Can We Trust God for Emergencies in His Church?

We are not wearied so readily in looking to ourselves, we break down in the case of others; and unless our souls are fortified by the word of God and prayer, we sink from the pressure of trial, into indifference: or, wearied with combating the wills of others, determine on the unrestrained exercise of our own. But God has written confusion on man's efforts. And even men of God have wandered furthest from His thoughts, when they have sought to provide for emergencies in the church before they have appeared, or to obviate their manifestation by discipline of their own. The chaos around us in the Religious World, the very vanity and vexation of all things, are God's warning to us, to "cease from man." Man would not trust God for His church, and has sought to restrain disorder by bonds of his own. How utterly has this exercise of will proved abortive, and brought in confusion which nothing can remedy, the end of which is revealed to be judgment.
Present Testimony, 1849.