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CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §1. CHRIST'S SECOND COMING.

If it were a question of setting out Irvingite doctrine in the order of relative gravity, it would be necessary to present in the first place their views of Christ's person. The Epistles of John, as indeed the N.T. word generally, makes us feel that no truth is of equal moment in itself or as a test of divine teaching. But it is proposed here to examine their chief dogmas historically, and therefore to begin rather with that which they themselves now as ever put forward zealously and notoriously through their evangelists wherever they essay to catch the public ear in Christendom and particularly among the English-speaking races. There is some skill in this; for as a rule the denominations, great and small, are dumb for the most part on the Saviour's return in glory; while undeniably Scripture, especially the N.T., everywhere insists on its preciousness as our hope and its practical value for every day. On the face of things therefore the Irvingite emissary comes before the public to render a service which is in general painfully neglected. Thus are not a few drawn speciously into their not of error.

It would be strange, however, if those who have been shown to be the victims of extraordinary and dangerous delusion of the worst kind proclaimed "that blessed hope" in its purity. Error as to fundamentals is apt to weave a web of vast extent, and in no case is this more conspicuous than in Irvingism, especially as it developed after his death who was its only great man. Not that error will be found really consistent with itself; for consistency is only found in Christ, and blessed are they who, in the face of deceivable appearances which is Satan's work, cleave only to Him in the unity of His body, and with whole-hearted subjection to His word by the Holy Spirit.

The fact is that the truth of the Lord's coming again, though asserted prominently, is misused in almost every possible way, being made subservient to the sect without shame, instead of held in the bridal spirit of faith and love and holy liberty, so as to exalt, Christ, fit in with His work, will, and word, and minister a hope as heavenly as is the relationship of the christian and the church.

No one can intelligently read their writings, even the most fully considered and authoritative,* without perceiving how much they are under the influence of passing circumstances. The spirit of the age, as shown in the various French revolutions, and the growing democracy of Great Britain and elsewhere, fire their minds as antagonistic champions. It is quite true that the principles now at work, not only in the world but religiously, are alien and opposed to God's word. But the christian is not of the world; and if he enter the political arena, all must suffer proportionately, his faith, hope, service, and walk. Such a position is radically false, and must lower and darken and pervert all who are drawn aside by it, most of all those who assume that God has spoken to them exclusively by His prophets, and has restored to them apostles who sanction such heart-occupation with the world whilst boasting of their separateness. When they do testify of Christ's coming indeed, who does not know that the real aim at the close (for as ever "The prophet that teacheth lies, he is the tail") is to insinuate if not inculcate "the restored apostles" (or "apostolate") as the grand resource in these last days and in view of the Advent? The favourite weapon is, as the originating idea was, terror from present and imminent circumstances in Christendom, supplemented by the Zoar they offer all who seek sealing at their hands.

*Compare the "Testimony to the Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, etc.," 71,72, etc.

How different is all this from the heavenly peace and holy power of the christian hope! Our Lord Himself represents it in far other guise. Take the virgins in the first Gospel. "Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened to ten virgins, which took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom" (Matt. 25: 1, etc.). It was the original call from first to last, the only faithful and ever responsible attitude, due to Christ's love and word, which His own were meant to cherish. It was inexcusable to be found otherwise. What had it to do with distant predicted events, with French anarchy or British liberalism? The true apostles were set in this place, even before the church vas formed at Pentecost by the descent of the Holy Spirit Who gave energy to the words of the Lord; and fresh communications of the N.T. demonstrate and apply as well as confirm all; for the truth is one, no less than the head and the body. Spurious profession is anticipated. The Lord would not have His own surprised. If five were wise, five were to be foolish; and their folly was to be shown in going forth "without oil." The gift dwreva (not necessarily gifts, carivsmata) of the Spirit essentially distinguishes the true confession of the Lord from the false. "The wise took oil in their vessels with their lamp:" in them only did the Holy Spirit dwell, not special energies but His unction. they gave up going forth to meet the Bridegroom, wise as well as foolish; and perhaps the wise mainly through the foolish, though the flesh be ever evil even in the regenerate. Certain it is, as the Lord adds, that while the Bridegroom tarried, they all grew heavy and slept. But grace intervenes: God raises indeed a testimony. "At midnight there was a cry, Behold the bridegroom! Go forth to meet Him." They could not have slept had they adhered to their first call. They, wise and foolish, had gone in here or there to sleep. What a picture of the departure of Christendom! and how true! Decay in the hope practically dissolved the bond, and flesh and world gained the mastery. Nor is unity of value if not in the Spirit. But the cry aroused: "Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps." Even the foolish were excited and busy. The wise possessed of the oil alone could resume the first and only right portion — going forth to meet the Bridegroom. The foolish seek the divine reality, which they have not. The wise do not pretend or dare to give of their oil. As their lamps were going out (for wick without oil could not last) the foolish repair "to them that sell." Vain hope to buy for themselves! And while they went away to buy (exactly what the foolish are doing now throughout Christendom — a time almost unequalled in financial effort and human energy), "the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him unto the marriage feast; and the door was shut." The other virgins were left without. They might cry loud, "Lord, Lord, open to us:" but the answer was, "Verily I say unto you, I know you not." They are so much the more guilty, and surely lost, because they had no more than an empty profession, baptised with water but not of the Holy Spirit.

Look at Luke 12: 35, 36: "Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning; and ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their lord, when He will return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immediately," The christian hope is quite independent of times and seasons. It is Christ coming in person, and precisely the same now as when the first disciples waited for Him from heaven. Prophecy may confirm our hope, but is quite distinct in its nature. Hence a Christian ignorant of prophecy might he abounding in hope by the power of the Spirit. He waits for Christ, like a true servant his master's return, to open the door immediately when the knock is heard. Such is the right moral state, which Luke gives more than any other.

John 14 presents the hope as ever from the elevation of Christ's person and love and glory. The Son was going to the Father's house on high, no longer to be visible as Messiah on earth, but an object of faith as God always is. This is proper Christian faith. But He is coming as surely as He goes, having. prepared a place for as in those many mansions; "I come again, and will receive you unto myself, that where I am, ye may be also." Meanwhile as loving Him we keep His word, and have the Paraclete with and in us for ever. Christ was all, His love perfect as proved in His death, His provision of the word and Spirit complete, His "coming" for us sure. It is in no way bringing on the accomplishment of this awful change or that; but those events on earth are connected closely with His "day," which is to execute judgment on the beast, and the kings of the earth, on "the king" or Antichrist in the land and temple, as well as on his enemy "the king of the north." But these are the details of prophecy. The hope of the Christian is quite distinct in character as in source, and depends on His loving promise, so as to be always fresh and firm to faith till He comes to receive us to Himself and His heavenly home. Can contrast be more decided with the excited watching of events and dates, renewed and disappointed again and again, to say nothing of the vanities of a modern apostolate (as presumptuous officially as the true twelve were lowly), and of the ravings of prophets so called which practically supplant scripture?

It is all well to study every prophet, and above all the great prophetic book of the N.T., which stands to Christendom similarly related as the book of Daniel to the Jewish nation. They reveal the result of each of these failures respectively. It is certainly for no christian to neglect the Revelation; but the Revelation guards against the error which blinds Irvingism even more grievously than most of the Christian sects. The hope has nothing to do with dates or earthly events: it is the confusion of the hope with prophecy, which has everything to do with them. How could we have such words of assured promise as are found in the conclusion after the visions of judgment, the constant hope to the faithful, if we had to wait for the accomplishment of seals, trumpets, and vials, as so many signs? Revelation is perfectly consistent with the rest of the N.T., which discriminates them, as Peter formally does at the end of chap. 1 in his Second Epistle. We do well to take heed to the lamp of prophecy. But daylight dawning with the Day-star arising in the heart is a better light and the proper christian hope, quite distinct from the lamp of prophecy shining on events in a dark squalid world.

Thus the apostolic teaching, the written word from the beginning, is as sober, sound, and sure, as God could make it; and abides the special resource for the faithful in the last days of self-will and pretentiousness and form without the power of godliness. Irvingism as to the Second Advent, like Millerism in America, is only another form of excitement through prophecy misunderstood, as was found when "the new-prophets"-mania broke out in the early part of the eighteenth century, or earlier still when the Cromwellian rebellion lot loose mind, will, and imagination in religion hardly less than in politics. The Reformation was comparatively free from that excitement, because more urgent wants craved and found utterance, save perhaps among the Anabaptist fanatics of Münster. But even in times when Rome had almost all its own way in Western Europe there were two grand eruptions, as is commonly known, about 1,000 A.D. and some four hundred years before

Yet one great error there was which characterised them all, if they took the ground of Christianity and the church — the dread of the Judge appalled them, instead of "going forth to meet the bridegroom." This, and this alone, becomes him who rests on redemption and is sealed with the Spirit. It was not hope founded on the known grace and truth of Christ; it was alarm and extreme agitation, such as the false teachers sought to infuse among the Thessalonian converts, young in the faith. And therefore is it now ignorant and unbelieving not to profit by the apostle's correction of that early error. For he takes pains to beseech them by reason, or for the sake (uJpe;r)*, of that bright hope of Christ's coming and our gathering together unto Him, not to be "quickly shaken in mind, nor yet troubled, neither by spirit or by word or by epistle as from us, as that the day of the Lord is present." Next, after having thus shown the hope, he explains that that "day" cannot come in judgment till the evils are fully manifested which it is to judge. The "day" of the Lord is quite distinct, and full of what is most tremendous to man on earth. The hope of being gathered to the Lord at His "coming" is the motive alleged against the disquietude caused by the rumour that His "day" was come. It is not said that His presence must be before the development of the predicted evils, but that His day could not, be before the horrors it is to judge. We must distinguish between His "coming" (ver. 1) and "the manifestation or epiphany of His coming (ver. 8), which last corresponds with His "day," it naturally ought; and we must not invert their relative order.

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. § 2. THE REVELATION MISUSED.

What has been already said as to Christ's Second Coming is greatly confirmed by a fuller consideration of the misuse of the Apocalypse which is alike prevalent in, and characteristic of, this society. To state the truth it enunciates is in itself the best disproof of the wrong done, partly in ignorance, partly by party spirit. In the great book of N.T. prophecy there are well-defined landmarks which afford the most seasonable help and yet demand no sustained attention or study, but he may run that reads them. The first and very essential distinction for all right understanding of it as a whole is that laid down by our Lord Himself in Rev. 1: 19, "the things which are, and the things which shall be after these," not a vague "hereafter," but what next follows. There are in fact three divisions; "the things which thou sawest," namely, the Lord Jesus as presented after a new sort in the midst of the seven golden lampstands (Rev. 1); "the things which are," or the seven churches shown out in the seven letters respectively (Rev. 2, 3); "and the things which shall be after these," that is, after the church-state closes (Rev. 4—22). The bearing of this on the application of the prophecy, simple as it seems, is immediate and immense, neglected by none more than by Irvingite interpreters. This is the more regrettable as they are among the few exceptional communities that really ponder the Book. For the most part in christendom only individuals here and there appear to pay it any marked attention. As the Catholic Apostolics must be pretty familiar with its contents, they ought to have noted well the divinely registered postponement of the strictly prophetic visions to "the things that are"; especially as their ablest leader, Mr. Irving, devoted the greater portion of his Exposition of the Book (4 vols. 12mo, 1831) to the seven Epistles, and with no small measure of truth. They constitute the mystery of the church-condition, or "the things which are," from the days of the prophet till it vanishes from the earth, the faithful to meet the coming Lord in the air, the faithless to sink into the corrupt or apostate evils that await His day. Of the church, as a recognised object on earth, we never hear again in the Revelation, till the visions of the future are closed (Rev. 22: 6). In ver. 16 of the last chapter John is instructed to testify "these things," that is, the sum of these inspired communications, in or for the churches. Also in ver. 17 the church symbolically is shown longing for Christ. But this leaves the fact untouched in all its force, that the outwardly prophetic visions follow the seven-fold picture of the church, till it is no more seen or heard of on earth.

This again is corroborated by the opening vision of "the things that must come to pass after these" in Rev. 4, 5 The scene is transferred from earth to heaven, where the prophet in the Spirit sees a throne set, and One sitting on it, Who is celebrated as Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord God, the Almighty, which was, and which is, and which is to come — the Eternal. But an absolutely new element appears. Around the rainbow-encircled throne were four and twenty thrones, and upon them four and twenty elders sitting arrayed in white, and on their heads crowns of gold. Now, without going into debateable and delicate questions, these elders are admitted, with or without the four living creatures, to represent the heavenly redeemed. It was a new sight for Stephen to see at God's right hand the Son of man. Now in heaven John looks on the symbol of the glorified saints as the chiefs or heads of the royal and heavenly priesthood. Never before had man even in the Spirit beheld them there. Their number is complete, twenty-four elders answering to the four and twenty courses of the Levitical priesthood. Others are called on earth to suffer and blessed subsequently, as we learn (Rev. 6 to Rev. 18); some are seen to go up to heaven (Rev. 11); many sufferers are raised at the last moment, earlier or later in the Book (Rev. 20: 4) priests of God and of Christ, to share in His reign for a thousand years; but not one is ever added to the twenty-four elders, or chief priests.

The inference is irresistible. There can be no full complement of the glorified O. and N.T. saints, as we see in the symbol of Rev. 4, till the Lord comes and gathers them to Himself on high. For though the O.T. saints could have none added after Christ's first advent, they are but disembodied till He comes again. Then alone the church His body will also be complete, both being changed in a moment, the dead and the living, into the likeness of His glory, as these demonstrably are here. For separate souls no more sit on thrones than angels do. Here the saints are crowned and glorified, which can only be after He comes for them. They re-appear expressly in Rev. 7, 11, 14, and in the early part of Rev. 19 taking the deepest interest in what is done to God's glory; but they are to the last mention "the four and twenty elders," whatever and wherever the blessing of others; for the book lets us also into no small variety of blessing to come in God's mercy. But the blessed are others, after the church is taken to heaven, and presented separately.

Be it observed again, "out of the throne proceed lightnings, and voices and thunders" (ver. 5). It is not a throne of grace as in Heb. 4 to which the christian approaches boldly now; nor yet is it the throne of millennial glory on high (Rev. 22: 1), out of which proceeds a river of water of life, bright as crystal. Most commentators interpret Rev. 4, 5 of the present period, whereas it is only applicable in reality to a transition yet future. The throne expresses such providential inflictions as fill the hour of temptation that is coming, after the church goes to meet the Lord before the appearing. So too the Spirit of God assumes henceforth from Rev. 4 a judicial character ("seven lamps of fire burning before the throne"); for it is no longer sovereign grace gathering into one, the body of Christ. Further, the sea before the throne is as it were "of glass" like unto crystal; for the elders no longer is the washing of water by the word needed, as once necessarily to have a part with Christ, whatever Peter foolishly thought. Theirs is now, not a purifying process, but fixed purity and in its highest form, "like unto crystal." The difference of Rev. 15 makes the meaning all the more striking; for there also we see another company of saints at the close who come off victors over the Beast and over his image and over the number of his name, not by any means characterised as the elders, yet singularly honoured, standing upon the sea of glass, and having harps of gold. But in their case the sea is as it were glass "mingled with fire." These do pass through the fiery tribulation at the end of the age, whereas the saints symbolised by the elders were caught up before; even as the Lord had promised the faithful who were awaiting His advent, to keep them out of the hour of temptation which is about to come upon the whole habitable world (Rev. 3).

Certainly Irving was behind few and not more negligent than most christian teachers, who allow in word the meaning of the elders and living creatures, and yet fail to hold it fast when they proceed to interpret the visions that follow. The consequence is the inevitable confusion which prevails. They almost all overlook that, instead of churches, Jewish or Gentile saints, no longer forming one body, are seen as the object of divine care but of the world's hatred throughout the external predictive visions of the Revelation. Hence in Rev. 6 the cry of the martyrs of the fifth seal takes us back from the grace of Stephen and the church of God as seen in the N.T. to the cry of the righteous in the Psalms and the O.T. The reason is evident. The church must already be caught up, in order that the vision of Rev. 4, 5 should be verified. Hence the saints subsequently called in that hour of trial which succeeds have a relationship, and therefore experience and affections, according to those that preceded the actual heavenly parenthesis of grace, whilst Jews and Gentiles are, gathered in unity. Beyond controversy the holy sufferers, that had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held, are represented as crying aloud, "How long, O Sovereign Master, the holy and true, dost Thou not judge, and avenge our blood on those that dwell on the earth?" They are in unison with a God Who will then be dealing judicially; as we ought to be with His grace, Who is now not only long-suffering but saving and blessing the lost gratuitously to the uttermost. It is a day of salvation; by-and-by it will be one of solemn judgments. Why confound them?

Rev. 7 affords ample and distinct evidence of the change which then will follow, anticipative though it is, as being an evident parenthesis between the sixth and seventh seals, answering to a similar case in the trumpets and the vials. Therein first is pledged a numbered company from each of the twelve tribes of Israel; as next the prophet sees a countless crowd from out of the Gentiles, both blessed, but quite distinct, and declared (of the latter at least) to come out of the great tribulation: in neither case the church, but by one of the elders explained, as far as the Gentile multitude is concerned (for the twelve tribes are so expressly described as to need no explanation), to be a special class of that still future period. The promised blessing suits, not heaven but the millennial earth, where the sealed of Israel are also to be. The church is exalted far beyond either,

In Rev. 8: 3-5 further proof appears, indicating that all the saints then on earth are witnesses, not of heavenly grace, but of God's intervention in judgment. For the effect of their prayers is that the angelic high-priest cast from the altar fire on the earth; "and there were voices and thunders and lightnings and an earthquake:" the premonitions, not of the gospel of the grace of God, but of His displeasure and ways that express it unmistakably; and the trumpets follow without farther delay.

The only allusion bearing on this in Rev. 9 is the negative one of ver. 4. The men not sealed on their foreheads are to be smitten. There is not a trace of the church on earth. Other witnesses follow.

So in Rev. 10 it is God's prophetic testimony as to many peoples and nations and tongues and kings, but neither the gospel nor the church as now.

More than this is made plain in Rev. 11, where the witnesses of that day, clothed in sackcloth, have power to inflict judgments such as those of Moses and Elijah, till their brief term of testimony is completed when the Beast kills them. What can be more in contrast with the apostolic witnesses or of the true men in their day who heard God's beloved Son rather than the law and the prophets, however truly they believed both?

