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 arV15914 
 
 The papal supremac 
 
 3 1924 031 433 273 
 
 olin.anx 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 AND 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 TESTED BY 
 
 THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 
 
 AND THE 
 
 CANON LAW OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH, 
 
 WITH A 
 
 PLEA FOR CHURCH UNITY. 
 
 THE REV. W.'^D.'t^ILSON, D.D. LL.D. L.H.D., 
 
 EMERITUS PROFESSOR IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY, 
 
 AUTHOR OF THE CHURCH IDENTIFIED, 
 
 DEAN OF ST. ANDREWS, SYRACUSE, 
 
 ETC., ETC., ETC , ETa 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 JAMES POTT & CO., PUBLISHERS, 
 
 14 AND 16 AsTOR Place. 
 
 I88g. 
 
COPY WRIGHT iSSij, 
 BY W. D. WILSON. 
 
PEEFICE. 
 
 The peculiarity of this essay, in which it differs 
 from most others on the same subject — all others so 
 far as I know — is the fact that it treats the question of 
 the Papal Supremacy purely as a matter of fact 
 and of history. No comparison is made or at- 
 tempted between the doctrines taught, and the 
 rites and usages practiced under that system, and 
 those which prevail elsewhere. 
 
 In any system of religion, church authority must 
 be a most important element, aside from any ques- 
 tion of Divine Authority and spiritual grace of 
 which it may be the channel, since it must and will 
 exercise a powerful influence upon the character and 
 spiritual growth of its members, as we can see every- 
 where around us. 
 
 For this reason it has seemed to me desirable to 
 have some short and handy treatise that discusses 
 
4 PREFACE. 
 
 this question as a mere matter of historic facts, dis- 
 entangled from, and unembarrassed by, association 
 with questions of doctrine and of ritual, which are 
 more or less distinct from it. 
 
 With this brief explanation of the purpose and 
 character of this little work, I commit it to the care- 
 ful consideration of the reader and to the blessing 
 of Almighty God. 
 
 Syracuse, May, I88g. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter I.— THE PAPAL SUPREMACY AND THE 
 
 HOLY SCRIPTURES 9 
 
 The Apostolic Fathers 31 
 
 Chapter II.— THE PAPAL SUPREMACY AND THE 
 
 CANONS OF THE PRIIMTIVE CHURCH, 35 
 
 Chapter III.— THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE 
 
 PAPAL SUPREMACY 62 
 
 Chafier IV.— THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM IN ENG- 
 LAND <)3 
 
 The Reformation loO 
 
 Chapter V.— THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM IN THE- 
 
 UNITED STATES I'g 
 
 Chapter VI.— THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM AS A 
 
 BASIS OF UNION 149 
 
 Chapter VII.— CONCLUSION— A PLEA FOR UNITY 169 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 AND 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY AND THE HOLY 
 SCRIPTURES. 
 
 Every time we repeat the Apostles' creed, we say, 
 " 1 believe in the Holy Catholic Church." Who- 
 ever is duly baptized and received into any church, 
 or branch of the Church of Christ, professes his 
 belief in the teachings of our Lord and his Apos- 
 tles, as contained and set forth in that creed. And 
 even though, as in many cases it happens, the Apos- 
 tles' creed is not used or obviously referred to in the 
 administration of that Sacrament, yet all persons 
 who profess to be Christians at all, or to have any 
 belief in Christianity, believe in some sort of a 
 Church as a part of the divine institutions that have 
 been provided for the redemption and salvation of 
 mankind. 
 
 No one can read the Bible without finding that 
 our Lord said, " I will build my Church . . and 
 
lO THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Nor 
 can he fail to see that our Lord gave his Apostles 
 ample authority, as well as the influence of the Holy- 
 Spirit, for their guidance in arranging the principles 
 and details of its organization and the materials and 
 modes of accomplishing its work. 
 
 The Apostles speak of the Church as His Body, 
 (Col. i. i8 ; Eph. iv. 12), words which were doubt- 
 less designed to denote the closest and most intimate 
 relation between it and Him. We read, (Acts ii. 
 47), that after the Ascension He "added to the 
 Church" — by conversion and baptism — "daily such 
 as should be saved," or, rather, such as were being 
 saved. 
 
 And yet it is the very common impression, in the 
 community where we live, that the Roman church is 
 the Catholic church — "the Holy Catholic Church" — 
 and that all others besides those who are in that 
 communion are merely seceders from it. 
 
 Nor is this the worst of the case. Since 1870, at 
 least, that Church has declared that the Bishop of 
 Rome — the Pope — is in such a sense the Head of 
 the Church as successor of St. Peter, that no one 
 can be regarded as in the Church at all, or have any 
 hope of salvation as a Christian, who does not ac-. 
 knowledge that supremacy and receive as matter of 
 faith all that the Pope may teach and command, 
 whether as dogma or duty, as doctrine or discipline. 
 
 If this view is well-founded, there is no help for it. 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. n 
 
 We must all of us, however much we may like or 
 dislike the doctrines and practices of the Romish 
 Church, accept the supremacy of the Pope and sub- 
 mit to all that he may choose to declare to be a part 
 of the Faith, or necessary as a means of the salva- 
 tion of our souls. 
 
 Doubtless faith is of more importance than knowl- 
 edge. But no such contrast may be made between 
 faith and obedience. We must both believe and 
 obey, whatever and whoever the Lord has ap- 
 pointed, though our responsibility may be deter- 
 mined by the opportunities we may have to know 
 the truth and do what he has commanded. 
 
 We remember that the poor, trembling girl who 
 suffered for many years "and was nothing bettered, 
 but rather grew worse" by all that the Physicians 
 could do for her, was healed by the mere touch of 
 the hem of the Divine Saviour's garment. It is prob- 
 able that she knew nothing, and had no means of 
 knowing anything, more of Him than that He was 
 the Lord and had power to heal. 
 
 We remember, too, that the thief on the cross recog- 
 nized Him as the Saviour and in sincere and earnest 
 repentance uttered the prayer, "Lord, remember me 
 when Thou comest into Thy kingdom," and he was 
 assured that he should be that day with his Lord in 
 Paradise. No word was said about Baptism, or the 
 Lord's Supper, for which he had no opportunity. 
 
 But assuredly we can draw no inference from these 
 
12 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 cases in favor of those who have the opportunity to 
 know and to do — to read the Holy Scriptures, join 
 the Church, participate in its worship and to receive 
 the Holy Sacraments which our Lord has instituted 
 and commanded us to observe. The promise is to 
 those that believe and are baptized, and the Apos- 
 tles were to teach their converts to observe all 
 things that He had commanded, everywhere, always 
 even unto the end of the world. 
 
 Let us, then, turn to the Holy Scriptures and see 
 what they teach on the subject. 
 
 L It seems that on more than one occasion there 
 arose a question, "a strife" among the Apostles as 
 to who should be the greatest in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven." (Matt, xviii., i, Mark ix., 33, Luke ix., 
 46). On these occasions our Lord gave no intimation 
 of any superiority of one over another, except that 
 superiority in spiritual excellence which always comes 
 from genuine humility and excellence in the works 
 of charity. 
 
 The second occasion, as related by St. Luke, is 
 more significant (Luke, xxii., 24). It occurred at a 
 much later period in His ministry. It seems to have 
 been at the very time when He was approaching "the 
 end," and after the time when our Lord made the 
 declaration to St. Peter on which the Romanists lay 
 so much stress — "Thou art the Rock." St. Luke says, 
 "there was a strife among them which of them," — 
 the twelve — "should be the greatest. And He said 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 
 
 13 
 
 unto them, the Kings of the Gentiles exercise lord- 
 ship over them and they that exercise authority upon 
 them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be 
 so." Then, after a few words, He continues : "Ye 
 are they who have continued with me in my temp- 
 tations and I appoint unto you a kingdom as my 
 Father hath appointed unto me, that ye may eat 
 and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on 
 thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." 
 
 Here is no allusion to, but rather, as it would 
 seem, a pretty stringent exclusion of, any superiority 
 of Peter over the rest, or any one of them over an- 
 other, save and excepting always that superiority in 
 personal holiness which God gives to those who the 
 most earnestly strive for it. On any other consider- 
 ation, as it would seem, it is not even His to give, 
 (Matt. XX., 23.) 
 
 The passage quoted from St. Matthew with re- 
 gard to St. Peter, (Matt., xvi. 16,) relates what 
 occurred before both the event spoken of by St. 
 Luke just cited and this other just now quoted from 
 St. Matthew himself. It would seem that our Lord 
 could not have used these words and made these 
 declarations without some reservation in favor of 
 St. Peter, if the Romanist view of the former pass- 
 age be correct. 
 
 II. Let us now proceed to consider the text, (St. 
 Matt., xvi. 18): "And I say unto thee that thou art 
 Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church, and 
 the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." 
 
14 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 I do not propose to discuss this text at length and 
 to show precisely what was the meaning intended to 
 be conveyed in it or by it. I will make only a few 
 remarks on it. 
 
 (i) In the first place, this confession of our Lord's 
 true character and nature, as the Christ, the Son of 
 God, was made by Peter at Caesarea Philippi, the 
 greatest distance to which our Lord ever went from 
 Jerusalem, and he was also the only one to deny 
 Him when questioned about Him at Jerusalem. He 
 was, indeed, the first and foremost to confess Him at 
 this place, far remote as it was from all danger, and 
 the only one that denied Him at the hour and place 
 of greatest peril. 
 
 (2) In the next place, whatever the declaration 
 may have meant, or have been intended to mean, 
 this statement, though given, indeed, by St. Mat- 
 thew, St. Mark, who wrote under St. Peter's special 
 direction, says not a word about his being a rock, or 
 the building of the Church on it, or him, as the case 
 may be. All that he says is : "And Peter answer- 
 eth and saith unto him, thou art the Christ. And he 
 charged them that they should tell no man" of him. 
 
 Now, is it Peter's modesty that guides the Evan- 
 gelist in this omission ? If so, surely the Papists are 
 quite unlike St. Peter in this respect. Or, was the 
 omission because neither St. Peter nor St. Mark at- 
 tached to the declaration the importance and mean- 
 
AND THE HOL Y SCRIPTURES. 
 
 IS 
 
 ing that the modern advocates of the Papal suprem- 
 acy ascribe to it ? 
 
 In either case this omission by St. Mark, under 
 these circumstances, seems to me to be fatal to the 
 Romish view. If the passage, as recorded by St. 
 Matthew had no such importance as the Romanists 
 attach to it, we can well understand why, as a matter 
 of mere modesty and personal feeling, St. Mark 
 should omit it. But if it conveyed the authority 
 for which the Romanists contend, modesty is no 
 justification for its omission. It conveyed a prerog- 
 ative which neither St. Peter nor St. Mark had any 
 right to ignore or to omit. 
 
 St. Luke, also, refers to this interview, (ix., 18-23.) 
 But he says nothing about "the Rock," nor yet 
 about the building of the Church on it, or him, as 
 the case may have been. He merely says : Peter 
 answering said, "the Christ of God." And, as in St. 
 Mark, "He straightly charged them to tell no man 
 that thing." 
 
 St. Luke wrote under the direction of St. Paul. 
 Are we to assume that either St. Paul or St. Luke 
 knew nothing of a supremacy, thought by some to 
 have been implied in the words which St. Matthew 
 ascribes to our Lord ; or, on the other hand, that 
 they knew of the words that were used, indeed, on 
 that occasion, but did not consider them of suffi- 
 cient importance to repeat them in giving an account 
 of this confession? The confession is, indeed, in 
 
l6 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 some sense, the rock and corner stone on which 
 the Church is built. But, in any case, it seems un- 
 questionable that neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, 
 neither St. Mark nor St. Luke, supposed there was 
 any such meaning in the words as our modern Ro- 
 manists claim for them. 
 
 St. John, in his Gospel, which was written some 
 thirty or more years after those of the other three 
 Evangelists, Sts. Matthew, Mark and Luke, (about 
 A. D. S3-63,) says nothing about this conversation 
 between our Lord and St. Peter. And the time 
 when he, St. John, wrote (A. D. 90) is important. 
 By that time the supremacy of St. Peter, if he had 
 any, must not only have become well known, but of 
 the greatest practical importance to the Church. 
 
 I consider these "silences," therefore, as most em- 
 phatic and expressive utterances against any such 
 claim as the Romanists put forth. 
 
 (3) Then, we find in the Gospel of St. John (xxi., 
 15-18,) a passage which is much quoted by the Ro- 
 manists — rather for popular effect, I think, than be- 
 cause they attach any importance to it in an argu- 
 mentative point of view. 
 
 The passage referred to is that in which our Lord 
 asks Peter three times with regard to his love for 
 Him, and on Peter's answer in the affirmative He 
 repeats three times, also, the charge : "Feed my 
 lambs" — "feed my sheep." But we must remember 
 that Peter had been in disgrace and apostacy from 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 
 
 17 
 
 the time of his thrice-repeated denial on the even- 
 ing of his Master's trial, when most of all, if, indeed, 
 He can be said at all to have needed that His friends 
 should stand by Him. These declarations of our Lord 
 did, doubtless, restore him to the position he had 
 lost, and to his share, whatever that may have been, 
 in the pastoral office of an Apostle. But we must 
 assuredly take these words with those other "three" 
 in which Peter denied thrice that he knew our Lord. 
 
 Up to this time of restoration , Peter was no "saint" 
 at all ; he was, rather, in disgrace. When he denied 
 our Lord, he not only denied Him three times — this 
 he did not only repeatedly, but with anger and great 
 earnestness, or at least solemnity, for the Evangelist 
 says he swore ("with an oath," are the words used). 
 Hence it is that I say, that up to that time not only 
 was Peter no saint, but he was actually in the dis- 
 grace of apostacy. He had denied his Lord and he 
 had been restored to the divine favor. Judas had 
 betrayed him. Peter denied Him and afterwards 
 repented and after repeating his declaration of faith 
 and love three times, with tears, he was restored. 
 But Judas did not repent, was not restored, but com- 
 mitted suicide and "went to his own place." 
 
 In view of these facts the declaration, or charge, 
 rather, though thrice repeated, must be considered, 
 in the first place, as merely raising Peter to the place 
 he had lost by his cowardice. 
 
 But did these words accomplish anything more 
 
1 8 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 than to make him an equal with the rest of the 
 Eleven ? Most assuredly they do not necessarily in 
 themselves imply anything more. And we shall see 
 further on whether they were intended for anything 
 more. 
 
 III. I pass then to the next text. It occurs in 
 immediate connection with the declaration I have 
 been considering, (Matt, xvi., 19) : "And I will give 
 unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and 
 whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound 
 in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth 
 shall be loosed in heaven." 
 
 These are, doubtless, words of the gravest import. 
 And without going into detail and disputed points, 
 I think we may say that they contain clearly two 
 points. 
 
 (i) The use of "the keys" implies opening and 
 shutting. And we find that on the day of Pente- 
 cost, immediately after the reception of the Holy 
 Spirit for the work committed to them, St. Peter 
 preached to the Jews, when about three thousand 
 converts were made — were baptized and added to 
 the number that were being saved and "continued 
 steadfastly in the Apostles' doctrine" — "receiving 
 their instruction — "and fellowship, with the break- 
 ing of the bread and in the prayers." 
 ' So, again, we find St. Peter now foremost in 
 preaching to the Gentiles — "(opening the kingdom 
 of heaven with the keys to them ?)" in the case of 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 
 
 10 
 
 the centurion and his friends. They were converted 
 and baptized and thus admitted to the church (Acts, 
 
 X. 44-49)- 
 
 Then, again, we find Peter the foremost in shut- 
 ting the doors — in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, 
 his wife. It was a severe case of discipline. But 
 they had "lied to the Holy Ghost ;" that is, they 
 had said, or professed, that which they knew to be 
 false, and they had lied to the Apostles, all of them, 
 not to Peter alone. But Peter alone was foremost 
 in denouncing their fraud and delivering them over 
 to the terrible penalty that followed. 
 
 (2) But to return to the other part of our text, 
 which conveys a remai kable grant of power : 
 "Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound 
 in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth 
 shalt be loosed in heaven." 
 
 Now, whatever these words may have meant, they 
 are repeated word for word and in the same form 
 to all the Twelve, Judas included, shortly after, 
 (Matt., xviii. 18,) and in a much more emphatic 
 manner, and with something of detail that is of in- 
 terest. It is now, "Verily I say unto you, whatso- 
 ever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, 
 and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be 
 loosed in heaven." 
 
 In St. John's Gospel, (xx., 23,) there occur words 
 which are usually considered as of the same import : 
 "Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto 
 
20 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 them, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are re- 
 tained," 
 
 This, in the lowest estimate that can be put upon 
 it, as I think, means, that whomsoever they should 
 admit into the Church by the confession of the true 
 faith of Christ, the Son of God, and by Baptism, had 
 their sins forgiven, and were put into a state of sal- 
 vation — "added," in fact, as St. Luke says, "to those 
 that were being saved." And conversely, whomso- 
 ever they should reject, either by refusing to them, 
 on sufficient grounds. Holy Baptism, or by excom- 
 munication from the means of grace in the Church, 
 and fellowship with its members, should be in the 
 state of a heathen, or probably worse now — "a hea- 
 then and a publican." 
 
 But in both of these cases, (Matt., xviii. i8,_and 
 John, XX. 23,) the authority is given to all the Apostles 
 alike, and no more and nothing more to St. Peter 
 than to the other eleven in' the case of St. Matthew, 
 and the other ten in the case of St. John (Judas had 
 fallen). 
 
 There is no complete account of the organization 
 of the Church anywhere given in the New Test- 
 ament, so far as mere details are concerned. But 
 in Heb., vi. 1-3 we have an enumeration of the 
 first "principles," and the supremacy of St. Peter 
 is not one of them. They are, as enumerated. Re- 
 pentance, Faith, Baptism, Confirmation (or laying 
 on of hands) Resurrection from the dead, and Eter- 
 nal Judgment." 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 2 1 
 
 Of course, there could be no valid Baptism that 
 did not bring one into the Church and add the re- 
 cipient to "the number of those that should (or 
 might) be saved ;" and no Confirmation that did not 
 admit those that received it to full communion and 
 fellowship. But nothing about any supremacy of 
 St. Peter, or the submission to any Pope. 
 
 We have now two things before us : St. Peter 
 was the first to confess our Lord in reference to his 
 proper nature, and, alas ! the first, too, to deny all 
 knowledge of Him. After his restoration to divine 
 favor he was the first to "open the kingdom" — use 
 the keys — to Jews, and, after that, by special guid- 
 ance, to the Gentiles also. Then, he was the first to 
 use the keys in shutting the kingdom, by way of 
 discipline, in the case of Ananias and his wife Sap- 
 phira. 
 
 So, too, it was Peter who denounced Simon Ma- 
 gus : "But Peter said unto him, thy money perish 
 with thee, because thou has thought that the gift of 
 God may be purchased with money." (Acts, viii. 26.) 
 In these cases he had, and exercised, unquestiona- 
 bly, a primacy, or, rather, as I should say, 2. prece- 
 dency over and before the other Apostles. 
 
 (3) Peter was also first and foremost as the spokes- 
 man of the Apostles, after their imprisonment (Acts, 
 v. 17-29.) "Then Peter and the other Apostles an- 
 swered and said, we ought to obey God rather than 
 men." 
 
22 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 It was, however, James, the brother of John, and not 
 Peter who was the first of the Apostles to be called 
 to martyrdom, (Acts, xii. 3.) And although Herod 
 saw fit to put James to death, thus giving the first 
 and most glorious of all primacy or precedency, that 
 of martyrdom to St. James, he seems to have been 
 content in regard to Peter with merely putting "him 
 in prison." 
 
 IV. This brings us down to about the time of the 
 organization of the Church at Jerusalem. And we 
 find that not Peter, but James, "the brother of our 
 Lord," was placed over the Church as its first local 
 Bishop. This was the first Church that was ever 
 fully organized and St. James, and not Peter, was 
 placed over it as its head under Christ. 
 
 And from this time, probably as early as A. D. 
 35 or '6, James, and not Peter, had the "primacy" — 
 the only primacy and all the primacy in or over the 
 Church that we know anything about. Up to this 
 time the name of Peter always comes first in the 
 order when two or more of the Apostles are men- 
 tioned byname, Peter, James, and John, in the order. 
 But after this event the order is changed ; it is James 
 and Peter, or Cephas and John, etc., (Gal., ii. 9.) 
 Acts, xxi. 18, St. Luke says that Paul, in his visit to 
 Jerusalem, "went in with us to James and all the 
 brethren were present." There is no special men- 
 tion of Peter as being of more importance than the 
 others. 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 
 
 23 
 
 We find, also, several indications that St. Peter, 
 although one of the Apostles, was in some sense 
 subject to their direction. Thus, Acts, viii. 14, we 
 read that when the Apostles which were at Jerusa- 
 lem heard that Samaria had received the word of 
 God, they (the Apostles) sent unto them Peter and 
 John, "to hold a confirmation there." James was at 
 this time Bishop of Jerusalem and, as such, the Head 
 and Primate of the Apostles. He, with others, sent 
 Peter and John to Samaria. Just imagine the 
 Bishops of some little towns about Rome, or "the 
 College of the Cardinals," if you please, sending the 
 Pope to Milan, or to Naples, to hold a confirmation, 
 to administer the rite of "laying on of hands," to a 
 class duly prepared for confirmation ! 
 
 So, again, at the Council of Jerusalem in about 
 A. D. 48 or 50, James presided (Acts, xv.) Peter, as 
 one of the speakers, related how God had made 
 choice of him that the Gentiles should by his mouth 
 hear the word of the Gospel and believe. Then, 
 Paul and Barnabas declared what miracles God had 
 wrought among the Gentiles by them. And then, 
 after due discussion and deliberation, James, who 
 seems to have presided in the Council, gave his opin- 
 ion : "Wherefore my sentence is that we trouble 
 not them which from the Gentiles have turned to 
 God," etc. And the letter, as suggested by St. 
 James, and in the very words which he uttered, was 
 sent in the name of the Apostles and Elders and 
 
24 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 the whole Church." "It seemed good unto us . . 
 to send chosen men unto you ;" and they add, "it 
 seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to them" — the 
 Apostles, Elders, and the whole Church, to lay upon 
 them no greater burden than these necessary things, 
 pertaining to the Christian life, and omitting all the 
 peculiarities of the law of Moses so far as mere 
 ritual was concerned. 
 
 Now, manifestly here was no supremacy of St, 
 Peter. No primacy — not even a precedence ; ex- 
 cept, perhaps, the fact that he appears to have been 
 the first to speak in the Council. But, assuredly, the 
 man who presides in --any Council in which he is 
 present and of which he is a member, is, if anybody 
 is so, the Primate. 
 
 And it is to be noticed that in the Letter that was 
 sent by the Council, St. Peter neither wrote it, nor 
 was it written in terms which he dictated. Nor was 
 it sent in his name, as being anything more than one 
 among the rest, one among equals. 
 
 Now, this is not merely negative testimony, as it 
 is sometimes called ; that is, the absence of any tes- 
 timony to the primacy or supremacy of St. Peter, 
 such as is claimed for the Pope, when we might have 
 expected it. It is more. It is a statement of facts 
 that are inconsistent with any such idea and thus 
 precludes it from the possibility of being held as true 
 by those who profess to regard the Holy Scriptures 
 as of divine authority, or as giving a true — not to 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 25 
 
 say complete — account of Christianity and the Chris- 
 tian Church. We not only have no proof that St. 
 Peter was regarded as the prince of the Apostles, 
 having precedence and dominion over them ; but we 
 have facts and statements which, as we have seen, 
 are totally inconsistent and irreconcilable with such 
 a doctrine. 
 
 Precedency, or forwardness, in speaking and acting 
 there may have been and, doubtless, there was ; but 
 anything like a primacy, or supremacy, could hardly 
 have been manifested until there had arisen some 
 occasion for a combined action, as in a Council. 
 And when this occurred, after the selection of Mat- 
 thias, and after the organization of the Church, 
 James, and not Peter, appears to have had the prec- 
 edence or primacy. 
 
 V. The expression, "obedience to the Faith," 
 occurs several times as descriptive of the result of 
 the work of the Ministry, (Acts, vi. 7.) But there 
 is never a word about any "obedience" to St. Peter 
 or to the Bishop of Rome, (Rom., xvi. 26.) In 
 Romans i., 5, St. Paul describes the result of his 
 work as an Apostle, as that for which he was set 
 apart to that work, as "to bring all nations" (the 
 Gentiles ?) to obedience to the Faith ;" not merely 
 to its knowledge or acceptance, but to obedience 
 to its commands and the observance of its institu- 
 tions, obedience to the Faith — not to Peter or to 
 the Pope. (See also Rom., xvi. 26.) 
 
26 'THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 (i) But we have some positive declarations on 
 this subject. Thus, St. Paul, in writing to the Cor- 
 inthians, (2 Cor., xi. 5,) says of himself: "I sup- 
 pose that I was not a whit behind the very chiefest 
 Apostles." He makes no exception, and states no 
 limitation to the meaning of his words. Surely, if 
 he had known any point or respect in which St. 
 Peter had any primacy or supremacy — I do not say 
 precedency in time — but any primacy or supremacy 
 over him, or the rest of the Apostles, St. Paul 
 would never have used these words. 
 
 (2) Then, again, in his Epistle to the Gallatians, 
 St. Paul says (ii., 7-9) that when he went up to 
 Jerusalem to confer with the Apostles who were in 
 the Ministry before him and had been appointed by 
 our Lord in person during His earthly life, they "in 
 conference added nothing to him, but, contrariwise, 
 when they saw that the Gospel of the uncircumcision 
 was committed to me, as the Gospel of the circum- 
 cision was unto Peter, and when James and Cephas 
 (Peter) and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived 
 the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me 
 and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we 
 should go to the heathen and they to the circum- 
 cision." 
 
 Now, here are several things to be noted : (i) St. 
 Paul had been preaching successfully before he had 
 seen Peter, or knew anything of him except by 
 name as one of the chief Apostles — "pillars" — 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 27 
 
 preaching, I say, to such an extent that they "added 
 nothing to him" (as we may understand) either in 
 the knowledge of the truths of the Gospel, nor yet 
 in authority to preach. 
 
 (3) In the third place, Peter concurred with James 
 and John, (and James is named first in the order — 
 James, Peter, and John,) in giving St. Paul jurisdic- 
 tion over the Gentiles, as they themselves — they, 
 not Peter — had over the Jews. There was no reser- 
 vation for any "primacy," or "supremacy," of St. 
 Peter. Nor is Peter mentioned as having any exclu- 
 sive jurisdiction, primacy, or supremacy over the 
 Jews and the converts that had been made, or might 
 be made, from among the Jews. It was a joint affair 
 between the three who seemed to be pillars, James, 
 Peter, and John, with no hint of a superiority on the 
 part of St. Peter. 
 
 (4) Then, again, in his Epistles to the Corinthians, 
 (2 Cor., xi. 28,) St. Paul, in speaking of his labors 
 and sufferings in the cause of Christ, says ; "Besides 
 those things that are without that which cometh on 
 me daily, the care of all the Churches." He makes 
 no mention of St. Peter. He speaks of the care of 
 all the Churches. We may well supply the limita- 
 tion that would restrict its scope to the Churches 
 which he himself had founded among the Gentiles. 
 But, even so, there is no recognition of any subordi- 
 nation to St. Peter, or of St. Peter as having any 
 care over them. 
 
28 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 (5) We have one more very striking passage in St. 
 Paul's Epistles (Gal., ii. 14.) Here St. Paul disap- 
 proved of the practice which was being pursued by 
 St. Peter and severely reprimands him for it. He 
 says, "to whom we gave place by subjection, no, not 
 for one hour." This was at Jerusalem, and while 
 both St. James, the Bishop, and many of the other 
 Apostles were there. But, most assuredly, St. Paul 
 could have used no such language to St. Peter, or 
 with regard to him, if it had been understood at 
 that time that any primacy or supremacy over the 
 whole Church, or over the other Apostles, such as 
 Romanists now claim, had been given him. 
 
 And this becomes the more noteworthy if we 
 consider St. Paul's great care and jealousy about 
 intruding into any other man's field of labor — ^juris- 
 diction, we should call it in these days. Thus he 
 says, (Rom., xv. 20 :) "I have striven so to preach 
 the Gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I 
 should build upon another man's foundation." This 
 was written to the Romans; and, of course, there- 
 fore, St. Peter had laid no foundation at Rome, nor 
 had he, in the opinion of St. Paul, any especial or 
 exclusive right or prerogative there. 
 
 Now, surely, St. Paul could not have said these 
 things if he had known of, or acknowledged any 
 primacy, supremacy, or oversight, either in fact or in 
 right, over the Churches to which he refers. 
 
 Or if, in these writings of St. Paul, we are to find 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 29 
 
 any trace of a supremacy at all, we must find two 
 and not one merely. We have seen (Gal., ii. 7-9,) 
 that there was a sort of a division* of "the field," 
 which was the "world," between Peter and Paul ; 
 Paul and Barnabas for the Gentiles, and James,., 
 Peter, and John for the circumcision, or the Jews. If, 
 then, there is any primacy, there are two, and we 
 who are or were of the Gentiles and not of the Jews 
 are to look for our Primate somewhere in the line of 
 succession from St. Paul. 
 
 (6) And we find St. Paul writing Epistles to eight, 
 at least, of the Churches he had founded, and giving 
 instructions to Timothy and Titus with regard to 
 the administration of others ; the Church at Eph- 
 esus and the Churches in Crete, with no reference or 
 allusion to St. Peter, and with as much freedom, and 
 in a tone of as much authority, as if there had been 
 no St. Peter within the range of his knowledge. 
 
 St. Peter also writes one or two Epistles ; not, 
 however, to churches that he had founded, or other- 
 wise, but to individual believers — to those, it is com- 
 monly understood, who were of Jewish descent and 
 had been converted, but were scattered abroad 
 among the Gentiles throughout Pontus, Gallatia, 
 Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, that is, through- 
 out Asia Minor, from the southeast corner of the 
 Black Sea (Pontus,) Bithynia on the northv/est 
 corner of the Peninsula, Gallatia and Cappadocia in 
 the interior and southeast, as well as Asia, in the 
 
30 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 narrower sense of the word, in the southwestern 
 portion of what we now call Asia Minor. He 
 writes, however, not as Pope, but as an "Elder;" 
 that is, as one who is old in knowledge and experi- 
 ence, as well as in years. 
 
 In his second Epistle St. Peter speaks of his "be- 
 loved brother Paul" and his Epistles, speaking of 
 them as authority, and as containing things "hard to 
 be understood," of which some persons make an 
 unprofitable use. But in all this St. Peter evidently 
 speaks of St. Paul as being, at least, an equal both 
 in regard to his authority as a teacher and his juris- 
 diction as an Apostle, or "wise master builder" (I. 
 Cor., iii. lo,) in the Church of God. 
 
