Taking away the gospel from the earth, then, is not a new thing; not a thing peculiar to the first centuries of the Christian era. It had been done before when transgression led the people to depart from its ordinances and disregard its precepts. So, too, after the introduction of the gospel by the personal ministry of the Son of God, when men transgressed its laws, and corrupted its teachings and ordinances by their vain and foolish fancies, or by their efforts to modify it to make it acceptable to a pagan nation, because of transgression, it was taken from among them. Not abruptly. Not in such a sense as that the Christians some night in the third century all laid down to sleep good, faithful saints and awoke next morning stripped of the Gospel and turned pagans. No; but as the elders and bishops who held divine authority were destroyed by persecution, or passed away by natural death, the people with each succeeding generation growing worse and worse, and less and less worthy of the gospel—false teachers without authority from God usurped power, corrupted the gospel and the church until the false displaced the true, and anti-Christ sat in the temple of God.
Nothing remained but fragments of the gospel; here a doctrine and there a principle, like single stones fallen and rolled away from the ruined wall; but no one able to tell where they belonged in the structure, and so many of the stones missing that to reconstruct the wall with what remains is out of the question.
The fragmentary accounts of the gospel, as recorded by some of the apostles, and their associates, is all that was left to the world. All! But this was much. It has stood to the people since the days of the great apostasy as the law of carnal commandments did to Israel after the transgression which occasioned the gospel to be taken from them. Those fragments of the truth, however disconnected, have been as the light of the moon and the stars to the night traveler; not the sunlight, indeed, which makes so clear the way, but light which, however dim, is still better than absolute darkness; and will, I trust, yet lead many of our Father's children into the sunlight of Christ's restored gospel.
It will not be necessary to examine at length the Protestant argument, viz.: The gospel had been corrupted, and buried under the rubbish of idolatry for ages it is true, but the "Reformers" of the sixteenth century cleared away the rubbish and brought to light again the gospel, and restored the Church of Christ in all its simplicity of organization, and efficacy of power. Of this one need only say that the gospel having been taken from the earth, and divine authority lost, the only way for their restoration is through the re-opening of the heavens and the committing of a new dispensation thereof to men. As this answers the argument, it is only necessary to prove that Protestants admit the apostasy.
Luther said of himself, "At first I stood alone." Calvin in his epistle says: "The first Protestants were obliged to break off from the whole world."11 The editor of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Rev. H. H. Milman, a Protestant divine, writes in his preface to that book: "It is idle, it is disingenuous to deny or to dissemble the early depravations of Christianity, its gradual and rapid departure from its primitive simplicity, still more from its spirit of universal love."
The reader is already acquainted with the declaration of Wesley that the Christians had turned heathens again and only had a dead form of faith left.12
In Smith's Dictionary of the Bible—the work is endorsed by sixty-three learned divines and Bible scholars—the following occurs: "We must not expect to see the Church of Christ existing in its perfection on the earth. It is not to be found thus perfect, either in the collected fragments of Christendom, or still less in any one of those fragments."13
Roger Williams refused to continue as pastor over the oldest Baptist Church in America on the ground that there was no regularly constituted church on earth, nor any person authorized to administer any church ordinance; "nor can there be until new apostles are sent by the great head of the church for whose coming I am seeking."14 Alexander Campbell, founder of the sect of the "Disciples," says: "The meaning of this institution (the kingdom of heaven) has been buried under the rubbish of human tradition for hundreds of years. It was lost in the dark ages and has never, until recently been disinterred."15
And lastly, that greatest of all Protestant sects, the Church of England in its homily on the Perils of Idolatry, says: "Laity and clergy, learned and unlearned, all ages and sects and degrees have been drowned in abominable idolatry, most detested by God and damnable to man, for eight hundred years and more."16
Footnotes
1. Matt, xxviii: 19, 20.
2. End of Religious Controversy (Rev. John Milner), p. 281.
3. Faith of our Fathers, p. 72.
4. Matt. xxviii: 16-20.
5. John xiv: 2.
6. Faith of Our Fathers, p. 72.
7. Faith of our Fathers, p. 87.
8. Heb. xii: 22, 23.
9. This should be remembered by the student of the Bible. The law of Moses, with its formalisms and numerous rites, does not reflect the fullness of divine wisdom. It was not the best and highest code of laws and morals which God could give, but the best the people could be induced to accept.
10. Quoted by Rev. John Milner in End of Religious Controversy.
11. See p. 101.
12. Smith's Dict. of Bible, p. 163.
13. Picturesque America, p. 502.
14. Picturesque America, p. 502.
15. Christianity Restored, p. 184.
16. Perils of Idolatry, p. 3.
THESIS III.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ in the Last Days—In the Hour of God's Judgment—Is to Be Restored to Earth by Re-opening the Heavens, and Giving a New Dispensation Thereof to the Children of Men.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE NECESSITY OF A NEW REVELATION—THE ARGUMENTS OF MODERN CHRISTIANS AGAINST IT CONSIDERED.
I shall take it for granted that those who have followed me to this point are convinced that the world has need of a new witness for God; that the Church of Christ was destroyed; that there has been an apostasy from the Christian religion so complete and universal as to make necessary a new dispensation of the gospel.
I have already remarked, in noticing the Protestant claim that the Church of Christ was re-established by the Reformers of the sixteenth century, that the gospel having once been taken from among men, and divine authority lost, the only way that either one or the other could ever be restored would be by the Lord giving a new revelation, and re-commissioning men with divine authority, both to teach the gospel and administer in its ordinances. This is a proposition so obvious to reason that I can scarcely persuade myself that it requires either argument or proofs to sustain it.
If there are those, however, who think that