The One Church on Earth Author:John Robertson 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: fied by outer circumstances of position and weather, retains the structure of the bud. The picture, though marred in the painting, presents, nevertheless, in the... more » main, the general features of the original. Let me, 0 my God, be privileged to have heaven's gates unbarred before me at the last, and look in, a spectator, nay a worshipper, when this contrast shall be fully drawn in the facts of heaven's history ; and let me have a glimpse, if Thou wilt, to enrapture me of those two most singular and amazing objects in heaven, that surpass angelic natures in their glory. Thyself, Thou " three-one" God in Christ, upon thy throne, reigning in thine own inimitable oneness ! And Thy Church, 0 Christ, many-in-one, in the midst of which Thou art and Thy Father in Thee; one glorious living thing made by Thee, like to Thee in Thy oneness—the only living likeness of the three-one God! SECT. III. THE ONENESS OF THE INVISIBLE CHURCH, ON EARTH—HOW MANIFESTED. This Church has no outer organization of its own, apart from that of the visible Church, and theorganization of the visible Church does not exactly correspond with it. We endeavoured to make that plain from Scripture in our definition at the outset. Its members are not found in any single ecclesiastical body or number of ecclesiastical bodies organized into one Church of believers. There are unbelievers, mere professors, mixed up with them everywhere in all the churches. God's original plan certainly was, and His effort still is, as far as possible, to get the visible and the invisible, the body of professors, and the body of believers, to coalesce or coincide and be one; and if men were not capable of deceiving themselves or acting the hypocrite it would be so. But the devil mars the plan. The Churches, visible and invisible, do not coi...« less