DEPARTMENT OF HIERARCHIES |
| DIRECTOR Hermokrates Krankenhaus |
ABOUT
Hence the history of hierarchies is a history of divisions, wide-spread and intense. The history of the Roman hierarchy is a history of schisms. Those tendencies of hierarchies are not merely speculative. They have revealed themselves in facts, and have been fearfully effectual in every age. And, at this time, there is no hierarchal organization on earth, in which human legislation and creeds do not come between the local churches and the Bible, or in which the law of Christ can be carried out in the administration of discipline. Under any hierarchy the local church has not the ultimate power of discipline, and cannot have it; for no local decision can be made that is not liable to reversal by superior powers.
We see, then, as we might suppose, that as free local churches were ordained by Christ, so they are the wisest and most effectual means of gaining his great end; and that their establishment was not owing to any peculiar and transitory circumstances of the age. In proportion as Christ's ideal of holiness, and of the kingdom of God through it, is understood; in proportion as the culture of true scriptural holiness becomes a matter of intense desire,— will the superior adaptation of free local churches to these great * ends be the more clearly seen.
And it is an undeniable fact in church history, that in proportion as hierarchies subverted the system of free local churches, originally ordained by Christ, in the same proportion the study of the Bible receded, and the study of the traditions of men took its place. This process went on until the Old and New Testaments, the two great witnesses of God among men, were clothed in sackcloth, and testifled for ages in vain. We use these words, not as the interpretation of a prophecy, but as the best description of a great and undeniable historical fact.