Presbyterians

“ I suppose the real meaning of this doctrine is, that Presbyterians are just as sure of going to heaven as all other folks are of going to hell. The real idea being, that it all depends upon the will of God, and not upon the character of the person to be damned or saved; that God has the weakness to send Presbyterians to Paradise, and the justice to doom the rest of mankind to eternal fire. ”

“ Presbyterianism in Virginia and the states south of it from colonial days, as well as the recent revival in Kentucky, gave them ground for saying: “We are not the only Presbyterians who view the doctrine of the atonement different from the Confession.”
But the Springfield Presbytery was only a transition stage. These five men might make their independent presbytery the nucleus of a new Presbyterian body, as the Seceders and others had done in Scotland long before, and as the Cumberland Presbyterians were to do a little later; or they might cease to be Presbyterians. ”

“ The Presbyterians live in great charity with them, and with one another; their minister as a true pastor of the gospel, inculcates to them the doctrines it contains, the rewards it promises, the punishments it holds out to those who shall commit injustice. ”

“ The Presbyterians can go away by themselves and build cities and towns, and try to prohibit all other persons who are not Presbyterians from dwelling with them: the Methodists can do the same; the Baptists can do the same. ”

“ As the Presbyterians were the originators of the movement, "The Continent" takes a justifiable pride, in quoting from a contemporary, that: "They are perfectly ready to contemplate a Christian unity that involves the passing away of this particular organism called the Presbyterian Church, finely wrought though it be," and exhorts: "Presbyterians, this sort of reputation is a lot to live up to. But we must not fall from it."
The principles of evolution—principles which we find underlying modern thought—are freely called upon to explain this movement and justify its consequences. ”

“ The Nonconformists, therefore, who in the latter part of the seventeenth century might have been attached by a successful measure of comprehension to the National Church, were the Presbyterians—at that time a large and influential body—a considerable proportion, probably, of the Independents, and individual members of other denominations. ”

“ But I do insist that the Presbyterians have assumed to appropriate to themselves their Supreme Being, and that they have claimed, and that they do claim, to be the "special objects of his favor." They do claim to be the very elect, and they do insist that God looks upon them as the objects of his special care. ”

“ To Presbyterians, therefore, thankful as they are for an historic past that has in it so much to arouse gratitude to God and loyalty to the Church they love, the citing of the practice of their forefathers in Reformation times, or even that of the early fathers of the Church, can never be a final argument for the acceptance of any particular method in worship. ”

“ In a word, the condition of the Presbyterian sects throughout the world was such that a general council of its leading men was highly desirable, provided that there remained in the sects anything worth saving, and they possessed in themselves the power of saving it. For ourselves, we believe that the mutilated fragments of Christian truth still retained by the majority of the Presbyterian laity and by a considerable number of the Presbyterian ministers are well worth saving; but we fear that the Presbyterians themselves will not, or cannot, save them. ”

“ I believe in free agency. I do not think that God forces men to do things. But you,” continued Ernest with a laugh, “are a regular old blue-stocking Presbyterian.”
“I cannot suffer you, my young friend, to give up to the Presbyterians exclusively the most precious doctrines of the Bible. You are very much mistaken if you think that Presbyterians are the only people who believe in election and the final perseverance of the saints.”
“Do you believe that other horrid doctrine of Predestination? ”

“ There was yet a faint hope that the Independent Divines in the Assembly might be made ashamed of the tag-rag of Anabaptists, Antinomians, and what not, that hung to their skirts, and so might be brought to an accommodation with the Presbyterians. But, failing that, the Presbyterians must stand firm, must face Independency and all its belongings both in Parliament and in the Army, and try at length to beat them down.—Of course, Baillie and his Scottish brethren were doing their best to assist the English Presbyterians in this labour. ”

“ The Presbyterians were opposed to the Methodists and Baptists; and these last named sects, though not agreeing with each other, were equally opposed to the Presbyterians. Why should the church of {277} Christ be split up into fractions? Is God the author of confusion? Would he teach one society to worship one way, and administer one set of ordinances; and then teach another society quite a different system of worship, and another set of principles and ordinances different from those taught the first? ”

“ The Union occupied the Presbyterians so completely at this period, that their attention was for a time drawn off from the Episcopal Clergy: but when the feeling, which that measure created, had subsided, they did not overlook a body of men, whose principles they so much disliked. ”

“ Two out of three millions are Roman Catholics—I believe the proportion is still larger—and two-thirds of the remainder are violent rank Presbyterians, who have always been, but most particularly of late, strongly averse to all government placed in the hands of the members of the church of England ”

“ Are these the Presbyterians only? I trow not. I know my men; and I tell you that many of those that you call Independents, that you call Anabaptists, Sectaries, and what not, are among the stoutest and godliest in England, and will go as far as any. Some weeks ago I complained to you of Major-general Crawford, because he would trouble these men, and would have no soldiers of Parliament in my Lord Manchester's army that did not agree with his own notions of Religion and Church-government. ”

“ It must not be supposed that these people are therefore lacking in sincerity and devotion or that they are outside the fold of Christ. But such is the clarity of the Bible in its teaching on God's sovereignty that Presbyterians cannot convince themselves that such people have a sufficient understanding to discharge the responsibilities of an ecclesiastical office. ”

“ During the last century there were Presbyterians in England holding decidedly Evangelical views, and of late there have been numerous congregations gathered, which, in their unity, form what is called “The Presbyterian Church in England.” Scotch brethren of great renown—Dr. James Hamilton, Dr. Young, and Dr. Archer—I had the privilege of numbering amongst personal friends, and they were held in honour by all Evangelical Churchmen and Nonconformists. ”

