HERALD

OF THE

KINGDOM AND AGE TO COME.

RICHMOND, VA., OCTOBER, 1851

The next number of the Herald may be of late issue owing to our absence in Nova Scotia. It will be mailed immediately on our return. Mr. Magruder is kind enough to read the proof while we are away.

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THE CLERGY.

            “Bear with me as foolish,” says Paul, “that I may boast myself a little. What I speak (now) I speak not after the Lord; but as it were in foolishness in this confidence of boasting. Seeing that many glory after the flesh, I will glory also. For being wise, you bear with fools willingly. For if a man bring you into bondage, if a man devour you, if a man take of you, if a man exalt himself, if a man smite you on the face, ye bear with it. I speak concerning dishonour as that we had been weak. Howbeit whereinsoever any is bold (I speak ironically) I am bold also. * * * Are they ministers of Christ (I speak banteringly) I excel them.”

            This, was a source of great vexation and mortification to the apostle. He had done good service for those in Corinth. He had brought to them at great hazard and under much reproach, the knowledge of inestimable truth, which had they been left to themselves they could never have searched out—truth that was not only wonderful, but able to make the believer of it rich, honourable, and glorious for ever. Nevertheless, they who had the means of aiding him in his work abundantly, left him to get along as best he could. “Woe is me,” said he, “if I preach not the gospel.” They knew it. They knew he was bound to do it, and could not evade the responsibility. But what was that to them? He was “rude in speech”—“weak in bodily presence; and in speech contemptible.” Such a man in Corinth would not attract the learned and polite; and give position in genteel society to those who contributed to his support. They behaved themselves toward him with meanness and parsimony, so that what he got out of them, if any thing, was like squeezing blood out of stone. This must have been exceedingly galling to a man of his generous and exalted disposition. “Have I committed an offence,” said he, “is abasing myself that ye may be exalted, because I have preached to you the gospel of God freely? For I levied upon other churches, taking wages of them to do you service.” “But what is that to us, see thou to it!” They had believed and obeyed the truth; but the walking in it was not so much to their taste. The apostle longed to keep them in the way, and to gather fruit of them for the benefit of others, that it might redound to their account at the appearing of Christ in his kingdom. But they were selfish, wilful, narrow-souled, and covetous. They were devoted to their lusts—their god was their appetites; and they gloried in their shame. They had houses to eat and drink in, and joyously they feasted; but it was the opulent of society, and not the poor of Christ’s flock whose hearts were made glad by the abundant cheer. A man of weak bodily presence and contemptible speech, such as Paul, would have shamed his stylish brethren in the presence of their friends. They sought, therefore, a more fashionable ministry than his—ministers by whose eloquence and classical learning the upper-tendom of Greek society might be propitiated in favor of their increasing and rising community. There were Hymenaeus, and Philetus, Phygellus and Hermogenes, accomplished gentlemen in their way, who were prepared to popularise the faith, and to “enter the evangelical field.” They soon “proved themselves worthy of their Alma Mater;” and their brethren were not long in discovering “the bearing of their ministry upon the fortunes and progress of the reformation,” or repentance preached by the apostles. They boasted themselves as the sons of “Education, the great handmaid of religion,” whose “educated minds were needed to train the vineyard of the Lord!” If the gay Corinthians were too miserly to cooperate with the self-denying apostle, they were well fleeced and plucked by these College Evangelists. In fact they got their deserts. They were reduced to bondage, devoured, taxed, and smitten, by these self-exalted ministers. The Apostle bantered them upon their pretended excellencies; and denounced them as false, and deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles, or perhaps, “evangelists” of Christ—ministers of Satan, pretending to be ministers of righteousness, whose end should be according to their works.

            These men were the Clergy of the apostolic era. Paul says, they were fools whom the Corinthians willingly suffered. They were “grievous wolves,” “men speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them;” and who soon became “Lords over the Heritages,” (katakyrieuontes toon kleeroon,) not sparing the flock. Learned fools, inflated with a false notion of “their high and responsible position before God and man,” who preached “another Jesus,” “another spirit,” and “another gospel,” a sort of improvement upon the original, which Paul had not declared. These contemporaries of the apostles were their rivals, who at last utterly destroyed their influence by the faint praise they bestowed upon their teaching. Under the tuition of these men every generation became more ignorant and superstitious than the preceding, until the Holy Scriptures were suppressed, and “darkness covered the earth, and gross darkness the people” everywhere, as at this day. The Clergy still exist, and flourish in the gloom like whited sepulchres. The class is divided into a multiplicity of Orders, called “Holy Orders,” after the “sacrament” which sanctifies them. Every sect hath its orders, one or more, from His Latin Holiness down to the newest and most recent edition of the craft. Like their predecessors in apostolic times, they wear sheep’s clothing, and devour, spoil, and smite the faces of their supporters, who with craven and niggard hearts, and overflowing hands, load them with riches, while if left to the spontaneousness of their own grovelling natures, they would leave the truth and its unselfish advocates to perish before their eyes.

            In fine, the Clergy and their schools have ever been the enemies of progress, and the opponents of the truth. If one of their class take a few steps in advance of his fellows he soon retreats; or takes up a position far in the rear of the ancient gospel and apostolic order of things, and falls right sectarianly to the building up of the institutions he once valiantly labored to destroy, thereby constituting himself a transgressor. Let us then cease from the clergy, and stand aloof from all their schemes. Their schools, and colleges, and “benevolent institutions,” and divinity, and gospel, are all of that old fiction which exalted itself that the apostle might be abased.