The present tract before the reader is an exceedingly rare one indeed. According to David Wing's Short-Title Catalogue 1641-1700, only one copy of Spittlehouse and More's Vindication is known to be extant in any library in the world. And this copy resides at the American Baptist Historical Society in Rochester, New York. In terms of theme, this aspect of the tract is clearly manifest in the very title of the work. Messrs. Spittlehouse and More laboured to defend the doctrine of the perpetuity of Christ's assembly. And the kind of ekklesia they argue is perpetual is not the ecclesiastical nonentity that we have come to know through theological history as the universal invisible church, but rather a local congregation of immersed disciples who follow Christ and keep his commands. - Introduction.