none might preach the gospel, unless he had the consent of all, none should That is for the third objection.

preach amongst us.

The fourth objection is this; that it may haply be lawful in a man's family, but not in a church (I speak in the world's language). Their reason is, because one is public, and the other private: and God hath given a private spirit, and this is for private men to exercise privately with; He hath also given a public spirit, and this is for public persons (which they call themselves) for a public use.

To this I answer, that there is no member of the body of Jesus Christ but is of the same nature with the whole; a public member of a public body. And the spirit proceeding from the head to every member is one and the same Spirit, and his gifts of like nature-public gifts of a public Spirit, for the good of the whole body: and so, in its place, according to its measure, is it to be used, whatever gift it be. So that, though the members be many, yet the body is but one; every one a member of the head, and all members one of another: and though the members have several offices, yet every member in the body hath some office, and useful gift; and that not for its own profit alone, or the profit of two or three members next it, but for the good of the whole body; God having so placed the members in the body, that the chiefest cannot say to the meanest, I have no need of you, nor the meanest also to the chiefest, I am not to care for you; but every member to have the same care one of another, though this care be manifested diversely, according to the several offices they have in the body, and the several gifts given them for discharge of the same. For though, in respect of the polity of congregated bodies, the more part are out of office; yet, as we are all one body in Christ, and members one of another, there is never a member out of office, and that for the service of the whole. There are no more private christians, than private members of Christ ; neither in any other sense can they be properly called private christians, than as they may also be called private members of Christ; seeing that in the whole book of God we find no such phrase as private christian, or private spirit.

Thus have I laboured, as the Lord hath helped me, to discover the lawfulness of my practice, both public and private. I have laboured to answer all the objections that I ever heard against it; unless it be this, that, though it be lawful, yet not at this time; and that for this reason, because haply it might hinder the work of reformation.

To this I answer, that, in the work of reformation, it is necessary that all errors should be brought to light, and that all truths should be discovered. And finding this, out of God's word, to be an error that is held commonly amongst us, that, rather than any man should be a publisher of the gospel of Christ, unless he were skilled in arts and tongues, and sent forth by our prelates, thousands of our meeting-houses should be shut up, and the people starved for want of food, though God hath abundantly provided for them; I thought no time so fit for publishing this truth by my practice, as now, at this time, when God hath given us such hopes of a glorious reformation, and when so many of those that pity poor souls, to see them lie in ignorance and blindness, have power in their hands to redress it. Therefore I thought no time so seasonable as this time: and thus have you all the objections, that are brought against me,

answered.

That which occasioned me to put these few lines forth to the view of the world, hath been the importunity of many that bear good-will to Sion, and to this truth; also, the evil aspersions that are cast upon me for this my practice. I have heard a noise, but I have seen as yet nothing out of the word of God that might dissuade me (but rather persuade me, and encourage me in the way,

to go on) by any that object against it. To this day could I never procure any fair reasoning of any person whatsoever, though I have exceedingly sought to hear what grounds they had. Could it be made apparent out of God's word, that it was unlawful for me to go on in this way, or that there was no need of the discovery of Christ in the world, or that the people did not earnestly desire it, I should cease with joy and rejoicing of heart. But so long as there can be nothing found in God's word against it, and seeing the great necessity of the people and their great willingness calls for it, I shall be willing to suffer what God shall please to inflict upon me for the same. Yet am I persuaded, though I be trodden under foot, this truth shall flourish and spread itself forth in the world, to the amazement of all that do oppose it. Ând thus, according to what light the Lord hath bestowed on me, out of his free love in His Son, I have, for the satisfaction of some, published these few lines to the world. JOHN SPENser.

FUNDAMENTAL ERROR OF THE WRITINGS OF EDWARD

IRVING.

IT has been a successful device of Satan to deter many of the children of God from the study of prophecy, by representing the wild excesses of the followers of Edward Irving as the legitimate result of prophetic inquiry. Having lately looked through many of the papers in the "Morning Watch” (a publication to which I had previously been a stranger), I have been much struck with the manner in which sober inquiry into prophetic truth becomes gradually superseded, towards the conclusion of that work, by the assumption of prophetic inspiration on the part of the writers themselves.

But it is not for the purpose of commenting on their mode of prophetic interpretation that I take the pen, but to transcribe a few sentences from the first volume. published in 1829, shewing, as I understand them, fundamental error regarding the person and work of Christ,-error which lies at the very root of what is now termed " Irvingism," and which appears to have been infused 'into the gifted mind of Irving himself, from whose pen the following proceeds (Vol. i. p. 163) :—

'First, Is it not the same flesh and blood which the children have that Christ partaketh of? And, secondly, Is it not for the purpose of dying that he partaketh of the same? And then I ask, thirdly, whether flesh and blood fallen, or flesh and blood unfallen, be liable to death? If he had taken flesh and blood not in the state of sin, and not under the sentence of death, then was he as far from death as before he became incarnate, for Adam could not die until Adam sinned."

