But I Abhorred and Was at Enmity with Mr. Baxter, as a Stated Enemy to the Grace of God

JAMES FRASER of Culross, and Richard Baxter of Kidderminster, did not take the same view, exactly, on the matter of their justification. The Scottish divine said that if antinomianism was an error at all, yet it was an error that ‘ lay very near truth.’ Whereas, the English author of the Aphorisms was so set upon preaching and pressing home the absolute necessity of a holy life, that he seemed to some to lay far too little weight on the sovereign grace of God, and on the imputed righteousness of Christ. It was an age of great logical acuteness, and that acuteness was sometimes so carried into certain regions of religious truth as to make the simplicity of the Gospel to partake far too much of the refinements and the subtleties of the dialectical schools. And far worse than that, this minute rigidity of doctrine, and the argumentative temper that too often accompanied it, produced the most deplorable results in practical religion and in personal morals. As when the author of the Bass Rock Treatise on Justifying Faith denounced the author of- Saints’ Rest as a stated enemy to the Grace of God, and declared openly that he abhorred him, and was at enmity with him. Speaking for myself on this matter, I lean with all my weight on James Fraser’s doctrine of the! evangelical faith that alone justifies the ungodly:

k but I turn away with the deepest distress from the

I scandalous language that he uses against the author

I ’ of the assailed Aphorisms. Referring to an atrocious placard issued against him at an English

I election, Mr. Gladstone said that such things,

: openly published about a man, were enough to

make his blood to freeze in his veins. And to read what James Fraser wrote and published about him was surely enough to make Richard Baxter’s blood to freeze in his veins. That beins: so, just listen to the way that the greatest of all the Puritan peacemakers answered our, fierce-blooded Covenanter. Pursuing the noble argument of the noblest of his books, Baxter says: ‘We shall then rest from all our sad divisions, and from all our unchristian quarrels with one another. Paul and Barnabas are now fully and for ever reconciled, and no sister’s son shall ever separate them in heaven. There God’s saints are not any more in conceit with the issues of their own brains; but all are now admiring the Divine Perfection, and are in the most self-forgetting love with one another. Where the saints of God rest there is full and entire reconciliation between the Lutheran and the Calvinist, between the Remonstrant and Contra-Remonstrant, and between the Conformist and the Nonconformist; indeed, these names are not known in that language. There is no recording there of our neighbours’ infirmities, and no raking up there of old sores that Christ died to heal. How many sermons zealously preached, how many books studiously compiled, will then be all dis¬ claimed by their ashamed and penitent authors. In the New Jerusalem there is no deep plotting to strengthen our own party, nor any deep designing against our redeemed brethren. And, is it not a sin and a shame that our course on earth is so contrary to what it will be in heaven? Surely, if there be shame and remorse in our Father’s house, it will be when we meet and look in one another’s faces. Even as Joseph’s brethren were overwhelmed with confusion when they beheld their brother, whom they had, at one time, so shamefully wronged.’ I wonder what James Fraser felt when he read that passage in his copy of The Saints’ Rest or did he refuse to buy and read or even look at that book of the man whom he had so shamefully abused? At any rate, we refuse to read the writings, or even to hear the names, of the men we have shamefully abused. It is long since Tacitus detected himself and accused himself of hating all the men whom he had ever hurt. With all our communion-season self-examinations have we come up to Tacitus’ discovery and confession of his inhuman sin?

But we do not need to go so far back as to Tacitus, or even to Fraser, in order to see what party spirit can do in the diabolical way of one Christian man hating and reviling another. There has never been a religious or a political controversy, in any age, which has not exhibited that deplorable spectacle. Controversy is, perhaps, unavoidable as long as men do not see eye to eye in doctrine and in duty. But party spirit, and its malevolent mind, surely ought not to be unavoidable among truly Christian men. Well, then, as we would love one another, and thus please Him who made us and redeemed us to that end, let us put away from among us every cause, and every occasion, of party spirit and ill-will; and, especially, let us put all that away from within the Church of Christ. God knows, there will always be plenty of cause, and of occasion, for party spirit and ill-will among men; even if these bad passions were at once, and for ever, cast out of the Church of Christ! For one thing, as long as the king’s government is carried on by the party system, and as long as the human heart remains what it is, we shall always have men abhorring, and hating, and reviling one another; the shame, and the scandal of which we cannot but see and hear every day we live. But, in God’s Holy Name, and in the strength of His Holy Spirit, let us determine to banish all party spirit, and all party strife, with all their disastrous results, out of that kingdom which is set up on His earth to be peace, and righteousness, and joy in the Holy Ghost. All which is our prayer at the present moment, and at the same time it is our effort at the present moment, as it has never been before in the whole history of the Church of Christ in our beloved land.