 Surely, this is both unaccountable and unintelligi- 
 ble, if the writers of Holy Scriptures had any such 
 idea of St. Peter and of the supremacy of the Bishop 
 of Rome, as his successors, as the modern advocates 
 of the Papal Supremacy claim for it and for them. 
 The Scriptures do not even so much as say that St. 
 Peter was ever at Rome. But, on the contrary, they 
 create rather a strong presumption that he was not, 
 by speaking of his being at Babylon when he wrote 
 his first Epistle. 
 
 In fact, the Scriptures say almost nothing about 
 St. Peter after the Council at Jerusalem, (A. D. 48 
 or 50.) They follow St. Paul in his course of preach- 
 ing the Gospel ; but they say nothing of St. Peter 
 that gives us any account of the places where he 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 31 
 
 went, or what he did, except the writing of the two 
 Epistles that we have under his name. And of 
 these the first is commonly supposed to have been 
 written about A. D. 60 and was dated from Babylon, 
 down in the part of Asia near the Persian Gulf. 
 
 THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 
 
 This brings us down to the close of the Scripture 
 account, and the close of the Apostolic age. 
 
 VI. But it is well to look alittle farther, especially 
 as we have indisputable testimonies and other state- 
 ments which throw light on the subject. 
 
 We have what are known as the writings of "the 
 Apostolic Fathers" who wrote at the close of the 
 first, or the beginning of the second, century. St. 
 Clement was Bishop of Rome, according to the 
 commonly received dates, from A. D. 91 to A. D. 
 100 — nine years. He wrote an Epistle to the Cor- 
 inthians, not, indeed, in his own name, but as 
 from the Church at Rome. He describes very much 
 the same state of things as is disclosed to us in the 
 Epistles of St. Paul, and gives very much the same 
 advice, though in a much less authoritative tone. 
 In the letter he makes mention of St. Peter only 
 twice. The first time (ch. v.) is in the following 
 words : "Let us set before our eyes the holy Apos- 
 tles ; St. Peter who, by unjust envy, underwent, not 
 one or two, but maiy sufferings, till at last, being 
 martyred, he went to the place of glory that was due 
 
32 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 unto him. For the same cause did St. Paul in like 
 manner receive the reward of his patience," etc. 
 Then, again, in eh. xlvii., St. Clement exhorts them: 
 "Take the Epistle of the blessed Paul the Apostle 
 in your hands . . . Verily, he did by the Spirit 
 admonish you concerning himself and Cephas, (Peter) 
 and Apollos, because that even then ye had begun 
 to fall into parties and factions among yourselves." 
 
 These two are the only mentions that are made 
 of St. Peter at all. And, assuredly, they neither 
 assert nor imply any "primacy," or "supremacy" on 
 the part of St. Peter, though written from Rome 
 and by a Bishop of Rome. They say nothing of 
 St. Peter as having so much as even been there in 
 person. 
 
 Then, we have the letters, seven in number, of St. 
 Ignatius, who had been Bishop of Antioch. He 
 was brought to Rome and suffered martyrdom there 
 somewhere between A. D. 97 and A. D. 115, the 
 date is not quite certain. 
 
 Now, among these Epistles, all of which were writ- 
 ten while on his way to Rome to suffer martyrdom, 
 one of them is addressed to "the Romans." In this 
 letter he makes no mention of St. Peter, nor ef any 
 Bishop as being at that time at Rome ; although in 
 all the other six he speaks of their respective Bish- 
 ops, sometimes by name, and always as appointed 
 by divine authority for the instruction of the Chris- 
 tian believers and preserving the unity of the Church, 
 
AND THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 33 
 
 saying expressly, "that there is no Church without 
 a Bishop," besides its Presbyters and Deacons. Yet 
 in writing to the Romans he makes no mention of 
 any Bishop tliere. The order of the Bishops of 
 Rome is pretty well known : Linus, 67-79 ! Cletus, 
 79-91; Clement, 91-100; Evaristus, loo-iio, and 
 Alexander, 110-120. And it must have been while 
 one of the three last named was Bishop there, or, 
 possibly, during the interval between some two of 
 them, as between Clement and Evaristus, or between 
 Evaristus and Alexander, that the letter was written. 
 
 But be this as it may, there is no mention of St. 
 Peter or of any other man as Bishop of the Church 
 of Rome at that time. 
 
 But in one place St. Ignatius does mention the 
 name of St. Peter. He writes to the Romans, iv., 
 "I do not, as Peter and Paul, command you ; they 
 were Apostles. I am but a condemned man," etc. 
 And this is the only mention of St. Peter, or refer- 
 ence to him, in the seven Epistles. 
 
 And besides these two, Clement and Ignatius, we 
 have "the Catholic Epistle of St. Barnabas," some- 
 what in character like the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 But, although it is somewhat lengthy, there is no 
 mention of St. Peter in it. 
 
 Then we have also the "Visions of Hermas," his 
 "Commands," and his book of "Similitudes," in 
 which he discusses very freely the chief points of 
 Doctrine and Discipline as taught and exercised in 
 
34 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 his day ; but no mention of St. Peter. He speaks 
 of a "beautiful virgin," rising out of the Tiber, and 
 of our Lord as appearing to instruct him (Hermas.) 
 He alludes to Clement, who was probably the 
 Bishop of Rome at the time. He was directed by 
 "the Beautiful Virgin" to write two books, and to 
 give one to Clement, who would send it to foreign 
 Churches. 
 
 But, although we find so little about St. Peter, we 
 shall see in due time that the first assertion of the fact 
 that St. Peter was ever at Rome at ail, was made about 
 one hundred years after this time, by three or four 
 writers, Caius, TertuUian, and Irseneus. These were 
 the first authors to speak of St. Peter as ever having 
 been at Rome at all. 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY, AND THE CANONS OF THE 
 PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 
 
 I turn now to testimony of another kind — that of 
 the Canons of the early Church. 
 
 You will remember that our Lord gave his Apos- 
 tles pretty ample authority for regulating all matters 
 of doctrine and discipline in this Church (Matt., 
 xviii. 28, John, xx. 23.) We have seen, also, how 
 He gave them the Holy Ghost to guide them in 
 their work and the performance of their duties, and, 
 we may add, their responsibilities as well. And we 
 have seen, moreover, how about the very important 
 question with regard to compelling the Gentile con- 
 verts to keep the Mosaic law, the Apostles, Elders 
 and brethren came together to consult about the 
 matter. And the early Bishops seem to have under- 
 stood and believed that the authority, the duty and 
 the responsibility, with the promise of the same 
 blessed help and guidance, was extended to them 
 
36 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 also. Hence they began early and often to assemble 
 in Councils, or Synods, for consultation and agree- 
 ment upon any matters that perplexed them, or in 
 regard to which they were in doubt what to do. 
 The rules, or conclusions, thus agreed upon were 
 commonly called Canons. And of the rules, or 
 Canons, thus agreed upon we have a very ancient 
 code, called the Apostolic Canons. For the most 
 part we know nothing of the persons by whom, the 
 places where, or the time when, they were made. 
 But we find them in general use and widely known 
 at the time of the Council of Nice, A. D. 325. 
 
 This Council of Nice was the first General Council 
 of the whole Church that was ever held, after that 
 at Jerusalem, if we are to regard that as a General 
 Council (Acts xv.) Up to the conversion of Con- 
 stantine, about twelve years before the Council of 
 Nice, Christianity was a religion that was not allowed 
 by law in the Roman Empire. Much of the time 
 Cliristians were actually under persecution. No 
 General Council could be held. But after the con- 
 version of Constantine and his proclamation recog- 
 nizing Christianity as a lawful religion, A. D. 313, 
 Christians could come together from all parts of the 
 Roman Empire. And we find him calling them 
 together to consult on several very important mat- 
 ters. 
 
 Now, in order to understand and appreciate the 
 matter before us, we must recall the fact that the 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 37 
 
 Roman Empire included at this time nearly the whole 
 known world, from Britain, France and Spain on the 
 north, Africa and Egypt on the south, to Asia as far 
 east as India. It was, moreover, divided at that 
 time into thirteen Dioceses, as they were called, much 
 as our country is divided now into what we call "the 
 States of the Union." Each Diocese was divided 
 into what were called Provinces, much as our States 
 are divided now into counties. Of these Provinces 
 we have an enumeration of one hundred and eight- 
 een. In each Province, as in our counties, there was 
 always one city which was for them "a seat of gov- 
 ernment," or, what we call a county seat with us. 
 Now, in many of the cities in a Province, as well as 
 in the chief city, seat of government, or metropolis, 
 there were Bishops, one in each of the cities. But 
 the Bishop of the chief city, or seat of government, 
 was always regarded as having a sort of primacy, or 
 oversight, over all the other Bishops in his Province, 
 much as the English Archbishops of Canterbury 
 and York have now in England over their respect- 
 ive Provinces of Canterbury and York. Each of 
 these "suburban cities," as they were called, which 
 had a Bishop of its own, constituted what we would 
 now call a Diocese, and was then called a Parish ; 
 and Parishes, in the modern sense of the term, did 
 not then exist ; or, if they existed at all, they were 
 not generally known and did not extensively pre- 
 vail. 
 
38 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 At first, of course, the believers, the number of 
 converts and worshippers, in any city were but few. 
 But as they increased and multiplied, it seems to 
 have been the practice to provide additional church 
 buildings, or places of worship, for their accommo- 
 dation. But they were not divided into Parishes in 
 any modern sense, with separate parochial organiza- 
 tions. The Bishop always had under him a body of 
 Presbyters, as well as Deacons and others, who were 
 competent for all the ordinary services, under the 
 direction of their Bishop. 
 
 I have spoken of the great General Council of 
 Nice, A, D. 325. There were several others of 
 which the three next following were the most im- 
 portant, and all of them that were of any import- 
 ance for our present purpose ; namely, Constanti- 
 nople, A. D. 381 ; Ephesus, A. D. 431, and. Chal- 
 cedon, A. D. 451, extending over a period of 125 
 years of the Church's history. 
 
 The principal object before each and all of these 
 Councils was to settle or agree upon the proper form 
 in which to state some of the doctrines concerning 
 our Lord and the Holy Spirit. And as a result of 
 their deliberations, we have an enlargement of the 
 Apostles' Creed into the form which we have now 
 and call the Nicene Creed. 
 
 But the subject of Discipline came also before 
 these Councils. 
 
 I. The Council of Nice had Bishops present 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. 3^ 
 
 from, if not all, yet at least some of the remote parts 
 of the Empire, and part of the list of those who 
 subscribed the proceedings is lost. But Hosius, of 
 Cordova in Spain, presided. The Bishop of Rome 
 was not there. We have good evidence that there 
 were three Bishops from England present, though 
 their names are not found in that part of the list 
 which remains to us. 
 
 Can. iv. distinctly recognizes the Provincial system, 
 as then in existence ; that is, the Bishops of 
 each Province, in the sense of the word just ex- 
 plained, were regarded as making, with the other 
 Clergy and the brethren of the Laity, a collective 
 and organic Branch of the Church, and abundantly 
 competent for all the purposes of preaching the 
 Gospel, administering Sacraments, and enforcing the 
 Discipline of a godly life. 
 
 This Canon provides that in every Province the 
 Bishops shall be consecrated by all the Bishops in 
 that Province. But if that is impossible, then by at 
 least three Bishops, the rest giving their consent in 
 writing, and the Metropolitan, that is, the Bishop of 
 the city which is the seat of the civil government of 
 the Province, approving and confirming what is 
 done. 
 
 The v. Canon provides "that Synods or Councils 
 shall be assembled twice every year in every Prov- 
 ince." That all the Bishops and Presbyters being 
 assembled together, questions of discipline — nothing 
 
40 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 said about doctrines — "may be examined into and 
 adjusted ;" these Synods to be held, one of them 
 " before Lent " and the other " in the season of 
 Autumn." 
 
 The vi. Canon ordains " That the ancient customs 
 shall prevail and the Sees of Alexandria, Rome and 
 Antioch — the former in Africa, the latter in Asia, 
 while Rome was, of course, in Europe — are men-, 
 tioned by name as having something of a jurisdic- 
 tion over other Churches or Provinces, but yet in 
 all these places the " ancient privileges are to be pre- 
 served." 
 
 And yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to say 
 what that jurisdiction or oversight could have 
 amounted to. Nor is it necessary for any of the 
 purposes I have in hand to attempt to reach any 
 definite views on the subject. We shall soon see that 
 the Bishops of certain of the larger cities of the 
 Roman Empire, as Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and, 
 at a later period, Constantinople, were regarded as in 
 some sense patriarchs, " principal fathers," for that 
 is what the word means, over the Churches in the 
 regions lying around about them. 
 
 At this time (A. D. 325,) the Bishop of Jerusalem, 
 now called the Bishop of ^lia, was under the 
 jurisdiction of the Bishop of Caesarea as his 
 Metropolitan, although until the fall of Jerusalem 
 the Church in that city had been regarded as the 
 Mother Church, and its Bishop had been held to be 
 the Primate of the whole Christian Church. 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. 41 
 
 And at this time, too, it is clear that the Bishop 
 of Rome was not regarded as Primate of the whole 
 Church, nor as having any jurisdiction over Alexan- 
 dria, Antioch or Jerusalem. He appears, from evi- 
 dence to have had, at the time, a sort of patriarchal 
 jurisdiction over " the suburbicarian districts," which 
 cannot have extended north of Italy, although it 
 may have included the adjoining islands of Sicily and 
 Sardinia. 
 
 It certainly did not include Milan on the north, 
 nor yet Spain in the west, or France or England at 
 the northwest. 
 
 The Council of Nice, as I have said, was held in 
 A. D. 325, and was attended by three hundred and 
 eighteen Bishops. 
 
 II. The next General Council was held at Con- 
 stantinople in A. D. 381, fifty-six years after that of 
 Nice, and was somewhat less largely attended, there 
 having been present only about one hundred and 
 fifty Bishops, and these mostly oriental. It has 
 nevertheless been accepted as a General Council by 
 all parts of the Church, and was especially so recog- 
 nized by the subsequent Councils at Ephesus and 
 Chalcedon- 
 
 It added to the expansion of the Apostles' Creed, 
 which had been made at the Council of Nice with 
 special reference to the divinity of Christ — a further 
 expansion and amplification concerning the third 
 person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost. 
 
42 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 But in reference to the subject more immediately 
 before us, there were two of the Canons that are 
 especially important. 
 
 It seems that some of the Bishops — those of Alex- 
 andria and Antioch are especially named — had been 
 seeking to extend their jurisdiction and supremacy, 
 if not over the whole Church, yet, at least, beyond 
 the proper limits that had been assigned to them. 
 In view of these facts, the Council decreed (Canon 
 i.) that Bishops must not go beyond their borders, 
 nor bring confusion into the Churches. 
 
 But according to the Canons, the Bishop of Alex- 
 andria must have the administration of the affairs 
 of Egypt only. 
 
 The Bishop of the East must administer the 
 affairs of the East only. The privileges that were 
 assigned to the Church of Antioch by the Canons 
 made at Nice being preserved, etc., etc., the Dioceses 
 that were named were " the Asian," southwest part 
 of Asia Minor, the " Pontic," the northeastern part 
 of Asia Minor, and "Thrace," which was in Europe 
 and included Greece, extending as far west as the 
 Adriatic Sea. 
 
 I have already referred to the fact that the word 
 " Diocese " was used at that time in a sense quite 
 different from our present use. What we now call 
 a Diocese was then a Parish, and Parishes in the 
 modern sense were unknown; the order was (i) the 
 Empire, (2) Dioceses, thirteen in number, (3) 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. a-. 
 
 Provinces, of which there were one hundred and 
 eighteen, varying ixora. five to seventeen in each Dio- 
 cese and (4) Parishes (now Dioceses) the number 
 of which in each Province we have no means of as- 
 certaining. But of one thing we may be certain ; 
 namely, that there were no districts or portion of 
 of the Empire reckoned as a Province for ecclesias- 
 tical purposes that had not three or more Dioceses 
 in the modern sense of the word — each of them 
 with a Bishop of its own in charge over it. 
 
 In the Canon just cited (Const, ii.,) the word Dio- 
 ceses is used as indicating the boundary or limits 
 within which the Bishops referred to were to confine 
 their jurisdiction and the exercise of their authority. 
 But there are, in reality, no political divisions of the 
 earth's surface in our day that coincide with the old 
 Dioceses. In some respects the several States and 
 Territories of our country correspond with the Dio- 
 ceses of the Roman Empire. But in others, the 
 separate Nations of the world, as England, France, 
 Spain, Italy, etc., etc., correspond more nearly to the 
 older sub-divisions. 
 
 But in any case, there are three of the thirteen of 
 the Dioceses mentioned by name, for which a law was 
 passed to the effect that the Bishop — that is the Arch- 
 bishop, or Metropolitan, or Patriarch, rather of each 
 of those sub-divisions of the Church — might have ex- 
 clusive jurisdiction and control in his Diocese, so far 
 as the peculiar duties of his office were concerned, and 
 
44 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 that he must confine himself to that field. Of course, 
 therefore, the Bishop of Rome was excluded from 
 all the " Dioceses," except his own. 
 
 The next Canon (iii.) is important and sig- 
 nificant. It reads, " The Bishop of Constantinople 
 shall have the precedence of honor after the Bishop 
 of Rome, because Constantinople is new Rome." 
 
 I have underscored and italicised the words "pre- 
 cedence of honor " because they deserve a moment's 
 notice in passing. 
 
 In the earliest ages — the days of the Apostles — 
 until after the destruction of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 
 itself was regarded as the Mother Church, with the 
 " primacy of honor." After that came Antioch un- 
 til the time of Pantaenus, about A. D. i8o, when Alex- 
 andria succeeded to that honor in the Church's esti- 
 mation. 
 
 But when the time for General Councils came, for 
 the settling of matters that pertain to and concern 
 the whole Church of Christ — it became neccessary 
 to name some order in which the Bishops of the 
 whole Church should take precedence. And in ref- 
 erence to this matter, the first place was given to the 
 Bishop of Rome, and the second to the Bishop of 
 Constantinople ; Alexandria and Antioch following 
 in the order just named. Jerusalem had been in- 
 significant since the destruction of the city by Titus, 
 and Moscow in Russia was not as yet recognised — 
 in fact the Russians had not been converted. 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 45 
 
 Some precedency, however, became neccessary so 
 soon as there were to be Councils at all. It was so 
 then and is so now in every branch of the Church. 
 Thus, in England, in Canterbury, we have the order: 
 the Bishops of Canterbury, London, Winchester, and 
 so on. In York we have York, Durham, Carlisle, and 
 so on. 
 
 But in this country the order of seniority — 
 " precedency of honor," as the Canon calls it — is de- 
 termined not by the sees which the Bishops hold, 
 but by seniority in the order or date of their conse- 
 cration. Hence those in this country who have held 
 " the precedency " are Seabury, of Connecticut, 
 1784-1796 ; White, of Pennsylvania, 1796-1836 ; 
 Griswold, of Massachusetts, 1836- 1842; Chase, of 
 Illinois, 1842-1852 ; Brownell, of Connecticut, 1852- 
 1865; Hopkins, of Vermont, 1865.1868 ; Smith, of 
 Kentucky, 1868-1884; Lee, of Delaware, 1884-1887, 
 and now Williams, of Connecticut. In this respect 
 we follow the example of the ancient Church in Af- 
 rica, rather than any other of the ancient branches 
 of the Church of whose order in this respect we have 
 any knowledge. 
 
 (i) But what was thus given to the Bishop of 
 Rome was merely " the precedency " or the primacy 
 of honor — the respect and honor due to the oldest 
 man, and not mUJiority. The expression neither 
 implied nor gave any more than the precedency which 
 we give to our senior Bishops, over the other Dio- 
 
46 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 ceses and Bishops in our National Church of this 
 country. The word is presbeia, from presbus, an old 
 man, and denotes the honor of precedence, which we 
 always give to age — if only it happens to be accom- 
 panied with modesty and wisdom. 
 
 (2) The second point to be noted in the Canon is 
 the reason assigned for the honor thus conferred — 
 and note it is the honor ifime) and nothing else. The 
 reason assigned is that it is Rome, and the second 
 place is assigned to the Bishop of Constantinople, 
 " because that is new Rome ; that is Rome was the 
 old seat of the empire — the old empire in the 
 West, and Constantinople had become now the seat 
 of the new empire — or the empire in the East. 
 
 (3) And we note the fact as pertinent to our 
 present purpose, that there is no mention of St. 
 Peter and no obvious reference to him in this con- 
 nection. It is neither said nor implied that he was in 
 any sense the first or the chief of the Apostles — 
 that the Bishop of Rome was in any sense his suc- 
 cessor any more or in any other sense than all the 
 other Bishops were his successors. There is even no 
 intimation in this Canon, or in the other Canons at all, 
 that Peter was ever at Rome for any purpose what- 
 ever. 
 
 The Council of Chalcedon (A. D. 451,) gives em- 
 phasis to this view. In Canon xxviii. it says : " The 
 Fathers properly gave the Primacy of honor to the 
 throne of the elder Rome, because that was the im- 
 perial city." 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 AT- 
 
 Here arc both the fact and the reason for it. The 
 Fathers gave the precedence or primacy, and be- 
 cause of the dignity of tlie city in which the Bish- 
 op's See — throne they called it — was situated. The 
 Fathers gave it. Not a word about what our Lord 
 said to Peter or the Rock. Not a word about his 
 having any primacy or precedency among the 
 Apostles. Not a word about Rome's being the See 
 of St. Peter. Not a word about Peter at all ; not 
 even a mention or a reference to his name. 
 
 And, in fact, I doubt very much if the Fathers in 
 the eastern parts or Provinces of the Church espe- 
 cially, knew or had heard, or even thought of St, 
 Peter as having so much as been at Rome at all. 
 
 We have no account in the Scriptures of St. 
 Peter's having been at Rome. In fact, we hear but 
 very little about him after the Council at Jerusalem 
 (Acts XV., A. D. 48 or 50). The first mention we 
 have of his name in connection with Rome is, so far 
 as I know, in the writings of Western men, as Caius, 
 of Rome ; Irenseus, of Lyons, and Tertullian, of 
 Carthage, in the latter part of the second century 
 and in the beginning of the third. And from that 
 time onward, the connection of his name and his 
 martyrdom with Rome grew apace. 
 
 But it was a Western, a local, tradition in its origin 
 and influence. The Eastern Fathers, while giving, 
 as we have seen, the precedence, the Primacy of 
 honor to the Bishop of Rome, did it because Rome 
 
48 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 was the ancient imperial city and from no regard oi 
 respect for its having been the scene of St. Peter's 
 labors or martyrdom for the cause of Christ — even 
 if they knew or believed it to be so. 
 
 III. The third General council was held at Ephe- 
 sus, A. D. 431, and was attended by about two hun- 
 dred Bishops. 
 
 The Canon that chiefly concerns our present sub- 
 ject is the viiith. It seems from the Canon that several 
 Bishops of the Island of Cyprus had complained 
 that other Bishops — especially the Bishop of Anti- 
 och — had interfered with their rights by ordaining 
 Clergy in Cyprus, contrary to the laws of the 
 Church " and the Canons of the Holy Fathers." 
 Then, re-enacting the laws already passed, the Coun- 
 cil enacts that " the Canons of the Holy Fathers and 
 ancient customs " shall prevail. They declare that 
 these Canons and Customs must be observed. " The 
 same rules shall be observed in all the other Dio- 
 ceses — and the Provinces — note the addition, in 
 Provinces as well as in the Dioceses, or as we should 
 now say, the Nations, "in the Provinces every- 
 where (no exception for either Rome or Constanti- 
 nople,) so that no Bishops shall invade any other 
 Province which has not heretofore and from the be- 
 ginning been under the hand of himself or his pre- 
 decessors." And the Canon closes with the words : 
 " But if any one shall introduce any regulation 
 contrary to what has now been defined, the whole 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. ^g 
 
 Holy and Ecumenical Synod has decreed that it 
 shall be of no effect. 
 
 IV. The next General Council was that of Chalce- 
 don, A. D. 451, one hundred and twenty-six years 
 after that of Nice. It was the most largely attended 
 of any, having had about six hundred and thirty 
 Bishops present. 
 
 It began by recognizing the creed of Nice of the 
 318 " Holy Fathers," with the addition made at 
 Constantinople by the 150 " Holy Fathers." 
 
 It then proceeds to say, (Can. i.,) " We have 
 thought it right that the Canons which have been 
 issued by the Holy Fathers, in each Synod up to 
 the present time, should continue in force." Besides 
 the three General Councils already named, there 
 had been five local or Provincial Councils held, 
 whose Canons had been collected into a code, 
 namely Ancyra, in Gallatia, A. D. 315 ; Neocmesarea, 
 in Pontus, A, D. 315; Gangra, in Paphlagonia, A. 
 D. 325 ; Antioch, A. D. 341, and Laodicea, (prob- 
 ably) A. D. 365. 
 
 But be that as it may, these Canons have been 
 generally received as endorsed and adopted by the 
 Church. The Council of Antioch, 341, one hundred 
 and ten years before that of Chalcedon, and only 
 sixteen years after that of Nice, passed some Canons 
 which are quite to our purpose. 
 
 I. The ix. Canon provides that the Bishops " in 
 every Province — not Diocese in the old sense — but in 
 
so 
 
 7 HE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 every Province, must acknowledge him who presides 
 over the Metropolis (seat of government of the 
 Province) and who is to take care of the Province. 
 Each Bishop is to have authority over his own 
 Parish (Diocese in the modern sense) and to admin- 
 ister it, and to make provision for all the district (or 
 country) which is under his city ; to ordain Presby- 
 ters and Deacons, and to determine every thing 
 with his judgment (or discretion); but let him not 
 attempt to do anything further without the Bishop 
 of the Metropolis." 
 
 Canon xiii. of Antioch, reads : " Let no Bishop 
 dare to pass from one Province to another and 
 ordain any person in the Churches to the dignity of 
 officiating ; unless he comes with a written invita- 
 tion from the Metropolitan and the other Bishops 
 of the country into which he goes." 
 
 Canon xv. enacts that if any Bishop is charged 
 with any offense, and that sentence is pronounced 
 unanimously by the Bishops of the Province, " he 
 is not to h^ judged by any others, but the unanimous 
 sentence of the Bishops of the Province shall re- 
 main established." 
 
 Canon xxii. is about the same as the xiii. It 
 reads : " A Bishop must not enter into another 
 city (Diocese in our sense,) which is not subject to 
 him, nor into a District which does not belong to 
 him, to ordain anyone, nor to appoint a Presbyter 
 or Deacon in places subject to another Bishop, un- 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 SI 
 
 less with the consent of the proper Bishop of the 
 District." 
 
 Canon xxiii. says : " A Bishop is not allowed to 
 appoint another in his stead, even at the close of 
 his life." 
 
 2. To return to the Council of Chalcedon. It 
 passed thirty Canons. The x. provides that " No 
 clergymen shall be on the list of the Church of two 
 cities at the same time." The xvii. Canon reads in 
 part, "the rural and country Parishes, (probably 
 Dioceses in the modern sense,) in any Province^ 
 must continue without disturbance under the Bish- 
 ops who have had possession of them, particularly 
 if they have had them under their management for 
 the space of thirty years without dispute." 
 
 But the Canon adds : " If, however, there has 
 been or shall be any dispute among them, those who 
 say that they are injured may tnove the matterhtiore 
 the Synod of the Province." But more emphatic 
 still: "But if any one has been wronged by his 
 Metropolitan, he is to be Judged by the throne of 
 Constantinople, as has been before said." And 
 finally : " If any city has been newly erected by 
 Royal (competent, we say) Authority (into a Me- 
 tropolis), or shall hereafter be so erected, let the 
 order of the ecclesiastical Parishes (Dioceses) follow 
 the political organization." 
 
 The xix. Canon recognizes the fact that in some 
 of the Provinces the Synods — two in each year 
 
S2 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 ordered by the Council of Nice — were not held ; re, 
 enacts the Canon, and declares " that in every Prov^ 
 ince the Bishops shall meet together twice in every 
 year, at the place which the Bishop of the Metrop- 
 olis may approve, and settle whatever matters may 
 have arisen." 
 
 There is no reference or allusion to any authority 
 out of the Province, and none over it except its 
 Synod. And any Bishop not prevented by sickness 
 or other infirmity, who does not attend these semi- 
 annual Synods or Conventions, is to be " reproved 
 in a brotherly manner." 
 
 But the most important of all these Canons is the 
 xxviii. It says, as I have already quoted it as say- 
 ing, that " the Fathers properly gave the Primacy 
 (of honor) to the throne of elder Rome, because 
 that was the imperial city. And the 150 most re- 
 ligious Bishops (at Constantinople), being moved 
 with the same purpose, gave equal privileges to the 
 most holy throne of New Rome, judging, with 
 reason, that the city which was honored with the 
 Sovereignty and Senate, and which enjoys equal 
 privileges with the elder royal Rome, should also be 
 magnified like her in ecclesiastical matters, being 
 the second after her. 
 
 But most of all, this Council decreed that the Metro- 
 politan of the Dioceses (in the old sense) of Pontus, 
 in the northeast corner of Asia Minor; Asia, south- 
 west corner of Asia Minor, and Thrace, southeast 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. e, 
 
 corner of Europe, including Greece, should be or, 
 dained by the Bishop of Constantinople. And also 
 that the Bishops, — in the Missionary regions, as we 
 should call them, — which were outside of the 
 Roman Empire and in no one of its Provinces, 
 should be ordained by and under the jurisdiction, 
 not the Bishop of Rome, but by "the above men- 
 tioned most holy throne of the most Holy Church 
 of Constantinople." 
 
 3. At this Council of Chalcedon we find, for the 
 first time in the Canons, a reference to an order of 
 Bishops above the Metropolitans, called Exarchs 
 or Patriarchs. Something like it, in fact, though 
 without the name Exarch or Patriarch, seems to have 
 been referred to in Can. vi. of Nice, A. D. 325. It 
 speaks of the Bishop of Alexandria as having 
 authority over several Provinces, as Egypt, Libya 
 and Pentapolis; of the Bishop of Rome as having a 
 similar authority over the cities and Provinces that 
 were in the immediate neighborhood of Rome. It 
 also mentions the Bishop of Antioch as having sim- 
 ilar oversight or authority over several Provinces in 
 the East. But it adds, in immediate connection, in 
 fact : " Let ancient customs prevail," and these an- 
 cient " privileges are to be preserved to the Churches 
 in all the Provinces," as well as in the three Patri- 
 archates that have been named. 
 
 But the ix. Canon of Chalcedon, A. D. 451, 
 orders that if a Bishop or Clergyman shall have any 
 
54 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 misunderstanding with the Metropolitan of the 
 Province (that is, the Archbishop that was immedi- 
 ately over him), he may have recourse or appeal to 
 the Exarch of the Diocese, or to the throne of the 
 Imperial city, Constantinople, and there let the 
 matter be decided." The same provison was re- 
 peated in about the same terms in the xvii. Canon. 
 
