food, so also of their spiritual, and thus being joined to one another in Christ. The agreement, therefore, of those communicating their common faith and love constitute the real consecration of the bread and wine; it is this which, through Christ's Spirit, changes the supper into the sacrament.

But the priest says, "Not so: it is not your common faith and purpose to celebrate the communion it is not the fact of Christ having died and risen again which can bring him to you or you to him: I must interpose, and pronounce certain words over the bread and over the cup; and then what neither your faith nor Christ's redemption of you had made other than common food, becomes now, through my mediation, a thing endowed with a divine virtue, nay, it is become Christ himself. Whether there be any communion of yourselves or no, whether you are alone or with one another, whether you are concurring in spirit or no, still, because I, the priest, have pronounced certain words over it, it has acquired a miraculous power, and unless you are partakers of this you cannot be saved." So the communion of the Church, which morally was so essential, is thus made unessential; and the uttering certain words by a particular person, of which neither Christ nor his apostles had said anything, and which morally can have no virtue at all, is made essential. And thus was the Church supplanted by the priest; and the communion which is the very life of the Church, became the mass, with all its superstitions and idolatries.

The Church being set aside, and the principal part in the communion being transferred from it to the priest, his office grew in importance, and the Church in the same proportion, became removed from Christ, and desecrated. Then the priest was regarded as the minister of Christ in spiritual things, the Church only in temporal. For not only in the communion, but in the public prayers and exhortations of the Church, the Church itself was reduced more and more to a passive condition, the priest alone was active. Thus there were some whose business was religion, and others whose business it was not. Religion and life were separated; the one was called spiritual, when it was in reality become less so; the other was called, and became truly secular. The salt which Christ had given to the Church, that each man might by it render the world and worldly things pure and holy to him, the Church had now to seek from the priest; and because it was to be sought from another, it in great measure lost its savour.

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II. NO PRIESTHOOD IN THE CHURCH.

IT has been stated generally that the efficacy of the Church has been destroyed by the excess of a good and necessary principle, that of government, and the introduction of another principle, wholly false and mischievous, that of priesthood. The first in itself, the Church recognises, and must ever recognise; the second she wholly repudiates. And thus we shall find that, while there is much said in Scripture in commendation of the one, the other is altogether omitted, as element belonging to Heathenism, and not to Christianity.

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Now, omitting all the commandments given us to obey government in general, and all such passages as claim obedience to the Apostles personally, we find several injunctions to submit ourselves to the rulers of the Church, being Christians, and yet not being Apostles ;—and al these injunctions are a proof of our first position, that the principle of government in the Christian Church is recognised and sanctioned in the Scriptures.

I. St. Paul, in the earliest of all his Epistles, the first to the Thessalonians, entreats the church of Thessalonica to acknowledge or recognise, sideva, those that laboured among them, and were over them in the Lord, and who admonished them, voverovTas μes. And he calls on the church to "esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake." 1 Thess. v. 12, 13.

II. In two passages, Galatians vi. 6, and 1 Timothy v. 17, he asserts the claim of the governors of the church to be maintained by the church. In the first, indeed, he speaks only of such governors of the church as are instructors; κοινωνείτω δὲ ὁ κατηχούμενος τὸν λόγοντῷ naτnxoũvti év mão ȧyabois; but in the second passage, while he acknowledges the especial claim of such, he extends the right to all rulers of the church generally, whatever may be their particular functions : οἱ καλῶς προεστῶτες πρεσβυτεροι διπλῆς τιμῆς αξιούσθωσαν.

III. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says also, "Obey your rulers and submit to them ;-and that this means the Christian rulers of the church is evident by what follows, "for they watch as men who are to give an account for your souls ;" which of course could not be said of Heathen authorities.

IV. To these may be added all that is said of the qualifications of an inixomos in the first Epistle to Timothy and in that to Titus ;

and which implies that government in the church was a thing essential and recognised from the beginning.

V. St. Peter, as if writing under the liveliest recollection of our Lord's charge to himself, and of the strong contrast which Christ had drawn between the common practice of heathen government and that which should prevail among Christians, thus writes in his first Epistle, v. 2, to the elders of the several churches: Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof," TITOTOUTES, "not by constraint, but willingly ;" Lachman adds xarà tó as becomes a servant and child of God;'"not for filthy lucre," which implies that lucre might be a motive, that is, that the rulers of the church were maintained by the church, "but of a ready mind.”

VI. We read also in the Acts, that Paul and Barnabas appointed elders to govern the churches which they founded in Lycaonia and the south of Asia Minor, xiv. 23; and St. Paul addresses the elders of the church of Ephesus, xx. 28, in the same language as St. Peter, charg ing them "to feed the church of God." Now this term of "feeding as a shepherd feeds his flock," is one of the oldest and most universal metaphors to express a supreme and at the same time a beneficent govern

ment.

It is needless to multiply other passages, as those already quoted are abundantly sufficient to show that Christianity supposes and sanctions the principle of government in the church, and reciprocally the principle of obedience; that in this respect the church was to resemble all other societies; some of its members were to rule and others were to be subject.