Rev. 12 opens what may be called the second volume of the prophecy, and shows a retrogressive vision. For assuredly we err if we fail to see that the seventh trumpet brings us in a general way to the end. Momentous matters which take us back in time had to be particularised; and the birth of the Man-child Who is to shepherd the nations with a rod of iron is mystically before us, in order to link on with God's future designs and ways in Israel. Hence it is not the bride, but the mother here, the clear symbol of Israel according to God before the day of deliverance shines. The remnant of her seed that keep the commandments of God and have the testimony, as it is here, are clearly Jewish, and not what we now know as christian. This book is admirable not only to clear the eyes as to the future, but to enlarge hearts. The church, incomparably blessed as it is, does not cover all the plans that are before God or revealed in His word.

In Rev. 13 those who have their tabernacle in heaven are definitely distinguished (6, 7,) from the saints on earth with whom the Beast makes war. Cf. ver. 8, 9, 10. Not a word hints at the assembly, Christ's body; but there are saints Jewish and Gentile, and separately viewed.

This is palpable in Rev. 14 where we hear of 144,000 with the Lamb on mount Zion, a remnant of Judah, yet more honoured and more closely associated with the earth-rejected Christ than the sealed company out of all Israel in Rev. 7. After this scene, the everlasting gospel goes out to those settled down on the earth, and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people, but no hint of baptism into one body as now in the church. We have afterwards (12) the endurance of the saints noted who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus — this is indispensable, but the church nowhere on earth; and no wonder if caught up to heaven before the accomplishment of Rev. 4, 5. The blessedness from henceforth of those who die in the Lord is proclaimed (13); and immediately after the Son of man's appearing to judge, whether discriminatively, or unsparingly.

Then comes in Rev. 15 the vision of those who overcome the Beast and sing the song of Moses as well as of the Lamb, owning the King (not of saints but) of nations, as in Jer. 10: 6. That these follow on earth the church gathered already to heaven has been fully shown.

In Rev. 16 the vials contemplate the awful hour of man's and Satan's worst evil with God's last judgments, before He sends the Lord in person to inflict vengeance, and then introduce the reign of righteousness and peace. Hence the Lord comes as a thief, unwelcome and unexpected; but blessed will he be who then watches, even if it be not the bridal joy of those caught up before.

Rev. 17 is a description which strictly has nothing to do with the three great series of judgments in the book to occupy the book from Rev. 6 and onward, though we may gather from Rev. 14: 8 and Rev. 16: 18 its relative place in the last of these dealings of God. But being descriptive it can show us Rome's corruption all through her lofty and false history, as Rev. 12 connected Christ in the past with God's purposes about Israel in the future. The blood of the saints and that of the witnesses of Jesus (6) seems purposely general, as we see most pointedly in Rev. 18: 24. But it is certain that the one chapter speaks of the glorified saints coming with the Lord Jesus when He overcomes the Beast and the kings; and that the other gives a final call of God to His people, true in spirit ever since the Roman pseudo-christian Babylon persecuted, but pointedly to the Israel of the future before judgment destroys. "My people" properly designates (not christians but) the elect nation, and the execution of external widespread judgment is the purpose of the warning as usual; The heavenly redeemed have been already caught up and come with the Lamb.

Rev. 19 is another evidence of the same truth; and it is plain, full, and precious. Here the symbols of the twenty-four elders and of the four living creatures appear for the last time after the judgment of the great harlot, the corrupt pretender to that place of holy privilege which belonged to God's church. Immediately follows the announcement of the Lamb's marriage-supper, and His wife has made herself ready, and the guests are called blessed, even if they have not her relationship, the O.T. Saints, in glory as well as the church; to both of whom answers the uniting symbol of "the armies which were in heaven" that follow our Lord when He is seen, not as the Bridegroom though ever so, but for the while as the Warrior in righteousness. To this we must add the weighty fact that the martyred remnants of the earlier and later persecutions during the Apocalyptic hour of temptation are seen raised from the dead in time for the millennial reign in Rev. 20: 4: "the souls of those that had been beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God (cf. Rev. 6: 8); and such as worshipped not the Beast nor his image, and received not the mark on their forehead and on their hand." The O.T. saints and the church had been already raised or changed, and had followed the Lord out of heaven in the glorified state. Indeed this state was made true ever since Rev. 4 showed them crowned and enthroned. Now they are seen on the millennial thrones, before those slain under the Apocalyptic visions join them in resurrection bodies for the reign with Christ.

If all this evidence be justly weighed, the Irvingite application of the Revelation is seen to be thus far a tissue of mistake. The sealed on their foreheads in Rev. 7 are the "Israel of God" at a future epoch after the translation to the Father's house of the church as well as of the O.T. saints; when the same chapter next reveals an innumerable throng of saved Gentiles unmistakably distinct. This is enough to put to the rout the allegorising view of the twelve tribes in the preceding vision. But what they teach is worse than mere error of interpretation; it is a "strange doctrine," which upsets a cardinal truth and standing privilege of God's church. For every member of Christ is and has been sealed of the Holy Ghost since Pentecost. "He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit." "If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." "If then God gave unto them (Gentiles) the like gift (dwrevan) as unto us (Jews), on our having believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God?" "By one Spirit were we all baptised into one body whether Jews or Greeks, whether bond or free, and were all made to drink into one Spirit." These scriptures suffice to prove the indispensable and universal character of that great gift for every christian: without it one cannot be a member of Christ's body. To allow a constant line of such members since the twelve died, and to aver that sealing can only be by the imposition of apostolic hands, such as they and they only have in the Irvingite community, is obviously and unanswerably to contradict themselves.

Here their system is inexcusably astray. It is scriptural to affirm that the gift of the Spirit, and also gifts, were conferred for special ends by the imposition of apostolic hands. It is the grossest ignorance of scripture to overlook the fact that on still greater occasions the Spirit was given, even where an apostle was present, or all the apostles, without any such laying on of hands, as we have already shown; how much more where apostles were not present and could not be? How has so serious a heterodoxy pervaded these men? A snare of the enemy working on the pride or vanity of would-be apostles designated by modern false prophets. These apostles forsooth can seal, they only now: what follows logically, but that none are sealed outside Irvingism? none since the apostles till these men? That there is no mistake about their arrogant pretensions, built on a total misconception of the Scriptural doctrine and facts, will be plain to any upright christian on reading the following statements from their most authoritative document, "The Great Testimony," given in a footnote.*

* "The French Revolution of 1793 was but a partial outbreak of that universal convulsion which is now preparing — the first shock of that earthquake which will throw down every civil and ecclesiastical fabric — corruption in the court and in the church had destroyed the happiness and moral feelings, and supplanted the principles, of the great mass of the people; — and the people, oppressed and exasperated, at last burst through all restraint, and then every evil passion was let loose: wickedness, cruelty, and bloodshed, a diabolical hatred of God, and of religion, and of all government, and of decency and virtue, had their full sway, and unheard of crimes were committed in the palace of the king, and detestable lewdness and outrageous sacrilege revelled even in the temples of God, — murder became the policy, and atheism the religion, of a whole nation.

"But that revolution rose up in the face of better principles then still existing, the which with mighty force it assailed and sought to overthrow, but which ultimately stayed its violence. But now the revolution, of which the former was the type and omen, impends upon christendom leavened throughout with its evil, and sweeps and carries away institutions whose foundations are already sapped; and that infidelity, which flowed darkly and silently its course beneath through the period of Papal corruptions, which gained strength and has burst forth into the light of day in Protestant apostasy, shall swell out into that third and last flood of antichristian blasphemy, which shall carry away both church and state, as visible ordinances publicly witnessing to God, and raise up in their room the ordinance of hell; mischief shall be framed by a law, and every insult against God and His Christ shall be perpetrated, not by the tumultuous acts of infuriated mobs but by legislative measures, with all the pomp and circumstances of government, yet springing from the people, whose will shall be all powerful; the ties of society, formerly burst asunder by the violence of man's passions, shall now be loosed by the impiety of his wisdom; and the bands of God being broken, none other shall bind men together; every man's hand shall be against his brother, and misrule shall be the law of the world, until all are gathered up under that Antichrist who hastens to be revealed (Micah 7: 5).

"For we know from God's word that in the last days self-love, covetousness, boasting, pride, blasphemy, disobedience, unthankfulness, unholiness, the want of natural affection, truce-breaking, false accusation, incontinence, fierceness, disrelish of good, treason, rashness, highmindedness, love of pleasure (2 Tim. 3: 2-4), cloaked indeed by all the forms of worship and godliness, but denying all power therein, shall not only have their votaries as they ever had, but shall reign triumphant over the minds of men. In one word, lawlessness shall pervade and prevail, tossing man to and fro as the waves of the sea, until it shall bring forth its concentrated energy in that wicked, the lawless one, who shall be revealed, the man of sin, 'who opposeth and exalteth,' etc. (2 Thess. 2: 3, 4, 9). And he, must he manifested speedily; for amid the increasing tumults and confusion of all people in every country of Europe, in this distress of nations, with perplexity, the time foretold in God's word rapidly approaches, when the Son of man shall coins in the clouds of heaven to judge the nations, and to act up that kingdom which shall never be destroyed. And when He cometh, that lawless one stands already revealed: for it is written that the Lord shall consume him with the Spirit of His mouth, and destroy him with the brightness of His coming.

"And this is the fearful crisis in the history of man to which the world approaches; and this is 'the hour of temptation,' etc. It is only an holy people who can abide before Him [after citing Mal. 3: 2-4], walking as children of light and children of the day (1 Thess. 5: 5); it is only a people filled with the Holy Ghost, the servants of God whom He sealeth on their foreheads, before the four winds of heaven let loose the elements of destruction on the earth and on the sea (Rev. 7: 3). And that ministry of the Holy Ghost cannot be given, that sealing cannot be affixed, the church cannot be perfected, except through those ordinances which God gave at the first for that end." [Here their unfailing and presumptuous self-assertion betrays itself.] "But they shall be given; all the promises contained in His word of the restoration of His Zion [[ the usual ignorance, which robs Israel of their hope and arrogates to the fallen church, without one word of reality for so grievous a misapplication of O. and N.T. prophecy], in the hour of her greatest peril, shall be fulfilled; and that purpose shall be accomplished according to His own counsel, and by no man's devices, God will appear again in the mighty presence of His Spirit" [undoubtedly, but for Israel when broken before the Crucified, and the nations through that chosen people: nowhere in scripture is there to the church a promise of restoration or of a second effusion]; "again shall His gifts, given without repentance at the ascension of His Son, be manifested, apostles, sent forth not of man, neither by man, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers..., shall work the work of God in His church, and minister to the edifying of the body, and the body shall be replenished with life (!); the dead bones (!!) shall be brought together, framed again in their wonted order, and shall stand up a mighty army (Ezek. 37); and the followers of the Lamb, the undefiled," etc., etc. What hotch-potch of scripture, what confusion of christianity with Judaism, needs no proof to any spiritual mind. The citation of these extracts from "The Great Testimony" is drawn from Mr. Miller's Appendix I. Vol. i., 429-434.

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. § 2. THE REVELATION MISUSED.

That the entire groundwork is fictitious is shown by another sure consideration. The "sealing" of Rev. 7 is not employed as we find it in the Pauline Epistles, but a symbolic form of this prophecy, which therefore is said to be "upon the foreheads" of those selected from the twelve tribes of Israel. It is an astounding blunder to confound the sign of a divine exemption from outward judgments, as this will be, with that richest inward privilege which God makes true of every believer in Christ since Pentecost. Its essence is the indwelling Holy Spirit, of which not a trace appears in Rev. 7. Indeed the effusion of the Spirit appears from the Prophets and the Psalms quite inconsistent with the revealed condition of God's ancient people during their future crisis: even the godly, though born of the Spirit, will not have the gift of the Spirit till the Lord appears in glory; just as the disciples, though born again, only received the Holy Ghost after Christ was glorified.

As Rev. 7 did not speak of the Lamb nor of mount Zion, so Rev. 14 says not a word about sealing on their foreheads. There indeed a different lot appears to await a different company of 144,000* from Judah: not protection from the awful tempests of that judicial period, but the Lamb on mount Zion associated with holy sufferers, having His name and His Father's written on their foreheads. It is not here a living God's seal of immunity from hurt, but undefiled ones that refuse idolatrous corruption and follow the Lamb whithersoever He goes. Hence another and higher though clearly not the church, nor even heavenly; for they, and they only, learn the song chanted before the throne, and the living creatures and the elders, i.e., those who symbolise the church and the O.T. saints in glory. They follow, and are associated (in God's mind at least) with the Lamb on mount Zion; no doubt anticipatively, for the Lord has not yet appeared, as we see from the closing visions of this chapter; just as in chapter 7 the 144,000 out of the twelve tribes of Israel are merely marked out and assured by a living God of the general Messianic portion of Israel, the day-spring that will dawn on them foreshown before the dark apostacy at the end of the age. But the elect of Judah who tread in the footsteps of the Lamb stand with Him on Zion where He will sit as King soon, and are near enough to catch the "as it were new song before the throne." This is the highest place on earth and quite distinct from the ordinary blessing of Israel; it was such as had David's companions in sorrow and prowess compared with the people at large. Both visions give the intervention of God earlier and later, for His ways of goodness toward the seed of Abraham; the confusion of which indicates total ignorance of the structure of the Apocalypse, as if Rev. 14 were a mere repetition or at best supplement of what was revealed in Rev. 7. In fact they are just as distinct as those slain under the fifth seal are from their brethren that were about to be killed (further on) as they were, who are distinguished even when raised to reign with Christ (Rev. 20: 4).

* It is "the," not "a" Lamb as before, but (not the) 144,000. Those introduced in Rev. 7: 4-8 and in Rev. 14 were not mentioned previously, and therefore they each are without the article in the Greek.

The two chapters therefore do not treat of the same subjects, but of different at distinct epochs and — of evidently varied character. The first chapter speaks expressly of those sealed out of the twelve tribes of Israel, in contrast with a still larger complement from among the Gentiles; and both companies wholly apart from the known and acknowledged symbol of the O.T. saints and the church presented in the same chapter. The second chapter does not speak of the twelve tribes, but from the context it is implied to be rather from the Jews proper, mount Zion being the keynote; and here again is the symbol of the heavenly redeemed quite distinct, the four living creatures and the elders (ver. 3).

There is no doubt that those "sealed" in Rev. 7 are supposed to have an appropriate blessing thereby. To apply this to a special time for some of the church, which no christians had enjoyed for ages previously, nor yet do the great mass at that very time (and such is the Irvingite interpretation), is not only infatuation and arrogant self-complacency, but such a subversion of every christian's most essential privilege as could not be entertained for a moment by any soul that understood what the church of God is. For this reason, as for others already given, a living God's seal as in the prophecy cannot be here meant of the church at all, still less at a specific season, and yet less of a mere part. Such notions are incompatible with the seal of the Spirit which is the inalienable mark and joy of the christian (2 Cor. 1: 22, Gal. 4: 6, Eph. 1: 13, 14, Eph. 4: 30).

On the whole then, and in every point of view, their accepted and uniform interpretation of the Revelation is unintelligent and unsound; whilst their doctrinal use of sealing is a denial of God's church, of whose unity, catholicity, and apostolicity they falsely claim to be champions, whereas their teaching overthrows each and all. Now the book rightly understood carefully guards from all these errors, confirming the truth elsewhere revealed, instead of undermining anything and confusing all. Mr. Irving was quite right, with Vitringa, Sir I. Newton and others, in giving (besides the mere historical application) a larger and protracted view of the Seven Apocalyptic Epistles, as long as churches exist on earth. The very terms employed by our Lord, "the things which are," might have suggested a continuous sense, especially as the internal contents indicate, and the cessation afterwards of any church-condition clenched the fact. But this being so, where is the consistency of interpolating christians and churches into "the things which should be after these?" The visions of prophecy from Rev. 6 to 18 concern not the church, but the world; and accordingly Jews and Gentiles come before us, not the body of Christ where such differences are effaced. Even those blessed are expressly or by adequate implication Jews or Gentiles, in no case do they rise up to church or christian relationships.

With this concurs the all-importance of Rev. 4, 5 as indicating beyond just question the presence above of the complete company of the heavenly redeemed, risen and glorified as they can only have been by Christ's coming Who introduced them there. His presentation of the saints on high at once makes the way clear for God's ways in putting Christ into actual possession of His inheritance by providential judgments, in the midst of which those to be blessed on earth are gradually prepared; as the heavenly ones from chap. 4 were already in their place. And these heavenly saints are distinguished by the clearest marks from the earthly, however favoured (with differences too) the latter may be. They are enthroned assessors round God's throne, in the intimacy of His counsels, and worshipping with full spiritual intelligence. Further, they have not only a royal but a chief-priestly function altogether peculiar. And when this symbol founded on the heads of the twenty-four priestly elders comes to an end, it is merged for the church in the unity of the Lamb's wife (Rev. 19), with the O.T. saints as the guests or "they that are bidden" at the marriage. Accordingly both these classes of heavenly saints soon after follow our Lord out of heaven, and, when the thousand years' reign comes (Rev. 20), sit at once on thrones for judgment, resurrection not being then predicated of them, the first general class, as they were changed before they were caught up long before; whereas it is said of the two classes of saints subsequently martyred in the Apocalyptic period, "that they lived," being just before seen as "souls" in the separate state till then (ver. 4). Compare Rev. 6: 11.

The raising up of these two classes of what may be called Apocalyptic martyrs is a beautiful sample of God's compensating grace. For they only come into the rank of holy witnesses after the Lord will have received the saints at His coming. They do not escape persecution unto death, as others will who are to be delivered when He appears in judgment. Hence they might seem to have lost much. But not so: dying for Christ, even though they may have known very little of the truth, they are destined of God exceptionally to a far higher place than their fellows who survive. For they are raised at the last moment, so to speak, in order to have their blessed and holy part in the first resurrection; whereas those that escaped death are "the people of the saints of the Most High" (or heavenly places). Those dead and risen are "the saints of the Most High" themselves, and reign; whereas "the people" are reigned over. Only we must carefully notice that the first part of Rev. 20: 4 sets out the great bulk of the saints in general from the beginning till the Lord comes to change and translate them to heaven. The later clauses embrace the twofold martyrs who only come forward after those symbolised by the twenty-four elders are glorified.

Be it noticed here that the critical form of Rev. 5: 9, 10, as approved by the best editors, helps and is helped by seeing this. For the new song celebrates the Lamb because He was slain and did purchase to God with His blood out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation, and made "them" to our God a kingdom and priests, and "they" shall reign over the earth. It is not thanksgiving for their own portion. It is the joy of divine love that others are to be blessed highly even in face of that dismal day. It is true that these are not to be made elders or chief priests in the heavenly hierarchy; but they are to be royal priests when the time comes to reign over the earth. In Rev. 20: 4 the time is come, and their anticipation is fulfilled. The singers of the new song followed the Lord out of heaven (Rev. 19) as "the hosts that were in heaven," where they had been as the twenty-four elders, ever since the church-state closed, and "the things which must be after these" began as shown to John (Rev. 4). All this while they had been changed; and therefore we read, "And I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them." They were in a glorified condition already; whereas those who had suffered for the testimony and for the word of God, before the Beast had developed, and such as worshipped not the Beast but refused every shade of the evil after it was full-blown and in highest power, and were killed even as their earlier brethren were, are now alike raised to reign with Christ a thousand years. So consistently does the word of God shine, and so much the more as it is searched in faith, and as attested by the best ancient evidence.