 All these references to the Exarchs or Patriarchs 
 are in immediate connection with the law that the 
 rights, the customary rights, of the Parishes (Dio- 
 ceses, we now call them), shall be preserved invio- 
 lable, and that all questions of doctrine or discipline 
 arising in any Parish or Province shall be settled by 
 the Archbishops or the Synods of the Province, ex- 
 cept in the case specified — when the dispute or 
 quarrel was with the Archbishop himself — and in 
 that case there lay the right to appeal to the Patri- 
 arch of the Diocese, if there was one, and if not, to 
 the Bishop of Constantinople. 
 
 But the word Exarch, or Patriarch, appears now 
 for the first time in the Canons. And while four of 
 them are named as equals, (Antioch, Alexandria, 
 Rome and Constantinople), no mention is made of 
 any other, although the language used is such as to 
 imply that there were, or, at least, might be others — 
 one in each of the thirteen larger sub-divisions of 
 the Empire, called Dioceses. 
 
 There was afterwards set up a claim to such an 
 independent Patriarchate for some city in France. 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. 55 
 
 But there never was any in North Africa or in Eng- 
 land. 
 
 VI. There is one other point in the doings of 
 these early Councils, which, though not very directly 
 connected with my general purpose, I will turn 
 aside for a moment to consider. 
 
 It will be remembered that the primary object for 
 which these Councils were called together was to 
 ascertain and set forth, with authority, the funda- 
 mental facts and doctrines of the Faith as it had 
 been always held and ought always to be held and 
 taught throughout the whole Church and through- 
 out all time. 
 
 For this purpose, as I have said, the Council of 
 Nice enlarged the first and second Articles of the 
 Creed which was then in general use throughout the 
 whole Church, though differing slightly in its terms 
 and forms. This Council enlarged the first Article 
 so as to make it declare, as against the Gnostics, 
 that God is the one Creator of all things visible and 
 invisible. And the second Article was so enlarged 
 so as to declare against the Arians — the Divinity of 
 Christ, as implied in His Sonship. 
 
 The Council at Constantinople enlarged the third 
 Artcle, with a regard to a Holy Ghost, so as to de- 
 clare against the Macedonians who denied His per- 
 sonality. 
 
 After this, each of the Councils, claiming to be 
 General Councils and acting for the whole Church, 
 
56 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 expressly recognized the Faith or Creed thus set 
 forth as the one Creed that ought to be professed by 
 all Christians. 
 
 But the Council of Ephesus, the next that was 
 held after that of Constantinople, enacted that " no 
 person shall be allowed to bring forward, to write or 
 to compose any other Creed." (Can. vi.) And the 
 Council of Chalcedon repeated and emphasized the 
 same prohibition in their Encyclical letter. They 
 say : " These things having been expressed with 
 the utmost accuracy and attention, the Holy 
 Ecumenical Synod has decreed that it shall not be 
 lawful for any one to bring forward, to write, com- 
 pose or devise, or teach men any other Creed. And 
 those who shall dare to. compose any other Creed, or 
 to bring forward or teach or deliver any other Creed, 
 to those who are desirous of turning to the acknowl- 
 edgement of the truth from heathenism, Judaism or 
 any heresy whatever, if they are Bishops or of the 
 Clergy, shall be deposed, but if they are Monks or 
 Laymen they shall be anathematised" or excommu- 
 nicated. 
 
 VII. I believe I have now quoted all that there is 
 jn these Canons of the General Councils and in the 
 Canons that have been accepted by the Church, 
 that relate to or have any important bearing on the 
 subject before us — The Papal Supremacy or the Pro- 
 vincial system in the Church — except the following 
 passages which I cite from what are called the Apos- 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. t y 
 
 tolic Canons. As I have said, nobody knows when, 
 where, or by whom they were passed, but they were 
 in existence and in force before the council at Nice 
 and are understood to have been recognized as in 
 force by the general Councils under the title " An- 
 cient Customs or Canons." 
 
 I will cite but a few passages from them. 
 
 Canon xiv. forbids any Bishop " to leave his own 
 Parish (Diocese) and pass over into another" to per- 
 form any Episcopal function. 
 
 Can. xxxiv. The Bishops of any nation must 
 acknowledge him who is first among them and ac- 
 cept him as their head and do nothing of conse- 
 quence without his consent. 
 
 The word " nation" here is worthy of notice. It 
 hardly corresponds to any now in use. The word 
 that most nearly corresponds to it is perhaps "race." 
 It is the same word as is translated in the New Tes- 
 tament "Gentiles" as in contrast with Jews. As 
 " the people of Samaria," (Acts viii-9). " All na- 
 tions of men .... to dwell on the face of the earth 
 (Acts xvii 26). 
 
 This and a few other facts and phrases occur- 
 ring in these Canons seem to suggest that the Canons 
 were adopted before the sub-divisions of the Empire 
 into Dioceses to which I have referred, was adopted, 
 or had come into general use. 
 
 The xxxvii. reads " Let there be a meeting of the 
 Bishops twice a year and let them examine among 
 
53 
 
 THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 themselves (or one-another) concerning the doctrines 
 (dogmata) of piety, religion or a godly life (eusebia). 
 and let them settle the ecclesiastical controversies or 
 questions that have arisen. 
 
 The scxxix. Canon reads, " Let not the Presbyters 
 or Deacons do anything without the knowledge (or 
 consent) (gnome) of his Bishop, for he it is who is 
 entrusted with the people of the LoRD, and who 
 must give account of their souls." 
 
 I think we have now before us all of any import- 
 ance, both from the Holy Scriptures and from the 
 Ancient Canon Law of the Church, that bears very 
 directly on the question of Papal Supremecy, 
 
 It will be noticed that I have taken account of those 
 Councils only which have been either recognised 
 as General Councils, or were recognised by the Gen- 
 eral Councils and therefore virtually included among 
 their acts. 
 
 Provincial Councils in the West frequently au- 
 thorized appeals to the Bishops of Rome, not only 
 because that was the imperial See, but also because 
 it was the only one in the west that had been founded 
 by an Apostle, or as was claimed, at a later date, be- 
 cause it had been founded by St. Peter and thus be- 
 came the chair of St. Peter. These Councils and their 
 Canons, however, I have not thought it worth while 
 to notice in this place. The testimonies from the 
 Canons, like that from the Holy Scriptures, is of two 
 kinds. 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. tq 
 
 I. Negative, we find no recognition of the Bish- 
 ops of Rome as in any way, or any sense the suc- 
 cessor of St. Peter; no proof from this source that 
 St. Peter was ever at Rome or that he had any 
 supremacy or superiority over the rest of the Apos- 
 tles or that he gave it to any successor, if he had. 
 
 2. It is affirmative in a two-fold manner, {a) by 
 expressly limiting the Bishops of Rome, as it did 
 those of Antioch and Alexandria, to their own special 
 field. Diocese or Province. This declaration we 
 saw was put forth at Nice and reiterated at nearly 
 all the Councils afterwards {If), by providing that 
 all that the Bishop of Rome, or any other Bishop 
 could do should be done by some other Bishop or 
 Synod — " It is a maxim of Law that in the granting 
 of power and franchise — the mention of one is the 
 exclusion of all others." And it is a principle of com- 
 mon sense as well as the maxim of law. 
 
 The Bishops-of Rome did not attend any one 
 of the General Councils, and therefore had no oppor- 
 tunity, and gave us no opportunity to see or to 
 judge what and how much was implied in " the 
 precedency of honor " that " the Holy Fathers" 
 gave him. And the world has had no opportunity 
 to see any manifestation of it or to judge frofn any- 
 thing besides the mere words that were used in the 
 Canons which I have quoted, what it was and how 
 much it amounted to. 
 
 The Councils did indeed notify him, as they did like- 
 
6o 'THE PAPAL SUPREMACY 
 
 wise all other Metropolitans, of what they had done, 
 but they did not mention him in their resolutions 
 giving the notices. Least of all did they submit 
 their action to him for approval or disapproval. 
 Their language is " each Metropolitan having per- 
 mission to take a copy of the things now transacted for 
 his own security." (Canon Ephesus A. D. 431, viii.) 
 The report of the doings (Canons) at Ephesus was 
 addressed " to the Bishops, Presbyters and Deacons 
 and the people in every Province." No mention of 
 or allusion to the Bishop of Rome whatever. 
 
 It will be observed that I cite these Canons chiefly 
 as testimony and scarcely as authority. They show 
 unquestionably what was. And it will be a matter 
 of doubt and of varying opinions how far they show 
 us what must be in all time to come. 
 
 And they show us beyond a doubt : 
 
 1. That the Bishops of Rome had no Primacy or 
 Supremacy out of the Province or "Diocese" in their 
 
 ■ sense of the word. 
 
 2. That each Province or Nation had its Church 
 with a Synod which was regarded as entirely compe- 
 tent for all the purposes of Doctrine, Discipline or 
 Worship that could come before it or at all arise 
 needing to be settled. 
 
 And yet there was always the most profound re- 
 spect for the authority of the General Councils duly 
 called and properly held. I presume therefore that 
 we have a right to regard this respect and deference 
 
AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH. 6l 
 
 for such authority as always implied and acted upon. 
 In all cases the Councils speak with the utmost re- 
 spect and with the most profound regard for what- 
 ever had been done by such a General Council,whether 
 by General Councils in which the whole Church was 
 represented, or whose Canons and determinations 
 were acquiesced in and accepted by the whole Church ; 
 or, as in the case of " the Apostolic Canons" and the 
 five Provincial Councils,Ancyra, Neocsesarca, Gangra, 
 Antioch and Laodicea, which had been accepted, 
 adopted and ratified by the General Councils. These 
 General Councils, including the 2d and 3d of Con- 
 stantinople, ranged, as we have seen, from A. D. 325 
 to A. D. 630, a period of about three hundred and 
 fifty-five years, and were composed of Bishops as- 
 sembled from all parts of the Church ranging in num- 
 bers from 150 to 680, as follows: Nice A. D. 325, 
 three hundred and eighteen ; 1st, at Constantinople, 
 A. D. 381, one hundred and fifty; Ephesus, A. D. 
 431, two hundred ; Chalcedon, A. D. 451, six hun- 
 dred and thirty; 2d, Constantinople, A. D. 553, one 
 hundred and sixty-five ; 3d, Constantinople, A. D. 
 680, one hundred and seventy. 
 
 If, now, any statement could be cited from a pri- 
 vate authority. Father or heretic, that is contrary or 
 contradictory to the testimonies of these Councils, it 
 can be regarded only as the expression of a private, 
 personal opinion, but I know of none. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 
 
 I think we have seen sufficiently in the two preced- 
 ing chapters that : 
 
 (i) The Holy Scriptures not only furnish no evi- 
 dence of any authority of St. Peter over the rest of 
 the Apostles, and none over the Church, except such 
 as was common to all the Apostles and possessed 
 alike by them all — but also that Our Lord made 
 ample provision for the settlement of all cases and 
 questions that could arise and call for or justify the 
 exercise of Church authority without any interfer- 
 ence of the Bishops of Rome or any other See out- 
 side of the proper Provincial or, at least, Patriarchial 
 jurisdiction that belonged to each one by himself. 
 
 And I think we have found, too, in the Holy 
 Scriptures, the germ of the Provincial system, or a 
 system of National Churches, each totally autono- 
 mous and independent of each and all others, acting 
 separately, and not as General Councils. 
 
 (2) I think, too, that we have most abundant 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 
 
 ^l 
 
 evidence in the Canons of the early Church that 
 there was, neither in fact nor in theory, any Suprem- 
 acy of the Bishops of Rome over the other Patri- 
 archates or National Churches ; and also that most 
 stringent Laws and Canons were passed for the ex- 
 press purpose of preventing any such consolidation 
 or unification of the Patriarchates and National 
 Churches as would inevitably result from the claims 
 that were even then put forth by the Bishops of 
 Antioch, of Alexandria, of Constantinople, and last 
 in the order of time but most pretentious of all — 
 Rome itself. 
 
 Eusebius, who lived at the time of the Council 
 of Nice (A. D. 325), and wrote a history of the 
 Church from its origin to the A. D. 324, and to 
 whom we are indebted more than to all other sources 
 put together for our knowledge of the early history 
 of the Church, says but very little about St. Peter 
 or the Church of Rome. In B., ii., chap, xxv, he 
 speaks of the report that St. Peter was crucified at 
 Rome, and apparently believes it. 
 
 But in chap, i., Book iii., he intimates that but 
 very little is known as to the places where the 
 Apostles preached. " Thomas," he says, " accord- 
 ing to tradition, received Parthia as his allotted re- 
 gion, Andrew received Scythia, John, Asia," (that is 
 the southwest corner of Asia Minor,) " where, after 
 continuing some time, he died at Ephesus. Peter 
 appears to have preached through Pontus, (i. e. the 
 
6^ ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 northeast corner of Asia Minor), to the Jews that 
 were scattered abroad, who also finally came to 
 Rome and was crucified." And then he adds, 
 " Why should we speak of Paul spreading the Gos- 
 pel of Christ from Jerusalem to Illyricum and finally 
 suffering martyrdom at Rome under Nero ?" 
 
 Then, in the next chapter, he says : " After the 
 martyrdom of Paul and Peter," (Paul's name is al- 
 ways mentioned first,) " Linus was the first that re- 
 ceived the Episcopate at Ro.Tie. Paul also men- 
 tioned, in his Epistles from Rome to Timothy, . . 
 . . Eubulus, Pudens, Linus and Claudia." 
 
 And this is all that he knows or, at least, all that 
 he cares to say, of St. Peter that has any bear- 
 ing whatever on our present subject. 
 
 Now, this silence of Eusebius, one to whom, as I 
 stated, we are more indebted than to all other writers 
 for our knowledge of the history of the Church up to 
 the beginning of the fourth century, shows most 
 clearly that he knows nothing of a Primacy, of St. 
 Peter, or any Supremacy of the Bishops of Rome. 
 And he had all the documents befoie him. This 
 omission, if the modern claims are well founded, is 
 something worse than "the Tragedy of Hamlet with 
 the part of Hamlet left out." 
 
 We have seen that the Canons — those of Nice, 
 vi., and those of Ephesus, viii., seem to recognize as 
 already existing certain officers which were after- 
 wards called Exarchs or Patriarchs. The name Ex- 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 
 
 65 
 
 arch, however, does not occur in the Canons until 
 the Council of Chalcedon, A. D. 451. And then in 
 two of its Canons, ix. and xvii., it provides that in all 
 cases of discipline which cannot, for a reason there 
 given, be settled in the Province, appeal may be 
 made to the Exarch or Patriarch, or, as a last resort, 
 to the Bishop of Constantinople, not at all to Rome. 
 
 As we see, there was not only no recognition of the 
 Papal Supremacy, but no provision or allowance for 
 the Bishop of Rome's interfering with any affairs 
 outside of his Province or Diocese, at least, or allow- 
 ing any appeal to him in regard to any matter by 
 any person outside of his recognized jurisdiction, 
 thus circumscribed ; any appeal, I say, for anything 
 more than an opinion, such as might be asked by 
 anybody of any person whom he regarded as wiser 
 than himself, or whose opinion he thought to be 
 worth having. 
 
 And we must remember, that the Bishop of Rome 
 was not the only one of the early Bishops, nor, in 
 fact, the first of them, to make an effort to extend 
 his influence and jurisdiction beyond the proper ter- 
 ritory of his Diocese or Province. The first of the 
 General Councils, that of Nice, A. D. 325, had occa- 
 sion to assert that the " Ancient Canons, or customs" 
 should be allowed to prevail and the Bishops of the 
 ancient Sees, Antioch and Alexandria, are specially 
 mentioned in the warning against extending their 
 claims. 
 
66 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 Rome is mentioned, but from the way in which it 
 is spoken of it would seem that the Bishops of that 
 See had not yet done anything that called for re 
 buke. (See Can. vi.) 
 
 Agafti, in Can. ii. of Constantinople, A. D. 381, 
 the like evil required correcting. And here, too, we 
 have specially the Bishops of Antioch and Al- 
 exandria mentioned by name; but the law is made 
 universal, so as to include " all the Dioceses every- 
 where." And it was this Council that expressly gave 
 the Bishop of Rome, no authority or jurisdiction 
 beyond the " Diocese" of Rome, but a precedency 
 of honor over all others, and next to him, the Bish- 
 op of Constantinople. (Can. iii.) 
 
 At the Council at Ephesus (A. D. 431,) there was 
 still a complaint of the Bishop of Antioch as going 
 beyond his proper sphere, his "Diocese," performing 
 ordinations in Cyprus and the Council not only re- 
 peated the prohibition of the earlier Councils, 
 but it declared that if any regulation contrary to 
 what has now been declared, shall be made, it shall 
 be of no effect. The regulation referred to could, of 
 course, be nothing else or other than some rule, or 
 canon, that might be passed by a Provincial Synod, 
 or what claims to be one. 
 
 But at a later period, say about A. D. 450, 
 the claims of Rome had come into conspicuous no- 
 toriety. Antioch and Alexandria disappeared from 
 the contest, and Rome and Constantinople were now 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 
 
 67 
 
 the two rivals, and virtually they were from this time 
 onward, the only two. 
 
 The first claim of any Bishop of Rome to be suc- 
 cessor of St. Peter and to have any authority over 
 any part of the Church except his own Province of 
 Rome — Rome the city and its suburbs — was put 
 forth by Scricius, who became Bishop of Rome A. 
 D. 384. He issued a " Decree" concerning matters 
 of discipline, to the Church in Spain. This was 
 more than three hundred years after the death of St. 
 Peter. It was about sixty years after the first Gen- 
 eral Council of Nice, just about the time that the 
 Council of Constantinople gave the Bishops of Rome 
 a precedency of honor on account of the dignity of 
 the city, and about sixty years before the rivalry be- 
 tween Rome and Constantinople assumed its final 
 form. 
 
 Doubtless the Fathers often spoke in high terms 
 of the Bishops of Rome, even calling them Popes, 
 and most Holy Popes. But " pope" was then a title 
 that was freely given to any Bishop. And the Bish- 
 ops of Carthage, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch 
 were freely and frequently called Popes, and even 
 " most Holy Popes." 
 
 But what could be the value of the opinion or 
 testimony of any one Father, or even several of 
 them, as either expressing an opinion as to what the 
 statements in Holy Scriptures really meant, or as a 
 statement as to what was the fact in regard to any 
 
68 ORIGiy AND GROWTH OF 
 
 law, custom, or usage of the age, when contrasted 
 with the Canons of the Church which I have quoted ? 
 Here we have at Nice a body of three hundred and 
 eighteen Fathers testifying to the facts in the case. 
 At Constantinople we have one hundred and fifty ; 
 at Ephesus, more than a hundred years after the 
 Council at Nice, we have two hundred, and at Chal- 
 cedon, still later, six hundred and thirty. To a large 
 extent there must have been different men in each 
 of the Councils. They bore testimony to what they 
 knew to be the facts in the case. They legislated in 
 accordance to what they believed to be the meaning 
 of Holy Scripture. And, more than that, they con- 
 stantly assure us that they were legislating in ac- 
 cordance with what had always been held and ob- 
 served in the Church. 
 
 And it will be considered, also, that the first of 
 these Councils, that of Nice, was held only about 
 twelve or fifteen years after the conversion of Con- 
 stantine, and the cessation of persecutions. 
 Many of the " Holy Fathers," therefore, who assem- 
 bled on that occasion, must have had on their bodies 
 the marks of the sufferings they had endured. We 
 are told that some of them had lost a hand, others 
 one of their legs, and others had had one of 
 their eyes put out, or, possibly, their tongues muti- 
 lated. They must have been in earnest and had 
 given proof of their earnestness such as we, in these 
 modern times, have had no occasion to show. 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 
 
 6g 
 
 I. I think it will be well, before we go farther 
 with our general subject, to pause a moment and 
 consider one other point in the matter of the Primi- 
 tive Church organization. We have seen that they 
 knew nothing of any Supremacy or Primacy of the 
 Bishop of Rome over the whole Church, and that 
 they had the Provincial System ; that they attached 
 the utmost importance to it and never doubted for 
 a moment its harmony at least with the divine appoint:' 
 ments and the commands, if, indeed, it were not an 
 undisputable part of those things, which our Lord 
 gave them in charge during the great forty days, for 
 all nations of which they were to make disciples. They 
 certainly do not appear to have had any doubt that 
 the Church would be perpetual. Many of their 
 most explicit and. emphatic commands, or Canons, 
 had for their object nothing else but the perpetua- 
 tion of the system, and the preservation of the 
 independence of each Province, its Bishops and its 
 Synods, from any and all encroachments save and 
 excepting only the appeal in certain cases to the 
 Patriarch of the Diocese or Nation, or, in any neces- 
 sary alternative, to the Bishop of Constantinople. 
 
 But the authors of these Canons had no idea or 
 thought of more than one Church in a Parish, or 
 Province, or Diocese, that could be regarded as 
 legitimate and having right to jurisdiction and the 
 administration of the Sacraments. Or, to put this 
 into the terms of modern use, they had no idea that 
 
70 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 there could be more than one Church in a Diocese, 
 Province, or a Nation, that could be regarded as a 
 legitimate Church or branch of the Church of Christ. 
 
 In the estimation of those early days, the doc- 
 trine of One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism for the 
 remission of sins was not only fundamental, but it 
 seems to have been always uppermost in their 
 minds. Hence, the idea of two or more churches, 
 not in communion, or, at least, with separate organ- 
 izations, in the same community, seems not to have 
 occurred to them. If the people of the place had 
 One Faith there was no reason why they should not 
 have One Baptism and be in One Church or Com- 
 munion. And if they were not so, it was, in their 
 estimation, a clear case of heresy, schism, or anti- 
 Christ, or all of them together, on the part of those 
 who had introduced the heresy, or led off in the 
 secession. 
 
 All these words occur — " schism," or the " separ- 
 ating of themselves," and "anti-Christ" — in Holy 
 Scripture ; and all of them are used to indicate 
 some falling away, or, rather, some form and man- 
 ner of falling away, not only from the truth which 
 was taught in the Church and by its Ministers, but 
 also from the Church itself, though in some cases, 
 as it would appear, those that seceded held the true 
 Faith. 
 
 We rest, then, on the testimony of " the Church" 
 which Christ founded, the Church at large and as one 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 71 
 
 Body acting in its collective capacity. They, or 
 rather it, did allow to the Bishops of Rome a " prece- 
 dency or priority of honor " on account of its " higher 
 principality ;" but no Supremacy or Primacy, even, 
 over the whole Church, on account of St. Peter or 
 on any other account. 
 
 II. I think, then, that we can come to no other 
 conclusion than that the Papal Supremacy not only 
 has no foundation in the Holy Scriptures or the Can- 
 ons and authentic teachings of the early Church, 
 down, at least, to the third Council of Constantino- 
 ple, the sixth of the Universal or General Councils 
 A. D. 680, and the last that has been accepted as 
 Universal, or having the authority of a General 
 Council, by all the branches of the Primitive Church, 
 and that the Church as it then existed, all the 
 branches, Provinces or National Churches that were 
 then in existence were regarded as belonging to, 
 included in, and making up the One Holy Catholic 
 Church of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 And it seems to me, on the other hand, that the 
 Provincial system is very distinctly outlined, set forth, 
 as in practice and provided for, for all time and all 
 nations. 
 
 I have already quoted the famous passage. Matt, 
 xviii. 15-21. It was addressed, doubtless, to " the 
 disciples." But, then, this word may denote all the 
 believers, or only the chosen twelve, who were 
 Apostles. I think we cannot suppose it to have been 
 
-2 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 intended for all believers ; for in that case, any " two 
 or three" of them may organize themselves into a 
 Church not only so as to have the one Lord with them 
 for purposes of prayer and worship, but also extensive 
 powers for discipline, so that whatever they should 
 agree upon, " two or three of them" would have 
 divine authority, "be bound in heaven," and also 
 powers of discipline, so that whoever would not ac- 
 cept their rules " agreed upon " and submit to their 
 discipline, they might excommunicate and cause 
 to be to them as no Christian, but, rather, as 
 " a heathen man and a publican " was to the Jews ; 
 one, in fact, with whom they would have no inter- 
 course. Surely, this interpretation of the passage 
 is too monstrous and absurd to be maintained or ac- 
 cepted by any one. 
 
 In the only other view possible, we must regard 
 the passage as addressed to the Twelve ; and then 
 it becomes the " act of incorporation," so to call it, 
 of the Provincial System. Whenever two or three 
 of the Apostles, or their successors, might be assem- 
 bled for such purposes, there would be a Branch of 
 the Church, competent for all the purposes of de- 
 termining upon the doctrines to be taught and the 
 rules of discipline to be enforced. 
 
 For we must remember that the Apostles were to 
 '.'go into all the world and preach the Gospel to 
 every creature," (Mark xvi. 14,) "to teach all na- 
 tions, baptising them and teaching them to observe, 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 
 
 n 
 
 not only to believe, but to observe all things that He 
 had commanded them." And this mission, or com- 
 mission, was not personal to them and to end with 
 their lives, but the promise was : " I am with you 
 always, even to the end of the world." (Matt, 
 xxviii., 15-19.) 
 
 III. In due time, about A. D. 40, if not before, 
 the Apostles divided and went into different parts 
 of the earth — the Provinces of the Roman Empire. 
 And wherever one of them went he preached, made 
 converts and baptised those who were ready to make 
 a profession of the Faith in Christ, enter into the 
 Covenant, and lead a new life, following the com- 
 mandments of God, their Saviour. We see in the 
 Scriptures, in the cases of Timothy and Titus, at 
 least, others — uninspired men — continuing the Apos- 
 tles' work. If we look beyond the close of the In- 
 spired Volume we find others who had been disciples 
 of the original twelve, or, at least, some one of 
 them, as Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, etc., continu- 
 ing their work, not only of preaching the Gospel, 
 but also of " edifying the Church," by administra- 
 tion of Sacraments and the discipline which was 
 necessary to preserve the correctness of the Faith 
 once delivered to the Saints, and the purity and in- 
 tegrity of the Chuixh which they were building 
 on " the One Foundation, other than which no man 
 can lay." 
 
 How early any "two or three" of them may have 
 
^. ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 begun after the Council of Jerusalem, about A. D. 
 50 (Acts XV.), to form rules or Canons, we do not 
 know. In those days Christianity was a religio 
 ilicita — a religion not allowed to be publicly taught 
 or professed, and for much of the time the Church 
 was under actual persecution. In this state of things 
 the gathering together of only as many as two or 
 three for the purpose of holding a Synod or Coun- 
 cil is not likely to have been an act of much notoriety 
 or of any public record. 
 
 But we have seen that there was a code of Canons 
 or laws — commonly reckoned as eighty-five in num- 
 ber, although the genuinenesss of the last thirty-five 
 is doubted by some persons. I have remarked also 
 that some of the earlier ones, at least, bear marks 
 of having been adopted at a very early date in the 
 history of the Church, and before many of the 
 terms, phrases and usages that occur or are referred 
 to in the Canons of Nice A. D. 325, had come into 
 use. 
 
 At any rate, these Canons, the first fifty of them, 
 are older than the Council of Nice — were even old 
 at that time and recognized as of authority. 
 
 But at the time of the Council of Nice we find 
 the Provincial System in full operation and recog- 
 nized as a system or arrangement that might not be 
 superseded or disturbed. The Council of Chalce- 
 don (A. D. 451, Can. xvii.) went so far in the direc- 
 tion of the perpetuation of the system as to declare 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 75 
 
 that if any change should be made by the civil 
 authorities in the boundaries, or the capitals of the 
 Provinces, the divisions of the Church should not 
 be abolished thereby nor its efficiency in holding 
 Synods or Councils impaired, but, on the other 
 hand, the order of the ecclesiastical Parishes (Dio- 
 ceses in modern phraseology) should follow the 
 political and public forms or boundaries. 
 
 IV. If now we wonder, as well we may, how in 
 spite of all this the power of the Bishop of Rome 
 grew to the pretentious proportions which it 
 had at the time of the Reformation, I will mention 
 what I think may be regarded as the reasons and 
 influences under five distinct heads, though I have no 
 time to to develop them and point out all their force 
 and influence. 
 
 I. The first that I shall mention is the glory and 
 glamour of Rome itself — the city of the world. 
 
 We have seen that the General Councils gave the 
 " precedence of honor," and whatever was implied in 
 it, to the Bishop of Rome, especially on the ground 
 that it was " the imperial city." St. Irensus also 
 refers to this very fact or reason, " its greater prin- 
 cipality:" it was the principal city of the world. 
 
 But this was influence, and not authority, that was 
 given in that way. And on that account Rome was, 
 in the estimate of all the people, of the west at least, 
 the one Empire of the World and the city of Rome 
 was its capital. In their view, in theory if not in 
 
76 
 
 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 fact, the one Emperor who ruled all the World and 
 hence, naturally enough, there grew up the idea that 
 its Bishops should be at the head of all Bishops and 
 have a sort of supervision and jurisdiction over the 
 whole Church. The very name of President or Gov- 
 ernor of a large State like New York or Pennsylva- 
 nia carries more weight than the name of the 
 Governor of a small State like Vermont or Dela- 
 ware. The Bishop of New York or Maryland has 
 no more power, indeed, but much greater influence 
 in the Church at large, than the Bishop of a smaller 
 See, like Easton or western Texas, whatever may 
 be the respective wisdom and worth of the men. 
 
 And such is the world, that this influence goes a 
 great ways ; and is in effect authority to a very 
 large extent in determining questions of opinion or 
 in giving prestige to customs and usages. 
 
 2. I gladly mention, in the second place, the 
 soundness in the faith, and the practical wisdom, the 
 sagacity, and good sense which characterized the 
 early Bishops of Rome. 
 
 As Jerusalem had been the seat of the develop- 
 ment of the religion of the World, Greece its Phil- 
 osophy, so Rome had been the centre of the devel- 
 opment of its practical wisdom. In law and organ- 
 ization, and in fact in everything that pertains to 
 the organization and government of men, Rome 
 was, facile princeps, altogether ahead of the rest of 
 the ancient World. No man had a chance of sue- 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 77 
 
 cess there, except as a fool or a jester, who was not a 
 practically wise and sagacious man. 
 
 So, too, their Bishops. It is true, indeed, that up to 
 about A. D. 600, that is, up to Gregory the Great 
 (A. D. S90), very few of their Bishops, some sixty- 
 five in all, had been Romans by birth and educa- 
 tion. Most of them were Greeks. So far as we 
 know, the first one of them that was a Roman by 
 nature or Roman by descent was Victor, A. D. 190, 
 and he appears to have been born and bred in 
 Africa. Leo (the Great), A. D. 440-461, seems to 
 have been the first of them all, who was thor- 
 oughly a Roman by birth and education, and by the 
 possession of the truly Roman spirit. He was de- 
 scended from a Patrician family and had the true spirit 
 of the city and the people that ruled and were des- 
 tined to rule the world. His deputies, it was, who 
 objected to the xxviii. Canon of the Council of 
 Chalcedon — already referred to — although it was 
 finally accepted afterwards as a part of the Law of 
 the Church Universal, even by the Bishops of Rome 
 themselves. 
 
