By REV. J. P. MACQUEEN.
IN these days of union-mongering at any price, and unholy ambition to wield the bishop’s crozier, it is well to recall the days of old, and to remember that the great ideal of the martyrs, Reformers, Puritans of England, the Covenanters of Scotland, and the divines of New England, was to frame their lives and conduct according to the pristine purity and primitive simplicity of the apostolic Church of the first century of the Christian era. For this standard of purity and simplicity they looked to the Bible alone. The great fundamental principle of their aims and ideals was that it is “righteousness alone that exalts a nation.” They were actuated with a single eye to the glory of God in seeking to make not only their respective native lands, but all the nations of the earth, holy nations, with a people conspicuous for purity of doctrine, life, worship, discipline, and government. Their supreme and final appeal was to the Bible as the sole, authoritative, authentic rule of faith and practice, and their formularies, confessions of faith, and articles, as subordinate standards, were consequently rigidly, clearly, and definitely based upon the infallible veracity of the Word of God. They were pre-eminently lovers of the Book that had transformed their characters and moulded their lives. The Bible fired them with a holy zeal and passionate impulse for righteousness, and with an intense seriousness of purpose which caused them to oppose, sternly and firmly, everything which savoured of an irresponsible frivolity and levity in life, walk, and conversation, yet they were neither morose, gloomy, nor melancholy.
It is fashionable nowadays to disparage the marvellous achievements of these great men of the past, and to whitewash the notorious tyrants who persecuted them; but a little more careful reading of history and of studying the spirit and influence of these spiritual heroes, would rescue their noble names from obloquy, and at the same time demonstrate the great debt we owe to their influence and example. It is to their fine, noble, God-fearing example that our nation owes what may still be left of painstaking perseverance, industry, and conscientiousness in the discharge of duty, dogged tenacity of righteous purpose, real virtue, and uprightness of character. They were men and women conspicuous not only for their love of the Scriptures, but for their conscientious integrity of conduct, and their uncompromising fidelity to their deep-rooted principles and convictions. They have left to succeeding generations the enriching legacy of their outstanding gracious virtues.
There are those to-day, professing evangelical orthodoxy, who hold that this apostolic standard must not be too rigidly applied, because conditions which were suitable and helpful for “an infant struggling society of believers, are not necessarily the best for the conditions prevailing in this twentieth century of refinement, culture, and advancement.” This view is the sheerest sophistry, for the apostolic church was perfect and complete as a model, and designed as the norm and criterion of the true Christian Church to the end of time. The various professing branches of the visible church which have departed from this standard of Scriptural simplicity and purity, must penitently and sincerely return to this apostolic norm before they can have any right to expect Divine approval and blessing, and before they can be a blessing to human society anywhere in the world. Yet the Divine blessing is the greatest need of our generation, when the majority live without God, without Christ, and without hope, lovers of sport and pleasure more than lovers of God.
The authority of God in His Word, with its eternally-fixed standard, must ever be our rule of faith and conduct, and not the ever-shifting opinions of sinful men, whatever may be their gifts and graces.
Among those opposed to a sincere penitent return to the apostolic standard of church government, for instance, are the advocates of gradation of rank in the Christian ministry. This is not the fruit of the humility and simplicity characteristic of heavenly-mindedness, but is the outcome of the arrogant selfishness, carnal ambition, and snobbery of the unhumbled human heart. When the disciples themselves strove as to which of them should be the greatest, their Divine Master rebuked them sharply, reminding them that the pagan kings of the Gentiles exercised tyrannic lordship over their people, but that it was not to be so among them. He again reminded them that One was their Master, and “all ye are brethren.”
