not only on members of their church, but also upon all others and been pioneers in the sort of democracy that is the saving grace of America…

“Of all the Non-Conformists, from Martin Luther to Sylvester Hassell, who have blessed the world—(and to them most credit is due for democracy and freedom of religion)—the Primitive Baptists have been the most consistent. They have held steadfastly to the truth as it was given them to see it and proclaim it without any hint of proselyting or dogmatism.”

Josephus Daniels

Elder J. C. Moore who followed Elder Hassell as Moderator of the Kehukee Association wrote Elder Hassell’s Memorial as recorded in the minutes of the 1928 session of the Kehukee Association. Excerpts from this Memorial follow:

Born in Williamston, Martin County, N.C., July 28, 1842, and died there August 18, 1928; having reached the ripe age of 86 years and 21 days. His parents were Elder C. B. Hassell and his first wife Mary Davis, who died when her son was four years old. Three years afterward his father was married to Mrs. Martha M. Jewett, widow of Elder D. E. Jewett of New York, who exercised her kind and motherly influence over him…

The Lord called him in youth to Skewarkey Church where he related an experience of grace, was received into membership and baptized the ext day, January 11, 1864 by his father, Elder C. B. Hassell, in Roanoke River when the ground was covered with frozen snow and the ice in the river was more than an inch thick. He said, ‘The happiest day in my life.’…

He served Skewarkey, Jamesville, Hamilton, Great Swamp, and Coneto Churches.

From my earliest recollection his example and noble character as a true servant was held up as a pattern to this unworthy writer by my dear father, Elder A. J. Moore, his classmate at the University of North Carolina and life long friend, five years his senior and proceeded him to the grave, but loved him to the end as his best earthly friend. I am thankful for the sweet privilege I have enjoyed in their association here. Serene in death, the remains of our dear Brother Hassell were borne from his home to the last resting place, near his father and other loved ones gone before in the cemetery at Skewarkey Church as the shades of evening cast their mantle over the earth and the sun was illuminating the western hills. Surrounded by a host of sorrowing friends the casket was gently lowered into the grave to await the resurrection morn…

“None knew him but to love his noble character which proved that a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. May the Lord enable us to emulate the worthy example of our dear Brother Hassell who manifested by his life that the Spirit of Christ was with him.”

Julius C. Moore

In a letter dated May 11, 1973, Calvin W. Hassell, the only surviving son of Elder Hassell writes:

Father was the gentlest of men, a man so upright and Christ-like that many people in his home town of Williamston held the belief that no disaster ever visited that place because he lived there.

While a part of his daily diary was lost there is a substantial portion of it in the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina Library.

“He would have graduated in the class of 1861 at UNC, but was later awarded honorary degrees by the college. As I understand it, the University of North Carolina planned to award a Doctor of Divinity degree, but he would not accept this, but, instead accepted an LLD.”

These remembrances by those who knew him certainly attest to the devotion of Elder Hassell to the Cause of Christ and His Church; to his humble spirit in teaching and preaching the word; and to his ability and brilliance as an historian. In compiling this biography this publisher could but say, “Indeed here was a precious gift from God to His Church such as few generations have seen. May we thank God for Elder Sylvester Hassell, his life, and his work.”

“And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth; Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them” (Rev. 14:13)

Joe F. Hildreth Director and Sec.—Treas. Old School Hymnal Co., Inc.

The Following Inscription Appears on Elder Hassell’s Memorial

Sylvester Hassell, A. M., LL. D.
University North Carolina
Educator, Minister and Religious Writer
son of Cushing Biggs and Mary Davis Hassell
July 28, 1842
August 18, 1928
Pastor Skewarkey Primitive Baptist Church
1880 - 1928
Moderator Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association
1880 - 1928
Co-author with his father of History of the Church of God from the Creation

Biography of Mrs. M. M. Hassell.

It has often been said that “behind every great man there is a great woman.” In the life of the two authors of this History this statement certainly is descriptive. Following is a pen picture of the life of Mrs. M. M. Hassell written by Elder Sylvester Hassell and which is copied from the Biographical History of Primitive or Old School Baptist Ministers of the United States compiled and published by Elder R. H. Pitman in 1909. This book also included a section entitled “Talented and Spiritually-minded Sisters and”Mothers in Israel’.” In which this sketch appeared. This account of a step-mothers by a step-son speaks most highly of both.

Hassell, Mrs. M. M.

This eminent woman whose full maiden name was Martha Maria Worcester, was a daughter of Leonard and Rebecca Worcester and was born in Greenfield, New Hampshire, July 17, 1815, and died in Williamston, N.C., October 5, 1897. She was twice married, first to Elder Daniel E. Jewett of New York, who died in 1845, and four years later to Elder C. B. Hassell whose death occurred in 1880. Elder Sylvester Hassell, the well-known historian and minister, was a step-son of the subject of this sketch and gives the following pen picture of her: In her twelfth year, mother experienced conviction for sin and a hope of salvation through the atoning death of the Lord Jesus Christ, and she was baptized into the fellowship of the Baptist Church, of which she was a member more than seventy years; and all the days of her long pilgrimage she proved the reality of her conversion, and adorned her Christian profession with a most godly walk and conversation. She was blessed of the Lord with a fine intellect, and with the purest spirit. Her character was of the highest order-it was Christ-like. She was richly endowed with the Spirit of Christ, and manifested, in a pre-eminent manner, the graces of that Spirit. She loved the Lord and His holy law and precious gospel, His blessed Word and house and ordinances, and His dear people. She had a special and tender sympathy for ministers of the gospel in all their labors and trials, both of her husbands having been ministers. She had a deep and growing desire for the gospel peace and union and fellowship of all the people of God. She had an extensive religious correspondence and many of her humble and lovely spiritual letters were published in our periodicals. She was a true mother in Israel, beloved and revered all over the United States. She spoke evil of no one, and did harm to none, but wished to benefit every one. She was the most spiritual-minded person I ever knew. She lived in the presence of God and in the light of eternity. She surpassed all other human beings of my acquaintance in the gift of prayer. My dear father always had family prayer morning and night; and once every week he called on mother to lead, which she did in the most solemn, reverent, and thrilling manner I ever heard-it was to me a heaven below to listen to her humble, tender, and fervent voice ascending to the throne of the Divine Majesty. And, after father’s death, I have often heard her in her lonely chamber, at the dead hours of night, pour forth her earnest supplications to God for His mercies to herself and others. My own mother, who died when I was four years old, could not have treated me more lovingly and tenderly. She was always a ministering angel to me in affliction and bereavement. Her sympathy was active and profound; her counsel was heavenly. Her words often seemed to me as the words of God-they were in such harmony with the Scriptures and the teachings of the Divine Spirit. My intimate acquaintance with her for forty-eight years has been one of the very dearest and richest privileges of my life, for which I can never feel thankful enough to the Lord; and words seem too poor to express the painfulness of my bereavement in her death. But it is the deepest desire of my heart to say, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

1. This fine allegory on the origin, nature, and results of modern fashionable religion, and its total contradistinction from the Divine old-fashioned religion of the Bible, was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the most gifted literary geniuses of America. It is taken, by the permission of the publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, from Hawthorne’s “Mosses from an Old Manse,” price $2.