Renounces the Church

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 9, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 35.

Renounces the Church

Renounces the Church.—The Rev. C. S. Davidson, for years a minister of the Episcopal Church at Charlottesville, Virginia, has renounced the church, because, as he declares: “I charge that the Episcopal Church is the gentleman’s church in general, and in Virginia in particular. It is powerful financially and socially, stupid intellectually, and spiritually dead. It needs a change of heart, repentance, or utter obliteration. It favors the rich and the cultured, and has no vital interest in the poor and the common. It either segregates the poor in missions on the back streets, or relegates them in churches to the back pews.” “The Episcopal Church everywhere is shot through with materialism. Its overtures in the matter of unity are insidious and hypercritical. Behind closed doors it claims superiority to all Protestantism, and contemplates only an Episcopal merger. The leaders are misleading; the church is not divine on the side of its human imperfections. To-day in its conventional aspects it does not know God.” At the time that he uttered these words, the clergyman burned “the vestments of an impotent priesthood” and the prayer-book, which he calls “the fetish of a false worship, the idol of the diluted word of God.” He renounces and repudiates the ministry of the Episcopal Church, and “all digital succession, and I retain the ministry which I received of the Lord Jesus, and which the church never gave and can not take away.” He also proclaimed “the Bible as the sufficient rule of faith and order, as the sufficient guide-book and prayer-book for every one that is born of the Spirit.” If he stays by the Word, certainly he has chosen well.