 And to this add the fact that most of the earlier 
 Bishops of Rome for three hundred years, until the 
 conversion of Constantine, and the famous decree of 
 Milan, A. D. 313, in favor of the toleration of 
 Christianity, some thirty odd in number, had died as 
 martyrs to their faith. 
 
 But as a general rule these Bishops were sound 
 
;8 
 
 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 in the Faith — only one or two of them having 
 favored Pelagianism and other forms of heresy. 
 And they had not only been sound in the faith in 
 the judgment of the Church at large, east as well as 
 west, but they had, moreover, in many cases stood 
 firm when it required a good deal of firmness as 
 well as courage to do so. 
 
 And they were sound and practical in judgment, 
 administered their ofifices well and with good discre- 
 tion and executive ability. In this way, as well as 
 in consequence of the greater dignity of their See, 
 they commanded the respect of the world and ex- 
 erted a widespread influence. 
 
 (3) I name as the third element among the in- 
 fluences that developed the growth of the influence 
 and power of the Bishops of Rome, the state of 
 civil affairs and their usefulness and great benefit to 
 the Christians and the Church generally. 
 
 From the first, the Christians at Rome seem to 
 have been mostly converts from the Jews and the 
 Gentile Greeks. Very few, if any, Roman citizens 
 were included among the members of the Church. 
 Hence the members of the Church, having no status 
 as citizens in the Roman courts, used to appeal to 
 the Bishop. 
 
 Nor was this all. Often it happened that the 
 Bishop could intercede for them with the civil 
 authorities, securing their rights and protecting 
 them against oppression. 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. ijg 
 
 Nor, again, was this all. After the removal of 
 the seat of Empire — by the Emperor himself — first 
 to Milan A. D. 285, and after that to Ravenna, 
 the Bishop of Rome was about the only person or 
 authority left in the city that could protect it and 
 its inhabitants against the foreign enemies — the 
 hordes of barbarians that were seeking to capture 
 and devastate the city. Of this we have several 
 very striking illustrations. Especially on several 
 occasions the Bishop of Rome showed that he had 
 more power and influence in defending the city and 
 the people in it than even the Roman Army itself. 
 See notably the case of Leo and Attila. 
 
 (4) Once more. After the conversion of Con- 
 stantine and the beginning of the interference of 
 the Civil Powers in the affairs of the Church, with 
 the pretence, not now of persecution, but rather as 
 a matter of friendship and favor, it became common 
 for any party, especially in the East, whom the Em- 
 peror would not favor, to appeal to the Bishop of 
 Rome. He was too influential to be neglected by 
 any one who would continue to wield the sceptre, 
 and while it is to be considered, and gladly do we 
 concede the fact that the decisions were, for the 
 most part in accordance with justice and right, 
 they did always conduce to the growth of the Papal 
 influence. And we soon find the Bishops of Rome 
 claiming this right to be appealed to from all parts 
 of the Church. 
 
So ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 (S; But, finally, I feel obliged to mention another 
 influence and one which was in some respects the 
 most influential of all, and one which we cannot but 
 condemn as almost unprecedented in its infamy. I 
 refer to what are now known as the " forged De- 
 cretals." 
 
 As early as A. D. 419, a Bishop of Rome, Boni- 
 face I., A. D. 418-422, had claimed the right to hear 
 appeals from any part of the Church and sent to 
 Carthage for the purpose of interfering with their 
 affairs. He claimed, or his messengers did for him, 
 certain Canons which, as they afifirmed, had been 
 passed at the Council of Nice A. D. 325. But on 
 investigation it was found that there were no such 
 Canons passed at the Council of Nice, and, of 
 course, therefore, they were forgeries when claimed 
 to have been passed at that Council. 
 
 As another instance of the tricks and frauds in- 
 vented by the advocates of the Papal Supremacy, I 
 cite the case of Nicholas I. (A. D. 858-867.) He 
 made an attempt to corrupt the reading of the 
 Canon xvii. of Chalcedon so that it should give him 
 the supremacy and right to appeal from the Whole 
 Church. The Canon, as already cited, provides that 
 in cases of controversy or dispute where the Metro- 
 politan — the Archbishop of the Province — was in- 
 volved so that neither he nor the Synod in the Prov- 
 ince could be expected to do justice, there might be 
 an appeal to the Exarch (Patriarch) " of the Diocese." 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 8 1 
 
 But Nicholas proposed to make it read " the Patri- 
 arch of the Dioces^J — in the plural. It was well 
 understood that each of the thirteen Dioceses had, in 
 fact, the right to have a Patriarch of its own. 
 But the Patriarch of the Dioces^j — the one Patri- 
 arch over them all, who could he be ? Of course, 
 the Canon settled the matter. " If there was any- 
 one such Patriarch, it was the Bishop of Constanti- 
 nople." But he of Rome claimed the position for 
 himself. 
 
 This version of the 'matter, involving as it did a 
 forgerj' — that is, a conscious and intentional change 
 of the text of the Canon for a purpose — the Pope 
 Nicholas sent to the Eastern Ernperor, to Charles 
 the First, King and Emperor, (by title,) of the West 
 and to the Bishops of France — who were at this 
 time, as they had been for a long time, claiming to 
 have a Patriarch of their own and for " the Diocese 
 of France." 
 
 It is both impossible and undesirable to go into 
 details in this place and show all the special acts of 
 fraud and forgery. 
 
 This document, or these documents, are usually 
 called the " forged Decretals." As decretals they are, 
 a large part of them, or rather pretend to be, records 
 and accounts of some decree or decision of a ques- 
 tion by the Bishop of Rome, which not only shows, 
 or rather would if it were genuine, show what the 
 Pope had done, or had been accustomed to do, and 
 
82 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OP 
 
 thus serve as a precedent for the future. And they 
 would thus show that the Pope was therein acknowl- 
 edged to have the right and power thus to interfere 
 as Pastor of the Pastors — Patriarch of Patriarchs — 
 of the whole Church, and in each and all of its parts. 
 
 The Decretals are in six books. The last of the 
 six was added by Boniface VIII. about 1298. But 
 no genuine Decretals have been discovered that were 
 issued earlier than those that were issued 
 by Siricius, who became Pope in A. D. 385. 
 The pretended decrees of an earler date — that is, the 
 forgeries — began to be extensively used in the ninth 
 century A. D. 858-867 — when Nicholas I., as we 
 have seen, tried Ito impose a forgery or forged read- 
 ing of the xviith Canon of Chalcedon on the whole 
 Church. 
 
 The forgeries thus palmed off on the Church, 
 claimed to be genuine copies of the Decretals from 
 the very first days of the Church's existence at 
 Rome, assigning the first to Clement, who was 
 Bishop of Rome from A. D. 91 to A. D. 100. 
 
 It is now known that these Decretals were in- 
 vented — or, at least, published — by a Bishop who 
 lived in Spain in the sixth century, and they were 
 issued by him under the assumed name of Isidore. 
 They were extensively used and with great effect at 
 the time, but are now universally ' acknowledged to 
 have been forgeries. 
 
 The fraud, I say, is now universally acknowledged. 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 
 
 83 
 
 But the Romanists show no disposition to give up 
 what they gained by it. Judas returned the " thirty 
 pieces of silver," Peter repented and was restored. 
 But the Bishops of Rome and their advocates do 
 not seem inclined either to repent or restore what 
 tliey gained by these false pretenses. 
 
 I can well believe, and am glad to hope and be- 
 lieve, that in those days of ignorance and the utter 
 lack of knowledge and criticism, many who used 
 these forged documents did it in good faith and 
 without the slightest suspicion of their real char- 
 acter. And this concession may extend even to the 
 Popes themselves — at least some of them. 
 
 And yet, at a still later date, these frauds have been 
 continued — or, rather, new ones have been attempted. 
 Jeremy Taylor, in his " Dissuasive from Popery" (B. 
 i.. Sec. vi.,) has shown that as late as the fifteenth 
 and sixteeth centuries more than one deliberate at- 
 tempt has been made by the writers and other 
 authorities in the Roman Obedience, to corrupt the 
 works of the genuine Fathers so as to make them 
 teach the supremacy of the Bishops of Rome and 
 the peculiarities of the Romanish doctrines. 
 
 One example is all that I can find room for in 
 this connection. In St. Cyprian's treatise on " The 
 Unity of the Church" (died A. D. 258,) they have 
 introduced, within a few lines, corruptions which I 
 will indicate in my quotation by putting them in 
 brackets and also in italics. " And again He says 
 
84 
 
 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 to the same after his resurrection, ' feed my sheep.' " 
 \Upon Him, being one. He builds His Church and 
 commits his sheep to be fed.^ And although to all 
 the Apostles after His resurrection He gives an 
 equal power and says : ' As My Father hath sent 
 Me, even so send I you, receive ye the Holy Ghost ; 
 whosoever sins ye remit they are remitted unto 
 them,' yet that He might set forth unity He arranged 
 by his authority the origin of that unity as begin- 
 ning from one. Assuredly the rest of the Apostles 
 were also, the same as Peter, endowed with a like 
 partnership, both of honor and of power ; but the 
 beginning proceeds from one, [^and the primacy is 
 given to Peter that there might be shown to be but one 
 Church of Christ and one See ; and they are all Shep- 
 herds and the Flock is one which is fed by all the 
 Apostles with unanimous consent,'] which one Christ, 
 also the Holy Spirit, in the song of songs, says. 
 . . . . Does he who does not hold this unity of 
 the Church think that he holds the Faith ? Does 
 he who strives against and resists the Church, [who 
 deserts the chair of Peter on whom the Church is 
 founded^ trust that he is in the Church," etc., etc. 
 
 This one extract with the interpolations will serve 
 to show that the attempts at fraud were not all con- 
 fined to the earlier stages of the strife. 
 
 "V. But the Papal usurpations were not an un- 
 mixed evil. Or rather, like all the evils that occur 
 in the world, God used it for His purposes and over- 
 ruled it for good. 
 
THE rAFAL HUFKEMACY. 
 
 85 
 
 All through the Middle Ages, from the downfall 
 of Rome itself, A. D. 476, there was a state of 
 almost unparalleled barbarism and disorder through- 
 out Europe. The civil authorities were not only 
 hostile to each other, but they were only too often 
 inclined to use the Church, its funds, its offices — 
 especially its Bishops — to promote their ambitious, 
 sometimes their most unrighteous, schemes. The 
 Bishops of Rome, availing themselves of the in- 
 fluence they had acquired, had but too often oc- 
 casion to interfere. This interference was for the 
 most part in the direction of protecting the Bishops 
 and other Clergy against secular interference in the 
 performance of their duties. Doubtless the Bishops 
 of Rome had, for the most part, an eye to their own 
 aggrandizement and the aggrandizement of their 
 See. But, on the whole, their influence was in favor 
 of Christianity, the proper performance of the 
 Christian duties, as they were then understood, of 
 the Bishops and Clergy, and the promotion of civil- 
 ization. In fact, one does not readily see how the 
 Church, Christianity, or even the Scriptures, could 
 have been preserved through that dark period with- 
 out the exercise of this Papal authority. 
 
 To my mind, the case is strikingly analgous to 
 the history of the Hebrew people. In the Penta- 
 teuch, (Deut. xxiii., 14-20,) Moses warned them of 
 the dangers that attended a monarchy in somewhat 
 impressive terms. And then when they asked for a 
 
g5 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 King, Samuel the Prophet warned them against it 
 (i. Sam. viii., 6 and following). But one was selected, 
 and we can now hardly see or imagine how the 
 nation could have been perpetuated without the'Kihgs 
 from Saul to Rehoboam, or protected against insur- 
 rections within and the encroachment of enemies 
 without and around them. 
 
 But the Kings, from Solomon, at least, became one 
 among the chief influences in promoting the 
 decay of true religion and the introduction of 
 false religion, idolatry, and general depravity and 
 corruption of morals, until in B. C. 725 we have the 
 ten tribes carried away by Shalamaneser, and in a 
 few generations more (B. C. 586) the other ten 
 tribes, the kingdom of Judah were carried to Bab- 
 ylon. The Jews in their Babylonish captivity repent, 
 ed of their sins and were restored. But the ten 
 tribes were never restored. They constitute " the 
 Dispersion" and their only chance or hope as it 
 would seem, is "after the fulness of the Gentiles be- 
 come in." (Rom. xi., 25.) 
 
 The Jews who were allowed to return from their 
 Babylonish Captivity, rebuild Jerusalen and the 
 Temple and restore their worship, never sought or 
 desired to restore the Kingship. 
 
 Nevertheless, I regard the assumptions of the 
 Bishop of Rome as being in themselves an 
 evil. But the times were evil ; and events in 
 this world require remedies that are themselves evils 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 8/ 
 
 — only the least of evils, one or the other of 
 which is inevitable. Medicines are evils ; but it often 
 happens that a powerful drug which is a deadly 
 poison saves a human life. We cannot, however, 
 make that drug the ordinary food when the disease 
 is gone, for men who are in health. The thick clothes 
 of winter are necessary during the winter; but 
 nobody wants to wear them in the heat of summer. 
 
 I do not mean to be understood, by this, as 
 sanctioning the doctrine that " the end sanctified 
 the means." There seem to be some evils in this 
 world out of which there is no way but by another 
 evil. When in the course of history God finds 
 something that needs to be done. He always finds 
 some one who has no " conscientious scruples" 
 against doing it. The treachery of Judas,and the weak- 
 ness of Pontius Pilate are alike necessary to the 
 accomplishment of that Event, on which the for- 
 giveness of sins and the salvation of mankind de- 
 pend. 
 
 For various reasons, Constantinople was unsuccess- 
 ful in the contest with Rome, and finally the ri- 
 valry which began in A. D.451, ended in a final sep- 
 aration. Other points of difference and disagreement 
 between the two great divisions of the Church, the 
 East and the West, besides the claim to Supremacy, 
 were under discussion and exerted more or less of 
 influence. But the Supremacy claimed for the Bish- 
 op of Rome, not only over Constantinople, but also 
 
83 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 over all the other Churches of the East, was the turn- 
 ing and controlling point. The East would not yield, 
 and so the final separation ensued. 
 
 At the time of the separation of " the East and the 
 West," " the East," which, if it did not adhere to Con- 
 stantinople, did agree with it in rejecting the Rom- 
 ish claim, was much the largest part of the Church. 
 Constantinople was much nearer the centre of Crist- 
 endom ; and although we have no means of deter- 
 mining the number very correctly," the East," prob- 
 ably, contained not less than two thirds of the peo- 
 ple who had embraced Christianity, and had at 
 that time by far the largest amount of the scholar- 
 ship and other means of influence that was then in- 
 cluded in the Church.- 
 
 And the Bishops of Rome succeeded only in the 
 West, and we are in a measure familiar with the 
 result. The Bishops of Constantinople did not suc- 
 ceed in establishing any such supremacy and control 
 in the East, and the East, as it was known when 
 the contest first made its appearance, was over-run by 
 Mahomedans and remains what we see it to be now. 
 Russia was not at that time known as a part of the 
 Church ; its millions of inhabitants had not been 
 converted to the Faith and have never submitted to 
 Rome. 
 
 Of course, what was then included in the East never 
 submitted to the Papal claims, and it never fell into 
 the peculiarities of the Church in the West which 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY, 
 
 89 
 
 called for the Reformation in the sixteenth century. 
 The East included all that was left of the Church in 
 Africa, Egypt and Absynia, in Europe east of the 
 Adriatic Sea, including ancient Greece, Turkey in 
 Europe, and Russia, with all of Asia from the Medi- 
 terrean Sea to India, including Armenia and Persia 
 down the great rivers Euphrates and Tigris to the 
 Persian Gulf. 
 
 VI. It may be said, and I believe it is commonly 
 maintained by the adherents of the Roman Suprem- 
 acy, as it is at the present day and has been grow- 
 ing to be ever since the first centuries, that it is but 
 a development or evolution of germs that were con- 
 tained in the Primitive Church, if not in the original 
 grant to St. Peter, (Matt, xvi., 16,) and especially in 
 the subsequent charge given to him at his restora- 
 tion — " feed my lambs, feed my sheep." (John xxi., 
 16-18.) 
 
 Evolution or development must be from within 
 and of that which was contained within. If we 
 had only the negative evidence, that is, the absence 
 of evidence to which I have referred, this view 
 might possibly be maintained. 
 
 But we find that our Lord, before his sufferings 
 on Calvary, had many things to say unto the Twelve, 
 which they were not even then ready to receive. 
 He talked with them during " the great forty days " 
 of things pertaining "to the Kingdom." But even 
 then there were some things — perhaps we 
 
90 
 
 ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
 
 ought to say many things — which they did not fully 
 understand. And we see one such question of the 
 very greatest importance, for which, as we have 
 seen, the Apostles, Elders and Brethren came to- 
 gether^ "to consider the matter." There was no 
 reference of it to the supposed " Chair of St. Peter." 
 
 But evolution or development must be of that 
 and from that which is already within the original 
 institution. It cannot be in contravention of any- 
 thing that was thus contained or taught. 
 
 And here our positive testimony comes to our 
 aid. The fact that St. Paul was not a whit behind 
 the very highest of the Apostles and had daily the 
 care of all the Churches, leaves no room for the 
 Supremacy of St. Peter, to say nothing of the 
 equality of the Apostles in power and authority, one 
 to another, which, as we have seen, was given to 
 them in express terms and in the most explicit 
 manner. (St. Matt, xviii., i8, St. Mark xvi., 15, St. 
 Luke xxii., 28—31, St. John xx., 21-24.) 
 
 Thus each of the Evanglists makes mention, 
 though in different ways and in different terms, of 
 the commission to the Apostles to go preach the 
 Gospel, and build the Church. Yet no one of them 
 uses terms that impliy any superiority of any one 
 of them over the others. And St. Luke, in another 
 place, (Acts xiii., 47,) represents St. Paul as saying : 
 " For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I 
 have set thee to be a light unto the Gentiles, that 
 
THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. gi 
 
 tJiou (St. Paul) shouldest be for Salvation unto the 
 ends of the Earth." And yet all the Apostles had 
 part in this work. 
 
 Now, when there is one provision for all the work 
 that is to be done and all the authority that is to be 
 exercised, there is of necessity the exclusion of all 
 others. This I regard as naturally positive testi- 
 mony against the claims for St. Peter. 
 
 I regard the claim to infallibility as a confession of 
 weakness and an indication of decay. Nobody in this 
 last half of the nineteenth century would put forth 
 such a claim unless he was conscious of putting forth 
 claims, and holding and teaching doctrines that can- 
 not be sustained by an appeal to Holy Scripture or 
 any exercise of sound reason. And the fact that 
 the Supremacy was useful or necessary in the past 
 ages of darkness and barbarism, is no reason why it 
 should be perpetuated through all ages to come. 
 
 And doubtless it will pass away in God's own 
 good time, when it has accomplished the purpose for 
 which He raised it up, or rather permitted it to rise, 
 shall have been accomplished. 
 
 But that time has not come yet. No one of the 
 Nations that have submitted to it, as France, Ger- 
 many, Portugal and Spain has yet seen the time 
 when the Church in those countries could assert its 
 independence as did the Church of England in the 
 sixteenth century as we shall see in the next chapter, 
 at length. 
 
92 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 
 
 Nor are the people who acknowledge that Su- 
 premacy in this country yet prepared to do without 
 it. That people have not been trained for so much 
 religious freedom as such a rejection implies. And 
 one must be strangely blind not to see how much 
 restraint, in a moral and social point of view, their 
 Priesthood are capable of exercising by their belief 
 in this mediaeval figment. 
 
 There are times and occasions when, and persons 
 with whom, superstition is more effective as a means 
 of controlling men than the truth itself. Nay, 
 it is sometimes effective when even the sword of 
 the magistrate is powerless. Error and heresy have 
 had their martyrs as well as the truth itself. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM IN ENGLAND. 
 
 While, then, we cannot regard the Papal Suprem- 
 acy with the infallibility of the Pope, or without it, as a 
 development of any principle or germ that was con- 
 tained in the Primitive Christianity, I think that 
 we must regard the Provincial System as hut a 
 legitimate, not to say inevitable, development of 
 principles that were taught by our Lord Himself, 
 of germs of which He and His Apostles embedded in 
 the very substance of Christianity. 
 
 He sent them to preach the Gospel to all nations, 
 and promised to be v/ith them always, even unto the 
 end of the world. He not only gave them charge 
 and authority to make converts in all these nations 
 and throughout all time, but also to teach them to 
 observe all things whatsoever he had commanded. 
 He also gave to any " two or three of them" that 
 might be gathered in His name, in any nation or 
 Province, even when they could not all be assembled 
 in a Council as at Jerusalem, power to hear and 
 
94 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 determine causes that might arise, with authority 
 that should be binding and final, so far as any au- 
 thority of earth or on earth should be concerned. "It 
 shall be bound in Heaven," are His own expressive 
 and em*phatic words. 
 
 I. But what is a " nation " — for they were to 
 preach to all nations ? And what is a Province — 
 how large a part of a " nation ?" 
 
 Of course, our Lord never marked out nor recog- 
 nized any subdivisions of the earth's surface in such 
 a way as to give it special sanction or to make its 
 perpetuation a matter of necessity or of Christian 
 obligation. He left that to the course of events or, 
 rather, to the course of that Providence working in 
 historic events, "who hath made all nations to dwell 
 on all the face of the earth and hath determined the 
 times before appointed and the bounds of their hab- 
 itation." (Acts xvii., 26.) 
 
 But we have seen that the Primitive Church did 
 not only recognize, but also developed, this system. 
 They divided the Catholic Church, or rather recog- 
 nized its division into Provinces in accordance with 
 the political divisions of the State — made the chief 
 city, or seat of government, of each Province the 
 seat or See of its Primate, Metropolitan or Chief 
 Bishop. And they also made him, with his coad- 
 jutors, the ultimate power on earth for arranging 
 and managing all matters of detail and discipline 
 under, doubtless, the supreme authority of Holy 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 9S 
 
 Scriptures and the superior authority of a General 
 Council, which represented, in fact, not only the 
 body of "the Apostles, Elders and Brothers" as at 
 Jerusalem, but also the body of their successors in 
 all that was permanent and transmissible in their 
 office through all the world and through all the suc- 
 ceeding ages of worldly time. 
 
 Nor is this all. The early Councils, as we have 
 seen, provided for changes in the boundaries of 
 their " Provinces " in the ecclesiastical, so as to make 
 them conform to all the changes and divisions of 
 what were called Provinces in the civil or political 
 use of the word. (Chalcedon xvii.) 
 
 How far this law of the early Church is obligatory 
 on us or binding for all time, is a question that I 
 will not raise nor discuss in this connection. It is, 
 at any rate, a safe precedent and involves a principle 
 which, as I think, is to some extent and in some 
 form inevitable in these modern times and when there 
 is no union of Church and State, as well as in all 
 former times when such union existed in some form 
 or other. Some of our duties to "the laws of the 
 land " and to " those that are in authority " were 
 sure to make some such principle a matter of neces- 
 sity. 
 
 But think what we m.ay and say what we will 
 about the Provincial System as having been contem- 
 plated and provided for in the words used by our 
 Lord in the passages of Holy Scripture which I 
 
96 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 have quoted, there can be no doubt that the Primi- 
 tive Church in the first centuries of its existence did 
 develop it and distinctly recognize it as the proper 
 outgrowth of what our Lord said, even if it were not 
 the distinct and definite thing that He intended. Nor 
 can there be any doubt of Its necessity as a means 
 of carrying on the work he gave to them in convert- 
 ing the nations and establishing His Church through- 
 out the whole world. 
 
 The men for whom He died, who were to be con- 
 verted, resided so far apart that they must have some 
 means of settling minor questions that should arise 
 near at hand, even in their very midst. They were 
 of different languages, and must have the Scrip- 
 tures translated into the tongues that were vernacular 
 to them. They must also have some details in 
 their mode of worship and administering the Sacra- 
 ments provided for them. They would each of them 
 have some questions with regard to the mode of life 
 to be settled that were peculiar to themselves. In 
 short, they would need just what every Church and 
 every sect or denomination find necessary for them- 
 selves in the rules of dicipline which, in whatever 
 form and by whatever name they may be called, 
 they provide for and pass in their " Synods," " Coun- 
 cils," "Diets," "Presbyteries," "General Assemblies" 
 or " Conferences," by whatever name they are called, 
 such as all of them hold at times for the very pur- 
 pose which our Lord seems to have had in mind 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 97 
 
 when He uttered the words I have so often quoted 
 in this connection. 
 
 And they all hold these acts of theirs to be author- 
 ity also. If any member " offends " against any one 
 of themselves or against their rules they do not hesi- 
 tate to subject to " discipline," and, even, to 
 " excommunication " those whom they find incor- 
 rigible. They act as though they believed that 
 whatever they bind on earth will be bound in heaven 
 and whatsoever they shall loose on earth shall be 
 loosed in heaven. 
 
 The words "in heaven" I should be disposed to 
 understand or read "the Church," which is, in a 
 sense, "the Kingdom Heaven." And for "loose," 
 I think we may well believe that what is meant, is 
 any relaxation of a mere matter of detail that was 
 used and practiced at an earlier day, perhaps in the 
 very times of our Lord and His_ Apostles them- 
 selves. 
 
 We have, in fact, many details that fairly come 
 under this head as the mode and form of adminis- 
 tering Baptism, whether by immersion or affusion, 
 the annointing of the sick with oil, and many other 
 such like things relating to the mere manner of 
 worship and the administration of the Sacraments, 
 which may be changed so long as we leave the sub- 
 stance untouched. 
 
 II. But to return from this somewhat prolonged 
 digression. I shall assume that we have seen enough 
 
98 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 to satisfy us that the Provincial System, if not dis- 
 tinctly and directly ordained and provided for by 
 our Lord Himself, was yet developed by the Primi 
 tive Church in conformity with what they believed 
 had He taught, and without in any respect, whether 
 of principle or detail, violating the instructions He 
 gave or going contrary to the words He used and 
 the institutions He ordained. 
 
 We have seen that at the time of the General 
 Councils the Roman Empire consisted of some one 
 hundred and twenty Provinces, besides Missionary 
 work outside of the Empire, as is seen by the xxviii. 
 Canon of Chalcedon. It is also supposed that there 
 were about two thousand Bishops in the Church at 
 that time and, therefore, there were an average of 
 about sixteen Bishops to a Province. In many of 
 them there can be no doubt that the number was 
 much larger. But in the least and smallest of them 
 there must have been, at least, "two or three," as 
 specified in our Lord's declaration and as provided 
 for in order that any Bishop could be ordained, by 
 first of the Apostolic Canons. And the number 
 was raised to three, at least, by the ivth Canon of 
 Nice. The phraseology of the Canon, however, im- 
 plies that there was at that time no Province in 
 which there was not that number. 
 
 But to come nearer to our own times and to the 
 more immediately practical purpose of this Essay. 
 
 England, at the time of the Councils, was a Dio- 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 99 
 
 cese, and had five Provinces in the political sense, 
 and for the purpose of its civil administration. But 
 there seems to have been only three ecclesiastical 
 Provinces, with three Metropolitical Sees, namely, 
 York, London and Caerleon (in Wales). 
 
 We do not know precisely when or by whom 
 Christianity was first preached in England. It is in 
 this respect like the great majority of the Provinces 
 which were then in the Roman Empire ; like Carth- 
 age and Alexandria, like the South of France, like 
 Rome itself, and, in fact, the whole of the East beyond 
 Antioch and Jerusalem. 
 
 After the Council at Jerusalem, we know almost 
 nothing of the doings and teachings of St. Peter 
 himself, except as we have it from writers who lived 
 many years after the close of his life. It is true 
 that he wrote an Epistle to " the strangers '' in the 
 northern portion of Asia Minor on the shores of the 
 Black Sea. But then, it was to the " Dispersion," 
 that is, the Jews who were scattered abroad through 
 those regions. And the fact of his having written 
 a letter to them does not prove that he had ever 
 been among them. St. Paul had not been at Rome 
 when he wrote his letter to the Romans. And the 
 work of preaching the Gospels and establishing the 
 Church among the Jews had been given to St. Peter, 
 as the like work and responsibility with regard to 
 the Gentiles had been given to St. Paul. (Gal. ii., 
 7-9, 2 Cor. xi., 28.) And St. Peter appears to have 
 
100 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 written the Epistle from Babylon, which was far 
 down on the Euphrates towards the Persian Gulf. 
 And this seems to me better proof that he was there 
 when this Epistle was written A. D. 60 or later, than 
 we have that he was ever at Rome at all. 
 
 But the Church of England, or rather the Church 
 in England, was fully organized and had three of its 
 Bishops, one from each of the Metropolitan Sees 
 named above, London, York and Caerleon, at the 
 Council of Aries in the South of France, which 
 met A. D. 314, eleven years before the Council of 
 Nice, in the northwestern corner of Asia Minor. 
 And St. Athanasius says there were Bishops from 
 England at the Council of Nice, though that part of 
 the list of those who attended, in which the names 
 should appear, is lost. 
 
 But in A. D. 358, St. Hilary, Bishop of Poictiers, 
 in the middle of France, addressed a letter to the 
 Christians in all the Provinces north of Spain and 
 west of Germany (which was not converted at that 
 time), over which he claimed a sort of Patriarchal 
 jurisdiction. In this letter he speaks of the Prov- 
 inces of Britain and includes their Bishops in his 
 address, " Entreaty for peace and union," as he 
 calls it. 
 
 About this time the invasion of the Saxons — who 
 were yet unconverted heathen — became so trouble- 
 some to the Christians in Great Britain that we hear 
 nothing more of them as attending the General 
 Councils we have mentioned above. 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 lOI 
 
 The Saxon conquest was accomplished in the sixth 
 century (A. D. 477-547). Up to this time there 
 had been no knowledge or recognition of any Su- 
 premacy or authority of the Bishop of Rome in or 
 over the Church in England in any of its Provinces. 
 
 III. But after the Saxon conquest a holy and 
 earnest Christian man saw some beautiful youths of 
 the Saxon race in Rome and was prompted to inquire 
 who they were and from what part of the world 
 they had been brought, for they were slaves. He 
 learned that they were Angles — or Saxons — and 
 from the Island of England. He determined to go 
 as a Missionary to that people, and actually started 
 on his journey when he was called back to be Bishop 
 of Rome as Gregory the Great. 
 
