Nevin and Historic Christianity

…to take away from the church its divine historical existence… is to turn it into a wretched Gnostic abstraction. To conceive of it as the mere foot-ball of Satan from the beginning, is to suppose that Christ was either totally unmindful of his own word that the gates of hell should not prevail against it, or else unable to make his word good.
- John Williamson Nevin, taken from Darryl G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R), 155.