your conduct towards them-supposing them (to use your own language) ignorant of their sin-with your conduct towards those who persist in disobedience to any other part of the divine rule. I suppose that, for any thing for which you refuse admission into your synagogue, you would also remove from your synagogue; though indeed you are in such a labyrinth of-wicked inconsistency, that I do not know whether I ought to suppose it. One thing, however, in your letter marks it quite superfluous to attempt the exposure of any of your inconsistencies. You hold your interpretation of 2 Thess. iii. and at the same time deny that you consider wilful and avowed rejection of known apostolic precept consistent with the continuance of Christian fellowship. Now the only way in which these two things can possibly be reconciled, is by your maintaining that the idler remained ignorant of the apostle's meaning in testifying against the evil of his idleness, and enjoining the opposite course. I do not conceive that any continuance of argument, with the man who will assert this, is at all likely to be productive of any advantage. I am sorry to add, that I consider your confession of faith to Mr. M- much more like that of a theologian than that of a simple Christian; and one turning point of it at least very ambiguous. But that you may not again charge me with passing over any matters, I must expressly tell you that I neither have now, nor had when 1 last wrote, any intention of answering you at large. I neither have time for the attempt, nor if I had would I think it useful. It will rejoice me at any time to find your zeal receiving a direction for the word of God instead of against it. I am, &c. LIII. TO THE SAME. Dec. 12, 1818. DEAR JOHN,-You will perhaps be surprised at hearing from me again; but no matter: let it at least mark the concern I feel at the course you are pursuing. I have just returned from C, where, at your mother's desire, I communicated to her your letters and my replies. In reading the latter, I perceived a passage which I felt very obscure from the brevity which I used; and as I had to explain my meaning in C, I think I may as well explain it to you also. It is in the passage where I observe, "that I suppose that, for any thing for which you refuse admission, &c. you would also remove," &c. My meaning is this: you refuse to take into fellowship the people in Stephen-street, on account of an evil in their course, on which they are deaf to admonition, and avow that they cannot see the evil: it is not yet revealed to them that it is evil by that private spirit, which so many set above the Scriptures. Well; if one of those, with whom you are at present walking, should fall into the same evil course of occasional and private worship with persons in the Establishment, and if he should prove deaf to your admonition upon it, is it not to be supposed in common consistency that you would remove him from your fellowship? You would not make this evil a matter of forbearance, though he should plead that you were removing an ignorant disciple, instead of instructing him. That is, you would in this one instance professedly pursue the same course with us, but certainly not on the same grounds; it would be at your own fancy and religious taste. If it were in maintenance of the word of the Lord, you would have done with your forbearance in other matters, where the authority of that word is invaded. In removing him also, or in not receiving the Stephen-street people, according to your avowed principles in your first letter, you conclude that they are all manifested as not of the kingdom of heaven. I know you do not mean this; though I do not well know what you do mean: yet I suspect that I know it as well as you do yourself. But it is more important to remark, that I have lately found to a certainty, what I had long suspected, that the Stephen-street people forbear upon the truth of the Gospel itself; that many of them avowedly maintain, and erroneously contend for, that deadly part of the Sandemanian doctrine, that a believer walks in doubt whether he is a child of God or a child of the devil, till he observes evidences in himself, that satisfy him he is a genuine believer. From your repeated attempts to obtain a junction with them, I am apprehensive that you are of one mind with them in this; or think this also a matter of forbearance. If so, all communication with you about the walk of disciples is very much misplaced. I shall only briefly add, (lest my silence upon it should be misconstrued) that I have very long questioned the correctness of the interpretation, which I offered in my Apostolic Traditions, on 2 Thess. iii. 15; and that, for some time, I have been convinced of its incorrectness. The Apostle must be understood as there guarding the church against a precipitate withdrawing from the offender, without a previous effort of love to bring him to a sense of his evil by admonition. But all admonition from the church, collectively, must cease after his removal, though individuals may occasionally renew it as opportunity offers, while his verbal acknowledgment of the truth continues. I think I have now said all that I feel needful: may the Lord (if it be his sovereign will) bring you back to the reverence of his holy name and word. Your sincere well-wisher, that Dec. 1818. your We are directed, beloved brethren, by the church in Dublin, to communicate to you some of the sentiments which have been suggested to our minds by our hearing of the trying division that now keeps asunder those who have walked together in C. By a letter received from our brother C—, we understand that he, as well as our sister W, is now through divine mercy of one mind with But his objection to some of us and you on the subject of oaths. In this the sentiments and practices contended for by those with whom you have lately formed a junction, keeps him asunder from you. it appears to us that he is right, and that you were precipitate in forming a union with persons not agreed with us on the divine rule If they, when they offered themby which we are called to walk. any such selves to your fellowship, were conscious of the existence of disagreement, and still more if you were conscious of it, we think there was a very evil departure from the essential principles of Christian union in your forming the junction, and that a step which ought never to have been taken cannot be too soon rectified. We should minds are deeply regret an additional evil, if it appears infected by the vain extravagancies which, we learn with pain, your new associates have run into. We allude not merely to the affectation of particular modes of diction opposed to the ordinary language of common life, but also to the misinterpretation of the words of Christ in Matt. xxiii. 8. 10. and John xiii. 14. In the former, the word rendered "master" is literally a guide or leader; and what our Lord forbids to his disciples in the passage is evidently-not the addressing of men in civil society according to any of those distinctions of rank and circumstance with which his kingdom was never designed to interfere, but the assumption of any titles or character of In the latter passage our religious superiority above their brethren. Lord, teaching by expressive acts as well as by words, as on other occasions-(see for instance Mark ix. 36.)