The Listener in Oxford, by the Author of 'Christ Our Example'. (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LETTER III. THE CHURCH. " The Church" has become the watch-word, not of unity, but of separation; not of established authority, but of novelty and innovation. Of whatever party it has been made the Shibo- leth, traced to its origin, and watched to its results, it has never seemed to mean any thing but " themselves." Our quarrel is not with words. We know that the term " Church" has many vernacular meanings, besides the only one it originally had. It means an ecclesiastical establishment maintained by law?such as the English or Scotch Church. It means a more extended profession of similar creeds?the Romish, the Greek Church. It means the ministry as distinguished from the people. It sometimes means no more than the foursquare walls of some consecrated building.We correctly use the word in all these senses: but it is indispensably necessary that when we speak of " The Church," we know what we are talking about: that the simple be not unwarily misled, or artfully confused: till verily, in the minds of many it becomes a doubt, whether the oracles of God, the comforts of the Spirit, and the benefits of salvation, secured by eternal promise to the " Church of Christ/' are assigned to a redeemed people, to an episcopal priesthood, to a national institution, or to certain piles of consecrated brick and mortar. In all its meanings, the word has a just application, and the thing signified its value and its uses: but every truth of God may be obscured, and every soul of man be rujned, by the stupid, or careless, or wilful intermingling of these uses. In its divine origin, " The Church" had but one signification, and in Holy Writ it never acquired any other; for though in the language of the apostles, it sometimes designated an assembly of saints, a certain portion of the Church, res...