How the visions of the book fall in with and justify the distinction pointed out between the christian hope and prophecy needs no elucidation. Our hope belongs to "the things that are" or church-period; the lamp of prophecy deals with the judgments, times, seasons, etc., or "the things that shall be after these." The coming of the Lord to gather the heavenly redeemed to Himself is the mystery fully revealed in 1 Cor. 15, 1 and 2 Thess., and elsewhere, which it did not fall within the scope of the Revelation (as being characteristically judicial) to describe; but it is necessarily implied after Rev. 3 and before Rev. 4. As no one pretends that it is portrayed anywhere in the prophecy, there must be a space more suitable than any other for that wondrous event; and what so proper as that which immediately precedes the presence of the crowned and enthroned elders in their completeness on high? The Revelation does predict and describe the emerging out of heaven (Rev. 16: 14, Rev. 19: 14,); but this is prophecy: not properly our hope of the Lord's coming to receive us unto Himself in the Father's house. The epiphany or appearing of His coming naturally follows His coming; for the measure of the interval between them we are dependent on scripture, mainly the Apocalypse, to decide. In a general way at least this, we have seen, is not difficult.

It may be well to add that the Revelation may be regarded from another point of view, which has its importance and may be here briefly stated. If we look at the seven churches as they existed historically and only so in the apostle's day, "the things which must come to pass after these," or the prophetic scenes that follow, must be allowed their place from that time onward. According to this aspect of the book, Rev. 4, 5 would be the anticipation of the heavenly saints gathered on high, before the revelation of God's dealings with the world in the, seven seals, which announce His unveiling of the great changes in the Roman world from the days of the prophet till the downfall of heathenism, which made way for a vast influx of men from Judaism and the nations, as seen prophetically in the parenthetical Rev. 7.

Then as introduced by the seventh seal the seven trumpets proclaim successive judgments first on the Western Empire (Rev. 8), next woes on the Eastern Empire and from the east (Rev. 9), with another great parenthesis (Rev. 10, 11) which brings before us a mighty cloud-clothed angel, with symbols of supreme power and judicial setting his right foot on the sea and his left on the land, and the full expression of divine majesty, swearing that there should be no more delay but that the seventh trumpet should see the mystery of God finished according to the prophets. Sackcloth prophesying follows, sustained by power like that of Moses and Elijah; and the blast of the seventh trumpet ushers in the, world-kingdom of the Lord and His Christ. Now in the shadowy application or the book, which the Protestant school labours to treat as complete and final, it is admitted that this may foreshow in a vague way the providential work of God in the Reformation. It is not the Lamb or holy earth-rejected Sufferer, as in Rev. 5: 7, any more than it is yet the Son of man actually invested with and coming in the kingdom as later on. It is angelic or providential, whether in priestly action first, or in the prophetic announcement of the end of man's day and the coming kingdom of God over the world; in the course of which we see a little open book, not the sealed one as at the first, and prophecy resumes its course before many peoples and nations and tongues and kings. But when we seek the real and minute interpretation of what is said, there is total failure in predicating the two witnesses, and indeed all other details, of pre-reformation times culminating in that great event; and none more forcibly disproves its adequate fulfilment than such an able and intelligent advocate as the late E. B. Elliott. To allow a general application to the past history is the utmost possible. In this vague point of view the seventh trumpet prefigures the closing scene, when God will intervene to reward His own and destroy the destroyers of the earth: a state of things clearly not yet arrived.

Then from Rev. 12 (or rather including Rev. 11: 19) we are taken back for a second survey of what is coming, in order to give more special facts not particularised in the visions which compose what we may call the first volume of the prophetic vision.

Here God's purpose in Israel comes out, with a mystic view, not only of Christ the centre and supreme-object of His glorious counsels, but of the translation of those identified with Him to heaven apart from all dates, circumstances, and times, followed when His dealings with the earthly people begin to be developed. The church is the body and bride of Christ, not His mother, which is alone true of Israel, whatever tradition may blunder about it. Every christian moderately acquainted with the more pious commentators on the prophecy knows how they apply the vision to the vindication of Christ's glory against Arianism and the uprising of Satan's antagonism in that Roman empire which had given up paganism and outwardly acknowledged christianity. And this is followed in Rev. 13 by the gigantic instruments of Satan in hostile powers, whether external or ecclesiastical according to the Protestant theory, with the intervention of God's ways in recent times.

The Lamb, it will be noticed, reappears (Rev. 14) with suited followers, testimony unprecedentedly active to the nations, warnings of Babylon's fall and of the Beast's doom for all his party, the blessedness henceforth of those that die in the Lord, and the Son of man's judicial coming for the harvest of the earth, with unsparing vengeance on the vine of the earth. These visions may in the earlier part be applied to what God has wrought, as we are awaiting the later part ripening into its tremendous accomplishment we know not how soon. And so may be regarded the detailed vision of the vials (Rev. 15, 16), with that of Babylon's sad story and fall (Rev. 17, 18), before the Lord appears from heaven (Rev. 19), followed by the glorified saints, both to execute the closing judgment and to bring in the millennial reign over the earth (Rev. 20), and eternity as the sequel (Rev. 21), with a retrogressive vision in Rev. 21: 9 — 22: 5, and the conclusory appeals for present profit or warning.

If the protracted or historical application of the Revelation be sound, which may be allowed without enfeebling the rapid and exact fulfilment of the book in the future crisis after the church state terminates, and the question of Christ's actual assumption of the inheritance ensues, with the preparation of Jews and Gentiles as His earthly objects, it is plain that the Irvingites err as decidedly in the one view as in the other. It may be said no doubt that too many companions are involved in error among the godly both now and in the past. But they have the unenviable peculiarity of perverting the Apocalypse, as they do almost all the scriptures, to exalt themselves and exclude true members of Christ from their sure and blessed privileges to the deep dishonour of the Lord, the grief of the Holy Spirit, the perplexing of weak ones who differ from them, and their own hurt and shame. If this were not the inevitable effect of their false application of the Revelation, as well as of the divine word generally, it would hardly become a believer to occupy time in the investigation here pursued. But assured that so it is, I am bound in the love of Christ and by His truth to help souls, either within or without their bounds, against that which presents appearances sufficiently attractive to many in a day of increasing confusion and self-will. We have already seen that according to the fulfilment in the future crisis, which is the only accurate and exhaustive accomplishment of the book, there is not the smallest room for their reveries as to Rev. 7 or Rev. 14.

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §. 3. PROPHETS AND APOSTLES, etc.

The next subject calling for examination is as distinctive a doctrine of the community as any that could be named: their view of prophets and apostles, and pretension to them. The restored apostolate is the unfailing claim in their books and pamphlets, their reaching and conversation. The very posters of their evangelists keep it up before all eyes.

It is remarkable that one is obliged in dealing with this matter to depart from the order of scripture, where on every ground we hear of "apostles and prophets." Such was the order in fact is in position. It is not, that these modern claimants fail in crying up the superiority of their apostles. but beyond doubt prophets in their case preceded apostles and also designated them. Even their first actual apostle, J. B. Cardale, was named by prophecy;* and so were others, not only such as served in that office, but Mr. D. Dow, who refused in the face of all remonstrance — himself a man who spoke "in the power."

* A courteous paper, forwarded by another, intimates, on the authority of printed letters which I have not seen, that I am mistaken in stating (on the late Mr. Baxter's authority) that it, was "the pillar of the prophets" who nominated Mr. C. But it was by the voice of prophecy, and by an inferior, it seems, to Mr. Taplin. I gladly acknowledge the correction; but will they never learn that a dozen errors about names cannot change the principle? Never in scripture were so chosen. — And if Lady H. D., etc., were not of the seven, be it so. But prophetesses did figure in the darkest way, as I shall have occasion to prove. — And does the subsequent return or repentance of Mr. D. Dow affect the gravity of the fact that, though called to the apostolate in power, he declined and in fact never was one? — And what matter if the twelfth (Mr. Mackenzie,) still continued in the Irvingite fellowship? He resigned apostolic duties: as two others, it seems, never would pretend to seal. Is all this nothing, because they did not quit the society? All this effort to correct, where there seems also systematic, secrecy, is but the merest nibbling, even where there is not such scurrility of abuse as comes from another of the party.

Thus the doctrine in the Great Testimony is contradicted by the facts of their history. Their first designated apostle was Mr. R. Baxter, who had been also fully acknowledged as a prophet, like Messrs. Cardale and Drummond afterwards. Of this there is the amplest evidence. But Mr. B., alarmed at the failure of his own prophecies (to say nothing of others), got his eyes opened to the power of evil at work; as he also stood firm in refusing the name without the signs of an apostle. Others were less scrupulous and more ambitious. And Mr. B. discerned in a measure the fatal heterodoxy as to Christ, which lay at the root, and perverted the truth in many ways.

Here is their own statement to the patriarchs, etc., and to emperors, kings, etc., in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Daring men some certainly were, with weaklings carried along for a while. "Without apostles, it is not difficult to understand that prophets should have ceased; for the laying on of apostles' hands is God's ordinary way of bestowing the Holy Ghost, whether in gifts, in administrations, or in operations. Apostles are His gift, direct and immediate; but prophets and other ministries ordinarily are His gifts, mediate and through apostles," etc. On the face of their history the reverse. is true. For prophets preceded in point of time, and named each at of the early apostles, as well as Messrs. Baxter and D. Dow, the last declining, the first utterly rejecting.

The truth is that in scripture the gift of a prophet is no less direct and immediate from Christ than that of an apostle, though they have not the same degree of dignity. Where is there revealed a single case of a prophet mediate and through apostles? They contradict God's word in this, as we have seen they do their own history when they lay down doctrine. No doubt the cautious man of strong will, the bold and energetic pillar of the apostles, saw it needful to put his foot down, after that prophecy had done its part in elevating him. This alone seems to account for his monstrous departure from scripture in ordaining Mr. Taplin as prophet. The N.T. knows of no such thing as ordaining a prophet, or yet evangelists, or pastors and teachers. They were alike "gifts." Apostles no doubt were officers, as well as gifts; and they did choose or ordain elders, and lay hands on deacons, both of which were local officers. But apostles as gifts, prophets, and the rest in Eph. 4, were not only alike direct from Christ, but alike in the unity of His body, not local; though some might hold local office also, as we see in Stephen and Philip, who had gifts quite independent of the diaconal office they exercised in Jerusalem.

Scripturally judged, therefore, all is confusion in the Catholic Apostolic theory of prophets and apostles, and the antagonism to scripture is as evident as complete. The facts and principles are certain as laid down in God's word. The Messiah on earth chose the Twelve in plain relation to the tribes of Israel (Matt. 19: 28); and when one by transgression fell, the son of perdition, another was in the Jewish way (as the Holy Ghost was not yet given) shown to be chosen of the Lord. Not one was designated by a prophet. But the Lord had farther purposes, and expressly acted outside and beyond the Twelve by the extraordinary and heavenly call of Paul in sovereign grace. He declares himself apostle, not from men nor through man. Those who construe Acts 13: 2-4 as either his call or nomination or ordination to the apostolate contradict God's word and play the part of the many adversaries of his ministry. It was solely a separation of him (and Barnabas) to a special work, after being already called and labouring for years. Do men argue that his inferiors ordained him? It was repeated in Acts 15: 40; which compare with Acts 13: 2-4. His was to be, and in fact was, the apostleship of the uncircumcision, as theirs of circumcision: so it was settled between him and them (Gal. 2). The break with Jerusalem order was no less distinct and intended; so that Popery and all tradition-mongers are not more baseless in tracing up the succession to Peter than the Catholic Apostolics are in seeking and claiming another Twelve. Paul was not one of the Twelve; and it is from him that those called out from the Gentiles ought to derive, if derivative succession were true; as he (not Peter and his fellows) gives the special type of that development which is bound up with the revelation of the body of Christ, which is the true principle with which we have to do ever since, To point to the Twelve, and pretend to reproduce another batch in any measure, is unintelligent and retrograde; it is to abandon the fuller, special, and standing instruction given us through the great apostle of the nations.

Again, according to scripture (Eph. 2: 20) we are "built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the chief corner stone." Of this (unless the foundation were ill laid, which will not be said by believers) account must rightly be taken in applying the further word of Eph. 4: 11-16. "And He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers," etc. On the one hand, the Holy Spirit abstains from language implying such a stay for the church on earth as would defer the constant hope of Christ's coming; but on the other adequate provision is assured, whether by the gospel to call souls in, or by guidance and teaching to feed and guard those called. The continuance or restoration of apostles and prophets is therefore in no way implied or admissible, unless we are deceived by him who could wrest "It is written" from its context and learn not from Him Who safeguards us by "It is written again."

As the Catholic Apostolics have not a word in the N.T. even to suggest, still less to warrant, this their favourite but most unfounded and presumptuous hobby (rather have we seen, from comparing Eph. 2 and 4, its exclusion) they are driven here, as almost everywhere, to the wildest falling back on the O.T. to eke out what fails utterly. How absurd for the details of a strictly N.T. institution! Hence their recourse to Isa. 1: 26, "I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning."* What deplorable ignorance and unspiritual perversion of God's word! Every word of the chapter concerns the Jew only, their moral judgment, and the execution of divine wrath on the impenitent, but their glorious restoration when they repent and Jehovah avenges Himself of His enemies. It is the same Jerusalem (morally Sodom and Gomorrah) that gave up fidelity to become a harlot, which afterward, when the Lord Jesus appears and we with Him in glory, shall be called Town of Righteousness, Faithful City. But this is not at all under the gospel or the church, but when Zion shall be redeemed with judgment and her penitents with righteousness. It is not at all "this evil age," but the age to come.

* Anyone who wishes to see a peculiarly audacious begging of this question may find it in pp, 154-6 of "Abstract principles of Revealed Religion" (Murray, 1845) by Mr. Drummond, who held together the functions of prophet, angel, and apostle, and therefore speaks with no small authority among his co-religionists. No wonder such a start is followed (p. 157) by the discovery in Isa. 40 of apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors! It were surely ludicrous if not sad and profane.

It is evidently the most extreme form of that misapplication, especially of the promises to Zion, Jerusalem, Israel, etc., which since the so-called fathers has been the bane of Christendom, and, even before that, of the Judaising against which the apostle strove mightily in his testimony. Mr. Irving indeed had light on at least the essential difference between Israel and the church; but Messrs. Taplin and Cardale and Drummond "in the power" seem to have most contributed to lead away the society into more fatal depths of this ruinous amalgam than was found then in any sect, though others have followed since still more heterodox. And one of the most mischievous results was the assumption that the promise to Zion of restoring its judges and counsellors in pristine purity, which awaits its fulfilment "in the regeneration," is the adequate scriptural ground for expecting a fresh dozen of Gentile! apostles to put in order what is confessedly Babylon, and prepare the bride to meet the Bridegroom.

Now the N.T. continually sets before us the anticipation of coming ruin in Christendom, as surely as it had been in Israel (Luke 17: 26-37; 2 Thess. 2: 3-12; 1 Tim. 4: 1-3; 2 Tim. 3: 1-13; 2 Tim. 4: 3, 4; 2 Peter 2, 3; 1 John 2: 18-26; 1 John 4: 1-6; Jude; to say nothing of the solemnities in the book of Revelation). There is no restoration for corrupt Babylon or Gentilism that bore the Lord's name faithlessly; there will be for poor guilty Israel, beloved for the fathers' sake. This is taught authoritatively in Rom. 11. "Toward thee [the professing Gentile] goodness, if thou continue in goodness. otherwise thou also [no less than the Jew in the past] shalt be cut off;" and not one word intimates restoration, as pledged positively in divine mercy to Israel (ver. 25-32). For the far more favoured Gentile the ruin is irreparable, whatever grace may work meanwhile for individuals and a remnant.

Granted that on the death of the apostles the evils kept in cheek by their holy vigilance came in like a flood ever-growing. So Paul warned; so Peter, Jude, and John, as we have seen. "I know that after my departure grievous wolves shall enter in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverted things to draw away the disciples after them" (Acts 20: 29, 30). Here surely was the fitting place to have directed attention to any provision of God, if such there were either in the shape of apostolic succession or of a restored apostolate, to meet the imminent ruin. But neither here nor anywhere does the apostle drop one word; nor does any other of the apostles in speaking of the deepening gloom hold out the smallest hint of any such expedients. The word of God's grace, scripture, is the resource and safeguard in the difficult times before them; as they already knew an ever-abiding Paraclete, the witness and energy for enjoying the presence and power of the Lord Jesus. A revived apostolate is a far more daring invention than apostolic succession in Episcopacy. They are alike unscriptural vanities. It is remarkable that even the brothers Macdonald of Port Glasgow, who seem to have been pious men, did not accept the apostolic claims set up in England but mourned "for their very great blindness," and "dared not receive them as apostles." So we are told in their "Lives," pp. 212 and 215. They charged the Catholic Apostolics, even in early days, with "giving the Lordship to the Spirit, and not to Christ" (p. 220).

Of the Irvingite prophets there is no need to say much, though (if one wished to criticise) scarce a subject could be found more inviting or provocative. But this is fur from my aim. Immortal souls, yea, children of God are concerned, not to speak of what is due to Christ and the truth. In the early history of the movement a good deal has already come before the reader in the personal experience and excellent testimony of Mr. R. Baxter; and the darkest page of all is yet to be written in tracing the relation of prophecy to that fatal departure from the faith of Christ's person which has exercised so malignant an influence on Christendom, as well as of course still more nearly on the Catholic Apostolic body.

Mrs. Cardale (wife of Mr. J. B. C.) is said to have been the first to open her mouth in what they called a tongue and in prophesying. But as usual the utterance was only remarkable for its strange mannerism. "The Lord will speak to His people. The Lord hasteneth His coming. The, Lord cometh." This was on the last day of April, 1831.

Mr. Taplin followed, as has been stated already, some time afterwards in public; nor was anyone more remarkable for crash of sound, whether in a tongue or in English. But "Jehovah, hear us!" gives no sign of the Holy Spirit in a Christian; nor can one accept as of God his next utterance, "It is thou, O Britain: thou art the anointed cherub." What sort of interpretation or even application is that? Again, is it to be believed that the Holy Ghost led to say on the following day, "The Lord hath come down"? "He is in the midst of you. His eye hath seen," etc. — What now is any possibly true sense of "The Lord hath come down"? Never does scripture warrant such language among Christians.

