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 Fragment on the church. 
 
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FRAGMENT 
 
 THE CHUECH. 
 
 THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D. 
 
 LATE HBAD MASTER OF RUSBY SCHOOL. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 B. FELLOWES, LUDGATE STREET. 
 1844. 
 
GEORGE WOODFALL AND.. SON, 
 
 ANGEL COURT, SKINNER STREET. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 The following pages are a part of a much larger 
 work which Dr. Arnold contemplated, but which 
 was interrupted by his early death. 
 
 The executors having kindly allowed me to 
 fulfil my wishes as to this fragment, I have felt it 
 a duty not to withhold what remains from his 
 pen on the subject which so greatly occupied his 
 thoughts. 
 
 The references, which it was not his habit to 
 make till after the work for which they were re- 
 quired was completed, have been in part supplied. 
 
 Before he began the work in the more historical 
 form in which it appears in these pages, he had 
 already, on two occasions, approached the question 
 of Church and State. These fragmentary essays — 
 for they are scarcely more — it is intended to in- 
 clude in a volume containing some of his miscel- 
 laneous works. 
 
 M. A. 
 
 Fox How, October 5, 1844,. 
 
THE CHURCH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The language of prophecy leads us to hope for 
 more than the salvation of a certain number of 
 individuals through the gospel. It speaks of a 
 general restoration, so complete as to repair al- 
 together the mischief which had been introduced 
 into the world by sin. And the language of St. 
 Paul, when declaring the great mystery of his 
 preaching, namely, the admission of the Gentiles 
 into the kingdom of God, seems also to go be- 
 yond the redemption of a few individuals, com- 
 paratively speaking, out of the multitude of all 
 nations. Christ was to present unto himself a 
 Church holy and without blemish; and the dis- 
 tinction made by some between the visible and 
 invisible Church, seems only a later refinement 
 of interpretation, Suggested by the fact that the 
 Church, in the obvious sense of the term, was not 
 pure and spotless. Now ought we to lower the 
 language of prophecy, in order to make it agree 
 with the existing state of things ? or to be anxious 
 to amend the existing state of things, for the 
 
Z THE CHURCH. 
 
 very reason that it does not correspond with the 
 promises of Scripture ? 
 
 The spread of Christianity, speaking of the 
 geographical extent of its mere nominal dominion, 
 has been partial ; — its real moral effects have been 
 still more partial. The largest part of the world 
 does not acknowledge Christ so much as in name ; 
 and where he is acknowledged in name, he is yet 
 denied in many instances in works. The perfect 
 work of the Gospel has been seen only in in- 
 dividuals : Christ has laid his hands on a few sick 
 folk and healed them ; but he has done no mighty 
 work of spiritual healing on a whole church. It 
 is still most true, that we see not yet all things 
 put under him. 
 
 Now are we prepared to say that, whereas the 
 world was lost by one man's sin, it was only to be 
 in a small part recovered by one man's righteous- 
 ness ? — that, whereas through Adam all died, only 
 a very small number were through Christ to be 
 made alive? This is directly contrary to the 
 language of Scripture, which represents the re- 
 demption as designed to be a full reparation of 
 the evil occasioned by the fall. 
 
 Or are we prepared to say that God's purposes 
 have been defeated by the greater power of God's 
 enemy? — that sin has been stronger than grace, 
 Satan mightier than Christ? — that the Church 
 with its divine Head and its indwelling Spirit 
 
THE CHURCH. 3 
 
 has been unable to overcome the powers of evil ? 
 — that the medicine was too weak to overcome 
 the disease? 
 
 If neither of these alternatives be true ; if the 
 Scripture will not allow us to doubt of God's 
 gracious will towards us all ; and if to doubt his 
 power be blasphemy, — what remains, but that we 
 have weakened and corrupted that medicine, which 
 was in itself sufficient to heal us ? — that we have 
 not tried, and are not trying Christianity, such as 
 Christ willed it to be ? — -that the Church, against 
 which the powers of hell have so long maintained 
 an advantageous conflict, cannot be that same 
 Church against which Christ declared that they 
 should not prevail? 
 
 Now here it is necessary, in order to prevent 
 much confusion and very much uncharitableness, 
 to distinguish carefully between what I may be 
 allowed to call Christian religion and the Christian 
 Church a . 
 
 By Christian religion, I mean that knowledge 
 of God and of Christ, and that communion of the 
 Holy Spirit, by which an individual is led through 
 life, in all holiness, and dies with the confident 
 hope of rising again through Christ at the last 
 day. This knowledge being derived, or derivable 
 at any rate, from the Scriptures alone, and this 
 ■communion being the answer to our earnest 
 
 a [See Serm. xxxix. in vol. iv. ; Leet. on Modern Hist. vLJ 
 
 B 2 
 
4 THE CHURCH. 
 
 prayers, it is perfectly possible that Christian 
 religion may work its full work on an individual 
 living alone, or living amongst unbelieving or un- 
 godly men, — that here, where the business rests 
 only with God and the individual soul, God's 
 glory may be exalted and the man's salvation 
 effected, whatever may be the state of the Church 
 at large. 
 
 ' But, by the Christian Church, I mean that pro- 
 vision for the communicating, maintaining, and 
 enforcing of this knowledge by which it was to 
 be made influential, not on individuals, but on 
 masses of men. This provision consisted in the 
 formation of a society, which by its constitution 
 should be capable of acting both within itself and 
 without ; having, so to speak, a twofold move- 
 ment, the one for its outward advance, the other for 
 its inward life and purification; so that Christ- 
 ianity should be at once spread widely, and pre- 
 served the while in its proper truth and vigour, 
 till Christian knowledge should be not only com- 
 municated to the whole World, but be embraced 
 also in its original purity, and bring forth its 
 practical fruit. Thus Christian religion and the] 
 
 ; Christian Church being two distinct things, the one 
 acting upon individuals, the other upon masses; 
 it is very possible for the former to continue to 
 do its work, although the latter be perverted or : 
 disabled. But then the consequence will be such 
 
THE CHURCH. 5 
 
 as we see before us, that Christianity, being de- 
 signed to remedy the intensity of the evil of the 
 fall by its religion, and the universality of the evil 
 by its Church, has succeeded in the first, beeause 
 its religion has been retained as God gave it, but 
 has failed in the second, because its Church has 
 been greatly corrupted. 
 
 Christianity, then, contains on the one hand a 
 divine philosophy, which we may call its religion, 
 and a divine polity, which is its Church. 
 
 But it is precisely from an acknowledgment of 
 this last truth, accompanied with a misunder- 
 standing of its real nature, that the greatest part 
 of the actual mischief has arisen. When we say, 
 therefore, that Christianity contains a divine polity, 
 namely, its Church, it is of the utmost importance 
 that we have a clear notion of the Christian 
 Church, according to what we may gather froth 
 the Scripture to have been the mind of its divine 
 Founder. 
 
 Now, that religion should be a social as well 
 as an individual concern, is nothing peculiar to 
 Christianity, if by religion we mean the outward 
 and visible worship of God. The act of sacrifice, 
 almost of necessity, involves the cooperation of 
 more than a single person ; — festivals and solemn 
 processions, even hymns of thanksgiving and praise, 
 can scarcely be performed by one alone. Religion, 
 then, in that sense in which the ancient world 
 
6 THE CHURCH. 
 
 generally understood it, that is, public and visible 
 worship, has always been, and must always be, the 
 business of several persons together ; — the religion 
 of a single individual must, in this sense, be some- 
 thing imperfect, and only in a very small degree 
 possible. 
 
 But the peculiarity of Christianity consists in 
 this, that while it takes religion in another sense, 
 and means by it, not the visible worship of God, 
 but the service of the heart towards him; and whilst 
 it would thus appear that religion could exist 
 perfectly in one single individual, and required no 
 cooperation of more persons, yet still it is made 
 the business of a number or multitude, and our 
 spiritual relations to God are represented as 
 matters of a joint interest, no less than that visible 
 worship which, in its very nature, must be more 
 than individual. 
 
 Now it is seen and generally acknowledged, 
 that men's physical welfare has been greatly 
 promoted by the cooperation of a number of 
 persons endowed with unlike powers and resources. 
 One man having what another wants, and wanting 
 what another has, there is an obvious wisdom in 
 so combining their efforts, as .that the strength of 
 one should supply the weakness of another, and 
 so the weakness should in no case be perceptible. 
 
 This cooperative principle, founded on the great 
 dissimilarity which prevails amongst men, was by 
 
THE CHURCH. 7 
 
 Christianity to be applied to moral purposes, as 
 it had long been to physical"; each man was to 
 regard his intellectual and moral gifts as a means 
 of advancing the intellectual and moral good of 
 society ; what he himself wanted was to be sup- 
 plied out of the abundance of his neighbour ; — and 
 thus the moral no less than the physical weak- 
 nesses of each individual, were to be strengthened 
 and remedied, till they should vanish as to their 
 enfeebling effects both with respect to himself and 
 to the community. 
 
 Nothing could be more general than such a 
 system of cooperation* It extended to every part 
 of life ; not only going far beyond that cooperation 
 for ritual purposes, which was the social part of 
 the old religions, but, so far as men's physical 
 well-being had been the sole object of existing 
 civil societies, it went far beyond them also. For 
 though it is possible, and unhappily too easy, to 
 exclude moral considerations from our notions of 
 physical good, and from our notions of ritual re- 
 ligion, yet it is not easy, in looking to the moral 
 good of man, to exclude considerations of his 
 physical well-being. Every outward thing having 
 a tendency to affect his moral character, either for 
 the better or for the worse, and this especially 
 holding good with respect to riches or poverty, 
 
 a [j3ee Introduction to Sermons on Christian Life, its 
 Course, its Hindrances, and its Helps, p 1 . xlviii.] 
 
<5 THE CHURCH. 
 
 economical questions, in all their wide extent, fall 
 directly under the cognizance of those whose 
 object is to promote man's moral welfare. 
 
 But while thus general, the object of Christian 
 co-operation was not to be vague. When men 
 combined to offer sacrifice, or to keep festival, 
 there was a definite object of their union ; but 
 the promotion of man's moral welfare might seem 
 indistinct and lost in distance. Something nearer 
 and more personal was therefore to be mixed up 
 with that which was indistinct from its very vast- 
 
 , ness. The direct object of Christian cooperation 
 was to bring Christ into every part of common 
 life ; in scriptural language, to make human society 
 one living body, closely joined in communion with 
 Christ, its head. And for this purpose, one of 
 
 , the very simplest acts of natural necessity was 
 connected with the very deepest things of religion : 
 — the meal of an assembly of Christians was made 
 the sacrament of the 'body and blood of Christ. 
 And the early church well entered into the spirit 
 of this ordinance, when it began every day by a 
 partaking of the holy communion. For when 
 Christ was thus brought into one of the com- 
 monest acts of nature and of common society, it 
 was a lively lesson, that in every other act through 
 the day he should be made present also: if 
 Christians at their very social meal could enter 
 into the highest spiritual communion, it taught 
 
THE CHURCH. 9 
 
 them thai in all matters of life, even when sepa- 
 rated from one another bodily, that same commu- 
 nion should be preserved inviolate; that in all 
 things they were working for and with one another, 
 with and to Christ and God. 
 
 Such appears, even from the meagre account of 
 a stranger, to have been the manner of living of 
 the Christians of Bithynia, about a hundred years 
 after the birth of our Lord, and about seventy 
 therefore from the first preaching of Christianity. 
 They met before day, and sang together a hymn to 
 Christ : then they bound themselves to one another 
 by oath, — according to Pliny's expression, " Sacra- 
 mento," but in reality, we may be sure, by their 
 joint partaking of the communion of Christ's body 
 and blood, — that they would neither steal, nor 
 rob, nor commit adultery, nor break faith, nor 
 refuse to restore what had been entrusted to 
 them. Then they went to their day's work, and 
 met again to partake their meal together; which 
 they probably hallowed, either by making, it a 
 direct communion, or by some prayers, or hymns, 
 which reminded them of their Christian fellowship. 
 
 Now in this account, short as it is, we see the 
 two great principles of the Christian Church : first, 
 cooperation for general moral improvement, for 
 doing the duties of life better ; and secondly, the 
 bringing Christ as it were into their communion, 
 by beginning the day with him, and deriving their 
 
10 THE CHURCH. 
 
 principle of virtuous living directly from his sacra- 
 ment. The church of Bithynia existed on a small 
 scale, in a remote province ; but here are precisely 
 those leading principles of the Christian Church 
 exemplified, which were fitted for all circum- 
 stances and all places, and which contain in them 
 that essential virtue which the Church was to em- 
 body and to diffuse. 
 
 It is obvious, also, that the object of Christian 
 society being thus extensive, and relating not to 
 ritual observances, but to the improvement of the 
 whole of our life, the natural and fit state of the 
 Church is, that it should be a sovereign society 
 or commonwealth ; as long as it is subordinate and 
 municipal, it cannot fully carry its purposes into 
 effect. This will be evident, if we consider that 
 law and government are the sovereign influences 
 on human society ; that they in the last resort 
 shape and control it at their pleasure ; that in- 
 stitutions depend on them, and are by Jthem 
 formed and modified; that what they sanction 
 will ever be generally considered innocent; that 
 what they condemn is thereby made a crime, and 
 if persisted in becomes rebellion ; and that those 
 who hold in their hands the power of life and 
 death must be able greatly to obstruct the pro- 
 gress of whatever they disapprove of, and those 
 who dispose of all the honours and rewards of so- 
 ciety must, in the same way, be greatly able to 
 
THE CHUECH. 11 
 
 advance whatever they think excellent. So long, 
 then, as the sovereign society is not Christian, and 
 the Church is not sovereign, we have two powers 
 alike designed to act upon the whole of our be- 
 ing, but acting often in opposition to one another. 
 Of these powers, the one has wisdom, the other 
 external force and influence; and from the divi- 
 sion of these things, which ought ever to go to- 
 gether, the wisdom of the Church cannot carry 
 into effect the truths which it sees and loves; 
 whilst the power of government, not being guided 
 by wisdom, influences society for evil rather than 
 for good*. 
 
 The natural and true state of things then is, 
 that this power and this wisdom should be united ; 
 that human life should not be pulled to pieces 
 between two claimants, each pretending to exer- 
 cise control over it, not in some particular portion, 
 but universally; that wisdom should be armed 
 with power, power guided by wisdom ; that the 
 Christian Church should have no external force to 
 thwart its beneficent purposes; that government 
 should not be poisoned by its internal ignorance 
 or wickedness, and thus advance the cause of God's 
 enemy, rather than perform the part of God's 
 vicegerent. 
 
 This is the perfect notion of a Christian Church, 
 
 a QSee Lectures on Modern History (Inaug. Lect. and Ap- 
 pendix).] 
 
12 THE CHURCH. 
 
 that it should be a sovereign society, operating 
 therefore with full power for raising its condi- 
 tion, first morally, and then physically ; operating 
 through the fullest developement of the varied 
 faculties and qualities of its several members, and 
 keeping up continually, as the bond of its union, 
 the fellowship of all its people with one another 
 through Christ, and their communion with him as 
 their common head. 
 
 With this notion of a perfect Church two things 
 are utterly inconsistent : — first, the destroying of 
 the principle of cooperation through the varied 
 talents and habits of the several members of the 
 society, and substituting in the place of it a sys- 
 tem in which a very few should be active and the 
 great mass passive 8 ; a system in which vital heat 
 was to be maintained, not by the even circula- 
 tion of the blood through every limb, through the 
 healthy cooperation of the arteries and veins of 
 every part, but by external rubbing and chafing, 
 when the limbs, from a suspension of their inward 
 activity, had become cold and paralyzed. ■ 
 
 Secondly, the taking of any. part or parts of hu- 
 man life out of its control, by a pretended dis- 
 tinction between spiritual things and secular; a 
 distinction utterly without foundation, for in one 
 sense all things are secular, for they are done in 
 
 a [Introd. to Sermons on Christian Life, its Course, its Hin- 
 drances, and its Helps, pp. xlviii, xlix.] 
 
THE CHURCH. 13 
 
 time and on earth ; in another, all things are spi- 
 ritual, for they affect us morally either for the 
 better or the worse, and so tend to make our 
 spirits fitter for the society of God or of his ene- 
 mies. The division rests entirely on principles of 
 heathenism, and tends to make Christianity, like 
 the religions of the old world, not a sovereign 
 discipline for every part and act of life, but a 
 system for communicating certain abstract truths, 
 and for the performance of certain visible rites 
 and ceremonies. 
 
 These two notions, both utterly inconsistent 
 with the idea of a true Christian Church, have 
 been prevalent alternately or conjointly almost- 
 from the very beginning of Christianity. To the 
 first we owe Popery in all its shapes, Romanist or 
 Protestant ; the second is the more open form of 
 Antichrist, which, by its utter dissoluteness, has 
 gone far to reduce countries nominally Christian 
 to a state of lawlessness and want of principle 
 worse than the worst heathenism. 
 
 But these two Antichrists have ever prepared 
 the way for each other ; and the falsehood of the 
 one has led directly to the falsehood of its appa- 
 rent opposite, but real ally and cooperator. 
 
 I begin, then, with the first of these two evils : 
 the substitution of the activity of some in place 
 of the activity of all ; the distinction of the grand 
 characteristic of the Christian Church, the co- 
 
14 THE CHUECH. 
 
 operation, namely, of society through the several 
 faculties and qualities of its members, for the at- 
 tainment of the highest moral good of all. 
 
 This life, as it may well be called, of the Church, 
 may be injured by an extreme predominance of 
 the activity of some members, by which the others 
 are necessarily rendered less active. A mere ex- 
 aggeration of the principles of government may 
 effect this, and it may arise out of the most bene- 
 volent feelings. Kind and earnest teachers com- 
 mit this very mistake when they assist their pupil 
 too much ; they feel that they can do the work 
 better than he can, and that their assistance will 
 enable him to accomplish his task in a shorter 
 time, and more effectually. But they really injure 
 him ; because the greater completeness and clear- 
 ness of any one particular piece of knowledge is 
 a far less benefit than the strengthening of his 
 own faculties by exercise: the knowledge thus 
 given is not power, but is gained at the cost of 
 power, and is a hindrance rather than a help to 
 the wholesome acquisition of knowledge hereafter. 
 Even so benevolent governments, seeing the ig- 
 norance and mistaken notions of their people, are 
 eager to fence them in on every side by their 
 own care, and to act for them, because they 
 were likely of themselves to act wrong. But 
 unhappily with the tares they thus pluck up the 
 good seed also ; the people get accustomed to let 
 
THE CHURCH. 15 
 
 the government act for them ; they thus may ac- 
 quire the innocence of infancy or death, but they 
 acquire also the incapacity of those states for 
 good ; and the result is not a living spirit but a 
 lifeless corpse. 
 
 Still, it must not be forgotten that with go- 
 vernment the error is only in the excess or in 
 the unseasonableness of its activity. In itself it 
 is beneficent and necessary. Its abuses are no 
 argument against its existence; it is founded on 
 truth, and is indispensable in every state of so- 
 ciety. But the life of the Church was impaired . 
 far more fatally by the introduction of another 
 principle very distinct from that of government, 
 the principle of priesthood. Persons unaccus- 
 tomed to examine the subject thoroughly have 
 often very confused ideas about priesthood ; they 
 profess utterly to disclaim it, while in fact they 
 are zealously maintaining it. But the essential 
 point in the notion of a priest is this, that he is 
 a person made necessary to our intercourse with 
 God, without being necessary or beneficial to us 
 morally. His interference makes the worshipper 
 neither a wiser man nor a holier than he would 
 have been without it ; and yet it is held to be in- 
 dispensable. This unreasonable, unmoral, unspi- 
 ritual necessity is the essence of the idea of priests 
 hood. 
 
 Priesthood, then, is properly mediation, taking 
 
16 THE CHURCH. 
 
 this last word in its etymological rather than in 
 its common meaning. When the act on the wor- 
 shipper's part is already complete, whether the 
 worship be ritual or spiritual, the presence or in- 
 terference of a priest is made a necessary medium 
 through which alone the act can be presented to 
 God. For instance, suppose that the worshipper 
 has a right belief concerning God, and knows 
 what he desires to ask of God, the act of prayer 
 on his part is complete; but if it be said that 
 his prayer must be offered to God by another, and 
 that otherwise God will not accept it, then here is 
 the exact notion of priesthood. It ceases to be 
 priesthood, and becomes teaching or assistance, if 
 the act on the worshipper's part cannot be morally 
 or reasonably complete without the aid of another. 
 He who knows not what to pray for, cannot by 
 himself complete the act of prayer, but requires 
 to be taught in order to do it. This teaching, 
 however, is not priesthood, because the necessity 
 for its interposition is reasonable, moral, and spi- 
 ritual. 
 
 A priest, therefore, as he does not make the 
 worshipper more fit to worship in himself, implies 
 necessarily that man cannot approach God. The 
 necessity for his mediation arises out of this : man 
 cannot approach God, but he may approach to 
 some other being, and this other being may ap- 
 proach God. Thus this intermediate being stands 
 
THE GHUECH. 17 
 
 to man in the place of God, and man's direct re- 
 lations towards God himself are declared to be an 
 impossibility. 
 
 "We have arrived at a great and divine truth ; 
 the very foundation stone, indeed, of Christianity. 
 We cannot come to God directly ; we require one 
 to be to us in the place of God. But one in the 
 place of God and not God, is as it were a false- 
 hood ; it is the mother falsehood from which all 
 idolatry is derived. The mystery of Christianity 
 has met this necessity of our nature, and at the 
 same time has avoided the evil of the falsehood. 
 We have one who is to us in the place of God, 
 but who is also God truly ; — we have one whom 
 we may approach, although we cannot approach 
 God, for he is also truly man. 
 
