Now, I will just state a strong case, but a fact. I was one day
travelling in the mail, and a certain person in one corner began a
most obscene conversation, with a gentleman who came to see him at the
door of the mail, while it was changing horses. Opposite him, in the
other corner, was his own son. When the mail arrived at the place to
which we were going, on getting out, I asked the people at the coach
office, who that person was. I had previously considered him as an
officer in the army, but, to my amazement, was told he was the
Rev. ----. This individual has since been made a dignitary of
the Church of England, and has had other preferment bestowed upon him;
and this is but part of what might be said. You will say this is an
extreme case. But it is a matter of fact. Am I to remain under the
ministry of such a teacher? It not only shocks the affections of a
child of God, but the very common sense of the world, and, if our eyes
were single, it would, in proportion strike us till we should come
down to the apostle's rule, about receiving teachers--those who preach
the truth, and walk as ye have us for an ensample.
As to example on which so much stress is laid, what example does a man
give to his children or neighbourhood, when he continues to sit under
the ministry of one whom he believes to be not a preacher but a
perverter of the truth? Why, that the Church of England and its forms,
even in the midst of our unfaithful ministry, is dearer to him than
Christ's Church and his truth, under less agreeable external
circumstances. On the other hand, what example does he give if he quit
this, which may be granted on all hands to be an unsound ministry, for
a sound one? Why, that he loves Christ's Church and truth so much
better than any circumstances, that though it may cost him pain and
sorrow he leaves the one for the other.
There seems an idea prevalent, and kept up in all these letters, which
is in fact most untrue--that a man, by leaving the church[41] becomes
a dissenter in principle. Whereas I think many who have merely
followed the line which the apostle recommends, of turning away from
false teachers, are not at all thereby rendered in love with dissent
as one system set up against another system. It appears to me, that a
sectarian Church of England-man, and a sectarian Dissenter, whose only
desire is to see augmented the respective members of those who follow
them, are equally removed from the mind of Christ. The thing devoutly
to be prayed for, for them all is, that when they respectively
approach the nearest to the meaning of the divine word and the mind of
Christ, they might be respectively strengthened and made willing in
those things to borrow from each other, and all sides to remember that
that love which covereth many faults is more valuable a thousand times
than that sectarian zeal that magnifies every weakness and infirmity
into a mortal sin, and which delights in evil surmisings and evil
speakings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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