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§ 23. It is worthy of mention that this second, or national, form of the Church did not set aside the family, but continued it in all its integrity. It did not build a national establishment upon the foundation of the individual, but upon the foundation of the household. The home continued, though its priesthood was absorbed in the Aaronic priesthood. The family of Jacob had become the nation. That the family continued in full force under this dispensation is evident from the laws respecting marriage, the relation of children to parents, the Levirate marriage, the punishment of adultery, and the law of inheritance. The law recognized and fostered the existence and continuance of families. The

family was the unit of organization. The people were numbered after their families, and circumcision was a household rite, as well as a national (Gen. 17: 12; Josh. 5: 2, 5, 9). Circumcision was the chief sign of the covenant, which, taking its origin in the family, became, as we have seen (§ 20) national.

This most important institution, the family, like the day of rest, was perpetuated also in the final and ecumenical form of the Church of God, the Christian dispensation. Development in ecclesiastical matters thus retains the primitive type, and what is added to suit new conditions is not destructive of the original form. Christianity fosters the home.

§ 24. Yet in this church form there was the greatest possible unity and concentration. There was one place of worship; one priesthood, culminating in one high priest; one initiatory rite; one ritual; one system of feasts; one congregation, or church; one Head and Ruler, the one living and true God. It was a close, exclusive, centralized, unifying system, in complete contrast with the preceding dispensation. The Church of God was a holy nation, which all believers in God must join. This concentration, together with its particularity, made the system burdensome in the extreme. Centering in the capital, to which all males must go three times a year, and filled with minute requirements, this "tutor"

became intolerable (Gal. 3: 24; Acts 15: 10). It was in striking contrast both with the liberty of the gospel (Gal. 4: 3–7; 5: 1, 13) and with the cruel tyranny of other religions.

§ 25. This national Church became inadequate. The festal journeys were too severe for the young and aged, too long for the distant, and too infrequent for the needs of growing spirituality. The temple worship could not be carried into Babylon or into the dispersion. How much less could it meet the wants of all nations, if converted to Judaism? It conserved unity and fellowship, and thereby preserved the rich promises of God, but its limitations precluded its ever becoming the religious establishment of the world. It became conscious of this fatal inadequacy: for when it had largely served the ends for which it was ordained, the life which it had preserved and nourished found its provisions inadequate, and added thereto a form of worship in synagogues which became the germ of the Christian congregational worship. While Mosaism was old and vanishing away; while the temple was closed and the Church was in exile, and the required worship could not be rendered, social neighborhood worship sprung up, without prophet or priest, which soon spread wherever the Jews were scattered, and which met the wants of the pious, in reading the sacred books, in prayers, and in praise. We have seen how circumcision was the link which, extending four hundred and thirty years into the patriarchal dispensation, bound it to the ceremonial dispensation; and we shall see how the congregational worship of the synagogue became the organic link that, extending nearly six hundred years into the ceremonial dispensation, bound it to the Christian dispensation. The life of God begotten in the hearts of men prepared for enlargement in external forms centuries before the actual development occurred.

§ 26. Nor was the extra-legal synagogue worship the only prophecy of the coming fulfillment and supersedure of the ceremonial law. Moses, who had founded this dispensation,

had especially predicted its temporary nature (Deut. 18: 18, 19). The Law-giver, like unto Moses, should establish a new covenant, which should include the Gentiles (Is. 42: 6). Daniel became very explicit: "The God of heaven shall set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed" (Dan. 2: 44). The Jews understood these predictions; for they looked for a coming One, even at the time of his appearing, to establish a kingdom.

It is hardly necessary to add that the ceremonial dispensation has been superseded by the Christian. Christ came to fulfill and destroy it (Matt. 5: 17, 18). When he said: "It is finished," the veil of the temple was rent in twain, from the top to the bottom (Matt. 27: 51), opening the most holy place in the sacred temple to the gaze and tread of all men. This ended the second form of the Church of God, a fact repeatedly declared in the Acts and Epistles. The partition between Jew and Gentile was broken down (Acts 11: 1217; Eph. 2: 14, 15); circumcision was abolished (Acts 15: 1, 24-29). Christ "abolished the law of commandments contained in ordinances" (Eph. 2: 15), and brought in "a better hope" (Heb. 7: 18, 19), under another priest (Heb. 4: 14) and law (Heb. 7: 12).

