The thorough agreement of our reformers' ideas respecting the nature of the church with those of the apostles and primitive Christians comes out even more emphatically in the statements they make in the First Book of Discipline and the Book of Common Order about the ordinary members of the congregation, and the arrangements there recommended for promoting their spiritual welfare, and calling forth all their gifts. Not only are they to be allowed a voice in the choice of their ministers, elders, and deacons, in the exclusion of members from the church and their readmission into it, and through their representatives in the government of the church generally; not only are they to have week-day and Sabbath services, and frequent communions for their edification and growth in grace,--but in the principal congregations there are to be weekly meetings for the study and interpretation of the Scriptures. At these meetings every man was to be allowed to speak his mind and propose his doubts, to exercise his gifts for the edification of the brethren, or to "inquire as God shall move his heart and the text minister occasion."[210] The opening paragraph of chapter xii. of the First Book of Discipline shows us whence this remarkable institution was derived, and proves clearly that Neander was not the first in post-Reformation times who discovered the full significance of certain well-known passages in St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, but only a restorer of the long-forgotten teaching of Calvin, Alasco, and Knox. The paragraph is as follows: "To the end that the kirk of God may have a tryall of men's knowledge, judgements, graces, and utterances; as also, such that have somewhat profited in God's Word may from time to time grow in more full perfection to serve the kirk as necessity shall require; it is most expedient that in every towne where schooles and repaire of learned men are, there be a time in one certain day every week appointed to that exercise which S. Paul calls prophecying; the order whereof is expressed by him in thir words: 'Let the prophets speak two or three and let the other judge, but if anything be revealed to another that sitteth by, let the former keep silence; for ye may one by one all prophesie that all may learne, and all may receive consolation.' ... By which words of the apostle, it is evident that in the Kirk of Corinth when they did assemble for that purpose, some place of Scripture was read, upon the which one first gave his judgement to the instruction and consolation of the auditors; after whom did another either confirme what the former had said, or added what he had omitted, or did gently correct or explaine more properly where the whole verity was not revealled to the former; and in case things were hid from the one and from the other, liberty was given for a third to speak his judgement to the edification of the kirk." The exercise or practice here authorised