2010。 THE CALLING OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST: A DISCOURSE TO ILLUSTRATE THE POSTURE AND DUTY OF THE PRESBYTE- Delivered at the opening of the General Assembly of 1842. We pray always for you that our God would count you worthy of this calling, and fulfil all the good pleasure of his goodness, and the work of faith with power.-2 THESS. i. 11. FATHERS AND BRETHREN, chosen representatives of a great and wide-spread communion, I stand before you this day to perform one of those remarkable official acts required by Divine Providence of but a man here and there in successive generations, and, as yet, with us, of no man a second time. Deeply impressed with the solemnity of the occasion, let us fervently rejoice in the many evidences upon which we are allowed to trust, that the God of Jacob, the God of a chosen people, is still with us as our refuge and our strength; let us reverently seek in his dealings and his commands, for the knowledge of our peculiar posture and vocation, as an important portion of his visible kingdom; and let us humbly address ourselves to him for grace to be found worthy of our high calling, and for faith to fulfil all the purposes of his infinite goodness towards us. I. The Church of the living God, is one, and is eternal. It is the light and the hope of this guilty and ruined world. The real history of man, when truly read, is a history of religious ideas, in their progress, revolutions, and results. Though these have been often wrong and often disastrous, yet, in all their manifestations, they establish the universality and the intensity of the religious constitution of man. And amid the mass of deplorable errors which have covered and polluted the earth, a stream of clear and life-giving truth, issuing from the throne of God, has urged its way onward and onward through perishing generations, and has rolled its increasing and purifying waters, even as far as unto us. The perversity of man which forfeited the benefits of the covenant of works, in an aggravated form has availed to deprive our race of the full blessings of every successive development of the covenant of grace. The antedeluvian dispensation of personal visitation from the heavenly intelligencies, the Abrahamic covenant which brought with it a visible and gathered Church, the Mosaic economy which was replenished with the blessings of a permanent, written revelation, and the personal ministry of the Lord of glory, God descended amongst men to perfect his work; all these passed away, leaving but a very small remnant to save the whole earth from the fate of Sodom. The free dispensation of the Divine Spirit, early perverted by an incipient hierarchy, was at last swallowed up, over the whole Western Church, by the successive corruptions of a spiritual oligarchy, tyranny, and despotism; until the bride of the Lamb, driven into a waste and howling wilderness, sat, for weary centuries, weeping over her murdered children and sorrowing at the long delayed coming of her Lord. Prone as man is to every false religion, and greedy of every corruption of the true, no lesson has been more sternly taught him, than that the spirit of all these falsehoods and corruptions is fatal even to his earthly hopes. It was not therefore without resistance, though often illconceived and ill-directed, that Antichrist rose to such authority and ruled with such absolute sway. The civil power throughout Europe sought in vain to curb his iron rule, and to reform the church upon the bosom of which he sat proclaiming himself a God. The whole learning of the west banded itself against him again and again, only to make manifest its emptiness in such a conflict. The Church itself over which he reigned, often and by its most numerous and powerful councils sought without success its own reformation in its head and in its members, confessing before earth and heaven, and trembling at the sight of its dreadful apostasies. And more than all, the true children of God, throughout these fearful and protracted ages, lifted up their voices in solemn testimony, from the depths of dungeons, and from the dust into which they were trodden, and from the racks on which they perished. At length when the cup of abominations was full, and that of suffering had been drained to its dregs, the Spirit of God, in infinite compassion, re-visited the earth; the light of the Incarnate Word broke forth once more upon the nations; and down-trodden men arose and shook off their gross darkness, and flocked with mingled lamentations and rejoicings to be healed by the beams of the bright and blessed day-star. Thought, which had slept for ages, awoke as a strong man refreshed by slumber. Inquiry, which as to all useful objects had been fettered and as to most stifled, burst a bondage no longer possible when thought was free. The conscience, long blinded, partook of the same impulse that enlightened the understanding, quickened the perceptions, and sharpened the faculties of man; and his moral emancipation followed immediately, if indeed it did not, step by step, accompany his intellectual. And then the triumphs of personal and public liberty crowned and adorned the glorious fabric of the Reformation. There is a profound and pervading sympathy amongst all the grand interests of man. Even the convulsions which his sins and follies render necessary, subvert obstacles otherwise irresistible and consolidate a progress which would be imperceptible and uncertain. The advance of modern civilization and the development of all those great elements which constitute the grandeur and strength of our present social state, have been co-ordinate with the progress of that spiritual revolution which, though it had long worked, gained its first decided victories in the fore part of the sixteenth century. Nor is the unity of the religious standards of the Reformation less striking than the co-ordination of all the great interests of society with the spirit of the Reformation itself. |