 It has been well said, that no error is mere 
 error ; something there is of truth ever mixed 
 with it. So the error of human priesthoods does 
 indeed but express a great truth, that man cannot 
 come to God without a mediator. But this truth 
 is to man, when left to his own devices, either 
 useless or mischievous. He attempts to act upon 
 it by devising for himself a human mediator, and 
 he falls at once into superstition and idolatry. 
 
 Again, the human mediator, as I have said be- 
 fore, does nothing to bring us in ourselves really 
 nearer to God. His interference at all, implies 
 that we are separated from God ; this separation 
 
 c 
 
18 THE CHURCH. 
 
 is a moral thing, arising out of our unlikeness to 
 God. But the human mediator does nothing to 
 restore to us God's likeness. It is strictly true, 
 therefore, that his interposition has no moral 
 value : it makes us neither better nor holier ; it 
 therefore shows the falsehood of its own claim; 
 for while professing to bring us to God, it leaves 
 us as far from him as ever. 
 
 But the true Mediator does not so : while he 
 reconciles God to man, he also reconciles man to 
 God. He works by his Spirit upon our own na- 
 ture, and weeds out from it the seeds as it were 
 of our alienation from God. Thus he does brhig 
 us near to God, for he makes us like God. And 
 he is our one and only Priest, our one and only 
 Mediator. 
 
 Some there are who profess to join cordially 
 in this doctrine, and ask who disputes it. So 
 little do they understand the very tenets which 
 they uphold. For they themselves dispute and 
 deny it, inasmuch as they maintain that the sacra- 
 ments are necessary to salvation, and that they 
 can only be effectually administered by a man ap- 
 pointed after a certain form. And thus they set 
 up again the human mediator, which is idolatry, 
 and they show the falsehood of his claim, because 
 they make a man like ourselves necessary to bring 
 us near to God, and this man, who is to complete 
 Christ's work, and reconcile to God those whom 
 
THE CHURCH. 19 
 
 Christ had left alienated, cannot touch the slight- 
 est part of the soul or mind of any one. If we 
 were separated from God, he cannot bring us to 
 him ; for we remain in ourselves, when his minis- 
 tration is over, just the same as we were before. 
 
 This dogma, then, of a human priesthood in 
 Christ's church, appointed to administer his sacra- 
 ments, and thereby to mediate between God and 
 man, from no reasonable or moral necessity, is a 
 thing quite distinct from any exaggerated notions 
 of the activity of government : it is not the excess 
 of a beneficent truth, but it is, from first to last, 
 considering that it is addressed to Christians, who 
 have their Divine Priest and Mediator already, a 
 mere error ; and an error not merely speculative, 
 but fraught with all manner of mischief, idolatrous 
 and demoralizing, destructive of Christ's Church ; 
 injurious to Christ and to his Spirit ; the worst and 
 earliest form of Antichrist. 
 
 This error is demoralizing, because it has led to 
 the false distinction between secular things and 
 spiritual, and has tended to bring back Christianity 
 to the likeness of a heathen religion, by chang ing 
 it from a law of life to a matter of rites [and put- 
 ward observances ; from which the care of the 
 general moral character of every man is a thing 
 altogether different. 
 
 It has led to the false distinction between se- 
 cular things and spiritual. For in all the acts of 
 
 c 2 
 
20 THE CHURCH. 
 
 life into which it was the design of Christianity 
 to bring God and Christ, the priest is altogether 
 excluded. In the works of justice and mercy, 
 in the feelings of devotion, of hope, of fear, of love, 
 the priest can find no place, for what is real and 
 moral repels him. His element is only what is 
 formal, shadowy, ceremonial ; and in order to make 
 himself of importance, he must raise what is 
 shadowy and ceremonial into the place of what 
 is real and moral. Men can act in life without 
 him, and feel without him; but he tells them 
 that certain ceremonial acts cannot be performed 
 without him, and then he goes on and teaches 
 that these ceremonial acts are the essence of re- 
 ligion. 
 
 But in Christianity his task was hard, because 
 1 even in its very ceremonies the essence was some- 
 thing real and moral. When Christians met to- 
 gether and received the bread and wine of their 
 common living as the body and blood of Christ, 
 such an act had a real tendency to strengthen and 
 confirm their souls, and the Holy Spirit made 
 such a communion a constant means of grace to 
 those who partook of it. But here there was no 
 place for the priest; on the one side there was 
 Christ's Church assembled, on the other there 
 was Christ and his Spirit to bless them. The 
 priest then steps in, diverts attention from the 
 moral part of this communion, from its peculiar 
 
THE CHURCH. 21 
 
 union of things divine and human, of social feelings 
 and religious, from its hallowing of common life, 
 by making us even eat and drink to God's glory 
 and our own salvation, and fixes it upon a sup- 
 posed mystical virtue conveyed to the bread and 
 wine by the pronouncing of certain words over 
 them by a certain person. The bread and wine 
 became the sacrament of Christ's body and blood 
 according to Christ's ordinance, by the assembled 
 church receiving them as such; by their con- 
 verting an act of nature into an act of religion ; 
 by their agreeing to partake together as of their 
 earthly food, so also of their spiritual, and thus 
 being joined to one another in Christ. The agree- 
 ment, therefore, of those communicating, their 
 common faith and love constitute the real con- 
 secration of the bread and wine ; it is this which, 
 through Christ's Spirit, changes the supper into 
 the sacrament. 
 
 But the priest says, " Not so : it is not your 
 common faith and purpose to celebrate the com- 
 munion ; it is not the fact of Christ having died 
 and risen again which can bring him to you or you 
 to him : I must interpose, and pronounce certain 
 words over the bread and over the cup ; and then 
 what neither your faith nor Christ's redemption of 
 you had made other than common food, becomes 
 now, through my mediation, a thing endowed with 
 a divine virtue ; nay, it is become Christ himself. 
 
22! THE CHURCH. 
 
 Whether there be any communion of yourselves 
 or no, whether you are alone or with one another, 
 whether you are concurring in spirit or no, still 
 because I, the priest, have pronounced certain 
 words over it, it has acquired a miraculous power, 
 and unless you are partakers of this you cannot 
 be saved." So the communion of the Church, 
 which morally was so essential, is thus made un- 
 essential ; and the uttering certain words by a 
 particular person, of which neither Christ nor his 
 apostles had said any thing, and which morally 
 can have no virtue at all, is made essential. And 
 thus was the Church supplanted by the priest; 
 and the communion, which is the very life of the 
 Church, became the mass, with all its superstitions 
 and idolatries. 
 
 The Church being set aside, and the principal 
 part in the communion being transferred from it 
 to the priest, his office grew in importance, and 
 the Church, in the same proportion, became re- 
 moved from Christ, and desecrated. Then the 
 priest was regarded as the minister of Christ in 
 spiritual things, the Church only in temporal. For 
 not only in the communion, but in the public 
 prayers and exhortations of the Church, the Church 
 itself was reduced more and more to* a passive 
 condition, — the priest alone was active. Thus 
 there were some whose business was religion, and 
 others whose business it was not. Religion and 
 
THE CHURCH. 23 
 
 life were separated ; the one was called spiritual, 
 when it was in reality become less so ; the other 
 was called, and became too truly, secular. The 
 salt which Christ had given to the Church, that 
 each man might by it render the world and 
 worldly things pure and holy to him, the Church 
 had now to seek from the priest ; and because it 
 was to be sought from another, it in great measure 
 lost its savour. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 It has been stated generally that the efficacy 
 of the Church has been destroyed by the excess 
 of a good and necessary principle, that of govern- 
 ment, and the introduction of another principle 
 wholly false and mischievous, that of priesthood. 
 The first in itself the Church recognises, and must 
 ever recognise ; the second she wholly repudiates. 
 And thus we shall find that, while there is much 
 said in Scripture in commendation of the one, the 
 other is altogether omitted, as an element belong- 
 ing to Heathenism and not to Christianity. 
 
 Now, omitting all the commandments given us 
 to obey government in general, and all such 
 passages as claim obedience to the Apostles per- 
 sonally, we find several injunctions to submit our- 
 selves to the rulers of the church, being Christians, 
 and yet not being Apostles; — and all these in- 
 junctions are a proof of our first position, that the 
 principle of government in the Christian Church 
 is recognised and sanctioned in the Scriptures. 
 
 I. St. Paul, in the earliest of all his Epistles, 
 
THE CHURCH. 25 
 
 the first to the Thessalonians, entreats the church 
 of Thessalonica to acknowledge or recognise, et- 
 Sevcu, those that laboured among them, and were 
 over them in the Lord, and who admonished 
 them, povOerovvras vfias. And he calls on the 
 church to " esteem them very highly in love for 
 their work's sake." a 
 
 II. In two passages, (Galatians vi. 6, and 1 
 Timothy v. 17,) he asserts the claim of the go- 
 vernors of the church to be maintained by the 
 church. In the first, indeed, he speaks only of 
 such governors of the church as are instructors ; 
 KoivcoveiTco Be o Karrj^ovfievos top \oyov rm Karrj^ovvn 
 ev iraaiv dyadots ; — but in the second passage, 
 while he acknowledges the especial claim of 
 such, he extends the right to all rulers of the 
 church generally, whatever may be their particular 
 functions : ol koX&s irpoearTUiTes irpeafivTepot, SittXtjs 
 Tifirjs afjiovcrdaa-av. 
 
 III. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 says also, " Obey your rulers and submit to 
 them;" — and that this means the Christian rulers 
 of the church is evident by what follows, "for 
 they watch as men who are to give an account for 
 your souls ;" — which of course could not be said 
 of Heathen authorities. 
 
 IV. To these may be added all that is said of 
 the qualifications of an eirltricoiros in the first 
 
 » 1 Thess. v. 12, 13. 
 
26 THE CHURCH. 
 
 Epistle to Timothy and in that to Titus; and 
 which implies that government in the church was a 
 thing essential, and recognised from the beginning. 
 
 V. St. Peter, as if writing under the liveliest 
 recollection of our Lord's charge to himself, and 
 of the strong contrast which Christ had drawn 
 between the common practice of heathen go- 
 vernment and that which should prevail among 
 Christians, thus writes in his first Epistle (v. 2) to 
 the elders of the several churches — " Feed the 
 flock of God which is among you, taking the over- 
 sight thereof," (e-jria-KoirovvTes,), " not by constraint, 
 but willingly;" (Lachman adds Kara Oeov, 'as be- 
 comes a servant and child of God ;') " not for filthy 
 lucre," (which implies that lucre might be a motive, 
 that is, that the rulers of the church were main- 
 tained by the church,) " but of a ready mind." 
 
 VI. We read also in the Acts, that Paul and 
 Barnabas appointed elders to govern the churches 
 which they founded in Lycaonia and the south of 
 Asia Minor a ; and St. Paul addresses the elders 
 of the church of Ephesus b , in the same language 
 as St. Peter, charging them " to feed the church 
 of God." Now this term of " feeding as a shep- 
 herd feeds his flock," is one of the oldest and most 
 universal metaphors to express a supreme and at 
 the same time a beneficent government. 
 
 It is needless to multiply other passages, as 
 
 » xiv. 23. i> xx. 28. 
 
THE CHURCH. 27 
 
 those already quoted are abundantly sufficient to 
 show that Christianity supposes and sanctions the 
 principle of government in the church, and re- 
 ciprocally the principle of obedience ; that in this 
 respect the church was to resemble all other so- 
 cieties ; — some of its members were to rule and 
 others were to be subject. 
 
 But of the principle of priesthood, by which 
 one man or set of men are declared to be neces- 
 sary mediators for their brethren, so that without 
 them their brethren cannot worship God accept- 
 ably or be suffered to approach him, the Scriptures 
 contain not one word, except as rejecting and 
 condemning it. This of course cannot be shown 
 by^xtracts as to the negative part of it : it will 
 be sufficient to show that the passages usually 
 quoted by the advocates of the priesthood as 
 sanctioning their notions are all misinterpreted, or 
 misapplied ; and then to give some passages which 
 assert the contrary to the doctrine of the priest- 
 hood, and describe it as one of the great privi- 
 leges of the Christian Church, that its one great 
 High Priest Jesus Christ has given it full access 
 to God for ever, so that there is nothing for 
 priesthood to do, or rather for human priesthood 
 to pretend to do for it, any more, so long as earth 
 shall endure. 
 
 The principle of priesthood unmixed with any 
 other is seen in the Christian Church most plainly 
 
28 THE CHURCH. 
 
 in the claim to administer the Lord's Supper. I 
 say this rather than, in the claim to administer 
 the sacraments generally, or in the so-called power 
 of the keys, — because although something of the 
 notion of priesthood has undoubtedly been mixed 
 with both these, and especially with the latter; 
 and although in practice absolution has come to 
 be a proper priestly act, yet in their origin both 
 the power of baptizing and that of absolving 
 were in a great degree acts of government; 
 being in fact the power of admitting or of restoring 
 members to the privileges of the Christian society. 
 But the claim of administering the Lord's Supper 
 is the assumption of a power exclusively priestly ; 
 it interposes in an act with which government 
 has nothing to do, and its supposed object is 
 merely inward and spiritual — to give a spiritual 
 efficacy to that which without its interference 
 would have been common food. The Scripture, 
 then, might recognise an exclusive power of bap- 
 tizing or of excommunicating and absolving, with- 
 out at all countenancing the notion of a priest- 
 hood, because it might view such a power as one 
 naturally belonging to the rulers of any society, 
 and as connected therefore with government only. 
 But if it be found to recognise an exclusive claim 
 of administering the Lord's Supper, then no doubt 
 it must be allowed in the strictest sense to re- 
 cognise in Christianity a human priesthood. 
 
THE CHURCH. 29 
 
 This power is said accordingly to be recognised 
 by the Apostle Paul in two passages, 1 Corinth, 
 iv. 1, and again in the same Epistle, x. 16. 
 
 I. In the first passage St. Paul says, " Let a man 
 so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and 
 stewards of the mysteries of God." It is contended 
 that, by this last expression, St. Paul means to say 
 that himself and his fellow ministers were " dis- 
 pensers of the sacraments." 
 
 But, in the first place, Baptism and the Lord's 
 Supper are not in the Scripture sense mysteries 
 at all. A mystery, in the Scripture, is a hidden 
 truth ; — almost always, it signifies a truth hidden 
 generally from men, but revealed to the people of 
 God. By a figure, Christ himself is twice called 
 " the mystery of God," or " of godliness," a be- 
 cause his manifestation in the flesh is the great 
 truth which Christianity has revealed to us. Bap- 
 tism and the Lord's Supper are actions connected 
 with the Christian mysteries, but they are not 
 mysteries themselves ; much less are they so 
 especially deserving of the term as to engross 
 it to themselves, and to become the prominent 
 idea expressed by it. 
 
 Again ; by whatever name St. Paul might have 
 called himself, it certainly would not have been 
 " a dispenser of the sacraments." He had just 
 before said that his business was not to baptize, 
 
 » Coloss. i. 27. 1 Tim. iii. 16. 
 
30 THE CHURCH. 
 
 but to preach the gospel; that, so far from its 
 being his office to " dispense the sacraments," he 
 had only baptized three or four individuals in the 
 course of his whole ministry at Corinth. He who 
 thus studiously devolved on others the ministra- 
 tion of one of the sacraments, could scarcely have 
 desired the Corinthians to regard him as being ap- 
 pointed especially to dispense them. 
 
 On the other hand, we find him saying, a little 
 before, that he and his fellow ministers were in 
 the habit of speaking of " the wisdom of God in 
 a mystery," or rather " God's secret or hidden wis- 
 dom," — the wisdom hidden from men, which God 
 foreordained before the world unto our glory. And 
 again, further on in the Epistle, he uses the expres- 
 sion, " I have had a dispensation " (or ' steward- 
 ship,' if oitcovojAos in the former passage be trans- 
 lated ' steward ') " entrusted to me." Now this 
 dispensation is so certainly the " dispensation of 
 the Gospel," by preaching, that the gloss evayye- 
 \lov has actually found its way into the text, and 
 is expressed in the common editions, and in our 
 translation. It is shown by the whole context, 
 in which he repeatedly says that his business is 
 " to preach the Gospel." -There can be no doubt, 
 therefore, that when he describes himself as " a 
 steward or dispenser of the mysteries of God," he 
 means that very same " speaking of the wisdom 
 of God in a mystery," that very same " dispensa- 
 
THE CHURCH. 31 
 
 tion of the Gospel by preaching," which in other 
 parts of this Epistle he declares to have been his 
 business as an Apostle ; just as he declares also 
 that " to dispense the sacraments" was not his bu- 
 siness; for he says, "God called me not to baptize, 
 but to preach the Gospel." 
 
 II. The second passage is as follows: " the cup 
 of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion 
 of the blood of Christ? The bread which we 
 break, is it not a communion of the body of 
 Christ?" This shows, it is argued, that it be- 
 longed to the Apostles to bless the cup at the 
 communion, and to break the bread; in other 
 words, to consecrate the elements, and so to give 
 to them their sacramental character and virtue. 
 It is necessary to say that I have myself heard and 
 read this interpretation; I do not pretend to. 
 know how many there are who adopt it. 
 
 It is evident that the whole force of this pas-, 
 sage depends on the meaning of the word " we." 
 If " we " means " we Apostles," as distinguished 
 from other Christians, then the argument would 
 have some plausibility; but if "we" means not 
 " we Apostles," but " we Christians," then the 
 whole argument falls to the ground at once. 
 Now the very next verse goes on as follows: 
 " For we being many are one bread and one body, 
 for we are all partakers of that one bread." It 
 is then, not " we the Apostles," but " we Chris- 
 
32 THE CHURCH. 
 
 tians," " we being many," " we all," " who bless 
 the cup of blessing, and break the bread." So 
 far from proving that there exists in Christianity 
 a priestly power in the administration of the com- 
 munion, this passage rather shows the contrary. 
 
 The contrary also fully appears from the gene- 
 ral language of the New Testament. It is de- 
 clared as plainly as words can speak, that, in a 
 religious sense, all Christians are equal before God, 
 and that all are brought near to him, have access 
 to him, are reconciled to him, are his heirs, and 
 his children. Now some of these terms were ap- 
 plicable to the whole Jewish church, and yet in 
 that church there was undoubtedly a human priest- 
 hood. But the Epistle to the Hebrews shows the 
 great distinction, when it says that we are sanc- 
 tified by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ 
 once for all ; that sacrifices must therefore cease 
 to be offered ; and that as the especial object of 
 the Jewish priesthood was to sacrifice, so it may 
 be presumed, that where no sacrifice remains to 
 be offered*, so neither should there be any priest. 
 It is not pretended that all Christians are equal 
 socially; for some are governors and others are 
 governed : nor are they so equal as to render dis- 
 tinctions for order's sake in their public meetings 
 
 a For his own view of what was the true Christian sacrir 
 Ece still continued, see Introd. to Serm. vol. iv. p. 1 ; Serm. 
 vol. v. p. 273. 
 
THE CHURCH. 33 
 
 unnecessary; for women are not allowed to speak 
 in the congregation : but they are equal religiously, 
 as being all alike redeemed by Christ, and brought 
 by him near to God ; that is, put into a condition 
 to offer to him acceptably all religious offices ; and 
 in the only remaining kind of sacrifice, the spi- 
 ritual offering of themselves to God, commanded 
 to be, every man his own priest ; inasmuch as by 
 ourselves alone can our own hearts and bodies be 
 devoted as thank-offerings to him who made them 
 and redeemed them. 
 
 We find, then, no place in Scripture for the no- 
 tion that any human mediation is required in order 
 to perfect the purely religious acts of Christians. 
 As all Christians can pray acceptably through 
 Christ's mediation, so can all communicate ac- 
 ceptably in the signs of his body and blood; such 
 communion being manifestly not an act peculiar 
 to the rulers of the society, but belonging to all 
 the members of it ; and therein differing from 
 baptism, which is an act of government, so to 
 speak, as well as an act of religion; and may, 
 therefore, be fitly appropriated to one particular 
 order of society, not as priests, but as governors. 
 
 It will be understood in what sense I call bap- 
 tism an act of government, if it be considered that 
 it is, amongst other things, the admission of a new 
 member into the Christian society, and that, as 
 such, it belongs properly to those who have au- 
 
34 THE CHURCH. 
 
 thority given to them in that society ; for where 
 is the private individual, who is allowed at his own 
 choice to admit strangers to the rights of citizen- 
 ship in the commonwealth ? It does not follow 
 that baptism is nothing more than an act of go- 
 vernment ; but because it is clearly this, whatever 
 it may be besides, therefore it is at least possible 
 that when the power of administering it is ascribed 
 exclusively to one particular order in the church, 
 there should be in this no allowance of any priestly 
 power, but simply of the power of the magistrates 
 or rulers of a society. We shall see, by and by, 
 that this distinction is not unimportant. 
 
 Farther; it may appear on examination, that the 
 very power of the keys itself, when rightly under- 
 stood, implies nothing of a priesthood, but only 
 the legitimate power of government. 
 
 It will be asked, however, what is the right un- 
 derstanding of this well-known expression, " The 
 power of the keys ? " And the answer must not 
 be given lightly ; for we are here concerned not 
 with the careless words of fallible men, but with a 
 solemn promise to the Church, made at three se- 
 veral times by Christ our Lord. Undoubtedly, 
 therefore, the power of the keys means something, 
 and that meaning cannot be a matter of indiffer- 
 ence. 
 
