The people of God are liable to falling into temptation, into sin, into errors and mistakes, from an exercise of grace, or from a degree of steadfastness in Gospel truths, and even into a final and total apostacy, were it not for divine power; and they are not able to keep themselves.

Joseph Scriven lived his early life in the north of Ireland. At age twenty-four, on the night before he was scheduled to be married, his fiancée was thrown from her horse into a river, where she drowned as Scriven looked on helplessly. To distance himself from his grief, Scriven moved to Canada, where he devoted himself at the cost of personal poverty to ministry and service to the disadvantaged.

Now to forsake such assembling, signifies a great infrequency in attending with the saints, a rambling from place to place, and takes in an entire apostacy.