* Let any reader compare the first paper on prophecy in the first volume of the "Morning Watch," with those in the last volume, on "Unaccomplished Prophecies now fulfilling," No. vii. "Moab, the evangelical world!" for instance, and observe the puerility into which the writers must have sunk, ere they gave forth such sentences as the following, meant for a commentary on Jer. xlviii.: "Against Moab, thus saith the Lord of Hosts; the God of Israel! woe unto Nebo! for it is spoiled,' &c. Nebo means a speaker, the very idol of the evangelical world; the others are names of cities, or places of meeting, as Exeter Hall," &c. P. 258, again, "Thou daughter of Dibon, come down from thy glory and sit in thirst!' Dibon means 'understanding the reason,' which is the strong snare of Moab now: the little that he has he erects into a god, and sits in judgment on the things of the Spirit of God, as if he had the master-key of the world of spirits. For this he shall sit in eternal thirst!"

Here is a distinct denial of the imputation of sin to Christ as the cause of his death. He " was delivered for our offences," ""He hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin," is the statement of Scripture. He took flesh and blood in the state of sin, and therefore died," is Irving's heretical opinion.

Again, in page 28 occurs the following passage, in which there is a studied concealment of the great truth that "it is the blood* that maketh atonement for the soul":

No man indeed can name that name, but he himself; Immanuel alone knoweth what Immanuel meaneth. We know only this, that it is the harmony of the human and the Divine nature, the at-one-ment, or, I might say, in-onement of God and man: and beyond this we cannot go; for as to how it taketh place, who shall tell but God alone? As to the fact that it hath taken place and that all peace is therein wrapped up, my soul rejoice thou therein !"

But an extract from p. 24, to my mind, most completely developes the whole mystery of evil :—

"And here I may step aside to open the ancient fable, or muthos of Hercules the son of Jove strangling the serpent in his cradle-that is, the Son overcoming the devil from his childhood-then contending with the hydra of wickedness, and beating down head after head, until nothing but the fire, the lake of fire, would quell him; into which the devil is to be cast impotent at length. But Hercules received from her he loved, and for whom he went into servile offices, a poisoned garment, with which being clothed, he was all envenomed, and cast himself headlong into the sea; shadowing forth most orthodox doctrine; How Christ, for the love he bore the human soul, consented to become a servant to her, and to be clothed with her body of sin and death, and to give up his life of his own accord, and for a season to be translated to his Father's throne, that he might come again in the might of his Father, and not only assail and overcome the giant brood, sons of heaven and of earth that is, of the soul, derived from God, and the body, from the ground—but likewise reclaim the earth itself, and bring it into subjection and blessedness for ever. But to return.

If any one inquire further, why his being the Seed of the woman should qualify him for bruising the serpent's head, as it shewed itself in the successive confederacies of the wicked against the word of the Lord and the Lord's anointed King, I answer, that God, by preparing a body of fallen humanity for his Son through the power of the Holy Ghost, and his Son by taking it, did begin the work of destroying the potentiality of evil in creation, and expelling it out of living creation into the lake which burneth, which is the second death. All evil which had been conceived in the apostate angels was poured forth in its strength into the fallen world of nature, whereof man's soul, man's

* John Bunyan writes thus well and forcibly on this point, vol. ii. p. 793: "Must there be redemption by blood added to mercy, if the soul be saved? This shews us what an horrible thing the sin of man is. Sin, as to the nature of it, is little known in the world. Oh! it sticks so fast to us, as not to be severed from us by all the mercy of God, do but exclude redemption by the blood of Christ. I will say it over again. All the mercy of God cannot save a sinner, without respect to redemption, from the curse of the law, by the death and blood of Christ. Without shedding of blood is no remission.' No remission, no pardon or passing by of the least transgression without it. Tears! Christ's tears will not do it: prayers! Christ's prayers will not do it: an holy life! the holy life that Christ lived will not do it, as severed from his death and blood. The word redemption then must be well understood and close stuck to, and must not be allowed as properly spoken, when we talk of deliverance from sin, the law, and God's curse, unless it be applied particularly to the death and blood of Christ."

will, is the sovereign. To destroy the devil and his works, to destroy the liar and his lies, which God from the beginning had resolved on, and unto which all things, good and evil, were steadily working together, it became him to send forth his Son, made of a woman, that he might encounter all the power of the devil, the world, and the flesh, in our nature, and overcome them all; and by dying destroy him that had the power of death; and by rising froin the dead leave him with his sceptre broken, denounce him an usurper, shew sin as an ephemeral phantom, and the sinful form of things as but their condition of changing and passing onward unto a state of perdurable blessedness. The whole kernel of the mystery of God's blessed government of all things in a state of blessedness, is therefore contained in the promise of a virgin conceiving a Son; of a living one coming forth from the substance of manhood without the cause of life; or, in other words, of the unmanifested life, informing with life the substance of fallen womanhood, and taking it from the devil's mastery, through the jaws of death, up aloft, above all place and power, to the right hand of the throne of God. Though we, low-minded generation that we are, have fallen from the admiration of this great mystery, it is the ancientest of this world's oracles; and it was the most famous of the hopes of nations, who looked for no amelioration whatever, until the time that the Virgin's child should be revealed. Witness the beautiful verses of the Pollio of Virgil, which he himself acknowledgeth to have come from the Sybilline books; which Bishop Horsley, in his famous Essay, regardeth (I think justly) as the relics of the prophecies which had been preserved amongst the heathens." The Scripture declares that Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself for it," but Irving, "He loved the human soul, and became a servant to her," and so to be clothed with her body of sin and death. Irving clearly adopts the old Platonic mysticism, and holds that matter is the source of evil, and that the soul, in itself a spark or emanation from the Divine essence, is imprisoned in a body of clay, and thereby subjected to sin and death.

