with the name of church. What is this church? that word that has such charm in it; is it something from God, and of God as it stands?
That it has some charm in it is evident from the well- known fact that whereas in the popular English Bible of the day, there was “congregation” where now we have “church;” king James insisted that church and only church should be there. It has a successional character, and however small the rivulet in which some think to have pure water, still it is to be derived from larger ones into channels that, they pretend, makes the water pure. The grosser corruptions were purged away three centuries ago; what resulted has largely turned to infidelity, and many are going back to the superstitions as that which is in the old channel.
What is this great system, this potent idea? Is a successional church, corrupt or purified or infidelized (if I may coin a new word for a new state of things), a church of the past, on a pattern some centuries ago, or a church of the future, with no pattern at all but man’s fancied competency in this age to do better and be wiser than all before him; is any church as now understood, coming down from ages past, however reformed and arranged, a thing of God? Is it to pass in some shape on this descendible principle? Is there that which, calling itself a church, exercises authority over the mind of man according to the mind of God? We are forced to look the whole question in the face: is the existing professing church, whatever shape it may assume, a thing which God owns? Is a successional body in any shape true or right according to God? I repeat, this question is forced upon us, the whole question; not Is this or that church right?