We may say little of Miss Hall, who, though she took full part and was recognised by all, at length owned she was not genuine and eventually left the body. But amidst those scenes Mr. Taplin towered over all, with little or nothing in it save what was Jewish and not christian. For the utterances were beyond mistake denunciatory. Grace and truth there was none, as the rule. Miss E. Cardale came into great prominence and the highest account with Mr. Irving and others. All the gifted recognised Mr. Baxter as having the same spirit as themselves, but refused his solemn warning that it was a lying spirit of evil.

But why crowd these pages with the crude and vehement inanities thundered or shrieked out even in Mr. Irving's presence, and taken up by him to clothe with his impassioned thought and feeling in beautiful forms of speech? Even Mr. Drummond, vigorous as a man, was utterly vapid as a prophet, save in an utterance out of all ordinary human experience. Now what has such unearthly loudness to do with true. prophesying? It did characterise the raving prophets or prophetesses of the heathen. Prophecy in scripture revealed new truth from God, or laid bare the secrets of man's heart. It would be strange if any sober unbiassed christian could so testify of these uncouth ejaculatory cries of Irvingite men and women.

Miss E. C. did indeed rebuke Mr. Taplin in the power, and brought him on another occasion to confess evil against the Lord. After Mr. Irving's death, when Mr. Ryerson in Newman Street was thought to be preaching at the same Mr. T. for gift without grace, Miss C. in an "appalling" way, says Mr. Baxter (Irvingism, 41-44), followed this up in power with "he never had it; he never knew it;" Yet Mr. T. remained as he was the chief among the prophets till the end. — The same Mr. T. prophesied of one from America that he was to be a prophet to gather men there into God's church. But the man was soon proved an impostor. — Equally false was the prophecy about an American Indian, who, spite of grand predictions, returned unconverted. — The intimation of a great work to be wrought in Scotland by Mr. Irving himself was notoriously falsified by his death. The baptism of fire too never had the semblance of a fulfilment in any, though promised to all. — Was not the second Napoleon said "in the power" to be the coming Antichrist?

But enough. It is painful to be compelled to speak of the details of such wholesale error. He who desires to know the truth of things has already sufficient evidence.

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §. 4. THE INCARNATION.

The subject which now calls for consideration is most solemn, and demands the clearest evidence, not only because one is bound to beware of exaggeration, but because the society concerned are here extremely unwilling to face the facts which condemn them. They refer to the opening words of Mr. Irving's preface to the Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of our Lord's Human Nature (London, 1830). "It is necessary to inform the reader, ...... that whenever I attribute sinful properties and dispositions and inclinations to our Lord's human nature, I am speaking of it considered as apart from Him, in itself; I am defining the qualities of that nature which He took upon Him, and demonstrating it to be the very same substance with that which we possess. To understand the work which He did, you must understand the materials with which He did it. The work which He did was, to reconcile, sanctify, quicken, and glorify this nature of ours," etc.

Now no one subject to God's word could agree to this, but must reject it as wholly unscriptural. For we read of "reconciling the world," "you ... hath He reconciled," "we were reconciled," "reconcile both unto God." We read also of "reconciling all things," looking onward to the day of glory; but never, nowhere, and in no sense of reconciling human nature. Mr. I.'s idea* is unknown to scripture, and the source of manifold error. If sinful flesh were in Christ, clearly it had to be reconciled to God; and this accordingly Mr. I. teaches habitually and resolutely.

*Listen again to his rash words. "It is no reconciliation of individuals [exactly what it is now only], but a reconciliation of human nature. It is not thine, it is not mine, it is not Christ's, but it is the common unity of our being": a statement preposterously false

Clearly therefore it is not humanity apart from Christ that is in question, as to which no sober christian could hesitate. The horror inspired by this able but misguided man, and not least in the treatise to which we are referred, and by his sermons on Incarnation and in short all his writings on the subject to the last, was through his doctrine on the human nature in Christ's person here below.

Some extracts, spread over the work, will prove it distinctly to a believer or even an upright man.

"If then Christ was made under the law, He must have been made by His human nature liable to, yea, and inclined to, all those things which the law interdicted" (p. 10)! It is vain to attempt unsaying this by the plea that he speaks of His human nature in itself. No one charges Mr. I with meaning that Christ yielded to sin. It is not humanity in the abstract. He means, as he continually speaks of, His fallen or sinful humanity. Hence this fundamental error drove him from the truth of atonement to the falsehood of at-one-ment. For Irving like other heterodox men confounded it with reconciliation and poured contempt even to blasphemy on the cross and sufferings of Christ for our sins. This consequence of sinful humanity was inevitable; for how could a blemished creature be a sacrifice to God? and what could be more so than fallen manhood, even by Mr. I.'s own description as we shall see?

"And in the face of all these certainties, if a man will say that His flesh was not sinful flesh as ours is, with the same dispositions and propensities and wants and afflictions, then, I say, God hath sent that man strong delusion that he should believe a lie" (p. 23)! "Now if there had not been in Christ's mature appetites, ambition, and spiritual darkenings, how, I ask, could the devil have addressed these several temptations to His will?" (p. 24.) It is sorrowful to report such enormities, but truth must be vindicated.

"If His human nature differed, by however little, from ours, in its alienation and guiltiness, then the work of reducing it into eternal harmony with God hath no bearing whatever upon our nature, with which it is not the same" (p. 88). Here again it is the evident consequence of a false start — that atonement means a fallen nature brought into reconciliation with God, by overcoming all its inherent propensities: a different gospel, which is not another, and what is worse, not the Christ of God, but an antichrist.

"Was He conscious, then, to the motions of the flesh, and of the fleshly mind? In so far as any regenerate man, when under the operation of the Holy Ghost, is conscious of them (!). Yea, verily, He knew the evil law of that nature Be was clothed with (!); He knew every point and passage of it (!), and at every point and passage of it He met it with the Spirit, and drave it back and put bonds upon it, and let it forth again tamed and reclaimed(!); a servant, of itself an unwilling servant, and still in all things a servant of God. I hold it to be the surrender of the whole question to say that He was not conscious of, engaged with, and troubled by, every evil disposition which inhereth in the fallen manhood (1), which overpowereth every man that is not born of God; which overpowered not Christ, only because He was born or generated of God; the Son of God that day begotten in flesh when He was conceived of the Virgin" (p. 111). This is bold speaking. Three words of God put it all to shame. He "knew no sin."

There is if possible worse and more blasphemous still. "This is the human nature which every man is clothed upon withal, which the Son of man was clothed upon withal, bristling thick and strong with sin like the hairs of the porcupine I stand forth and say that the teeming fountain of the heart's vileness was opened on Him; and the Augean stable, of human wickedness was given Him to cleanse, and the furious wild beasts of human passions were appointed Him to tame. I believe it to be most orthodox, and of the substance and essence of the orthodox faith, to hold that Christ could say until His resurrection, Not, I, but sin that tempteth Me in My flesh(!); just as after the resurrection He could say, 'I am separate from sinners'" (pp. 126, 127).

It is unnecessary, after such copious and varied extracts from the later treatise to do more than refer briefly to Mr. Irving's earlier sermons in 1828, the first vol. of the three being devoted to the Incarnation. But there too, though not yet so developed, is the same plague-spot. "I shall proceed to open, in the second part of this sermon, how God by uniting. the person of His Son to fallen flesh doth thereby reconcile the whole lump of fallen humanity into Himself," etc., (140) i. "That the Son of God ... should join Himself unto fallen creation, and take up into His own eternal personality the human nature, after it had fallen, and become obnoxious to all the powers of sin and infirmity and rebellion...... That Christ took our fallen nature is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take ... I believe therefore ... that Christ took unto Himself a true body and a reasonable soul, and that the flesh of Christ, like my flesh was in its proper nature mortal and corruptible," etc., ii. (160) iii. At the same time his testimony to Christ's vicarious sufferings was far simpler and clearer than afterwards, though even here atonement was confounded with reconciliation, and both with Incarnation, which last is misunderstood and perverted, being made a question of human reasoning instead of faith in the word of God. "The human nature is thoroughly fallen; and without a thorough communication, inhabitation, and empowering of a divine substance, it cannot again be brought up pure and holy. The mere apprehension of it by the Son does not make it holy" (140) xiii.

Every simple and sound believer will own that this denies the Incarnation of scripture, yea of the creed of christendom, inferior as this is and must be to God's word. For there it is owing to the action of the Holy Ghost, and to the power of the Highest, that, the Holy thing was to be born of the Virgin and as such called the Son of God. The anointing of the Spirit of God afterward was for power in service. He was the Holy One even in His humanity from first to last: there could be no question of the divine nature. Had there been sin (no one says sins) in His humanity, Immanuel as to flesh would have been no longer holy. Thus the evil doctrine divides as well as defiles the person necessarily; and the flesh of the Lord Jesus was represented, not as so, united as to form one person, but as a fallen thing, surrounding Him like a garment or a pit (Mr, I's own illustrations), from which flesh His life was one series of conflicts to liberate itself victoriously, as an example to us who are really what is here falsely said of Christ. It will be seen too that, as Christ's person is overthrown by unbelief in the true Incarnation, so atonement according to God is denied; and Mr. I. goes so far as to say that "atonement and redemption have no reference to God (!); they are the names for the bearing of Christ's work on the sinner!! and have no respect to its bearing upon the Godhead "!!! This would satisfy an Arian or even a Unitarian. There are statements quite inconsistent with this fundamental falsehood. But there it is; — and no lie is of the truth.

In the preliminary discourse to Ben-Ezra (the copy now before me being a gift to an elder of the Caledonian church "with the tender affections of Edward Irving") Mr. I. spoke after a far more orthodox sort. "Between Him and His people there is no difference in respect to that which is observable; while there is the utmost difference in respect to the principle and cause. in the Son of man the cause was the imputation of the sins of the people, in our case it is indwelling sin, and the sin which is around us" (p. 114). So (in p. 126) he says "the Word of God took flesh of the Virgin Mary, passive humanity He took, obnoxious to every temptation, and begirt with every sinless infirmity." One need not insinuate a fault; but the statement would have been correct, had he predicated sinlessness of every temptation as well as of everything else. This at any rate is done with emphasis and jealousy in Heb. 4: 15, Christ apart from sin, c. aJm.: in Him, not only by Him, was none. But Mr. I. probably so believed at that time (1826) without a jibe at "imputation," or contempt for" stock-jobbing theology": this followed his heterodoxy. As yet Christ's person and work were unassailed.

No unsophisticated child of God could read such statements without both rejecting and resenting them as an insult to Christ and the truth. The Incarnation is subverted, the person of Christ belied. What room is left, by this unholy and destructive system for the wondrous message, "That holy thing which shall be born [of thee] shall be called the Son of God"? What has the new birth in our case to do with the wholly exceptional action of the Godhead in the birth of Christ? Beyond doubt the believer is quickened by faith; he has life in the Son. What has this in common with the Son's taking humanity into union with His Deity, That Holy Thing by the power of the Holy Spirit to be born of Mary? When a man is born of God, is his human nature born again? The Irvingite fabric is shattered by the merest touch of scripture. The language about Christ's birth is wholly inapplicable to any other. How could it be otherwise if He is the Saviour and we the saved, He a divine person, however truly deigning to become man and by redemption bring glory to God even where sin was and abounded, impossible in any other way?

In keeping with this defamation of Christ, it is not Irvingites only who misapprehend temptation as spoken of the Christ of God. Mr. I. repeatedly in this treatise misquotes Heb. 4: 15 by leaving out the last words, which are essential to the truth. He and all who judge of Christ from themselves, from human nature as it is in us, did not understand its bearing. Christ has been tempted in all things in like manner with us, sin excepted. The sense is not merely that He never sinned when tempted, but that He had been thus similarly tempted in all points "apart from sin," and not merely without sinning. In Him was no sin; in us there is. This characteristic and peculiar difference is here pointed out as an exception of the utmost magnitude qualifying His temptations in contrast with ours. In Him even what was born of His mother was holy, whilst we, the regenerate, no less than others, were shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin. He therefore did not know sin, and never had a lust or passion from fallen humanity. His temptations were exclusively those of a holy being, and full of suffering to Him, because He felt always according to God when the enemy thus tried but found nothing in Him — alas! how much in us, even in the regenerate. Flesh yields to evil temptation and is gratified, instead of suffering.

They talk indeed as if it was necessary to sympathy with us, that Christ should know our unholy temptations, as in Jam. i. 11, 15. But this is most superficial as well as false. He sympathises with us so much the more, because we have an inward traitor which He had not, while He suffering perfectly in keeping out the enemy is undistractedly and perfectly free to feel for us in every trial. In fact, if their principle were at all sound, it ought to go farther; for it would involve His failing under temptation, in order to comfort adequately those bitterly conscious of their failures. But the principle is false and evil. The believer abhors the notion of Christ's sympathy with his evil thoughts, feelings or ways. He hates thorn all and judges himself for them, and finds the true. answer to sin in Christ a sacrifice for it. He socks and obtains Christ's sympathy with the new man in loathing every evil within, and comes not in vain and even with boldness to the throne of grace, to receive mercy and find grace for seasonable help. What he needs for his sins, I repeat, is that propitiation and substitution of Christ which Mr. I's heterodoxy taught him to despise.* Christ died for our sins. This was what was required by God for us — not sympathy, but infinite suffering in atonement; and by that one offering they are effaced, and we are purged for God's presence, condemnation having already been executed on their root, sin in the flesh, when He became a sacrifice for sin (Rom. 8: 2, 3).

* "The man who will put a fiction, whether legal or theological, a make-believe into his idea of God, I have done with; He who will make God consider a person to be that which he is not, I have done with. Either Christ was not in the condition of a sinner, was not in that form of being towards which it is God's eternal law to act as He acted towards Christ, or He was not [? not]. If He was, then the point is ceded, for that is what I am contending for. If He was not, and God treated Him as if He had been so: if that is the meaning of their imputation and substitution, or by whatever name they call it, away with it from my theology for ever; for it makes my God a God of fictions," etc., etc., (pp. 116, 117).

To this end God sent His Son, not in "flesh of sin" as this horrible doctrine presumes, but "in the likeness" of it, being born of woman, and thus more fully man than Adam unfallen, but by the power of the Highest born "holy," as no man ever was. Born in sin would have unfitted Him for communion as well as for sacrifice. Likeness of flesh would have been unavailing and useless; but "in the likeness of flesh of sin" was just what was wanted for the divine glory, as well as for our salvation. And thus in the cross was God glorified even as to sin, as Christ had glorified the Father as the obedient man, most holy alike in life and death, holy from first to last in all His being, as in all He did and suffered, He only.

It will be argued, however, that in all this dark antagonism to the truth of Christ's person and atonement it is a question of Mr. Irving, rather than of the Catholic Apostolic body. But these are facts: that Mr. I. was incomparably the most influential teacher they ever had; that no tenet is more characteristic of their one joint organ (the Morning Watch) throughout its seven volumes and by many if not all its contributors; and nowhere more acrimoniously than in the last vol. Thus it is in vain to represent their first angel as an exception instead of being the most prominent and active leader in doctrine. Indeed it is to his credit that none can impute underhandedness or bringing in things privily, the almost unfailing reproach of false prophets. He at least was outspoken; which did not please more prudent men well aware of the umbrage given far and wide to christians by language on this subject so vehement, unmeasured, and profane. Incarnation was not at all that action which works in the regenerate, as he alleged,* but peculiar to Christ; while no one doubts the power of the Spirit in which He invariably walked.

*"It is an heretical doctrine that Christ's generation was anything more than the implantation of that Holy Ghost life in the members of His human nature, which is implanted in us by regeneration" (Human Nature, p. 140). Heterodoxy does not lack boldness when thus destroying the true and special character of the Incarnation which belongs to Christ alone. Our humanity was unholy by birth, His alone was holy. Regeneration is quite another truth, and does not touch the question.

Another plea, by no means candid, is that Irving preached the sinful humanity of Christ before the ordinances, as they call the setting up of apostles, etc. They all know he preached it no less when he was ordained angel by the pillar of the apostles.

But the truth is, as another has acutely observed, that his preaching that Christ took flesh of sin has so much the greater weight because it preceded the gifts and authorities. For, as they alleged, "the power" sealed its truth. No fact is more certain. Mr. Trying himself wrote on April 21st, 1832, to Mr. Baxter, who had testified his unsoundness on the Lord's humanity, on imputing righteousness, and on holiness in the flesh (for the same error asserted sin. in Christ's flesh and the possibility of its absence from ours). In that letter Mr. I. adhered to the evil, and distinctly reported that the spirit in Miss. E. C. laid down that Mr. B. "had been snared by departing from the word and the testimony," and that I. had maintained the truth, and the Lord was well pleased with him for it; that in some words he had erred, and that the word by the spirit in B. was therefore true; that if I. waited on the Lord, He would show this by His Spirit, but that He had forgiven it, because He knew his heart was right before Him; that I. had maintained the truth and must not draw back from maintaining it. They then joined in prayer, among the rest for Mr. Baxter's deliverance from the snare concerning the flesh of Christ and the holiness of the believer. Mrs. I. advised leaving it to the Lord, but Mrs. C. gave an utterance in power that Mr. B. had stumbled greatly, dwelling most on the doctrine of perfect holiness. A third utterance from Miss E. C. taught, Mr. Irving that Satan sought to overthrow his confidence in the truth, and to bring him into a snare, but that he was called upon to maintain it more firmly than ever.

In the same letter Mr. I warns Mr. B. that now he is "brought to oppose that very doctrine which alone can bring the chosen to be meet, for her Bridegroom: — that as He was holy in the flesh, so are we, through the grace of regeneration, brought to be holy — planted in a holy standing — the flesh dead to sin, as His flesh, was dead to sin — and that by the baptism of the Holy Ghost we are brought into the fellowship of His power and fulness, to do the works which He also did, and greater works than these." Mr. I. read his report to his wife, as well as to the two prophetesses,. who said it was a full and exact account. He also reiterated that not the motions of the flesh but the law of the flesh was all present in Christ, only in Him by a holy life put down; and that thus ought we to be and shall be, when the flesh becometh the sackcloth covering. (Mrs. C. had prophesied that the baptism by fire would burn out the carnal mind.) Narrative, pp. 103-108.

Who can wonder that on this rose a doubt in Mr. B.'s mind whether the whole work were not of Satan (Narrative, pp. 116, 117). And it is perfectly clear that it was not only the heterodoxy of Mr. Irving before the alleged restoration of the Comforter, but the spirit, which built up the entire Catholic-Apostolic structure, stands fully committed to Mr. I.'s doctrine in substance, save some unguarded expressions. Just so Mr. I. stated previously that "The way for the coming of the Comforter had to be pre. pared by the preaching of the full coming of Christ in our flesh and His coming again in glory, the two great divisions of christian doctrine which had gone, down in the earth, out of sight and out of mind, and which must be revived by preaching, before the Holy Spirit could have anything to witness unto."