 Gregory, however, does not seem to have forgotten 
 his zeal for the conversion of these heathen people 
 in the glory and cares of his episcopate. And in A. 
 D. 596 he sent Augustine (not the great Augus- 
 tine of Hippo) to undertake the work he had thus 
 been prevented from prosecuting in person. 
 
 Augustine, on his arrival, found a survival of the 
 ancient British Church, r.nd found, too, apparently 
 to his surprise, that it differed in some respects from 
 the ritual and forms to which he had been accus- 
 tomed at Rome. He called a Council of those 
 Bishops whom he found there, to discuss these 
 matters in which the two Churches had been found 
 to differ, and asked them to conform to the Romanist 
 v/ays. 
 
102 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 And in regard to the day on which Easter should 
 be kept, he had the right and law on his side. For 
 the Council of Nice had decided that Easter should 
 be kept on the Sunday, the actual day of the week 
 of our Lord's Resurrection, rather than on the four- 
 teeth day of the month, whatever the day of the 
 week it might happen to be. 
 
 But as to any Supremancy or authority of the 
 Bishop of Rome over the Church of England or the 
 Christians in the British Islands, the reply as 
 given by Dinott, Abbot of Bangor, is explicit : " Be 
 it known to you, beyond a doubt, that we are all 
 and each one of us obedient and subject to the 
 Church of God and the Pope of Rome, and to every 
 other true and pious Christian, to the extent of 
 loving each of them in word or deed as the sons of 
 God; but other obedience than this we do not 
 know to be justly claimed and proved to be due to 
 him whom you call Father of the Fathers " — a title 
 which he had given the Pope. "And this obedience 
 we are willing to give and perform to him and to 
 every other Christian continually. But for anything 
 further we are under the jurisdiction of the Bishop 
 of Caerleon on Uske, who is under God to take the 
 oversight of us and make us pursue a spiritual life.", 
 
 We have seen that this Caerleon was the seat of 
 one of the three Provinces in the Church of Eng- 
 land before the Saxon conquest. One of its Bishops 
 was at the Council of Aries, A. D. 314. And one 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 103 
 
 of them was addressed by St.. Hilary, A. D. 359, in 
 his Eirenicum. The Province in the civil division 
 was called Britania Secmida and included all west of 
 the river Severn in a line up north from the mouth 
 of that river as it enters the British Channel, to 
 Liverpool. It had, at least, five Bishops who were 
 present on this occasion and, therefore, enough to 
 comply with our Lord's direction, " two or three," 
 and with all the Canons of the Primitive Church in 
 regard to the holding Provincial Councils. 
 
 V. We have then three centres of Missionary 
 or Church operation in England, for the century or 
 more following (i) the Church in Wales, which never 
 ceased its existence or its work; (2) the Church in 
 the Province of York, which was never altogether 
 overrun and conquered by the Saxons ; and (3) the 
 Province of London or Canterbury in the southeast 
 part of the Island. This was especially the seat and 
 scene of the Missionary efforts of Augustine and 
 his successor until after, by the united efforts of all 
 these Provinces, all England had been brought to 
 confession of Christ. 
 
 The complete union of the two or, rather, three 
 communions of the rival churches, including the 
 Celtic and Pictish, with that founded by Augustine 
 — that is, the Welch, the Irish and the Scotch — as 
 well as a large part of the north of England, was 
 not finally effected until A. D. 1135-50. 
 
 IV. But, in A. D. 1066, William, the Duke of 
 
I04 "^^^ PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 Normandy, which was the northwest corner of France, 
 undertook the conquest of England. It is under- 
 stood that he did this in conjunction and with the 
 approval, if not the co-operation, of the Bishop of 
 Rome, Tyho was at that time Alexander II. At all 
 events, they helped each other. The Pope helped 
 the invader to gain, and especially to retain, the 
 crown ; and the King, in return, helped the Pope to 
 extend his authority and influence in England over 
 the English Church. 
 
 From this time, A. D. 1066, to the reign of Henry 
 VIII., A. D. 1509, the two forces co-operated. And, 
 we may add, that notwithstanding the occasional 
 controversies and conflicts between the two. Kings 
 and Pope, neither one of them could have kept his 
 place and position over the Church and people with- 
 out the help of the other. 
 
 But, although the Papal influence in England was 
 an assumption and a tyranny, it was not wholly an 
 evil or, rather, it was one of those necessary evils 
 which we find everywhere in the world. Where there 
 is evil to be cured or dealt with, whether it be dis- 
 eases of the body or sins of the soul, they are evils, 
 and remedies which they require, for any effectual 
 treatment and cure, are of the nature of evils also. 
 Lesser evils are often the only means to avoid or 
 cure greater ones. 
 
 Tyranny was the characteristic of the age. It 
 was the only cure for the worse evil of anarchy and 
 
IN ENGLAND. 105 
 
 total lawlessness. In the State, there could be no 
 order or law without it. In the Church, there could 
 be no administration of the worship and Sacraments, 
 and more especially no enforcement of a Godly life 
 without it. In the East, tyranny in the State there 
 was in abundance. But in the Church — including 
 the three Eastern Patriarchates, Antioch, Alexandria 
 and Constantinople — there was none, or none, at 
 least, that could cope with and resist the tyranny of 
 the State and the corrupt tendencies of the human 
 heart, " the fault and corruption of every man which 
 doth remain, yea, in them that are regenerate," even 
 unto the end of their lives. And we see in the 
 history and present condition of the Eastern 
 Churches the consequence. 
 
 But in the West, in Rome, there was that which 
 arose to meet the emergencies of the times. The idea 
 of rule and ruling the whole world and all the men 
 that were in it, was a fundamental element in the 
 truly Roman character. It was as much an instinct 
 —unconscious, perhaps, but controlling in its nature 
 — as that of the wildcat or the tiger that prowls to 
 catch its prey, or the fish that swim in the sea. 
 
 The first truly Roman Bishop had (Victor A. D. 
 190-202) it in his veins ; the second, who was still 
 more thoroughly Roman in his nature and education, 
 (Leo A. D. 440-461,) made it conspicuous; the 
 glorious and holy Gregory the Great (A. D. 590-604) 
 was not without it. And from his time onward the 
 
I06 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 idea that Rome must assume and control the Chris- 
 tianity that was in the world or to be in the world — 
 the western part, at least, — was never lost sight of, 
 and often became conspicuously the controlling idea 
 of the men who occupied that See. 
 
 And if this Supremacy was, as I have expressed 
 my belief that it was, necessary for the administra- 
 tion of the Church and the preservation- of Christian- 
 ity in the West generally, it was scarcely less so for 
 England at the time. 
 
 Doubtless the Pope helped the King, and with- 
 out his help no King, from William the Conquerer, 
 A. D. 1066, to Henry the Eighth, A. D. 1509, could 
 have kept his throne or continued to wear his crown 
 in England. 
 
 But, on the other hand, while the King dared not 
 reject the Papal influence wholly, or even so much 
 as attempt to set it aside and get along without it, 
 the Pope did very often interpose in behalf of Bish- 
 ops and Clergy for the preaching of Gospel, the up- 
 holding and maintaining it as against the King him- 
 self. And the Kings were always in fear of such an 
 interference and were always more or less restrained 
 by that fear, 
 
 THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 V. But on the quarrel of Henry VIII., about 
 his marriage — or rather his divorce from Queen 
 Catharine — Henry determined to carry his point and 
 have his way, notwithstanding the Pope. And the 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 107 
 
 Church took advantage of this quarrel to declare in 
 favor of a reformation towards which opinions and 
 events had been more especially tending for some 
 two hundred years, since the days of Wycliff, A. D. 
 
 1350- 
 Taking advantage of this state of things, the 
 
 Church, in each of its two Provinces — that is, in the 
 
 Convocation in each — passed acts expressly rejecting 
 
 the Papal Supremacy, and declaring what had always 
 
 been the law of the Realm, that there never had 
 
 been any such Supremacy by divine right or by any 
 
 other means than fraud and usurpation. 
 
 Their words are as follows : In the Convocation 
 of Canterbury, March 31, 1534, " the Roman Bishop 
 has no greater jurisdiction given him by God in this 
 Kingdom than any other foreign Bishop." The 
 Convocation of York in the same year, June 1st, 
 1534, put their declaration in these words: "The 
 Roman Bishop has not in the Holy Scriptures any 
 greater jurisdiction in the Kingdom of England 
 than any other foreign Bishop." 
 
 And this decision was adopted and accepted by 
 the Church almost unanimously, as it had been pre- 
 viously declared by Parliament. The Archbishop 
 of York said that he did not know of more than 
 twelve of the secular clergy and very few of the 
 friars that dissented. 
 
 And of the few men, lay and cleric, who did dis- 
 sent or hesitate, as in the case of Sir Thomas More 
 
I08 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 and Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, they have 
 left on record their reasons. It was simply that they 
 feared greater evils from the tyranny and interference 
 in Church affairs which King Henry would exercise, 
 than had been caused or were likely to be caused by 
 the Pope. If they must have a tyrant and a usurper 
 over them, they preferred a Pope who was, at least, 
 a Clergyman and lived in Italy, to a mere layman, 
 and rather a coarse and beastly man, at that, who 
 was right among them. 
 
 What the English actually did then was to reject 
 and cast off the Papal usurpations and assert and 
 exercise their Provincial rights in reforming their 
 Church from the errors and abuses that had crept 
 into it during the dark ages that had passed. 
 
 I have said " Provincial rights." But we must re- 
 member there were two Provinces in the ecclesias- 
 tical sense — that of Wales had been absorbed into 
 Canterbury — and yet not two Provinces in the civil 
 sense, and in that sense in which the General Coun- 
 cil of Chalcedon (Can. xvii.) use the word when it 
 directed that the ecclesiastical arrangement should 
 follow the subdivision of the Empire, But, as 
 England was but one nation or, if you please, one 
 Province, in the sense that it was under one and the 
 same civil government, there could be but one Prov- 
 incial Church in England. 
 
 But in thus rejecting the Papal Supremacy, the 
 Church of England did not separate nor intend to 
 
IN ENGLAND, 
 
 109 
 
 separate from the Roman Church, as it is sometimes 
 expressed, or from the other National Churches, 
 even though they continued still to acknowledge 
 and submit to that Supremacy. She intended 
 and claimed only to exercise her own rights as an 
 independent Branch of the Church of Christ. 
 
 Thus the Church of England, says in her xxxth 
 Can., 1603 ; " Nay, so far was it from the purpoce of 
 the Church of England to forsake and reject the 
 Churches of Italy, France, vSpam, Germany and any 
 such like Churches in all th.ngs which they held 
 and practiced that .... it do'Ji with rever- 
 ence retain those ceremonies which do neither en- 
 danger the Church of God nor offend the minds of 
 sober men." The Church of England departed 
 from them, in fact, only as they had departed from 
 their Apostolic Models. 
 
 I have italicised the words " such like " in the 
 foregoing extract from the Canons of the English 
 Church, for it seems to me that they have a special 
 and significant meaning. 
 
 It will be noticed that the Churches are all 
 " National " Churches, and still in the Roman Obedi- 
 ence. But in the xix. of her xxxix. Articles the 
 Church of England makes mention of the Patriarch- 
 ates of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch and Rome 
 as " having erred in matters of Faith." But she no- 
 where recognizes the Protestant Churches on the 
 continent or those within her own borders as 
 Branches of the Universal Church of Christ. 
 
no THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 I take no notice in this place of the "argument" 
 sometimes used to the effect that England, having 
 once consented to the Supremacy of the Pope, has 
 no right to reject it ; it was a contract, and neither 
 party had a right to break it. 
 
 But we may " turn the tables " on them and say 
 that by the Holy Scriptures and the ancient Canons 
 the Bishops of Rome had no right to extend their 
 Supremacy into England. It was a " wrong " from 
 the beginning and, therefore, the Pope has no right 
 to insist upon it. 
 
 But, seriously, if the Bishops of Rome extended 
 their influence and interfered in Churches beyond 
 their lawful and proper jurisdiction, with the best of 
 intentions, and with no mistake of judgment as to the 
 best and, perhaps, the only means by which it could 
 have been done — interfered solely for the good of 
 the Church, the promotion of Missionary work and 
 the protection of the Church and its Ministers 
 against the political powers of the world, its tyran- 
 ous Kings and godless Dukes and Nobles, and I have 
 no hesitation in believing and in saying that many of 
 them did interfere, assert and extend their " Suprem- 
 acy " in this way and interfere for these reasons, so 
 that they may be regarded as wholly justified in \\hat 
 they did, yet, when the occasion had passed away, 
 the insistence itself became a sin, no less than if the 
 occasion had never occurred. 
 
 We often put lunatics and insane persons under 
 
IN ENGLAND. I j i 
 
 guardians, and even in chains, for their own good, to 
 save their own lives and their property. But this is 
 no justification for the continuance of this authority 
 over them and the abridgment of their rights when 
 reason is restored and they become able to take care 
 of themselves again. 
 
 VI. It forms no part of my design to discuss the 
 doctrines and practices which had prevailed in Eng- 
 land under the Papal influence and which had been, 
 to a large extent, forced upon the English by that 
 influence and against their tastes and judgment, as 
 forming in any sense or to any extent a justification 
 for the measure of rejecting that Supremacy. I am 
 content, or, at least, it is all that my present purpose 
 requires, to let it rest on the simple question, whether 
 the Papal Supremacy or the freedom of the Pro- 
 vincial System, both for England and all the other 
 " nations " of the world was or was not in accord- 
 ance with the teachings of the Holy Scriptures and 
 the Canons of the Early Church. And on this point 
 I will say no more at present. 
 
 Still, however, it may be well to state that the 
 Canons of the General Councils, as we have seen, 
 not only bear most explicit testimony to the Pro- 
 vincial System with its enlargement into general in- 
 dependent Patriarchates, but they did expressly en- 
 act that " if anyone shall introduce any regulation 
 contrary to what has been defined, the whole Holy 
 and Ecumenical Synod (of Ephesus) has decreed 
 that it shall be of no effect." (Eph., Can. viii.) 
 
112 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 Nor do I propose to discuss the Papal abuses at 
 length that led to the rejection. I will, however, 
 allude, in passing, to the enormous pecuniary burdens 
 which the Papal Supremacy imposed upon the Eng- 
 lish people as a means of sustaining this foreign 
 Papacy. Besides filling many of the richest Sees 
 and Abbacies with foreigners, French and Italians, 
 who could not speak the English language and who 
 were put there for the double purpose of "provid- 
 ing" for these incumbents, and for advocating and 
 enforcing the Supremacy upon an unwilling and 
 often a rebellious people. They managed to raise, 
 in the form of what was called " Peter's pence," and 
 in other forms and by other means, and to send to 
 Italy, for the Pope's use, more, in some instances, 
 than they had or could raise to spend for charitable 
 and religious purposes at home. 
 
 Why should the people of England thus draw 
 from their own resources and impoverish themselves 
 to support a foreign Bishop, and he by no means a 
 Missionary Bishop in a heathen land, but the Bishop 
 of what claimed to be the capital city of the world ? 
 
 Nor was this all. The money thus drawn from 
 England was not only used to support the splendor 
 and, alas ! the profligacy of the Roman Church, but 
 it was used in some cases, as is said, as a means of 
 carrying on war against England itself. 
 
 At this time there was but one Church in England 
 which was the Church of England. And nobody 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 113 
 
 seems to have thought of the possibility of there 
 being more than one Church in the same Province 
 or within the bounds of the same national territory. 
 In the early days, and until the Saxon invasion in 
 the fifth century, there was but one Church in the 
 three Provinces — Wales, York and London. By 
 the Saxon invasion, the Church became extinct in 
 the Province of London and badly crippled in that 
 of York. The Archbishops of both Provinces fled 
 into Wales, where the Church continued, not very 
 badly disturbed by the invading heathen. On the 
 coming of Augustine, A. D. 596, there began the 
 work of conversion among the Saxons in the old 
 Province of London, with its See, then, as now, at 
 Canterbury. For a while, as we have seen, the two 
 communities — the two Branches of the Church — 
 were not in full communion. But gradually the 
 work of converting the. Saxons continued until it 
 was completed and the points of difference between 
 the two Churches were reconciled, and in 11 50, if 
 not earlier, the union was complete and had been so 
 from that time to the time of the rejection of the 
 Papal Supremacy, of which I have just spoken. 
 
 VIL Having rejected the Papal Supremacy and 
 escaped its control, the English Church resolved to 
 proceed with the work of reformation. It deter- 
 mined to have the Holy Scriptures in English and 
 freely circulated and used among the people — to 
 have the Prayers in English, which all the people 
 
114 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 iCould understand — to allow the Bishops and Priests 
 to marry and to live like other men, and to inculcate 
 and insist upon the doctrines and discipline of a holy 
 life, as they had been taught and practiced in the 
 Primitive and undivided Church. 
 
 At this time, that is, from Henry VIII. to the 
 time of Elizabeth, nobody seems to have thought 
 of separating from the Church or of the possibility 
 of two churches in the same country. The first per- 
 sons to secede and establish a schismatic body were 
 the Romanists — the adherents of the Pope A. D. 
 1569. And soon after that, A. D. 1572, the Presby- 
 terians — the adherents of John Calvin — made a like 
 movement. 
 
 And from that time secessions have been frequent. 
 And the idea has generally prevailved that believers 
 may separate and form Churches of their own and 
 in accordance with their own tastes and preferences, 
 if they only hold the true Faith. It has become, in 
 a sense, what we may call " the Protestant Idea," the 
 central and fundamental principle of what is pecul- 
 iarly — and, I may add, appropriately — called Protest- 
 antism. 
 
 But, assuredly, we can find no such idea in the 
 Holy Scriptures. Nor was any such thought toler- 
 ated by the Early Church. 
 
 In the Scriptures we not only read that " the LORD 
 added to the Church daily such as should be saved " 
 — or were being saved — but we have warning against 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 115 
 
 heresy (r Cor. xL, 19; Gal. v., 20; 2 Pet. ii., i) and 
 schisms, (i Cor. xii., 23,) as well as strifes, contentions 
 and divisions in the Church, (i Cor. iii., 3 ; Gal. v., 
 20 Phil, i., 6; Rom. xvi., 17.) 
 
 We have also those spoken of as separating them- 
 selves, (Jude. 19,) going out from the Church and 
 becoming, in some way, either by the opinions they 
 held and advocated or by the church organizations 
 which they set up for themselves, anti-Christian, and 
 in an important sense opposed to Christ and His 
 Church, (i John ii , 18-20.) They were from that 
 time regarded, not as gathering with Him and into 
 His Fold, but rather as scattering abroad. 
 
 And the Early Church took the same view of the 
 subject. Thus the Council of Constantinople (A. 
 A. 381) defined the word Heretics, (Can. vf,) those 
 who have been cast off by the Church, and in addi- 
 tion those, also, who do, indeed, pretend to con- 
 fess the true faith, but have separated themselves 
 and formed congregations in opposition to our 
 Canonical Bishops. 
 
 It should be carefully noted here that this is a 
 General Council and, therefore, there are two quite 
 different points to be considered ; (i) those who had 
 been cast off or excommunicated by the General 
 Councils. Provincial or local Councils and Synods 
 are quite a different affair. In fact, I presume that 
 there is scarcely one, perhaps not one, of the doc- 
 trines of the Catholic Faith — not one in the Apos- 
 
Il6 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 ties, or Nice creed — that has not been denied by 
 some such local or Provincial Synod and its adher- 
 ents excommunicated and anathematised. 
 
 But the other (2) point is all those who, though 
 they do profess to hold the true Faith, do yet sep- 
 arate themselves and form congregations in opposi- 
 tion to the Canonical Bishops of the Province. 
 Like our Lord, they did not consider difference and 
 disagreement in opinion or doctrine a justification 
 for secession and separation from, but, rather, as 
 an occasion for remaining in the Church and labor- 
 ing for its restoration and adoption of the true 
 dotrine — if, indeed, it, rather than they themselves, 
 was in the wrong. 
 
 In Can. viii., of the same Council, there is a deter- 
 mination with regard to the reception of those who 
 had "separated themselves," on whatever ground, 
 back into the Communion of the Church. They 
 make two classes: (i) Some of them as Arians 
 and Macedonians (the former of whom denied the 
 Divinity of Christ, the latter the Personality of the 
 Holy Ghost) with others were to be received with- 
 out rebaptising and with only a written renuncia- 
 tion of their errors and confirmation at the hands of 
 the Canonical or Catholic Bis-hops. And then.(2) 
 there were others, as Eunomians, Montainists and 
 such like, who were to be received by baptism as 
 though they were not merely " heretics " or schis- 
 matics, but were rather mere heathens, or worse. 
 
IN ENGLAND. 
 
 117 
 
 And all the Canons of the six General Councils 
 and those of the Apostolic code, as well as those in 
 the five codes of the Provincial Councils that were 
 recognized by the General Councils, coincide with 
 this view. 
 
 But, of course, in these modern times, when the 
 difficulty of identifying the Church and finding who 
 have the right to speak to us in the name of the 
 Lord, and when the principle of the right to sep- 
 arate and form Churches, each for himself, has be- 
 come prevalent, the case has become very different, 
 though the principle doubtless remains the same. 
 
 VIII. I have spoken of Provinces and of Dio- 
 ceses (in the modern sense. Parishes in the ancient 
 use of the word). But I have scarcely had occasion 
 to speak of National Churches. When the Gospel 
 was first preached, and when the General Councils 
 were held, there was but one nation in the modern 
 sense of the word. " The nations " spoken of in 
 the Scriptures to whom the Gospel was to be 
 preached, (Matt, xxiv., 14,) and to which God hath 
 appointed the bounds of their habitation," (Acts 
 xvii., 26,) were not political bodies or corporations 
 at all — not bodies politic like our modern nations — 
 but they were rather " races " and " peoples," dis. 
 tinguished chiefly by their language and other 
 peculiarities which showed them to have been de- 
 scended from some common stock. 
 
 Hence, in this sense of the word, the French are 
 
Il8 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM IN ENGLAND. 
 
 one " nation," whether living in France or wherever 
 else, so long as they speak the French language and 
 have a common French ancestry. And in this way, 
 too, all English speaking people must be regarded 
 as one " nation," whether living in Europe, on the 
 Island of Great Britain — in America — these United 
 States, or Canada, in India, Africa, Australia or the 
 Islands of the South Seas. 
 
 And then, wherever they go, they are the English 
 Nation or " people," and will carry their religion — 
 the Gospel as they profess and hold it, the Church 
 as they have it organized and administered, and its 
 worship as established and observed by them in 
 their Provinces at home — until, by the organization 
 of Provinces elsewhere, competent for that purpose 
 they shall make such changes as the changes in time 
 and place, political institutions and habits of the 
 people may require and as are allowable, by Holy 
 Scriptures and the Canons of the Ancient Church, 
 to each Province. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 The Church in these United States presents some 
 peculiar features and problems of serious difficulty. 
 It is a National Church, in the modern sense of the 
 word, and it is, as yet, but one Province. The terri- 
 tory of the United States is about the same in ex- 
 tent as that of the Roman Empire when the Gen- 
 eral Councils were held, and when the Empire in- 
 cluded some one hundred and fifty or two hundred 
 millions of inhabitants,and one hundred and seventeen 
 Provinces. There were then, as is estimated, about 
 two thousand Bishops. Our territory is now as 
 large as theirs, and our population will be as great 
 in some forty or fifty years, at least. 
 
 I. Of course, therefore, some subdivision of our 
 Church, which is now really but one Province, seems 
 to be an inevitable necessity. I suppose it is fair to 
 presume that our Church will before that time come 
 to contain so many Bishops and clergy that there 
 
120 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 will be no possibility of a General Convention, which 
 shall be constituted like ours at present. Of course, 
 it is not likely that we shall have two thousand 
 Bishops or, perhaps, a quarter of that number. 
 And the number of Deputies may be reduced from 
 four of each order in a Diocese to one of each order. 
 And then our General Conventions will be no larger 
 than some of the General Councils of the Early 
 Church. 
 
 I take no notice, in this connection, of what has 
 been sometimes proposed and urged — a "propor- 
 tionate representation " in our General Conventions, 
 I consider such arguments as both faulty and futile, 
 (i) They are futile, because the change cannot be 
 effected without the consent of most or nearly all of 
 the smaller Dio(?'eses, and this consent cannot be 
 reasonably expected. 
 
 Then, in my judgment, the arguments in favor of 
 such a plan are (2) faulty. They are based on what 
 seems to me to be a false analogy. In the legisla- 
 tion in the State, the fundamental axiom is" the great- 
 est good of the greatest number." Here, " number' 
 is a fundamental element and must be represented. 
 But in the Church, the aim is, or should be, the 
 "highest good of all." And for this purpose the 
 wisdom and piety of a few, v/hether they be all of 
 them, or none of them, from New York, is a vastly 
 better guarantee than the clamor of a multi- 
 tude. Not the wants of men but their wisdom and 
 
IN THE UNITED STATES. 121 
 
 piety are what is requisite for the best Church legisla^ 
 tion. Wisdom may be defective ; hut wants are often 
 positively wrong. 
 
 But the great difficulty, the serious problem 
 for which no one has yet suggested a remedy 
 or solution, so far as I know, is, to find some 
 thing for ihe Provincial Councils to do that ought 
 not to be either (i) left to the Bishops, each one, and 
 his Diocese, or (2) to be left under the control of the 
 General Convention. 
 
 At the present time, our Church includes but a 
 small part of the sixty or eighty millions of people 
 in our country. It is a comparatively small body, but 
 it is fast growing in numbers and influence. And I 
 may be permitted to say that we may well look for 
 the time when the Papal Supremacy will be repudi- 
 ated in this country, and in fact finally pass away, 
 and the denominations cease to exist as separate 
 bodies. In fact, Church Unity will become an accom- 
 plished fact in this country; and our General Conven- 
 tion, with its hundreds of Bishops and many more 
 hundreds of Deputies, will become, practically, an 
 unwieldly body. 
 
 And yet, even this difficulty is not so great — so 
 insuperable — as it appears to be at first sight. We 
 have now about fifty Dioceses, with some sixty-five 
 odd Bishops entitled to seats in, and as composing, 
 our House of Bishops. Suppose these are increased 
 by a division of existing Dioceses and the erection 
 
122 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 of new ones out of territory not now occupied, so 
 that we shall have three times as many, or about 
 two hundred ? That will be only about two-thirds as 
 many as were at the Council of Nice and scarcely 
 one-third as many as there were at Chalcedon. 
 
 With our fifty Dioceses and four Deputies of each 
 order, there may be four hundred in the lower 
 House. With only two of each order, there would 
 be, of course, just half of that number. And with 
 only one of each order and three times as many 
 Dioceses there would be only three hundred in the 
 lower House, which is by no means an unmanagable 
 number. There were indeed but three hundred and 
 eighteen Bishops at .Nice ; but the other Clergy and 
 Laity in attendance are usually thought to have 
 made the whole number about two thousand. 
 
 II. But what shall be left to the General Conven- 
 tions, what to the Dioceses and what relegated to 
 the Provincial Councils ? that is the great question. 
 
 In State policy it is held that in a Kingdom or an 
 Empire, size, beyond certain rather narrow limits, is 
 an element of weakness and, precursor and cause of 
 disruption. But in a Republic it is thought to be 
 quite the reverse, the larger the stronger. And for 
 the reason that only the few most general subjects 
 of legislation are be provided for by the Central Gov- 
 ernment ; while each of the States has full legisla- 
 tive power and jurisdiction over all the questions 
 that can need to be differently managed and admin- 
 istered by different laws in the various localities. 
 
IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 123 
 
 And besides this, in the General Government 
 there resides both the right and the power to enforce 
 its laws by suppressing any effort that may be made 
 towards insurrection or rebellion. 
 
 But in the Church it is otherwise in this most im- 
 portant particular. Any Province which has Bishops 
 enough to be able to assert its independence may do 
 for themselves all that any Church may do, all that 
 even the General Convention of the National 
 Church itself can do. It could not, indeed, depart 
 from the Scriptures nor set forth a new Creed. But 
 it could elect, and proceed to consecrate, its own 
 Bishops.and thus not only perpetuate,but exaggerate 
 any peculiarities which the majority of its Dioceses 
 and Bishops might choose to make prominent or de- 
 clare to be terms and conditions of communisn. 
 
 There would be no remedy. We might have here, 
 under our one National banner, Churches with 
 " the Historic Episcopate" in unbroken and unques- 
 tioned succession, differing as widely in doctrine 
 and discipline (nearly, at least) as do the three or 
 four great Branches of the Catholic Church, the Ro- 
 man and the Anglican, the American, Austrian, and 
 the Russian, at the present day. 
 
 Suppose that New England, for example, should 
 be one Province and the majority of the Bishops 
 should become Unitarians or Mormoms, they might 
 elect and consecrate Bishops holding their own 
 views or refuse to consecrate anybody who did not. 
 
1 24 THE PRO VINCI A L S YSTEM 
 
 Truth is universal and Catholic, while error and 
 heresy are local and predominate only at times 
 and in places. 
 
 With smaller Provinces, New York or Chicago, 
 Virgiiria or Texas would have some hope and pros- 
 pect of being able to control, each one its own 
 Province, while no one of them has any expectation 
 of being able to control the General Convention. 
 
 A schism between several Provinces in our coun- 
 try would be by no means as bad in its influence 
 upon the people as that which now exists by having 
 many bodies of Christians, each one claiming to be a 
 legitimate Branch of the Church in the same town 
 or city ; the Provinces, whether more or less in num- 
 ber, would of necessity be in different parts of our 
 country. Nor is it likely, as it seems to me, that 
 they would be so small in territory as to occasion 
 the evils that now exist in the present state of 
 things. 
 
 It is, indeed, quite true that any three or four of 
 our Dioceses may now secede from the General Con- 
 vention on doctrinal or ritual ground and form them- 
 selves into a Province. But in so doing they would 
 commit the sin of Schism in its Scripture sense. 
 And yet a General Convention, with all the Bishops 
 we are likely to have, and one Deputy of each order 
 from each Diocese would not be an altogether un- 
 manageable body. 
 
 III. One of the most common arguments that we 
 
IN THE UNITED ST A TES. 125 
 
 have in favor of a sub-division of our Church into Pro- 
 vinces, is the want of some means to restrain the 
 eccentricities and irregularities that may arise in 
 Dioceses from the independence, and what is called 
 the autonomy, of our Bishops and Dioceses. 
 
 But there are two sides to that question. As it 
 is now, the evil is, or may be cured by the election 
 of a successor when occasions occur. But in the 
 case of smaller Provinces there would be danger that 
 these evils would be enacted into laws in some of 
 the smaller Provinces, at least. 
 
 But these are facts calling for most careful and 
 grave consideration before any final steps can be 
 taken in the direction of any division into Provinces. 
 
 In the Apostolic Canons, the words "Diocese" 
 and " Province" do not occur. And this is one of 
 the arguments — a controlling one, I think — for the 
 great antiquity of these Canons. At any rate, there 
 were many of them, at least, so old as to be called 
 "ancient, ' at the Council of Nice A. D. 325. 
 
