ble ecclesia. A house, a vine, a family, an army with banners, a light, the moon, the mother, and a city set on a hill-these are the most common figures of the church; and all these denote visibility.

The saints forsake not the assembling of themselves together. Wherever a number of people fully accept Christ, whether in a country place or in a city, they assemble together for worship. These assemblies constitute local churches, geographically distributed throughout the world. All such assemblies are visible. Surely Barnabas and Paul, who assembled a whole year with the church at Antioch (Acts 11: 26), did not gather together with something they saw notwith unseen spirits. Saints, as an assembly, worship God. This worship consists in prayer, song, exhortation, testimony, praise, and preaching. All such meetings and public devotions are visible.

The saving effects of the gospel ministered through the church are visible. God calls and qualifies certain persons to preach this gospel. Their preaching produces joy, comfort, and peace in the hearts of believers. They express this in song, praise, and spiritual worship.

Sinners are melted and under pungent conviction fall at the public altar, cry for mercy, and find deliverance. All this is visible.

God is a God of order. Through the Holy Spirit he organizes every local assembly raised up through the preaching of the gospel. He sets the members in the body as it pleases him. As before stated, this work is invisible, but these members who constitute the body are visible. Its ministry-evangelists, pastors, and teachers -are visible. They feel the call of God upon them and exercise in their respective callings. Their call and work is recognized by the church in which they labor, and they are publicly ordained by the laying on of hands. Whether they be classed as local or traveling elders-called pastors and evangelists-their work is visible. Deacons are chosen and ordained to look after the temporal affairs of the church. Their work also is visible.

Then again, the ministry are placed in authority. They are ambassadors for Christ. The chief shepherd and governor of his people has placed "governments" in this church (1 Cor. 12:28). These are vested in the holy ministry. As ensamples to the flock, they teach, warn, ad

monish, rebuke, and execute his Word. To them he says, "Hear the Word at my mouth and give them warning from me.' "Them that sin, rebuke before all." To the church the following charge is given: "Remember them that have the rule over you, men that speak unto you the Word of God." "Obey them that have the rule over you and submit yourself to them." Heb. 13: 7, 17, R. V. This is government, and it is visible.

And again, in the exercise and manifestations of the gifts placed in the church there is visibility. The Lord has placed in his church many spiritual gifts—gifts of exhortation, preaching, wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, discerning of spirits, tongues, etc. All these are visibly manifested.

So the church of God stands out before us the most beautiful, visible institution on earth.

Sects, then, are not necessary to make the church visible. In this respect they are worthless. This theory is generally circulated by sectarians in defense of their own rival organizations, that the constitution of sects is essential to the visible manifestation of the church. A sect is a portion "cut off." Is there any sense, rea

son, or divine truth in the teaching that an invisible body is made visible by cutting off a portion of it? None of the present sects came into existence until the third century. Was God's church an invisible thing on earth for nearly three hundred years? Who can affirm that the multitude of sects have made visible the church of God, from which they are severed by their particular creeds? We affirm in the presence of the Judge of all men, with a clear consciousness of his truth to support our proposition, that the creation of the sects of Christendom have had exactly the opposite effect. Their traditions have made "the Word of God of none effect." Their confusing creeds, heaps of rubbish, and interminable machinery have utterly subverted and well-nigh hidden the church that Jesus builded. As the historian D'Aubigne says, in the third century an "earthly association," "an external organization," was gradually substituted for "the interior and spiritual communion which is the essence of the religion of God.” Then, says the historian, "the living church retired gradually within the lonely sanctuary of a few solitary hearts"; that is, the real church of God was almost hidden from view by the over

spread pomp of the false. So, then, men's sects do not make visible God's church, but, on the contrary, obstruct her life and obscure her glory. These are facts of the history that no honest and intelligent man can deny.

The Babel of human sects long obscured the sight of the church of the first-born. Until the evening light revealed the true church as she shone out in the morning of the dispensation, everybody looked upon man-made substitutes as the divine church, and the body of Christ, which only is the church, was scarcely discerned at all.

Visibility is a natural characteristic of the church of God. Thus the church of God did not become visible by the organization of sects; for in the days of primitive Christianity none of the modern sects existed. Those who speak of God's invisible church and can see it visible only in sect organizations hold a superstition of the Dark Ages. Babylon theologians teach that God takes members into his invisible church, while they admit members into the visible. In this they are without any Scriptural support. It is true that the world can not see the head of the church, as do the Christians, for