We have now amply seen by his own words what Mr. I. meant by the coming of Christ in "our" flesh; add the spirit which the Catholic Apostolics acknowledged as the voice of God sealed that lie against the Lord, contrary to the faith of God's elect in every age, land and tongue, contrary to every creed of Greek, Oriental or Roman, as well as the articles of faith of all Protestants. But one rests, as all ought, on the unfailing standard of God's word, and cannot but pronounce it an antichrist. On this evil foundation rests the Irvingite body, as surely as the witnesses produced are irrefragable. Nor can they purger themselves from their original error, any more than Papists, who adhere to their dogma of infallibility. So no less but rather more are the Catholic Apostolic adherents bound by most unhappy lot to the sanction of that spirit they own as divine. To judge it a lying spirit means their dissolution; and hence every effort to hide, evade, and explain away, so characteristic of the party.

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §. 5. THE ATONEMENT, etc.

Necessarily, as the person of Christ is the truth, if His person is defamed, the very core is corrupted. And such we have seen to be the fact with Irvingism. They are unsound, not on this or that side merely, but in the heart and centre of all revealed truth. The spirit which built up their system throughout, which they accepted as the voice of God, affirmed the doctrine of Christ's fallen humanity. It is therefore an impossibility for the society to purge itself from this root of error as for Popery, when once committed; because it would be to own that their boast of infallible guidance is false and a delusion of the enemy. They are bound, wrapt up, and blinded by this spurious self-security, to persevere in every evil thought into which the spirit of error can drag them.

And so in fact it is found. For, whilst they have a vast deal of truth with which they are occupied beyond the various denominations of Christendom, they are steeped in error beyond ordinary example. What they hold of truth is, so far as I have observed, invariably tainted, so as to exceed in malignity the traditional creeds even of those most mistaken. Again, their pretension to what not even Popery or the Greek system, still less any Protestant body claims, exposes them both to the setting up of lifeless forms and to the snare of a reality of power from beneath which distinguishes them most painfully.

The proof of what is here stated will be apparent from a few citations out of the "Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of our Lord's Human Nature."

"Now that Christ is a sinless person we all admit, and how then could He reach death? He could not reach it by coming in a sinless and unfallen nature, such as Adam's: for such a nature, not having sinned, could not die, without making death void as the great sign of God's holiness. To reach death there is no other way but by coming in the nature of a sinful creature; in that nature which, having sinned, did underlie the curse of death. If with His holy person He inform this nature, He may die; nay He must die: for when human nature was sentenced in the person of Adam to death, it was all sentenced, every particle of it whatever; and the death of it is the grand demonstration of God's holy hatred and final judgment against sin. And therefore, agreeing that the death of the clean and innocent Lamb of God is the means unto our redemption or atonement, I say it could not be otherwise reached but through His taking humanity, fallen, sinful, and under sentence of death" (p. 91). Any believer ought to see through this poor human reasoning, which disproves itself because it destroys the grace of Christ's death. For if He must die, His death was only at most a little before its time. But to pursue from page 95. "How, it may be said, is this an atonement for me? It seems to be no more than a bearing of the infirmities of His own human nature; it seems to be no more than a righteousness wrought in His own human nature for it. I answer, There is but one human nature: it is not mine, it is not thine, it is not His; it is the common unity of our being. Bare He the infirmities of human nature? He bare the sins of all men. Bare He the infirmities of human nature? He bare the infirmities of all men. Overcame He the enemies of human nature, sin, death, and the devil? He overcame the enemies of all men. Took He them captive? They are at large no more; they are impotent, they are as nothing, and ought so to be preached of. He hath abolished death; He hath taken away sin; 'He hath judged the prince of this world.' Whether this be new doctrine or not, I appeal to the Epistles of Paul; whether it be new in the reformed church, I appeal to the writings of Martin Luther.

"I know how far wide of the mark these views of Christ's act in the flesh will he viewed by those who are working with the stockjobbing theology of the religious world, — that God wanted punishment, and an infinite amount of it; which Christ gave for so many; and so He is satisfied, and they escape from His anger, which flames as hot as ever against all beyond this pale. And this you call preaching the free grace of God, the justice of God, the work of Christ, the doctrine of election, atonement, etc.! Yet one word as to suffering. The atonement, upon this popular scheme, is made to consist in suffering; and the amount of suffering is cried up to infinity. Now I utterly deny that anything suffered but the human nature of Christ; and that could only suffer according to the measure of a man: more, no doubt, than unholy men like us suffer, because He was perfectly holy, and so His soul felt the smart of every pang manifold of what we do; but still it was only according to the measure of a holy man. If more, whence came it? From the divine nature? But this is contrary to all sound doctrine that the Godhead should be capable of passions. Well, let these preachers — for I will not call them divines or theologians — broker-like, cry up their article, it will not do: it is but the sufferings of a perfectly holy man, treated by God and by men as if He were a transgressor." Here every moderately taught christian will feel into what ignorance and contempt of the truth Irving was plunged by his idol dogma, to say nothing of the grossest dividing of Christ's person.

But take another specimen from p. 98, which ought to alarm some too sure of their own soundness: "A very poor wit have they, and a most barbarous idea of God, who will represent this sublime, stupendous action of Godhead as taking place to appease the wrath of Godhead, which verily takes place to manifest the love and grace and mercy of Godhead. Why, what mean they? It is God Who doth the thing. And why doth He it, but because it is godly so to do? Love and grace are in Him; of His essence, of His ancient eternal essence, which is unchangeable. If they are of Him and in Him now, they have been of Him and in Him for ever. And out of the fountain of His love cometh that stream, hiding its head in darkness for a while, that it may wash the very foundations of the base world, and appear in light and glory unpolluted, the life, the beauty, of this redeemed world. but what a system of theology is that which representeth God as in Himself implacable to the sinner, until His Son, by bearing the sinner's strokes, doth draw off the revenge of God? Then God is changed in His being with respect to a few; but with respect to the many His implacable nature worketh on in its natural course. Such a God cannot be the object of love; and upon such a system an object of love He never is. And all this they represent as needful for the glory of His holiness and justice." It is needless to say that this grievous misrepresentation of the truth springs simply from Irving's heterodoxy which made him caricature the divine judgment of sin and cleave to his own exaggeration and one-sidedness.

An extract from p. 99 may be well. "In whatever light these remarks may appear to others, to myself they have brought this solid conviction, That while the present views of atonement continue to be doted on by the church, it is in vain to attempt to carry any point, of sound doctrine." This witness is true, though in an opposite direction. So vital is the doctrine of atonement, that all else is sure to be shaken where it is false, and established where it is true. As the person of Christ is bound up with it, so all the communion, walk, and worship depend on it. In what follows the reader will observe that the same fundamental error reappears as in our day. "Atonement and redemption are the names for the bearing of Christ's work upon the sinner,! and have no respect to its bearing upon the Godhead!, nor upon Christ, the God-man!!; and on that account, instead of occupying the first and highest place in theology, they should occupy the third only, being preceded by the glory of God, and the glory of Christ."

One more from p. 116 must suffice. "The man who will put a fiction [this is the way imputation of sin is treated], whether legal or theological, a make-believe into his idea of God, I have done with; he who will make God consider a person to be that which he is not, I have done with." Compare what the apostle lays down in Rom. 8: 3; 2 Cor. 5: 21; Gal. 3: 13. It is evident not only that atonement and reconciliation are confounded, but that atonement is nullified, and that reconciliation is wholly misunderstood and depraved.

The bearing of their fundamental heterodoxy as to Christ's person on His atoning work is absolutely destructive of its truth. Propitiation is lost as well as substitution, the two essential sides of the truth adumbrated by the great Day of Atonement in Israel. It is in vain to say that Mr. Irving or others did not mean this. The question is, what the enemy meant who beguiled them. They were carried utterly away by a vain dream which shut them out from the healthful working of the word of God, and committed to a torrent of error which can readily find appearances to sanction every wild imagination, and ingeniously bound over the firmest obstacle. The Holy Spirit gives subjection to scripture by keeping the soul in self-distrust looking only to Christ and His glory. But here the essential difference of Christ is ignored. His being personally in the Father, and the Father in Him, they confound with what we may enjoy in the Spirit by faith. So that in general we may say that their system debases the Second man as it exalts the first, and is thus at perpetual and incurable issue with God's mind. In fact, it is the old quarrel of Satan with God.

In the last paper we saw that their doctrinal basis is the Son's assumption of fallen or sinful humanity, and His work victory over it in the Spirit, thereby rendering it holy and acceptable to God. They may say other things which sound fair and good; but this which the spirit among them expressly sanctioned as the truth overthrows both the person and the work of Christ. No doubt some of them learnt to speak more guardedly and condemned more or less the out spoken language of Mr. Irving but the doctrine characterised them as distinctly as the claim of the restored apostolate, prophets, and other gifts in their ecclesiastical polity, not withstanding their desperate efforts after secrecy save with the initiated. Hence the infinite sufferings of the cross are ignored or even decried; hence the railing and ridicule heaped on the substitution of Christ, on the imputation of righteousness to the believer, in short on all that the christian elect of God have found most solemn and precious in and through the Saviour's death. Even if His death or blood be referred to, it is to put all the race upon one level of redemption and forgiveness: as to this the special blessings of the faithful are nowhere.

How could it be otherwise if the Son of God took fallen sinful humanity into union with Himself? Its reconciliation must then supplant propitiation, and reconciliation itself be confounded with atonement; as is verbally done indeed by unhappy errors of the A.V. in both the Old Testament and the New. Another fatal result is that reconciliation is thus rendered altogether vague and impersonal, the reconciliation of humanity, instead of its being the enjoyed and exclusive portion of those who actually believe. Finally, holiness is as much lost by this misbelieving Reheme as righteousness; for it takes as into the falsehood of improving and perfecting by the power of the Holy Spirit that old man which, according to scripture, is irreparably evil, the mind of which is enmity against God and is not subject to His law, neither indeed can be. Now whatever the moral perfection of our Lord in the days of His flesh, it is in resurrection only that He becomes Head of the new creation. Till He died atoningly, He abode alone. Only after sin was judged in the cross is He "the beginning," and bears much fruit. His living relationship is with the sanctified, not with the race.

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §. 6. JUSTIFICATION, SANCTIFICATION, etc.

No spiritual mind that sees the antichristian character of the Irvingite community, as tested by the person and the work of Christ, can look for truth in its application. For the centre of all is false and evil; yet it may not be amiss to prove their wanderings from the word of God here also. And the work of Mr. Sitwell, the apostle of Spain and Portugal (or in their strange dialect, of the tribe of Naphtali), "Creation and Redemption," the third edition of which lies before me, furnishes the means of ascertaining their views authoritatively.

The treatment of justification is characteristic of the body, for he professes to combine the disjointed fragments of doctrine, and to put each in its place, as well as to repudiate the falsehoods that have been added to it. Thus he hopes to show how needlessly the high churchman is divided from the low, justification being not only imputed at first but imparted at last. Here is this "end of controversy." "There are, seven ways mentioned in scripture, or which can be fairly deduced from it, whereby a man is justified. These are — 1, Faith. 2, Blood of Jesus Christ. 3, Righteousness of Christ. 4, Word of Christ, by means of the ministers of the church. 5, Sacraments of the church. 6, Works. 7, Resurrection. In each of these seven the double sense and power of justification, viz., imputation and impartation, will be found in operation" (p. 231).

To any intelligent christian this suffices. It is pretentious and deplorable confusion, the effect of which is to darken the truth and perplex every one heeding it. "What saith the scripture?" There is but one way or principle in which a soul is justified. It is by faith (ejk p. Rom. 5: 1), as the apostle had expressly laid down before, apart from works of law, the only other way conceivable — the very way whereby he had said no flesh shall be justified in God's sight, Rom. 3: 20, 28. The blood of Jesus is not another way, but the efficacious ground (Rom. 3: 25; Rom. 5: 9), for it cleanses from every sin; and His resurrection is the proof and living witness of its, acceptance (Rom. 4: 24, 25). Undoubtedly it is God reckoning faith for righteousness, as in Abram's case (Rom. 4), for the soul believing on God that justifies the ungodly (ver. 5), as David also testifies. If we ask the source therefore, it is grace — God's, grace (Titus 3: 7), and no desert of man whatever. The gospel meets him as a lost sinner: therein is. God's righteousness revealed, for all is over with man's. But so glorified is God with Christ's work on the cross that He can be and is just and the justifier of him that has faith in Jesus. To say, "Yet the justifier," etc., shows God's righteousness to be unknown.

Nor is this all. The salvation of the gospel embraces God's dealing in the cross with sin, as well as our sins, the root no less than the fruit. What he is troubles the renewed soul as much or more than past evil deeds. Has this been overlooked of God? In no wise. As Adam is the fallen head, Jesus is the living one; for without dying He had abode alone. It is not only that Christ died for us: we who believe are entitled to say that we died with Him. This if we were dumb is the expression of our baptism. We were baptised unto His death; that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life. Accordingly this we know, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer be slaves to sin. For he that died (the christian) has been and is justified from sin. It is our abiding status since redemption. Nevertheless, as Galatians enables each to say, "I live; yet not I but Christ liveth in me" — Christ risen our life. Ours is, as Rom. 5 calls it, a "justification of life." Baptism however is the sign of our death with Christ, the sole efficacy being His work, on which faith rests before God; and as 1 Cor. 10 warns, all is ruin where there is not life. But life is only by the faith of Christ, and therefore through the word and Spirit (John 3: 3, 5, 6; James 1: 18; 1 Peter 1: 23-25; 1 John 5: 1, 4, 5). Indeed this is necessarily implied in faith which cannot be without God's revealed word (Rom. 10: 17), of which Christ is the object and centre, and now for the christian His accomplished work also.

What then does James 2 mean? Not at all the justifying of a sinner before God, but that of a true professor as distinguished from a false one before men. Hence says he, "Show me thy faith apart from works, and I by my works will show thee my faith." And this is strikingly confirmed by the samples alleged; for faith alone gave true character to Abram's offering up of Isaac or Rahab's receiving the spies: without it, what had either work been? Murder, or treason, as is clear,

And this entirely falls in with the Epistle of James, which does not, like most of Paul's, bring out the wonders of Christ's blood, death, and resurrection, and ascension. His object is to insist on practical reality in those who professed the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, Lord of glory. Hence he speaks in his first chapter not only of faith and enduring temptation, but of that intrinsic life which grace gives to those otherwise dead. "Of His own will He begat us by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first-fruits of His creatures." A christian walk is the effect, and ought to be the expression, of the life we have in Christ. It is, as the apostle says, faith working by love, the only faith of value in the sight of God. It would seem that there was excessive danger for Israel (a danger now so long prevalent in Christendom) of a merely sentimental or intellectual faith, not insincere but without a real work of the Spirit of God's word in the conscience, a faith resting on evidence or tradition, to which our Lord did not trust Himself (John 2). Man "must be born again." This only produces reality. "He that believeth hath everlasting life." This therefore is what James throughout insists on, rather than Christ's blood, however indispensable this may be for cleansing us from all sin. but even the acknowledgement of Christ's blood might be without living faith, as we see in Heb. 10. Those were not wanting even in early days, who after being thus set apart had given it up and sinned wilfully, counting the blood of the covenant an unholy thing. Good reason there was then for insisting on a new nature in Christ as the basis of practical holiness.

No believer doubts what the portion of the saints will be when changed at Christ's coming. But it will only be the displayed perfection of what grace has now given us, and given us to know by the Spirit. We shall be found in Christ, not having a righteousness of our own, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith. Yet are we not waiting for righteousness then; but, as the same apostle tells us, we through the Spirit by faith wait for the hope of righteousness (that is, heavenly glory). The righteousness we have already in Christ entitles us by God's word to look for nothing less, even as Christ is already entered in personally; and we shall be with Him and like Him.

Mr. S. confounds (p. 236) baptism with water, important as it is outwardly, with baptism in virtue of the Spirit, which scripture strongly distinguishes; he surpasses a Jew in his idolatry of the sacraments, but in this hardly worse than millions outside Irvingism. Only it is to be remarked here that the fatal virus peculiar to their company reappears in p. 251: "So our Lord, having come into flesh, always laid down His life as a sacrifice to God.... While our Lord died daily, and we are called to imitate Him in this," etc. Now this is not only misconception in every way, and false, but most evil. Death, death with Christ in His death, is the necessary way of life for us, sinful as we are, even though a new creation in Christ: to make it so for Christ is blasphemy. These statements betray she old heterodoxy as to our Lord's person. What else is the meaning of His always laying down His life and dying daily?

But the truth of revelation is that we died with Christ. So elsewhere we are called to "mortify our members," that is, to put them to death, but never to die, as the mystics think and teach, ignorant of what grace gives us in Christ dead and. risen. Our old man was* crucified with Him. Therefore are we to reckon ourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. But that Christ had anything to die to daily is the worst of slanders. Our comfort of faith is that we died with Him when He died. When the apostle speaks of dying daily, he refers to his constant exposure to literal death, and not at all to the christian doctrine which Mr. S. misunderstands, not only for us but, alas! for the Lord, the Holy One of God. They may strive to conceal this deadly wound to the truth and to His glory; but it cannot be hid. The levelling down of Christ and the levelling up of ourselves naturally go together, both wholly in opposition to God's word. The idolatry of ordinances accompanies both, evil enough in a Jew ignorant of the Messiah: how much more terrible is the unbelief, now that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ!

* Nor is it the continuous "was" of the imperfect, but the completed of the aorist.

Of sanctification personally, that first action of the Spirit which sets us apart to God in new birth, before peace and liberty, Mr. S. knows nothing. It is clearly laid down in 1 Peter 1: 2, as well as in 1 Cor. 6: 11, etc. He only speaks of it, and even so speaks feebly and imperfectly, as one seeing no more than is seen in Christendom generally. He had not learnt that the Holy Spirit invariably works by keeping the eye on Christ. See 2 Cor. 3 and the N.T. as a whole. We are Christ's epistle in the world, and can. only reflect Him aright by walking in the Spirit, as we live in the Spirit, Who is here to glorify Christ.

This is strikingly shown in John 17 "Sanctify them by (or, in) the truth; Thy word is truth. As Thou hast sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world; and for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by truth" (John 17: 17-19). There are thus in His mind two especial means of christian sanctification: the Father's word, the truth: and Christ set apart on high as the glorified man Who forms, as the personal model before our faith.

