In reading the history of the church, one is overwhelmed to see how
innovations have crept in and eat the vitals out of the church. At
every period of the church, when there was any vitality in it, any
spirituality or devotion to God, there has been a constant effort on
the part of the enemy, through some well-meaning, but worldly minded
professors of religion, to work things into the church, or to work
something out of it, in the nature of the case calculated to corrupt
and destroy it. We must be awake to these wily manœuverings and guard
against them, or they will ruin the great work so well begun and so
successfully carried on in our time. The insidious, wily and stealthy
machinations of the Grecian and Gnostic philosophers, did an immense
work in corrupting the primitive church. Many of these did this, too,
with the best intentions in the world. They thought it would be a
grand acquisition to the Christian religion, an accomplishment and
refinement, to append to it philosophy, and require every preacher
to be a philosopher. These were constantly edging into the pure
religion of Christ their fine philosophical notions, pagan customs and
ceremonies, and destroying the church whenever they did it. On the
other hand, learned Judaizers were foisting Judaism into the church at
every opportunity. Between Judaizers on the one hand, and Gnostic
philosophers on the other, they amalgamated Christianity, Judaism and
Paganism, and made Romanism. It was easy to obtain the idea of infant
membership from Judaism, the idea of image worship from Paganism, and
the idea of one true church from Christianity, and thus incorporate a
system with a membership based in the flesh, making all the infants
members, without any regeneration, under pagan idolatry, in worshipping
images, and at the same time, with the idea that they are the true
church.