One word more may be said. At the business meeting one of the speakers was the Rev. Leigh Mann. Distinctly he avowed a belief the reverse of Unitarianism, and distinctly he glorified the association as one in which men of the most opposite dogmas could meet. In such an utterance we have an indication,
how significant or eccentric time alone can tell. At any rate, while confessing that hitherto there has been little of Christian union founded on dogma, we may anxiously ask, is there a better chance if the common bond be work?
CHAPTER XVI.
the london ecclesia.
In the independent way, Baxter, describing the Westminster Assembly of Divines, says, “I disliked many things.” After mentioning what those things were—their making too light of ordination, their unnecessary and unscriptural strictness about the qualification of church members—he adds, “I disliked also the lamentable tendency of this their way to divisions and subdivisions and the nourishing of heresies and sects.” The soul of the good man was wearied, as well it might be, with these differences, so trifling yet so fiercely discussed, with this waste of power, with this spirit of wrangling and contention, with these quarrels of Christian with Christian, when the world was only to be made better, and the true Church only to be built up, by a holy life. In our time the tendency of some minds to fly off into fresh sects is greater, perhaps, than ever. In one street
you see a placard up stating that here the Gospel is preached, and nowhere else. A good man says he is weary of all this sectarianism, and at once hires a room and starts a new sect. A man’s conscience is too sensitive to allow him to worship with a one-man ministry, or with any existing denomination. He shakes his head, and mourns over their worldliness, their carnality, their want of spiritual life; but does he better it by standing aloof, by shutting himself up with a few dismal-minded people, who come with their Bibles, and see in them, not what sound scholarly criticism teaches, but that which their own morbid fancy suggests? As men of the world, these things are to be looked at practically, and by the light of common sense. Here are certain religious agencies at work—by them people are being strengthened in the Christian life, trained to Christian work, in their way promoting the welfare of man, and glorifying God. I may affect a superior piety, I may refuse to associate with common Christians, I may leave them; but what is the result? That as far as I can I put hindrances in their way. Ignorant people look up to me as a saint, and the church and the minister where I have any influence are to the extent of that influence damaged. A gentleman
writes to me—“Those who now represent the London Ecclesia, in recognition of the constitution and order of its organization, are, in this metropolis, myself and three others;” and then quotes—“‘Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’” It is in Peckham this new religious body meets. At such meetings they do not admit strangers, in fulfilment of the ordinance of the Lord which enjoins us to assemble “ourselves together to worship God in spirit and in truth,” and commands us—“If there come any unto you and bring not this doctrine (the doctrine of the Christ), receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed.”
For the doctrines of this new sect I must refer the inquirer to a pamphlet published at 22, Paternoster Row, called “The Truth as it is in Jesus, defined in the Constitution and Order of the London Ecclesia, or immersed believers of the things of the Kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ.” In this pamphlet we have a summary of the faith delivered to the saints contrasted with the erroneous dogmas of popular theology, and also the apostolic rules for an ecclesiastical organization. In America, and many parts of England, Ecclesias, as they call them, exist.
The document to which they subscribe their names is an exceedingly lengthy one, nor is it very intelligible. I should say that wherein they differ from other Christians in point of doctrine is this, that “everlasting life is the gracious gift of God through our Lord Jesus the Christ—the clothing upon the living soul or mortal body of life of a justified believer, with the quickening spirit or house which is from heaven, or the swallowing up of his death nature in the life of the Divine nature, so that this corruptible puts on incorruption, and this mortal puts on immortality by an impartation of spirit-life energy into every fibre of its organism, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, during the sounding of the last trumpet; and according to his type the Lord Jesus, the saint then becomes a son of God in power by a spirit of holiness, through a resurrection from among the dead, and cannot sin because he is born of God, and lives and moves and has his being in the essential goodness and peace and blessedness of the Divine existence.” Hence “the physical and moral impossibility of an immoral agency of evil exercising the attributes of an uncreated spirit—omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence—emanating from the Supreme Good, to antagonize His purposes and defeat the counsels of
His will concerning the redemption of the Adamic race for the glory of His name.”
So far I quote what the followers of this new sect call their Marturion. As people generally can neither understand nor find time to read such verbose and minute confessions of faith, let me add that they believe that punishment on the finally impenitent is “the infliction on him as a living soul or mortal body of life of the many or few stripes in execution of his sentence until the appointed hour of his final doom arrives—to utterly perish in his own corruption.” Furthermore, I glean that with them the Devil simply means sin in the flesh. As the reader will have gathered from the title of their confession, they baptize with immersion; they deny, amongst other things, the common doctrine of the Trinity, or that Christ is God and had an existence independent of the Father; that the Holy Ghost operates of His own power as God; that God fashioned man after His own image; that the serpent was an incarnation of an immoral intelligence; they deny the common ideas of heaven and hell; that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses the sin of the whole world, so that infants, idiots, and believers obtain eternal salvation under the covenanted and uncovenanted