John Gibson MacVicar
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 110
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1840 edition. Excerpt: ... they had now a mission to chastise, to purge the Lord's vineyard, which, though it has now for nearly three hundred years been growing in a bright light of truth to which Romanists are strangers, is yet bringing forth to such a fearful extent wild grapes only? But let the reader think rather than the writer speak on such a subject. The present only is ours. "It is not for us to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power." But we have duties. Let us not forget them, nor Him who calls us to them. The Apostles. The apostles, guided by that Spirit which "taught them all things," were too enlightened not to know that party spirit and sectarian zeal, which had ever shewn themselves leading principles in human nature under every form of religion, would soon manifest themselves in the Church of Christ, as well as every where else. In almost every one of the apostolic epistles, therefore, there are to be found passages emphatically enjoining unity in that church to which the epistle is addressed, and cautioning the Christian converts against schism. In almost every apostolic epistle, therefore, there is some passage or other relating to the inquiry which now engages us. And this part of our investigation naturally leads us to a variety of details. There is one respect, however, in which all these passages are at one; and it is important for us to remark, in the first place, this feature of universal agreement amongst them; and therefore let us do so now. Thev are all at one, then, in this, that they have all for object to shew, not the limits of Christian communion, like the articles of the creeds of too many subsequent churches, Acts i 7. z but, on the contrary, its comprehensiveness. Altogether unlike any thing...