Luther said of himself, "At first I stood alone." Calvin in his epistle says: "The first Protestants were obliged to break off from the whole world."[[11]] The editor of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Rev. H. H. Milman, a Protestant divine, writes in his preface to that book: "It is idle, it is disingenuous to deny or to dissemble the early depravations of Christianity, its gradual and rapid departure from its primitive simplicity, still more from its spirit of universal love."
The reader is already acquainted with the declaration of Wesley that the Christians had turned heathens again and only had a dead form of faith left.[[12]]
In Smith's Dictionary of the Bible—the work is endorsed by sixty-three learned divines and Bible scholars—the following occurs: "We must not expect to see the Church of Christ existing in its perfection on the earth. It is not to be found thus perfect, either in the collected fragments of Christendom, or still less in any one of those fragments."[[13]]
Roger Williams refused to continue as pastor over the oldest Baptist Church in America on the ground that there was no regularly constituted church on earth, nor any person authorized to administer any church ordinance; "nor can there be until new apostles are sent by the great head of the church for whose coming I am seeking."[[14]] Alexander Campbell, founder of the sect of the "Disciples," says: "The meaning of this institution (the kingdom of heaven) has been buried under the rubbish of human tradition for hundreds of years. It was lost in the dark ages and has never, until recently been disinterred."[[15]]
And lastly, that greatest of all Protestant sects, the Church of England in its homily on the Perils of Idolatry, says: "Laity and clergy, learned and unlearned, all ages and sects and degrees have been drowned in abominable idolatry, most detested by God and damnable to man, for eight hundred years and more."[[16]]
Footnotes
[1]. Matt, xxviii: 19, 20.
[2]. End of Religious Controversy (Rev. John Milner), p. 281.
[3]. Faith of our Fathers, p. 72.
[4]. Matt. xxviii: 16-20.