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One of these soon surrendered, "on account of the present embarrassment of finances." Now a compact army had already been assembled, while new races and languages were beginning to reinforce our ranks. Even the English contingent, which had so long maintained an unequal fight, was securely entrenched in four boroughs with seventeen congregations on its roll.
From this, and from a volume of Barbara Heynemann's inspired utterances, I gather that the congregations did not hesitate to criticize, and very sharply, the conduct of their spiritual leaders; and to depose them, and even expel them for cause. Moreover, they recount in their books, without disguise, all their misunderstandings.
But our office constantly brings us into association with this large outer fringe of our congregations at times when their hearts are responsive to anything that we may have to say. We meet them at weddings and at funerals. We baptize their children and we bury their dead. Once in a while some of them even come to church.
Bishops, ecclesiastical communities, religious congregations, all orders of Christian people, vied with one another in their zeal to do him honor. As many as six, eight, eleven thousand signatures were often appended to the same dutiful address. The memory of such faith and devotedness can never perish.
The Roman Basilica became the Christian church; a noble form of building enough, though one in which was neither darkness, solitude, nor silence, but crowded congregations, clapping or otherwise the popular preacher; or fighting about the election of a bishop or a pope, till the holy place ran with Christian blood.
The necessity for congregations and the traditions of preaching conspire to make the message of the Church far less vital than it ought to be. Preaching is too much declamation and far too much a following of narrow and deeply worn paths. The cults themselves represent a craving for light, especially in the regions of pain and loss.
In most of the permanent segregations the colored preachers were ordained and their congregations instituted under the patronage of the whites. At Savannah as early as 1802 the freedom of the slave Henry Francis was purchased by subscription, and he was ordained by white ministers at the African Baptist Church.
To make rules for the Church is one thing, but to execute these rules already made, and to employ the proper means for the promulgation of the Gospel, is another. The latter, but by no means the former, is the business of this body. That there ought to be no appeals from the decisions of congregations is evident from Matt. 18, 15-20."
Its sound was called in the Hebrew tongue Asosra. Two of these being made, one of them was sounded when they required the multitude to come together to congregations. When the first of them gave a signal, the heads of the tribes were to assemble, and consult about the affairs to them properly belonging; but when they gave the signal by both of them, they called the multitude together.
At Lindsey House they sunk £12,000; at Fulneck, in Yorkshire they sunk thousands more; at Bedford they sunk thousands more; and meanwhile they were spending thousands more in the purchase and lease of building land, and in the support of many preachers in the rapidly increasing country congregations. And here they made an amazing business blunder.
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