Thus, the Divine Founder of Christianity, condemned soaring carnal ambitions and un-Christian self-assertiveness in the infant church, as an infallible directory for the guidance of all future generations regarding church government. Presbyterianism has sought to live up to this apostolic standard as the Scriptural form of church government, while prelatic and diocesan episcopalian church government, and the papal hierarchy have acted in the teeth of this Divine injunction and standard. Bishop Lightfoot, though an ardent episcopalian himself, asserts that “as late as A.D. 70 there was no distinct system of episcopal government,” while the Rev. Prof. Rawson Lumby of Cambridge, another ardent episcopalian, declares, after his scholarly researches, “There is not a vestige of evidence of prelatic or diocesan episcopalian church government in the apostolic church.” In the New Testament, of course, bishop, presbyter, and elder are interchangeable terms, involving no gradation of rank. Bishop, in the apostolic church, simply meant an overseer or pastor, and it involved no superior rank or status, and therefore no “My Lord Bishop.” What, then, in the light of these Scriptural and historical facts, becomes of the false doctrine of the exclusive validity of episcopal ordination and consequent unbroken “apostolic succession”? Those who, therefore, insist upon perpetuating prelatic and diocesan episcopal church government are as guilty in their own sphere of church government, of inventing the theory of “logical ecclesiastical development from the apostolic norm” to present-day episcopacy, as was Cardinal Newman in the realm of doctrine, in his un-Scriptural theory of “Development of Christian Doctrine.” Neither theory can stand the tests, either of Scripture or historical apostolic practice. Our worthy and noble Scottish Covenants fought to the death against the tyrannical imposition upon them of prelatic episcopal government. Presbyterianism also safeguards governmental decency and order, as distinguished from disorderly Plymouth Brethrenism.
We could easily multiply instances from church history to demonstrate the falsity of these theories, and to vindicate the wisdom of the principle of equality of status in the New Testament Christian ministry, but one instance must suffice on the present occasion. When the late brilliant and scholarly Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, with his European reputation in philosophy, delivered his very able lecture on Calvinism in St. Paul’s Cathedral, it so appealed to no less scholarly an evangelical than the late Rev. Leigh Hunt, Editor of “Peace and Truth,” that he insisted on large extracts from the Archbishop’s address appearing in the quarterly organ of the Sovereign Grace Union. Notwithstanding that fact, Dr. William Temple, shortly afterwards participated in celebrating high mass in an Anglo-Catholic church in Bristol, without a qualm, and apparently without the least sense of guilt, shame, or incongruity. This glaring inconsistency not only showed his lamentable lack of spiritual discernment and fidelity to principle, but that he was as ready as Cardinal Newman to sign the papal Articles of the Council of Trent simultaneously with signing the Protestant Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. Thus, intellectual endowments and scholarly attainments are no assurance in a professedly Christian minister, any more than are social rank and financial status, that he will commit apostolic doctrine, in its original Scriptural purity, to posterity, according to the apostolic direction:—”The same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also” (II Timothy, i, 1). On the other hand, a minister of mediocre ability, with but slender educational attainments, may be endowed with penetrating spiritual discernment and uncompromising fidelity to principle, hence the demonstration of the wisdom involved in the New Testament prohibition of gradation of rank in the Christian ministry. The latter may have essential qualifications for the Christian ministry, which the former may sadly lack.
Let us emphasise, at the same time, that the church of Christ, under God, owes an incalculable debt to sanctified scholarship in the Christian ministry. It is the abuse, not the use, of scholarship that we condemn. With all its pseudo-Biblical scholarship, however, Scotland to-day is largely a spiritual desolation—the dire result of infidel Modernism.
Let us emphasise, then, once more, the fact that all the branches of the professing Church that have departed from the apostolic standard must sincerely and penitently return to that Scriptural criterion, before we can expect God’s blessing on Church and State in this nation, or among the nations of the world. Thus all churches with gradation of status in their ministry, such as prelatic and diocesan episcopalian churches, like the Church of England and the Episcopal Church of Scotland, and also hierarchical systems, like the Greek Orthodox Church and the Romanist hierarchy, must sweep these carnal excrescences away forever, while churches having instrumental music, and uninspired hymns, in defiance of the apostolic standard and practice, must penitently and sincerely cease these un-Scriptural practices, to make way for the Church of the Millennium, which will be broadbased on the New Testament model. Let it never be forgotten that instrumental music and uninspired hymns were unknown in the apostolic church, and were only introduced after centuries of the Christian era had passed into history. The evil of the practice is seen even among evangelical churches that substitute uninspired evangelical hymns for the inspired psalms, when they speak with the same reverence of their evangelical hymn-writers, as one would expect due only to an inspired psalm-writer, under Divine infallible direction and tuition. The principle of the national recognition of true Christianity must also be universally adopted by the professing Church.
