CATHOLIC ARGUMENTS--PROTESTANT ADMISSIONS.
But what of the Catholic argument that there has been an unbroken
line of authority from Peter to Leo XIII.; and running parallel with
that line of authority a continuation of all that is essential to the
Gospel, both in doctrine and ordinances? My reply is: "Of what avail is
argument in the face of facts which contradict it? The facts of both
history and prophecy are against the contention that there has been
such a line of divine authority, accompanied by a continuation of all
the essentials of the Gospel; and therefore, the argument is worthless.
But that we may see how weak the argument is in itself, let us examine
it.
"Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name
of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost * * * And lo I
am with you to the end of the world." [1] On this Catholic writers
remark: "Now the event has proved * * * that the apostles themselves
were only to live the ordinary term of man's life; therefore the
commission of preaching and ministering together with the promise of
the divine assistance, _regards the successors of the apostles, no less
than the apostles themselves._ This proves that there must have been
an uninterrupted series of such successors of the apostles, in every
age since their time; that is to say, successors to their doctrines,
to their jurisdiction, to their orders, and to their mission." [2]
Cardinal Gibbons, commenting on the same passage says: "This sentence
contains three important declarations: 1st, the presence of Christ
with His Church, 'behold, I am with you;' 2nd, His constant presence
without an interval of one day's absence, 'I am with you all days;'
3rd, His perpetual presence to the end of the world, and consequently
the perpetual duration of the church, 'even to the consummation of the
world.' Hence it follows that the true church must have existed from
the beginning; it must have had not one day's interval of suspended
animation, or separation from Christ, and must live to the end of
time." [3]
Of the conclusion here arrived at, it is only necessary to say that it
is founded upon an assumption. Look again at the passage upon which the
argument is based, in connection with its context. "Then the eleven
disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had
appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshiped him; but some
doubted. And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying: All power is given
unto me in heaven and in earth, Go ye therefore, and teach all nations;
* * * and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."
[4] It will be seen that the promise was to the eleven apostles, not
to the church. To say that this promise "regards the successors of
the apostles no less than the apostles themselves," is an assumption
unwarranted by the text; and it is upon that assumption that the Rev.
John Milner and other Catholic writers, base their conclusions that the
word of Jesus is pledged to an uninterrupted continuation of His church
in the earth.
The argument of Cardinal Gibbons is still worse than that of Dr.
Milner. He says the promise of Jesus to the apostles contains three
important declarations, the first of which is: "The presence of Christ
with His _church._" This is worse than assumption. The learned Cardinal
has written "church," where he should have written "apostles;" and
therefore the conclusion he reached, namely, the perpetual duration
of the church, is based upon a misstatement; and as the premises upon
which the argument is based are untrue, the conclusion is false.
The argument by Catholics is thought to be invulnerable, because the
promise of Jesus to be with the apostles to the end of the world is
impossible of fulfillment, unless it "regarded the successors of the
apostles no less than the apostles themselves." But to be with their
successors is not being with the apostles. Hence the device arranged
by Catholics for the fulfillment of this promise of the Lord, misses
its purpose altogether. Moreover, there is no need of such device to
explain how the promise of Jesus could be fulfilled. "In my Father's
house," said he, addressing these same men, "are many mansions: if it
were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you,
* * * _that where I am there ye may be also;_" [5] And there they are
with Jesus in the place he prepared for them, and they will continue to
be with him even unto the end of the world.
No less erroneous is the Catholic argument for the uninterrupted
continuation of the church of Christ on earth, based on the passage
in the sixteenth chapter of Matthew, when Jesus in the course of a
conversation with Peter says to him: "Thou art Peter, and upon this
rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it." "By this promise," says a foot-note on this passage in the
Douay Bible--the version accepted by the Catholic Church,--"we are
fully assured that neither idolatry, heresy, nor any pernicious error
whatever, shall at any time prevail over the church of Christ." "Our
blessed Lord clearly intimates here," says Cardinal Gibbons, "that the
church is destined to be assailed always but to be overcome never."
[6] The argument of Catholics is, that if the great apostasy took
place which, as we have seen, is clearly predicted in the scriptures,
and, as I believe, confirmed by the facts already presented to the
reader in this volume, then the express promise of Jesus Christ that
the gates of hell should not prevail against His church has failed.
"If the prediction of our Savior about the preservation of His church
from error be false, then Jesus Christ is not God, since God cannot
lie. He is not even a prophet, since he predicted falsehood. Nay, he is
an imposter, and all Christianity is a miserable failure, and a huge
deception, since it rests on a false prophet." [7]
This argument and its conclusion is based upon too narrow a conception
of the Church of Christ. That church exists not only on earth, but in
heaven; not only in time, but in eternity. It has not been prevailed
against, because men on earth have departed from it; corrupted its
doctrines, changed its ordinances, transgressed its laws. The Church of
Christ in heaven, consisting of "an innumerable company of angels--the
general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in
heaven--" [8] the church there has been far beyond the reach of the
powers of hell; and ultimately here on earth it shall be triumphant. To
repeat an illustration I before used: Truth may lose a single battle,
it may lose two or three, and yet be victorious in the war. So with
the Church of Christ: many of those enrolled as its members may be
stricken down by cruel persecution; those remaining may capitulate with
the enemy, and by compromises betray the cause of Christ, and put him
to an open shame. Repose and luxury, the reward of the above perfidy,
may bring in such floods of wickedness that virtue can scarce be found
among men, and no abiding place found on earth for the church of the
Redeemer. That church, however, still exists in heaven, in all the
glory of the general assembly of the firstborn; and from time to time
dispensation after dispensation of the gospel will be sent from thence
to the children of men, until a people shall be found who will remain
true to all its doctrines, accept its ordinances, obey its precepts,
preserve its institutions, and the Church of Christ everywhere become
triumphant as well on earth as in heaven. The promise of the Lord Jesus
will not fail--the gates of hell will not finally prevail against his
church.
The reader's faith in the above view will doubtless be strengthened if
I remind him that the apostasy contended for in the foregoing pages,
is not the first time in the experience of men that the gospel has
been taken from among them. It is written by Paul that, "the scripture
foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith preached
before the gospel unto Abraham." [9] A little further on the apostle
asks: "Wherefore then serveth the law?" Referring to the law of Moses.
That is to say, if the gospel was preached unto Abraham, wherefore
serveth the law of Moses? His answer is, "It was added because of
transgression till the seed should come, to whom the promise was made
* * * Wherefore the law was our school master to bring us unto Christ
that we might be justified by faith." [10] Having in the third chapter
of his epistles to the Hebrews referred to the dealings of God with
the children of Israel in the wilderness, and having in the opening
verse of the fourth chapter warned the saints against similar sins
to those committed by Israel, Paul says: "For unto us was the gospel
preached as well as unto them [ancient Israel], but the word preached
did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it."
The only conclusion to be drawn from these passages is this: In very
ancient times the Gospel was introduced among men; but because of their
disinclination or inability to keep its laws and live in harmony with
its precepts--"because of transgression," it was taken from among them.
God, however, not willing to leave His children utterly without light,
gave unto them a less exalted law--the law of carnal commandments. A
law better suited to their condition, wherein were forms and ceremonies
foreshadowing things to come, designed to act as a school master to
bring the people to Christ.
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.