WE do not believe that the 25th of December is the birthday of our Lord. We have seen abundant reasons for this, and could adduce them, if the importance of the matter required it, though we have not the works at hand now to refer to, as we think, settling the matter.
There is not an intimation of the first Christians making anything of the birthday of our Lord, observing it religiously in any way, or regarding it as a holiday, or a holy day at all. This accounts for the uncertainty about the day. If the first Christians had observed it, or in any particular way celebrated it, as the Jews did the Passover, there never could have been any doubt about the day. Anti-christ is great on holy days, specially if, of his own appointment, or if some paganism is mixed in them. This was one source of corruption in the primitive church—the continual tendency to mix up pagan ceremonies and superstitions with the simple, pure and holy religion of our Lord. Worldly and carnal-minded men in the early ages conceived the idea of popularizing the religion of Christ and commending it to the world by mixing pagan ceremonies, customs and superstitions with it; adorning it with philosophy and the pagan ideas of refinement. But all this only corrupted and degraded it.
The Romish apostasy now has some forty holy days in a year, and as many human laws about observing them, while those involved in it gormandize, drink, revel and gamble on the Lord’s day, and thus encroach upon the laws of a civilized and enlightened people. Protestants are patronizing them in this, and recognizing their holy days, and at the same time making nothing of celebrating the sufferings of our Lord, on the first day of every week, as all history assures us was the practice of the first church! Instead of recognizing the glorious resurrection of our Lord, in the assembling on the first day of the week, they talk of the Sabbath, and instead of “the communion of the blood and body of the Lord”—the commemoration of his great sufferings for us, they listen to a pitiful ditty called “a sermon,” and then put on long faces and keep Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, etc., not named in the law of God at all, but derived from paganism. If we had no other objection to sectarianism but this, we would stand clear. People who see nothing in “the first day of the week”—“the Lord’s day”—but Sabbath, or rest, and see not the importance of celebrating the Lord’s death, commemorating his sufferings, in obedience to some of his last instructions, such as the injunction, “Do this till I come”—“Do this in memory of me”—need to be enlightened before they can be regarded as worshipers in any true sense, under Christ. This is the very life, the heart, the soul, and if it be left out, all is a sham, an empty pretence—nothing. The question is not about Christmas, Good Friday, nor Easter, of Romish and pagan authority, but of “the Lord’s day,” and “the communion of the blood and body of the Lord,” having the supreme and absolute authority of the Great King.
[PREACHERS BELONGING TO NO CHURCH.]
WE think it is quite proper for men who belong to no church to make it known, and then if people want to uphold such anarchy, disorderly men, as preachers of the gospel, they can do so with a clear understanding. If preachers can live out of any church and do the will of God, other people can do the same. This is not all nor the worst of it. These men claim not only that they can live out of any church and do the will of God, but they claim that they can do more good out of any church than in one. This only needs to be run out to its legitimate result to see the absurdity of it. Outside of any church is not only outside of churches of human device, but outside of the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth. The Lord has established one church, one body, one kingdom. He gave himself for that church. He built it on the rock. He sanctified and cleansed it with the washing of the water by the word. He made one new man, so making peace, or one new church. It is the Lord’s one flock of which he is the one Shepherd; the temple of God, in which God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit dwell; the kingdom which we have received that can not be moved. Outside of any church is outside of this church. Outside of this church is the world, and inside of it is the kingdom of God—all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.