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Updated: June 3, 2025
Considerations of church-membership and baptism, for which the Cambridge Synod of 1648 was summoned, were destined, because of political events in England, to be thrust aside and to wait another eight years for their solution in that conference which framed the Half-Way Covenant as supplementary to the Cambridge Platform of faith and discipline.
Thus suffrage was regarded as a privilege and not a right. Although the first of the colonies to establish a Separatist church, the Puritans of Plymouth did not make church-membership a condition of citizenship; still, there can be no doubt that this restriction practically prevailed at Plymouth, since up to 1643 only about two hundred and thirty persons acquired the suffrage.
Teage, editor of the Liberia Herald, preached an appropriate and well-written discourse, on occasion of admitting three men and a woman to church-membership. One of the males was a white, who had married a colored woman in America, and came out to the colony with Mr. McDonough's people, some time ago.
Most bitter of all toward the new theory of church-membership was, naturally enough, Mr. This burning question was the source of angry contentions in the First Church of Boston. Its teacher, the learned and melancholy Norton, died in 1663, and four years later the aged pastor, John Wilson, followed him.
The evil in some degree suggests the remedy, though we do not mean to say that we know of any complete remedy. Church-membership ought to involve discipline of some kind in order to furnish moral aid. It ought, that is to say, to impose some restraint on people's inclinations, the operation of which will be visible, and enforced by some external sanction.
This theory of church-membership, based on what was at that time stigmatized as the "Halfway Covenant," aroused intense opposition. It was the great question of the day.
To say this is not to discredit church-membership as placing us at the mercy of emotional suggestion, reducing spontaneity to custom, and lessening the energy and responsibility of the individual soul towards God. On the contrary, right group suggestion reinforces, stimulates, does not stultify such individual action.
These proceedings practically vested all the judicial and legislative powers in the court of assistants, whose tenure was permanent, and left to the freemen in the general court little else than the power of admitting freemen. Not only was citizenship based on church-membership, but the Bible was the only law-book recognized by the court of assistants.
Of course they were Calvinists, more rigid even than their brethren in Geneva. The Bible was to them the ultimate standard of authority civil and religious. The only restriction on suffrage was its being conditioned on church-membership. They aspired, probably from Calvinistic influence, but aspired in vain, to establish a theocracy, borrowed somewhat from that of the Jews. I do not agree with Mr.
But what doth he mean by the dross? why, he looked upon them as no better, notwithstanding their church-membership, than the rabble of the world, that is, with respect to their latter end; for to be called dross, it is to be put amongst the rest of the sinners of the world, in the judgment of God, though at present they abide in his house: "Thou puttest away all the wicked of the earth like dross; therefore I love thy testimonies."
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