Page:Darby - Christianity Not Christendom.djvu/7

 of themselves they are going back to it, and now many of the most respectable of themselves who have broken with it. From Rome to which am I to go? Who will tell me that? I have a din of voices claiming to be right.

We want Christianity not Christendom, we have had enough of that. Now I look all this in the face and take the question up, not on the disputed claims of churches, who mutually disprove their respective claims, but on the question of the church, as man looks at it now, as we see it in every time as the subject of ecclesiastical history, and I say it never was, as a system, the institution of God, or what God established; but at all times, from its first appearance in.ecclesiastical history, the departure, as a system, from what God established, and nothing else; primitive church and all; and the more it was formally established, the more it was corrupt. Saints, beloved of God, I do not doubt were and are in it, but it was a corruption offensive to God from the beginning of its history; take a history, any history, of the church, it is a history, not of God’s institution, but of man’s corruption. History and scripture both testify of this, and no man can speak of the church of ecclesiastical history, if he be an honest man, without admitting, that it was man’s corruption, not God’s institution, or denying history and scripture alike; I say, from its outset as the subject of ecclesiastical records, or scripture statements.

That Christ has a church which He loved and gave Himself for, and will present to Himself a glorious church, no true Christian denies; nor that the work which gathered it was to be carried on on earth, nor that in a scriptural sense the foundation was laid on earth; all that is true: but my proposition is simple,