 The promise was made by our Lord on three 
 several occasions : viz. 
 
THE CHURCH. 35 
 
 1st. To St. Peter, apparently as a reward to 
 that Apostle for his confessing his Master to be 
 the Christ 3 . 
 
 2nd. To the whole body or church of Christians, 
 as a sanction to their sentence, when he had or- 
 dered that all quarrels between Christian and 
 Christian should in the last resort be referred to 
 the decision of the church b . 
 
 3rd. To the eleven Apostles, when our Lord, 
 after his resurrection, was giving them their com- 
 mission to found and govern his Church a . 
 
 In the first two of these promises the words 
 are identical, and they are figurative. They run, 
 " Whatsoever thou " (or 'ye') " shalt bind on earth 
 shall be bound in heaven : and whatsoever thou " 
 (or ' ye ') " shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in 
 heaven." In the third the words are different, 
 although the sense is generally supposed to be 
 nearly the same. They are, " Whosesoever sins 
 ye remit, they are remitted unto them ; and whose- 
 soever sins ye retain, they are retained." 
 
 "To bind and to loose" are metaphors certainly, 
 but metaphors ' easy to be understood. They ex- 
 press a legislative and a judicial power. To bind, 
 legislatively, is to impose a general obligation ; to 
 say that a thing ought to be done or ought not to 
 be done : to bind men's consciences either to the 
 
 a St. Matthew, xvi. 19. b St. Matthew, xviii. 18. 
 
 e St. John, xx. 23. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 THE CHURCH. 
 
 doing of it, or to the abstaining from it. Thus, 
 St. Paul speaks of a woman being bound so long 
 as her husband lives ; but of being free to marry 
 whom she will, if her husband be dead. In the 
 one case there was a binding of the conscience, in 
 the other a loosing of it. And this is one part of 
 the sense of the expression. Again ; to bind ju- 
 dicially, is to impose a particular obligation on an 
 individual, to oblige him to do or to suffer certain 
 things for the sake of justice, which, if left to 
 himself, he would not choose to do or suffer. 
 And to loose judicially, is to pronounce a man 
 free from any such obligation ; to declare that jus- 
 tice does not require of him, in this particular case, 
 to do or to suffer any thing for its satisfaction. 
 Justice has no claim upon him, — she leaves him 
 free. This is the second part of the expression. 
 
 It is to this second part, to the binding and 
 loosing judicially, that the third promise of our 
 Lord belongs. For the retaining and remitting of 
 sins is clearly a judicial power : the retaining of 
 sin is the pronouncing that a man is bound to do 
 or suffer something as a satisfaction for it ; the 
 remitting of sin is the pronouncing that justice 
 has no hold upon him, that he is acquitted, 
 loosed, freed from all her demands on him. 
 
 But such a legislative and judicial power is a 
 power of government ; government in fact consist- 
 ing mainly of these two great powers, the legisla- 
 
THE CHURCH. 37 
 
 tive and judicial: We do not as yet find any thing 
 then in the power of the keys that bears any 
 relation to priesthood, according to that defini- 
 tion of it which was given above — -that it is an 
 interposition between God and man supposed to 
 be necessary to our acceptance with God, yet 
 without being necessary or beneficial to us mo- 
 rally. And this is strictly the idea of priestly 
 absolution. For whether it be said that he who 
 is absolved is forgiven by God, or that he Who is 
 not absolved is not forgiven by God ; there is 
 in either case an act made essential or beneficial 
 to our salvation, which yet makes us morally 
 neither the better nor the worse. Absolution 
 then so understood is a proper act of priest- 
 hood. But does such a power of absolution form 
 any part of the Christian power of the keys ? 
 
 It has been contended that it does, and our 
 Lord's words to his Apostles are appealed to as 
 the proof of this : — " Whosesoever sins ye remit, 
 they are remitted unto them ; and whosesoever sins 
 ye retain, they are retained." Now here there are 
 two questions :— First, What was the meaning of 
 our Lord's promise as addressed to the Apostles ? 
 Secondly, How much of this meaning was intended 
 to apply to any except the Apostles ? 
 
 1st. It is allowed that this promise confer- 
 red on the Apostles a judicial power, as distinct 
 from a legislative one ; it gave them authority 
 
38 THE CHURCH. 
 
 to decide on individual cases ; to pronounce 
 that such or such a man was forgiven, in some 
 sense or other; and that such or such a man 
 was not forgiven. But the great question is, 
 whether this power can be shown to be distinct 
 from a power of government; that is, were the 
 forgiveness or refusal of forgiveness here spoken 
 of distinct from some outward sentence passed 
 upon a man with reference to the Christian so- 
 ciety; and were they grounded upon any thing 
 more than actions cognizable by human percep- 
 tion, and therefore the fit objects of human reward 
 or censure. For the peculiarity of a priestly power 
 consists in this : that its sentence, in its essence, 
 is not outward but inward ; affecting a man not in 
 his relations to the Christian society, but in his 
 relations towards God, and grounded therefore 
 upon a knowledge of more than actions cognizable 
 by human perception; namely, of the thoughts 
 and motives of the heart. For there is no doubt 
 that our state towards God depends mainly on 
 the state of our hearts, so that a judgment of the 
 former cannot be passed without a knowledge of 
 the latter. 
 
 We must separate, then, all such judicial acts 
 as the declaration of forgiveness implied in the 
 admission of new converts to baptism ; and as the 
 declaration of the retaining of sins implied in the 
 striking of Elymas with blindness, in the visiting 
 
THE CHURCH. 39 
 
 the incestuous Corinthian with some bodily pu- > 
 nishment, in excommunication, and in the deaths 
 of Ananias and Sapphira. In all these cases 
 there was an outward sentence, affecting men out- 
 wardly and visibly in their earthly condition ; and 
 this sentence was grounded on some outward ac- 
 tion ; in baptism for instance, on the profession of 
 repentance and faith ; and in the other instances 
 on acts of a similar character to those which hu- 
 man law habitually punishes. 
 
 But can we find, over and above such instances 
 as these, any cases in which the Apostles, without 
 any visible or outward sentence, passed a judg- 
 ment simply on the state of an individual towards 
 God ; and a judgment , founded, not on outward 
 and tangible acts, but on a knowledge of the sin- 
 cerity or insincerity of his feelings ? We read of 
 no such cases ; but we find such language used re- 
 specting Christ's judgment, and God's knowledge 
 of the thoughts of the heart, as is agreeable to 
 our common impression, that of the state of a 
 man's heart with respect to God, God is the only 
 judge \ 
 
 It may seem that in one instance an Apostle 
 did possess a power of reading the heart, when 
 Paul is said to have perceived that the cripple 
 who stedfastly listened to his speech at Lystra, 
 
 a £l Sam. xvi. 7. 1 Kings, viii. 39. Jerem. xvii. 9, 10. 
 St. Luke, xvi. 15. 1 Cor. iv. 4, 5.] 
 
40 THE CHURCH. 
 
 " had faith to be healed." It is uot certain, how- 
 ever, that there was in this case any reading of 
 the heart ; " the stedfast listening," the expression 
 of deep interest in Paul's words manifested in the 
 whole countenance and attitude of the -hearer, 
 •were an evidence not to be mistaken that he was 
 thoroughly convinced by what he heard. But ad- 
 mitting for a moment that the Apostle's was a 
 deeper judgment than he could have formed by 
 his mere natural faculties; yet in this case we 
 have God's warrant that he had judged rightly, 
 inasmuch as the man's faith was proved by his 
 being cured of bis lameness at Paul's word. So 
 that even if there was a sentence grounded on 
 such things as man cannot naturally discern, yet 
 the proof was given that the judgment was right, 
 by its being followed by an outward consequence, 
 greater than man alone could have effected. 
 
 2nd. So much of the power given by our Lord 
 to his Apostles, as depended on their possessing a 
 greater than human knowledge, would not, of 
 course, be given to those who do not possess that 
 knowledge. And if any man says that he does 
 possess such knowledge, and if the claim does not 
 prove itself, as in prophecy or in telling to a man 
 what was in his thoughts, then we may call upon 
 him for some sign that he does possess it. If he 
 says positively that such a man has his sins for- 
 given in the sight of God, then he should tell him 
 
THE CHUECH. 41 
 
 as St. Paul did, to stand upright on his feet, or 
 should relieve him from some trouble or infirmity 
 by which he is manifestly afflicted. If he says as 
 positively that such and such a man is not for- 
 given, then let him also show his power of de- 
 livering such an one to Satan for the destruction' 
 of the flesh, that his spirit might be saved in the 
 day of the Lord. 
 
 It does not appear that the Apostles ever ex- 
 ercised what was properly a priestly power. Ad- 
 mitting however, for the moment, that they had 
 exercised it, yet as such a power is of an extra- 
 ordinary character, and requires more than the 
 ordinary attributes of human nature to exercise 
 it properly; and as the Apostles were endowed 
 with certain extraordinary gifts, such as are not 
 possessed by men in general ; we should be justified 
 in assuming some connexion between their power 
 and their gifts, and might safely conclude that 
 those who had not the latter could not enjoy the 
 former. But the case is stronger, now that it 
 cannot be shown that even the Apostles possessed 
 a priestly power. If such a power was too great 
 even for them to wield, how can it be supposed 
 that others can wield it, on whom none of their 
 extraordinary qualifications have descended ? 
 
 The nearest approach to a priestly power re- 
 cognised in the New Testament is in the effects 
 of intercessory prayer; for if we pray for grace 
 
42 THE CHURCH. 
 
 for our brother, and God grants our prayer, we 
 seem to be in some sort the channel of God's 
 mercy to him, without producing any effect upon 
 him morally ; and this was laid down to be the 
 characteristic of a priestly power as distinct from 
 a ministry or cure of souls, which acts on those 
 committed to its charge through moral means. 
 
 First, however, the virtue of intercessory prayer 
 is in itself widely different from the pretended 
 priestly power to give a virtue to the sacraments. 
 The peculiarly unchristian part of this latter claim 
 is this, that it makes a human mediator necessary 
 to those who are actually acknowledging, trusting 
 in, and earnestly desiring to enjoy the fruits of 
 Christ's mediation ; whereas no one would say that 
 our own prayers, offered up according to Christ's 
 Spirit, and in Christ's name, will not be accepted, 
 unless others will also pray for us. The prayers 
 of others in our behalf are not made the condition 
 on which alone our own earnest prayers shall he 
 accepted. 
 
 Intercessory prayer in its highest cases supposes 
 that a man has not the grace of repentance and 
 faith ; that he is not at present morally in a state 
 of acceptance with God. It is the very worst part 
 of his condition, that he will not pray for himself. 
 Under these circumstances that God should have 
 graciously left a way open by which his friends 
 may labour with hope in his behalf; that over and 
 
THE CHURCH. 43 
 
 above the secret and inscrutable ways by which 
 he, according to his own pleasure, sometimes 
 touches the heart of the impenitent sinner, he 
 should have also revealed one way in which the 
 love of his friends may work for him ; this 
 would be a very different thing from declaring 
 that a man's own faith, and love, and prayers, shall 
 be of no use unless other men shall also inter- 
 pose for him. It is one thing to enable human 
 charity to be serviceable to him who, if left to 
 himself, would be lost; and another to allow human 
 presumption to declare its aid necessary to him, 
 who having received Christ's grace through faith, 
 is already saved. 
 , But there is yet another great difference which 
 effectually separates the intercessory prayer of 
 Christians from the mediation pf a priesthood ; 
 namely, that its efficacy is not limited, or given 
 especially, to the prayers of any one order of 
 men : it is not the priest who is to pray for the 
 people, but the ministers and the people who are 
 to pray for each other ; nay a peculiar stress is laid 
 on the efficacy of the united prayers of many ; so 
 that we may assume that the prayers of the people 
 are at least as important to the minister, as hia 
 prayers are to them. 
 
 Here, however, we shall be referred to that 
 well-known passage in the epistle of St. James, 
 which directs the sick to call in the elders of the 
 
44 THE CHURCH. 
 
 church, and speaks of the elders praying over them 
 and anointing them with oil in the name of the 
 Lord, and of their being raised up by virtue of 
 this prayer. Now here again a manifest distinc- 
 tion must be taken, between those elders who 
 possessed the gift of healing, and others who have 
 it not ; it cannot be maintained that with regard 
 to the especial subject there spoken of, the re- 
 covery, namely, of a sick person, a general con- 
 clusion follows as to the peculiar efficacy of the 
 prayers of presbyters in all times, because they 
 were peculiarly efficacious when combined with 
 the gift of healing. But I should be unwilling to 
 limit the words of the Apostle entirely to bodily 
 cures, or to the circumstances of the early church. 
 I would allow, most readily, that they are of gene- 
 ral and perpetual application, but their meaning 
 makes against any priestly power in the clergy, 
 rather than establishes it. 
 
 The object of the passage is to encourage the 
 exercise of those mutual spiritual aids rendered by 
 Christians to each other, which are one of the 
 great objects and privileges of the institution of 
 the Church. The body was to sympathize with 
 its several members. If a man was in trouble, he 
 was to pray ; if in joy, to sing hymns : in neither 
 case is the Apostle speaking of private prayer or 
 private singing ; but of those of the Christian con- 
 gregation : there every individual Christian could 
 
THE CHURCH. 45 
 
 find the best relief for his sorrows, and the liveliest 
 sympathy in his joy. St. Paul's command, " Re- 
 joice with them that do rejoice, and weep with 
 them that weep," applies to this same sympathy, 
 which the prayers and hymns of the church 
 services were a constant means of expressing. 
 But if a man were sick and could not go to the 
 congregation, still he was not to lose the benefit 
 of his Christian communion with them ; he might 
 then ask them to come to him ; and as the whole 
 congregation could not thus be summoned, the > 
 elders were to go as its representatives, and their 
 prayers were to take the place of the prayers of 
 the whole church. Care, however, is taken to 
 show that the virtue of their prayers arises not 
 from their being priests, but from their being 
 Christians, and standing in the place of the whole 
 church. For these words immediately follow; 
 " confess therefore to one another your sins, and 
 pray for one another, that ye may be healed ; there 
 is much virtue in a just man's prayer, when it is 
 offered earnestly." Now this most divine system 
 of a living church, in which all were to aid each 
 other, in which each man might open his heart to 
 his neighbour, and receive the help of his prayers, 
 and in which each man's earnest prayer, offered in 
 Christ's name, had so high a promise of blessing 
 annexed to it, has been most destroyed by that 
 notion of a priesthood, which claiming that men 
 
46 THE CHURCH. 
 
 should confess their sins to the clergy, not as to 
 their brethren, but as to God's vicegerents, and 
 confining the promised blessing to the prayers of 
 the clergy as priests, not as Christians, nor as the 
 representatives of the whole church, has changed 
 the sympathy of a Christian society into the 
 dominion of a priesthood and the mingled careless- 
 ness and superstition of a laity. 
 
 St. John's language agrees with that of St. 
 James : " If any man see his brother sinning a 
 sin which is not unto death, he shall pray, and 
 Christ shall give him life, for those who are not 
 sinning unto death. There is a sin unto death ; — 
 it is not for that that I am bidding him to pray." 
 Here the very same blessing which St. James 
 speaks of as following the elder's prayers, is said 
 by St. John to follow the prayer of any Christian : 
 — a clear proof that the elders were sent for as 
 the representatives of the church, and not as if 
 their prayers possessed a peculiar virtue, because 
 they stood as priests between God and the people 1 . 
 
 Thus then we find much in Scripture which 
 recognises high powers of government in the 
 Christian church ; but nothing which acknow- 
 ledges a priesthood. The distinction is of immense 
 importance, for from the covert intermixture of 
 priesthood with government has followed the 
 great corruption of the divine plan of the Christian 
 chureh. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 The chapter which I am now going to write is in 
 truth superfluous. Nay, although its particular 
 object were proved ever so fully, yet this would 
 be a less gain than loss, if any were by the nature 
 of the argument encouraged to believe that we 
 are to seek for our knowledge of Christianity any 
 where else but in the Scriptures. What we find 
 there is a part of Christianity, whether recognised 
 as such or no in after ages ; what we do not find 
 there is no part of Christianity, however early or 
 however general may have been the attempts to 
 interpolate it. If this be not so, we must change 
 our religion and our Master : we can be no longer 
 Christians, servants of Christ, instructed by him 
 and his own Apostles; but Alexandrianists, Sy- 
 rianists, Asianists, following the notions which 
 happened to prevail in the Church according to 
 the preponderance of particular local or temporary 
 influences, and following as our master neither 
 the wisdom of God, nor even the wisdom of men ; 
 but the opinions of a time and state of society, 
 
48 THE CHURCH. 
 
 whose inferiority in all other respects is acknow- 
 ledged, — and the guidance of individuals, not one 
 of whom approaches nearly to that greatness which 
 in the case of the great Greek philosophers made 
 an implicit veneration for their decisions in some 
 degree excusable. 
 
 If it could be shown that the unanimous voice 
 of men eminent alike for goodness and for wisdom, 
 had from the earliest times insisted upon some 
 doctrine or practice not taught or commanded in 
 the New Testament as an essential part of Christ- 
 ianity; if it should appear that this doctrine or 
 practice were in no way favourable to their own 
 importance or interest ; and if it could be shown, 
 also, that it was not in accordance with the way 
 of thinking prevalent in their age and country, — 
 but could have commended itself to their minds 
 by nothing but its intrinsic excellence, — then, in- 
 deed, the doctrine might be concluded to be 
 reasonable, and the practice good : but the omis- 
 sion of all notice of them by our Lord and his 
 Apostles would be a fact so unaccountable and so 
 staggering, that the triumph of ecclesiastical tra- 
 dition would be the destruction of all well grounded 
 faith in the authenticity of our records of Christ- 
 ianity, nay it would involve in the most painful 
 uncertainty the very truth of the Christian revela- 
 tion. For if Christ and his Apostles omitted any 
 essential part of Christianity; if their revelation 
 
THE CHURCH. 49 
 
 was not perfect ; then the dispensation of the 
 fulness of times must be sought for elsewhere : 
 and the claim of Mohammedanism, that it is the 
 perfecting of the earlier dispensations, the Jewish 
 and Christian, ceases to be blasphemous. Or if 
 it be said that the doctrine or practice in question 
 were inculcated by Christ and his Apostles, al- 
 though they are not noticed in the New Testa- 
 ment, then what is our security that other vital 
 points have not been omitted in like manner in 
 our epistles and gospels ? And when we consider 
 what the New Testament is ; that it contains 
 four detailed accounts of our Lord's life and teach- 
 ing, one of which was written by his beloved 
 disciple St. John; that it contains an account of 
 the first propagation" of Christianity by our Lord's 
 Apostles ; that it contains, farther, thirteen or four- 
 teen epistles of St. Paul, written some to churches, 
 some to individuals, and comprehending systematic 
 views of what Christianity is; appeals innumer- 
 able to its motives, its hopes, and its consolations ; 
 exhortations innumerable to cling to its truths 
 and to walk in its precepts, with specific mention 
 of these truths and precepts ; — when we consider, 
 farther, that we have in the same Scriptures an 
 epistle from St. James, the head of the church of 
 Jerusalem, whose mind and views, humanly speak- 
 ing, were least like those of St. Paul ; and that we 
 have epistles also from St. Peter and St. John, 
 
50 THE CHURCH. 
 
 two of our Lord's very cbiefest Apostles, and that 
 these epistles are addressed to Christians gene- 
 rally, and dwell on those points of Christian faith 
 and life which it was most essential to bear in 
 mind; then if all these writers, all these great 
 Apostles, in these long and varied writings, have 
 omitted with one accord themselves, and have 
 represented our Lord as omitting, any essential 
 doctrine or practice of Christianity, how can we 
 believe that they were indeed partakers of that 
 Holy Spirit which was to guide them into all 
 truth ? How can we think that they were really 
 empowered by God to be the preachers and au- 
 thoritative teachers of his revelation ? 
 
 Or, thirdly, it may be said, that the New Testa- 
 ment refers only to the beginnings of the Gospel ; 
 that the new converts received, indeed,;™ dvay- 
 KaioTwra tjjs- TraiSeia? tov Xpicrrov, — such truths as 
 were most indispensable, and without which they 
 could not have been Christians at all ; but that the 
 full development of the system of Christianity was 
 reserved for a later season; that the Scriptures 
 themselves imply this, inasmuch as, in the epistle 
 to the Hebrews, a distinction is expressly drawn 
 between the first principles of the doctrine of 
 Christ and the going on unto perfection, and the 
 writer of that epistle complains that they whom 
 he was addressing were not yet fit for this more 
 perfect truth. That in this manner the doctrine 
 
THE CHURCH. 51 
 
 of the Christian priesthood and of the mystic 
 virtue of the sacraments is not, indeed, fully de- 
 veloped in the New Testament, but was taught 
 by the Apostles at the very close of their career, 
 and received by the Church as their last and most 
 perfect instruction, which was to complete the 
 revelation of Christianity. 
 