 This word Province means, gained by conquests, 
 and at first indicated any portion of territory beyond 
 Italy that was under Roman rule. But under the 
 Empire all the conquered countries were organized 
 into Provinces for the greater convenience of admin- 
 istration. 
 
 But the territory was not, then as it is now, divided 
 up into Townships or Parishes. Each city claimed 
 and was acknowledged to have jurisdiction over the 
 
126 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 country around it, its " suburbs," and this made its 
 "jrapocKia, Parish, and finally the city and its suburbs 
 made up the Parish. But the suburbs of any city 
 extended to the suburbs of the next city in each 
 and all directions, so that the cities and their suburbs, 
 or the Parishes, included all of the territory that was 
 included within the domain of the nation or under 
 its authority. And most frequently, and especially 
 in its earlier stages, there was no fixed and well 
 known limit or line of demarcation between them. 
 
 The idea seems to have been that there should be 
 one Bishop in each city, with Presbyters and Dea- 
 cons such, and so many, as were necessary for the 
 Church-work with the three orders : St. Igna- 
 tius (Bishop A. D. 67-107) says there is no Church, 
 " or better," there is nothing that is called a Church, 
 without them, eKKXrjaia 6v KoKerai. 
 
 This testimony becomes the more important if we 
 consider the following facts and cannot be fully ap- 
 preciated without so doing. 
 
 I. Antioch was at this time the great city of the 
 East in a political point of view. It was nearly as 
 large as Rome itself and the seat of the principal 
 Power in the East, or in the words of Irenseus, its 
 "principality" was second only to that of Rome itself. 
 Here the disciples were first called Christians, Here 
 both St. Peter and St. Paul spent a large part of 
 their time in building up the Church. And as we 
 have seen, Antioch was the first of all the Sees to 
 
IN THE UNITED STA fES. 127 
 
 put forth claims to a Primacy or Supremacy Over 
 the whole Church, such as Rome itself put forward 
 only some two or three hundred years later. And 
 Antioch with Alexandria were the first Sees to be 
 rebuked by the General Councils Nice and Constan- 
 tinople for this pretense. 
 
 2. In the next place, Ignatius is said to have been 
 made Bishop of Antioch by Sts. Peter and Paul. But 
 at any rate he became Bishop of that See about A. 
 D. 6"]. He was born six years before our Lord's 
 crucifixion, became Bishop of Antioch before the de- 
 struction of Jerusalem, and within a very few years 
 after the death of James the brother of our Lord who 
 was Bishop of Jerusalem, some twenty-five or thirty 
 years before the death of St. John, who was living at 
 Ephesus at the time and before, therefore, the last of 
 the New Testament scriptures were written. 
 
 No man, therefore, had, or could have had, better 
 means of knowing the truth of what he said about 
 the organization of the Church in his day, than St. 
 Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. 
 
 But, as I have said, neither of the words " Province" 
 nor " Diocese" occurs in the Apostolic Canons. 
 And yet some such sub-division as these words indi- 
 cate seems to have been implied. 
 
 Canon xxxvii, directing that there shall be a meet- 
 ing of " the Bishops twice a year," is vague in regard 
 to the number of Bishops or the territory referred to. 
 How many Bishops ? The Bishops in what cities 
 
128 T^E PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 or in what territory ? There is no indication. It is 
 simply as I have quoted, " the Bishops must meet 
 twice a year" for the settling of all ecclesiastical con- 
 troversies that may have arisen. But several of the 
 Canons imply and make it necessary that there 
 should be " two or three" at least. Without this 
 number nothing could be done. 
 
 And frequently it would happen then as it does 
 now in new countries, that a little settlement or ter- 
 ritory that laid between two cities in " suburbs" of 
 one or the other, or perhaps upon a spot that was 
 not regarded as in or belonging to the jurisdiction 
 of either one or the other of them, but was rather 
 in the " neutral" ground that lay between the su- 
 burbs, grow up into a city and assert its rights. In 
 that case Church work would begin, a Church be or- 
 ganized with its three orders and suburbs, also requir- 
 ing the attention of the city clergy. 
 
 The relation of the State to the Church in this 
 country is such as it is no where else and as it never 
 has been in any time past. From Pentecost until 
 the conversion of Constantine, it was opposed by 
 the State and most of the time under persecution. 
 From that time onward the State has endeavored to 
 control it under the pretense of protecting it. But 
 in this country we have neither the one nor the 
 other ; neither oppression nor " protection" to provide 
 against. 
 
 2. In the second place our Dioceses are, in many 
 
IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 129 
 
 respects quite unlike the Dioceses in the Primitive 
 Church (Parishes as they were then called, and we 
 must remember that there were no Parishes then in 
 our modern sense of the word). 
 
 In each of our Dioceses we have Annual Conven- 
 tions, composed of the Bishop, the Clergy of the 
 Diocese, and Lay members. These Conventions 
 make Canons which are obligatory on all Bishops, 
 Clergy and Laity, just as the Canons of the Provin- 
 cial Councils were in early times, on all persons in 
 the Province. 
 
 The introduction and recognition of the Lay 
 men in all our Conventions, General and Diocesan, 
 is an important element, and must be, to some ex- 
 tent, a controlling one in all our plans for the future. 
 It is unprecedented ; nothing like it has occurred 
 in the past. And so complete and extensive is it in 
 its influence, that no Law or Canon can be passed — 
 nothing in fact can be done — without the concur- 
 rence of the three orders. Bishop, Clergy and Laity. 
 Each order has the right to a separate vote and 
 has a check or negative on both the others. 
 
 And our Bishops are under the Canons thus made. 
 They must obey them and be guided by them as 
 law, both the Canons of the General Convention and 
 the Canons of the Diocesan Conventions, each in his 
 own Diocese. 
 
 3. We are all under the laws of the land, both for 
 obedience and for protection, protection even in 
 
130 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 Church matters. If any one, Priest, Deacon or Lay- 
 man suffers a wrong by any act or proceeding of his 
 Bishop which is contrary to the Canons and Laws of 
 the Church, and the Church in his Diocese he has 
 a remedy in the courts of law if he chooses to pur- 
 sue it before such a tribunal. 
 
 But the fact that our Diocesan Conventions and 
 the legislation that is had in them, composed as they 
 are of the Clergy and representatives of the Laity of 
 the Diocese have a binding force upon the Bishops, 
 takes away much of the necessity or occasion for Prov- 
 inces which shall consist of several Dioceses, making 
 a Body that will stand some where between the Gen- 
 eral Conventions on the one hand, and the Dioceses 
 on the other. 
 
 4. The whole process of making, administering 
 and enforcing laws, both in Church and in State, is 
 totally different from what it was in the days of the 
 early Church legislation — so different as to make it 
 difficult to reason from them to our times and to 
 render many of the principles which were thought 
 indispensable then inapplicable now. 
 
 5. Then, undoubtedly, in view of the many de- 
 nominations in our country and of the many godless 
 unbelievers and scientific agnostics, the facts 
 which are constantly being discovered, call for new 
 explanations of Divine Truth, and for new lines of 
 argument in defence of the Truth and the Church, 
 which is " the Pillar and the ground of the Truth." 
 
IN THE UNITED STA TES. 1 3 1 
 
 Events and changes, and adaptations which no one 
 can foresee are undoubtedly in store for us in the 
 future. 
 
 The question is, as I have said, a grave one, and I 
 shall make no attempt at its solution. But it is be- 
 fore us and must be met, either by sound and devout 
 men guided by the Holy Spirit of God, or by that 
 over-ruling Providence which, in the history of Na- 
 tions as well as in the affairs of men, "works all 
 things after Counsels of its own will." 
 
 IV. I have said that it is not my purpose in this 
 Essay to discuss, to any considerable extent, ques- 
 tions of Church Unity, or rather the unification of 
 those who profess to believe in our common Saviour 
 and to be His Disciples. 
 
 But in view of the facts already presented, I think 
 that in any sub-divisions of our National Church into 
 several Provinces, there is great danger of a total 
 isolation of the Provinces. 
 
 But I think we may reasonbly look for a Church 
 Unity that will involve (i) a total rejection of the 
 Papal Supremacy in this country and over professing 
 Christians in it, and (2) the acceptance of " the His- 
 toric Episcopate" by all of the Protestant Denomi 
 nations around us, not, indeed, that they will come 
 into the Unity of the Church as organized bodies, 
 but their members will come individually, one by 
 one. 
 
 I have already alluded to the fact that there is no- 
 
132 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 where in the Scriptures any full account of the or- 
 ganization of the Church. From this, many people 
 of our day have drawn the inference that the form 
 of organization is not important, that, therefore, any 
 consiclerable number of believers may organize 
 themselves into a Branch of the Church, ox a Church 
 as they please. 
 
 But the fact was, and is, that the Church was not 
 organized by its members at all ; but by those whom 
 our Lord had appointed for that purpose. It was 
 therefore to them a matter of fact, which they all 
 might know, and probably did know, and therefore 
 it needed no description. 
 
 Unlike the Jewish Dispensation, the Christian 
 Church was for " all Nations" and " until the end of 
 time." Most of the details of its organization and the 
 worship of the Christian Church, therefore, could not 
 be prescribed in the words of Holy Scriptures, but 
 must be left to the Apostles and their successors 
 wherever and whenever " two or three" of them 
 might be gathered together in His name. 
 
 But in the Christian Dispensation there can be no 
 need or occasion for another Church than that which 
 He founded, and no desire for one so far as I can see, 
 so long as people are content with the Faith, which the 
 Church teaches or was commanded to teach. And 
 if the Branch of the Church which is in the nation 
 where one has his lot in life cast has fallen into error, 
 and that is certainly very possible, it would seem to 
 
IN THE UNITED STATES. 133 
 
 be his duty, not to leave it, but follow the example of 
 our Lord Himself and His Apostles, remain in it and 
 do all he can to reform it and bring it to the Bible 
 standard. 
 
 It is not merely that men must have some religion 
 and that to have religion they must have some or- 
 ganization, and in this organization there must be 
 not only some argreement among the members, but 
 there must be some yielding of private opinions 
 and preferences. No two or more can unite and be 
 "a church" with worship and any administration of 
 the Sacrmaents, without going beyond what is actu- 
 ally prescribed in Holy Scripture. 
 
 And there is no help for it. Not even two can 
 walk together unless they are agreed. And they 
 cannot be " agreed" so as to walk together for any 
 long time unless there is some recognized authority 
 to determine for them how they shall go in matters 
 in regard to which they have irreconcilable differ- 
 ences of opinion, or have differences of tastes and 
 mental constitutions, so that that which will please the 
 one is sure to displease the other. Even with but 
 " two or three" there must be an authority, some- 
 where, to guide their actions. 
 
 They cannot " agree to disagree," in matters of 
 religion, and go on each one in his own way. This 
 they may do as citizens and get along very well.. 
 But as Christians it would be utter isolation ; it 
 would be going beyond the most extremes of Inde- 
 
134 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 pendence, or Congregationalism. It would not have 
 even the " two or three" spoken of in the Scripture ; 
 for they must " agree" or be agreed upon what- 
 ever they would ask, if it is to be done for them in 
 heaven, as well as upon whatever they would" bind" 
 or " loose" as a matter of Church discipline, if it is 
 to have any validity or force, be "loosed" or 
 "bound in heaven." 
 
 And for this very adjudication and adaptation of 
 the Church, its principles and methods of teaching the 
 fundamental truths of the Gospel to the peculiarities 
 of our times, it seems to me that we can see the 
 hand of God in keeping us, for the present, as one 
 Province, with but our one Provincial Synod or 
 General Convention, in order that we may have that 
 conservative and cautious wisdom that comes, 
 and can come, only from a multitude of Coun- 
 sellors. " Two or three" may do for unimportant 
 details, but for such grave matters a large Council 
 seems to be necessary. 
 
 V. But in any concessions we may see it neces- 
 sary or feel disposed to make we must see to it that 
 we do not pander to and so increase the very feeling 
 and spirit of sectarianism which we are trying to 
 cure and eradicate from among us. 
 
 The spirit of sectarianism is that spirit of heresy — 
 schism — leading to apostacy and to anti-Christ, that 
 is spoken of in the Scriptures, by which one is led to 
 hold an opinion and practice as ritual or discipline 
 
IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 135 
 
 that which he chooses or prefers, rather than that 
 which the Church holds as taught by the Holy 
 Scripture and because it is so taught. When one 
 offends in this matter or manner, we are taught by 
 our Lord, what to think of him and what to do with 
 and how to regard him. 
 
 Church authority, as exercised by a Provincial 
 Synod or under its Canons, is not only an element 
 of Christianity, but respect for it, and obedience to 
 it is one element of the Christian character. It may 
 lead to error and superstition. But the want of it 
 is certainly a very serious defect. The want of it 
 implies the presence and excess of that spirit of self 
 and self assertion which lies at the foundation of, and 
 is the moving spirit to, if not the vg.xy gravamen of 
 all disobedience and rebellion against God. 
 
 I have spoken of the authority that was given to 
 the Apostles, when " two or three" of them should be 
 gathered together in His name to bind and loose, 
 that is, as I understand it, to make rules or Canons, 
 that should have a binding, authority on those that 
 were in the Church subject to their jurisdiction. 
 And this too I would take to mean any Branch of 
 the Church which has the right to be and to act as 
 a Province by itself. 
 
 The v/ords used by St. John, " whosever sins ye 
 remit they are remitted to them, and whosoever sins 
 ye retain they are retained," (John xx. 23,) I take to 
 have only a limited signification, for none can forgive 
 sins but God only. 
 
136 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 Whoever was converted and baptised had their 
 sins remitted to them. They were forgiven all the 
 past and put on the same conditions with regard to 
 the past as if they had not descended from Adam, 
 or beenjsinners of the Gentiles, participating in their 
 idolatry and abominations. Their past sins were 
 forgiven," remitted unto them," and grace was given 
 them for the future. 
 
 And so, on the other hand, if they should not 
 keep the faith and continue to walk in the way of 
 salvation, the authorities of the Church had the 
 right, after a first and second admonition, to reject 
 them, (Tit. iii. 10 ;) cast them out, so that they 
 should be as heathen men and publicans — their sins 
 would be retained. 
 
 Our Lord prayed for His people, for them that 
 should believe on Him through the word that His 
 ministry should preach, that they all may be one, 
 that the world might believe. We see the effect of 
 this want of unity every where around us and in our 
 midst. It is, in some of its aspects, like the believ- 
 ing in many Gods and the having of idol temples, 
 and the worship of idols among the ancient Jews. 
 It not only led away from the worship of the 
 one true and only God, causing infidelity and unbe- 
 lief, but it immensely weakened the moral effect of 
 that religion and worship, even among those who 
 remained true to the Mosaic doctrine of one God. 
 
 And it would appear from the history of the 
 
IN THE UNITED STA TES. 
 
 137 
 
 Prophets that it was about as difficult to persuade 
 the people, or even to make them understand, that 
 there is but one God who has created all things, 
 and who alone is the proper Object of worship, as it 
 is to persuade the people of our day that there is but 
 one Church that is built on the one Foundation, 
 and that of this Church, while there may be many 
 Branches differing widely, perhaps, in different coun- 
 tries, there can be no two Branches in the same com- 
 munity or Province, without one of them being 
 guilty of heresy, or schism, or perhaps both. 
 
 VI. There is one thought more that occurs in 
 this connection and seems very appropriate to the 
 occasion. 
 
 We find nothing in the Holy Scriptures or in the 
 early Canons, in favor of what is called, in these 
 modern times and in our country. Diocesan inde- 
 pendence. The authority to make laws was not to 
 each Apostle or Bishop by himself, or for his Dio- 
 ceses, but it was where two or three of them were 
 gathered together in " His Name." 
 
 And in the early Church we find most abundant 
 proof of Provincial independence ; but none, v/hat- 
 ever, of Diocesan independence. 
 
 Doubtless, some of the details of worship, instruc- 
 tion, and discipline were left to each Bishop; but for 
 the most part, everything was regulated by the Pro- 
 vincial Synod. And even the Bishops were 
 restrained, to a considerable extent, from doing any- 
 
138 THE PRO VINCI AL SYSTEM 
 
 thing without the consent and approval, if not the 
 direct instructions and command, of the Metropolitan. 
 
 We hear much said, in our day and country, about 
 the rights of the Dioceses, and what rights they 
 surrendered to the General Convention and what 
 rights they reserved to themselves. But we find 
 nothing in the Scriptures, nor in the Canons of the 
 early Church, to afford any support to such a view. 
 In them, or as represented by them, in their estima- 
 tion all authority is from above, and comes from God 
 and from Christ, the Head of the Church. So that 
 whatever authority a Provincial Synod or any General 
 Convention may have, comes from the succession of 
 Bishops, and not from the people or the Dioceses. 
 
 In fact there were no Diocesan organizations, in 
 our sense of the word, in the Primitive Church, so 
 far as I have been able to find. The authority, so 
 far as we can see, was given by our Lord Himself 
 to St. Peter first, (Math , xiv. 16,) and afterwards to 
 all the Apostles equally and alike. (Math., xvii. 18 ; 
 John XX. 29-24.) Afterwards, Mathias was elected 
 to the number, and St. Paul was miraculously called. 
 And they seem to have had, and exercised, equal 
 authority with the original .Twelve. 
 
 But when the Church was established in any city, 
 we find, whenever we can find enough to enable us 
 to say anything about it, that there were three orders, 
 Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. St. Ignatius, who 
 lived as contemporary with St. John, and possibly 
 
IN THE UNITED STA TES. 
 
 139 
 
 died before St. John did, says that there is no Church 
 without the three orders, or strictly, it " is not called 
 a Church," or still more strictly, perhaps, " a 
 Church is not said to be there." 
 
 But the Bishop, with his Clergy and Lay brethren 
 who made up his Diocese or Parish, never assembled 
 as a Convention or Synod, so far as we know. The 
 Bishop had certainly a certain power of directing 
 the affairs of his Diocese; about as much, and so far 
 as we can see, just the same as is implied in our Offi- 
 ces when Deacons and Priests, in their ordina- 
 tion, promise submission and obedience to " the 
 godly admonitions" of their Bishop, while both he 
 and they are under the Laws and Canons of the 
 Church. 
 
 No ; the smallest sub-divisions of the Church that 
 existed in the early times, for any legislative pur- 
 poses, so far as we knov/, are the Provinces. And 
 in each of them, long before the Council of Nice, (A. 
 D. 325,) there were Provincial Synods held, when 
 practicable, twice every year. (Apost. Can, xxxvii). 
 
 Of the political Provinces, as we have seen, there 
 were in the Roman Empire one hundred and eigh- 
 teen. We have forty-two States in our Union. 
 Consequently our States are, on the average^ about 
 three times as large as their Provinces. But in each 
 of the political Provinces, there must have been, at 
 least, three Bishops or Dioceses, in our sense of the 
 word, in order to have any legislation, " the binding 
 of anything on earth that should be bound in Heaven." 
 
I40 "^HE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 In this respect the Church is just the reverse of 
 the State. In the State, according to the theory in 
 our country, all authority resides in the people and 
 comes from them, so that the officers whom we elect 
 are our agents, and derive whatever authority they 
 may have from us, the people. But in the Church it 
 is just the reverse. All authority comes fropi God — 
 and from Christ through the Ministry of His ap- 
 pointment— "the Historic Episcopate;" so that 
 obedience and submission to God, implies within cer- 
 tain limits, submission and obedience to them, and 
 conversely, within those proper limits, obedience and 
 submission to them, is obedience and submission to 
 Him. 
 
 VII. I have said nothing about the Papal Su- 
 premacy in this country, or the rights of the Papal 
 adherents here. But we have seen : 
 
 1. That there is not the slightest indication of 
 any Supremacy of St. Peter over the rest of the 
 Apostles, or over the Church at large in the Holy 
 Scriptures — but quite the contrary. 
 
 2. That in the passage most relied upon (Math, 
 xvi. 18-20,) there is no mention of Rome or of any 
 possible Bishops it may have, or of any continuance 
 of the prerogative here given St. Peter, whatever 
 it mayhavebeen,inany of the Bishops of the Church, 
 whether at Antioch or Alexandria, at Rome, or at 
 New York. 
 
 3. We have seen that the Church in its General 
 
IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 141 
 
 Councils, not only restricted the efforts of the 
 Bishops of Antioch and Alexandria to extend their 
 authority and their jurisdiction over Churches that 
 had not from, the beginning belonged to them, but 
 it also, in the Council of Ephesus, enacted, in the 
 most solemn manner, that if any Bishop should try 
 to extend his jurisdiction, or if any Provincial Coun- 
 cil should make any rule or excuse to that effect, or 
 for that purpose, it should be of no force or validity 
 whatever. 
 
 Hence, I believe, of course, as I have said, that i/i 
 due time the Papacy will be a thing of the past ; in 
 due time, that is, as soon as it has done its work in 
 preparing the Western part of the Christian world 
 for something better; just as the Jewish Kingdom, 
 with its Kings from Saul and David down, prepared 
 the World for the true King — the King of Kings — 
 and then passed away. 
 
 I have made no effort to prove that Episcopacy, 
 in our modern sense of the word, was a part of the 
 original constitution of the Church which Christ and 
 His Apostles built on the Rock of Faith, or that it, 
 in itself, and intrinsically, or by Divine right and 
 necessity is permanently binding on the Church, so 
 that there can be no valid ordination or ministry 
 without it. But, what I say is, that we have no ac- 
 count of any Church that was organized on the Presby- 
 terian or Congregationalists, plan. We hear of Chris- 
 tians and "Churches," in fact, in many places where 
 
142 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 the organization was incomplete, or nothing, and of 
 many more of whose organization, if they had any, 
 we know nothing. 
 
 1. We have the assertion of St. Ignatius, who suf- 
 fered martyrdom about the time of the death of St. 
 John, that at that time there was no Church without 
 the three orders, or rather, to use his exact expres- 
 sion, without the three " it is not called a Church." 
 
 And, if anybody knew at that early time, St. Igna- 
 tius did. He had known St. John, was Bishop of 
 Antioch, the place where the disciples were first 
 called Christians, and the place which then, and for 
 more than a century afterwards, was, more than any 
 other, the centre of unity and held a Primacy over 
 al] the Church, and all the Bishops of the Church. 
 
 2. In the next place, the first of the Canons pro- 
 viding for the succession of the Bishops, allows of, 
 and recognizes, no ordinations except those per- 
 formed by Bishops, whether of Presbyters, Deacons, 
 or any of the inferior Clergy, as Singers,Deaconesses, 
 and such like grades in the Divine Service. 
 
 But all these "Denominations," with their church 
 organizations, must, like the Papacy, come to an 
 end, when, and as fast as the " true Church idea," 
 as I have tried to set it forth in these pages, gains 
 entrance into the minds, and its place as a controlling 
 influence over the hearts of men, in this, our country, 
 and among the nations of the world, in this, our 
 nineteenth century, and the coming centuries, until 
 
IN THE UNITFD STATES, 
 
 143 
 
 there shall be one Church in a place, and all the 
 Churches and the Provinces in the world, however 
 independent in themselves, shall be the One Fold 
 under the One and Only Shepherd and Saviour of 
 Souls. And, then, we shall have, as will be manifest 
 to all persons. One Lord, One Faith, and One Bap- 
 tism. 
 
 VIII. And I know of no New Testament au- 
 thority that clearly justifies believers in withdrav/ing 
 from the Church, or any Branch or Province of it. 
 The only one that occurs to me that has ever been 
 cited, so far as I can recollect, is Rev. xviii. 4. But 
 this is of doubtful interpretation. Of late years, and 
 among Protestants, Babylon has been supposed to 
 mean "the Church of Rome." But a still more 
 recent interpretation, and one which seems to be 
 now coming into favor, is that Babylon meant Jeru- 
 salem, especially, as it was after it had rejected its 
 Messiah and assumed the attitude of persecution of 
 those who believed in Him. And, as we know, be- 
 lievers did retire from Jerusalem, so that none of 
 them were there to suffer the awful calamities of its 
 siege and fall. 
 
 But, even on the supposition that it means Rome, 
 I am by no means inclined to say that if I were 
 living in France, Italy, Spain, or any of the countries 
 where the Church acknowledges the Papal Suprem- 
 acy, I should feel obliged to leave the Church, "come 
 out of her." But this can have no application to the 
 
144 ^■'^ PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 English Church, or to the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church in the United States. 
 
 But the fact is that the great mass of our people 
 never study the Scriptures, or even read them, in a 
 proper spirit, or with any legitimate purpose in 
 view. 
 
 Critics and Skeptics read them to find fault with 
 them, and excuses for their own unbelief and 
 irreligion. 
 
 And professing Christians but too often, and for 
 the most part, read and re-read favorite passages, 
 often in total ignorance of other parts which are in 
 some respects, quite possibly, of greater importance 
 to the object in regard to which they most espec- 
 ially need to know what they contain. 
 
 And even their clergy are often astonishingly 
 ignorant of what, it would seem, it most behooves 
 them to know. Thus an eminent Congregationalist 
 Minister, in a Book which has reached the fourth 
 edition, says (p. 43): "we find no evidence in His 
 word that our Lord ever designed to form a Church 
 or general organization of believers." And yet, we 
 have, Math. xvi. 16, in the Gospels. A Baptist 
 Preacher, not long since, denied that anywhere in 
 the Scriptures, w-as any connection of regeneration 
 with the use of water. I quoted (John iii. 3): •' Ex- 
 cept a man be born again, of water and of the Spirit, 
 he cannot enter the Kingdom of God." He said 
 there were no such words in the Scriptures, and ac- 
 
IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 145 
 
 cused me of falsifying the Gospels. I quoted to a 
 Presbyterian, a Calvanist, the words, (i Tim. ii. 4,) 
 " God will have all men to be saved, and to come to 
 the knowledge of the truth." He had never noticed 
 the text before, and doubted if it could be found in 
 Holy Scripture at all. Even a Romish Priest was 
 delighted with the the text, " Arise, be baptised, and 
 wash away thy sins." (Acts xxii. 16.) But he had 
 never seen it before and did not know where it 
 could be found. 
 
 For the great mass of men, now, as in the days of 
 our Lord — some divine influence, like that of which 
 He spoke when he said, " and if I be lifted up on 
 the Cross will draw all men to me" — some emana- 
 tion from the Cross touches their hearts. We can 
 not always, or often, tell how, and they go, as did 
 those who werelivingin His time, to Him, or rather, 
 to some one who professes to teach in his Name, for 
 guidance. 
 
 I have taken a good deal of pains to set forth in 
 this Essay, the fact, that the Holy Scriptures do 
 not represent God as requiring faith only, but obe- 
 dience as well. Faith, without a full knowledge or 
 comprehension of what we believe, is indeed pos- 
 sible, and in fact it is, to some extent, a matter of 
 necessity. But faith, without charity and obedience, 
 is surely of but very little value in a spiritual point 
 of view. 
 
 I believe it to be a growing policy and conviction 
 
146 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 among all Christian men, and all denominations, 
 and creeds, that we want both more faithful and ex- 
 plicit teaching on the part of the Clergy — and also 
 more of the spirit of docility and submission, and 
 obedience on the part of the people. We must 
 walk by faith if we are to make progress upwards, 
 and towards anything that is better than what this 
 world affords. And faith implies to that extent, 
 both docility and obedience, and docile following on 
 to know if we would come to know the truth of our 
 Lord's teaching. " If any man will do His, he shall 
 know of the doctrine," (John vii. 17,) by his expe- 
 rience in consequence of his obedience. 
 
 Since the paragraps pp. 121-122, were in type, 
 one of the wisest of our Presbyters, who was a 
 trained lawyer before he came into the Church or 
 its Ministry, and with whom I have had frequent 
 conversations on the subject, has suggested, as a 
 solution of the difficulty there stated, that our Dio- 
 cesan Conventions give up, entirely, their Canon- 
 making power and relegate all of this part of 
 their functions to the Provincial gynods. 
 
 This is, certainly, a practicable scheme, and one, 
 too, which our wise men may find themselves com- 
 pelled to adopt. We should then have (i) one Gen- 
 eral Convention once, say, in ten years, with all the 
 Bishops and one or two Deputies from each order. 
 (2) Provincial Synods, with perhaps ten Provinces, 
 
IN THE UNITED STA TES. 147 
 
 or possibly more, in time, meeting with four or more 
 Deputies from each order, the two bodies sustaining 
 to each other much the same relation to the mak- 
 ing of Canons that our state Governments do to the 
 General Government at Washington, in regard to 
 the laws of our land. 
 
 Then, in the third place, we should have Diocesan 
 Conventions once a year, as now, meeting to dis- 
 cuss and to provide for and manage the financial 
 affairs and the missionary work of the Church within 
 the Diocese, very much the same as our Conventions 
 do now when there is no change in their Canons to 
 be made. 
 
 I confess, that the more I think of this plan, it 
 seems to me the best, if not the only one, that has 
 been suggested. And not only the best, but also 
 practically feasible. For I can well imagine that 
 our Clergy and Laity would consent to give up what 
 of the right to make Canons in their Diocesan Con- 
 ventions they now exercise, in view of the many 
 advantages of such a Provincial System in which, of 
 course, they could have a much larger representa- 
 tion than they now have in the General Convention. 
 And then, too, this plan would allow of "Propor- 
 tionate Representation" in our Provincial Councils, 
 much like that of the States in Congress, 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM AS A BASIS OF UNION. 
 
 This work was begun and written, though, in the 
 first draught of it, with the sole aim indicated by 
 the printed title, " The Papal Supremacy and the 
 Provincial System." But, as I read it over, ques- 
 tions and suggestions with regard to the subject, 
 just now so much talked about, " Church Unity" 
 were constantly arising, and I inserted, occasion- 
 ally, a new paragraph with reference to its bearing 
 on v/hat was before me, on that subject. 
 
 I. The circular that was issued by the General 
 Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church at 
 its last meeting — 1886 — and adopted by the Pan- 
 Anglican Council, 1888, has received a very exten- 
 sive attention. The four terms of union there pro- 
 posed were, (i) the Holy Scriptures ; (2) the Apos- 
 tles* and Nicene Creeds ; (3) the two Sacraments, 
 Baptism and the Lord's Supper, duly administered ; 
 and (4) " the Historic Episcopate." 
 
THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM AS A BASIS OF UNION. 
 
 149 
 
 And I suppose that there was implied, though it 
 is not specified, Confirmation, or the Laying on of 
 Hands, by some Bishop in the line of " the Historic 
 Episcopate ;" since no Church that has that Episco- 
 pate admits persons to the Holy Communion with- 
 out it. 
 
 I suppose that in view of these conditions, two 
 facts are inevitable. 
 
 1. There can be no organized union with any of 
 the Protestant Denominations as a body, because (a) 
 they have not the Historic Episcopate, and {U) they 
 have not, and do not practice, the right of Confir- 
 mation. 
 
