DISCOURSE IV.

THE TRUE CHURCH A VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION.

“If any man will come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." - Luke ix. 23.

"If any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world but to save the world. He that rejecteth me and receiveth not my words hath one that judgeth him; the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day."—John xii. 47, 48.

"If he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican.” — Matt. xviii. 17.

"Yet count him not as an enemy but admonish him as a brother.". I Thess. iii. 15.

In defining the constitutional nature of Christ's Church in a former discourse, the third distinctive feature of it was stated in these words, to wit:"It was a purely voluntary association under the leadership of Christ. Its members came together originally of their own free will, and could remain or withdraw as they might choose. In the exercise of the same liberty new members were received or discharged. At the same time the church was empowered to extend its fellowship to those who wished to enter it, or withdraw or withhold the same for reasons deemed sufficient. Questions of duty or policy were determined by general voice or consent, obtained without compulsion or restraint;

and no dernier resort to violence or death-dealing force was allowable." To the discussion of this proposition, I now invite attention.

I. That the statement is substantially correct must be so obvious to thoughtful readers of the New Testament that to cite texts or go at length into any attempt at formal demonstration would be superfluous. In the very nature of the case Christ could not have founded a church of compulsory membership, to be maintained and governed by arbitrary rules and resorts to physical force. Such a course would have been contrary to the essential spirit and fundamental principles which he preceptively taught and by which he lived. Neither his religion, his personal character, his distinctive moral and social aims, nor the friendship of then existing worldly governments, admitted it. It would have been an act of extreme inconsistency on his part and circumstantially impossible. We may, therefore, simply glance at the beautiful fitness of this feature of his ecclesiastical superstructure which he designed to have express itself in a new and social order for the governance of his disciples in all the walks and relations of life.

He was dealing with moral agents, with human beings, having minds and hearts of their own, upon whom was laid the burden and obligation of personal responsibility. Adherents, converts, numbers, were nothing in his great scheme of improvement and redemption unless they were gained through honest conviction on their part, by the exercise of their own free will, and remained by reason of their

heartfelt, loyal attachment to him, to their associates, and to the cause they had espoused. Whoever should be with and for him against their own choice would merely seem so while they were really aliens. As he was true to himself and to his declared principles and the spirit of his religion, he could not force people into his church if he would, and would not if he could. Voluntariness, absolute freedom, characterized his entire system. As persons outside must come into his church of their own free will, so on the part of those already in and constituting the organic body of believers there must be equally voluntary reception of new-comers and fellowship. None were to force themselves upon unwilling associates. There must be a consenting, cordial welcome or there could be no real, but only nominal, unity and co-operation.

Nor would it do for unworthy, discordant, apostate persons to insist on a continuance of ecclesiastical relations and church privileges against the wish and remonstrance of the main body to which they were attached, properly expressed. There must inhere in that body a right not only to counsel and reprove disorderly and mischief-making members but to disown them in the last resort; not to hate, injure, wrong them under any pretext but to place them where, on moral and religious grounds, they justly belonged, outside and not inside the church, with their own proper company. So in the administration of all its affairs, internal and external, the genius of the church required the cordial consent if not the formal suffrage of the entire fraternity

or communion. It was not for apostles, as such, or ministers of any grade, or influential members to be dictators. It was for such-yea, for any one to express an opinion, to give counsel, to recommend, to instruct their comrades upon any matter, and then await the general voice of the whole body and not in any case to arbitrarily overrule it. Such, so far as can be ascertained, was the primitive usage. And as to coercion, penal infliction, restraint, or compulsion by force and arms, it never cursed Christian ecclesiasticism until the body of professed believers had prostituted itself and cast away its original simplicity and purity by an unholy alliance with imperial Rome. How morally beautiful and sublime was this voluntary, peaceful character of the primitive Christian church a church recognizing and founded upon the principles of religious liberty, upon the free will and uncompelled choice of its members, who constituted one common, united, harmonious, Christianized brotherhood.

2. We can now perceive by contrasting the church in its corrupted estate with what it was as Christ instituted it, the vast mischiefs that have arisen in consequence of the apostacy just noted, and especially in regard to the particular feature of church life now under consideration. The decadence began, as shown in the last volume of this work, in the second century, and culminated in the fourth, when freedom of thought and action, involving freedom of choice, upon matters of a religious nature, was either wholly suppressed or

limited to an ostracised and persecuted few brave, independent souls, who not infrequently maintained their inborn liberty at the expense of their lives. Starting with the assumption of exorbitant and irresponsible power on the part of the priesthood and the corresponding degradation of the laity, who became the mere puppets or abject slaves of those set to watch over them in the high places of the church, it grew to such proportions and took upon itself such tyrannical forms, after the church and state united, that all idea of religious liberty, of freedom of conscience and conduct, was abandoned and lost. Upheld by governmental authority and backed by the military establishment of the Roman empire, the church thereafter stood forth before men and angels as a mighty despotism, unscrupulous and arrogant in its claims, merciless in its measures, policies, and modes of administration, the antipode of the primitive church of Christ; scarcely one of its celestial attributes remaining. By fear and force it multiplied its numbers and went forth to the conquest of the world, every step of its onward way marked by the blood of slaughtered men. The church grew exceedingly and vast multitudes were added to it; not, however, of their own free will, by the gentle persuasions of truth and love and the pleadings of the Holy Spirit of God, as in the day of Pentecost, but by the unchristian incentive of the spear and battle-axe. Strange as it may seem it is nevertheless true, that whole nations in the north of Europe embraced the profession of Christianity as one of the conditions of