66

Such a belief cannot co-exist with a full reception of the scriptural account of the fall of man; and if man be looked on not as lost, but only in evil case, because the ethereal spirit is imprisoned in the body, and if sin be looked upon as only "an ephemeral phantom," and the " sinful form of things" but as a condition of passing on to perdurable blessedness," there is no room for the reception of the glorious gospel of the blessed God-no need at all for a Saviour; and we need not wonder to find in such a writer the plain denial "that Jesus is the Christ,"-for to assert that "a body of fallen humanity" was prepared for the Son, is to deny that "in Him was no sin," and to subvert the very foundation on which our hopes are laid. I subjoin a quotation from Baxter's "Narrative of Facts," that in the mouth of two witnesses-Irving himself and Baxter-every word may be established. Speaking of "Irving's general or broad doctrine," he says (p. 111):-

"Here then lies the first error, in ascribing to Jesus that corruption of nature, as it regards his flesh, which belongs to all of us. The next error lies in putting out of sight the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to us, which is our wedding garment, and in which we are holy and without blame in the sight of the Father, seen as standing in Christ, and, instead of this, requiring us to work out a personal holiness, and by the power of the Spirit to make ourselves holy as Christ was holy. The first error strikes at the root of Christ's incarnation, and also of the atonement; the second subtly brings in again the covenant of works and bondage. Conjoined, the mystery of iniquity is deep and very subtle, but yet plainly such, when examined by the word of the revelation of Jesus Christ." H.

545

BUNYAN ON JUSTIFICATION.

WE come now to the second thing propounded, and by which his love is discovered, and that is his improving of his dying for us. But I must crave pardon of my reader, if he thinks that I can discover the ten hundred thousandth part thereof, for it is impossible; but my meaning is, to give a few hints what beginnings of improvement he made thereof, in order to his further progress therein.

Therefore, This his death for us was so virtuous, that in the space of three days and three nights it reconciled to God, in the body of his flesh, as a common person, all, and every one of God's elect. Christ, when he addressed himself to die, presented himself to the justice of the law, as a common person; standing in the stead, place, and room of all that he undertook for; he gave his life a ransom for many; he came into the world to save sinners. And as he thus presented himself, so God, his Father, admitted him to this work; and therefore it is said, The Lord laid upon him the iniquity of us all:" And again, "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows." Hence it unavoidably follows, that whatever he felt, and underwent, in the manner or nature, or horribleness of the death he died, he felt and underwent all as a common person; that is, as he stood in the stead of others; therefore it is said, "He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities ;" and that "the chastisement of our peace was upon him." And again, "the just died for the unjust.'

Now then, if he presented himself as a common person to justice, if God so admitted and accounted him, if also he laid the sins of the people, whose persons he represented, upon him, and under that consideration punishes him with those punishments and death that he died; then Christ, in life and death, is concluded by the Father to live and die as a common or public person, representing all in this life and death, for whom he undertook thus to live, and thus to die. So then it must needs be, that what next befals this common person, it befals him with respect to them in whose room and place he stood and suffered. Now, the next that follows is, that he is justified of God; that is, acquitted and discharged from this punishment, for the sake of the worthiness of his death and merits; for that must be before he could be raised from the dead; God raised him not up as guilty, to justify him afterwards: his resurrection was the declaration of his precedent justification. He was raised from the dead, because it was neither in equity or justice possible that he should be holden longer there, his merits procured the contrary.

Now he was condemned of God's law, and died by the hand of justice, he was acquitted by God's law, and justified of justice; and all as a common person; so then, in his acquitting we are acquitted, in his justification we are justified; and therefore the apostle applieth God's justifying of Christ to himself, and that rightly. For if Christ be my undertaker, will stand in my place, and do for me, it is but reasonable that I should be a partaker. Wherefore we are also said to be quickened together with him; that is, when he was quickened in the grave, "raised up together, and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Therefore another scripture saith, "He hath quickened us together with him, having forgiven us all trespasses." This quickening must not be understood of the renovation of our hearts, but of the restoring of Jesus Christ to life after he was crucified; and we are said to be quickened together with him, because we were quickened in him at his death, and were to fall or stand by him quite through the three days' and three nights' work; and were