As you are all aware, a step has been taken this year, such as has never been taken before; a great step towards the banishment of controversy, and party spirit, and envy, and ill-will out of the Church of Christ in Scotland. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, d the General Assembly of the United Free Church of Scotland, have both appointed large committees, and have instructed them to meet together, and to confer and inquire together, and to report to their respective Assemblies, as to what are the causes that keep those two Churches from being one Church and one Assembly. Now, the great difficulty with those two committees, and, then, the great difficulty with the two Assemblies, as it seems to me, will be to decide on what they are to direct their special attention, and to carry on their inquiries and to conduct their deliberations. They may be tempted to look only, or to look too much, on the admitted obstacles that stand in the way of union; and to look too little on what lies beyond those obstacles. Or, on the other hand, they may be led to look with such an overmastering desire on what lies beyond all intervening obstacles, as to make them determined to surmount all such obstacles whatsoever, and to surmount them at all costs. When the Northern tribes of Europe had once tasted the wonderful wines of Italy, they could take no rest till they had scaled the Alps, with all their immense obstacles of rocks and snows, and had taken possession of the vineyards and oliveyards of the South. And, if the two negotiating Churches have tasted enough of the divine wine of a true and a pure brotherly love, then it may safely be predicted that no opposing obstacle whatsoever will continue to keep them apart. There are many motives of many kinds, in the minds and hearts of Christian men among us, moving them towards such a union. There is the consolidation, and the efficiency, of the whole work of the Churches; there is the great saving of men and money that would result from such a union; and there is the harmonious re-adaptation of the Churches’ life and work to the pressing necessities of the land. A great forecast is in many men’s minds, of what could be done for the whole people of Scotland if those two great Churches were one Church, in counsel, and in work, and in worship. All these motives are in my own mind; and they are making me to pray and to hope for a speedy union of both the Churches concerned. But, if I were to tell you the whole truth about myself in this matter — it is the motive of the text that moves me the most. In the honest and plain-spoken words of the evangelical prophet, his motive was — God’s own motive was — that ‘Ephraim shall no more envy Judah, nor Judah any more vex Ephraim.’ Now, I am so full of those two vices of envy and vexation myself, that I would fain live a little longer to have them, and all of their evil kind, for ever rooted out of my heart; and that by a union that would sow the seeds of a universal brotherly love in my heart in the room of those deep and ineradicable roots of bitterness that so often spring up to torture me. William Law has taken my portrait in this matter, as well as in so many other matters: ‘ Selfishness and partiality are very inhuman and base qualities,’’ he says, ‘ even in the things of this world; but in the things of religion they are of a still baser nature. Now, this is the greatest evil that the division of the Church has brought forth; that it raises in every communion a selfish, partial orthodoxy, which consists in courageously defending all; thatlt lias, and in absolutely condemning all that lit has not. And thus every champion is trained up in defence of their own truth, their own learning, and their own Church, and he has the most

merit, and the most honour, and the most reward, who likes everything, and defends everything among themselves, and leaves nothing uncensured in those of a different communion. Now, how can truth and goodness and union and religion be more struck at than by such defenders as those? And our laying all this to heart will enable us to live in a divided part of the Church unhurt by its divisions; and it will keep us in a true liberty

and fitness to be edified and assisted by all the good that we hear or see in any other part of the Church. And thus uniting in heart and spirit with all that is holy and good in all the Churches, we will enter into the true communion of saints.

and become real members of the Holy Catholic Church, though we are, for the time, confined to the outward worship of only one particular part of that Church.’ So far the author of An Appeal to all those that Doubt and Disbelieve.

But there are able men, and honest men, and peace-loving men in both the Churches, who will see, and will say, that there are fundamental principles; and, indeed, plain and evident Scriptural truths that stand right in the way of this proposed union. Principles and truths for which our fathers in both the Churches have often con¬ tended and suffered; and that to death itself. So there are. And we are to let those principles and those truths have their full place given to them, and their full honour paid to them, in all our negotiations. But, while all that is so, and must remain so, James Fraser has a fine passage elsewhere, in which he teaches us that there are ‘ principal substantial truths,’ and that there are ‘ subordinate truths’ — though he sadly forgets his own sound doctrine when he comes to discuss with Richard Baxter. But, for my part, and, taught by James Fraser, and by still greater teachers than he, were there far higher Alps, both of principal and subordinate truths than there are standing in the way of this union, I would do all that lies in my power to scale both those principal and subordinate Alps for the sake of the vineyards that lie beyond them. For, when all is said, both truth and principle, at their very best, are but the servants of love, and are not to be allowed to stand in the sovereign’’s way, but are there to advance her way. The highest truths and the deepest principles are but the ministers of love; and they are in their truest and safest places when they hasten, at all times, and in all places, to feed her heavenly flame. Philip Henry well said that ‘ It is not the actual differences of Christian men that are the mischief; but the mismanagement of those differences.’ My brethren, let us pray, and labour, and examine ourselves, as never before, so that we may have no hand in the mismanagement of this splendid move¬ ment! And, that it may be so with us, let us dwell, and with all our mind and with all our heart on what that same sweet writer says concerning the Church divisions of his day. ‘ Not¬ withstanding all the sad divisions in our Churches,’ says the saintly father of Matthew Henry: ‘ the saints among us, so far as they are sanctified, are already one. The things in which they are agreed are many more, and are far more considerable, than are the things wherein they differ. They are of one mind concerning sin, that it is the worst thing in the world; concerning the favour of God, that it is better than life; concerning the world,

I that it is vanity; and concerning the Word of j God, that it is above rubies.’ Yes, the simple fact f is, as Philip Henry says, we are one Church and one Assembly already, if we would only believe it, and act upon it.

Let Paul’s noble paraphrase concerning charity, then, be the agenda as the clerks say, of every meet¬ ing of those two committees. And let that same apostolic paraphrase be imaginatively meditated on every day, by every member of those two committees, and by every one of ourselves. Let both the letter and the spirit, and the personal application of that heavenly hymn, be ever with us, and with all our fellow-believers everywhere. And, when that is so, all the opposing Alps of Christendom will soon sink into the earth; and will only the more help to make an highway for the coming chariot of the Prince of Peace. And, to borrow the eloquent words of Edmund Burke, ‘ on the lava, and ashes, and squalid scoriae of our burned-out volcanoes, there will soon grow the peaceful olive, and the cheering vine, and the sustaining corn.’