their blessings.

III. _The Prerogatives and Duties of Church Members._

[Sidenote: The Exercise.]

The thorough agreement of our reformers' ideas respecting the nature of
the church with those of the apostles and primitive Christians comes out
even more emphatically in the statements they make in the First Book of
Discipline and the Book of Common Order about the ordinary members of
the congregation, and the arrangements there recommended for promoting
their spiritual welfare, and calling forth all their gifts. Not only are
they to be allowed a voice in the choice of their ministers, elders, and
deacons, in the exclusion of members from the church and their
readmission into it, and through their representatives in the government
of the church generally; not only are they to have week-day and Sabbath
services, and frequent communions for their edification and growth in
grace,--but in the principal congregations there are to be weekly
meetings for the study and interpretation of the Scriptures. At these
meetings every man was to be allowed to speak his mind and propose his
doubts, to exercise his gifts for the edification of the brethren, or to
"inquire as God shall move his heart and the text minister
occasion."[210] The opening paragraph of chapter xii. of the First Book
of Discipline shows us whence this remarkable institution was derived,
and proves clearly that Neander was not the first in post-Reformation
times who discovered the full significance of certain well-known
passages in St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, but only a
restorer of the long-forgotten teaching of Calvin, Alasco, and Knox.
The paragraph is as follows: "To the end that the kirk of God may have a
tryall of men's knowledge, judgements, graces, and utterances; as also,
such that have somewhat profited in God's Word may from time to time
grow in more full perfection to serve the kirk as necessity shall
require; it is most expedient that in every towne where schooles and
repaire of learned men are, there be a time in one certain day every
week appointed to that exercise which S. Paul calls prophecying; the
order whereof is expressed by him in thir words: 'Let the prophets speak
two or three and let the other judge, but if anything be revealed to
another that sitteth by, let the former keep silence; for ye may one by
one all prophesie that all may learne, and all may receive consolation.'
... By which words of the apostle, it is evident