A great claim is set up by this Church. Like Aaron’s rod, it is to swallow up all the rest. So great is its hatred of sects, it forms a new one. While calling itself the holy and Apostolic Church, it makes no exclusive claim to the title. It acknowledges it to be the common title of the one Church baptized unto Christ. It claims to be no body of separatists from the Church of England. The members recognise the continuance of that Church from the days of the Apostles, and of the three orders, bishops, priests, and deacons, by succession from the Apostles. They have no sympathy with Dissent in any of its forms. That is schism, and is to be condemned accordingly. They meet in separate congregations, but they are not open to the charge of schism, on the ground of their meeting being permitted and authorized, so they say, by an ordinance of paramount authority which they believe God has restored for the benefit of the Church. At once their ecclesiasticism strikes the most superficial observer; the idea of the Church, that it is a mere assembly of believers, is rejected by them on every occasion and in every way. Their great glory is that the Apostolical order exists and is manifested in them. Their special teaching is something more. It is often asked, Are the days of Pentecost gone never to return? Have miracles ceased from among men? Cannot signs and wonders be still wrought by the Holy Ghost? As a rule, the Church answers this question in the negative. It teaches that the age of miracles is past; that they are no longer necessary; that in the fulness of time the Divine will was made known to man; and that the Church needs not now the signs and wonders by which that revelation was attested and declared. A large, or rather an active body, some few years ago sprang up in Scotland, crossed the Border, and extended to England, and enrolled amongst their members many in what may be termed an influential position in life. Enter their churches, and you learn, according to them, the gift of tongues still exists, signs and wonders are still manifested to the faithful, miracles are still wrought by those upon whom God has conferred the gift. Still, as much as in Apostolic times, does the Divine afflatus dwell in man, and the man so endowed becomes a prophet, and declares the will of God. “The doctrine of Christ’s reign upon earth was at first,” says Gibbon, “treated as profound allegory, was considered by degrees as a doubtful and useless opinion, and was at length regarded as the absurd invention of heresy and fanaticism.” A similar process has been in operation with regard to the power of working miracles and speaking in unknown tongues. Against this process the Irvingite or Catholic Church is a living protest.