BY THE LATE PROF. SMEATON, D.D.
THE duty and advantages of Union have been greatly exaggerated. No one, indeed, at the commencement of these negotiations,* put the matter on any very transcendental grounds. No one for a time had any idea that outward ecclesiastical Union was such an imperative obligation, that we must have it at any cost and with any amount of concession. The necessity of such a thing can in no way be deduced, as we shall afterwards prove, from the doctrine of Jesus and His Apostles. The Church has her own peculiar unity in her Lord before those humanly concocted schemes of external unification begin. And all these schemes have their dangers as well as their advantages. They are right when they bring to light or give expression to the spiritual, invisible, and everlasting unity which knits all the members in every place to their head, and to each other in Him. They are fraught with danger, and are more cognate to Popish than Protestant sentiments when advocated as an indispensable duty at any cost, or merely with a view to give a particular Church a more worthy or respectable position in the eye of others. The expected advantages are, to a large extent, illusory, and they threaten the united body with all the dangers of a Hierarchy, oftentimes a self-constituted order of men.
* That is the Union negotiations between the Free and the United Presbyterian Churches.
The notion which I see expressed in certain quarters of the Church, that you cannot recede from these Union efforts without sin, is one I do not share. That position, by whomsoever it is propounded, just means that some men have invented a new code of ethics on the subject of External Ecclesiastical Union—a theory unknown to the Protestant Church—and they have succeeded in fettering their own consciences; and they are proceeding, as far as in them lies, to do the same ill turn to their neighbours. I cannot allow any man to put the matter in this light. I cannot concede that External Ecclesiastical Union, even though it be Protestant and Presbyterian Union, is to be elevated into such a rank that it shall be made a religious duty, irrespective of all considerations of fitness and brotherly love. I cannot allow men to bind the conscience of the Church with such a dogma when visible unification is not synonymous with union to Christ, nor with union to the people of Christ. It is a matter desirable indeed when it is found to be practicable, convenient, or workable. But every Church from the days of the Apostles has been acting on the principle that many things may warrantly prevent it.
CASTING THE ANCHOR BLINDFOLD.
It is certain in experience that with a poor and slender “It may be,” at the first, many a soul hath cast anchor within the vail blindfold, and yet in the end hath found a firm and sure holdfast in the heart of God and grace of Christ to hang upon with the whole weight of their souls, the weight of their sins hanging upon them also (Luke xxiii. 42; Matt. viii. 2; Zeph. ii. 3).—Goodwin.