The devil is the Grand Master Workman in all such associations. Whatever may be the designs of those who contrive, or of those who enter into them, his design is to destroy the Church. Being no longer able to stir up the civil powers to persecute the people of God, as formerly, he beats up for voluntary associations, either for moral reform, or to promote the secular interests of men, that the seed of the woman may be entangled in them, or be driven from the means of obtaining a livelihood. Actuated by draconic subtlety, apostate ministers of the Presbyterian Church assail the doctrines of the Westminster Confession of Faith, not so much by attempting to prove that they are unscriptural, as by boasting of the superior advantages of modern divines, and how much more they know than the great men did, who composed the famous Westminster Assembly, men who were raised up by the Mediator, and furnished with gifts, natural and acquired, to give to the world a summary of the attainments of the witnesses to that time, of the truths that had been sealed by the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. The assertion that men know more of divine things because of greater literary, scientific, or any human knowledge, is neither scriptural nor according to fact.
Earthly wisdom is natural sensual and devilish.
The natural man cannot understand the things of God, because they are spiritually discerned. The cultivation of the natural mind only increases its enmity against the soul-humbling doctrines of the gospel. The most cultured intellects of this age, like the same class among the Jews and Greeks, in the time of our Savior and his apostles, are not among those to whom God, in his sovereign wisdom, has revealed the mysteries of the gospel. Although the judgments of God have visited the land by storms, by flood, by fire and epidemic, yet very few have noticed the hand of him who ruleth the nations, some uttering dreadful blasphemies, when reminded that these things are the doings of him who worketh all things according to the counsel of his own will. Gross ignorance of the nature of the terms of communion in the visible church lies at the foundation of a great part of the disorder that prevails within her pale.