It is accordingly no question now of the law, grave as its function is when used lawfully; nor yet of prophecy unveiling the government of the world. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. The Father sent Him into the world that we might know His word — know it in Him that is true. And now sent into the world by Him Whose death has severed His own from the world, they behold Him in heaven, as the further power of fashioning them spiritually. Both are needed, and both are given. Christ was infinitely more than the obedient man under law; He was the manifestation of God in man. He that had seen Him had seen the Father. The only-begotten Son Who is in the bosom of the Father, alone did, alone could, reveal Him; He manifested the truth about every one and every thing, and this in grace — in a love superior to evil.

But while this was the essential and first want which only He, the Son of God yet a man in the world, could supply, ver. 19 adds more and differently Christ as man glorified according to divine counsel and perfection in heaven before the Father. In the one case it was Christ as the Lord come down and on the earth revealing God the Father; in the other it is the same Christ as man setting Himself apart in glory, and the truth revealed then and there. Both were new and unique, that the truth might be known and work effectively; and the believing Jew no less than the besotted pagan needed to be sanctified practically according to both principles, distinct as they are, yet united in the person of the Lord. It is the revelation of the Father in the Son in grace, and of the Son as glorified man in righteousness, that the mission of His servants might be according to the. truth which separated them from the world according to God's nature and the relationship of His children, though nothing be so foreign and distasteful and hateful to the world as His grace and the objects of it.

But the book commented on scarce rises above the measure of Israel, and is quite short of the truth of that sanctification which the N.T. presents, as we have seen its total deficiency and indeed error about justification. It proves what the new apostolate is worth.

Is it not passing strange that men who have studied scriptural figures and symbols should have failed to see the use made of "water" as compared with "blood" in this very connection? "But ye are washed"; "The washing of water by the word"; "This is He that came by water and blood," etc., are samples; and the types of the O.T. answer to the figures of the New. We all know that in Christendom such things are passed over for the most part without serious thought, perhaps without a word: sometimes they are confounded, oftener all is vague. The difference is that the action of the blood of Christ is once and for ever, as the Epistle to the Hebrews pointedly and repeatedly says, whereas that of the water is not only the dealing with the soul at the start, but whenever need arises throughout the walk (John 13). Thus the propitiation abides in its unchanging value before God for the believer; but the impurities of daily walk need the application of the. word and Spirit continually. To be washed or loosed from our sins by blood is once for all; but, if bathed in water ever so truly, the soiled feet call for fresh washing. It is the answer of the Spirit by the word to Christ's advocacy. Expressly and evidently the notion of repeated application of the blood overthrows the truth of the unity of Christ's sacrifice and of its, efficacy on our behalf. On the other hand the teaching of the constant need of the washing of water by the word is bound up with practical holiness. It is. just because we are brought nigh to God by Christ's blood that we are called to habitual self-judgment lest we grieve the Holy Spirit of God whereby we, were sealed unto the day of redemption. Yet more should we humble ourselves on actual failure.

The propriety of the figure is obvious. Water among other uses is to cleanse. For this the Holy Spirit employs God's word. We are begotten by the word of truth (James 1; 1 Peter 1; 1 Cor. 4), and cleansed by reason of the word (John 15: 3). So deep is the original uncleanness that nothing short, of death, Christ's death, can avail us. Therefore He came by water and by blood. He purifies as well as atones by His death; and purifies our hearts consequently by faith (Acts 15: 9; 1 Peter 1: 22), as scripture declares. Only the washing of the water by the word applies through our entire path, exposed as we are to defilement continually. Not so the cleansing by blood, which takes place once for all. For the blood of Jesus cleanseth from all, from every sin. If He needed to be offered often, He must suffer often, whereas it is but once, once for all, as Heb. 9 insists. But the communion, interrupted by sin, must be holily restored. Hence the need of the water for purification for defilement by the way. Compare Num. 19. And so the Jews by-and-by. It is not enough to look on Messiah-Jehovah pierced (Zech. 12): a fountain also is opened for sin and for uncleanness, a fountain not of blood, pace Cowper, but of water. See Zech. 13: 1.

Thus all christians must allow progressive holiness as a matter of growth through the truth and that self-judgment which is the more incumbent on us because we enjoy not only the word and prayer, but the remembrance of Christ in His supper regularly. There is such a thing as deliverance when the soul after toiling under law is brought to give up self and condemn the flesh as utterly and incurably evil. This however is simply the normal state of the believer, no longer striving in vain, to improve what God has condemned in the cross (Rom. 8: 3), but, resting on that work of Christ as a sacrifice for sin, sees himself in Christ henceforth; so that he is now to live by the faith of Him dead and risen, and to abhor in himself what he finds not in Christ. This some call sanctification or perfection, and consequently turn it to error by making it a matter of feeling, instead of owning it true of all who submit to the righteousness of God.

Plainly therefore according to scripture we are personally "sanctified" or set apart livingly to God when born of Him by faith of the truth, sanctified by the Spirit unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus. Thereon follows the practical call to holiness, because God, our God and Father, is holy, as we see later on in the same chap. 1 of 1 Peter. Holiness in spirit and ways is a duty flowing from the relationship of saints and children already formed by sovereign grace — not in order to become, but because we are, His and in the nearest way through Christ our Lord.

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §. 7. THE CHURCH.

We have seen how shallow is the view of Mr. Sitwell as to Christianity, that is to say, our standing and privilege individually considered, even where it is not plainly erroneous. It is no better as to the church, that is, our corporate place, even Christ's body here below. The entire scheme is faulty from first to last. Thus his "first part" is the calling of the church (pp. 1-36); but in it not a true trace of that calling occurs even accidentally. He confounds the church absolutely with the kingdom; whereas the latter is another relationship of no small moment, as distinct from the former as power is from grace. As christians, we are now after a special way in the kingdom; but we also compose the church, being members of Christ. Following Him in His rejection, we are not mere subjects like Israel by-and-by, but become kings and priests, and shall reign with Him in that day. This is the kingdom, not the church, His body; and the effect of the confusion is inevitably and in every respect mischievous. In this pseudo-apostolic volume the mystery concerning Christ and concerning the church, great as it is declared to be, is not at all understood. The exclusive topic throughout is "the gospel of the kingdom." The immense and eternal purpose of God revealed in Eph. 1, etc., does not enter his mind, the heading up in Christ of all things in heaven and all things on earth, and our association with Christ in both the calling and the inheritance.

Mr, S. does not look above man on the earth. "And the habitation, the dwelling-place of man is the earth, — for ever" (p. 5). We may praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and exult in His glory, no less than own the riches of His grace, that it is far otherwise for the saints, even now blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places in Christ. How sad not to have the eyes of our heart enlightened to discern our incomparably higher blessedness! The Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians, to say nothing of others, are ignored for this. Not that one would depreciate "the kingdom" for a moment. It is meat that the scene of our S2avionr's infinite humiliation should shine in the day of His manifested glory. But it is only a part, and an inferior one, bright as are the visions which prophecy opens about the earth, Israel, and the nations, to the eye of faith. But the New Testament, on the accomplishment of an everlasting redemption in Christ's cross, discloses what had been kept hid from ages and generations — hid in God till Christ ascended and the Holy Ghost came down to dwell in us. This mystery makes known the church in union with the Head; yet as to it all Mr. S.'s book is a complete blank. Surely as one of the new apostles he ought to have been an adequate exponent, when his task was to explain the calling of the church; he seems from his book to have known nothing about it.

Mr. Irving, boldly astray as to the object which ought to be dearest to us, Christ's person, rose far beyond this poverty. Indeed the "part first" unwittingly proved what is justly enough laid to the door of christendom in his "part second" (pp. 37-39), that not only most people, but Mr. S. himself, forgot the church's calling and became earthly. His doctrine, as we saw, makes all who receive it earthly in principle. Amiable approval of certain traits in Rome, Greece, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism and Dissent, shows how all he can say is incompatible with the feeblest faith in the church's calling. He divides the past course into six periods of declension: the apostolic, the episcopal, the imperial, the papal, the reformed, and the revolutionary; but on this we need not dwell now.

The third part is the church recalled to her true standing (pp. 130-254). Here again the same judaising pursues us. Hosea 2 is said to be fulfilled, which is certainly untrue; as the prayer for the outpouring of the Spirit, denies the distinctive abiding privilege of the church. It is a lapse into Israel's need, Tongues and powers, even if true, could have in no measure availed before the ruin of the church: nothing but humiliation, and obedience, sure of blessing in the grace of the Lord. Apostles and prophets constituted the foundation; and such they were in divine power and grace. How out of place and season to have this ever again? or, to meet the objection, by talking of a John Baptist ministry? For Christ's forerunner was no apostle. No! The setting up of apostles was presumption, and as far from God's mind as can be conceived. It was the work of a spirit. All is simply an apology for Irvingism, with its vain misinterpretation of the Tabernacle, the Cherubim, and the Seraphim. Of doctrine we have spoken, but left other points.

The fourth part is the end — its progress and consummation (pp. 255-336). Here they have a little more truth because there is less of the church and more prophecy. But antichrist, the man of sin, is confounded, as usually, with the last Roman emperor, whereas he is the prophet-king in the land; and also with the king of the north, or Assyrian, the enemy of both! And though the two Witnesses (Rev. 11) are allowed to be future, Rev. 14: 1-4 as well as Rev. 7: 1-5 are applied to the Irvingites, as well as the manchild! Of these puerilities enough has been said before.

The fifth is the conclusion, which still lingers over the society, as the sixth-part consists of answering objections to their work, and especially to apostles. Mr. S. was only like others occupied with themselves, not with the Christ of God; so that the true calling of the church, and the blessed hope, were lost in earthly things.

As to the Irvingite interpretation of Rev. 12 can anything be more out of the way? It is self-evident that, lacking intelligence of the book as a whole, they of course cannot be trusted for any particular part. The woman is seized on for the church, the twelve stars for the new apostolate, and the catching up of the manchild for the party rapture to heaven.

Now in the prophetic visions three women appear with marked differences. The first is the mother, the second the harlot, and the third the bride, the Lamb's wife. This the new Jerusalem is beyond just dispute, the glorified church, as the harlot is the corrupt counterfeit, Babylon. The first needs more care, but is distinct from either, and points to Israel, of whom Christ the Son and Heir was born. The chief difficulty is to account for introducing what was past in a revelation of the future; but this is far from inexplicable.

Rev. 12 (or more strictly 11: 19) begins the second part of the prophecy, the first bringing us to the seventh trumpet which unmistakably carries us on in general terms to the end of all. The second part therefore, which explains much in detail and with more precision, must go back; and in the manner of the O.T. prophecy it gives us a mystic view which identifies Christ and the church. It goes indeed beyond Rev. 4, 5 where are the heavenly saints in peaceful session on their thrones round God and the Lamb. Here they are wrapt up as it were in a Son of glory, the Manchild caught up to God and to His throne. The translation of Christ (long before) omits His life and death, and passing over all the intervening times joins with itself those who are to share with Him the rule of all the nations. This, we know, is the promised portion of Christ and the church (Rev. 2: 26, 27, Rev. 3: 21); so that scripture confirms fully what is here advanced. But there can be no favoured party: what more abhorrent to the mind of Christ? For "we shall not all sleep, but we shall all he changed." The entire church are concerned. Isa. 50 shows how the christian is lost in Christ like a binary star (cf. Rom. 8); as Isa. 63 passes at once to the Second Advent from the First. Indeed both are not uncommon; and the Revelation recurs to the prophetic style. There is this characteristic difference, however, that while O.T. prophecy skips clean over the christian or church parenthesis, from the Lord's birth and rejection to His taking His great power and reigning publicly, the Apocalyptic view here is rather to show us in an enigmatic way God's purpose in Christ and the translation of the heavenly saints found in Him caught up to the throne of God. This, it will be observed, is absolutely dateless: a token not without moment. It is in virtue of the rejected Christ on God's throne that the saints can be caught up and thus seen mystically in Him.

But what of the vision as a whole? "The temple of God that is in heaven was opened." On earth His temple was to be the scene of the most daring rebellion of man and triumph of Satan, the man of sin worshipped there as God. But God's purpose is declared on high before judgment effects it here below. "And there was seen the ark of His covenant in His temple." Israel the covenant people is to be the theatre of His plans for blessing, the church having been proved irreparably guilty and ruined, and no promise of restoration for her, as for the Jews beyond controversy and in mercy that endures for ever. The accompanying signs of divine judgment ("lightnings and voices, and thunders," etc.) still mark that actually it is a time when God's hand is on men in displeasure, the harbinger of wrath to come yet more terribly. It is not yet His day, any more than it is properly the day of grace, but of special judicial dealings in providence. "And a great sign was seen in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon underneath her feet, and on her head a crown [or chaplet] of twelve stars." It is the chosen people of God as in God's purpose, invested therefore with supreme authority, lifted quite above their old servitude to the reflected light of legal ordinances, and adorned with the evidently complete instrumentality of administrative rule in man for the earth. So it will surely be when the Lord reigns in Zion; and this is Apocalyptic intimation of God's purpose in heaven before the conflict with Satan is described. His opposition immediately follows, and this foremost against Christ in every way. But there is this added, "And being with child she crieth, travailing and in pain to bring forth." It is not millennial joy, but the hour of sorrow yet. "And there was seen another sign in heaven; and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his heads seven diadems. And his tail draweth the third of the stars of heaven and did cast them unto the earth." Christ and those one with Him must be in their place first, whatever the dragon's enmity. For though he is seen, not as of old but with characteristics of the Roman empire and casting them down from God's light and order in the west, as I suppose, and with destructive hostility against God's counsels in Christ, all is vain. "And the dragon stood before the woman that was about to bring forth, that when she brought forth he might devour her child. And she brought forth a son a male, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron; and her child was caught up to God and to His throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God that there they should nourish her a thousand two hundred and sixty days." Rev. 11: 19 — 12: 6.

Once the Christ thus mystically regarded (see 1 Cor. 12: 12) is caught up, we find ourselves in the latter day; and the rage of Satan under the form of the Roman power is directed against the Jewish people, the true mother of Christ; and set times come into reckoning. They have to do with the earth and the earthly people, not with the church of the heavenlies. This is not agreeable to those who are preoccupied with christendom, which tends to make the practical question one between Romanism. and Protestantism. This was not Mr. S.'s snare, who thought as cheaply as any could, either of the Popish dream about the Virgin Mary in the same woman, or of the historical fancy that the rapture of the Manchild to God's throne means the political elevation of the christian profession under Constantine and his successors. If this were true, the woman might rather have been worshipped, or seated on a throne, than driven into the wilderness: an absurd result of the christening of the empire.

Now we can readily understand that, when God has His heavenly ones with Christ above, His purpose for the earth comes into view; and that a mighty change occurs in the true seat of power — heaven, when those who are Christ's for His glory there are in their place. As long as the church is here below, wrestling with spiritual wickednesses in heavenly places goes on. But after the translation, there is war in heaven; Satan loses his bad eminence and is cast to the earth (Rev. 12: 7-12), which fires his wrath the more against those destined to inherit the earth under Christ's reign, the Jews especially. These accordingly have nothing to do with such wrestling as Eph. 6: 12 describes, It is thenceforth a dispute for the earth; God forbid it should be so for the church. Satan accordingly is seen, not only in his efforts against the woman and the rest of her seed, the godly Jewish remnant of this transitional time before the millennium (Rev. 12: 13-17), but bringing forward his final instruments of blasphemous power and deceit against the Lord and His Anointed (Rev. 13). Matt. 24, etc., and above all the Revelation, furnish N.T. light on this future remnant.

The attempt to make party capital out of Rev. 12: is altogether inferior to what is called the Protestant interpretation, unsatisfactory and even absurd as this has been shown to be, one evil effect of which is the direct countenance it lends to consecrating worldliness in the church. The Popish idea is as childish and profane as their peculiar opinions usually are in divine things. But the Irvingite fancy is a vain essay to catch at symbols in a random way and with gross inconsistency in order to flatter their "Twelve" as well as their adherents. The truth gives all the glory to Christ in Whom the church, not some members but all, is regarded as hidden, its regular place in the prophetic word, its happiest place morally, the joy and boast of hearts true to the Bridegroom Who alone is worthy, whatever His grace to all that are His. The mystic man, Christ and the church, being out of reach, the hatred and last efforts of Satan against God's earthly purpose in Israel ensue without delay, with the measured times which connect all with O.T. prophecy. Daniel in particular, is the prophet of Gentile supremacy on the total failure of the Jews, as John is of the world's judgment on the proved and irreparable ruin of christendom. The church, normally, belongs to heaven which does not like the earth come under times and seasons.

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §. 8. PRIESTHOOD, AND SACRAMENT

We may now take up a pertinacious system of priestly ordinances which Irvingites share with all the bodies which claim to be Catholic. This assumes. a more than ordinarily virulent character in the modern society, just because they after their manner own N.T. truth and power wholly inconsistent with those "old bottles." In their hands it is no mere confusion, as with some Protestants, but a deliberate and radical error which undermines and destroys fundamental and distinctive privileges which the gospel of God confers on the christian.

There is no question about their views, which they love (in this case at least) to state in bold and open terms. Take the preface to Mr. Drummond's "Abstract Principles of Revealed Religion," p. v. "That without priesthood there can be no sacraments, and without sacraments no spiritual life can be rightly imparted or adequately sustained; that the due worship of God can be carried on only by priests appointed by Himself; that all its parts are definite; forms of buildings in which it is carried on; rites therein performed; furniture appropriate to that end; vestments of those who officiate; hours of celebration, etc.; and that the single act which constitutes christian worship, and distinguishes true from false worship in Christendom, is the offering up of the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, without the eating and drinking of which no one can have part in Him."

Were this a true standard, it would soon and certainly appear that the church of God as built on the foundation of His holy apostles and prophets must be pronounced by this self-constituted judge to have never been conformable to the mind of God! But believing the N.T. history and Epistles, we see that professing Christendom only adopted it as it fell into Babylonish corruption. For scripture demonstrates that, in principle as in fact, the assumption of the party as expressed by one whom they honour as alike apostle, prophet, and angel, is wholly and in every particular opposed to the revealed word as regards the church. One might venture fearlessly to say that the enemy could not, forge an invention more antagonistic to the truth.

