had hands laid upon him on two several occasions,* once by the presbyters, and a second time by St. Paul alone; though it is possible that the Apostle's imposition of hands had reference only to the imparting of spiritual gifts. But, according to the rule of the Church, ordination can never be repeated. Had the Church been a religious society founded on the same principle as that which pervaded the Jewish system, we cannot doubt that a special ceremony, and a ritual of consecration, would have been appointed for the inauguration of Christian ministers: that no such ceremony, or ritual, is to be found in apostolic Christianity is an additional proof, if such were needed, of the essential difference between the earlier and the later dispensation. "The Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away: "it was the Holy Ghost who intimated whom he would have sent forth; it was the Church that delivered to the persons selected their commission. The declared will of the Holy Ghost did not render the intervention of the Church, represented in her "teachers and prophets," unnecessary: if Paul and Barnabas were to go to the Gentiles, they must receive from the Church a commission to do so: but the inward call, or, in other words, the spiritual endowment, came directly from above. To authenticate the divine call, to carry into effect the divine intention, was the province of the Church. +

• 1 Tim. iv. 14.; 2 Tim. i. 6. The suggestion of some ancient writers that the word peoẞóreptov in the first of these passages may signify "the office of an elder" by which the passage is made to mean that Timothy was ordained to be a presbyter, has been abandoned by most recent commentators of any note. The word never occurs in that sense in the New Testament; nor was the office which Timothy held that of an elder, in the strict sense of the word. Much obscurity, however, hangs over the nature of the transactions alluded to by St. Paul,-i. e. whether the imposition of hands alluded to relates to the setting apart Timothy to the ministry, or to the imparting to him of spiritual gifts; but the former supposition seems to be the more probable.

The appropriation of the word "ordination," and its derivatives, to signify the act of setting persons apart to the ministry, has had the effect of causing us to forget the secularity of its origin. So far from its involving, in its original meaning, any idea of a sacred or sacramental character, it is, of all ecclesiastical terms, the most purely secular in derivation. The word ordo, from which the Latin verb ordinare is derived, was the technical term for the senate or council, to which, in the colonies and municipal towns of the Roman empire, the administration of local affairs was committed, and the members of which were called Decuriones. The correlative, therefore, to the ordo was not the laity as distinguished from the priesthood, but the plebs, or private citizens, as distinguished from the magistracy. And, in fact, the word ordinare is never used by the classical writers to signify consecration to a sacred office. From the state it passed into the church, whence the frequent use, in the early Latin fathers, of the word plebs to denote

If the imposition of hands for the work of the ministry, as the rite meets us in Scripture, was but a recognition of the gifts which Christ had given, and a commission to exercise them, we should expect to find that it would be a matter of comparative indifference, except as a question of order, by whom the act was performed. And so, in fact, it is. No law respecting the minister of ordination can be found in the inspired record. Wherever Apostles were present, they naturally discharged this, the most important of all duties connected with the government of the Church: who so qualified to make choice of persons for the office of the ministry as they who possessed, in its highest form, the gift of spiritual discernment? Especially would this rule be observed in the first founding of a church, when the immaturity of Christian knowledge and experience on the part of the recent converts would obviously render it inexpedient that they should be entrusted with the selection of their own pastors, and, perhaps, even compel the Apostles present to lay hands, as Bilson suggests, upon certain individuals for the express purpose of qualifying them, by the imparting of spiritual gifts, for the exercise of the ministerial function. It would have been, for example, unnatural if, when St. Paul and St. Barnabas visited the churches of Asia which they had just founded (Acts, xiv. 21.), any other person but these Apostles had "ordained elders in every church;" or if in the imperfectly constituted churches of Ephesus and Crete, the Apostle being absent, his delegates and representatives had not been commissioned to do what, had he been there, he would have himself done. And in no part of Scripture is the rule laid down that to a legitimate ordination the presence of the Apostles or of their delegates was necessary; no intimation is given that a mystical virtue resided in the inspired founders of the Church, which they only were capable of transmitting, and without the transmitted possession of which no one was entitled to preach the Word or administer the sacraments. Where the Apostles were present, they, for the reasons above given, commonly ordained; where there were no Apostles, others might perform this office, provided only they

the Christian people, or the laity, in contrast with the clergy. It is reasonable to suppose that, when first introduced, its ecclesiastical corresponded to its civil meaning; and that to be "ordained," or to be invested with "holy orders," signified merely to be chosen a member of the governing body or presbytery in a Christian society; no reference being intended to a specific grade of religious standing supposed to be thereby acquired. To transfer the notions which in later times became connected with "ordination" into the apostolic age, or the sacred narrative, is the ready way to fall into serious errors of scriptural interpretation.

*

did so in an apostolical spirit. A Timothy, and a Titus, might during St. Paul's lifetime ordain elders with no prejudice to the validity of the ordinance; and if the transaction referred to in 1 Tim. iv. 14., relates to Timothy's ordination, it seems to follow from it that the presbytery might, at the suggestion of "prophecy,"―i. e. by a special divine intimation,-send him forth into the vineyard. Or shall we say with some ancient commentators, who could cut the knot in no other way, that they who laid hands on Timothy were not presbyters, but bishops? Even Apostles, like Paul and Barnabas, might be separated to their special mission by certain persons at Antioch concerning whom we cannot pronounce with certainty that they were of the positive ministry at all, still less of the highest order of it. In this, as in other matters of ritual and polity, the Church was left comparatively unfettered: the essential point was to pitch upon those who, in the words of Chrysostom, had been, previously to their formal ordination, ordained by the Spirit, ‡ to whom it really appertains to qualify and send forth labourers into the vineyard.