 It has .pleased God that of the peculiar teaching 
 of the great majority of the Apostles we should 
 know nothing ; we cannot say with certainty what 
 they taught individually at any period of their 
 lives. But we can say positively that the latest 
 teaching of St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John, con- 
 tained in.it no more perfect revelation [concerning 
 the priesthood and the sacraments than they had 
 made known at. the beginning of the gospel. St. 
 Paul's second epistle, to Timothy must surely be 
 considered as containing his latest views of Christ- 
 ianity; and as being addressed tp one who was 
 himself a teacher,, it must have contained those 
 views fully ; it cannot be pretended that St. Paul 
 had any doctrine too esoterical to be communi- 
 cated to Timothy. But his latest epistle, amidst 
 many differences of expression from his earlier 
 writings, such as the lapse of years brings to all 
 men, contains in substance the very same -.view of 
 Christianity which we find in the epistles to the 
 Thessalonians. Paul's gospel is still Christ's re- 
 surrection, God's free salvation, Christ's coming to 
 
 e 2 
 
52 THE CHURCH. 
 
 judgment. He is still as averse as ever to strifes 
 about words; he warns Timothy that the time 
 will come when Christians shall turn away their 
 ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto 
 fables. He refers him to his past doctrine ever 
 since Timothy first knew him, not as to an imper- 
 fect system, to which he was now going to add 
 some great truth hitherto suppressed, but as that 
 very system which he earnestly wished to save 
 from corruption and interpolation. This was 
 Paul's language at a period when he declares that 
 he had finished his course on earth, and had only 
 to enter into his reward. 
 
 As we learn St. Paul's latest sentiments front 
 his second epistle to Timothy, so we learn those 
 of St. Peter from his second epistle general. He 
 too speaks of himself in that epistle as leaving 
 to the church his dying admonition, as telling 
 them the things which they might have always 
 in remembrance after he was gone. Does this 
 epistle contain that great doctrine of the priest- 
 hood and sacraments which, when he wrote his 
 first epistle, the Church was too weak to bear? 
 In that first epistle, having used the expres- 
 sion " that baptism saved Christians," he hastens 
 at once to explain his meaning, lest any should 
 understand him superstitiously ; and says that 
 he does not mean by baptism's saving us, that 
 the bodily washing with water saves; but the 
 
THE CHURCH. 53 
 
 answer of a good conscience towards God, when 
 men in repentance and faith were admitted into 
 the fellowship of Christ's redemption. His ex- 
 planation is clearly intended to draw off our at- 
 tention from the outward rite to the moral state 
 of the person receiving it : it was the repentance 
 and faith of the person baptized, which, through 
 God's mercy in Christ, saved him; and not the 
 outward rite of immersion in water. Now no- 
 thing is to be found in the second epistle which in 
 any degree qualifies this : every word of his latest 
 charge turns upon moral points ; upon growth in 
 all Christian graces, on improving to the utmost 
 their knowledge of Christ. He speaks, indeed, of 
 some who would soon introduce grievous heresies 
 and corruptions of Christianity; but for himself 
 he has nothing to add to his former teaching ; he 
 is only anxious that it should be remembered, and 
 practically turned to account. 
 
 Lastly, Christ's beloved disciple ; he who lived 
 so long that some of the brethren supposed that 
 he was never to die at all ; he who in an especial 
 manner connects the first age of the Church with 
 the second ; — do his epistles, written evidently late 
 in his life, — does his revelation, which so empha- 
 tically bears the character of a final declaration of 
 God's will, — contain this supposed perfect doctrine 
 of the priesthood and the sacraments ? Not one 
 word of either. Written to those who had an 
 
54 THE CHURCH. 
 
 unction from the Holy One, and knew all things, 
 to the Church of Christ, with no distinction of 
 priest and layman, St. John's epistle contains 
 no new commandment, but the same which the 
 Church had received from the beginning: his 
 gospel is Paul's gospel also ; God's infinite 
 love in Christ, Christ dying for us; faith work- 
 ing by love; holiness being the mark of God's 
 people ; sin the mark of false brethren. Of priest- 
 hoods, of one body of men ministering grace 
 to the rest through certain outward rites which, 
 unless administered by them, lose their efficacy, 
 St. John, like St. Peter and St. Paul, says no- 
 thing. Something, indeed, he does say of the 
 spirit of priestcra ft, in order to condemn it; there 
 
 was one_ Diotrephes who loved to exercise au- 
 thority, and to cast out of the Church those of 
 God's people who were strangers to his particular 
 portion of it ; and reproved * those who knew 
 better the largeness of Christian charity. But 
 Diotrephes, the true, p rototy pe of priestly and 
 fanatical presumption, is condemned by Christ's 
 beloved Apostle, as prating against him with ma- 
 licious words; as disobeying by his bigotry the au- 
 thority of the loving apostles of Christ Jesus. 
 
 The latest writings, then, of these three great 
 Apostles— Paul, Peter, and John — contain no 
 traces of any other or more mysterious doctrines 
 than they had received from our Lord and taught 
 
THE CHURCH. 55 
 
 \ 
 
 to their first converts at the beginning of the gos- 
 pel. And the expressions already alluded to in the 
 epistle to the Hebrews, like the whole of that 
 epistle, are, in fact, directly opposed to the notion 
 of a more mystical Christianity, which was to be 
 the reward of a due improvement of the first 
 principles of Christian knowledge already com- 
 municated. The "perfection" of which the 
 writer speaks as opposed to the principles or the 
 elementary doctrine of Christ, is an understanding 
 I that the law, its priesthood, and its' sacrifices were 
 ho longer necessary, inasmuch as Christ, by his 
 eternal priesthood' and one sacrifice, had done ef- 
 fectually that work which they could but typically 
 foreshadow. It is well known that the Jewish 
 Christians still observed the ceremonial law ; and 
 the Apostles sanctioned this, not only to avoid un- 
 necessary offence' to the unbelieving Jews, but 
 also because the' converts themselves would have 
 been shocked at the notion of renouncing it. St. 
 Paul, however, and those who followed him, were 
 well aware that this observance of the law was very 
 apt to be coupled with a belief of its necessity in a 
 spiritual point of view, and therefore they represent 
 the full grown Christian as one who feels the. un- 
 importance of all Jewish ceremonies, arid who 
 places his whole reliance upon Christ. " Let us, 
 as many as are perfect," says St. Paul to the Phi- 
 lippians, "be thus minded ;" where his meaning is 
 
56 THE CHURCH. 
 
 exactly the same with that of the epistle to the 
 Hebrews, where he speaks of going on unto per- 
 fection. So far, then, was the perfection of 
 Christian doctrine from consisting in the belief 
 in a human priesthood, and in the mystic virtue 
 of outward ordinances, that it was the very op- 
 posite of this, and consisted in clearly understand- 
 ing that Christ's death and resurrection had ren- 
 dered all priesthoods, sacrifices, and ceremonies, 
 for the time to come, unimportant. It was be- 
 cause * this perfection was not generally attained 
 to, because the minds of so many Christians could 
 not embrace principles-^oupure, that the doctrine 
 of the priesthood and the sacraments gradually 
 made its way into the church, as the natural sue 
 cessor of Judaism. For when the Jewish temple 
 and sacrifices were destroyed, those Christians, 
 who had till then regarded them as important 
 parts of Christianity, were naturally led to substi- 
 tute another priesthood and another sacrifice of 
 the same sort in the place of those which they 
 had lost : and as they had joined the Levitical 
 priesthood with that of Christ, and the daily 
 sacrifices of the law with his sacrifice, so after- 
 wards, in the same spirit, they made a new priest- 
 hood out of the Christian ministry, and a new 
 sacrifice out of the communion of the Lord's 
 Supper. 
 
 It may be safely said, that whatever we find in 
 
THE CHURCH. 57 
 
 the New Testament, as to a gradual communica- 
 tion of Christian truth, relates to this one point : 
 that the disciples were to be led on gently to a 
 full sense of the unimportance of the ceremonies 
 of the Jewish law. Christianity was given com- 
 plete, as to its own truths, from the beginning of 
 the gospel : but the absolute sufficiency of these 
 truths, and the needlessness of any other system 
 as joined with them, was to be learned only by de- 
 grees ; and, unhappily, it never was learned fully. 
 The perfection of which the epistle to the He- 
 brews speaks as not having been yet reached by 
 those to whom the author was writing, was, by 
 the great mass of the Church, never reached at all. 
 The errors of the Judaizers continued, and as- 
 sumed a shape far more mischievous; because 
 the Judaism of the succession priesthood, and 
 the sacrifice of the communion, did not, like the 
 older Judaism, simply exist by the side of pure 
 Christianity, but incorporated itself with Chris- 
 tianity, and destroyed Christian truths to substi- 
 tute in the place of them its own falsehood. 
 
 Thus, then, as the Scriptures wholly disclaim 
 these notions of a human priesthood, as the per- 
 fection of knowledge to which they would have 
 us aspire consists in rejecting such notions 
 wholly; it is strictly, as I said, superfluous to 
 inquire into the opinions of early Christian 
 writers, because, if these upheld the doctrine of 
 
58 THE CHURCH. 
 
 the priesthood ever so strongly, it would but show 
 that the state of mind of which the epistle to the 
 Hebrews complains, was afterwards more universal 
 and more remote from Christian perfection. But 
 it is satisfactory to find that this Was not so ; that 
 although the' germs of the mischief may be here 
 and there discernible, yet that the doctrine of the 
 Apostles was in the main faithfully taught by 
 those who, in point of time, came nearest to them; 
 that it needed more than one generation to cor- 
 rupt so deeply the perfect purity of Christian 
 truth". s ' 
 
 Our inquiry will not be a very long one. For 
 when that favourite expression with some, "the 
 voice of Christian antiquity," is analyzed, it ap- 
 pears that, besides the writers of the New Testa- 
 ment, the first century and a half of the Christian 
 era produced no more than ten writers, or, if we 
 include Justin Martyr, eleven. These were all 
 whom Jerome could discover, although he pro- 
 fesses to give a complete list of the Christian 
 writers from the earliest times, and even swells it 
 with the names "of Josephus, Philo-Judseus, Justus 
 of Tiberias, who was also a Jewish writer, and L. 
 Seneca. 
 
 The ten writers of Jerome's list are the follow- 
 ing: Barnabas, Hermas, Clemens of Rome, Ig- 
 natius, Polycarp, Papias, Quadratus, Aristides, 
 Agrippa, and Hegesippus. Of this number the 
 
THE CHURCH. 59 
 
 works of the five last have perished, with the ex- 
 ception of a few passages preserved in quotations 
 by other writers. But Quadratus and Aristides 
 were only known to Jerome himself as the au- 
 thors of two apologies in behalf of Christianity, 
 addressed to the emperor Hadrian ; and Agrip- 
 pa's works were an answer to the heretic Ba- 
 silides, of which it is not certain that it was extant 
 in the time of Jerome. Of Polycarp and Ignatius, 
 Jerome knew no other works than those which 
 we still possess under their names ; that is, Poly- 
 carp's epistle to the Philippians, and the seven 
 epistles of Ignatius: 1, to the Ephesians; 2, to 
 the Magnesians ; 3, to the Trallensians ; 4, to the 
 Romans; 5, to the Philadelphians ; 6, to the 
 Smyrnseans; and 7, to Polycarp. Barnabas, also, 
 and Hermas were known to Jerome only by the 
 Epistle of the former, and by the Shepherd of the 
 latter ; both of which we possess. And the only 
 undisputed work of Clemens, his epistle to' the 
 Corinthians, is also still in existence. The only 
 important remains of Christian antiquity which 
 Jerome possessed, and which are lost to lis, are 
 therefore the Apologies of Quadratiis and Aris- 
 tides, the Ecclesiastical History of Hegesippus, and 
 Papias's five books, entitled " A Setting Forth of 
 the Words of the Lord." "Eicde&is Xoyav Kvpiov. 
 
 It is not my present purpose to inquire into the 
 genuineness of the epistle of 1 Barnabas, or of the 
 
60 THE CHURCH. 
 
 other writings of the so-called Apostolical fathers. 
 I am willing for the present to assume that they 
 are genuine, because I wish to meet the advo- 
 cates of the priesthood on their own ground; 
 and I contend that their system can no more be 
 derived from the reputed works of the earliest 
 Christian writers, than from the Scriptures them- 
 selves. If there be no works remaining of the 
 Christian writers of the first century and a half, it 
 is idle to talk about a tradition running back to 
 the very times of the Apostles ; the links of the 
 chain are wanting in the very most important 
 part, and the wide gap between the Apostles and 
 Justin Martyr must resist every attempt to con- 
 nect the opinions of the end of the second century 
 with the Christianity of the Apostolical age. 
 - I. The epistle of Barnabas is directed mainly 
 against the notions of the Judaizers. The writer 
 is so earnest against the observance of the Jewish 
 law by Christians, that he ascribes a figurative and 
 spiritual meaning to alHhose passages in the Old 
 Testament which enjoin the several ceremonies of 
 the Jewish ritual. Even circumcision, he con- 
 tends, meant the circumcision of the heart, and 
 not the outward rite ; and after stating an objec- 
 tion to this view of it, in the words of a supposed 
 opponent, who observes, " that the Jews were cir- 
 cumcised as a seal of their covenant," he replies, 
 " But the Syrians and Arabians, and the idol priests 
 
THE CHURCH. 61 
 
 generally, use circumcision. Are they, also, then 
 partakers of God's covenants ? " A writer who 
 would so little admit outward ceremonies as an 
 essential part of the Jewish religion, was not 
 likely to regard them as essential in Christianity. 
 There is, accordingly, not a single word about any 
 Christian ceremonial, whether of temple, priest- 
 hood, or offering ; he knows nothing of the Eu- 
 charist as the unbloody sacrifice of the new law, 
 to be offered only by the new priesthood ; he only 
 knows of the sacrifice once offered by Christ, of 
 the whole Church as the spiritual temple of God. 
 It is true he speaks of baptism under the name of 
 " water," and applies to it several passages in the 
 Old Testament, which speak of " streams of wa- 
 ter," 'Hiving springs," &c. And from these ex- 
 pressions, it might be supposed that he was laying 
 a stress on the outward act of baptism. For in- 
 stance, the following words might be quoted as 
 identifying baptism with regeneration : — " We go 
 down to the water full of sins and filthiness, and we 
 come up with our hearts bringing forth fruit ; hav- 
 ing fear and hope towards Jesus through the Spirit." 
 This, and other such passages serve admirably well, 
 when quoted separately, to make it appear that 
 Barnabas held the Judaizing notions of the mys- 
 tical virtue of the sacraments: but when we 
 compare his strong language, as to the utter 
 
62 THE CHURCH. 
 
 worthlessness of the outward act of ^circumcision, 
 and as to the circumcision of the heart being the 
 only thing intended by the commandment, it is 
 quite clear that, by parity of reasoning, the whole 
 importance of baptism in his eyes must have con- 
 sisted in the real change of heart which it implied, 
 and the change of life of which it was the begin- 
 ning ; and that the ceremony of baptizing with 
 water was merely a symbol of the great and im-: 
 portant change which a man underwent in passing 
 from a state of heathenism to Christianity. In 
 this sense, baptism, as synonymous with an admis- 
 sion to the benefits and promises of the Christian 
 Church, could not be spoken of too highly; it was 
 truly the turning point of a man's whole existence 
 from evil to good. .And in the time of Barnabas^ 
 when the real change involved in the act of bap- 
 tism was so striking, and the superstitions con- 
 nected with it had not as yet. had full time to 
 grow up, any one might speak of it as Barnabas 
 has spoken, without suspecting that his words 
 could be misinterpreted. St. Peter himself says, 
 " Baptism does now save us ; " and it seems to me 
 rather an instance of God's abundant goodness, to 
 hinder the Scriptures from giving any counte- 
 nance to the Judaizing. superstitions, than a ne- 
 cessary caution on the writer's part to save 
 himself from misinterpretation, when he adds 
 
THE CHURCH. 63 
 
 expressly, " not the putting away the filth of the 
 flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards 
 God." 
 
 It should be always remembered, that the su- 
 perstition of the Judaizers consists not in their 
 reverence for the sacraments, wluch Christ ap- 
 pointed as great instruments of good to his Church ; 
 but in their having drawn off men's attention from 
 the important part both of Baptism and the Lord's 
 Supper to that which is external : to regard God's 
 grace not as conveyed by them morally, because 
 the joining Christ's Church in the first instance, 
 and the constantly refreshing our communion with 
 it. afterwards, are actions highly beneficial to our 
 moral nature ; but as conveyed by them after the 
 manner of a charm, the virtue being communi- 
 cated by the water and the bread and wine* in 
 consequence of a virtue first communicated to 
 them by certain words of consecration pronounced 
 by a priest. It is the famous " aecedit verbum ad 
 ejementum e t fit sacramentum," which contains 1 
 the essence of the unchristian and .most mischiev- 
 ous view of. the sacraments entertained by the 
 Romish and Anglican popery. And,, in order to 
 show that the early Christian writers favour this no- 
 tion, it is not enough to show that they speak strong- 
 ly of the benefits of t\\e sacraments ; for in this the 
 Scriptures and almost all true Christians would 
 agree with them: but it must farther be made 
 
64 THE CHURCH. 
 
 evident that they lay the stress on the virtue 
 communicated by the outward elements, after 
 those elements have been first consecrated by 
 certain formal words repeated by a priest. Un- 
 less they can be proved to hold this, we may in- 
 terpret their language rather as agreeing with 
 that of Christ and his apostles, than as counte- 
 nancing the superstition of the Judaizers. 
 
 From the epistle of Barnabas, I pass to that of 
 Clemens Romanus. 
 
 II. There is nothing in Clemens, either on the 
 subject of Baptism or of the Lord's Supper, or of a 
 priesthood. But there are one or two passages 
 which have been often quoted as asserting what 
 is called apostolical succession ; and these, there- 
 fore, it will be proper to examine. As before, in 
 the case of the epistle of Barnabas, I am assum- 
 ing the genuineness of the epistle of Clemens, 
 and also its freedom from interpolation. 
 
 It is difficult, unfortunately, notwithstanding the 
 length of this work, to learn from it with any 
 clearness the exact nature of the circumstances 
 to which it refers. It complains, indeed, largely 
 of the mischiefs of quarrelling and pride ; but it 
 does not state what was the occasion of quar- 
 rel, nor what were the views and objects of the 
 party which disturbed the peace of the church. 
 They are spoken of as " a few," oXiya irpoam-Tra ; 
 and they are blamed as " lifting themselves up 
 
THE CHURCH. 65 
 
 over Christ's flock," liraipofikvmv eirl to wolfiviov 
 rov Xpia-Tov, at the same time that they were dis- 
 paraging the authority of the lawful elders of the 
 Church. Some of the elders had been actually 
 displaced, and for no fault of theirs; and those 
 through whom they had been expelled had gained 
 a great authority in their room. These last Cle- 
 ment exhorts to give up their power, to do the 
 bidding of the congregation, ra irpoa-raa-a-o'/ieva vtro 
 rod irXriOovs, and to imitate the example of many 
 worthy kings and rulers of the Gentiles, who had 
 left their own countries, rather than be the occa- 
 sion of contention or civil war. 
 
 All this is to us exceedingly vague ; it reminds 
 us something of the tyrants of the old Greek com- 
 monwealths, establishing themselves on the over- 
 throw of the old aristocracies. It bears some re- 
 semblance to the picture drawn by St. Paul of his 
 Judaizing opponents in this very church of Co- 
 rinth, who depreciated or denied his authority, 
 and trampled themselves upon the mass of the 
 congregation with the utmost insolence 3 . It would 
 perfectly suit an attempt made on the part, of one 
 or two ambitious individuals to establish the des- 
 potism of a single bishop, instead of the mild 
 authority of the whole body of elders : for certain 
 it is that Clement, like St. Paul, recognises no one 
 bishop, in the later sense of the term, as ruling 
 - See II Corinth, xi. 20. 
 
 F 
 
66 THE CHURCH. 
 
 the church of Corinth ; the government is vested 
 in a certain number of bishops or elders, called in- 
 differently by either name, who, together with the 
 inferior ministers, Biukovoi, or in the language of 
 the Athenian constitution, wr^perai, constitute all 
 the officers of the Christian society. 
 
 With this uncertainty as to the precise nature 
 of the disturbance in the Corinthian church, we 
 cannot tell with what extent or with what limits 
 to understand the particular passage of Clement's 
 epistle, which is supposed to uphold the doctrine 
 of the so-called apostolical succession. He refers 
 to the minute rules of the Jewish Church ; to its 
 division of offices, and its stated seasons and places 
 of worship ; and he infers from this, that each man 
 in the Christian Church should keep his own sta- 
 tion and order with equal strictness. The Apos- 
 tles, he says, appointed everywhere the first 
 bishops and deacons, hriaKoirovs km Sia/covovs, in 
 the several churches which they founded. They 
 wished to obviate disputes about the government, 
 and therefore they not only appointed the first 
 bishops and deacons, but also appointed a succes- 
 sion, eirivofirjv, that when the first bishops were 
 dead, other tried men should succeed to their 
 office. " Those, then," proceeds Clement, " who 
 were appointed by the Apostles, or afterwards, 
 (fieTagv,) by other tried and approved men, (eXKo- 
 yl/jLwv,) with the consent of the whole church; 
 
THE CHURCH. 67 
 
 those who ministered unblamably to Christ's flock 
 with humility, gently, and in no spirit of sordid 
 gain, (d/3avavo-G>s,) and whose worth has many times 
 been attested by the whole Church, — these we think 
 are not justly expelled from their ministry ; for it 
 will be no small sin to us, if they who unblamably 
 and holily offered their gifts to God, be cast out 
 from their bishoprics." Such is the famous pas- 
 sage in which Clement is supposed to maintain 
 the indefeasible right of bishops appointed by 
 apostolical succession to exercise government over 
 the Church for ever. 
 