The testimony of the N.T. is plain, sure, and decisive. It tells us of Jewish and of heathen priests. But for the circle of the faithful there is a great High-priest, passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God; and none whatever on earth over the saints, for the very blessed and conclusive reason that the christians themselves compose His house and are exhorted to draw near to the throne of grace (Heb. 4), in the old priestly house, the sons of Aaron, could not, and even with confident boldness, which was impossible for Aaron himself who only entered once in the year with atoning blood and incense lest he die (Lev. 16). They are not to be admired nor even endured who speak of a casual expression in scripture. The truth is uniform. It is the same doctrine, only if possible more emphatically enforced in Heb. 10: 19 et seqq. after the one offering as well as the high-priesthood of Christ had been fully taught. "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which He dedicated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and [having] a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith," etc. This is unmistakable. The inspired writer couples the brethren as such with himself in equal and perfect liberty of access to God within the rent veil. Such is the habitual title of nearness which the gospel confers now on the believer. An intermediate class of priests on earth is not only unknown but quite excluded. Its assertion is an inexcusable slight of scripture, and a shameless ignorance of the grace of God to us, in answer to Christ's death which for us has brought in eternal reality of acceptance with God, Jewish shadows being now superseded and gone. The notion of intermediate priests between Christ and the christian is apostacy from the gospel and return to Judaism. So bright is the truth in the scriptures that the simplest believer is responsible to see and hold fast his priestly privilege; so inevitable the inference that the subtlest disputer of this age essays in vain to deny it honestly. And Heb. 13: 15, 16 cannot be evaded as further proof that the functions of priests are looked for in the offering up sacrifices, whether of praise or of well-doing and communication; not by priests for them, but by themselves as the only true priesthood on earth. He that opposes this is rebelling against the N.T.

But what of other scriptures? Peter is express to the same effect in his First Epistle, (1 Peter 2: 5, 9). Christians are a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices, and a royal priesthood to show forth the virtues of Him Who called them out of darkness into His marvellous light. How wretched, how wicked, to imagine a fictitious order of priests in presence of such words of God!

The Revelation of John (the divine so-called) has no other voice, and this not merely in parts that speak of the future, like Rev. 5: 10, Rev. 20: 6, but in what unequivocally bears on our present relations to God as in Rev. 1: 5, 6: "Unto Him that loveth us, and washed [or, loosed] us from our sins in His blood; and He made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father." This is the sole priesthood (besides Christ's) which the gospel owns. There is not a hint of an earthly priest for these priests, as the error assumes. The very idea is incompatible with Christian principles. To confound presbyter with priest is a fraud.

Nor is this all; though such a three-fold cord cannot be broken, save to the self-will which blindly fights for superstition against God's word thus widely in evidence and harmony. For every scripture, which since redemption speaks of its results to the believer, implies a similar standing for the christian. Thus in Rom. 5: 2 through Christ we also have obtained and possess (ejschvkamen) access by faith into this grace wherein we stand. In 1 Cor. 6 not only washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God, but our body the Holy Ghost's temple; and in 1 Cor. 12 ourselves members of Christ, which is yet more intimate and high than priests. So in Gal. 3 we are all one in Christ and sons with the Spirit of God's Son sent forth into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Of Ephesians 3 one might cite a vast deal more and from perhaps every chapter; for the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from the first is said to have blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ. Suffice it to quote for those not familiar with scripture, not only that we are Christ's body, but words so distinct as Eph. 2: 13: "Now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh by [or, in] the blood of Jesus;" and again ver. 18, "Through Him we both have access in one Spirit unto the Father;" and again Eph. 3: 12, "In Whom we have boldness and access in confidence through faith of Him." Farther, Col. 1: 12 gives thanks to the Father Who made us meet [an accomplished fact] to be partakers of the saints in light, Who delivered us out of the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love. What need of more? Of old the greatest privilege of a priest was the right to enter God's sanctuary. This is everywhere now the standing title of every christian, in a measure wholly transcending the degree of a Jewish priest. And this it is which is necessarily undermined by the pretension of a priest on earth between the christian and Christ or God. But it is a baseless figment; whereas the priesthood of all christians, the antitype of Aaron's house (only far surpassed), is the clear and certain truth of God, and of the utmost practical value for every believer every day, of which the fiction would rob him to the deepest dishonour of His grace.

Indeed it is a solemn consideration, for those professedly christian ministers who claim a sacerdotal place, to weigh the warning of Jude 11, lest they perish in the gainsaying of Korah. For his sin, so ruinous to himself and his followers, was proud discontent with Levitical service, and an impious pretension to the priesthood. It was rebellion against Moses and Aaron, types of Christ in this. Christian ministry is the exercise of a gift from the Lord, some, for the good of all, given and sent by Him. But all saints are priests made free equally of the true sanctuary. For some to usurp this nearness to God beyond and in denial of what grace has given to all the saints is without knowing it to misconceive and do away a prime blessing of christianity. It is to deny the grace of Christ and the efficacy of His work and the anointing of His Spirit.

But next the oracle declares that as without priesthood there can be no sacraments (an utter absurdity), so "without sacraments no spiritual life can he rightly imparted or adequately sustained." On this we join issue. They are alike dregs from the cup of "the great whore," and the latter as irreconcilable with God's word as the former has been proved to be null and void. It is the careful object of the apostle Paul, in an epistle devoted to church questions more than any other, to warn unwary souls that the so-called sacraments, far from really imparting or adequately sustaining spiritual life, may be possessed and rested on and gloried in where there is no such life but mere profession. Such is the divinely given admonition of 1 Cor. 10. These institutions of our Lord, Baptism and His Supper, have their weighty place, one as the initiatory mark of the christian, the other as the constantly recurring and corporate feast of the communion of Christ's body and blood. But to erect them into the channel and the sustainer of spiritual life is altogether to misunderstand (not these sacraments only but) christianity itself, and to prove that those who thus pervert them are rather Jews or even heathen in their thought than christians. These worshippers of ordinances ignore and resist and reverse the Spirit's warning. "I would not, brethren, have you ignorant how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and were all baptised unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ. But with many of them God was not well pleased; for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things were our examples (or types)" (1 Cor. 10: 1-6).

The theory of these men, Irvingites, Papists, Tractarians, etc., is that the sacraments are, as the most philosophical of such theologians taught, "extensions of the Incarnation." But first what has baptism to do with the Incarnation? The element is water, which in no way figures Christ's body, as the eucharistic bread does. Yet baptism, they insist, conveys life and is therefore the spring or basis of all! The theory therefore fails fundamentally at the outset. Baptism is not even a sign of the communication of Christ's humanity. There is no semblance of His sacramental presence in it. The truth of scripture is that baptism is burial to Christ's death, the manifest reverse of conveying His life. See Rom. 6; Col. 2; 1 Peter 3. Hence in the Acts baptism in His name is for the remission of sins (Acts 2) and washing away of sins (Acts 22), never for quickening, as these false teachers always assume.

So in the Lord's Supper we proclaim the Lord's death (1 Cor. 11: 26), and hence in remembrance of Him we eat His body and drink His blood. Both are therefore sacraments of His death, not of Incarnation, as they wrongly say, wholly departing from God's mind. It is His body given (even if "broken" be rejected), His blood shed. This is not life, but death. And the difference is immense. For till Christ's death there was no bearing of our sins, no glorification of God about our evil, no redemption of the slaves of Satan. Both these divine institutions are grounded on that death of the Saviour which alone has brought us to God and reconciled us by a perfect atonement. The self-styled Catholic idea is essentially false, for it expresses no more than Incarnation at best, when the only work which could blot out our sins righteously was not done, but only in hope. And such is the spiritual experience generated by the error. They do not possess the joy of accomplished redemption. They have, as they say, a humble hope. But this is Jewish, not christian: quite right when our Lord was simply incarnate, and under the law; utterly and unbelievingly wrong now that He has died for our sins and is raised for our justification, having by one offering perfected for ever — without an interruption, eij" to; dihnekev" — those that are sanctified, which all believers are. It is not the open hostile scepticism that denies the Incarnate Word; but it is real incredulity as to our present resting-place on His work as well as person, as set forth in both sacraments.

The fact is that even real christians feebly believe in the true gift to them of eternal life in Christ the Son of God. They lower it for the most part to an action by the Spirit on the mind and affections of man; so that he who was once indifferent, immoral, or hostile, now loves the Lord and devotes himself in repentance and faith to do His will. But this leaves out the all-important truth that we are truly born of God, and so are brought into the relation of His children by believing on Christ's name. "He that hath the Son hath life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." Whatever the value of ordinances (and he who despises them despises His authority Who gave them), they are never in scripture treated as channels of life, but, as we have seen, as symbolic of His death.

Faith alone gives life to the soul that hears God's word. Hence all the O.T. saints were spiritually quickened as truly as we who now believe the gospel. And our Lord lays down in John 3 the necessity of new birth (born of water and Spirit) as the indispensable condition of seeing or entering the kingdom of God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will surely be there, no less than we. There may be the unintelligent plea of circumcision, as in their case answering to baptism. But it is express that Abraham was justified in Gen. 15 before circumcision was instituted in Gen. 17, and the apostle as a certainty reasons on the importance of this fact in Rom. 4. Circumcision was but a seal of the righteousness of the faith he had whilst uncircumcised. The blessing was neither of the ordinance nor of the law which came in long afterwards but of the promise, and thus of faith that it might be according to grace — God's grace, not man's merit. And so it is now. It is judaising and worse to substitute an institution, however precious, for the Son of God and faith in Him and His work, which both quickens and justifies.

But this school always slights faith. It may be that some of them have no experience of it as a true work of the Holy Spirit in the soul. Others who perhaps are believers have heeded the fond dream of succession and priesthood and saving ordinances, which can never mix with the truth of the gospel, and hence in their blindness disparage faith is well as the power of redemption, though, thank God, they may still cleave to the glory of Christ's person. Solifidianism is an idle slur on those who possess Christ as life and righteousness.

And as John 3 is totally misunderstood, so is John 6 where the Lord sets forth, not an ordinance but His own person, first as the bread of God coming down from heaven, and giving life not to Israel only but to the world (32-50); next, giving His flesh for the life of the world, so that there was no life in themselves without eating the flesh of the Son of man and drinking His blood. It is not His incarnation only but His death; it is communion by faith with that precious death. Over and over again He shows that this is not a rite but to believe on Him and have eternal life. It is not the Lord's Supper, but the infinite truth itself of which the Supper is the sign. Hence, only understood thus, the words are absolutely true; whereas applied to eating and drinking sacramentally they become false every way. On the other hand we who believe in the incarnate Word rejoice with solemn joy in His death, without which neither God could be vindicated nor our sins be effaced; and assuredly one has life and looks for the Lord to raise him at the last day, as he meanwhile abides in Christ and Christ in him. On the other, who can be so infatuated as to say either that it is impossible to have life without the eucharist? or that a man, eating the eucharist, his necessarily eternal life and must be raised for the resurrection of those that are Christ's? The fourth Gospel does not occupy itself with external forms, but what is characteristically vital and bound up with the Father's grace and the Son's glory. Whereas these false teachers, knowing neither the scriptures nor the power of God, still less His sovereign grace and glorious counsels, are blind to the truth and pervert what they can in His word to exalt man, especially their own vain, self-assumed, priestly orders, and the superstitions they have picked up and espoused from the most corrupt streets of "the great city."

It may be added that while the Lord's Supper is in the strictest sense and fullest way the calling of Christ to mind, there is much more to the faithful than a sign or symbol. He vouchsafes His presence to be enjoyed there and then as nowhere else. Call this a real presence if you will; but it is not the grossness of a presence in the bread and wine, a dream worthy of a heathen. Consubstantiation is only less heinous than transubstantiation. There is simply "blessing" or thanksgiving — terms equally used when the Lord gave the bread and fish to the hungry multitudes. Consecration, as a sacerdotal act, is a mere superstition, a prelude to the mass.

There is another antichristian doctrine, common (it is true) to the sacerdotal system of all ritualists, on which it may be well to say a little — the notion of offering up Christ's body and blood to God in the eucharist. No doubt, Popery goes farther in the deadly evil both by the fable of transubstantiation (which naturally if not necessarily leads to direct idolatry) and by claiming for the offering the character of a true propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead. But, even in the most modified shape, any offering to God of the sacrament is not only opposed to all scripture but destroys the truth of its proper nature and aim. The appeal to the original of 1 Cor. 11: 24 and Matt. 26: 28 ("now" broken and "now" shed) is mere ignorance in Mr. Cardale (Readings upon the Liturgy, p. 32). It is the present participle, not of time, but of character, whenever the time might be, like John 1: 29 and crowds of instances. He Whom God made sin for us sits at God's right hand, Who needs no memorial of that perfect and accepted propitiation for our sins. This memorial He has made His Supper to be to us and our forgetful hearts. It is not for a moment to be doubted too that He is in the midst of His own when gathered to His name, and in the happiest way for this holy feast. Such is His true and only real presence. That it is in the bread and the wine is a baseless and base idea, not worthy of a Jew or even a pagan. We are there invited to eat and to drink. It is in no way an offering of His body and blood, but communion with both: just as Jews partook of what had been sacrificed, and Gentiles too in their dark way. But our God is love as well as light, and gives us to sit at a feast on the great sacrifice of Christ's redemption. Thereupon Christ sits on high, because it is done once for all, as its efficacy endures for ever, and even its application. There is no repetition. If there were renewed offering, there must be renewed suffering (Heb. 9: 26). But it is finished; and we feast with thanksgiving and praise, doing this in remembrance of Him, and showing forth His death till He come. Presentation before God is a vain addition which spoils the revealed intent; and so does the mixing up our worship with Christ's priestly intercession, which has another and wholly distinct object.

Never in scripture is either the Lord's baptism or Supper treated as a mystery, "the great spiritual mystery," as these men say of the latter. There are mysteries in abundance, once hidden, now made plain, precious, practical. Sacraments are not included in that category. One initiatory, the other constant, they had their wise and good place as His institutions; but, being external forms, they afforded a handle to religious imagination; and Christendom has made them into calves of gold to worship its own handiwork. If divine order is prized by believers, how can they depart from the holy and beautiful simplicity of that feast Christ bequeathed to us, and took care to give in three Gospels, and to reveal afresh to and by the apostle Paul? A more systematic and chilling departure can hardly he conceived than these "Readings" disclose to one imbued with the unworldly order of the scripture accounts. Are we not to believe His will therein reflected for us to follow? Let us bold fast the traditions as Paul delivered them to us.

On the theory put forth to justify as well as explain the sacramental system, insuperable difficulties confront these superficial theologians. They are self-deceived in their thought of effectively opposing rationalism by the truth. They ignore divine grace and scripture. Their own scheme is no better than religious rationalism, as opposed to that of profane sceptics who deny even a mediator, and especially the one Mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus a man. No believer contests that blessed and cardinal truth, the all-importance for God and man of the Incarnate Word. But the sacramentalists reason on the Incarnation simply, and reason wrongly, instead of believing that the Incarnation only presents the Saviour in that condition which was essential to effect redemption, but which in itself by no means did or could effect it. On the contrary the manifestation of God as light and love in Christ was more and more hateful to man, to Israel in particular; because it condemned their dark selfishness and utter insubjection to God, the end of which was the cross. Therein God laid the sole, adequate, perfect, and everlasting ground of deliverance for all that believe. The bloodshedding of Christ vindicated God's long forbearance, and made it righteous, not only to go out with the gospel to every soul, but to justify him that has faith in Jesus. This is certainly not man's righteousness (which was just then proved wholly wanting in Jew or Greek) but God's. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are the divinely given and standing expressions of the Saviour's death, not merely of His Incarnation. Judaism ends with that cross which is the basis of Christianity. The initiatory sign as truly sets before the soul the death of Christ, as does that central feast of thanksgiving which the christian observes, on the Lord's day especially, till He come. Apart from His death the signs have no meaning but a false one. They are founded on His finished work and proclaim His death. Till then the full trial of man was not a fact; nor the complete proof of divine love shown; nor God glorified to the uttermost, any more than man's wickedness consummated; nor sin judged before God and borne away to faith by the only availing sacrifice. Only in the cross was this done and more.

Hence it is evident and certain that the sacramental system stops short of christianity, by its own avowal that the sacraments are extensions of the Incarnation; because, if so, all these essential truths of christianity are not the ground, but only the hope as under the legal system. These men abide on the Jewish side of the cross, not on the christian. They are still under law, and priesthood, and offerings. By their own showing, if the sacraments are but the continuation of the Incarnation, they cannot express the privileges of accomplished redemption. They retrograde. Such is sacramentalism in principle. It is not christianity, but a mongrel superstition.

The whole doctrinal basis, essential to keep up earthly priesthood and worldly sanctuary, stops short of the saying grace of God that characterised the gospel; according to which baptism and the Lord's Supper have their true place and right meaning as expressions of that death which delivers alike from sin and the law and the world by the dead and risen Saviour.

Even on their own ground of religious speculation, which is blind to the force of the rent veil, and shrinks back unbelievingly from that one sacrifice that purges the conscience from dead works to serve the living God, the theory fails at the threshold. For how is baptism an extension of the Incarnation? Whatever appearance there may be in the eucharist, there is none in the water. Again, The theory is that, while Baptism gives life, the Supper sustains it. But this does not agree with John 6; for the eating there is not sustenance but quickening without the smallest reference to baptism. "For the bread of God is He that cometh down from heaven and giveth life to the world" (ver. 33). This contradicts the theory. Still plainer is ver. 51, and ver. 53 most conclusive, where all else is excluded, and eating the flesh of the Son of man and drinking the blood are said to be such, that otherwise "ye have no life in you." In every respect the sacramental theory breaks down at the touch of scripture.

Popery alone can boast complete consistency of error; for to make good the refusal of the cup, they fall back on eating all without drinking; that is, the theory is that the blood is still in the body. Theirs therefore is, with fatal unconsciousness, a sacrament of non-redemption, as another has well shown. How true the Saviour's decision: "By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned"!

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §. 8. TITHES, etc.

With an earthly priesthood naturally goes the provision of tithes. No one doubts that it was obligatory on Israel under the law, and that it was paid in patriarchal times (Gen. 14, 28). It is a religious debt from man to God on earth.

But the redemption that is in Christ Jesus changes all things, or, as is said in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of law. For the Christian there is no priest but Christ Himself in God's presence on high. In another and real point of view all Christians are themselves priests. Every other notion of priesthood as now subsisting is false. And so for the Christian, for the church of God, any such provision is ignored in the N.T. Nor is this casual, but goes essentially with our heavenly relationship, even while we are personally here below. We are not of the world even as Christ is not. Temple, priesthood, victims, incense, rites, etc., were all alike earthly. The Christian is heavenly though on earth for the present.

Hence it may be observed that all who contend for tithes are wholly ignorant of the true and heavenly nature of the church, and for the most part fall back for support on what was said of old before the Son of God came and brought in all that now characterises His own. If we are subject to the suited revelations of the Holy Spirit, we understand at once that it could not be otherwise without the grossest confusion. For we, believers now, are all members of Christ, and of Christ when exalted and glorified at God's right hand. As such is our privilege, of this nature is our responsibility. The sacrifice of Christ has blotted out our sins, and brought us nigh to God perfectly and therefore equally. A human or earthly priesthood is necessarily excluded, and evidently so, save where the efficacy of His death is clouded. Again, the Holy Ghost, on the ground of that accepted work, was sent down to baptize into the one body of Christ. This in no way sets aside the differences of place it pleased God to establish in the assembly. There are those whom He set first, and others in inferior position. There is all variety of gift; and this in exercise constitutes ministry. Nor is scripture silent that whether in the gospel or among the saints such are entitled to support and honour in the name of the Lord. But that one christian should act as priest for others has no place save in the unauthorised tradition of man. The mere idea offends against the absolute nearness which Christ's work imparts, and the oneness of the body through the Spirit's presence and action. Consistently with this we hear no more of tithes. Any such earthly due to a religious caste nearer to God disappears.

