HUMAN RULE INSTEAD OF DIVINE
The apostasy of the church, as one writer has expressed it, came by "ecclesiastical ambition and degeneracy." The human element got in the way where there should have been only the divine. There is necessarily the human element in the work of God, for Christian work is God and man working together; but in the true relation man is God's instrumentality and is altogether in subjection to the divine Head, who rules over all. When the human element supplants, gets in the way of, or acts in the place of, the divine, we have a fundamental error that always results in apostasy. This human ecclesiasticism, always more or less intolerant, reached its autocratic perfection in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and constituted the "man of sin" who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshiped; so that he as God "sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God" (2 Thess. 2:3,4).
The spirit of human government in church affairs has shown itself in, or has followed in the wake of, every reform movement of the past. The Spirit of God worked in the movement to accomplish good, but was always checked by this baleful element. Luther meant well but was himself dogmatic and intolerant. He held to many doctrines of Catholicism whose wrongs he could not see. He did not make proper allowance that others besides himself might be right, or at least have some truth. Neither did he or his associates or followers leave the way open for God to lead into more truth, much less the whole truth. Thus the reformation of the sixteenth century, while it recovered from the debris of apostasy the doctrine of justification by faith, became the occasion for Protestant sects, human-ruled institutions, and these were succeeded by other sects. Some of these have been as intolerant, inflexible, and as unlike primitive Christianity as the Roman Catholic Church itself.
Church government, as humanized in the sects, has taken forms other than the hierarchic. We have the episcopal, or rule by bishops; the presbyterian, or rule by presbyters; the congregational, or rule by the local brotherhood. Our object here is, not to discuss which of these forms most nearly resembles or is most different from the Scriptural, but merely to show that man rule has manifested itself in various ways.