As for the Church of Scotland, some of whose learned ministers recently, unashamedly, publicly denied the historical existence of Adam and mankind’s fall in him, and, consequently the necessity for Christianity and Calvary’s Cross, words cannot describe its guilt and wickedness, and, apart from Divine grace and mercy, its inevitable terrible punishment for not exercising Scriptural discipline in the case of these treacherous deniers of God’s inspired word. By a majority of 45 votes to 28 the Free Church at its last Assembly passed from an overture designed to safeguard the Church against the practice of exchanging pulpits with the modernist Church of Scotland. By the above decision the Free Church Assembly accepts the exchange of pulpits as a regular practice and thus forfeits all right to expect the confidence and respect of sincere uncompromising Christians.
Where is the ground for the exchange of pulpits between professedly orthodox churches and such as are notorious for heterodoxy found in 2 John, verses 10-11:—”If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God-speed: for he that biddeth him God-speed is partaker of his evil deeds”?
The statement that it “was not within the competence of the General Assembly to prescribe where a minister was to exercise his spiritual gifts, and that he had a wider duty than to the Church to which he belongs” is just very plausible sophistry. What, then, becomes of definitely-fixed ordination vows? What especially becomes of the Divine injunction “Come out from among them, and be ye separate, and touch not the unclean thing. What communion hath light with darkness?” What communion, for instance, is there between the dark infidel Modernism of the Church of Scotland, and the evangelical light professed by the Free Church? How will these men answer at the Judgment-Seat of Christ, though their glaringly-inconsistent conduct causes one seriously to question if they really believe in that unspeakably solemn and august Tribunal? Where, for instance, is the love to Christ and His Word manifested in exchanging pulpits with a Church whose ministers describe as a myth the fundamental doctrines of the Christian Revelation? The Free Church of Scotland ought to be thoroughly ashamed of its unfaithful conduct in this connection, and must yet repent of it in dust and in ashes, or otherwise, as a denomination, irretrievably perish on the rock of backslidden latitudinarian compromising. To quote Mr. Spurgeon once more:—”I have felt that no protest could be equal to that of distinct separation from known evil.” Carnal ambition, with its unseemly itch for popularity, always clamours for union with the great and mighty of this world, however ungodly such Modernists may be. Even when not Modernist in their preaching, most of their sermons are mere platitudinous discourses.
The statement made at the Free Church General Assembly, that it was only the evangelical ministers in the Modernist Church of Scotland that they always wanted in the Free Church pulpit, is incorrect and misleading, as I can personally, if necessary, give a list of the names of Church of Scotland ministers, who are rank Modernists, that have been invited to, and occupied, Free Church pulpits. It is thus clearly evident that some Free Church ministers are deceiving their people, and trying to throw dust in their eyes. This absence of candid common honesty, among professed servants of Christ, is lamentable in the extreme. All this is grieving away the Holy Spirit from Scotland, and adding to the prevailing spiritual darkness and barrenness, while provoking Heaven to inflict national punishment upon us. Nevertheless our duty, as individuals, and as a denomination, is clear:—”Occupy till I come,” enforced by such other Scriptures as “What is that to thee, follow thou me?” and “As for me, and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua xxiv, 15). While not otherwise, in the least degree, comparing myself with the most renowned of Scotsmen, I can conscientiously and consistently truly say with John Knox:—”I know that many have complained of my too great severity, but God knows that my mind was always void of hatred to the persons of those against whom I thundered my severest judgments.”