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power of God unto salvation." There will be no room, then, to doubt concerning its tendency. If the wisest of our fellow-mortals denounce our doctrine, "as naturally tending to the weakening or extinction of moral principle," excluding the ideas of right and wrong," as opinions contrary to our consciousness, to our moral feeling and judgment, and to all our principles of action," — we shall not heed the reproach, because we know what they cannot know, who never felt its power. And we shall remember that it is written, "The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."

March 12, 1825.

A

SHORT HISTORY

OF

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST,

ETC. ETC.

PART THE FIRST.

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST IN THE
PRIMITIVE AGES.

INTRODUCTION.

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OUR oldest ecclesiastical historian has observed, that the history of the church ought, in strict propriety, to begin with the " dispensation of Christ," from whom we are called Christians; and in Christ we are to consider a twofold nature; a superior, in which he is manifested as God, an inferior, the nature of man, which he has taken upon him, that he might be capable of suffering in order to our salvation. "In this, the true history of the Founder of our religion," Eusebius further remarks,

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we discover its dignity and antiquity; and an answer is afforded to those who object against the faith of the Gospel its novelty and recent origin1."

The histories, indeed, of most religious and philosophical sects, trace their origin, as well in the personal characters and early circumstances of their respective founders, as in the transactions which first disclosed them to the world, at the

Euseb. Eccles. Hist. b. i. 1'.

B

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head of their disciples and the societies they had formed. This is, in a very especial manner, the case with respect to the church of Christ; since the salvation' of which they who constitute his church believe themselves to be partakers, in the midst of a lost and ruined world, and the holy calling' which has convoked them together, to obey from the heart a form of doctrine delivered to them, and which has formed them into a visible society upon earth, are expressly declared to be "according to a purpose and grace which was given them in Christ Jesus before the world began; but is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel1."

This appearing of the Saviour, evidently refers to the transactions which that age had witnessed, when the Son of God had assumed his inferior nature, and was manifested as "the Son of Man" upon earth; but for the dignity and antiquity of our religion, as the historian has admonished us, we must look to that superior nature of Christ, whereby he is manifested as God also, and in which alone he could sustain eternal relations to his church, or, before the actual assumption of his humanity, could act in his predestined character, and gather to himself, as we know he did, a people, who, in every age, were waiting for his appearing.

The knowledge which God has given to us, in his revealed word, concerning his own mysterious and incomprehensible existence, can alone help us to form a notion of this superior nature of our Divine Master; but by this we are taught that the oneness of the Deity,-without destroying its perfect oneness,-subsists in Three Persons; each of whom, by himself, is God and Jehovah, though there are not three Gods or three Jehovahs, but one God and one Jehovah. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,' all his followers accordingly have been ordered to be baptized by our blessed Lord himself.

That a church, bought by the death of the Son of God, called by his Spirit, and evidenced by sincere penitence of heart, and the confession of a true faith in the promises, existed in the world from the very period of the fall, we have abundant evidence in the Scriptures of the Old Testament. The promise of the Woman's seed to our first parents, preached Christ; the declaration of God, that he would put enmity," or a principle

2 Tim. ii. 9, 10.

of hostility, between the woman and the serpent, marked the separation of a people from a world seduced under the dominion of Satan, by the instilling of a principle of divine grace into their hearts, and might be described, in the language of the New Testament, as "turning them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God.". We perceive, too, from the very first, ordinances of worship exhibiting the same "mysteries of godliness" that the rites of the Christian church are intended to display; especially the ceremony of sacrifice, typifying the offering of that" Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." The knowledge of this same covenant of redemption, and the observance of these same ordinances of worship, Noah propagated among the new race of mankind after the flood; a traditionary knowledge of which all ancient nations seem to have preserved, long after they had become apostates from the worship of the true God.

From the short account which we have in Scripture, of the Patriarchal Church previous to the separation of the family of Abraham, and before the institution of the Mosaic rites in the nation of the Israelites, the grand principle inculcated by revealed religion was, in fact, "God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." The altar and the sacrifice, with the rites of purifying, discover this; and also a divinely instituted priesthood, which could shadow forth the great Redeemer to them that waited for him, not only perhaps in his priestly, but also in his regal character.

On the testimony to HIM THAT WAS TO COME, after the institution of the Jewish Church, I need not here insist; or on what is found concerning him in the Law, in the Psalms, and in the Prophets, through a long succession of ages. The Church of England is well supported in her declaration, "The Old Testament is not contrary to the New for both in the Old and New Testament, everlasting life is offered to mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and man, being both God and man1."

The members of the church, before the "coming of Christ in the flesh," had not indeed all the privileges which his faithful people now enjoy; but the principles of revealed religion were always the same, and its gracious progress may be described in the same language: at "the hearing of faith," they turned to God from idols"-or from whatever darkness

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'Art. VII.

or vanity had held their minds in thraldom-" to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven.” They waited for the Redeemer's coming to perform all the promises made unto the fathers; perhaps, in some respects, without a clear distinction, in their expectations, between his first and his second advent. That which affords a specific characteristic of the New Testament church, and which has somewhat varied the objects of their faith and hope, is, that "Christ hath once appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time, without sin, unto salvation."

The history of this last dispensation of redemption, from the period of the incarnation of the Son of God, or, more strictly, from the close of the canonical Scriptures down to our own times, is the object of our present research :-the history of the people who believe that Jesus is the Son of God; who have remission of sins through his precious blood-shedding; and whose hearts are directed by the Spirit "into the love of God and patient waiting for Jesus Christ," now gone to appear in the presence of God for us, as our great High Priest, and to come again in his glorious majesty, to judge the quick and the dead, at his appearing and kingdom.

That great event, the incarnation of the Son of God, when he, "whose goings forth were of old, even from everlasting," was born in Bethlehem Ephrata, of a virgin of the house of David, and took our nature upon him in all the circumstances of its humiliation,-sin only excepted, -is minutely recorded by the evangelists; but their records of their Divine Master being in the hand of every Christian, precludes the necessity of our entering here upon the narration of these well-known

events.

We perceive from what is said respecting Simeon and Anna, that notwithstanding the general corruption of the Jewish church, there existed at this time, in Jerusalem, a people who were waiting for the appearing of the promised Saviour, "the Lord's Christ." This has been satisfactorily accounted for by those who study the Old Testament prophecies, especially those of Daniel. But it appears that the Samaritans also, who are reported to have received only the five books of Moses, entertained the same general expectation. We read the confession of one of them, whose information could hardly have been superior to that of the rest of her countrymen :-I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all

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