Excerpt from Proceedings of the Seventh General Council of the Alliance of Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System: Held at Washington, D. C., 1899 The Washington Council was the seventh in order of the great gatherings of Reformed and Presbyterian Churches, by which these exhibit to the world their Spiritual unity as forming one body in Christ. The project Of a world-wide Visible Church organization has never been countenanced by the Alliance. On the contrary, this has always maintained that Spiritual unity is quite compatible with Visible separation, and has confined itself to promoting among its members a more distinct consciousness Of the unity already existing between them, and to encouraging them to oo-operate in the matters whereunto they are already agreed. A Visible and universal Church organization can never be regarded as the only or even the best method for manifesting to the world the true oneness of the believers in Christ Jesus. Such a method may be in harmony with the system that characterises the Roman Catholic Church, or find favor in the eyes Of even some Protestants, but is as unwarranted by Scripture teaching as it would be perilous to spiritual life. The method adopted by the Alliance is one wholly different. On every side this sees numerous branches of the Christian Church, many Of which have existed for lengthened periods, and in ways many and important, done good service in the cause of Christ. Recognizing these facts, it assumes that these Churches will continue to exist, and urges them to group themselves together according to some recognized principle of association, be this doctrine, polity, worship, or what it may, and thus Show before the world their true inner unity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1850 Edition.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.