If you work upon this scheme among converts from heathenism, it is certain that you will find trouble. If you work upon the other, you will find trouble also. No good work in this evil world ever went forward without trouble. But this “Congregational way,” it is supposed by some, opens the door specially wide to all sorts of dissatisfaction and dissension. False brethren, unawares brought in, will scatter seeds of heresy and lead off into all sorts of back-slidings. Time will be wasted in disputes that had better be given to study and prayer. Ill-considered and impossible projects will be pressed upon you, and you will find the exercise of your veto power involving you in ungracious, even hostile, criticism. Thus your influence will be weakened, and your usefulness impaired. These objections are plausible, and address themselves to principles in human nature which the new birth, and even a missionary’s consecration, do not at once supplant. If we are not mistaken, they have gone far to determine the method in much of the missionary work of the world. But if we have read the New Testament correctly, the method against which these objections may be urged, is the one under which the first Christian missions were conducted—the one to which the teachings of the Master point, and which the example of his Apostles has endorsed. And the heathen among whom these primitive missions were conducted were just such as we find in the world to-day, only, if possible, more corrupt—a less promising material for a self-governing church. It is certain, furthermore, that those primitive churches, organized on this scheme of Christian liberty, did get into difficulties—into just such difficulties as these objections suggest. The epistles give mournful evidence of this. The hearts of the Apostles were often heavy on account of it. And yet no other scheme was substituted for it until long after the Apostles’ day, and liberty, with all its dangers and all its inconveniences, was preferred to any yoke of bondage, however well contrived.