The principle they lay down shows how far they are even from the perception of living christianity. For they distinguish as Jews from voluntary offerings the tithes as due to God in right to dispose of as He thinks good. Now the gospel overturns all this through the surpassing grace of Christ and His fully revealed truth. For we are bought with a price, not our possessions only but ourselves, and are called to glorify God with our body, not merely with tithe and a freewill offering to boot. The Christian slave even is Christ's freedman the Christian master is His bondman. Christ is all and as He elevates the lowest into liberty of the truest and most enduring kind, so he makes the highest that know Him to be His willing slaves. And as to what self would call its possessions, the Lord has ruled (Luke 16) that we are but stewards now in what men view as ours. We do well to follow what was commended in the Unjust Steward. If faithful now in what is Another's, He will in the day of glory give us what He is pleased to call our own, even the true riches which have no wings and where is no thief. Hence the wisdom from above is to make to ourselves friends out of the mammon of unrighteousness, that, when it shall fail, we may be received into the everlasting tabernacles.

We are waiting for the appearing of our Lord. When Christ receives His own things, so shall we. As to all in our hands now, faith makes us disown the title of sense or reason, waiting for the day when with Him God will freely give us all things. For we are heirs of God an joint-heirs with Christ, and are meanwhile to walk by faith, not by sight. Along with this it is of the essence of the gospel that we were called for freedom, only not for the flesh (which we own condemned irremediably and by divine judgment in the cross), but through love servants one to another, because we are His. It is, or it ought to be, clear therefore that the Catholic Apostolic society is so much the more guilty in all this, because they profess to see what the church of God is, as they at any rate know that, and others in general do not see it; and again, because they claim the action of the Holy Spirit whose ministration is in Scripture set in the Strongest contrast with that of the law which could only gender bondage, condemnation, and death. How distressing then to find that no dark traditional system of human thought and will exceeds, if it equal theirs, in turning back to the weak and beggarly elements whereunto they desire to be in servitude over again!

The following extract from the Regulations for the distribution of tithe (as given in Mr. Miller's Vol. ii. Appendix IX) will show, without argument, how far Irvingism is removed from Christian institutions and in principle Jewish, with all sorts of additions devised like Jeroboam's out of their own heart. The hand of lawyers is too plain in all.

" 1. Every ordained priest, being a fixed and regular Minister in a Church, and giving up his whole time to his spiritual duties, receives some proportionate part of the Tithe of the Church. Such proportion (that is, the ratio, not the amount) to be the same in all Churches, and to be subject to arrangement by the elders of the Church Universal in such manner as circumstances may from time to time require. Supernumerary priests do not receive any fixed proportion of tithe, but may receive support from tithe in the manner thereinafter appointed."

" 2. Every called priest, giving up his time to preparation for his spiritual duties, and to such subordinate offices as may be required of him, and every deacon giving up his time to his duties, may lawfully receive support from the tithe of the Church in which he is serving, after providing for the Angel and those already ordained to the priesthood."

" 3. In every Church the number of fixed and regular priests who, under Regulations, are to receive proportionate parts of tithe, is not to exceed the following: namely, one Angel, one Angel's Coadjutor, and such a number of priests as with the Angel and Angel's Coadjutor shall not exceed one to every fifty of the regular communicants. Nor in any Church is the number of fixed and regular priests to exceed the following: namely, Angel and Angel's Coadjutor, six Elders, six assistant Elders, and thirty-six other priests, of whom at least one third should be Prophets and Evangelists. Any other priests employed in the service of the Church are to be considered supernumerary, and not entitled to fixed portions of tithe."

" 4. The precise number and class of fixed and regular priests who are to receive tithe in any Church within the above mentioned limits, will from time to time be decided by the Apostle in charge of the Church (i.e. of Tribe), whose sanction is also necessary of all supernumerary priests."

What need of more, unless it be the opening of the Regulations in 1858, nine years after those cited? God having: given the Tithe of our Increase to be the endowment of His altar, He has placed the particular application of the same under the direction of the Apostles Did it never occur to these persons that we have the Lord preparing the way for christianity and the church in the Four Gospels, but not a hint of Christian tithe! We have a precise and comprehensive history of the gospel and the church, and the chief servants of the Lord for about thirty most eventful and instructive years, written by all inspired hand; but not a hint even here! We have Epistles written by the most honoured in various ways of the apostles, expressly providing divine light, didactic, exhortatory, ecclesiastical, and pastoral; but not a hint in one of them!

We all ought to know how solemnly the apostles spoke of the departure at hand for the Christian profession. So it was, as the Spirit predicted. Even during the earliest generation the testimony of the apostle Paul was very largely a series of conflicts with the inroads of Judaism even more than of Gentile philosophy. When his work closed, the ruin became as rapid as complete; but no one erred so grossly as to advocate tithe any more than priesthood among Christians. No doubt these mistakes and worse evils which defaced Christianity too soon followed.

Nor have any pushed to greater lengths the corruption from the simplicity and the purity that is toward Christ, cloaked under the plea of development. Scripture clearly warrants the use of water in baptism, of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper. How does either give license to bring in the use of lights, incense, vestments, and the like, to say nothing of holy water? It is all impeachment of the fulness of divine wisdom in the written word of God, a presumptious uprising of the church, instead of that single-eyed obedience which is of all price in God's sight. No doubt, the O.T. is also invoked to eke out the desired end. But this is unintelligent abuse, in the face of our authoritative instruction in the N.T. which gives the key of Christ to explain the spiritual meaning of these Levitical symbols, closed for the Christian in His work and offices, as the Epistle to the Hebrews shows us. To introduce them outwardly into the Church is to Judaise in fact, When God tried by law, man rebelled and violated it; when God proved its impotence and nailed it to the cross, man cleaves to it and makes it his idol, consistent only in his antagonism to God's will and glory.

The theory is a return to what was annulled in the cross as God made evident when the veil of the temple was rent from the top to the bottom. What was this but God desecrating what once was holy? As He of old set aside Shiloh, so He did then with His house in Jerusalem, a yet more solemn and evident proof: only that He means to take it up again when the Lord returns to reign over the earth. Meanwhile all is gone for any such thing on earth. The sanctuary which the Lord pitches, and not man, is exclusively in heaven; and the true light which now shines makes manifest to the believing Jew (and of course to all others) that the sanctuary of the law was essentially worldly (Heb. 9: 1), as its sacrifices, ritual, and priesthood were but carnal ordinances.

This is what the Catholic Apostolic body, more guilty than others, would resuscitate from the grave of Christ, instead of holding fast the faith of Him dead, risen, and glorified, and drawing near to Him within the Holiest where He is. For this, and nothing less, we are exhorted to do now, though and while we are on earth. And therefore in the Epistle to the Hebrews faith is insisted on, not here so much to get life and righteousness and peace, as to worship and walk in it as a practical principle covering and influencing all our conversation here below. Therefore are those addressed so earnestly Warned against craving after sensible objects and palpable helps, to which they had been accustomed in Judaism. On the face of it too all the church in Apostolic days met in the humblest way. It was not for lack of means or of liberality. There was no compulsion, no iron bond of law; but as many as were possessed of houses and lands sold them, and brought (not tithes, but) the prices of the things that were sold and laid them at the apostles' feet; and distribution was made to each, according as any one had need. It was a bright outshining of devotedness as they looked for the return of the Lord, the grace of Whom made earthly things of no account save to use them in love to each other.

But it never occurred to these saints, still less to the inspired apostles, to use their substance. in purchasing or erecting fine buildings, or in departing from the original simplicity of the Lord's supper by the adornments of gold and silver, of pearls and gems, of purple and fine linen. They were as far as could be from borrowing the rhetoric of the schools to set off the truth, or from imitating in honour of the Father and the Son the musical attractions of Jews or Heathen in their defunct or dark systems respectively. We belong to Him Who is not here but risen and on high.

The ground of this radical difference is as obvious as it is all-important. In Christianity all that is justly boasted is the grace and truth that came by our Lord, and is now enjoyed by the power of the Spirit in the written word. It is no longer the mountain, nor even Jerusalem. As true worshippers we worship the Father. It must be, to be acceptable, in spirit and in truth. God and the Lamb are before the heart, which is led by the Holy Ghost to look on the unseen and eternal, the heavenly things, not the earthly.

As this bright reality faded for the saints of old, they lapsed more and more into Jewish thought and feeling; and natural resources were called in as faith grew feeble and low. Then the O.T. prophecies got misapplied, as the true and heavenly and earth-rejected character of the church was lost; so that baptized men began to dream that Israel was for ever blotted out to make room for the Christian profession to enjoy earthly blessing, honour, and power. Thus was all the characteristic testimony of the church swamped; and the mystery of iniquity wrought into the mystery of Babylon the Great, the mother of the harlots and of the abominations of the earth.

There indeed earthly splendour is essential, for grace is unknown and truth is perverted and corrupted, if Babylon is to commit fornication with the kings of the earth and to intoxicate those that dwell on the earth. How sad to see those who used to profess the truth which judges this enormous imposture and unblushing worldliness now fallen in principle and practice into a similar dark pit! Yet who can wonder that, having lost the truth of the cross, they mind earthly things even more than the mass of Protestants?

CHAPTER 4.

DOCTRINE. §. 10. SYMBOLISM.

It remains now to examine the system of symbols, in the sense not of confession of faith, but of sensible forms before the eye, which Irvingites have elaborated in their late history. It is known that this development is due to the prophets so called, notably to their first pillar, Mr. Taplin. Here again we have distinct, undeniable, departure from the inspired authority of the true apostles and prophets to Judaising. The divine institution of Baptism and the Eucharist gives no warrant for the least addition, still less for wholesale invention, unrecognised in the N.T. for the church of God. Wherever introduced by man, it is essentially an alien, as it is a supplanter of faith. Now we walk by faith, not by sight. There is no legitimate adoption of it beyond divine authority. New objects of the kind are but idols; and well it is, if superstition degrade not what the Lord instituted into kindred evil. It is for Him to command, for the church to obey. It is not for us to initiate but to follow. All else is but presumption and indeed rebellion.

But let us hear what these men plead as cited* from "Symbols used in worship." "A type is that which is something absent and future; as for example Adam was a type of Christ; the sacrifices of the law were types of the sacrifice of Christ. A symbol, on the contrary, is something used to set forth and signify things really present, but unappreciable by the senses. It may also present a visible memorial of additional important truth. For instance the light which is kept burning before the altar, when the holy sacrament is there, symbolises to us the Lord's invisible presence; but it is also from its very nature a memorial to us that He who is our life is our light also; and not ours only but 'the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' . . . Symbolism is in fact the science of exhibiting invisible truth by visible and appropriate signs, in order that our senses may be made the helps and handmaids of our spirits, and we may be the better able to worship God. If this end be not attained, symbols are useless." Then the brass, the silver, and the gold of the Jewish Tabernacle are referred to, "a gradual increase of costliness from the court to the holy place, and from thence to the most holy. Doubtless these things typified different degrees of spiritual worship; but they also symbolised the truth that the more sacred the place and service the more costly should be the means employed. A palace is not furnished like a cottage; a drawing room is not furnished like a kitchen. We do not appear before a king in mean raiment. . . . It is barely possible for purity of heart to co-exist with voluntary impurity, either of our dwellings or of our persons." To read such effusions of naturalism is painful coming from men professing Christ; but alas! Christendom is so fallen from faith that not a few outside this party accept the sentiment as just in the main and apposite.

* In Miller's vol. ii. 308-311.

John 4 overthrows the system; as does the Epistle to the Hebrews expressly. The hour has come when the ritual of Jerusalem, divinely appointed though it was, is passed away. The rival way of Samaria or of aught else is vain. It is a question of worshipping the Father: His children alone are competent, having received the Spirit of adoption by which they cry Abba, Father. The hour now is, when the true worshippers worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such doth the Father seek to be His worshippers. God is a spirit. and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. The Lord had previously spoken of His giving the Holy Spirit (verse 14), without which Christian worship cannot be. Then, as we have seen, He contrasts it even with Levitical service, and intimates that it alone is now acceptable. For God is no longer hidden as in Judaism, but revealed in His Son which changes all and brings in what is new and eternal; and as God is seeking in fulness of love as a Father, so He can only be worshipped in spirit and truth as suits His nature. It is no longer man tested by law on the ground of what he ought to do. Rejecting the Messiah, the Son, they are proved to be lost and dead, like the poor Samaritan, till Jesus quickens them, and gives the Holy Ghost; and the Father's grace is thus known as seeking even such and making them His own, thenceforth true worshippers.

The Epistle to the Hebrews indicates a similar result in connection with the purifying of the conscience by the blood of Christ and His entrance into heavenly glory, before which the earthly ordinances of Israel fade into nothingness. Yet are they beautiful types if rightly apprehended as shadowing the "better thing" now come in Christ. But it is a retreat from the true light which now shines to set up under the gospel symbols of our own or borrowed from the law. This is to go back to type or symbol where God has given us the blessed anti-types. We are no longer babes needing such pictures. The Christian is of age, as Gal. 4 insists to counteract an analogous turning back to rudiments now discarded, and pernicious when thus misused.

Apostolic practice entirely falls in with this, if we allow for the gracious patience of God in gradually weaning those who had been Jews from the temple and its connected observances. But even from the beginning of the church nothing can be plainer or more certain than the simple and unworldly character of all that was found in "their own company" (Acts 4: 23). They broke bread "at home" (Acts 2: 46). Years after Pentecost we never hear of grand or beautiful buildings, which assuredly, if in any way an object, they had heart and means to erect. The utmost we hear of is "the upper chamber" to break bread in (Acts 20: 7, 8), or of the school of Tyrannus where the apostle daily discoursed, or lectured (Acts 19: 9). Not a trace in the inspired record, not a hint, of the earthly splendour of the Jewish temple sought to be imitated or exceeded in the church of God. On the contrary, all the evidence of the N.T. points to a total change of principle, because God was calling out and forming a body on earth to walk and worship by the power of the Holy Spirit in the faith and enjoyment of a Saviour enthroned in heaven, Who gave them each and all to draw near boldly to the throne of grace. Without doubt we are thus as believers, in presence of a glory revealed to us but not to the world, which pales all the pretentious efforts of architecture, or music, or eloquence in Christendom; yea, which is expressly compared with the law given by Moses, (even though this had unequivocally divine sanction for the time and the end then in view), in order to assert its immeasurable superiority.

Christ risen and exalted on high, in virtue not only of His person but of His work on the cross, is the centre of the surpassing glory, a glory with which we have the fullest association assured to us now, and of which the Holy Spirit Who has anointed us is the seal, as He is the earnest in our hearts. No Christian questions that "the annulled" system, the law, was with glory when and as introduced by God; but how much more does the ministration of the Spirit and of righteousness, "that which abides," exceed as it subsists in glory! There is one thing however absolutely needful for appreciating this truth, faith (alas! how rare) in holding fast our present heavenly relationship to Christ, as simply as the burdened conscience looks to Him dead and risen, and finds justification and peace with God. How could brass or silver or gold or precious stones, how could fine linen or blue or scarlet or purple, mingle with such worship? The thought of severing the members of the one body by a greater or less nearness answering to the court and the Holy place and the Holiest demonstrates the blankest ignorance of Christian standing and worship, as well as of the true meaning of their instructive shadows.

So does the argument founded on the symbols of social position, or of the distinctions in a household It is a return to man and nature under divine government, out of which the gospel now takes even Israelites to give a new and unheard-of intimacy by union with Christ, and this to Gentile no less than to Jewish believers. It is, to frame a human analogy, pleasing to the flesh and essentially of the world, when God calls to a heavenly reality even while we are on earth, which is the proper testimony of our faith in an unbelieving and hostile world.

It is the remark of one who wrote before me on this subject, and more forcibly than the author himself knew, that the incarnation is bound up with symbolism. But he ought not to have degraded it by pointing as examples to the Buddhist, or the Moslem, or the Quaker. For we have shown already, that however precious a truth Incarnation is, to stop short there is to stop short of Christianity. "For the love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that they who live should no longer live to themselves but to Him Who for their sakes died and rose again. Wherefore we henceforth know no one after the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to flesh, yet now we know Him [so] no more. Wherefore if any one is in Christ [there is] a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold they are become new; and all things are of God Who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation." This is Christianity. Christ, the Incarnate Word, was still minister of circumcision till He died for our sins and rose and ascended to become Head of the Church by divine counsels. Eph. 1, Col. 1. How few look on the unseen and heavenly objects which give character to worship!

Professed teachers are not entitled to ignore the characteristic truths of Christianity. Hence the doctrinal care in the N.T. to call away from earthly temple, officials, and rites, to the one sacrifice of infinite efficacy, to the one Priest after the Melchisedec order but Aaronic exercise, only far beyond either type, and to the heavenly and the true tabernacle which the Lord pitched and not man. To see the accomplishment of all in Him is the real honour of the ancient types; to reproduce them on earth and by men is the darkness of unbelief. And amazing it is that any bearing the Lord's name can so trifle with such scriptures as Heb. 7: 12, 18, 19; Heb. 8: 6-13; to refer to no more, though one might well press Heb. 9 and the first half of Heb. 10

What can be more overwhelming than the condemnation poured on symbolism among not only Irvingites but Romanists of every shade (for they differ almost as much as Dissenters, and to talk of their unity is the merest self-deception) by the apostle's word in Heb. 9: 1, in speaking of God's house in Israel where the symbolism was divine throughout. In the light of Christ at God's right hand, the sanctuary is pronounced "a worldly one." How much more all imitations, under the direction of Mr. Taplin or any other man since! This is the irrevocable decision of the Holy Spirit for the Christian. So in verse 24, Christ is said to have entered, not into holy places made with hands (like Aaron or his sons): these were but figures of the true. The heavenly things which Moses saw were really the originals which the tabernacle reflected. And now the true assume their place and moment; and Christ, having obtained everlasting redemption is gone into heaven itself now to appear before the face of God for us. The way into the true holies is now made manifest; and we are invited and exhorted to draw near within, for the veil is rent. Not incarnation, but Christ's shed blood alone makes us free by faith to approach boldly. Symbolism in effect denies the cross and leads us back to Judaism. Let every believer take warning: it is an enemy of Christ and a snare to souls, however fair a show in the flesh. Nothing can excuse rebellion against the Lord as He is now revealed in heavenly glory.