Excerpt from A Treatise Upon Baptist Church Jurisprudence, or the Common Law of the Gospel, Critically and Scientifically Considered: Illustrating the Written and Unwritten Laws of True Apostolic Church Government; Being a Discussion of the Principal Questions Incident to the Government and Polity of Baptist Churches

HE primary aim of the author in the present volume is not to attempt to unsettle any heretofore recognized principles of Baptist church polity, nor to supply any entirely new method of obtaining reasoned answers to ecclesiastical questions; but rather by careful reflection to introduce greater clearness and consistency into the kind of thought and reasoning with which every intelligent Baptist is more or less familiar. In order to arrive at sound and correct conclu sions on practical questions much detailed knowledge is needed, which the general theory of ecclesiastical government professes to give; it can only point out the nature of this further knowledge, and the sources from which it is to be obtained. The general theory of Baptist church jurisprudence ought to classify the con siderations by which any given question should be decided, and indicate their general bearing on the question under consideration; but the degree of weight to be attached to each species of consideration, in any particular case, has mostly to be learned from experience; so that the main practical use of the theory of Baptist church government is to show how experience is to be acquired in this the most peculiar of all church polities.

So wide, and so flagrant has been the departure from the true form of apostolic church government, by the various religious communities now extant in the world, that the author of the following work has undertaken to correct some of the errors which have led the Catholic and Protestant world astray. The subject of Baptist Church government is a noble science, and one that has not hitherto been treated with all the care it deserves. The greater part of our own people have, therefore, only a vague and incomplete, and often a very false notion of it.

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