the church and then to enforce its
decisions by judicial procedure, is foreign to the primitive church as
recorded in the New Testament. It is a product of Papalism, and yet
it has been, in its essential characteristics, transferred directly to
the sects of Protestantism. The New Testament recognizes no such human
positional authority. It recognizes only that divine authority which
operates through God's chosen ministers and helpers by virtue of
the Spirit-bestowed gifts and qualifications. The only governmental
authority exercised by the New Testament ministers was in cooperation
with Christ, the visible head, by putting forth, in accordance with
the Spirit's gifts and qualifications, some portion of that moral
power by which alone Christ governs.

The idea that to a clerical order has been committed the exclusive
guardianship of the church, with full power to admit to or exclude
from the worship and service of God all except those who come by
way of their priestly mediation, is the basest assumption. It is a
violation of the rights of individual conscience. Yet just such
power has been and still is being exerted as a means of enforcing
acquiescence in matters of opinion and submission to customs and
practises which every unprejudiced man knows, or can soon see, is no
part of the New Testament teaching and requirements. What a weapon
has this ecclesiastical assumption been! One always ready for use. It
makes no difference whether it is wielded by a Methodist conference,
an Episcopal judicatory, a Presbyterian synod, or a Catholic pope, it
is all the same in principle--"the power of the keys."

[Sidenote: Lack of religious freedom]

This assumed corporate power of the clergy has been one of the
fundamental causes of sect-making. When a general clerical body
assumes the right in its corporate capacity to prescribe rules of
either faith or practise, written or unwritten, and then to enforce
them by judicial action, it is a direct violation of the New Testament
standard, and of the rights of individual consciences. It was because
of this lordly, unscriptural rule that many sincere men of God have
been forced to sever their connection with the older sects in order
to find a place where a greater degree of light and truth could be
experienced and proclaimed. In such cases it was not religious liberty
that caused the formation of new movements and new sects, but _the
lack of religious liberty_.

That "power of the keys,