I say that church privileges are yours, the doors of God’s house stand open for you, Christ stands at the door and waits for you, he invites you to come in and to sit down at his table, and you shall be most freely and heartily welcome to your Lord, and to his people.

Quest.  What are those qualifications, which the rulers of a church, for their own satisfaction, should look for, and find in such persons, as they admit into full communion with the Church of Christ?

Ans.  It is certain that all that profess the name of Christ and his ways, ought not, and may not be admitted into the Lord’s holy temple, because many, if not the most of them, are very ignorant of Christ and his ways, and notoriously scandalous in their lives, as sad and woful experience shows.  If church rulers should admit known hypocrites, they betray their trust, and defile Christ’s holy temple, by taking in such persons as they know, or ought to know, he would not have there:  and that they ought to try and prove persons, that they may know their fitness, before they admit them in, is clear in Acts ix. 26, 27, and because Christ hath committed the keys of his house to take in and exclude according to his will and appointment.

As to satisfying qualifications in persons desiring admission into the church, when they appear to be real sound-hearted believers, according to the judgment of charity, by the rules of the word, the church ought to receive them in the Lord.

I. If they can satisfy the church, by giving Scripture evidence of their regeneration, conversion, repentance, and faith in Christ; of their knowledge of Christ, his laws and ordinances; of their lost and perishing state by reason of sin, and of their sincere desires and resolutions to become the Lord’s, and to walk with him unto all well-pleasing in all his ways.

II.  If they are sound in the faith of the gospel; I mean in the chief and principal doctrines thereof, although they may be ignorant of, or mistaken in matters of less importance.  If they have some distinct knowledge and faith concerning these, and other such truths and matters contained in the word of God; as of the state and condition in which man was at first created; how he lost that holy and blessed estate, and the misery into which he brought himself and all his posterity thereby.  Concerning themselves, that they are by nature children of wrath, dead in trespasses and sins, and condemned to eternal death; that they are enemies to, and at enmity with, God; that they have neither will nor power by nature to will and to do that which they ought, and which is well-pleasing to God; that they have forsaken God, and are under the curse of the law; and that they are the children, subjects, and servants of the devil, the world, and their own lusts; that God left not all men in this lost state and condition, but provided an all-sufficient remedy, namely, Jesus Christ, and that by an everlasting covenant, entered into with