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There are works that cost nothing, and works that are chargeable; and observe it, the unsound faith will choose to itself the most easy works it can find: for example, there is reading, praying, hearing of sermons, baptism, breaking of bread, church-fellowship, preaching, and the like; and there is mortification of lusts, charity, simplicity, and open-heartedness with a liberal hand to the poor, and their like also.
Water-baptism was to be left to individual conviction; they were to love each other equally, whether they advocated baptism in infancy, or in riper years. The only thing essential to church-fellowship, in Mr.
You proceed, 'If by edification, be meant the private increase of grace, in one another, in the use of private means, as private Christians in meeting together; how doth the principle you oppose hinder that? Endeavour to make men as holy as you can, that they may be fitted for church-fellowship, when God shall shew them the orderly way to it. Ans.
Nothing is more frequently taught and stressed by the Bible than the truth that church-fellowship presupposes, and must be preceded by, unity in the spirit, in doctrine. Amos 3, 3: "How can two walk together except they be agreed?" According to the Bible the Word of God alone is to be taught, heard, and confessed in the Christian Church.
Already their very indifference to it, the long years of the gradual abandonment of the Saybrook system, together with the development in civil life of a broader conception of humanity, had tended to bring back the independence of the individual church, while custom had preserved the inroojted principle of church-fellowship.
Christians are like the several flowers in a garden, that have upon each of them the dew of heaven; which being shaken with the wind, let fall their dew at each other's roots, whereby they are jointly nourished and become nourishers of one another. Church-fellowship, rightly managed, is the glory of all the world.
The management was placed in the hands of eight commissioners, two for each colony, "all in church-fellowship with us," who were to hold an annual meeting in each of the colonies by rotation, and to have power by a vote of six "to determine all affairs of war or peace, leagues, aids, charges, and number of men for war, division of spoils, or whatever is gotten by conquest," the admission of new confederates, etc.
This excommunication was not, however, permanent, and the sinner could be restored to the privileges of Church-fellowship after he had confessed his sin, professed penitence, and performed certain penitential acts, chief among which were alms-giving, fasting and prayer, and, somewhat later, pilgrimage.
How marvellous, the Friends are protected; and the Baptists, under the same government, are persecuted with increasing rigor! No interference on their behalf has been of the least use. In the Fourth Month of 1855 John Yeardley received a certificate "to visit his friends in Yorkshire, and to hold meetings with persons not in church-fellowship" with Friends.
For nearly twenty years did this austere man rigidly go through this lonely and sad ceremonial, until he conquered by sheer obstinacy and determination, and was again admitted to church-fellowship. A very extraordinary custom prevailed in several New England churches.
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