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The Church of England and Other Religious Communions, Lectures
The Church of England and Other Religious Communions Lectures Author:Robert Howard, Annie Besant, Jesus Christ 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: LECTURE III. THE BAPTISTS. It is the recognition of an important truth when we find each religious communion, as it separates from the Church, and in some ... more »cases also from a parent of its own kind, making a serious appeal to the scriptures of the New Testament and the practice of the apostolic age to defend and sanction its doctrines and institutions. Practically, however, in dealing with the claims advanced by each of the various religious sects to represent the original or, as it may be called, the purest form of the Christian Church, the appeals which are made, in defence of their position, to the New Testament may be put on one side. For these claims are made to rest chiefly on the varying interpretations of isolated passages. And such passages from the Scriptures are, in some respects, like the earthworks thrown up in haste by a besieging force: they only cover what would be otherwise a weak and dangerous position, and they serve for a time as a shelter, from behind which the attacking party may take aim at their adversaries and retire under protection. The New Testament, it has been often said, and itwill bear repetition, is a book instinct with principles, but not with ecclesiastical canons or rules ; and we can only discover the outward constitution and practice of the Church (its " ecclesiastical polity," as it is called) in the apostolic age, so far as we take the New Testament for our guide, by a process of inference from the brief and, as it were, marginal references in the recorded acts and teaching of the apostles. It is clear, I think, that if this process of inference, unchecked by comparison with subsequent church history, is allowed to have " free course," it will be not so much " glorified " as nullified. Calvin, for instance, as we have seen, from one o...« less