 It is manifest, in the first place, that Clement's 
 words are not general and prospective, but had re- 
 ference to a particular case actually before him. 
 He was thinking of something present and special, 
 and had evidently no thought of laying down a 
 general law for all times and places. Now, I am 
 very far from saying that the words of a wise man, 
 on a particular case, cannot contain any truth of 
 general application ; of course they can, and gene- 
 rally do : but as he did not utter them as general, 
 their bearing on any universal truth is indirect 
 rather than direct ; that is, we may conclude that 
 he would have applied them generally, so far as 
 the particular case before him was a faithful repre- 
 sentative of all future cases ; but if it differed in 
 any remarkable points from future cases, then we 
 
 f 2 
 
68 THE CHURCH. 
 
 have no right to make them general ; in other 
 words, we have no right to make him draw the 
 same conclusion, where the premises are mani- 
 festly different. 
 
 Now the premises in Clement's case lead justly 
 enough, assuming them for the present to be true 
 in fact, to his conclusion. Good elders, appointed 
 by worthy men, who had themselves been ap- 
 pointed by the Apostles, appointed with the con- 
 sent of the whole church, whose worth the whole 
 church had often attested, and who had discharged 
 their ministry unblamably, gently, and uncorruptly, 
 ought not to be deprived of their office. I am not 
 aware that the strongest opponent of priestly ty- 
 ranny would refuse his hearty assent to this propo- 
 sition of Clement. 
 
 But now, instead of Clement's own premises, 
 let us substitute others. " Bad and foolish elders, 
 appointed by others neither wiser nor better, which 
 others derived their own appointment from no 
 purer source, — proud and foolish elders, in whose 
 appointment the whole church had had no voice 
 at all, nor had ever attested their worth, but felt 
 their evil, — elders who had discharged their office 
 offensively, arrogantly, rapaciously," — shall there 
 be no power in the church to deprive such of their 
 office, and to commit the power which they abuse, 
 and have long abused, to other hands? Or, is 
 
THE CHURCH. 69 
 
 Clement's conclusion still to hold, although of the 
 premises from which he derived it, there is not left 
 iu this new case a single one remaining? 
 
 It must not be denied, however, that a com- 
 parison which Clement uses in this part of his 
 epistle, may seem to imply that he regarded the 
 government of the Church as a thing fixed once for 
 all, and not to be altered under any circumstances. 
 He refers to the selection of the family of Aaron 
 to hold the priest's office, as a parallel case to the 
 appointment of the first bishops by the Apostles ; 
 and as the priesthood remained in Aaron's family 
 to the end of the Jewish dispensation, without any 
 reference to the worthiness of the individuals of that 
 family in any one generation, so it might be argued 
 that, in Clement's notions, the personal worthiness or 
 unworthiness of the individual bishops had nothing 
 to do with the question ; their right to govern the 
 Church was derived solely from their Apostolical 
 succession. 
 
 Now if Clement had been arguing in the abstract 
 against the right of deposing any bishop or elder, 
 and had then referred to the law of the Jewish 
 priesthood, there could have been no doubt as to 
 his meaning. But this is precisely one of those 
 points in which the particular occasion of his argu- 
 ment makes his meaning, as to the general applica- 
 bility of his comparison, doubtful. If he felt that 
 bishops or elders had been factiousiy and unjustly 
 
70 THE CHURCH. 
 
 deposed, when they had been appointed to their 
 office either immediately by the Apostles, or at only 
 one remove, by those who had themselves Teceived 
 their office from the Apostles, the deposition of 
 such men so appointed could not but seem to him 
 an interference with a divine authority ; and he 
 would have looked upon their power, so unjustly 
 assailed, as resting on God's ordinance, as much as 
 the exclusive possession of the priesthood by the 
 family of Aaron. 
 
 But it is impossible to argue justly from this 
 passage, that if Clement had lived fifteen or sixteen 
 centuries later, and had seen the bishops of the 
 Church in a wholly different position from that of 
 the bishops of the church of Corinth, he would 
 have equally maintained their indefeasibility, and 
 considered the Levitical priesthood an exactly pa- 
 rallel case. For the continuance of the priesthood 
 in the same family was not a consequence simply of 
 the original divine appointment of Aaron, but fol- 
 lowed from the universal notion of the eastern 
 world, and of much of the western, that priest- 
 hoods must be hereditary. God appointed Moses 
 to be the prophet and ruler of his people, and 
 Moses after him appointed Joshua ; but the divine 
 appointment went no farther, because the prophets' 
 and judges' offices were not necessarily to depend 
 upon succession, and the Israelites were not bound 
 to choose for their judges the posterity of either 
 
THE CHURCH. 71 
 
 Moses or Joshua. Now the Christian ministry 
 would undoubtedly resemble the judges and pro- 
 phets of the Israelites rather than their priests ; 
 and therefore an original divine appointment would 
 not imply the necessity of a perpetual succession. 
 The succession here would, as to its divine author- 
 ity, die out naturally in the course of time, just as 
 the Roman lawyers held that collateral consan- 
 guinity expired in the eighth generation ; it being 
 impossible to suppose that >the virtue of the ori- 
 ginal descent from a common ancestor could exist 
 beyond that period. Thus, the elders appointed 
 immediately, or at one or two removes, by the 
 Apostles, might truly be said to hold their offices, 
 like Joshua, by divine appointment; and they 
 might as tridy be said to have been chosen by God, 
 as Aaron was chosen to be the priest, rather than 
 a man of any other family or any other tribe. And 
 the reason why the succession was not to be per- 
 petual in the case of the judge of Israel and the 
 Christian bishops was this, that unless each gene- 
 ration was as highly gifted by God as Moses and 
 Joshua, or as the Christian Apostles, the wisdom 
 of their original choice of successors would be im- 
 paired continually by fresh mixtures of human 
 folly or passion ; so that, as in the case of collateral 
 consanguinity, all its virtue must necessarily be lost 
 after the lapse of a certain interval of time. This 
 is the plain analogy and reason which makes it 
 
72 THE CHURCH. 
 
 probable that Clement would not have considered 
 any bishops of the Church, after the lapse of a cen- 
 tury, to be the successors of the Apostles, except so 
 far as they resembled them in their lives and 
 doctrine. 
 
 Nothing is less satisfactory than an argumentum 
 adhominem; and therefore I have chosen to consider 
 this passage of Clement with a view simply to the 
 truth of the case, and not merely to the silencing 
 or embarrassing an adversary. Otherwise it is 
 most true that the actual episcopacy of the Chris- 
 tian Church, for many centuries, can derive no sup- 
 port from the epistle of Clement. An aristocracy 
 and a monarchy are not so precisely identical that 
 the government of a single bishop can claim to be 
 of divine authority, because the Apostles appointed 
 in each church a certain number of bishops or 
 elders. Nor can it be shown that if the ordination 
 by bishops, one or more, be necessary, the consent 
 of the whole church, which was no less a part of 
 the primitive appointments, may be laid aside as a 
 thing wholly indifferent. But it is a poor triumph 
 merely to expose an opponent's inconsistencies : it 
 is far better to show simply, that Clement's words 
 — 1st, grew out of a particular occasion ; 2nd, 
 that the bishops to whose deposition he objected 
 were good men, who had discharged their office 
 well, and who had been appointed with the consent 
 of the whole church ; 3rd, that they were really 
 
THE CHURCH. 73 
 
 and bona fide the Apostles' successors, being no 
 farther removed from them than the virtue of the 
 Apostles' original choice might fairly be supposed 
 to reach; 4th, that, the virtue of that choice 
 necessarily dying out in time, it can never be proved 
 that he who upheld its authority when it really 
 existed, would therefore imagine it to exist when 
 it was really lost ; and 5th, that the cases of 
 Moses and Joshua, and the essential difference be- 
 tween a priesthood and an office of prophet or 
 ruler, make it clear that indefeasible succession 
 does not flow from an original divine appointment 
 in the latter case, because it accompanied it in 
 the former. 
 
 Finally, it must be remembered that Clement 
 speaks of the Christian ministers as bishops and 
 elders, not as priests. It is not a little curious 
 that, just at that period when the notion of original 
 Apostolical appointment could no longer be applied 
 to make out a virtual succession for the Christian 
 ministers as prophets or rulers, their office began, 
 to be represented as a priesthood ; that so the suc- 
 cession, which was inapplicable to them in their 
 real character, might be claimed for them under 
 this new and unchristian title. 
 
 III. The " Shepherd " of Hermas contains no 
 mention of the Lord's Supper, nor of a priesthood, 
 nor of a succession of ministers, nor of a mystical 
 virtue communicated to the elements in the sacra- 
 
74 
 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
 ments by a certain form of words. Baptism, as 
 the admission into the Christian Church, and as 
 equivalent to the obtaining a knowledge of Christ, 
 is indeed strongly insisted on in a remarkable pas- 
 sage, in which Hermas says that the Apostles after 
 their deaths went down into the place of the dead, 
 and preached there to the good men of former 
 ages, and taught them the name of the Lord Jesus, 
 and baptized them ; and that then, having received 
 the seal of the Son of God, they arose perfect and 
 fit for God's kingdom. " For," says Hermas, " they 
 had died full of righteousness, and in a state of 
 great purity, only they had not received this seal." 
 I am far from saying that there is not some su- 
 perstition involved in this ; but still the notion 
 is, that the knowledge of the name of Christ was 
 necessary, the seal of which is baptism: the stress 
 is laid on the knowing Christ, and belonging to his 
 Church, not on the mere outward rite of baptizing 
 by water. 
 
 IV. The pure and simple epistle of Polycarp is 
 as free from all taint of the corrupt doctrine of a 
 priesthood, and the mystical virtue of the sacra- 
 ments, as those of the Apostles themselves. He 
 dwells on the relative duties of the several mem- 
 bers of the Christian Church, and calls upon the 
 younger men to abstain from all evil lusts, and to 
 be subject to their elders and deacons as unto God 
 and Christ. So St. Paul had desired slaves to obey 
 
THE CHURCH. 75 
 
 their masters, and wives to be subject to their own 
 husbands, as unto the Lord. But this is very dif- 
 ferent from the exaggerated language of Ignatius, 
 and the pretended Apostolical constitutions ; and 
 the obedience to the elders and deacons is clearly 
 connected, in Polycarp's mind, with obedience to 
 the law of Christ which they taught, as opposed 
 to the evil lusts from which he wishes all Christian 
 people to turn aside. 
 
 V. The epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, as- 
 suming as before its genuineness, and not entering 
 into the question whether the longer or the shorter 
 version of it be the original, contains nothing that 
 bears directly on our present subject. One pas- 
 sage, however, may be noticed, as showing that 
 Ignatius understood aright the language of our 
 Lord recorded in St. John vi., respecting the eat- 
 ing his flesh, and the drinking his blood. " I 
 have no pleasure," says Ignatius, " in corruptible 
 food, nor in this life's pleasures : my wish is for 
 the bread of God, the bread of heaven, the bread 
 of life, that is, the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son 
 of God, who became afterwards of the seed of 
 David and of Abraham. And the drink which I 
 desire is his blood, which is love incorruptible 
 and life eternal." 
 
 Now it should be remembered that Ignatius, in 
 the whole of this epistle, is breathing an earnest 
 desire for martyrdom. He is impatient to arrive 
 
76 THE CHURCH. 
 
 at Rome, that he may be torn to pieces by the 
 wild beasts, and so may be for ever with Christ. 
 It is impossible, then, that he can have thought of 
 the communion of the Lord's Supper, when he 
 speaks of the body and blood of Christ : he speaks 
 rather of that perfect communion with Christ in 
 heaven, of which the Lord's Supper was intended, 
 amongst other things, to be the symbol. 
 
 It has been one of the most pernicious of all 
 corruptions of Scripture, to understand certain 
 passages as referring to the sacraments, which 
 refer really to those things of which the sacra- 
 ments are the signs. They are therefore coordi- 
 nate with the sacraments, pointing in word, as the 
 sacraments do in emblematic action, to the same 
 reality ; but not subordinate to the sacraments, nor 
 by any means pointing to them as to the reality, 
 which is something distinct from them and above 
 "them. 
 
 When our Lord declares, " Whoso eateth my 
 flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and 
 I will raise him up at the last day ; for my flesh 
 is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed," it 
 is evident that here is the self-same truth con- 
 templated which our Lord had also in view when 
 he said, " Take, eat, this is my body :" and, "Drink 
 ye all of this, for this is my blood of the New 
 Testament, which is shed for many for the re- 
 mission of sins." There is the^ self-same truth 
 
THE CHURCH. 77 
 
 contemplated, namely, that the closest possible 
 communion of the soul with Christ, and the 
 making him, in all his various relations of Pro- 
 phet, King, Saviour, and Lord, the soul's daily food, 
 was essential to man's salvation. This great truth 
 our Lord expressed, according to his usual manner, 
 in figurative words ; he expressed it also in figu- 
 rative action. He not only said, " My flesh is 
 meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed;" but 
 he embodied the words in action ; he commanded 
 us to eat as it were his flesh, and to drink his 
 blood, in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper. 
 But to suppose that the stress was laid on the 
 literal eating of the bread and drinking of the cup, 
 that by that figurative act the great moral reality 
 which it imaged forth symbolically would be ipso 
 facto attained, is a misrepresentation precisely of 
 the same kind as that which he so strongly con- 
 demns in his disciples, when they understood his 
 words, to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, as 
 a charge to beware literally of a particular sort of 
 bread. 
 
 Thus again, the summary of the tenth chapter 
 of the first epistle to the Corinthians, as given in 
 our English Bibles, runs thus : " The Jews' sacra- 
 ments types of ours." Here is the self-same error, 
 of making the outward rites or facts of the Jewish 
 religion subordinate to the outward rites of ours, 
 
78 THE CHURCH. 
 
 instead of regarding them both as coordinate with 
 one another, and subordinate to some spiritual 
 reality, of which both alike are but signs. In the 
 passage referred to, St. Paul is showing that out- 
 ward rites are no security for the existence of the 
 real thing which they typify. Christians have 
 been baptized with water, as an introduction into 
 Christ's service ; the Israelites passed through 
 water also, as an introduction to their becoming 
 God's people and receiving his law. Christians 
 eat bread and drink wine, in token of their being 
 united to their Lord and Saviour ; and so the Is- 
 raelites ate manna and drank of the rock, that 
 manna and rock representing Christ their Lord, 
 who was with them on all their way, just as the 
 bread and the wine of the Lord's Supper re- 
 present him now. But Israel, notwithstanding 
 these outward tokens of their belonging to God 
 and depending on bim, sinned and fell ; and not- 
 withstanding our outward tokens, the same may 
 be our case if we are not watchful. It is altering 
 the whole scope of the passage to say that it 
 represents the Jews' sacraments as types of ours ; 
 as if our sacraments, any more than theirs, were 
 necessarily or in themselves a reality. The drift 
 of the passage is not to magnify the sacraments, 
 but to prevent us from superstitiously trusting to 
 them. The Jews had their sacraments, as we have 
 
THE CHURCH. 79 
 
 ours, and both are types of the same thing ; but 
 the type in their ease did not prevent them from 
 forfeiting the substance, neither will it in ours. 
 
 So again, when St. John records so earnestly 
 his beholding the blood and water flowing out 
 from Christ's side, and when in his epistle, in 
 manifest allusion to the same thing, he says, 
 " This is he who came by water and blood, even 
 Jesus Christ ; not by water only, but by water 
 and blood : " it makes the whole difference be- 
 tween Christianity and the great corruption of it, 
 whether we understand these words as coordinate 
 with Baptism and the Lord's Supper, or as sub- 
 ordinate to them ; whether we say that they refer 
 to the two sacraments, or that they refer to those 
 great truths which the two sacraments also were 
 designed to image forth in emblematic action; 
 that repentance towards God, and faith in the 
 blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, are the sum and 
 substance of Christianity. 
 
 Finally, the memorable words of our Lord him- 
 self to Nicodemus, " Except a man be born of 
 water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the 
 kingdom of God," contain, perhaps, the same 
 figure in words that Baptism contains in action, 
 although even this is not certain, but are not 
 meant to refer to the outward rite of Baptism as 
 the thing indispensable. They are coordinate with 
 Baptism, it may be, but not subordinate to it. 
 
80 THE CHURCH. 
 
 The same obvious reason which led the Jews, in 
 common with many other people, to adopt the 
 rite of washing the body as symbolical of the 
 washing or cleansing of the soul from sin, led our 
 Lord to express this cleansing of the soul by the 
 term " water." A man must repent of his past evil 
 life, and receive the grace of the Holy Spirit to 
 enable him for the future to lead a new life, 
 before he can enter into the kingdom of heaven. 
 And if I am asked why I do not take the word 
 " water " literally, according to Hooker's canon of 
 criticism, when he says that " in the interpretation 
 of Holy Scripture, that sense which is nearest the 
 letter is commonly the safest," I answer, that 
 such a canon, as applied to a collection of works, 
 so different in point of style as those of the 
 Scriptures, is at once ridiculous. In the simple 
 narratives of the historical books, Hooker's rule 
 will hold ; in the prophetical and poetical books, 
 it would be the very worst rule that we could 
 follow. Now, our Lord's discourses, as recorded 
 by St. John, are eminently parabolical; his lan- 
 guage, both when speaking to the Jews and to his 
 own disciples, is continually figurative. Hence 
 the mingled surprise and pleasure of his disciples, 
 when, towards the close of his last conversation 
 with them, he dropped his usual style, and ex- 
 pressed himself without any figure. " Lo ! now 
 speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb." 
 
THE CHURCH. 81 
 
 He spake of water to the woman of Samaria, and 
 she, adopting Hooker's rule, understood him liter- 
 ally : " Lord, give me this water, that I thirst 
 not, neither come hither to draw." Was this, in- 
 deed, the true sense of his words ; or was it so 
 utterly mistaken as to lead to the extreme of folly 
 and profeneness ? And yet, some think, that to 
 interpret in a similar manner his words to Nico- 
 demus is neither foolish nor profane, but rather 
 that to interpret them otherwise is to explain 
 away the words of Scripture ! Explaining away 
 the words of Scripture! when we make them refer 
 to something spiritual and not bodily ; to a reality, 
 not to a symbol ; to a moral act, not to a cere- 
 mony ! 
 
 But why should we scruple to understand our 
 Lord's words of water, literally, when we know 
 that he did on one occasion tell a blind man to go 
 and wash in the pool of Siloam ; and that the 
 man went, and washed, and came seeing? This, 
 too, is one of Hooker's comparisons, in that same 
 fifth book of his Ecclesiastical Polity from which 
 so many unwise and nfair arguments have been 
 quoted as the words of impartiality and wisdom. 
 Is it in the slightest degree a parallel case, that 
 because a bodily application was prescribed as a 
 cure for a bodily disease, it should therefore cure 
 a disease of the soul? It is idle to say that we 
 do not understand the laws of body and spirit, and 
 
 G 
 
82 THE CHURCH. 
 
 that God can affect both our bodies and spirits by 
 whatever kind of instruments he chooses. The 
 argument from human ignorance, most just and 
 useful within certain limits, is by fanatics often 
 used so awkwardly as to lead to the conclusions 
 of the wildest scepticism. It is true, that we un- 
 derstand very little of the laws of body and spirit, 
 still the very notions of body and spirit imply a 
 wide difference between them ; and so far as we 
 do know or understand of either, our knowledge 
 is derived from different sciences, and we find 
 them to be subjected to different laws. If there 
 is no truth in all this ; if we do not know enough 
 to warrant us in saying that wisdom is not to be 
 gained by bodily exercise, nor charity by eating any 
 particular kind of food, then we have no grounds 
 for knowing or believing any thing ; least of all can 
 we think that we are living in the World of the 
 God of truth and love, if we have no grasp upon 
 truth whatsoever, and have no means by which we 
 may reasonably assure ourselves even that God is. 
 But, not to wander into any more remote in- 
 quiry, it is sufficient for the present to say that 
 the Scriptures fully recognise the authority of 
 what may be called our common-sense notions of 
 good and evil, of reasonableness and absurdity. 
 And when fanaticism, striving to render all truth 
 uncertain, that so its own falsehoods may have 
 the better chance of being received, and pushing 
 
THE CHURCH. 83 
 
 to extravagance the famous sentiment of Pascal, 
 w La raison confond les dogmatistes," would en- 
 deavour to persuade us, that we can have no sure 
 reliance either on the evidence of our senses or of 
 our reason, that we do not know what is or what 
 is not ; our answer will be, that our convictions 
 do not rest on any fond presumption as to our 
 own power of discerning truth, but on our faith 
 that God will not suffer us to be deceived by 
 trusting to his appointed witnesses. Truth in 
 itself we have, it may be, no power to grasp : it 
 may be possible, if you will, that in another state 
 of being, the surest conclusions of our senses and 
 of our reason may be found to. have been ab- 
 stractedly erroneous. But in the meanwhile, in 
 this our present state of being, they are true to 
 us; they are the language to which God has 
 adapted our present nature. By distrusting it, We 
 shall disobey him and be lost in endless error ; by 
 believing it, we shall resign ourselves to his guid- 
 ance, and shall attain, if not truth in itself, yet 
 that only image of truth of which we are capable 
 here, and by which alone we can be made capable 
 of arriving at real truth hereafter. It is not 
 rationalism, then, but reason resting on faith, which 
 assures us of the utter incapability of any outward 
 bodily action to produce in us an inward spiritual 
 effect. 
 
