Dost thou believe that the books which have the internal sense and are truly the Word of God are,—the five books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, the Psalms of David, the prophets, including the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the four Gospels, and the Revelation?” [79]
It is further stated in their eleventh article of faith, “That immediately after death, which is only a putting off of the material body, never to be resumed, man rises again in a spiritual or substantial body, in which he continues to live to eternity.”
On these doctrines it may be observed that the forms of worship founded on them are not such as Christ and his apostles ordered. The doxology is, “To Jesus Christ be glory and dominion for ever and ever;” the blessing, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.” The prayers are addressed to the “blessed Lord Jesus.” Whereas Christ, when he gave us a form of prayer, bade us address “our Father in heaven;” and bade us ask of the Father in his name; and the form of the apostolic doxology is, “To God only wise be glory through Jesus Christ for ever”; [80a] and the blessing, “Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.” [80b] As at this time Christ had ascended from the earth, had the human nature been entirely merged in the Divine, as this sect asserts, Paul the Apostle would not have made this distinction, which implies that the Lord Jesus still existed somewhere in his human form as the everlasting visible temple of the Invisible father of all things, for “no man hath seen God at any time,” says the beloved Apostle, [81a] and this is confirmed by Christ himself. [81b] If the man then be lost in the Deity, it follows that the Lord Jesus exists no more for us. I am aware that this consequence is denied by the sect, but it is a self evident proposition: for their creed runs thus, “I believe in one God in whom is a Divine Trinity, &c., and that this God is the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who is Jehovah in a glorified human form.” Now a human form must have some properties of matter; it must be visible, and circumscribed, or it is not form; and what is circumscribed and visible cannot be God, who, of necessity, is uncircumscribed, and therefore invisible. The infinite Eternal Omnipotent Deity must be where that glorified body is not; therefore, the Great Father of all things must always be the object of worship, through Jesus Christ, who is the visible image of his glory. The form of baptism is retained by this sect, though they assert that the rite was “constantly administered by the Apostles in the name of Christ alone”; an assertion contradicted by the whole testimony of antiquity from the earliest times; adding, “nevertheless it is well to use the express words of the Lord, when it is known and acknowledged in the church that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three separate persons but three Divine Essentials, constituting the single Divine Person of our Lord Jesus Christ.” [82] With regard to the “internal sense” of Scripture it is sufficient to observe that if “every syllable” were to be considered as inspired and holy, the long list of various readings would grievously shake our faith, though these are quite immaterial as to the general meaning.
There are serious objections to the distinctive tenets of this sect, yet, in justice to them, it must be allowed that the unguarded language of some preachers does so split up the Deity into separate individuals as to make the doctrine so taught a complete tritheism, and that a serious mind returning to the express declaration of the Scripture, that God is One, may be so far shocked by such unmeasured expressions, as to run into the extreme which I have condemned. Unitarianism on the one hand, and the doctrine of Swedenborg on the other, have equally sprung from a want of proper caution when speaking of the different manifestations of the Deity, and an unmeasured itch for the definition of things too far beyond the reach of our finite faculties to admit of any precision of terms. Words were formed for the things pertaining to earth; how then can they ever exactly express the nature of the Deity?
Notwithstanding the faith professed by this sect, their teaching, nevertheless, returns to the doctrine of the Gospel. In a tract “on the true meaning of the intercession of Jesus Christ,” published at Manchester by their own religious tract society, we have the following passage: “The Humanity named Jesus is the medium whereby man may come to God, because the Father, heretofore invisible, is manifested and made visible and approachable in him. This is meant by our coming unto God by him;” and elsewhere, as we cannot obtain this “light of life” without following the Lord, and doing his will, as he did the will of the Father, agreeably to his own saying, “If ye keep my commandments, even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love;” so neither can we obtain that divine food by which our spiritual life is to be sustained, unless we labour for it, as the Lord himself instructed us when he said “Labour for the meat which endureth unto everlasting life”; and is it not of the greatest importance clearly to understand what this labour implies? Let the reader be assured that he must labour in that spiritual vineyard which the Lord desires to plant in his soul, in order that it may bear abundant fruits of righteousness to the glory of his heavenly father.” [84] Thus we see again that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity will find their way, however men may speculatively disclaim them. Why then do we differ outwardly, when at heart we agree?
