The Church of the Bible Author:Frederick Oakeley Subtitle: Or, Scripture Testimonies to Catholic Doctrines and Catholic Principles, Considered and Collected in a Series of Popular Discourses General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1857 Original Publisher: Charles Dolman Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there m... more »ay be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 75 " DISCOUESE IV. THE EVANGELICAL COUNSELS AND THE RELIGIOUS STATE. No one who is even moderately acquainted with the Scriptures of the New Testament, can have failed to remark how many rules of conduct and descriptions of moral and religious excellence they contain, which are not only without example, but even without recognition, among professing Christians of the present time. Were this degeneracy confined to practice alone, there would be nothing in it which the simple student of the Bible would find it hard to understand. But it is otherwise when, not only do the disciples fall below the standard of practice set before them by their teachers, but even those teachers themselves appear to make large deductions from the rule of evangelical perfection; to set aside,- so far as we can judge, some of our Saviour's chief lessons, and even lay it down as a matter beyond dispute, that many portions of His teaching have become obsolete, and possess little more than a purely historical interest for the Christian of the nineteenth century. You will readily understand, my brethren, that I am here alluding, not so much to those maxims of our Divine Redeemer which describe the Christian life under images fitted to impress us with a sense of its strictness, and of the manyrestraints and sufferings incident to it, as to a class of texts still more startling to tlie natural instincts of men; in which our Lord appears to counsel, or to ...« less