In this hour of general apostasy – when the brethren of our Lord (on every hand) are committing themselves in unholy unions with infidels, when the table of the Lord is turned into the table of devils and the temple of God to a house of idols, when pastors, churches and professors define (and approve of) salvation and church behavior different from the book of Acts and the epistles of the New Tes
tament, when there is more leaven in the church than there is sincerity and truth, when the faithful are scattered upon the desolate hills of hopelessness as sheep without a shepherd, when the wicked lift their unholy hands in our assemblies to praise a holy God, and no one thinks twice, no one considers their way – in this hour, I say, it is meet for those whom God has risen up as salt and light, so to salt the corruptions of their generation, and to turn the lights on in that great bedroom of adulteries (i.e. the professing church), if perhaps God would be pleased indeed to stem the tide, seal the breach, and resurrect His standard of righteousness which has long lain without a Church to bear it. Having thus set ourselves against so much of that dead body of so called “orthodoxy”, and, “divinity”, we thought it meet to manifest our stance, in no uncertain terms, that he which readeth “may run that readeth it” (Hab. 2:2). Let no man think a trifle what God deems a matter of moment, and let no man make a mole hill of what God calls a mountain. The hill we stand upon to defend in the following Manifesto is the hill we have resolved to win, or to die upon. The following articles which we have, all of us, without exception, subscribed to, bear sway upon the eternal welfare of the soul, and the immediate state of Christ’s mystical body: the Church. When a child is reared all his days in the shadow of darkness, then at last is brought to see light, he finds not only is it good, and exciting to his senses, but that it is vitally necessary to the furtherance of life. These truths we hold to be self-evident, and most boldly alleged in our Testament, and without controversy among the saints of God in light. If one consents not to these truths as of yet, we believe, as ever he is a child of God, they shall be revealed (though not without proper light and reasoning), and if not, how can we but fear the words of Isaiah: “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isa. 8:20). If we see not eye-to-eye in these declarations it is not the beam in our eye, dear reader, but thine that is the issue. May the Lord assist you now to have an eye that sees deeper than the surface. My words are purposely brief, but they are not shallow. You will not discover the pearl by skimming the sea foam, but by diving deep below the ocean’s skin. And remember, it is not always the barrage, but often the single bullet, that deals the mortal wound. May God grant the reader grace now, as he surveys our articles, and grant that your eyes be enlightened by a little of our honey, in this day when the commandments of men have stopped the mouth at the comb (see I Sam. 14:24-46)!