-conveys to us a blessed lesson of readiness at all times to the lowest service of love to our brethren; a lesson which is altogether perverted by those who consider it as the institution of a ceremonial act which we are to make opportunities for observing. But it is not our object to enter into a We think it much more detailed exposure of any of these errors. important, dear brethren, solemnly to call your attention to the bitter root from which such idle questions and vain janglings originate. It is when our minds get from under the sobering but blessed influence of the glorious truth, that they are ready to run after every novel shadow, and to feed the vanity of the flesh with the admired inventions of our own fancies. Even if those who have adopted these vain conceits were now professedly to abandon them, we should not T 2 view the change with any satisfaction, unless they discerned that most evil root of their error which we have marked: and if you, brethren, discern it and are aware that these differences of sentiment were known to either side or both, when your junction was formed, we are persuaded that you are called immediately to dissolve that union which ought not to have taken place. We commend you, dear brethren, to God and the word of his grace, praying that you may be mercifully disentangled from every snare of the adversary, and kept abiding to the end in the simplicity that is in Christ Jesus. LV. TO J. L Dec. 28th, 1818. MY DEAR SIR,-Nay, I must say-brother-till I find you (which I hope and believe I never shall) turning away from that glorious truth which appears to dwell in you. Your letter has refreshed me and all the other brethren here to whom I have communicated it ; and I dare say several pray for you. It is refreshing to see the work and teaching of God in any of our fellow sinners. May the mercy and power of the LORD be more and more displayed in you and all his people for the glory of his own name, uniting our hearts to fear and love and rejoice in his holy name alone, and keeping us from all the deceivableness of unrighteousness which surrounds us, and which is always so congenial to our religious flesh! Do I not know you a little personally? Are you not the man whom I once heard exhort in the Leith Tabernacle, and who accosted me very affectionately in the gallery? This is only a question of curiosity, and very unimportant: for I think I know your mind-the mind of the spirit of truth in you-from your letter. What a hubbub that truth makes, when it gets among a number of decent orthodox professors, who doubt not but they believe enough and are occupied with going on to do! who are ready perhaps to say of the clearest statement of the gospel that it is all very true; but"-aye; but they see not in its truth all their life and all their glory. Very truly you observe, that but for God's own work the knowledge of his name would long since be extinct upon earth :—would indeed at any hour be extinct. Every thing in man-in us and others-is essentially opposed to it. And what a view does this give us of our own continued ungodliness! a view that puts down for ever all the common notions of some progressive betterness in believers than in others, or than in their former selves that he who glorieth may glory in the LORD. And seeing the revelation He has made of his great name, do we not see enough to glory in, and enough to cheer our hearts amidst all the reproaches we may be called to meet with for his name's sake? The world that : knows Him not cannot know us, cannot understand our meaning: and they naturally view us as disturbers of their peace, and opposed to all that they think most excellent. Can we boast over them? No, in no wise. While we are in nothing moved by the adversaries, but set our faces as a flint contending earnestly for the faith of God against all the lies of man, let it be with meekness and fear:" not that ungodly fear in which they walk, reasonably afraid of the insecurity of their ground after all their doings; but in that godly fear which will abound so much more in the glorified spirits of the re. deemed before the throne, than it ever does in them here. Your account of Mr. H does not surprise me, coinciding only with what I had myself observed in him, and lately heard of his course when in London. There were at one time pleasing appearances in him; and I set it down that either they would become more decisively pleasing, or that he would go back. For many years he has seemed to me to retrograde. I fear he has never seen the glorious sufficiency in the revealed character and work of God our Saviour to give the fulness of peace and joy and assured hope to an ungodly sinner, and its exclusive sufficiency to afford us any good hope at any time, and to work effectually in all them that believe the report of it. Where this is not discerned,-where this is not enjoyed, -we are at most but endeavouring to imitate the features of a living Christian and the imitations at this day are, indeed, many of them admirably executed. The imitators naturally take fire, when any poor sinner (snatched as a brand from the burning by divine mercy, and glorying in that holy name which is his all) attempts to examine their image, and questions whether there be in it the breath of life, and exposes some of its corruptible materials. And, indeed, the jealousy and alarm they feel at any impeachment or doubt of their own profession is one of the decisive evidences of its hollowness. What is it to me if all the world questioned my christianity? And if I were supposed to speak any thing contrary to the truth, or of dubious import in our meeting, I know not why I should be hurt at any brother's noticing it? If I know the certainty and glory of the things which I believe, I must be glad of the opportunity of asserting them, and well pleased at my brother's jealousy about them. There is a sentence near the beginning of Mr. H's review of my piece on baptism, in his magazine, that would long since-if his church were standing in the truth-have led them to call on him for a public recantation of it. He told me no doubt in a conversation, when you saw me last in Edinburgh, that he did not mean what he has said but if words have any meaning, he broadly asserts in the passage that sinners are justified for their believing: and he might just as well assert that they are justified for their works. But I confess that the liberality of his forbearance about the precepts of God I have commonly seen connected with a correspondent liberality about the gospel itself. It must spring from not discerning the sanctity of the word of the LORD. And no doubt if men will be ambitious of a large and respectable party in the religious world, they must adopt that liberal and forbearing course. But I trust the scattered sheep of Christ shall be given progressively to hear his : |