But of the principle of priesthood, by which one man or set of men, are declared to be necessary mediators for their brethren, so that without them their brethren cannot worship God acceptably or be suffered to approach him, the Scriptures contain not one word, except as rejecting and condemning it. This of course cannot be shown by extracts as to the negative part of it: it will be sufficient to show that the passages usually quoted by the advocates of the priesthood as sanction. ing their notions are all misinterpreted, or misapplied; and then to give some passages which assert the contrary to the doctrine of the priesthood, and describe it as one of the great privileges of the Christian Church, that its one great High Priest, Jesus Christ, has given it full access to God for ever, so that there is nothing for priesthood to do, or rather for human priesthood to pretend to do for it, any more, so long as earth shall endure.

The principle of priesthood unmixed with any other, is seen in the Christian Church most plainly in the claim to administer the Lord's Sup.

per. I say this rather than, in the claim to administer the sacraments generally, or in the so-called power of the keys, because although something of the notion of priesthood has undoubtedly been mixed with both these, and especially with the latter; and although in practice absolution has come to be a proper priestly act, yet in their origin both the power of baptizing and that of absolving were in a great degree acts of government; being in fact the power of admitting or of restoring members to the privileges of the Christian society. But the claim of administering the Lord's Supper is the assumption of a power exclusively priestly; it interposes in an act with which government has nothing to do, and its supposed object is merely inward and spiritual-to give a spiritual ef ficacy to that which without its interference would have been common food. The Scripture, then, might recognise an exclusive power of bap tizing or of excommunicating and absolving, without at all countenanc ing the notion of a priesthood, because it might view such a power as one naturally belonging to the rulers of any society, and as connected therefore with government only. But if it be found to recognise an exclusive claim of administering the Lord's Supper, then no doubt it must be allowed in the strictest sense to recognise in Christianity a human priesthood.

This power is said accordingly to be recognised by the Apostle Paul in two passages, 1 Corinth. iv. 1, and again in the same Epistle, x. 16. I. In the first passage St. Paul says, 66 Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God." It is contended that by this last expression, St. Paul means to say that himself and his fellow ministers were "dispensers of the sacraments."

But, in the first place, Baptism and the Lord's Supper are not in the Scripture sense mysteries at all. A mystery, in the Scripture, is a hidden truth; almost always it signifies a truth hidden generally from men, but revealed to the people of God. By a figure, Christ himself is twice called "the mystery of God," or "of godliness," Coloss. i. 27, 1 Tim. iii. 16, because his manifestation in the flesh is the great truth which Christianity has revealed to us. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are actions connected with the Christian mysteries, but they are not mysteries themselves; much less are they so especially deserv ing of the term as to engross it to themselves, and to become the prominent idea expressed by it.

Again; by whatever name St. Paul might have called himself, it certainly would not have been "a dispenser of the sacraments." He had just before said that his business was not to baptize, but to preach the gospel; that, so far from it being his office to "dispense the sacraments," he had only baptized three or four individuals in the course of

his whole ministry at Corinth. He who thus studiously devolved on others the ministration of one of the sacraments, could scarcely have desired the Corinthians to regard him as being appointed especially to dispense them.

On the other hand, we find him saying, a little before, that he and his fellow ministers were in the habit of speaking of "the wisdom of God in a mystery," or rather "God's secret or hidden wisdom," the wisdom hidden from men, which God fore-ordained before the world unto our glory. And again further on in the Epistle, he uses the expression "I have had a dispensation," or 'stewardship,' if oixovoμos in the former passage be translated steward,' "entrusted to me." Now this dispensation is so certainly the "dispensation of the Gospel," by preaching, that the gloss ivayyhio has actually found its way into the text, and is expressed in the common editions, and in our translation. It is shown by the whole context, in which he repeatedly says that his business is "to preach the Gospel." There can be no doubt, therefore, that when he describes himself as "a steward or dispenser of the mysteries of God," he means that very same "speaking of the wisdom of God in a mystery," that very same "dispensation of the Gospel by preaching," which, in other parts of this Epistle he declares to have been his business as an Apostle; just as he declares also, that "to dispense the sacraments" was not his business; for he says, "God called me not to baptize, but to preach the Gospel."

II. The second passage is as follows: "the cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of the body of Christ ?" This shows, it is argued, that it belonged to the Apostles to bless the cup at the communion, and to break the bread: in other words, to consecrate the elements, and so to give to them their sacramental character and virtue.

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It is evident that the whole force of this passage depends on the meaning of the word "we." If "we" means we Apostles," as distinguished from other Christians, then the argument would have some plausibility; but if " 66 " means not we we Apostles," but " we Christians," then the whole argument falls to the ground at once. Now the very next verse goes on as follows: "For we being many are one bread and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread." It is then, not "we the Apostles," but " we Christians," " we being many," we all," ," "who bless the cup of blessing, and break the bread." So far from proving that there exists in Christianity a priestly power in the administration of the communion, this passage shows the contrary.

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