History of the missions of the American board of commissioners for foreign missions to the oriental churches, Volume II.Anderson, Rufus
Religion
History of the missions of the American board of commissioners for foreign missions to the oriental churches, Volume II.
Anderson, Rufus
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Missions -- Eastern churches
"I have preached there three times since. Yesterday was our
communion. The house was crowded at both services. It was judged
that seven hundred were inside, and not less than one hundred and
fifty outside. I preached in the morning on the spiritual character
of a true church, and newness of life as the condition of admission,
and that the ordinances belong exclusively to the church, and not to
those outside. All listened attentively, though a disturbance was
feared. In the afternoon I 'fenced' our communion fully, but Priest
John had the effrontery to partake. I have since learned that had it
been withheld, he, with the rabble, would have taken it by force. A
perfect separation seems called for, and with it a casting out of
unworthy members from the church. But the heart of the body is
right, and will, I trust, stand by the truth."
"Enlightened villagers," adds Mr. Shedd, under date of January 20,
1870, "besides members of the evangelical communion, did not
partake. It shows the movement for high-church aid in its true
colors. Such aid on the part of the English bishops is nothing more
nor less than salarying Mar Shimon and his ecclesiastics, for
reading their old prayers and using their dead forms and rites, as
they have done for ages past. We rejoice in so simple an issue, and
are sure it can do no injury to vital Christianity."[1]
[1] _Missionary Herald_, 1870, p. 190.
The time having come for separate and independent church
organizations, these painful occurrences seem to have been
providentially designed to promote that result.
Mr. Cochran thus writes: "The progress of the gospel and
providential occurrences, are bringing us into many new relations to
the old Nestorian Church, and grave questions, affecting the purity
and future growth of our churches, are now forcing themselves upon
us. So long as the Old Church did not oppose evangelical labors, so
long as she freely opened her doors to our services, consenting to a
separate administration of the ordinances for the hopefully pious,
and silently tolerating many ecclesiastical and social reforms, and
an abandonment of the liturgical service; in short, so long as we
could see, under the preached gospel, the hold on the old
superstitions steadily lessening, and the masses being leavened with
evangelical truth, we were more than content to labor on without a
separate church organization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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