 Sect. 1. Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians. 
 
 g 2 
 
84 THE CHURCH. 
 
 — In this epistle, we find a marked distinction 
 between the bishop or superintendent, hrlo-Koiros, 
 and irpeo-fivrepiov, or the body of elders ; whereas in 
 Clement's epistle, as well as in those of St. Paul, 
 hrla/coTTos and irpecrfivTepos are synonymous terms. 
 There are also several passages, enjoining obe- 
 dience to the bishop and to the body of elders ; and 
 in one place Ignatius says, " Ye should regard 
 your bishop as the Lord himself." s But our Lord 
 had said to his disciples, " He that receiveth you 
 receiveth me ;" and St. Paul had said, even with 
 regard to the Heathen magistracies, " Whosoever 
 resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of 
 God." St. Paul also, as we have seen, enjoins 
 Christians no less earnestly to obey those who 
 were set over them ; and that Christianity recog- 
 nises a power of government in the Church, and 
 requires of all individual Christians that they 
 should be obedient to those invested with this 
 government, we have already shown at large. 
 But government is not priesthood, and neither 
 these passages of Ignatius, nor those quoted be- 
 fore from St. Paul, contain one word to show that 
 the bishops and elders of the Christian Church 
 were priests as well as rulers. 
 
 It may be worth our while, however, to see 
 what it was which induced Ignatius thus strongly 
 to urge the duty of obedience to the bishop and the 
 a [[St. Ignat. ad Ephes. vi.] 
 
THE CHURCH. 85 
 
 elders ; because, if we understand this rightly, we 
 shall find much excuse, at any rate, for certain strong 
 expressions, which otherwise, taken apart from the 
 context, and as meant merely to convey a high 
 notion of the episcopal dignity, breathe a language 
 very different from that of St. Peter and St. PauL 
 Every great reform which has taken place in human 
 society has contained, among its nominal advo- 
 cates, men who are morally the extreme opposites 
 of each other; some being the very best and 
 noblest of their kind, and others the vilest. And 
 it is these last who explain the otherwise monstrous 
 fact, that among the opponents of every reform, 
 there are to be found also, along with the lowest 
 and most wicked of mankind, some few of the 
 loftiest and the purest; men who look at the 
 evil supporters of the reform, and for their sakes 
 dread it and abhor it. Now even Christianity 
 itself shared this common lot of all great moral 
 changes; perfect as it was in itself, its nominal 
 adherents were often neither wise nor good, but 
 took part with it for its negative side, not for its 
 positive: advocating it, so far as it destroyed 
 what was already in existence, but having no 
 sympathy with that better state of things which it 
 proposed to set up in the room of the old. For 
 when the Church began to show its wide range of 
 action, and its singular efficacy, all who longed to 
 see the existing system overthrown, rallied them- 
 
86 THE CHURCH. 
 
 selves round its assailant. Here, they thought, was 
 a power which they could use for the accomplish- 
 ment of their purpose ; when this should have first 
 cleared the ground of the thickets which en- 
 cumbered it, it would be for them to sow in the 
 vacant soil their own favourite seed. 
 
 Now let any one, who knows what the Roman 
 empire was in the first century of the Christian 
 era, imagine to himself the monstrous forms of 
 opinion and practice which a state of society so 
 diseased could not fail to engender. All varieties 
 of ancient and foreign superstition existed, together 
 with the worst extremity of unprincipled scep- 
 ticism ; while in practice the unquelled barbarism 
 of the ruder provinces, and the selfish cruelty fos- 
 tered by long and bloody civil wars, had provided 
 a fearful mass of the fiercer passions; and the 
 unrestrained dissoluteness of a thoroughly corrupt 
 society was a source no less abundant of every 
 thing most shameless in sensuality. These seem- 
 ingly incongruous evils, superstition and scep- 
 ticism, ferocity and sensual profligacy, when from 
 any particular circumstances they turned against 
 the monster society which had bred them, and be- 
 gan to seek its destruction, often sheltered them- 
 selves under the name of Christianity, and were 
 the heresies of the first age of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 That this was so would be, I think, sufficiently 
 
THE CHURCH. 87 
 
 proved by that well-known passage of Tacitus in 
 Which he describes the Christians as " per flagitia 
 invisos," and their system as one amongst things 
 " atrocia et pudenda." * We know full well that 
 Tacitus would not have applied such language to 
 true Christians, and to true Christianity. We 
 know that no wise and good heathen ever did ap- 
 ply such terms to either. But Tacitus's testimony, 
 and the very fact itself that the Christian name 
 was generally odious, as connected with all manner 
 of wickedness, are quite sufficient to prove that 
 there were nominal Christians, whose rites and 
 whose practices were at once licentious and dan- 
 gerous to public order ; who formed a secret so- 
 ciety, fraught with mischief to the morals of indi- 
 viduals, no less than to the tranquillity of the state. 
 We are not left, however, to the mere testi- 
 mony of Tacitus ; the highest Christian authorities 
 confirm the same thing. These combined features, 
 sensual profligacy and lawless turbulence, appear 
 exactly in the portraits of the heretical Christians 
 drawn by St. Jude, and by St. Peter in his second 
 epistle. Nor does the disputed genuineness of 
 these two writings affect the question, for whether 
 written by Apostles or no, it has never been doubted 
 that they are the works of Christians in the first 
 century ; and that is sufficient for our purpose. 
 The account given by Eusebius of the gross licen- 
 
 a ; [Tac. Ann. xv. 44.] 
 
88 THE CHURCH. 
 
 tiousness of the Nicolaitans, agreeing with the 
 strong language used concerning them in the Re- 
 velation, is another evidence to the same effect. 
 I think also that the same thing is implied in the 
 first epistle of St. Peter. Twice in that epistle he 
 admits that the heathens spoke against Christians 
 as evil doers ; and he by no means denies alto- 
 gether the truth of the charge, but rather urges 
 those to whom he Was writing to show that in 
 their case it was false. His question, " Who is he 
 that will harm you, if ye become (<yevr)crde) followers 
 of that which is good?" and his saying, " Let none 
 of you suffer as a murderer, or thief, or evil doer," a 
 appear to show that a portion at least of the suf- 
 ferings of persons calling themselves Christians, 
 had been really the just consequence of their 
 crimes : and it is remarkable that here, too, the 
 command " to abstain from fleshly lusts," is fol- 
 lowed immediately by the command " to obey the 
 laws and government ;" b as if the Apostle was re- 
 garding the very same characters who are described 
 in his second epistle,; — men at once licentious and 
 anarchical. 
 
 In St. Paul's epistles, we find no less frequent 
 indication that there existed many within the 
 Church, whose principles and lives were altogether 
 unchristian. The well-known passage in 2 Timothy 
 iii. 1 — 8, refers, indeed, rather to a time imme- 
 
 » [1 St. Peter, iii. 13; iv. 15.] •> [Ibid. ii. 11. 13.] 
 
THE CHURCH. 89 
 
 diately following than to one past or present ; still 
 it was verified before the close of the first century. 
 But the union of superstition and profligacy is de- 
 scribed as a thing actually existing in the Church 
 in the epistle to the Philippians, iii. 18, 19, and 
 again in the epistle to the Galatians, vi. 12, 13 ; 
 and it appears above all in the Judaizers, so often 
 referred to in the epistles to the Corinthians. It 
 is evident, too, from the peculiar language twice 
 used in declaring the sinfulness of licentious plea- 
 sure, " Be not deceived," — " He therefore that 
 despiseth, despiseth not man but God," a that 
 there were some who would not listen to the 
 Apostle in this matter, and who tried to persuade 
 their fellow Christians that he was imposing on 
 them a yoke needlessly rigid. Finally, the cor- 
 rupters of true Christianity, whom Titus was sent 
 to Crete to check, were vain talkers and de- 
 ceivers, giving heed to Jewish fables and human 
 traditions, and at the same time denying God in 
 their lives, and being "abominable," (fiSeXvKTot,) 
 " and to every good work reprobate," (dSo/upoi,) — 
 " of no account and worthless." b 
 
 These passages might be greatly multiplied, but 
 what has already been quoted is sufficient for our 
 purpose. A great point is gained, when we under- 
 stand that the heresies condemned by the Apostles 
 
 « 1 Corinthians, vi. 9 ; 1 Thessalonians, iv. 8. 
 b [Titus, i. 10— 16.] 
 
90 THE CHURCH. 
 
 were not mere erroneous opinions on some theo- 
 retical truth, but absolute perversions of Christian 
 holiness; that they were not so much false as 
 wicked. And further, where there was a false 
 opinion in the heresy, it was of so monstrous a 
 character, and so directly connected with profli- 
 gacy of life, that it admits of no comparison with 
 the so-called heresies of later ages. What should 
 we think of men professing themselves to be 
 Christians, and yet maintaining, as did the Do- 
 cetse, that Christ never really died or really rose, 
 or asserting that the resurrection was past al- 
 ready ; that is, that in the sense of a rising from 
 tihe grave to eternal life there was no resurrec- 
 tion at all? 
 
 These opinions and principles, and this practice; 
 existed in the early Church, in open defiance of 
 the authority of the Apostles. In the Arian con- 
 troversy, and in all others which have since arisen 
 among Christians, the question has turned upon 
 the true interpretation of the Apostle's words ; but 
 both parties have alike acknowledged that what 
 the Apostles taught was to be received as the un- 
 doubted rule of faith and of action. Not so, how- 
 ever, the real heretics of the first century. St. Paul 
 is continually arguing against adversaries, with 
 whom his bare authority, it is evident, would have 
 weighed nothing. How strong is his expression to 
 Timothy, " All they that are in Asia are turned 
 
THE CHURCH. 91 
 
 away from me :" a they have followed another view 
 of Christianity as better than mine. And again, 
 in matters of government, we see that Diotrephes, 
 a man «vidently of no mean rank in the Church, 
 openly set at nought the authority of St. John b . 
 Thus it appears that we were in danger, humanly 
 speaking, of having a Christian Church, a society 
 of men baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, 
 who yet did not acknowledge the authority of 
 Christ's Apostles, and who believed and practised 
 things most opposite to the principles and revela- 
 tions of true Christianity. 
 
 It was therefore no vain superstition, and no wish 
 to establish a priestly dominion, which led Ignatius 
 to insist strongly on agreement with and obedience 
 to the bishop, or which had induced Clement to 
 press the importance of not displacing those elders 
 who had been appointed directly or at one remove 
 by the Apostles themselves. And the view here 
 taken will also account for the otherwise irrelevant 
 language which accompanies such exhortations to 
 obedience. It explains why Polycarp should speak 
 of being subject to the elders and deacons in close 
 connexion with his charge to abstain from fleshly 
 lusts. Ka\oi> yap to avaicvirrecrdat airo r&v etri- 
 dvfii&v ev tw KocrfiM, brt iraaa emOv/jua Kara rov 
 Trvevfiaros (TTpareverai .... Ato heov anrexetrffiii 
 diro irdvrwv rovrav, v7TOTa<r&o/jb€Vovs rots irpeafivTe- 
 » [2 Tim. i. 15.] b [3 John, 9.] 
 
92 THE CHURCH. 
 
 pois zeal SiaKovois, a>s ©60S Kai ~X.pi<rra> *. Compare 
 our Lord's words with regard to the Scribes and 
 Pharisees : — " The Scribes and Pharisees sit in 
 Moses' seat : all therefore whatsoever they bid you 
 observe, that observe and do." b That is, " they 
 are teachers of a true revelation from God, and 
 whatever they bid you observe in their teaching, 
 that do, without regard to the bad characters of 
 those who so teach you." That our Lord directed 
 obedience to them only so far as they taught the 
 commandments of Moses, is clear from this, that 
 he did not obey them himself in those usages which 
 they had engrafted on the law of Moses by their 
 own sole authority. And so Polycarp's command 
 to the young Christians to be subject to their 
 elders and deacons, and to abstain from fleshly 
 lusts, has a direct reference to them as teachers of 
 genuine Christianity, which condemned such in-! 
 dulgences, in opposition to many heretical teachers, 
 and to the general opinion of the heathen world, 
 which regarded them with indifference. 
 
 The same reason for enforcing obedience to the 
 bishop appears in the epistle of Ignatius to the 
 Ephesians. The bishop of that church, at the 
 time when this epistle was written, was Onesimus, 
 of whom, personally, Ignatius speaks in very high 
 terms. He commends also Burrhus, a deacon of 
 
 a £St. Polycarp, ad Philipp. v.] 
 b [St, Matthew, xxiii. 2, 3.] 
 
THE CHURCH. 93 
 
 the same church, together with Crocus, Euplus, 
 and Fronto, all of them probably holding some 
 station in the government of it. Now, if Ignatius 
 remembered how Paul himself had complained 
 that all they who were in Asia (i. e., the Roman 
 province so called, of which Ephesus was one of 
 the principal cities) were turned away from him, 
 and how especially he had commissioned Timo- 
 theus to purify the government of the Ephesian 
 church, in order to stop the spreading of false and 
 mischievous principles; what wonder is it that, 
 seeing now such a bishop and such a government 
 as he thoroughly approved of, he should urge the 
 church to the closest union with them, and the 
 strictest obedience to their instructions, as the 
 readiest way of abiding and advancing in the true 
 path of Christian holiness ? 
 
 Thus, when he speaks of Onesimus as praising 
 the orderliness of the Ephesians,— that they lived 
 according to truth, and that no sect following false- 
 hood dwelt among them, — he adds*, "For some are 
 wont to carry about their name" (scil., their name 
 of Christians) " falsely and deceitfully, doing deeds 
 unworthy of God: these ye should shun as wild 
 beasts ; for they are mad dogs, biting before men 
 are aware : and ye should beware of these, for 
 their madness is hard to cure." b And again, " Even 
 your deeds of a fleshly sort are all spiritual, for ye 
 
 a [St. Ignat. ad Ephes. vi. b [Ibid, vii.] 
 
94 THE CHURCH. 
 
 do all things in Jesus Christ ; but I know that 
 some have gone aside from that right way, and 
 have an evil doctrine." 3 
 
 This also explains the earnest desire manifested 
 by Ignatius, that the Church should go on in unity. 
 Parties existed bearing the name of Christians, 
 but only serving by their monstrous principles and 
 evil lives to bring that name into dishonour. How 
 closely, then, ought all real Christians to hold toge- 
 ther, lest their whole society should fall to pieces. 
 But to the Church, or society of Christians, God's 
 promises were given; Christianity was not meant to 
 be held by a multitude of isolated individuals, but 
 where the lawful government and the majority of 
 a society are, there is the society itself. Hence 
 the strong expression of Ignatius : " Let no man 
 be misled: if a man be not within the altar, he 
 fails of obtaining the bread of God. For if the 
 prayer of one or two be of such force, how much 
 more that of the bishop and of the whole church? 
 He, then, who joins not with the rest of the church, 
 
 he, we may be sure, is proud ; for it is 
 
 written, ' God resisteth the proud.' Let us be 
 careful then not to resist our bishop, that we may 
 be subject to God." b We should particularly ob- 
 serve the stress here laid on the prayers of a great 
 number, which is just like the language of St. 
 
 a [St. Ignat. ad Bphes. viii. ix. 
 * [Ibid, v.] 
 
THE CHURCH. 95 
 
 Paul"; but it it is quite inconsistent with a 
 system of priestcraft, where the numbers of the 
 people signify nothing, but the virtue is supposed 
 to reside in the prayers of the priest. And 
 although the language here used by Ignatius was 
 very liable to abuse, and although Cyprian, and 
 still more the Church writers of later times, have 
 abused it most palpably, yet still, as used by 
 Ignatius himself, it really contains nothing ob- 
 jectionable, if we only take the pains to understand 
 the circumstances of the case. He saw the Church 
 falling to pieces by the formation of various parties 
 whose ^principles and practice were alike unchris- 
 tian. The bishops appointed either immediately 
 or at one remove by the Apostles, were upholding 
 the authority of the Apostles' doctrine, and endea- 
 vouring to enforce it. Around them, therefore, 
 was the true Church gathered. Here was a genuine 
 apostolical succession; and to this Church, go- 
 verned by these bishops, Ignatius earnestly exhorts 
 all Christians to adhere, as separation from it was 
 either abandoning Christianity altogether, and sub- 
 stituting in the place of it some monstrous system 
 of error and wickedness ; or else it was the indul- 
 gence of individual pride or unsocial temper, in 
 separating from the Christian society, and forming 
 a religion for themselves individually. And if the 
 bishops now had been virkially selected by the 
 a 2 Cor. i. 11; iv. 15. 
 
96 THE CHUECH. 
 
 Apostles, as men on whom they could depend ; or 
 if they were the only teachers who taught true 
 Christianity now, while other ministers, instead of 
 preaching the gospel, taught Manicheism or Mo- 
 hammedanism ; or, again, if the bishops and their 
 churches formed such a living Christian society, 
 that separation from them could only be the pride 
 or fantastic spirit of a few individuals ; then the 
 sentiments of Ignatius, although expressed, accord- 
 ing to the temper of the man, with too little quali- 
 fication, would yet in the main be just and appli- 
 cable now. 
 
 Sect. 2. Epistle to the Smyrnseans. — In this 
 epistle, Ignatius is earnestly writing against those 
 who have been called " Docetse ;" those who con- 
 tended that our Lord did not really die and rise 
 again, but only seemingly. (Soiceiv avrov ireirovOevcu.) 
 These persons also, he says, were unchristian in 
 their spirit and life : " They have no care for charity, 
 nor for widow nor for orphan, nor for the dis- 
 tressed, nor for the prisoner, nor for the hungry or 
 the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist, and 
 from public prayer, because they do not allow that 
 the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus 
 Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins, which 
 in his goodness the Father raised up." a 
 
 Now, it is manifest that if this passage bears at 
 all upon the priestly notions of the communion, it 
 a [St. Ignat. ad Smyrn. vi.J 
 
THE CHURCH. 97 
 
 goes the whole length either of transubstantiation, 
 or at least of consubstantiation. If Ignatius meant 
 to condemn the Docetse for not thinking highly 
 enough of the elements, as they are called, used in the 
 communion; then undoubtedly his words were very 
 incautiously used, if he did not intend his readers 
 to believe that the bread and wine were actually 
 the body and blood of Christ. In this case, his 
 authority may be of use to the members of the 
 Church of Rome, in their disputes with those of the 
 Church of England, but cannot be pleaded con- 
 sistently by us, so long as we profess to abide by 
 our present Articles and Liturgy- But in truth 
 Ignatius objects to the practice of the Docetse on 
 a very different ground. He complains of their 
 rejection of the symbol as showing that they re- 
 jected, that reality which it signified. The Com- 
 munion was intended to keep in memory the death 
 of our Lord, and through our memory to strengthen 
 our faith, and so to make us actually and person- 
 ally partakers in the benefits of his death. But 
 the 'Docetse said that he had not really died, and 
 had made therefore no real sacrifice for us. Faith 
 in what had no real existence must be vain ; and 
 the memory of an unreal event must be vain also. 
 Therefore they rejected the Communion, and in so 
 doing they showed that their notions were not the 
 notions of Christ and his Apostles, and his Church, 
 For the 'Communion had been instituted by Christ 
 
 H 
 
98 THE CHURCH. 
 
 to keep alive for ever the remembrance of Ms 
 death ; and this showed that his death was a real- 
 ity. Now, as the rejection of the Communion 
 followed consistently from their principles, and 
 indeed was required by them ; and as they rejected 
 it for the very reason for which Christ had notoriously 
 nstituted it, their rejection of it was an evidence 
 that their principles were not the principles of 
 Christianity. This is the drift of Ignatius's argu- 
 ment, and so understood, it is of validity: otherwise, 
 taken as a mere argument upon the nature and 
 inherent virtue of the Eucharistic symbols, it has 
 nothing to do with the opinions of the Docetse ; 
 for it is most certain that thousands of Christians 
 have held the most various notions as to this point, 
 and yet have steadily agreed in celebrating the 
 Communion, and have believed most firmly jn the 
 reality and saving effects of that death of Christ 
 which it was appointed to commemorate. 
 
 A remarkable passage follows: — " Flee divisions, 
 as the beginning of evils. Follow all of you 
 the bishop, as Jesus Christ foilowetb his Father; 
 and the estate of the elders as the Apostles ; and 
 reverence the deacons as God's ordinance. Let no 
 man do any thing of matters pertaining to the 
 church apart from (or separate from) his bishop. 
 Let that be counted a valid Eucharist, (fiepaia,,) 
 which is celebrated under the bishop, or under one 
 who shall have received his permission to celebrata 
 
thk church. 99 
 
 it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let 
 the people be; in like manner as wheresoever 
 Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It 
 is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize, 
 or to celebrate the feast of love ; but whatsoever 
 the bishop shall have approved, this is well pleasing 
 to God, that whatever is done may be sure and 
 valid." a — a<r$a\es icai fie'fiuiov. And then he goes 
 on : — " It is good to acknowledge God and the 
 bishop. He who honours the bishop is honoured 
 by God ; he who does any thing without the know- 
 ledge of the bishop, serves the Devil." b 
 
 The first sensation which we ought to have on 
 reading such a passage as this, is one of gratitude 
 to God, who has not permitted any such language 
 to appear in the writings of the Apostles. In fact, 
 the striking difference between the Scriptures and 
 the early Christian writers, is more observable in 
 what the Scriptures do not contain, than in what 
 they do ; for their divine truths are for the most 
 part faithfully copied by the writers who so care- 
 fully studied them ; but in their freedom from all \ j 
 foolishness and error, they stand altogether alone, j 
 Doubtless God's Spirit would not have permitted 
 any Scriptural writer to cast such a snare upon 
 men's consciences as must have been cast by this 
 passage of Ignatius, if it came to us with divine 
 authority. Judged as a mere human writing, there 
 
 J QAd Smyfn. viii.] b [[Ibid, ix.] 
 
