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p213 MY DEAR BROTHER, Thanks for your note. I shall of course read the correspondence the brethren send me, and thank them for doing so; and, the Lord willing, will write when I have read it. It is evident I ought to say nothing fully till then. But allow me to remark, that your note does not quite estimate the state of the case. Suppose we excommunicate a person here, and you receive him at S., it is evident you have denied us here as a body gathered in Christ's name, and acting by His authority; for that is what discipline hangs upon. Further, the unity of the body is denied wholly. It is clear, if I have a part as faithful to Christ in excluding a person here, I cannot have one in another place in breaking bread with him there. Brethren united in the name of the Lord are not infallible, and remonstrance may be all right, but if a person is to be received in one place who is rejected in another, it is evident there is an end to unity and common action. I do not say that excommunication is the whole case; I only reply to the statement you make as to differing in judgment. If rejecting be anything, it is the church of God rejecting by the Lord's authority some evil person from the church for his good perhaps. If another set of Christians receive him, it is clear that they do not own the other body as acting under the Lord's authority, nor their having acted as a church where the Holy Ghost is. In the truth of the case, if I am to speak of the case, you have rejected and cut off all the brethren in L. as an assembly. How could I hold with the rejection of a person here and his reception at S.? When deliberately done, it is evidently impossible. If I am out of communion with him here, and in communion with him there, the unity of the body is gone. And where is the authority of the Lord? not in both. Your act is distinctively a condemnation of the whole body in L. as not acting under the Lord's authority, and in a point which affects the communion of every person in it. The thing is plain enough have you considered it?

Affectionately yours in Christ.

No persons, for example, who had been put out, or who had deliberately separated themselves from -, would have been received here. They would have been separated from the unity of the body there, if we received you there as representing it, and would not be in that unity here.

London, December, 1863.

[52132E]

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