“ They are a sturdy set of true-blue Presbyterians, these burghers of Dumfries; men after your father’s own heart, zealous for the Protestant succession—the rather that many of the great families around are suspected to be of a different way of thinking, and shared, a great many of them, in the insurrection of the Fifteen, and some in the more recent business of the Forty-five. ”

“ Have they liberty of electing their own5 officers, pastors, elders, and deacons? So the Presbyterians. 5th. Have they power to keep the whole lump of the Church from being leavened, and purely to preserve the ordinances of Christ, from pollution and profanation, &c.? So the Presbyterians, &c. So that whereinsoever the independent government is truly excellent, the presbyterial government stands in a full equipage and equality of excellence.
II. What one true excellence is there in the whole independent government in any one point, wherein it really differs from the presbyterial government? ”

“ The Presbyterians, who carried to extremes the principle, that every institution of the church must have its foundation in the Scriptures, and would not allow [472] that God had given, in this respect, greater liberty to the church of the New Testament, which his Spirit had brought to maturity, than to that of the Old, charged the Episcopalians with popish leaven, and superstition, and subjection to the ordinances of men, because they retained the Christian feasts. ”

“ My father's family was proselyted to the Presbyterian faith, and four of them joined that church, namely, my mother Lucy, my brothers Hyrum and Samuel Harrison, and my sister Sophronia.
"During this time of great excitement my mind was called up to serious reflection and great uneasiness. * * * * The Presbyterians were most decided against the Baptists and Methodists, and used all their powers of either reason or sophistry to prove their errors, or at least to make the people think they were in error. ”

“ United Presbyterians, a body of Presbyterians in Scotland who dissent from the Established Church on chiefly ecclesiastical grounds, and had their origin in union in 1847 of the Secession Church of 1733 with the Relief Church of 1752, bodies previously in dissent as well. A further union of the United Presbyterian body with the Free Church is to all appearance about to be consummated. ”

“ And the Presbyterian Church, praise God for its glorious history. It has always waged a never ending, uncompromising war against wrong and oppression. The organization is a body of conservatives until aroused, which must be by a cataclysm. Then we never sleep until right prevails, though the road we travel grows wet with blood and tears. Presbyterians came to America for conscience’s sake. They claimed the right to worship God as their conscience dictated. The first settlement was at New Amsterdam in 1628. The church grows as the community is raised to a higher educational standard. ”

“ The Presbyterians had been establishing a sort of tyranny over men’s minds, and sought to proscribe all other sects, till their intolerance gradually raised up a strong and general feeling of resistance. Since 1643 a brisk war of political pamphlets had been carried on between the Presbyterians and their opponents, when, in 1647, the Independents, whose cause had been espoused by the army, gained the mastery. “Sir John Presbyter” or to use the more familiar phrase, “Jack Presbyter,” furnished a subject for frequent satire, and the Presbyterians were not slow in returning the blow. ”

“ But the great accessions which in the first four years of the fourth decade of this century had increased the roll of the communicants of the Presbyterian Church by more than fifty per cent. had come in undue proportion from the New Englandized regions of western New York and Ohio. It was inevitable that the jealousy of hereditary Presbyterians, "whose were the fathers," should be aroused by the perfectly reasonable fear lest the traditional ways of the church which they felt to be in a peculiar sense their church might be affected by so large an element from without. ”

“ The official programme of the work of the council was thus conceived:
“To consider questions of general interest to Presbyterians; to strengthen and protect weak and persecuted churches; to explain and extend the Presbyterian system; and to discuss subjects of church work—evangelization, training of ministers, use of the press, colportage, suppression of intemperance, observance of the Sabbath, systematic beneficence, and the suppression of Romanism and infidelity.” ”

“ These were accompanied by numbers of their parishioners, who had previously followed the example of their ministers with regard to the indulgence. While the less narrow-minded among the Presbyterians rejoiced unfeignedly at the augmentation of their numbers, and gladly welcomed these brethren to the camp, there was another party who bitterly protested against the admission of the renegades, as they termed them, to the ranks. ”

“ The Presbyterian polity is the logical expression of that Nationalist principle which was cherished by many of the Puritan fathers, which contended at the birth of New England with the mere Independency of the Pilgrims, and which found an imperfect embodiment in the platforms of Cambridge and Saybrook. The New England fathers in general, before their views suffered a sea-change in the course of their migrations, were Episcopalians and Presbyterians rather than Congregationalists ”

“ The Independents differed from the Presbyterians in no one definite article of creed, with this exception—that they set no value upon ordination, and violently objected to the restraining any good man from public preaching, or any of the ministrations of a pastor, because he wanted this authorisation of a visible church. ”

“ The members of the Presbyterian General Assembly can go home from New York assured that they have vindicated truth and righteousness. The one vital, vicious fault in the report of the Conference Committee of the Northern and Southern Presbyterian Churches on Co-operation was amended out of it and as it now stands adopted it gives not even by implication any support to the unchristian doctrine of separate presbyteries and synods for black and half-white Presbyterians. ”

“ In England Presbyterianism was neither established nor yet the only prevalent creed among the enemies of Episcopacy. Many other separatist sects had sprung up in mysterious darkness, and, as soon as Laud’s hand was withdrawn, suddenly emerged into daylight—Brownists, Independents, Formalists, Adamites, Anabaptists, all sorts of names, differing in most respects, but all agreed in one, that the union of ecclesiastical and political power, as it had hitherto existed in England, must come to an end. In the signatures to the petition these sects had as great a share as the Presbyterians. ”