 H 2 
 
100 THE CHURCH. 
 
 is enough of truth in it, and enough of justification 
 in the circumstances under which it was written, 
 to prevent us from passing a harsh sentence on its 
 author ; but blessed be God a thousand times, that 
 no language so exaggerated, and so much more 
 vehement than wise, is to be found in that Word 
 which was designed to be our souls' guide. 
 
 I believe fully that Ignatius's horror of divisions 
 in the Christian Church originated in the odious 
 character which those divisions then wore ; inas- 
 much as the separating sects actually separated 
 themselves from the principles of Christianity. I 
 believe, also, that he exalted the authority of the 
 bishops, because he believed that they had been 
 wisely chosen, and that their influence was alone 
 capable of preserving the Church from the evils 
 which surrounded it. It is true, farther, that he 
 was laying down no general and perpetual prin- 
 ciple, but speaking to the Christians of Smyrna of 
 his own time, with reference to their own parti- 
 cular bishop. But still the language is unguarded 
 and exaggerated ; it forgets that the bishop, like 
 his people, was fallible ; that man is not a suffi- 
 cient stay for other men to rest upon; that if 
 anarchy and faction be evils on the one hand, idol- 
 atry of human authority is no less an evil on the 
 other. Compare the tone of this passage with the 
 spirit in which St. Peter expresses himself on the 
 same subject : — " The elders who are among you I 
 
THE CHUKCH. 101 
 
 exhort, ...... to feed the flock of God, 
 
 taking the oversight thereof not by constraint, but 
 ■willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; 
 neither as being lords over God's heritagej but be- 
 ing ensamples to the flock. Likewise, ye 
 
 younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, 
 all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed 
 with humility ; for God resisteth the proud, and 
 giveth grace to the humble." a No defence of a 
 priestly dominion could be extracted from this pas- 
 sage; so perfectly has God's Spirit fenced it round 
 on eveiy side, and tempered one view by its oppo- 
 site. But the words of Ignatius, taken as they 
 stand, have a tendency to establish in the Christian 
 Church tyranny in the rulers, and idolatry in the 
 people ; although I quite believe that if Ignatius 
 had been questioned as to his meaning, he would 
 earnestly have disclaimed the consequences of his 
 language, and would have expressed himself more 
 guardedly. 
 
 As to the general position, " that a fraction of 
 any society cannot perform such acts as belpng to 
 the society itself,"- it is indisputably true. No 
 individual, or small party of individuals, could be 
 authorized to do any worldly act in the name of 
 their society, unless they were commissioned by 
 its acknowledged, governors. A private man could 
 not sell the church's property, nor give it away in 
 
 » [1 St. Peter, v. 1—5.] 
 
102 THE CHURCH. 
 
 alms ; and so baptism, which is the admission of a 
 new member into the church, requires to be per- 
 formed by the church itself or with its sanction. 
 And if it be essential to the Communion that it 
 should be shared by all the members of the 
 church, then it too becomes a public act, and 
 requires of course the sanction of public authority. 
 All this is true if we regard the church as a mere 
 human society, and it leads to no tyranny, because 
 it wholly leaves untouched the great question, 
 " What is to be done when the public authorities 
 do not speak the sense of their society, .but act 
 wholly in opposition to it ?" and merely goes upon 
 the general and ordinary rule, " that the public 
 authorities do represent their society, and are 
 therefore justly considered to possess the exclusive 
 power of acting in its name." 
 
 Yet, when we consider the tendencies of power 
 to encroach more and more upon the rights of 
 others, and the immense mischief of draining off 
 as it were the whole vital activity of society into 
 that small portion of it which exercises the supreme 
 government, there is always a danger in making 
 the individual ruler or rulers so completely the 
 representatives of the body, as to sink the body 
 itself into complete insignificance. What the 
 fiction of- the Lex Regia had njade the emperors 
 of Rome, that the words of Ignatius would make 
 the bishops of the Christian Church ; and when 
 
THE CHUKCH. 103 
 
 we hear him say, " wherever the bishop shall 
 appear, there let the people be," we are reminded 
 of a later declaration of the most imperious des- 
 potism, " L'etat, c'est moi." But most especially 
 ■dangerous is such language in a religious society ; 
 for there despotism is apt soon to become priest- 
 craft, and priestcraft is at once idolatry. And, 
 therefore, our Lord and his Apostles, although 
 they certainly did not wish to encourage turbu- 
 lence and disobedience to lawful authority amongst 
 Christians, yet have shown themselves no less 
 careful ^n shutting the door against an excessive 
 reverence for any human teacher or governor. 
 And nothing can be more opposite than the im- 
 pression likely to be produced by the words of 
 Ignatius, " Follow all of you the bishop, as Jesus 
 Christ folio weth his Father: wherever the bishop 
 shall appear, there let the people be ; as, where- 
 soever Christ is, there is the Catholic Church," 
 and especially that most rash expression, " He 
 who does any thing without the knowledge of the 
 bishop serves the Devil ;" and by the words of 
 Christ on the other side, — " Call no man your 
 father upon earth ; for one is your Father, who is 
 jn heaven:" and, " Be not ye called rabbi, for 
 x>ae is your master, even Christ, and all ye are 
 brethren." a 
 
 Still, unguarded as is the language of Ignatius, 
 a [[St. Matthew, xxiii. 8, 9.] 
 
104 THE CHURCH. 
 
 and though it had a direct tendency to bring in 
 priestcraft, and has been quoted repeatedly in 
 support of the notion of a priesthood ; yet it is 
 only just to confess, that Ignatius himself appears 
 to have had no such meaning. His words ex- 
 aggerate unwisely the power and importance of 
 Christian governors ; they make them too uni- 
 versally and without exception the representatives 
 of the church ; but they acknowledge in them 
 no priestly character. It is to avoid divisions that 
 Ignatius will have no separate worship and no 
 separate sacraments; he invests the bishop with 
 the full character of the church, and so regards 
 him as the appointed channel of God's gifts to 
 the individual members of it ; but it is to the body 
 of the whole church, and not. to an order of priests 
 distinct from it, that he believes Christ's promises 
 to have been given, and his authority conveyed. 
 And although the two Systems but too often lead 
 practically to the same results, yet, in principle, 
 they are widely different. A priesthood supposed 
 to be of divine appointment is a hopeless evil ; 
 it requires nothing less than a new revelation to 
 remove it. But the degree to which the governors 
 of a society may be supposed to represent it, 
 naturally varies according to times and circum- 
 stances. There are seasons of peril when a 
 dictatorship affords the only means of safety ; that 
 lis, when the rulers must wield the whole authority 
 
THE CHURCH. 105 
 
 of society, and the rights and powers of the 
 society must be merged in their persons altogether. 
 But, in quieter times, society deputes far less of 
 its authority, and it is most desirable that it 
 should retain in itself no small portion of life and 
 activity, lest it sink into utter helplessness. It 
 may be that, in the days of Ignatius, the Church 
 did wisely in committing to its rulers an almost 
 absolute, authority ; it is most certain that it would 
 act most unwisely if it were to do the same thing 
 now. 
 
 Sect. 3. Epistle to the Magnesians, — In this 
 epistle there occurs again much of the same sort 
 of strong language which has been already no- 
 ticed, as to the necessity of being closely united 
 to the bishop and to the elders. But there is 
 nothing connected with our present subject which 
 seems to call for any separate notice. 
 
 Sect. 4. Epistle to the. Trallians.— In this 
 epistle we find the following passage, which I 
 copy from the text of Mr. Jacobson's edition. 
 
 Aet Be /cat tovs Bmkovovs, ovras /Jt,v<rTr)picov 'Irjtrov 
 XptcrToQ Kara iravra rpoirov iraaiv apecieeiv' ov yap 
 ftpa/jLarcav km ttot&v eicnv Sia/covoi, a7\X eKKkrjaias 
 ©eoO vTrypercu \ " Illos enim," so Vossius inter- 
 prets, " non esse ministros esculentorum et pocu- 
 lentoriim, sed ministros mysteriorum Dei, sive sa'- 
 cramentorum." " The /iva-r^pia 'I^o-ou Xpio-rov are 
 " [Ad Trail, ii.] 
 
106 TH» CHURCH. 
 
 the sacraments." This is with s6me a favourite 
 doctrine, and we have seen already that they have 
 not scrupled to ascribe it even to St. Paul, when 
 he calls himself a steward of the mysteries of 
 God. But here is the gradual growth of the 
 corruption of Christianity. In St. Paul's language, 
 " the mysteries of God " mean something quite 
 different from the sacraments; in Ignatius, the 
 expression probably includes the sacraments, but 
 not as the principal part of the idea; in later 
 writers, it would mean the sacraments principally, 
 if not exclusively. 
 
 It may be observed, however, that the actual 
 reading in Ignatius is not \LvaTi\piwv but fivo-rqpiov : 
 the text runs thus in the single MS. now known 
 to be in existence, tovs Siaicdvovs, bvras /ivar^piov 
 'Inja-ov Xpio-Tov. But the old Latin translation, 
 and the longer version of the epistles of Ignatius, 
 agree in reading iivar^pioav, and it is also plain, 
 from the corrupt state of the text in many places, 
 that our single MS. is a very bad one. Arndt, of 
 Ratzeburg, however, in an able paper on the 
 genuineness of the epistles of Ignatius, in the 1st 
 Number of the twelfth volume of the Theologische 
 Studien und Kritiken, defends the reading /bvotjj- 
 piov, and interprets it in the sense of " likeness," 
 " copy," — referriug to Polycarp's epistle to the 
 Philippians, chap, v., where Christ is said to have 
 been Biclkovos iravTwv. There seems therefore, on 
 
THE CHUKCH. 107 
 
 the whole, no reason to interfere with the actual 
 reading of the MS. At any rate, if we adopt the 
 reading fiwrriplmv, the passage is not to be read 
 as Mr. Jacobson has edited it, with a comma after 
 Biaxovovs, but, tovs Sia/covovs ovras fivarrjpimv, 
 k. t. \. " It befits those who are ministers of 
 Christ's mysteries," &c. It now remains to be 
 seen what Ignatius meant by Zulkovovs fivarripitov 
 Vqaov Xpierrov. 
 
 Now it may be true that Ignatius amongst the 
 other ji,v<rn\pi,a of Christ would have included the 
 sacraments : but the question is, whether the term 
 express the sacraments either exclusively or prin- 
 cipally. It cannot be too often repeated, that 
 the whole question with which I am concerned 
 regards the prominence of the sacraments in the 
 scheme of Christianity, and by no means their 
 existence in that scheme, which I am as ready to 
 allow as any of those who esteem of them most 
 highly. But did Ignatius regard the ministration 
 of the sacraments as the principal part of the 
 deacon's office, or did he include it merely as one 
 out of many parts, and that not a prominent one ? 
 So that when he spoke of /ivar^pia Xpiarov, he 
 was thinking principally of other things than the 
 sacraments, although, if he had been asked whether 
 he meant the term to include the sacraments 
 also, he might probably have answered in the 
 affirmative ? 
 
108 THE CHUECH. 
 
 a. The word nvarripiov occurs several times in 
 the New Testament, but in no one place is there 
 the least pretence for supposing that it so much 
 as includes the sacraments, far less that it speaks 
 of them principally. I have already noticed the 
 palpable misinterpretation of St. Paul's words', 
 where some have fancied that St. Paul meant to 
 call himself a " dispenser of the sacraments." 
 But with this exception, I do not know that any 
 one has ventured, even wrongly, to ascribe this 
 sense to the word. The confusion as to the mean- 
 ing of the Latin word " sacramentum," which is 
 the old translation of nvarripiov, in Ephesians v. 32, 
 needs scarcely to be noticed ; because neither does 
 " sacramentum" in the language of the old Latin 
 Christians mean what has been since technically 
 called a " sacrament," nor is it applied to any rite 
 or institution in which men can partake on earth, 
 but to the wonderful incarnation of our Lord, in 
 that he left his Father to join himself to- our na- 
 ture, and so to become one with us. 
 
 /S. Ignatius himself twice uses the word /jtvo-rripiov 
 in the scriptural sense ; that is, " a truth or doc- 
 trine not discoverable by man but revealed to him 
 by God." Thus the three truths, that Christ should 
 have been born as a man, and born of a virgin, and 
 that he should have died for us, are called by Ig- 
 natius " three mysteries," Ephes. 19 ; and Christ's 
 a 1 Corinth, iv. 1. 
 
THE CHURCH. 100 
 
 life and death are again called " a mystery," Mag-i 
 nesians, 9 ; and he adds, " through this mystery 
 we received our faith, and for the sake of this we 
 wait patiently, that we may be found Christ's dis- 
 ciples." The probability is, therefore, that if Ig- 
 natius called the deacons " ministers of Christ's 
 mysteries," he meant to call them " ministers of 
 the great truths of Christianity," and not merely 
 " ministers to distribute meat and drink to the 
 poor in alms." 
 
 y. Even in Cyprian's time the word " sacramen- 
 tum," which was from the earliest period of the 
 Church the corresponding Latin term to the Greek 
 /ivffrrjpiov, is applied generally to the solemn and 
 deep things of Christianity, without any especial 
 reference to what are now called " sacraments." 
 In Cyprian's 63rd letter, which contains a long ar- 
 gument on the necessity of using both water and 
 wine in the cup at -the Communion, the term 
 "sacramentum" is r applied, as we might expect, 
 several times to various points in the institution of 
 the Lord's Supper. So again,. in the 72nd letter, 
 we find it applied both to baptism and to the lay- 
 ing on of hands, or confirmation. But, in like 
 manner, Cyprian speaks also of the many " sacra- 
 menta," " deep truths of God," which are con- 
 tained in the Lord's Prayer a . So he speaks also 
 of the " sacramentum Trinitatis," in his 73rd let- 
 - De Oratione Dominica, p. 142; ed. Amstelod. 1691. 
 
110 THE CHURCH. 
 
 ter ; of the " sacratnentum vitse seternse," in his 
 Treatise on the Lord's Prayer, p. 151; of the " sa- 
 cramentum unitatis," or mystery of the unity of 
 the Church, and of the " sacramentum divinse tra- 
 ditionis," letter 74th, where it means little more 
 than " the sacredness of the lessons taught us by 
 Christ and his Apostles." Thus it appears that, in 
 the middle of the third century, and in the writings 
 of a man sufficiently inclined to exalt the ordi- 
 nances of the Church, the term sacramentum was 
 not even yet exclusively applied to what have been 
 since called sacraments. 
 
 Sect. 5. Epistle to the Philadelphians. — This 
 epistle, besides various other passages, insisting 
 on the necessity of uniting with the bishop, as in 
 the other epistles, contains also the following : 
 
 %nrovhderare ovv fiia ev^apurrta xprjaffai' fila yap 
 trapi; tov Kvpiov rjfi&v lrjaov 'KpiaTOV Kal ev irori\^ 
 piov eis evaxnv tov alfiajos avrov' ev 0vtria<TTr)piov 
 a>$ els eirttTKOiros, afia rq> irpeo-fivTepMp Kal Biukovois 
 toIs ffvpSovXois fiov, Iva b eav irpatrarfre Kara ©eov 
 ■n-pdaarp-e* '. There is nothing here in what is said 
 of the Communion deserving of remark, except the 
 use of the word Bva-iaorripiov. Did Ignatius mean 
 to call the Communion table an altar, and the 
 bishop who administered the Communion a priest 
 sacrificing at the altar ? 
 
 The answer is, that he did not : but that by the 
 a [Ad Philadelph. ivj 
 
THE CHURCH. Ill 
 
 term Gvaiaarrjptov he meant the Chnreh of Christ, 
 and the sacrifice to be offered on that altar was 
 the sacrifice of prayer and praise, and of the bodies 
 and souls of every Christian ; and by combining 
 together the words "one altar and one bishop," 
 he meant that there should be only one Church 
 and one government of it ; not a multitude of 
 separate bodies of Christians with their separate 
 rulers : for that then the sacrifice of the Christian 
 law would no longer be offered in unity. 
 
 That Bva-iaaT-fipiov in the early Christian writers 
 signifies the Church of God, as St. Paul also calls 
 the Church the vaos, or temple of God, may be 
 shown from various instances. The earliest and 
 best example - of this is to be found in the New 
 Testament itself, in the epistle to the Hebrews. 
 There, in the 13th chapter, v. 10 — 15, we have 
 the following remarkable words : "Exo/iev Ovaiaa- 
 TTjpiov, ej; ov (payelv ovk ej(pwiv etjovaiav ot Ty 
 aicr)vrj XarpevovTes. k. t. X. Where the argument 
 runs thus: our sacrifice, as an atoning sacrifice 
 must have been, was offered without the camp ; 
 that is, away from and out of the pale of the 
 earthly Israel. We follow him without the camp 
 also: our altar is no longer in the temple at 
 Jerusalem, but without its precincts ; it is where 
 Christ was offered ; that is virtually everywhere, 
 where Christ's people are gathered together. There 
 is their altar in the midst of their own company, 
 
112 THE CHURCH. 
 
 and on that altar they offer up their sacrifices, now 
 rendered acceptable through His atoning sacrifice, 
 their spiritual sacrifice of prayer and praise and 
 acts of charity. Of this altar the Jews have no 
 right to eat ; that is, as they would in the like 
 case have no right to eat of the actual sacrifices 
 offered on a literal altar which was quite distinct 
 from their own temple, so they have no right to 
 partake in the spiritual sacrifices of prayer and 
 praise offered on the Christian altar, or in the spi- 
 ritual bread of life, communion with Christ, which 
 is there for ever present. 
 
 Thus also Poly carp, in his epistle to the Philip- 
 plans, bids the widows of the Christian Church to 
 remember that they are God's altar a , and that every 
 offering offered upon that altar must be without 
 blemish \ That is, Christians themselves are God's 
 spiritual altar, and their prayers, praises, and holy 
 actions are the proper sacrifices to be offered 
 upon it. 
 
 Thus also Ignatius himself, in his epistle to the 
 Ephesians, says, "If a man be not within the altar, 
 he fails to obtain the bread of God;" and again, in 
 
 a So in the Apostol. Constitut. II. 26 ad fin., we find the 
 ■same notion, at "xyipM *«* optyuvoi u<; tvitov tov dvaiua'T'/i/iov M\o- 
 yio-vaiaav vfjuv' Ui te 3rap9evoi £*$ rinrov tov ^vfjuocrrioiov TET»^cr6wcraj', 
 
 na.) tov fiujMia^niTos. Is this upon the notion that offerings were 
 given for the widows, &c, and paid to them as on an altar ? 
 b [Ad Philip. iv.J o [Ad Ephes. v.J 
 
THE CHURCH. 113 
 
 the epistle to the Trallians, "He that is within 
 the altar, he is clean." a In the latter passage there 
 follows immediately this explanation : " that is, he 
 who does any thing apart from the bishop, and the 
 company of elders, and the deacon, he is not clean 
 in his conscience." And after the former passage 
 the writer goes on, " For if the prayer of one or 
 two persons has so great force, how much more is 
 the force of the prayer of the bishop and of the 
 whole Church ?" It appears, therefore, from both 
 these passages, that the altar is the Church of 
 Christ, and that the sacrifices offered on it are 
 prayers. And as it is said in the epistle to the 
 Hebrews, that " the Jews have no right to eat of 
 our altar," so Ignatius says, " that he who is with- 
 out the Church cannot obtain the bread of God ;" 
 that is, as the shewbread under the law might be 
 eaten only by the priests, so Christ, who is our 
 Bread of life, is only to be enjoyed by those who 
 are his priests, ministering at his altar, that is, by 
 his people, who on the altar of his Church offer to 
 him their prayers and themselves. 
 
 Sect. 6. Epistle to Polycarp. — In this epistle, I 
 may notice the passage in which Christians pro- 
 posing to marry are recommended to do it with 
 the sanction and approbation of the bishop, in 
 order that their marriage may be according to 
 God, and not according to mere passion. This 
 " £Ad ; Tra]l. vii.] 
 
