An invisible church (i.e. individual believers, in the midst of a professing body, which was severed from other men by religious rites) finds its real counterpart in the Jewish state of things, not in the Church of God as presented in the New Testament. In fact, it was out of such a condition that God gathered, on the day of Pentecost and afterward, “such as should be saved;” and these, gathered in one by the Holy Ghost, constituted the first nucleus of “the Church of God.” They were baptized by the Spirit into one body.
When the Church gave up the guidance of the Holy Ghost according to the word of God and the world subsequently came in like a flood, she did, as a fact, become “invisible;” but this was her shame and sin. It is not, nor ever was, the design of God And the believer is ever responsible to return to the divine ground on which the Church was meant, and is always bound, to stand. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” It is a question of the will and glory of God, and hence to us a question of faith. This does not make the “two or three” to be the Church of God; (which would ignore its present ruin-state;) but it puts them on Church-ground; and they are that part of the Church which is visible.