divorce or not, in other words, it includes divorce and desertion. And the exemption from "bondage" began to exist as soon as the separation commenced. Now would the Apostle have given a license greater than any law of the loosest Christian State gives, when he must have been cognizant of instances in which husbands or wives, who had thus deserted their partners, had become converts within a few months, and were thus ready to be reconciled and to live in Christian wedlock? Would he not have added some qualification or advised some delay ?

The view here presented brings the precepts of our Lord and that of the Apostle into harmony, or at least shows that there is no necessary contradiction between them. The Christian wife or husband must accept as a fact what the unbelieving partner has done, but the marriage, so far as the Apostle lets his opinion be known, may still have been indissoluble, and the injured believer must remain in a state of desertion. All other ways of reconciliation, which proceed on the assumption that Paul permitted remarriage, are failures. Will any one say with DeWette in his Commentary, that both Christ and Paul permit remarriage, when the parties are separated in fact? But Christ, at the most, only allows it in cases of adultery, and if Paul allows it in other cases he enlarges the rule. To say that Christ, when he said "except on account of fornication," only gave a sample of several exceptions which he regarded as valid, is to trifle with his words, and to leave the door open for any degree of laxness. Will it be said, as Meyer says, that Christ did not have mixed marriages in his mind, but only marriages within his church? We reply that he laid down a universal rule, and gave a reason of general application for his rule. If those Pharisees whom he addressed in Matthew, chap. xix., admitted the force of what he said, they would be bound to take it as the rule of their life, even if they could not admit his claims to be the Messiah. Why should the Christian partner in a marriage be released from obeying a command of his Lord, because the heathen would not submit to it? Or will it be said that Paul, and perhaps Christ, did not regard heathen marriage as marriage in the proper sense,

but only as a kind of contubernium, to which the laws that govern Christian marriage were inapplicable. But the Apostle nowhere indicates that he holds any such opinion. Marriage with a heathen was, indeed, in his view a violation of Christian duty for one who was already a believer (2 Cor. vi., 14); but marriage contracted in a state of heathenism was a condition in which the heathen was called the husband or wife of the converted partner, in which the Christian was to remain if the heathen did not dissolve the union, in which the unbeliever himself partook of a kind of sanctity and the children were holy. To apply the rules of Ezra's time to the times of the kingdom of God, to require that the idolater must be separated from the believer in the nearer relations of life was not in accordance with Paul's strain of thinking. Marriage among the heathen, it is true, was far from conforming to the ideal presented to us in the earlier scriptures, where the man is conceived of as cleaving to his wife so closely as to bring her nearer to him than father or mother, and as becoming one flesh with her. But there was some purity left, there were examples of illustrious conjugal fidelity, and there were vices against marriage that "were not so much as named among the heathen." If on the whole it fell far short of the ideal, so too in a heathen family the parental relation failed to come up to the ideal, and yet the Apostle, without doubt, regarded that as the source of important and permanent obligations; and if he bade bond servants to treat unbelieving masters with all honor (1 Tim. vi., 1), much more would he have recognized the duties of the natural relation of parent and child.

The result then to which this exposition has brought us is that Paul advances beyond our Lord's position in a single particular,-in conceiving of, and, to a certain degree, authorizing separation without license of remarriage. That he goes so far is clearly shown by v. 11; that this leads him into any departure from our Lord's principles cannot, we think, be made to

appear.

We had hoped to bring into connexion with this exhibition of the scripture doctrine of divorce several other important topics, without consideration of which our essay must remain

incomplete, such as divorce on the ground that the marriage was null ab initio, the office of the church in divorce, and cases, sometimes of a perplexing nature, which can arise where state law is laxer than the morality of the Bible. But we must defer all this for some future Article, and we hope also to be able to give a brief sketch of the state of opinion and of law in the principal Christian countries touching this important subject.

ARTICLE III.-CHURCH COMMUNION BY COUNCIL.

CONGREGATIONALISM is rather an ellipse than a circle. Its two foci are, the principle of the independence of the local Church of all authority but that of Christ; and the principle of the sisterly equality, friendliness, and helpfulness of these independent local churches-manifested in constant communion with each other.

This communion is ordinary or extraordinary, as occasion prompts. Ordinarily it expresses itself in the recognition of each other's officers and members; in exchanging members, at mutual convenience; and, generally, in all reciprocal charity and coöperation for the promotion of each other's welfare, and for the furtherance of the common cause and kingdom of God. Extraordinarily it has two functions; first, that of tendering advice to a church lacking light or peace, or both; and, second, that of admonition, and of procuring the self-justifying withdrawal of communion, where scandal exists, and is shielded by impenitent persistence, in the face of all suitable and scriptural loving labor.

The method of this extraordinary communion is by Ecclesiastical Council. Inasmuch as neighboring churches cannot conveniently assemble en masse to take into consideration the need which any sister church may have of light and peace,* they meet by delegation; and this assembly of the delegates of their appointment is held to be the churches themselves in council.

Councils for light are usually held when a band of believers propose to form themselves into a new church, or when a church proposes to ordain or dismiss its Pastor; and it is desired to know whether such action, in the reasons of it, will satisfy the judgment and receive the fellowship of neighbor churches. Such Councils may be held also for purposes of general consultation in regard to the welfare of the churches,

* Cambridge Platform, xv. 2, (2).

and the prosperity of the cause of Christ, like those at Cambridge in 1637, and 1646-8, those at Boston in 1662, and 1679-80, that at Saybrook in 1708, that at Albany in 1852, and that at Boston in 1865.

Councils for peace are held when any difficulty within a church proves too much for its own adjustment. Should matters proceed to such a length of obduracy as to make all the conciliatory labors of the Council of no avail, and to involve disgrace and danger to the common cause, the Council would issue in solemn admonition; and, if worst comes to worst, it may recommend to its constituent churches-each, for itself, by solemn vote-to withdraw all communion and fellowship from the offending body, until it shall repent.

Congregationalists hold that this method of ordering affairs between Churches, by Council, and not by Presbytery, or any Court or Prelate, is scriptural, while all other methods are unscriptural; and that it is adequate to every possible emergency, as they do not conceive other methods to be-as they assert, indeed, that long and wide experience has proved them not to be.

They find many Scriptures which seem to them to involve for local churches the duty of just such mutual affection, counsel, and admonition, as are enjoined upon individual Christians; and they conceive that the natural way of carrying out the spirit of those precepts is by precisely such a theory of church communion as distinguishes themselves from Independents, properly so called. While, in the fifteenth of Acts, they find in the sending of Paul and Barnabas, with "certain others of them," from the Church at Antioch to the Church at Jerusalem, to submit the question whether the Mosaic rites were still in force over the conscience of a Christian Jew; in the discussion of that question by "the Apostles and Elders with the whole Church," and the advice resulting, which was dispatched in the name of "the Apostles, and Elders, and brethren,"* by Judas and Silas; both the proof

Tischendorf sustains the common reading of this text, as do Scholz, Meyer, DeWette, and Lange. Wordsworth mildly protests, but leaves it standing; while even Dr. Pusey does not presume to say more than that the omission of the kai oi is “a reading extant in the second century, for which there is con