 I 
 
114 THE CHURCH. 
 
 advice is remarkable, as it shows to what a length 
 Ignatius carried his notions of unity, and what a 
 Spartan discipline as to the merging the individual 
 will in the will of the society, or of its repre- 
 sentative, he would fain have introduced into the 
 Christian Church. Regarding the bishops of the 
 several churches as men eminently fitted to bring 
 their people to the purest state of Christian per- 
 fection, and considering that amongst their people, 
 their subjects I might almost call them, there ex- 
 isted the greatest varieties; of wild opinion and licen- 
 tious practice, he saw no other remedy than to in- 
 vest the rulers of the Church with absolute author- 
 ity. Hence, he not only wished to unite in their 
 persons every power of government, and to sub- 
 ject to their absolute control every thing that 
 might be called a public or social act of the 
 Church as a body; as when he would have no 
 Communion celebrated without the bishop's au- 
 thority; but he would even give them dominion 
 over acts most strictly belonging to the individual 
 Christian ; even for marriage he would require 
 their sanction, as being the fathers of the Christ- 
 ian family : they were to judge whether the pro^ 
 posed union was entered upon in a Christian spirit, 
 or whether it was desired from mere youthful pas- 
 sion. Now this subjection of the individual to 
 the society, even in the most private relations of 
 domestic life, was very agreeable to the spirit of 
 
THE CHURCH. 115 
 
 many of the ideal commonwealths of the Greek 
 philosophy ; and, in the famous constitution of 
 Sparta, it had been actually established in practice. 
 Much was to be said in its behalf, by those espe- 
 cially who were most aware of the evils of the op- 
 posite extreme, of leaving the individual will 
 wholly uncontrolled, except if it should attempt 
 to offer a direct injury to another. Nor can we 
 doubt that Ignatius recommended pure despotism 
 as sincerely and as conscientiously as ever men of 
 different views and under different circumstances 
 have protested against it. But instead of seeing 
 in the letters of Ignatius a strong display of views 
 which have been often entertained by wise and 
 good men, and which in this particular case were 
 more than ordinarily justified by the peculiar cir- 
 cumstances of the Church, men have sought to 
 find in him a perpetual law of Church government, 
 and have taken his most vehement expressions as 
 an authoritative definition of the powers, which 
 ought to be always exercised by the rulers of the 
 Christian soeiety. Nor is this all ; but as persons 
 who have been capable of so misusing him were not 
 likely to have very clear notions of government 
 and the questions connected with it, so it has hap- 
 pened that confounding different times and usages, 
 and being the slaves of a name, they have trans- 
 ferred what Ignatius says of the necessity of an 
 absolute government in the hands of the bishop, 
 
 i 2 
 
116 THE CHURCH. 
 
 to the later system of the mystical power of the 
 priesthood ; and where he would acknowledge 
 nothing as an act of the church which was not 
 done by the authority of the bishop, they have 
 quoted him as sanctioning their doctrine of the 
 necessity of a priestly consecration of the elements 
 to the sacramental virtue of the Lord's Supper : 
 where he would have the bishop's consent ob- 
 tained for all marriages, that they might be such 
 as a Christian ought to contract, he has been 
 quoted as enforcing the necessity of the priestly 
 benediction to give to the rite of marriage any 
 validity ". 
 
 Here then we close our present inquiry : but one 
 or two points seem naturally to arise from it, and with 
 some notice of these I will conclude this chapter. 
 
 1st. We do not find in these early Christian 
 writers the. doctrine of the priesthood and sa- 
 
 a " Hinc clare patet," says Smith, " nuptias non fuisse 
 habitas justas et legitimas absque sententia episcopi, et bene- 
 dictione sacerdotali, in primis Christianismi seculis." Smith 
 is confounding two ideas perfectly distinct, one of which Ig- 
 natius had, while of the other not the slightest trace is to be 
 found in him. He did wish that the bishop should have the 
 .power of a father over the whole church, that his consent 
 .should be obtained before any Christian could marry. This is 
 a power of government, and this he undoubtedly wished to 
 give to the bishop of every church. But to require a priestly 
 blessing in order to hallow the rite of marriage is a very dif- 
 ferent notion, and one of which Ignatius says nothing what- 
 ever. 
 
THE CHURCH. 117 
 
 craments which was afterwards prevalent in the 
 Church; but we find language which will suf- 
 ficiently account for the subsequent introduction 
 of that doctrine ; whereas the Scriptures not only 
 do not contain it, but absolutely repel it: be- 
 tween them and it there is a great gulf fixed, over 
 which no art of man can cast a bridge. 
 
 2nd. A full consideration of this language in 
 the early uncanonical writers, will lead to three 
 conclusions. "While, in the first place, it marks 
 the wide distinction between them and the Scrip- 
 ture, and should' lead us to thank God that the 
 scriptural writers were so secured by his Spirit, not 
 from error only, but from such unguarded and one- 
 sided language, if I may so speak, as might readily 
 become the occasion of error; we shall, in the 
 second place, be spared the pain of believing that 
 Christianity was grossly corrupted in the very next 
 generation after the Apostles by the men who pro- 
 fessed themselves to be the Apostles' true fol- 
 lowers. We shall rather have reason to believe 
 that their language, taken in their own meaning, 
 and as applied to the circumstances of the Churc,h 
 in their own times, was substantially true. We 
 shall be able to sympathize with Ignatius in his 
 earnest desire to keep the Church in unity with 
 its bishops, and with Clement in his sense of the 
 value of their Apostolical succession ; we shall 
 readily confess that to this unity, and this real 
 
118 THE CHUKCH. 
 
 Apostolical succession of the early bishops, we owe 
 the general acknowledgment of the authority of 
 the Apostles and of their writings ; — we owe it, in 
 fact, that our Christianity at this day is that of St. 
 John, and not of Cerinthus ; of St. Paul, and not 
 of his Judaizing adversaries. And thirdly, com- 
 paring these early Christian writers with the Scrip- 
 tures on the one hand, and with the later Church 
 system on the other, as developed in the forged 
 Apostolical constitutions, we shall be able to trace 
 three stages through which Christianity passed, 
 and which, indeed, exhibit what may be called the 
 law of decay in all institutions, whether adminis- 
 tered by men only, or devised by them as well as 
 administered. The first and perfect state exhibits 
 the spirit of the institution not absolutely without 
 all forms, for that is impossible, but regarding 
 them as things wholly subordinate, indifferent in 
 themselves, and therefore deriving their value from 
 particular times and circumstances; and as such 
 particular times are not yet come, the spirit of the 
 institution is as yet wholly independent of them; 
 it uses their ministry, but in no way depends upon 
 their aid. Then comes the second stage, when 
 from particular circumstances the existence of the 
 spirit of the institution depends on the adherence 
 to particular outward regulations. The men of 
 this generation insist, as well they may, on the 
 necessity Of these forms, for without them the 
 
THE CHURCH. 119 
 
 spirit would be lost. And because others profess 
 to honour the spirit no less than they do, there- 
 fore they are obliged to make the forms rather 
 than the spirit their peculiar rallying word. Around 
 and for these forms is the stress of battle : but their 
 defenders well know that they are but the husk 
 in which the seed of life is sheltered ; that they are 
 but precious for the sake of the seed which they 
 contain, and to the future growth of which they, 
 under the inclemencies of the actual season, are an 
 indispensable condition. 
 
 Then the storm passes away,and theprecious seed, 
 safely sheltered within its husk, has escaped de- 
 struction. The forms have done their appointed 
 work, and, like the best of mortal instruments 
 their end should be, that after having served their 
 own generation by the will of God, they should 
 fall asleep arid see corruption. But in the third 
 stage men cannot understand this law. Their 
 iathers clung to certain forms to the death ; they 
 said — and said truly— -that unless these were pre- 
 served, the spirit would perish'. The sons repeat 
 their lathers* words, although in their mouths 
 they are become a lie. Their fathers insisted on 
 the forms even more earnestly than on the spirit, 
 because in their day the forms were peculiarly 
 threatened. But now the forms are securely esta- 
 blished, and the great enemy who strove to destroy 
 
120 THE CHURCH. 
 
 them whilst they protected the seed of life, is now 
 as ready to uphold them, because they may become 
 the means of stifling it. , But the sons, unheeding 
 of this change, still insist mainly on the importance 
 of the forms, and seeing these triumphant, they 
 rejoice, and think that the victory is won, just at 
 the moment when a new battle is to be fought, 
 and the forms oppress the seed instead of protect- 
 ing it. Still they uphold the form, for that is a 
 visible object of worship, and they teach their 
 children to do the same. Age after age the same 
 language is repeated, whilst age after age its false- 
 hood is becoming more flagrant; and still it is 
 said, " We are treading in the steps of our fathers 
 from the very beginning ; even at the very first 
 these forms were held to be essential." So when 
 the husk cracks, and would fain fall to pieces by 
 the natural swelling of the seed within, a foolish 
 zeal labours to hold it together : they who would 
 deliver the seed, are taxed with longing to destroy 
 it ; they who are smothering it, pretend that they 
 are treading in the good old ways, and that the 
 husk was, is, and ever will be essential. And this 
 happens because men regard the form and not the 
 substance; because they think that to echo the 
 language of their forefathers is to be the faithful 
 imitators of their spirit ; because they are blind 
 to the lessons which all nature teaches them, and 
 
THE CHURCH. 121 
 
 would for ever keep the egg-shell unbroken, and 
 the sheath of the leaf unburst, not seeing that the 
 wisdom of winter is the folly of spring. 
 
 So it has been with the unity of the Church 
 under its bishops, and with their apostolical suc- 
 cession. In the second stage of the Church, these 
 were really essential to the protection of Christian 
 truth : in its third stage, through many generations, 
 they have been a mere empty name, powerless to 
 preserve or to increase the spirit of Christianity, 
 but often only too powerful in stifling and in cor- 
 rupting it. 
 
122 THE CHURCH. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 In the inquiry which has been pursued through 
 the last two chapters, we have seen that the doc- 
 trine of the priesthood is repelled by the Scrip- 
 tures, and not acknowledged by the earliest unca- 
 nonical Christians. The first of these results ought 
 to be abundantly sufficient for our practice : the 
 doctrine which the Scripture not only does not 
 teach, but which it virtually condemns, must be 
 inconsistent with Christianity. The second result, 
 although not needed practically, is yet on two ac- 
 counts interesting. It is satisfactory to find that 
 the Church in the very first century had not grossly 
 corrupted Christian truth. It is also satisfactory to 
 find in the peculiar circumstances and language of 
 these early writers, an explanation, and something of 
 a palliation for the grievous errors of the subsequent 
 age. Had any generation of Christians fallen at once 
 from the perfect spirit of Scriptural truth into the 
 doctrine of the priesthood, it would have seemed 
 hardly less than apostacy from the faith ; but Ig- 
 natius and his contemporaries exhibit the Church 
 in a sort of transition state, which, although not 
 one of error, yet rendered the actual errors of 
 the following period more excusable. We now 
 proceed to see how the errors themselves came in ; 
 
THE CHURCH. 123 
 
 how government was converted into priesthood, 
 and how Judaism, driven from its own ceremonies, 
 and obliged to abandon circumcision and the dis- 
 tinction of clean and unclean meats, took possession 
 of the Christian sacraments, and held with effect 
 under their names the very same mischievous doc- 
 trines which, when connected with the names of 
 Jewish ceremonies, the Church had been so earn- 
 estly warned to avoid. So what took place with 
 regard to the sacraments, was the exact converse 
 of what happened with respect to Apostolical suc- 
 cession ; each instance equally confirming the truths 
 that men are ruled by names and not by things: 
 On the one hand, the benefits of a real Apostolical 
 succession were supposed to be retained, because 
 there was still an Apostolical succession nominally: 
 on the other hand, men thought that they were 
 safe from Judaism* because they put the word 
 baptism in the place of circumcision, and talked 
 of the mystic virtue of the elements in the Com- 
 munion, instead of the purifying nature of clean 
 meats, and the defiling character of such as were 
 unclean. 
 
 Let us now see in what respects the Church, 
 early in the second century, was ready to slide into 
 the doctrine of a priesthood, with all its accompa- 
 nying corruptions of Christian truth. 
 
 The beginning of the second century found the 
 Church under the government of bishops, many of 
 
124 THE CHURCH. 
 
 whom had derived their appointment from the 
 Apostles themselves, at only one or two removes ; 
 that is to say, they had been chosen by men who 
 had themselves been chosen by an Apostle, or by 
 persons such as Timotheus, in whom an Apostle 
 had entertained full confidence. They were en- 
 gaged in an arduous struggle not only against hea- 
 thenism, but against various monstrous forms of 
 error which claimed to themselves the name of 
 Christianity ; and, as happens naturally in such 
 times of danger, they drew to themselves more 
 and more, not through ambition, but by the neces- 
 sity of the case, the whole power of the Christian 
 society. They were the representatives of the 
 Church, and without them the Church had no ex- 
 istence ; those were not the prayers of the church, 
 that was not her Communion, which the bishop 
 did not either preside at or sanction. Here, then, 
 was a government of a religious society, whose 
 sanction was considered necessary to the religious 
 acts of that society, and which grounded its 
 claim to obedience mainly on the fact that 
 it derived its authority all but immediately 
 from the Apostles, and so might be supposed to 
 represent them faithfully. We see here at once 
 two facts, which, with a very little corruption, 
 might become two of the most essential elements 
 of a priesthood ; we see the germ of the neces- 
 sity of a priestly consecration of the elements in 
 
THE CHURCH. 125 
 
 the sacraments, and of the transmission of the 
 priestly character by a sort of elective succession. 
 
 Now, if it had pleased God that the Church at 
 this period should have become a sovereign so- 
 ciety, as it did two centuries later, it might have 
 been more easy to prevent the government of the 
 bishops from being confounded with the .notion of 
 a priesthood. Had they been able, that is, to 
 exercise the full powers of government, to con- 
 trol society in the last resort, and to exercise 
 jurisdiction over life and property, the largeness 
 and outward greatness of their functions would 
 have so satisfied men's minds, that none would 
 have sought for them any higher or nobler office 
 than that which they were manifestly seen to 
 exercise. But government in a subordinate so- 
 ciety, and divested consequently of its sovereign 
 character, is of necessity far less imposing. As a 
 government, it is wholly eclipsed, to the vulgar 
 eye at any rate, by that greater government of 
 general or sovereign society, to which it must be 
 itself subject. Considered as a ruler, the bishop 
 of a Christian church appeared a, far less import- 
 ant person than the Proconsul of a province ; the 
 most numerous synod was as nothing when com- 
 pared with the sovereign of the Empire. Yet 
 there was in the Church a greatness more than 
 the Empire could boast of; there was a sense in 
 which its bishops, were greater than Csesar. For 
 
126 THE CHURCH. 
 
 a time this was even outward and tangible; so 
 long as the Apostles possessed and conferred 
 those extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit, which 
 no wealth of man could purchase, nor power 
 compel. When these were withdrawn, the real 
 greatness still remained, but it was such as common 
 minds can with difficulty appreciated The moral 
 elevation conferred by truth and holiness; the 
 willing obedience of good men ; the task of guid- 
 ing a society "whose members spiritually consi- 
 dered were privileged far above the rest of man- 
 kind, to be as it were the salt of the very salt of 
 the earth itself; these were points of greatness 
 most real and most exalted. But the Ihind of 
 man, disappointed of what is outward and sensible, 
 turns not to what is spiritual, but to what is 
 mystical ; unsatisfied with the real excellence of 
 the office of a Christian bishop, it coveted the 
 mystical and false dominion of a priest. 
 
 According to Christ's ordinance, the rulers of 
 the church were distinguished above their brethren 
 in all that may be called the human relations of 
 the Christian society; they had authority both to 
 teach and to govern. The one only occasion on 
 which this distinction was to cease, was when the 
 church as a body came into direct relation with 
 God and Christ; that is to say, in its public 
 prayers, and in the Holy Communion. Rulers 
 and teachers cease to be distinguished from the 
 
THE CHURCH. 127 
 
 people, exactly in those acts in which the priest's 
 distinction is greatest. Others may teach, and 
 others may govern ; for these are human relations : 
 but in direct relation with God, the priest's me- 
 diation is wanted ; he must pray for the people, 
 and their communion with God can only be carried 
 on through him. But as prayer and the Holy 
 Communion were the church's most solemn acts, 
 as a body, if its rulers here were on a level with 
 other Christians, it seemed to lessen the dignity 
 of their office. It was not enough that the 
 presence or sanction of the bishop was required to 
 render the Christian supper a true Communion of 
 the church ; nor that, in the celebration of it, the 
 bread and wine were, to prevent confusion, dis- 
 tributed by the principal members of the society, 
 either by the bishop himself or by the elders. The 
 priestly mystical power, which seemed so much 
 greater than the mere government of a subordinate 
 or municipal society, was not here to be found. 
 Another step was to be taken, not only that the 
 bishop's authority as head of the church should be 
 required in order to invest any meeting of Christ- 
 ians with the public character of the* church, but 
 that religiously the church itself could not com- 
 municate with Christ without the mediation, not 
 of the bishop alone, but of the bishop or some 
 one of his presbyters, all of whom were to 
 possess equally with him this mediatorial cha- 
 
128 THE CHURCH. 
 
 facter. Nor was it to be a mere matter of order 
 that the bread and wine were distributed by those 
 who presided at the meeting to the several com- 
 municants, after the usual form of thanksgiving 
 before meat, had been uttered ; but from this dis- 
 tribution and this form of thanksgiving they were 
 to derive their sacramental virtue, and having 
 been before mere common bread and wine, they 
 became immediately, through the virtue of the 
 words so uttered, and of the priestly character of 
 him who uttered them, changed into the body and 
 blood of Christ. It could not but follow from 
 this, that the Communion should be represented 
 as an actual, not a spiritual sacrifice, in which 
 there was a visible offering made, and which there- 
 fore required a priest. 
 
 But one of the oldest representations now ex- 
 tant, of the celebration of the Communion in the 
 ancient Church, seems in a remarkable manner to 
 avoid these corruptions. I allude to the famous 
 fragment of Irenaeus, first published by PfafF, 
 from a MS. in the library of Turin, and given in 
 the Benedictine edition of the works of Irenseus, 
 Venice, 1734. In this famous passage, Irenseus 
 contrasts the spiritual sacrifices of Christianity 
 with the carnal sacrifices of the Jewish law. He 
 divides the Christian sacrifices into two kinds; 
 those of prayer and thanksgiving, and those which 
 consist in the offering up of ourselves to God, to 
 
THE CHURCH. J29 
 
 do him service. " Wherefore," says he, " the 
 offering also of the Eucharist is not carnal but 
 spiritual, and thereby it is clean (icaOapd). For 
 we offer to God the bread, and the cup of bless- 
 ing, rendering thanks to him, for that he has 
 bidden the earth to bring forth these fruits for 
 our nourishment. And here, having completed 
 our offering, we call upon the Holy Spirit, that he 
 may render (dirofyvy) this sacrifice to be, both the 
 bread the body of Christ, and the cup the blood of 
 Christ, that they who have partaken of these 
 symbols (dvTirvirmv) may obtain forgiveness of their 
 sins, and life eternal. They, then, who bring these 
 offerings in remembrance of the Lord, do not join 
 themselves to the ordinances of the Jews, but 
 worshipping (Xeirovpyovvres) spiritually, shall be 
 called the children of wisdom." 
 
 Now this most remarkable passage exhibits in 
 a surprising completeness that notion of the Com- 
 munion which has been given in the first chapter 
 of this work. The sacrifices or offerings of Chris- 
 tians must be spiritual, for we must worship God 
 in spirit and in truth ; and the offering of the Eu- 
 charist is therefore a clean and accepted offering, 
 because it is spiritual. How then is the Eucharist 
 a spiritual sacrifice ? Not because of the offering 
 of bread and wine, but because of spiritual acts 
 accompanying or following that offering ; the acts, 
 namely, of thanksgiving and prayer. Of thanks- 
 
 K 
 
130 THE CHURCH. 
 
 giving, when we thank God while offering the 
 bread and wine before Him, that He has given us 
 these things for our bodily sustenance : of prayer, 
 when, after having completed the offering, and 
 partaken of the bread and wine, we pray to God 
 the Holy Spirit, that He will make that temporal 
 food also a spiritual food ; and that as bread and 
 wine support our bodies, so, whilst in eating that 
 bread and drinking that wine we remember 
 Christ's body and Christ's blood, His body and 
 blood may be the redemption and the strengthen- 
 ing of our souls to everlasting life. Thus, the 
 bread that perisheth is changed by the Holy Spirit 
 into the bread of life; having eaten bodily for 
 our bodily good, the Holy Spirit guides us to eat 
 spiritually for our spiritual good. But the soul 
 feeds itself not with the mouth and teeth, but by 
 thoughts and love. To eat spiritually, is to assi- 
 milate an object to our spirits by drawing it to 
 them by thought, and embracing it by love. He, 
 therefore, who eateth Christ shall live by him; 
 because, by believing in Christ and loving him, 
 he takes Christ into his spirit, and his nature be* 
 comes assimilated to that of Christ, and so he 
 lives and must live for ever. Truly, therefore, 
 says Irenseus, that they who offer the bread and 
 wine to God, in remembrance of the Lord Jesus ; 
 that is, who, after having partaken of their bodily 
 food, and therefore, every day, do pray to the Holy 
 
THE CHURCH. 131 
 
 Spirit that their souls may feed upon Christ no 
 less as their spiritual food; they by that prayer 
 convert what else would be a formal and Jewish 
 sacrifice into one that is Christian and spiritual. 
 Their service to God (Aeirovpyia) is a spiritual 
 service, and they who so serve Him have no fel- 
 lowship with the ordinances of the Jews, but shall 
 be called the children of wisdom. 
 
 But observe that here, in this description of the 
 Christian Communion, there is no mention of a 
 priest's words of consecration changing the bread 
 and wine beforehand into the body and blood of 
 Christ ; and so giving occasion to all manner of 
 superstitions and profaneness. The bread and 
 wine are received with thanksgiving, as bread and 
 wine, as fruits of the earth, which God our Creator 
 has commanded the earth to yield for our bodily 
 support. Then, after they have been received, comes, 
 not a form of consecration by an earthly priest, but 
 a prayer to God the Holy Spirit, to Him who 
 communes with us only as spirits, dealing not 
 with our natural life, but with our spiritual ; that 
 He may render to each of us the bodily and out- 
 ward offering a spiritual and inward offering ; 
 that by eating bread and drinking wine, not sim- 
 ply as fruits of the earth, but in remembrance of 
 Christ's death, our spirits may feed upon Christ 
 himself, in all his manifold relations to us, and so 
 be strengthened by him and become like to him 
 
132 THE CHURCH. 
 
 more and more. In other words, we pray to the 
 Holy Spirit to keep alive in us daily our spiritual 
 appetites and powers, that they may desire Christ 
 and receive him into themselves, as naturally — 
 naturally, I mean, according to our renewed na- 
 ture — as the healthy body according to its nature 
 desires and digests its bodily food. 
 
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