 2. If they are ever to be brought into the Unity 
 of the Church," it must be, for the most part, one 
 by one, and individually" as the result of investiga- 
 tion and conviction, and they get imbued with " the 
 Church Idea." 
 
 The process must, therefore, be rather slow. But 
 these persons are coming, one by one, about as fast 
 as we can safely receive them. In 1886-7, there 
 were, of clergymen, thirty, whose names were re- 
 ported, namely, Methodists, eight ; Roman Catholics, 
 four ; Congregationalists./oMr ,• Baptists,/oMr ; Pres- 
 byterians, three ; of the smaller denominations, seven. 
 During the year 1887-8, there were twenty-seven, 
 namely, Methodist, eight ; Baptist, jifz'f / Roman Cath- 
 olic, /(?Mr/ Presbyterians, three ; Congregationalists, 
 two ; other denominations five. 
 
I50 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 And this is about the average rate at which their 
 preachers are coming into our Ministry. And we 
 lose, as going out from us, hardly so much as one in 
 the year on the average. 
 
 There are five Dioceses in this State of New 
 York, each with its Bishop, making five in all. But 
 of these five, only two were born from parents who 
 were in our Church. And one of them, certainly, 
 and, as I think, two of them, had been preachers in 
 other Denominations. Of the clergy in this city, 
 (Syracuse,) engaged in ministerial work, ten in all, 
 four had been preachers in other Denominations be- 
 fore they came into our Church, two were sons of 
 Episcopal Clergymen, and as to the other four, I do 
 not know what their antecedents may have been. 
 
 And, if I may speak of" my own experience, I 
 would say, that I have had about forty men under 
 my instruction who were preparing for the Ministry. 
 Of this number, four were ordained to the Espisco- 
 pate, two of whom were, and the other two were not, 
 brought up in the Church. Of the whole number, 
 five had been preachers in other Denominatins. Pre- 
 cisely how many had been brought up in the Church, 
 I do not know, but my impression is, that about one 
 half of them had not, but had come into the Church 
 as the result of investigation and conviction. 
 
 And, so far as the Laity are concerned, there are 
 reasons for believing that at least one-half of our 
 communicants are descended from those who were 
 
AS A BASTS OF UNION. 
 
 iSi 
 
 not members of our Church at all, and a very large 
 share have come to us after having been recognized 
 as " members" in the' various Denominations around 
 us. 
 
 The statistics show, that while the population of 
 our country increased, during the fifty years from 
 1 830-1 880, at the rate of 3.46 per cent, each year, 
 our Church has increased at the rate of 6.4, or about 
 twice as fast as the population of the country. 
 
 These facts, and statistics, show the tendency of 
 things. If we, of " the Protestant Episcopal Church" 
 are a legitimate Branch of the Church which our 
 Blessed Lord founded, having rightful jurisdiction 
 in this country, this tendency is in the right direc- 
 tion and foretells the ultimate result. But if we 
 are not, we are in a state of schism against Christ 
 and His Church, and have no right to continue to 
 exist as a separate body or organization of persons 
 claiming to be disciples of Christ. 
 
 II. I am well aware that this is not in accordance 
 with the sentiment that prevails in our community. 
 But, I believe it is not only in accordance with, but 
 that it is, in fact, the only teaching of the Holy 
 Scriptures on the subject. 
 
 In that Volume, the word " Church" is used in 
 the singular, to denote; 
 
 I. An Institution, as when our Lord said to 
 Peter, on " this Rock I will build my Church." And, 
 again, when St. Paul speaks of the Church as that 
 
152 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM' 
 
 by which " is made known" to the world " the man- 
 ifold wisdom of God," (Eph. iii. 10,) and, again, 
 " the Church of the living God, which is the Pillar 
 and ground of the Truth," (Tim. iii. 15). 
 
 2. Then, again, the word is used to denote the 
 collective Body of the believers as in Acts ii. 47, 
 "the Lord added to the Church, daily, such as 
 should be sound." And, as where St. Paul says, 
 " God hath set some in the Church, first Apostles, 
 secondly Prophets, thirdly Teachers" (i Cor. xii. 28). 
 
 3. In a few places, the word may mean, as it 
 does sometimes now, the place, or building, in which 
 Christians held their meetings for worship and edi- 
 fication. (Acts xix. 39; I Cor. vi. 8 ; xiv. 28-35.) 
 
 4. But when the word is used in the plural, as 
 " churches," it denotes bodies of Christians who lived 
 in different cities or Provinces, and were different 
 bodies of believers only because they were living in 
 different cities or Provinces. 
 
 It is, indeed, quite true that we have some indi- 
 cations in the Holy Scriptures, and more in the early 
 Church History, of a disagreement between the 
 Gentile and the Jewish converts, just as there is 
 now, between the whites and the blacks in our 
 Southern states. But they had no organizations, 
 constituted no separate Churches, or denominations, 
 in our modern sense of the word. 
 
 And, in fact, there could be no such division. If 
 false apostles and false prophets came to them, they 
 
AS A BASIS OF UNION. 
 
 153 
 
 were to be avoided. If even an angel from heaven 
 should preach any " other Gospel" than the One 
 the Christians in any city or place had received, he 
 was to be "accursed." And if it was the same, 
 there could be no need of another organization or 
 denomination ; to have another or to be separate, 
 therefore, implied "another Gospel, or schism in the 
 Body of Christ." 
 
 5. Besides, the word " Church" is used in the 
 New Testament, twice at least, in senses somewhat 
 different from either of those above given, id) In 
 Acts xix. 39, it is used to denote a court, or political 
 body, translated "assembly". («) In Heb. xii. 23, it is 
 said to denote those who are already in Heaven. 
 
 But when used to denote persons on earth 
 who profess to be Christians, it denotes a visible 
 body, and if they are Christians, it is the Church of 
 which believers were made members by their Bap- 
 tism, and in full communion, to which they were ad- 
 mitted by Confirmation or "the laying on of hands." 
 No others are reckoned as Christians or Disciples, 
 or members of the Church at all, or in any sense. 
 
 I can see no way, therefore of evading this issue. 
 If there is more than one religous organization in the 
 same Province so different in their Doctrines that 
 they are not in communion with each other, on ac- 
 count of differences in Doctrine, one of them is in 
 heresy. If there is no difference in their Doctrinal 
 Standard, which they regard as essential, then one or 
 
154 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 the other is in a state of schism, as against one another 
 and the Body of Christ. And if they have not the 
 "Historic Episcopate," they maybe in the condition 
 of those who build on " another foundation" than 
 that which is laid (i Cor. iii. 2) " the foundation of 
 the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself, 
 being the chief corner stone." (Eph. ii. 20.) 
 
 In a superficial view of the subject, (and this is as 
 far as many persons go in the matter,) the chief ob- 
 jection to so many Denominations and the prevailing 
 one is, it takes three or four times as many clergymen 
 who must be supported as would be needed, if all 
 were united in one Denomiation or Church. 
 
 But , on a deeper look into the subject, it is seen that 
 not the Church only, but Christianity itself, looses 
 the prestige it would otherwise have, and one of the 
 greatest elements of its power, nearly all its power 
 in a human sense, by these divisions. 
 
 The majority of our people do not profess to be 
 Christians at all, either to believe its distinctive doc- 
 trines, or to acknowledge its claim to divine origin 
 and authority. And the mass of our young men, 
 and women, too, 1 fear, are growing up without any 
 sanse of, or belief in, any over-ruling Providence, of 
 any moral government of God in this world or in any 
 life of rewards and retribution in the next. 
 
 It has even been claimed that the saloons con- 
 trol more votes and exert more powerful influence 
 in our public affairs than the Churches. 
 
AS A BASIS OF UNION, 155 
 
 The consequence is an abandonment to all those 
 natural impulses which St. Paul speaks of as the 
 "carnal nature" and "the life of the flesh which is 
 enmity against God." 
 
 It is true that we reject the Pope, but not the 
 Bishop of Rome, as Metropolitan of the Province, 
 nor yet as Patriarch of the old " Diocese," or Pat- 
 riarchate within its proper limits. What we reject, 
 is the claim to Supremacy over the whole Church 
 and his right to interfere with our Province. France 
 and Spain, Germany and Portugal must do as they 
 please — it is their affair and not ours. But we reject 
 it not only because we find no proof of it in the 
 Scriptures, but the contrary, and because the Ancient 
 Church protested against it, resisted it, and pro- 
 vided in its Provincial System for all that it claims to 
 have been authorized to do. 
 
 III. And, in this view, the Church in each Na- 
 tion or Province must claim for itself, assert and 
 exercise the authority that, as we have seen, was 
 given to it by our Lord Himself for this very pur- 
 pose, and do for the people in that Province or Nation 
 all, and whatever could be necessary for the fuU 
 publication and administration of the Gospel and 
 other means of Salvation, if indeed there are any. 
 
 And it is on this ground, and this ground only, that 
 the claims and exercise of any Papal influence or 
 authority beyond the mere Metropolitan jurisdic- 
 tion and the Patriarchal precedence that was acknowl 
 
156 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 edged to belong to it, or accorded to it, by the Ca- 
 nons of the Primitive Church, can he at all justified. 
 It was amaxin of the Roman law. Salus ReipubliccB 
 est suprema lex. Whatever is necessary to the salva- 
 tion of the Nation is above all law, or, rather, is, it- 
 self, the supreme law. Possibly, something of the 
 kind may be said of the Papal Supremacy. And it 
 has doubtless occurred in times past and may not un- 
 likely, occur even now, to many minds as a means of 
 justification for their continuing to submit to it and 
 to advocate its exercise. 
 
 It has sometimes been found neccessary to put 
 even innocent men into prison as the best means of 
 protecting them from the violence of the mob. But 
 this has never been considered a sufficient reason for 
 keeping them there after the danger had passed 
 away. 
 
 But if the view that I have suggested as, doubt- 
 less, occurring to the minds of intelligent Romanists 
 severally, that the only alternate is between Roman- 
 ism with the Papal obedience on the one hand, and 
 irreligion and total rejection of Christ and Christianity 
 on the other, there may be, and, in fact, there are, 
 grave reasons for hesitation and deliberation in mak- 
 ing a choice. 
 
 Our Lord, in that most pathetic Prayer uttered in 
 the night in which He was betrayed, said : "Neither 
 pray I for these alone, but for them also that shall 
 believe on me through their word, that they all may 
 
AS A BASIS OF UNION. 
 
 157 
 
 be one, as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that 
 they also may be one in us, that the world may believe 
 that thou hast sent me." (John xvii. 23.) 
 
 What this " oneness" is, St. Paul has, as I think, 
 fully indicated. When he said, " there is One Body 
 and One Spirit, even as ye are called in one Hope 
 of our calling One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, 
 One God and Father of all. (" Eph. iv. 4-6.) And 
 a little further on, (iv. 11 ) the Apostle says that our 
 Lord appointed (gave) a ministry in divers orders, 
 " some Apostles, Prophets, Evanglists, Pastors, and 
 Teachers" — " for the work of the Ministry and for 
 the edifying (or building up) the Church," both in 
 numbers and in the graces of the Christian character 
 and spirit which is the "One Body" of Christ. 
 
 Nor is this all, the errors and " sins" by which 
 divisions in, or secessions from, this One Body, which 
 is expressly declared to be the Church, are spoken 
 of and classed among the work of the flesh, (Gal. v. 
 20,) and all believers are warned against them. (Rom 
 xvi. 17; I Cor. i. 10, xi. 18-16; 2 Pet. ii. i.) 
 
 I. In the strictest sense of the word " heresy," is 
 the holding of an opinion that differs from the doc- 
 trine taught by the Church. Thus, Our Lord Him- 
 self was a " heretic," in reference to the teachings of 
 the Jewish Church in His day. (Math, xxiii. 1-5.) 
 St. Paul confesses that "after the way which they call 
 heresy, so worship, I the God of my fathers." (Acts, 
 xxiv. 14.) 
 
158 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 Heresy, that is, technical heresy, does not, in 
 itself, imply anything that is wrong. If the Church, 
 or that Branch of it which has jurisdiction in the 
 country to which we belong, teaches errors, it is bet- 
 ter to be a " heretic" than not ; if by so doing we 
 hold the truth as it is in Jesus, " the Faith once de- 
 livered to the saints." 
 
 2. Schism, on the other hand, is a division and 
 alienation from one another among those who are 
 " One Body" or ought to be, in faith and worship. 
 
 Thus St. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians (i Cor. 
 iii. 3,) says there is among you " envying and strife, 
 and divisions" (separations into parties or denomin- 
 ations). " One saith I am of Paul ; another, I am 
 of Apollos." It seems that this tendency to 
 schism or division was pretty general, for St. Paul 
 says, (i Cor. i. 12,) " Every one of you saith I am of 
 Paul, and I am of Apollos, and I of Cephas — 
 (Peter) and I of Christ. " 
 
 And a little further on he says, (i Cor. xi. 18,) 
 " I hear that there are divisions (schisms) among you 
 and I partly believe it, for there must be also heresies 
 (or sects) among you that they which are approved 
 may be made manifest among you." Doubtless, there- 
 fore, those who were not among the "approved" were 
 at fault. 
 
 This distinction and difference, however, between 
 "heresy" and "schism," word and thing, has not 
 always been observed in the Church or by Church 
 
AS A BASIS OF UNION. 
 
 159 
 
 writers. Thus the Council of Constantinople (A. D. 
 38 i-Can. vi.) says that it regards as '• heretics," and 
 calls by that name not only those that had been 
 previously excommunicated, but also "those that do, 
 indeed, pretend to confess the sound faith, but have 
 separated ihemseh/es aind formed congregations in op- 
 position to our Convincial Bishops", or as some 
 read, "the Bishops who are in communion with us." 
 IV. Besides this, there are two or three other 
 things to be' noticed. 
 
 1. The first, is the fact that we are forewarned 
 against false teachers ; and " false teachers who will 
 bring in damnable heresies." (i Pet. ii. i.) "Now 
 the Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times 
 some shall depart from the Faith, "(i Tim. iv. i,)not 
 able to endure sound doctrine ; " they will heap to 
 themselves teachers" (2 Tim. iv. 3) such.as they pre- 
 fer. 
 
 2. St. Paul, in his second Epistle to the Thessa- 
 lonians (iii. 3-13) says that in the future there will 
 come " a falling away" (from the Faith, I think) and 
 the " Man of Sin will be revealed" — who will deceive 
 the people " with all power and signs, and lying 
 wonders, and with all the deceivableness of unright- 
 eousness." 
 
 I will make no attempt to show who and what was 
 meant by this " Man of Sin." But I remark in pas- 
 sing, that, most assuredly, it was not the Church or 
 the Ministry, which our Lord appointed in the Church, 
 
l6o THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 while confining themselves to their appropriate 
 sphere of preaching the Gospel and administering 
 the Sacraments, the Worship and the Discipline of 
 the Church. 
 
 It may have been {a) the persecuting civil rulers of 
 Rome before the conversion of Constantine; [U) it may 
 have been the professing " Christian" Rulers who, 
 after that conversion, under pretense of ^^ protecting" 
 the Church, sought to control it and use it for their 
 own selfish and ambitious ends ; (c) the Papal Suprem- 
 acy with its assumptions and corrupt teachings, or 
 (d) finally, it may have been modern sectarianism, 
 dividing believers into Sects and Denominations each 
 with its own preferences. 
 
 3. Then, thirdly, in the writings of St. John there 
 is a special prediction of Anti-Christ, (i John ii. 18- 
 20,) or the Beast. (Rev. xiii-xix). 
 
 Here, again, I shall make no effort to show who, 
 or what was specifically meant, whether something 
 out of the Church as persecuting Emperors, or some- 
 thing within the Church itself, either {a) the Pope, as 
 is often affirmed by Protestants, or {J}) the spirit of 
 sectarianism and secession which prevails so exten- 
 sively in these modern times, as has been maintained 
 by others. 
 
 But, manifestly, whether in the Church or out of 
 it, it is an evil influence or power that bodes great 
 danger and evil, against which it is quite necessary 
 we should be on our guard. And, most manifestly, 
 
ASABA SIS OF UNION. i g j 
 
 whatever else it may be, it is not the Ministry or any 
 part of them, which our Lord appointed for the 
 edification of His Church and to whom He gave the 
 word and work of reconciliation (2 Cor. v. 18-19) so 
 long as they preach only what is written in the 
 Bible and confine themselves to the Province to 
 which their field of labor is properly assigned, 
 
 V. I read that Professor Fisher, of Yale College, 
 has been delivering some lectures in which he claims 
 that " Historical Science" is teaching that, (i) " no 
 specific form of Church government can boast of 
 being an Apostolic ordinance, (2) intended to endure 
 for all time." 
 
 Now, suppose both of these were proved or con- 
 ceded, it remains true beyond a doubt, 
 
 1. That our Lord founded a Church which was to 
 endure through all time (Math. xvi. 16-18) and to 
 which, as a visible Church or Society of believers 
 in Him, " He added daily such as should be saved. 
 (Acts ii. 47.) 
 
 2. It is equally certain that He appointed (gave) 
 a Ministry in divers orders for the work of preach- 
 ing the Gospel and building up his Church, the 
 necessity for which it will last as long as the 
 Church itself endures. (Eph. iv. 11-17.) 
 
 3. And it is equally certain that He never gave 
 to any who would be His disciples any permission 
 to separate from the Chruch so instituted and provi- 
 ded for — nor any authority to set up a ministry of 
 their own who should speak and act in His name. 
 
l62 1'HE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 Nay, St, Paul himself says that " in the last days 
 perilous times will come" — perhaps after the Papal 
 influence has confused and misled all men's notions 
 in regard to the Church and Primitive Christianity, 
 so that they do not know where or what the Church 
 is — a time when men will not endure what he calls 
 " sound doctrine," but will " heap to themselves teach- 
 ers" such as they like. (2 Tim. iii. i ; iv. 3.) 
 
 Surely this is not applied nor applicable to the 
 Ministry which Christ sent to preach His Gospel — 
 " the sound doctrine" which they are authorized and 
 commanded to preach. 
 
 If, then, we accept the doctrine that no particular 
 form of Church government was established that 
 was intended to be permanent or of binding obliga- 
 tion, what are we to do? 
 
 Only one of two things is possible, i. No change 
 can be made in the form of Church government 
 without the retention of this Ministry and their con- 
 sent and co-operation to any change we may propose ; 
 or, 2, we may have so many Churches, totally inde- 
 pendent and without union or inter-communion, as 
 persons of different minds or tastes may choose to 
 organize for themselves for such purposes. 
 
 Not even " two or three" can get together for 
 worship without some one " to take the lead." They 
 cannot, of course, have the Sacraments of Baptism 
 and the Lord's Supper without some one to admin- 
 ister them. In fact, not even so many as two or 
 
AS A BASIS OF UNION. 
 
 163 
 
 three professing to be disciples or believers, can get 
 together for the purpose of forming a church with- 
 out doing y<7r tJteinselves and by authority which they 
 assume, just what Our Lord authorized His Ministry 
 to do for His Church, — just what He " gave" or ap- 
 pointed them to do. And they cannot live as 
 Christian believers without some such organization. 
 
 It is true, that Professor Fisher thinks that mon- 
 archies, and all forms of hereditary government are 
 passing away, and that therefore all traces of a di- 
 vinly appointed Ministry, or what is claimed to be 
 such, is also passing away. 
 
 I quite agree with the learned Professor that all 
 forms of hereditary government are passing away 
 and must disappear in the course of ages. And I 
 am very glad he has said it. Kings and Nobles of 
 hereditary rights have been a necessity in the past, 
 just as the Papal usurpations were a necessity — a 
 necessary evil — in the Middle Ages. 
 
 But our Lord did not come to teach politics and tell 
 us what should be, or ought to be, in the State. His 
 Kingdom is not of this World. He did, however, 
 institute a Church and appoint for it a Ministry and 
 assign them a work that was not only for all nations, 
 but for all time, " even unto the end of the world." 
 And the Ministry-^/fw Ministry — cannot cease 
 until His word fails and His Church shall have 
 ceased to exist. 
 
164 
 
 THE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 Or does the Professor look forward to a time when 
 the Gospel will not need to be preached, when Chris- 
 tianity will become a mere philosophy, without Sac- 
 raments, Worship or Ritual, and discipline, for a 
 godly life ? and which every man may take, as he 
 does now, some system of philosophy or science, 
 accept it and follow its precepts, if he sees fit, or 
 rejects them and casts them off as idle prejudices, 
 superstitions of a past age, which humanity has out- 
 grown and no man has need for, if that be his choice ? 
 
 But the fact that Dr. Fisher can teach and is 
 teaching such doctrines, (for he is not only the au- 
 thor of several books that are highly commended, 
 but also a Professor in the theological department 
 of Yale University,) shows " that the Church Idea," 
 or any fair understanding and appreciation of that 
 idea as entertained by our Lord Himself, and both 
 taught and put in practice by his inspired Apostles, 
 have not yet become^ sufficiently diffused and ac- 
 cepted to allow us to hope for or expect any very 
 sudden union of Christendom into one Fold. 
 
 VI. In these pages I have made no effort to 
 show that "the Historic Episcopate," or the order of 
 Bishops as distinct from Presbyters or Deacons in 
 the Ministry which our Lord instituted in his Church, 
 is of divine appointment or was intended to be per- 
 petual. 
 
 We have seen, however, that in the very first or 
 oldest of^the Canons, the distinction was recognized 
 
AS A BASIS OF UNION, 165 
 
 and its perpetuation was provided for. The Canons 
 of the General Councils from Nice A. D. 325, and 
 onward, continued the same policy, although, at this 
 time, the Provincial System was fully established 
 with its Archbishop or Metropolitan in each Prov- 
 ince over the three or more Bishops in the Province, 
 as they were over the Presbyters and Deacons. 
 But I think it too manifest for denial or argument: 
 
 1. That the order of Bishops which is the essen- 
 tial feature of " Historic Episcopate" is, if not of 
 divine appointment, yet not so repugnant to, or in- 
 consistent with, our Lord's appointments as to be 
 properly a cause or a justification, even, of separation 
 from the Church that retains it, or of abstaining 
 from its ministrations, and, 
 
 2. That if we should abandon it and unite with 
 the non-Episcopal Denominations without its con- 
 tinuance, we should be regarded as uniting with 
 them and on their ground, rather than our bringing 
 them into the Church — by all the older Branches of 
 the Church — Anglican or Roman, Russian or East- 
 ern. 
 
 Besides, many of us regard the Episcopate as of 
 divine institution and therefore cannot consent to 
 give it up, whereas, I do not know as one of the 
 Denominations have any conscientious scruples 
 against it. 
 
 VI. Doubtless there are some things said in the 
 Holy Scriptures, that are accidental and designed to 
 
1 66 tl^^E PROVINCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 be transitory. But it is a very dangerous thing to 
 assume the responsibility of determining for ourselves 
 what is to be regarded as essential, and what is only 
 accidentcil and may be safely omitted. That which 
 the Chutch has " bound" upon us we ought, I think, 
 to feel bound to " observe and do." But whatever 
 it has "loosed" or allowed its members to leave un- 
 done, that, I think, we may safely feel "loosed" or 
 released from, for all the purposes of the salvation 
 of our souls. 
 
 But we must have some authority to determine 
 for us what we are to do, what we may do, and what 
 we may leave undone. If every one has the right to 
 decide for himself, there can be no rule or law. 
 And where there is no "law" there is no " transgres- 
 sion, "nor discipline and no punishment. If each one 
 is left " to do what is right in his own eyes," even 
 with the Bible in his hand, there can be no Church, 
 no organization that has, or can have any binding 
 force, or that can treat with authority, " bind or 
 loose" anything on earth so as to be bound in God's 
 sight. The questions to which I refer are numerous, 
 though 1 limit myself to those of them that are in 
 themselves not of essential importance to the exist- 
 ence of a Church. 
 
 Not to refer to what may be called doctrinal or 
 theoretical matter, such instances as these may be 
 cited ; all of them presenting questions on which 
 Churches are now divided : shall we keep the first 
 
AS A BASTS OF UNION. 167 
 
 day of the week or the seventh, as the weekly holiday ? 
 Shall we baptize our children in their infancy, or 
 must we wait until they are adults ? Shall we bap- 
 tize by imrnersion only, or may we baptize by affu- 
 sion as well ? Shall we retain the old custom of " an- 
 ointing the sick" or allow it to be omitted? Shall 
 we administer the Lord's Supper in the two kinds, 
 or only in one? Shall we retain the three Orders 
 in the Ministry, or go back, to what is claimed by 
 many, to have been the earlier form — Presbyterian- 
 ism or Congregationalism ? Or shall we omit Min- 
 istry and Sacraments altogether, as some, at least, 
 of those who profess to be " Bible Christians" seem 
 to prefer? 
 
 It is sometimes claimed that what is not so ob- 
 vious in the Scriptures that all can find it, cannot be 
 essential. Perhaps so. But then, no tv/o can get 
 together for worship and the administration of the 
 Sacraments v/hich our Lord ordained, without doing 
 something for which there is no specific command 
 or instruction in the Scriptures. 
 
 But however essential or accidental and unimpor- 
 tant these matters of organization and detail in wor- 
 ship may be, I think no one can fail to see that it is 
 best for his spiritual welfare — best as a matter of 
 faith and of obedience to our Lord Himself, to have 
 (i) if possible and as far as practicable those princi- 
 ples of organization, and these rites and ceremo- 
 nies which He ordained or " commanded" His Apos- 
 
l68 "^HE PROVINCIAL SYSTEM- 
 
 ties to teach all nations to observe or (2) if we need 
 others and more, to have such as have been or- 
 dained and established by those to whom He gave 
 the authority for this very thing. 
 
 In fact, neither our Lord nor His Apostles seem 
 to have contemplated the time when His Church, or 
 any Branch of His Church, should become so cor- 
 rupt, either in faith or in morals, as to justify His 
 disciples to withdraw from it. If we can judge from 
 His example and teachings, see Math, xxxiii. 1-5, 
 He would have them remain in the Church, abstain 
 from its evil works and evil teachings, and try to re- 
 form it. If it should " cast them out," as the Scribes 
 and Pharisees did His Disciples from their Syna- 
 gogues, and even put them to death as the Jewish 
 Church did our Lord Himself, so much the worse 
 for the Church. It can do them no spiritual harm 
 and the time will come, if they are indeed in the 
 right and worthy of it, when the Church itself will 
 accept their views and honor them as martyrs. 
 
CHAPTER VI 1. 
 CONCLUSION — A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 I am not willing to close this Essay without a few 
 words which, though in no way connected with my 
 arguments, are of a personal character, both in regard 
 to myself and the readers of these pages. 
 
 I. I am one of those who not only believe in the 
 Provincial System, but also in the necessity of some 
 adaptation of the Church and its methods, by that sys- 
 tem, to our times and to our forms of government. 
 It is not quite easy to see how far the changes may 
 go, or how far they can go, without forfeiting our 
 claims to be a Branch of the true Vine and the bles- 
 sings and benefits that flow from a connection with it. 
 
 As I have said in the last chapters, there has hith- 
 erto been no Government that was not in relations 
 with the Church, either (i) of open and avowed op- 
 position and persecution — or (2) of oppression and 
 restriction under the pretense of protection. And, 
 
170 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 I have expressed my belief that there is no possibil- 
 ity of any other relation, besides the one or the other 
 of these two, so long as Governments have a hered- 
 itary Monarchy or hereditay class, in any form, that 
 controls^ or aims to control, the people of the Na- 
 tion. 
 
 One of three things seem to me, therefore, to be 
 inevitable under such a government: (i) oppression, 
 (2) " protection" with its inevitable restrictions and 
 control, or (3) the Church so small as to be but 
 one of many sects which are so numerous and influ- 
 ential that they will quarrel among themselves and 
 neutralize any influence which the Church itself 
 might attempt to exercise over the reigning family — . 
 or the aristocracy of the land. 
 
 But with us, and our form of Government, there is 
 no danger, as there is no need, of such an influence. 
 Our Rulers are elected by the people, and for limi- 
 ted, but short, periods. If we like them, we can re- 
 elect them, or if we choose we can elect others in 
 their places at the expiration of the period for which 
 they were elected. 
 
 Nor is there any danger that a Church that is 
 without the pretentions of the Papal Supremacy, will 
 attempt to control the Government. For, even if they 
 were all of one way of thinking, and all the believers 
 in our land were one united body — One Body — the 
 Romanists having rejected the Papal Supremacy, it 
 could and would neither aim nor wish to do anything 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 171 
 
 more than the Denominations, all of them, do now, 
 in preaching and insisting upon the general princi- 
 ples of Christian faith and morality among all our 
 people. 
 
 But there must be some, perhaps much, adapta- 
 tion which shall of course be such, and such only, as 
 we have the right and authority to make in conjunc- 
 tion with the Ministry which our Lord appointed to 
 act wherever and whenever they, in sufficient num- 
 bers, may be gathered together in His Name for 
 that purpose. 
 
 II. We hear much said, indeed, about "salvation 
 by faith alone." We also read, he that believeth in 
 the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved. (Acts xvi. 31.) 
 But we are also assured that " faith without works, 
 is dead."(Jamesii. 17.) With faith there must be 
 not only the works of a righteous and holy life, but 
 also obedience — the observance of the Institutions 
 of Christian righteousness — Baptism, Public Wor- 
 ship, the Lord's Supper, and such like, as well. 
 
 But a Church, without any idea of its divine origin 
 and a sense of the obligation, to abide by, and 
 teach " the Faith once delivered to the Saints," as 
 expressed in the Apostles' creed, and expanded in 
 the Nicene creed, has no chance or prospect of per- 
 manence or long continuance, however it may be 
 organized or conduct its worship. The one Church 
 which our Lord, the only Savoiur of men, founded, is 
 the only one against which the gates of Hell will not 
 prevail. 
 
172 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 I believe there is no one of the older Denomina- 
 tions that has not departed from the creed or doc- 
 trinal basis on which it started into existence, and 
 for the sake of which it separated from "the Flis- 
 tcric Episcopate." The Congregationalists, as I un- 
 derstand, tliose of them I mean who have not left the 
 Denomination, agree now in doctrine more nearly 
 with the early Unitarians, the Unitarians of fifty years 
 ago, than they do with their ancestors of one hun- 
 dred and fifty years ago. The Methodists, as I under- 
 stand, no where hold and teach now the views of 
 Sacraments and the Church, which were held by their 
 great founder, John Wesley. And even the Presby- 
 terians are not only divided into some six or seven 
 "churches" as I understand, but the most conserva- 
 tive of them all, scarcely hold to the extreme doc- 
 trines of the Westminister Confession, and they are, 
 even now, discussing some important changes in 
 their doctrinal standards, either throwing out, or, at 
 least, allowing their members to dissent from, the 
 very doctrines on account of which their ancestors, 
 some two hundred and fifty years sgo, separated 
 from the Church of England, when they found that 
 they could not control it. 
 