The Plymouth Brethren, so called probably from the place where this society first arose, do not allow themselves to be a sect, though in their practices they differ considerably from those of the Established Church. They meet together on the morning of the first day of the week to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, when any “Brother” is at liberty to speak for mutual edification. In the afternoon and evening, when they have preachers, the services are similar to those in the Congregational Churches (Independents): the desk, however, for they condemn pulpits, is not occupied by one man, but used as a convenient place for speaking, being alternately occupied by the “Brother,” who reads the hymn, the one who prays, and the one who teaches or preaches the Word. There are also “Meetings for Prayer,” and what are technically called “reading meetings;” when a chapter is read, and those “Brethren” who have made it matter of reflection, speak upon it clause by clause for their mutual instruction.
Before a person is acknowledged a “Brother,” his name is announced at one of the times of “meeting together to break bread,” as it is termed, and if nothing occurs in the interval, he takes his seat with them the next Sunday.[85] Any one is admitted to their communion whom they believe to be “a child of God;” but they do not receive or acknowledge him as a brother, “while in actual connection with any of the various forms of worldliness,” i.e. the other churches of Christ. Their preachers move about from place to place, forming different congregations, which they again leave for other places where their services are required. None of their ministers receive any stipulated charity. The “Brethren” disapprove of any association of Christians for any purpose whatever, whether civil or religious, and therefore discountenance all Sunday School, Bible, Missionary, or even purely Benevolent, Societies. They do not disapprove of sending either Bibles or Missionaries to the heathen; but they say that if they go at all, “God and not the church must send them.” They do not think that the Gospel is to convert the world, but that it is to be “preached as a witness to” or rather against “all nations.” The world, they say, “is reserved for judgment, and therefore it is wholly contrary to the character of a Christian to have any thing to do with it or its government.” When a child of God is born again, “he lays,” say they, “all his worldly relations down at the feet of Christ, and he is at liberty to take up none but those which he can take up in the Lord.” They neither pray for pardon of sin, nor for the presence and influence of the Spirit, and carefully exclude such petitions from their hymns. Many of them think it inconsistent with the Christian character to amass wealth, or to possess furniture or clothing more than is necessary for health and cleanliness; and very great sacrifices have been made by the more wealthy of them.
These are most of them unimportant peculiarities; but the great feature of this sect, for so notwithstanding their protest, I must call these “Brethren,” is a degree of self approbation and uncharity for others, which, to say the least, is not what Christ taught. “No sect,” says Rust, [87a] “is more Sectarian, and none more separate from Christians of all denominations than “The Plymouth Brethren.” The Church of Rome they consider “bad.” The Church of England “bad.” “A popish priest and a parish priest, both bad;” “but infinitely worse,” says one of the Brethren (a Captain Hall), “is a people’s preacher.” They occasionally indulge in what they term “biting jests and sarcastic raillery,” of the ministers of our church, and of those who differ from them, which evince but little of the meek and peaceable spirit of the Gospel; [87b] for, as Lord Bacon has well observed, “to intermix Scripture with scurrility in one sentence;—the majesty of religion and the contempt and deformity of things ridiculous,—is a thing far from the reverence of a devout Christian, and hardly becoming the honest regard of a sober man.” If I have appeared to speak harshly of this sect, it is because they seem to me to have abandoned so much of the spirit of the Gospel. “If the tenets of the Plymouth Brethren be consistent with themselves,” observes Mr. Rust, “they necessarily withdraw them from all society, and every existing form of Christianity, shutting them out from all co-operation with the holy and benevolent, for the relief and blessing of their poor or sinful fellow creatures, making it sinful to fulfil the duties of a subject, a citizen, &c.” But I hope and believe that these tenets must be and are counteracted by the instinctive love of our kind, which for the benefit of the world God has implanted in man. The human race is so essentially social that they who endeavour to dissociate mankind, stand in much the same situation as he would do who should hope to dam up the ocean. It is in fact to these silent tendencies of human nature, whose force we never know till we attempt to check them, that we owe much of the innocuousness of false or overstrained opinions: the reason is deluded, but the feelings which the Creator has made a part of our very being, generally correct the false argument; and the man, if not previously corrupted by vice, acts right though he argues wrong.
