Church Polity: Or, What Is an Apostolic Church?, A Semi-Centennial Discourse, Delivered May 12, 1875, Before the Rhode Island Baptist

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Excerpt from Church Polity: Or, What Is an Apostolic Church?, A Semi-Centennial Discourse, Delivered May 12, 1875, Before the Rhode Island Baptist State ConventionThe nineteenth century presents to the world the spectacle of church government in three forms. Borrowing from the vocabulary of the state, we may call them the monarchical, the aristocratic, and the democratic or republican. The Episcopal form of government is monarchical, specimens of which may be seen in the Roman Catholic Church, the Greek Church, the Church of England, and modified by union with an aristocratic element, in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States and the Methodist Episcopal Church. The Presbyterian form of government is aristocratic, softened by some infusion of the popular element. The popular form is represented in the Congregationalists, the Wesleyan Methodists, and the Baptists - most thoroughly by the Baptists. These existing forms of church government is what we mean by the church polity of the nineteenth century. New Testament church polity covers only the apostolic period, and by this the church polity of the nineteenth century, and of all the intervening centuries, must be tried. What I propose to do, then, is this: to break whatever connection may be alleged to exist between the church polity of the present and the church polity of the apostolic age, and thus avoid transferring to the first century what we see in the nineteenth.To this method there ought to be no objection.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.