 The Presbyterian Assembly, which has just closed 
 its session, reports that they have in the five States 
 of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and 
 Michigan, 518 churches without a Pastor, and most 
 of them have no prospect or hope of ever having 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 173 
 
 ^'^Y't 354 have less than 30 members each. They 
 claim about 7,000 Parishes in the country, of which 
 1,139 are vacant ; 327, with less than 50 members; 
 319, with less than 25 ; and 219, with only 10, or 
 less. 
 
 Surely, a Church animated and inspired with the 
 idea and belief in its divine origin and mission, could 
 exhibit no such results in our country after two 
 hundred and fifty years of existence. 
 
 III. But, of all the forms of Christianity that are 
 professed amongst us, I think that the Romish, 
 though claiming divine origin and promise of perpe- 
 tuity, has the least ground of hope for standing 
 against and resisting the portentious power of infi- 
 delity that confronts us, or of reclaiming men from 
 its influence. 
 
 The few converts that the advocates of Roman- 
 ism make — and they are very few indeed — may be 
 referred to these classes (and Ihave known, person- 
 ally, examples of them all). 
 
 I. The highly intellectual, who really have no 
 love for the Papacy in itself, or for most of the doc- 
 trines or practices of the Romish Church, but who 
 accept it and them, because they can see no other 
 means of holding back our people from the extremes 
 of protestanti::.m — and what they regard as only the 
 next step, and inevitable consequence — infidelity. 
 And of this class, small as it is, a large portion 
 
174 CONCLUSION. 
 
 have returned from their apostacy, as, for example, 
 Ffoulkes and Littledale in England, and Forbes in 
 America. 
 
 2. The few who are in a measure educated, but 
 who have no time or disposition to investigate and 
 think for themselves, and want to have all questions 
 of a religious and moral chracter settled for them 
 by authority. 
 
 3. And, finaly, which constitutes by far the larg- 
 est class, those who are of an emotional or aesthetic 
 constitution, who care but little for the orthodoxy 
 or soundness of their theological views or for the 
 claims to authority on Church matters, but whose 
 religion consists to a very large extent of mere emo- 
 tional piety, mere sentiment, and the beauties of 
 ritual and worship. 
 
 In any sound view of the case, religion is, to a large 
 extent, a character which is not, and cannot be 
 formed by any sudden change of belief or opinion. 
 It is formed by habit and is transmitted from gener- 
 ation to generation. 
 
 Hence, no sudden change in the the masses of any 
 community is possible or desirable. In the breaking 
 away from old habits and associations, many of the 
 most salutary restraints that ever act, or can act 
 upon society are lost, (i) The more thoughtful and 
 intellectual few will go with the new opinions, if 
 they are better than the old ones. (2) Some, of a 
 more conservative turn of mind, will adhere to the 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 175 
 
 old views and ways, while (3) the great mass are 
 likely to take advantage of the removal of the re- 
 straints which is thus effected and go to " the bad" 
 in "the way that leads to death." 
 
 The Churches in the Roman Obedience, as I have 
 repeatedly said, must reject " the Papal Supremacy" 
 as it is now understood and claimed, which will 
 doubtless pass away as soon as God has done 
 using i': for His purposes. 
 
 But in this country the rejection of that Suprem- 
 acy by its adherents would need to be followed by 
 a change of Doctrines and Ritual, very much the 
 same as that which was effected in England in the 
 sixteenth century. 
 
 IV. But, as for the Denominations, as they are 
 called, they must come to admit and realise the fact 
 that our Lord did "build a Church," that He ap- 
 pointed a Ministry " in divers orders," to do " the 
 work of the Ministry," the Ministry of reconcilia- 
 tion," that, He and they " added to that Church daily, 
 " such as should be saved" as His Disciples, that He 
 prayed that " they all might be one" and that they 
 warned the disciples against " heresies" and "schisms" 
 in the Church and " secessions" /r^M it, as well as 
 against the "heaping to themselves" teachers that 
 might keep these secessions in existence as Denom- 
 inations or Sects contrary to His Word and Will. 
 
 In the Apostles days those who believed and were 
 baptised, were regarded as in the way of Salvation, 
 
1/6 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Heresies, divisions among those who were within 
 the Church, were classed among " the works of 
 the iiesh," which they that had fallen into them must 
 repent of in order to feel sure of final salvation. 
 
 But there were others who seceded from the 
 Church. St. John says of them, (i John ii. 19,) 
 " they went out from us, but they were not of us, 
 for if they had been of us they would have contin- 
 ued with us." 
 
 These words, as we have seen, were written 
 about A. D. 90, some thirty years after Linus, the 
 first Bishop of Rome, some twenty or more years 
 after Evodius, the predecessor of St. Ignatius, of 
 whom I have so often spoken as Bishop of Antioch 
 before St. John died, and for twenty or more years 
 during his lifetime. About thirty years, also, after 
 Annianus, the first Bishop of Alexandria, St. 
 Mark, and while (probably) Simeon, who succeeded 
 St. James in that See, was Bishop of Jerusalem. 
 
 We have no means of knowing, very definitely 
 who these " seceders" were. It is certain that they 
 had been in the Church, and left it on account of 
 some doctrine that they held in regard to the Father 
 and the Son, and the relation between them. Both 
 Gnosticism, which claims to understand and explain 
 all things, even the mysteries of the faith, thus mak- 
 ing of Chistianity a mere philosophy, and some forms 
 of Monasticism, that denied the salvability and res- 
 urrection of the body, and insisted upon not only 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 177 
 
 self dfcfiial, but the crucifixiom- or torture of the 
 body, as the source, seat and origin of all the evil 
 that is in us, made their appearance in the Apostles' 
 days, and it is most likely that these are the Sects 
 to which St. John refers in the words already quoted. 
 
 We are told that they " went out'' not that they 
 were cast out. They left voluntarily and formed 
 churches of their own in which they could have their 
 views preached, if not to the exclusion of all others, 
 yet, so as to give that prominence to them that 
 they thought to be desirable. 
 
 We find, indeed, heresy spoken of as a sufficient 
 ground for expulsion in individual cases in the Apos- 
 tolic times. But the Church, and the Churches in 
 the different Provinces, seem to have been, in those 
 early days, exceedingly tolerant of diversity of opin- 
 ians so long as men would consent to " walk by the 
 same rule." 
 
 The Primitive " Church Idea" seems to have been 
 quite the reverse of that of our modern Sects in re- 
 gard to this matter. 
 
 Thus, our Lord, in His answer to Nicodemussaid 
 " born of water and of the spirit," putting water 
 first. So, (in Acts ii. 47,) " the Lord added to the 
 Church daily such as should be saved." The Spirit 
 and " saving knowledge" were to come after and in 
 the Church. St. Paul observes the same order 
 (i Tim. ii. 4): God "who will have all men to be 
 
178. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." 
 So, (in 2 Tim. ii. 25,) "repentance ?^the acknowledg- 
 ing of the truth." 
 
 This is also in accordance with the Old Testament 
 teachings ; for there we read not only that " the fear 
 of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," but also in 
 the Prophets, (Hos. vi. 3,) then shall we know, if we 
 follow on, to know the Lord." 
 
 And bur Lord said, more emphatically and defi- 
 nitely still (John vii. if) " If any man will do His 
 will he shall know of the doctrine." Obedience be- 
 fore knowledge and as a condition to it. Faith and 
 love, leading to obedience and giving a docile dispo- 
 sition, and the two, docility and obedience, leading 
 to knowledge, a knowledge of the truth. This seems 
 to be a divine order. 
 
 V. I shall make no attempt to indicate what 
 changes must take place in our Branch of the 
 Church. If the Church is to be one, it must be com- 
 prehensive as well ; and comprehensive, too, in more 
 senses than one. The Pan Anglican Council, which 
 met in 1888, admitted that there might not only be 
 necessary some changes in the statements of the 
 XXXIX, Articles, but more than that, that some 
 changes might be both expedient and desirable. 
 And one of the ablest of the English Bishops, Words- 
 worth, has intimated that we may find it necessary 
 to go back of even the Council of Nice, to the more 
 primitive forms of the Apostles' Creed. 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 179 
 
 The guilt of schism does not always rest exclu- 
 sively with those who secede ; though always and in- 
 evitably a part of it does rest upon them — how large 
 a part of it no human being can tell. But in many 
 cases the responsibility for the schism does rest, in 
 part, upon the Church itself. If, for example, the 
 English Church had been in doctrines and practices 
 in the days of Wesley what it now is, there would 
 have been no secession of his followers, no Meth- 
 odists as an organized body, outside of, and distinct 
 from, the Church in England, or probably in America. 
 
 But times change and we change with them. 
 There have been times when the Church could not, if 
 it would, pursue a liberal policy, and times, indeed, 
 when it has no conception of such a policy, or even 
 of the possibility of it. He that would drive, and 
 whose duty it is do so, must hold the reins accord- 
 ing to the team he has in hand. 
 
 There are times and circumstances in the Church, as 
 in the family, when certain things may be safely al- 
 lowed, which cannot be tolerated at others without 
 utter demoralization, disorganization, and total loss 
 of that authority for good which is the divinely given 
 prerogative, to both the Church and the family. 
 
 And it often becomes a very difficult matter, even 
 for the wisest men, to decide when to tolerate an 
 error or an eccentricity, and allow it to correct itself 
 or the prevailing good sense of the community rather, 
 to correct it, and when to exercise the authority, which 
 
l8o CONCLUSION. 
 
 inioth cases, the Family and the Church, was given 
 them " for edification and not for destruction." 
 
 In view of this fact, there can be no doubt that 
 the Church itself, or the Branch of the Church which 
 is concerned, shares in some cases, with the seceeders 
 the guilt and ^& penalty too, of the schism. If there- 
 fore, the Church can afford to tolerate their views, 
 or thinks it can, the guilt of separation is wholly 
 theirs, and no compromise or union can be effected 
 without a total surrender of their errors on their 
 part and a due submission to the authority of the 
 Church. 
 
 But, if instead of mere toleration they desire 
 control, the case is different. The Presbyterians in 
 England were freely allowed to preach their Calvin- 
 ism, and to believe that Episcopacy was only 
 an unnecessary superstructure upon the organiza- 
 tion of the Primitive Church. But when they in- 
 sisted that the Church, and everybody else in it, 
 should hold, teach, and practice only their views, 
 there was no longer a question of toleration for 
 them. 
 
 So with the Baptists. If they preferred immer- 
 sion, the Church never objected to it. • If they 
 chose to defer the baptism of their children until 
 riper years, and what they called " conversion," the 
 Church, though strongly disapproving their views, 
 would have tolerated them. But when they insisted 
 that there should be nobody in the Church but Bap- 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. igl 
 
 tists, that is, of course, those who would accept and 
 follow their views, they were seeking not toleration 
 but the control of that Church which Christ had 
 founded, and that Branch of it which He had estab- 
 lished for their guidance in this matter. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the Church of England and 
 her daughter in America, is "broader" in her Views 
 and more tolerant of diversities of opinions and of 
 practices within her borders and among her mem- 
 bers, than any one of the Sects or Denominations 
 around us — unless it be the Unitarians or Agnostics, 
 who have scarcely any one article of belief that they 
 insist upon as essential. 
 
 And, indeed, her very position and claim of divine 
 origin and authority, as well as her belief in her own 
 perpetuity, enables her to be thus tolerant and lib- 
 eral. 
 
 Within her borders there is a Church sentiment, 
 a " Church idea," that rules and controls to a very 
 large extent all minds and hearts, and will either 
 bring them back from their errors and eccentricities, 
 the peculiarities of " the ecclesiastical measles" as one 
 of our Bishops called them, or put them into 
 such isolation, virtually "switching them aside," that 
 they do, and can do, but very little harm, and that 
 of a most transitory character. In times of general 
 intelligence and with free discussion and toleration, 
 the Spirit of the Lord which resides in the Church 
 will prevail and bring all things right in the end. 
 
1 82 CONCLUSION. 
 
 In the Church, by Holy Baptism — " the washing 
 of Regeneration" — to use St. Paul's expression (Tit. 
 iii. 5,) and then by (i) the outward influence of man 
 by instruction, example, culture, and refinement, and 
 (2) by the mward infiuence of the Holy Spirit — born 
 of the water and of the Spirit — we are, or may be, 
 trained up to all the knowledge we can have of 
 things divine, and there, by these influences, we may 
 have not only our ignorance, overcome our errors 
 in knowledge corrected, but all our faults in charac- 
 ter reformed, and ourselves — souls and bodies as 
 well, — trained for happiness and for Heaven. 
 
 VI. I am well aware that many, perhaps the most, 
 of those who are professing believers among the 
 Sects have an idea of an " invisible Church" which 
 includes all who are to be finally among " the saved," 
 whether they are in the visible Church or not. And 
 hence they infer, that it can be of no great import- 
 ance whether they are in that Church or not. 
 
 It is worth noticing in this connection, (i) that 
 the word Church is used in but one place in the 
 Gospels, that is, but once used before our Lord's 
 Ascension, and that is in the oft-quoted texts. Math. 
 xvi. 18, and xviii. 17. And (2) from that time on- 
 ward, that is, after the founding of the Church by 
 the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Whit-Sunday, 
 this word is constantly used. Before that time the 
 term used by the Evangelists to denote the work 
 our Lord was doing is, " the Kingdom of God," or, 
 
^ PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 183 
 
 " the Kingdom of Heaven ;" the one of them used 
 about as often as the other, and each of them about 
 seventy times. 
 
 But from the time of Whit-Sunday, "the Lord ad- 
 ded to His Church such as should be saved. ' It 
 was now, and from this time onward, the Church. 
 And this word occurs some one hundred and fifty 
 times in the Acts and Epistles. 
 
 What this difference in the use of the two terms and 
 its signification may be, I will not undertake to dis- 
 cuss or set forth. It may be that the terms " King- 
 dom of Heaven" and " Kingdom of God" are in- 
 tended to denote and include all those who are to 
 be included in the "many Mansions" of God's Heav- 
 enly Kingdom, whether Christians or not. It is ex- 
 pressly said of infants who cannot be considered as 
 conscious believers, and who cannot of themselves, 
 have made any profession of faith that " of such is 
 the Kingdom of God — or Heaven." (Luke xiii. 28- 
 
 29.) 
 
 And it is said expressly of some of those who are 
 departed this life, as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and 
 all the prophets, that they are to be, if they are not 
 now, " in the Kingdom of God." And so, too, shall 
 "men come from the East, and from the West, from 
 the North, and from the South," to occupy seats in 
 that Kingdom, as it would seem, persons who have 
 not known Christ by name. 
 
1 84 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 But, be this as it may, when, after it was estab- 
 lished, the Church is spoken of, or the word is 
 used to denote persons living on the Earth, it denotes 
 that visible society to which persons were admitted 
 by Baptism and Confirmation, and in which the be- 
 lievers were warned against the sins of heresy and 
 schism, of apostacy, and the heaping to themselves 
 teachers and of Anti-Christ. 
 
 And this Church, it was, that our Lord would 
 have to be united and One ; that by the love and 
 holy lives of its members, and their unity among 
 themselves, not only in communion and fellowship, 
 but also in their testimony to Him and the great 
 fundamental doctrines of His religion, the world 
 might believe in Him, and that influence for mor- 
 ality and religion, for the good of all men, might be 
 exerted on all persons and especially the young, 
 which never fails to come from practices and opin- 
 ions that are accepted by all, and universally prevail 
 in every community, no one disputing or dis- 
 senting from them. 
 
 In an invisible church, there can be no " heresy" 
 in the sense of the word which implies that there is 
 danger in it, and there can be no schism. From it, 
 there can be no secession or " going out" of those of 
 its members who are not thoroughly one in spirit 
 with it. And, among the members of such a Church, 
 there can be no agreement or uniformity of testimony 
 to anything — nobody knows, or can know who they 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 185 
 
 are, they are known to God only — to anything, I 
 say, practice or opinion, which will exert that influ- 
 ence for which, our Lord so earnestly prayed on that 
 night in which He was betrayed. 
 
 VII. But, of course, men are held responsible for 
 belief in our Lord and observance of whatever He 
 has commanded, only where the Gospel has been 
 preached and there are men claiming to be the Min- 
 isters of Christ. 
 
 But in Christian lands, the constant experience is, 
 that one by one, here and there one, and then another 
 " is pricked in the heart" by that unseen and myste- 
 rious influence, which, like the wind, bloweth where 
 it listeth, and which emanates from the Cross and 
 from Him who was " lifted up upon It ;" and they go, 
 not always, or often, to their Bibles, but to some one 
 who claims to be a Preacher of the Gospel, sent to 
 be their guide and instructor in matters that pertain 
 to the salvation of their souls. 
 
 I believe that all writers on Moral Philosophy make 
 an important distinction, so far as guilt or innocence 
 is concerned, between mistakes of fact, or rather ig- 
 norance of /airland ignorance of /r/««)>/^. The dif- 
 ference is illustrated by supposing, for one case, that 
 a man takes what is not his own by mistake, suppos- 
 ing that it is his own ; then, for the other example, 
 we have the case of a man who takes property 
 knowing that it is not his, but not knowing or think- 
 ing that it is wrong to steal. 
 
1 86 CONCLUSION. 
 
 The distinction is well founded on a most impor- 
 tant difference. Whoever thinks, or knows, that 
 Jesus Christ is the Lord and Saviour of men, knows, 
 as a matter of principle, that He ought to be loved and 
 obeyed in all matters that He has taught directly by 
 His own mouth, or indirectly by any persons to 
 whom He has given authority therefor. 
 
 But, with the most profound knowledge of the 
 principle, there may be ignorance or mistake as to 
 the fact, to whom he has given such authority, or 
 which body of Christians claiming to be a Branch of 
 His Church are really so, or are in fact only false or 
 mistaken pretenders — schismatic intruders — into the 
 Sacred Fold. 
 
 " If ye love me, keep my commandments." Here 
 is both Principle and Precept. There can be, no mis- 
 take about the Principle, but "the commandments" 
 are not all written in the Gospels ; " the world would 
 not contain all the books." And He gave His Disci- 
 ples many " commandments" during " the great forty 
 days" which they were to teach all nations to ob- 
 serve. And so, too, in a subordinate way, whatever 
 His Church, or any Branch of it, has legitimately 
 taught as a Creed to be professed, or a Rule of life 
 to be observed, is to be regarded as having been 
 commanded by Him. And herein consists the 
 ground and danger, the only ground and danger of 
 mistake in regard to matters of fact. 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 i8; 
 
 If the Papal Supremacy and obedience to the 
 Bishops of Rome are for all Christians among those 
 " commands," then that Supremacy will prevail. 
 But if the claim is wholly without foundation in the 
 Holy Scriptures, and entirely inconsistent with 
 what the Church understood and ordained in its 
 early Canons, as I have endeavored to show in these 
 pages, then no argument from expediency can cause 
 it to prevail. " If it be of God, we cannot overthrow 
 it." But if it be a mere matter of human invention, 
 the schemes of ambitious demagogues, or of 
 Jesuitical trickery and fraud, it will most assuredly, 
 in due time, "come to naught." And so of the 
 rest. 
 
 Hence, the proper thing for people everywhere to 
 do is, as it seems to me, to look for those who come 
 to them in the name of Christ, and profess to preach 
 His Gospel, administer his Sacraments, and point 
 out, and lead in the way of salvation which He pre- 
 scribed for His followers. And I have the greatest 
 confidence that all who do so in good faith will re- 
 ceive the chief blessings and benefits of Christ's Re- 
 ligion, whatever may be the faults or defects of the 
 system, whether of doctrine or of Church govern- 
 ment, that is presented to them. 
 
 I say " in good faith," and in the spirit of sincere 
 and devout obedience, as unto the Lord. For I can- 
 not but regard this obedience to what is believed to 
 be his will, as the essential thing, on our part. On 
 
1 88 CONCLUSION. 
 
 the part of God, doubtless, the Atonement is the 
 one indispensable condition of our salvation. But 
 wherever there is the spirit of obedience resulting 
 from the faith in the Lord Himself, now that the 
 Atonement has been made once for all — I cannot 
 doubt that the gracious God — the God that so loved 
 tTie world that He gave His only Son, rather than 
 that any should perish, will overlook any amount of 
 error that is not contrary to the natural reason and 
 instincts of man, notwithstanding any chasms there 
 may be in the history and successions of the minis- 
 try, (if, indeed, there are any,) which He has not given 
 them the means and the opportunity to investigate 
 for themselves. 
 
 I say " means and opportunity," for with the 
 spirit of obedience and docility which I have postu- 
 lated as always accompanying and flowing from 
 true faith, there can, and will be, no neglect to use any 
 means which one has the ability and the opportunity 
 to use, to find the truth and the true lines of duty. 
 God is gracious and merciful, and requires of no man 
 that which He does not give the means and the op- 
 portunity to do. 
 
 Vni. Does one ask, then, if I think that obe- 
 dience to Church authority is of more importance 
 than soundness in Faith ? I answer that in certain 
 cases, and for certain persons, it may be so. But, in 
 a country where the Bible is to be had by every one 
 who wants a copy — and for those who have learned 
 
A FLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 189 
 
 or can learn to read it if they choose to do so, I have 
 no doubt a very grave amount of responsibility at- 
 taches to them, for both their soundness in the Faith 
 and the catholicity of their Church relations, as 
 against the sins of heresy and schism. 
 
 Of course, there can be no doubt of the rights, 
 and the duty, too, of private judgment for each in- 
 dividual, in the last resort. One that has the means 
 to study the Holy Scriptures and has done so, may 
 doubt the interpretation that has been put upon 
 any passage in them, by the Church to which he 
 belongs. So, too, we have the perfect and ultimate 
 right to doubt and dissent from any canon, ritual, or 
 law, that the Church has made or may make, appeal- 
 ing to God, Who is the ultimate Judge of all Men. 
 
 But no one that reads the Bible can doubt that 
 God has given authority to His Ministry, and to 
 each and every Branch of His Church, not only to 
 preach the Gospel, but also to rightly and duly ad- 
 minister the Sacraments ; and more than this, to pre- 
 scribe rules and regulations for its members with a 
 view to guide, and to aid them, in the matter of 
 leading a holy life. 
 
 Hence, of necessity, notwithstanding the ultimate 
 right of private judgment, and in fact, in view of it, 
 the presumption is always in favor of what the 
 church, to which any one belongs, has taught, and 
 hence must be received and obeyed unless it is so 
 
I go CONCLUISON. 
 
 clearly contrary to God's written Word as to make 
 disobedience, and even separation, if need be. Justi- 
 fiable. 
 
 The Person of Christ, our Lord, the Truths which 
 He taught, the Ministry which He appointed, and 
 the institutions and Commands which He gave His 
 Apostles to teach, "teach all nations to observe," are, 
 umdoubtedly, the chief things, and the only known 
 means of human salvation. The Ministry are " to 
 preach" and teach men " to observe" in all nations, 
 to all people that dwell on the face of the whole 
 Earth all things that are needful for them. 
 And wherever " two or three" of them are gathered 
 " in His Name," they have authority for all things 
 pertaining to His Kingdom that can possibly be re- 
 quired for the special regulations for any Branch of 
 the Church. 
 
 We have, then, three points in the Rule for the 
 Christian Life. 
 
 1. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord and 
 Saviour of all men. 
 
 2. Observe all things whatsoever our Lord Jesus 
 Christ has commanded His Apostles to teach us to 
 observe. 
 
 3. Obey them that have the rule over us and 
 " watch for our souls as they that must give account." 
 
 And these two last can be adequately done only 
 in that Branch of the Church which is the Provin- 
 cial Church for the country where v/e live, with its 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 191 
 
 Ministry, so long as they confine themselves within 
 the legitimate sphere of duty and legislation. 
 
 And those who are obedient are being trained 
 through their faith and love, for Heaven, where they 
 will see God as He is. There can be no athe- 
 ism or agnosticism there. There they will see that 
 God is, and that His Will is perfect righteousness, 
 and His Love is unbounded — infinite. 
 
 And the very idea of divine origin and authority, 
 which I have so often spoken of, and insisted upon 
 in these pages, gives not only efficiency, but sanc- 
 tity as well, to the discipline of a godly life, which 
 in some form or another, and under some pretense 
 or another, all church organizations, and all bodies 
 of Christians, attempt to provide for. But if the au- 
 thority "is of God," and we can give prominence to 
 this idea without invalidating our claims to be the 
 Church that is of God, and not of men merely, we 
 add unspeakably to its inflluence for good, in training 
 our souls, while we live here, for Heaven, hereafter. 
 
 But " knowledge" is of comparatively little im- 
 portance. There are cases in which "it puffeth up." 
 But faith, and love, and obedience, docility, and 
 humble-mindedness, the disposition to know and to 
 do the Will of God that proceed from it, rather than 
 the " understanding of all the mysteries" of His Na- 
 ture, are the essential things in the Christian charac- 
 ter. 
 
192 CONCLUSION. 
 
 And we see everywhere around us, and in all times 
 past, that the peculiarities of the religious system 
 which one adopts exert a powerful influence upon 
 his character, his tastes and habits, his preferences 
 and enjoyments, corresponding to its character. 
 We have little or no difficulty in discriminating, by 
 these means and traits, the members of the different 
 churches that exist around us. And we do not need 
 to know them long, nor very intimately, to see that 
 one is a Romanist, another a Presbyterian or a Meth- 
 odist, a Universalist or an Agnostic. 
 
 It is, indeed, quite true, that we know and can 
 understand but very little, in this life, of the condi- 
 tion and means of enjoyment or of suffering in the 
 next. But besides the one great ineradicable differ- 
 ence between the two great classes, we have enough 
 told us to assure us that among the " saved," there are 
 different degrees and kinds of happiness dependent, 
 most likely, on the characters and habits both of 
 body and of mind which we form here. 
 
 Little as we know of the Joys and means of pleas- 
 ure and enjoyment of the blessed in Heaven, we 
 cannot doubt that among the chief sources and 
 means of their happiness, will be the pleasure they 
 take in doing right, with none of the hindrances they 
 experience in this world, and in seeing good trium- 
 phant, and the will of God done everywhere, and by 
 all intelligent beings who do, or can know, and un- 
 derstand that Will. 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 103 
 
 And if we know but very little of the nature and 
 means of the happiness of the Blessed in the future 
 state, we know less, perhaps, of the nature of th? 
 punishment that awaits those that are lost. 
 
 But there is one word which is used by our Lord, 
 which seems to me to be especially significant. It 
 is KoXaa-i'i, translated "punishment" (Math xxv. 46). 
 But it means " training" by restraint and coit- 
 straint, so that the wicked cannot do the evil that 
 is their choice, and must do, will be compelled to 
 do what they ought to do, and what true believers 
 will do as a matter of loving obedience to the will of 
 God. 
 
 And I suppose that we can all think of persons for 
 whom there could scarcely be a greater punishment 
 than to be compelled to do and say just what they 
 ought, and nothing else. 
 
 IX. We are all familiar with the declaration of 
 our Lord in regard to His Church, "the gates of 
 hell shall not prevail against it." (Math. xvi. 18.) 
 It is generally understood that this implies that that 
 Church should never become either (i) extinct, and 
 cease to exist, or (2) become apostate. 
 
 But I think it may fairly be understood as teach- 
 ing that the gates of hell shall never prevail against 
 it, so far, or to such an extent, that even one single 
 soul that trusts himself to the guidance of that Branch 
 of the Church which the Lord has established in the 
 
194 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Province or Country where he lives, shall ever fail 
 of its final salvation, however faulty that Church 
 may be. 
 
 We are all familiar, also, with our Lord's declara- 
 tion (Luke xii. 47,) with regard to the Servant who 
 " knew not his Lord's will," and did it x^oX.because he 
 knew it not, he shall be "beaten with few stripes." 
 
 " Beaten with stripes" doubtless, that is, he will 
 come short, in some respects, of the rewards of him 
 that both knew and did that will. But his lot will 
 be, by no means, as that of the Servant who knew, 
 or perhaps might have known, if he had made proper 
 efforts, and did it not. He shall be beaten with 
 many stripes ; suffer the just punishment for his 
 want of faith and for his deeds. 
 
 And I think that the two cases referred to at the 
 beginning of this Essay, are instructive and quite to 
 the point. 
 
 The poor woman, with the issue of blood, had 
 doubtless done all that she knew, or had the means 
 of knowing to be necessary, and would have done 
 all or anything more if she had known, or thought 
 it to be necessary, and she was healed. 
 
 So with the thief on the cross. He had confessed 
 Christ and begged for mercy and salvation. He 
 may have known nothing of the Divine Nature of 
 Christ, nothing of the atoning efifacacy of that 
 Death of which he was an unwilling witness. He 
 certainly had no opportunity, or means, of receiving 
 
A PLEA FOR UNITY. 
 
 195 
 
 Baptism or participating in the Holy Sacrament of 
 our Lord's Body and Blood. And yet, he was as- 
 sured of that, in regard to which many of us who live 
 where the Gospel is fully preached, and to whom 
 abundance of opportunity is afforded for an open and 
 public following of Him — may, and must, be fairly 
 anxious while in time — of being in Paradise with our 
 Lord, at last. 
 
 However, it is not ours to judge of the fate of 
 others. Nor is it necessary that we should know. 
 Our Lord began his Ministry with the exhortation, 
 " enter ye in at the straight gate." And when His 
 disciples asked Him whether there were many, or 
 few, that be saved. He repeated the injunction, 
 "strive to enter in at the straight gate." And his 
 last rebuke to St. Peter was given, when he inquired 
 about the final fate of his brother Apostle, St. John. 
 Our Lord's answer was, what business is that of 
 yours.'' " If I will that he tarry till I come, what is 
 that to you ? follow thou Me." Surely, these con- 
 siderations are enough to check our speculations 
 about others, and to fix all our thoughts upon the 
 one thing that concerns ourselves. 
 
 We have the Holy Scriptures in our hands, which 
 contain all that our Lord has seen fit to give us by 
 way of written instruction concerning His will. And 
 we have a Branch, a Provincial Branch, of His 
 Church in our land, which is abundantly competent 
 for. all that our Lord intended any Church to do in 
 
196 CONCLUSION. 
 
 guiding its members in the way of salvation. Let 
 us heed its instructions and follow on to know, until 
 we come to know, by personal experience, of His 
 will, if not in this world, then, surely, in the next, of 
 the doctrines, whether they be true or false, and 
 finally come to know, even as we are known by Him 
 who knoweth all things. 
 
 I close this Essay, which has already far exceeded 
 the limits I first intended, with the words of the 
 blessed Apostle St, Paul — the Apostle to the Gen- 
 tiles — that " speaking the truth in love" we " may 
 grow up into Him who is the Head, even Christ, in 
 whom the whole Body fitly joined together and com- 
 pacted by that which every joint supplieth according 
 to the effectual working in the measure of every part, 
 maketh increase of the Body unto the edifying of 
 itself in Love." 
 
 THE END. 
 

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