Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

any understanding with the bishops of this country; and perhaps in the
contempt which he expressed for them, he yielded too much to his indignation
against superstition.” f655
Claudius, having been sent to his field by “Lonious the Pious,” f656 and
possessing a powerful protector in the Frank emperor, f657 was, with his field
independent of popery.
The first church instead of building up several small churches in one locality,
extended its work throughout that territory by missions. In this plan there were
many pastors to the same church, so as to secure pastoral care of each mission.
But these missions and their pastors continued under the care of the mother
church. This gave the pastor of the mother church a pastoral care over all the
missions and their pastors. This is the case now in quite a number of Baptist
churches. Yet, as arbitrary or executive the authority was in the mother church;
its pastor had only moral authority. Consequently, there was nothing in this
resembling any heirarchal or Episcopal government. By the pastor of the
mother church, by degrees, stealing the authority of his church, after a few
centuries he became what is now known as a diocesan bishop. Of course, this
became the case in some localities much sooner than in others. While the Turin
churches were not yet popish, when Claude went among them they were
certainly rapidly on the road there. This prepares us to see how it was that
Claudius when called to account for his Scriptural course, by bishops and
pope, treated them all with contempt. It also prepares us to understand that the
church government of Turin was not Episcopal diocesian in the sense these
terms now imply. Robinson observes of the Turin bishop: “The bishop was
little more than a rector. He had no suffragan bishops and no secular power in
the valleys.” f658
Thus, there is a strong reason to believe that the Waldenses, in the Turin
diocese, had continued from apostolic times, and that the Lord had Claudius
sent among them in the time to save them from wandering so far as to lose
their apostolic character. Nor does the conclusion follow that they were fully
identified with the Turin diocese, even had it been a modern Episcopal
diocese. As Episcopal government is unknown in pure Waldensian history, had
the Turin government been Episcopal, the conclusion would naturally be that
the Waldenses were not, in full, ecclesiastically identified with the bishop of
Turin f659 but that from time immemorial they had made his diocese their
refuge, because his freedom from popery or non-subjection to it, with his great
evangelical feeling, assured them a refuge and home. The point of this
argument is not necessarily that the bishop of Turin and his diocese were
Waldenses — I think they were — but that genuine Waldenses existed there
long before Waldo’s day. Nor is it the point that they were called Waldenses
long before Waldo, but that they were, in teaching and practice, Waldenses. As