Endowed Territorial Work Author:William Smith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 83 LECTURE III. THE PRINCIPLE OF ENDOWED TERRITORIAL WORK AS CONTRASTED WITH VOLUNTARYISM. The line of observation followed in the previous lectures wil... more »l be felt to be neither inapposite to the main subject, nor uncalled for in the circumstances of the times, by those who consider that a copious and troublesome source of contention threatens soon to be, not, as heretofore, whether the Church of Christ on earth has had a particular form and constitution divinely and positively assigned to it in the New Testament, or whether, in the light of human reason exercised in applying practically the general principles there set forth, this or that ecclesiastical organisation and mode of procedure should be preferred—but whether it is the will of God, and consistent with true Gospel principles, that the Church of Christ on earth should assume any corporate form at all. The negative is maintained, at times with not a little plausibility, by a veryable and suggestive writer, in a recent publication. "There are those," he says, "and they cannot be despised, who believe that the tide now setting in all over the world against ecclesiastical establishments is but the beginning of the end; that the accomplishment of the object desired—the complete severance of Churches from the State, and their consequent independence of Governments—will, before many years are over, be followed by results little anticipated ; that the love of power inherent in all who imagine themselves authorised to sway the spirits of their fellow-men on earth by considerations bearing on the world to come, will manifest itself in unexpected forms ; and that a reaction, probably in the direction of a thorough spiritual despotism, followed by an infidelity that will demand the suppression of all ecclesiastical association...« less