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History of the Church of God

AUTHOR(S):

Hassell, Cushing Biggs
Hassell, Sylvester

Chapter XXV: A CHURCH—EDUCATION—ITINERANCY—ROMANIZING OF PROTESTANTS—SOCIETIES—SUNDAY SCHOOLS—PERSECUTION—FEET-WASHING.

1. As to what constitutes a Church—According to the Kehukee fathers, “a church of Christ is a congregation of men and women, publicly professing faith in Christ Jesus, and being regularly baptized by immersion, who have covenanted together, given themselves up to one another in the Lord, to be governed by His word, and to be guided by a regular and proper discipline, agreeable to the Holy Scriptures.”

The Philadelphia Baptist Association is the oldest, most honored and authoritative “Missionary” Baptist Association in America. The Minutes of that Association from 1707 to 1807 have been published in one volume. In the Circular Letter adopted by that Association in 1806 (p. 429 of the Minutes), it is frankly admitted that “in modern missions Papal Rome has led the way, the Society of Jesuits, formed in 1540 [1534], being the first missionary society.” Thus it is certain that Protestants copied their “modern missions,” not from the inspired Apostles of the first century, but from the Roman Catholic Jesuits of the sixteenth century. Now Protestants are universally agreed in denouncing the idolatrous corruptions and heathenish abominations of Roman Catholic Jesuits of the sixteenth Century. Now Protestants are universally agreed in denouncing the idolatrous corruptions and heathenish abominations of Roman Catholic “Missions”; but volumes of evidence have been published in demonstration of similar, if not altogether so horrible, corruptions and abominations practiced by Protestant “Missionaries” among the heathens of the nineteenth century. In India, Africa, the West Indies, the Sandwich Island, Tahiti, etc., such enormities as the following have been perpetrated in this century by Protestant “Missionaries:”—The gathering of congregations by the police with whips and rattans; the “missionaries” using the poor heathens as mules or oxen to draw to draw the families of the “”missionaries” to their religious meetings (or even on pleasure excursions), whipping them if they travel too slowly, and hitching the heathens out of doors, like beasts of burden, while the “missionaries” go into the house to preach their pretended “gospel;” the willful deceiving of the ignorant heathens into an external profession of Christianity after they learn to answer a few questions in the “Catechism,” and selling them, for money, monthly tickets as passports to Heaven, and the “missionaries” thus realizing large revenues, besides the amounts paid them by their employers at home; willfully false reports of success sent by the “missionaries” to their employers for the purpose of retaining and increasing their pecuniary incomes; capturing and confining the heathens in order to “convert” them; and the great increase of vice and crime, dishonesty, theft, drunkenness and licentiousness among the heathens after the introduction of this spurious Christianity into their midst. In proof of these statements, see the abundant testimony of competent witnesses (including government officers and ministers of the gospel, published in Griffin’s “History of the Primitive Baptists of Mississippi,” Elder Jesse Cox’s “Exposition of Revelation,” and the past volumes of the “Signs of the Times,” the “Christian Doctrinal Advocate and Monitor,” the “New York Sun,” the “Baptist Register,” etc. We would now ask the candid reader, Are not the above-mentioned Protestant “Missionary” abominations nearly equal to the Roman Catholic sale of indulgences to sin, and of priestly pardons, in the early part of the sixteenth century? Who can for a moment suppose that God is the author of such iniquities? Behold the corrupt fruit of a corrupt tree—the Roman Catholic and the Protestant departure from the perfect apostolic model of preaching the gospel exhibited in the New Testament!

ENDNOTES:

[1] The references in Church History to the ceremonial washing of feet, or pedilavium, or lavipedium, are very scanty. I find that the ceremony was observed, just after baptism, in the Visigothic churches of Gaul (France) and Spain during the third and fourth centuries, and has been occasionally observed, especially on “Maunday Thursday” (Thursday before “Easter”), in the Greek and Roman Catholic “Churches” ever since. Among the Mennonites, or “Anabaptists,” or Baptists, of the sixteenth century and since, it was practiced by some, and not practiced by others, and always placed among things indifferent, and never made a test of fellowship. The Tunkers, the River Brethren, the Winebrennerians and some Mennonites still practice it. The ceremony has been rarely observed among the Baptists in England. The English Strict Baptists do not at all observe it. It is the final result of all my researches among the Old School or Primitive Baptists of the United States that about one-half do, and one-half do not, practice the washing of feet as a church ordinance or rite. See Smith and Cheetham’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, Vol. I., pp. 158, 159; Vol. II., pp. 1160, 1161; J. H. Blunt’s Dictionary of Doctrinal and Historical Theology, pp. 397, 398; McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, Vol. III., pp. 615, 616; Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature, Vol. I., pp. 936, 937; the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. I., p. 823; and J. M. Cramp’s Baptist History, pp. 265 and 389.—S. H.

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