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§ 27. In concluding this imperfect glance at the preparatory dispensations, it is of importance to note what parts of them, if any, are properly taken up into the Christian dispensation. We have already referred to the family as running through all three dispensations (§ 23); so also the Sabbath and the covenant of grace (§§ 16, 23). mon elements will appear in our discussion. mark two tendencies: (1) The attempt has sometimes been made to return to the family form of the Church. All church organizations and all associations of ministers and churches, of whatever name, are denounced. Christianity is to be, in the view of such, wholly unorganized. Individual and family nurture is all that is needed. But the results of such nurture, whether in the primitive or in modern times,

do not satisfy. Indeed, they indicate that the disintegration of organic Christianity would be fatal to piety and missions. Hence this tendency is sporadic and transient. (2) The more extended and less fatal tendency is the transplanting of the ceremonial dispensation into the Christian. The priesthood, the ritual, the union of Church and State, the infallibility of teaching, have been transferred into the major part of Christendom, from which reformations have only secured a partial deliverance.

§ 28. If any one still fancies that polity is of trifling importance, he needs to recall the price at which the liberties of Protestantism have been bought; for it was on the field of church polity and through a sea of blood that they were won, and it is only on the same field that they can be maintained. The Protestant and the Puritan reforms had been lost altogether, had they not rested ultimately on a theory of the Church, that is, church government. Calvin wrote his Institutes, we are told, in order to convert Francis I., king of France. "It was a decisive moment in the history of the kingdom of God. Had the king, to whom all were looking, been converted, the nation would have been converted, and the conversion of France would have given a new character to this portion of history." 11 To have done this, however, the king's conversion must have led him to break with Rome; and his spiritual renewal must have also become an ecclesiastical conversion. For had he been regenerated by the Spirit, the conversion which Calvin desired would have occurred only in part. The reformers looked for more, for the adoption also of the great Protestant doctrine of the right of private judgment in matters spiritual, out of which has come all our liberties. Only such a conversion would have changed the history of France and of Europe. For systems of theology may come and go under the same polity, like floods in a river; even reforms may arise under any mode of ecclesiastical government; but unless they reform

11 Henry's Life of Calvin, 53.

the polity by changing its nature, or break loose from it, or are cast out by it, the on-rushing stream soon obliterates all traces of the reformation. In proof of this, put the histories of Germany, Holland, England, and Scotland in contrast with the histories of Italy, Spain, France, and Bohemia. Great awakenings in the former countries changed their histories, but only because they broke away from the polity brought over from Judaism; but similar awakenings in the latter countries failed utterly, because not carried, from various causes, into separation from the Papacy. It has been the ecclesiastical reformations that have saved the doctrinal and spiritual from beating like tides against the solid rock. As before said: "All the endeavors, truly reformatory, down to the Reformation had the idea of the true Church in some form for their basis." "The Reformation was the setting forth of a new conception of the Church." Reforms from papal errors and oppressions have failed whenever a new conception of the Church has for any reason been unable to assert itself as an accomplished fact, and such reforms must ever fail.

§ 29. The difficult task falls, therefore, to the lot of church polity of separating what is permanent from what is transient in the preparatory dispensations, and of embodying the permanent while rejecting the transient in the final Christian polity. In other words, we are called upon to trace the normal development of the outgrowth of the life of God in human history from its primitive germs to its perfect realization. We have seen its growth from the family form into the national, which itself looked forward to an ecumenical and everlasting form. It is the part of students of church. polity to unfold the true doctrine of the Church of God in its principles and details, while keeping it free from all attempted regressions into the outgrown and superseded, and from all abnormal developments. Communions, like fragments, have been broken off from the perverted Christian forms, and they have approached more or less closely the

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