And yet, to the candid inquirer, the circumstance will not be without weight, that, with the exception of Timothy's case above mentioned, no instance of presbyters ordaining occurs in Scripture; none certainly of an authority to ordain having been committed to them by the Apostles, as it was to Timothy and Titus. If the Apostles are not found claiming the power of ordination as the differentia of their office, it yet remains a fact, that to indi

This passage is not unfrequently combined with that in the second epistle, so as to make it appear that St. Paul laid hands on Timothy, the presbytery concurring with him in the act; but it is more natural to suppose that the Apostle alludes to different transactions which took place at different times. The argument founded on the difference of meaning of the prepositions perà and dià appears hardly conclusive. It is true that the idea of concurrence is most strongly expressed in μerà than in dià, but the context itself, without calling in any other passage, explains the use of the proposition. A spiritual gift (of whatever kind) has been imparted to Timothy μετὰ ἐπιθέσεως τῶν χειρῶν &c. - simultaneously with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery; the concurrence being between the gift and the imposition of hands.-See Winer's Grammatik, s. 51. p. 360. One general remark may be made upon the whole subject,- viz. that were it essential to the validity of ordinations that hands should be imposed by certain persons, or a certain order in the Church, the Scriptural evidence to that effect would never have been left so scanty and ambiguous as it has been.

† Οὐ περὶ πρεσβυτέρων φησὶν ἐνταῦθα, ἀλλὰ περὶ ἐπισκόπων· οὐ γὰρ δὴ πρεσβύτεροι τὸν ἐπίσκοπον Exriporóvovv.—Chrysost. in loc. An instance of a mode of Scriptural interpretation very common with divines. Because in his time, presbyters could not, by the rule of the Church, ordain, Chrysostom argues that so it must have been in the first age of the Church.

** Ορα πάλιν ὑπό τινων χειροτονεῖται ὑπὸ Λουκίου τοῦ Κυρηναίου καὶ Μαναἢ μᾶλλον δὲ ὑπὸ τοῦ IIμaros.-Chrysost. in Act. Hom. 27.

viduals, placed pro tempore in a position of ecclesiastical authority, and to such only, they delegated that power; and whatever conclusions may be fairly drawn from the fact, let them be drawn. The conclusion which probably will be drawn by the cautious student of Scripture is, that episcopal ordination, like episcopacy itself, is agreeable to the mind of St. Paul; and here he will stop. Should there, for example, from unavoidable or accidental circumstances, exist in any given church no order of ministers higher than presbyters, he will not venture to affirm that ordinations by such presbyters are invalid, or fail to convey the grace necessary for the discharge of the ministerial office; for this is precisely the point where the guiding light of Scripture fails us. The apostolic precedent and example it furnishes, but not the theory, not the doctrine. Why the Apostles or their delegates only ordained; whether on account of the existing circumstances of the Church, -such as the paucity of persons qualified to discharge so important a function,- or in obedience to the natural law of order, or, as the Church system would have it, because they alone possessed the power of transmitting the mystical grace of priesthood; upon this, the essential point in the discussion, Scripture throws no light. The Apostles have not supplied the grounds—the rationale - of their own mode of proceeding. And be it observed, to supply it for them, to append a dogmatical theory to what is simply a recorded fact, is to make a serious and unauthorized addition to the written record. When episcopacy was introduced, to bishops, as being so far successors of the Apostles as that. they were the highest order of ministers in the Church, the power of ordination was, agreeably to apostolic precedent, reserved; a reservation which was ratified by ancient canons, and has received the sanction of immemorial usage. On this solid ground it is best to rest the practice of episcopal ordination. That bishops rightly ordain, we can say with certainty; to say that none but they can ordain, is, not only to add something of our own to the written Word, but to set aside the evidence of history, which testifies to the contrary,*

The most remarkable instance in which a deviation from the rule that bishops only should ordain appears to have taken place in the well known one of the Alexandrian Church, in which, as Jerome reports, it was the custom for the presbyters “to choose one out of their own number, and, placing him in a higher position, to salute him bishop; as if an army should make an emperor, or the deacons should elect one of themselves and call him archdeacon." (Epist. ad Evang.) To the same effect is the testimony of Hilary the deacon, and of Eutychius of Alexandria. To the evidence of the former writer, Mr. Palmer (on the Church, part 6. c. 4.) objects that the word "consignant" which he (Hilary) uses signifies not "ordain," but "confirm," and to that of the latter, that he lived too late (in the tenth

and to abandon the moderate position taken up on this subject by our most learned divines. *

The conclusions to which the inspired testimony leads us on the subject under discussion may be briefly summed up thus: the ministry of the Church, in all that appertains to its essence, is the direct gift of Christ, to whom alone it properly belongs to perpetuate the succession of pastors: and in its primary state, or as it comes from Christ, it is not an external institution, but a spiritual power emanating from the bosom of the Church itself; it roots in the Church, and has no existence independently thereof. Along with the general outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, or rather as a constituent part of it, the ministerial gifts were given: they formed an element innate and natural of the spiritual constitution of the Christian body: they existed, and were exercised, before any positive institution of ministerial offices took place. To assume a fixed outward form, and become identified with a separate order of men, is a secondary, though necessary, process. Thus between the idea of the Church and that of its ministry, a perfect correspondence exists: the latter is homogeneous with the former. As a church is first a congregation of sanctified believers, and then an organized society, so the ministry century) to have any weight in determining such a question. But however indecisive the expressions, or the opinions, of each writer separately may be, the presumption in favour of the obvious meaning of Jerome's language created by their united testimony is very strong, especially as it is confirmed by a passage which occurs in the book printed with Augustin's works, Quæstiones de utroque Testamento:-"Nam in Alexandria et per totam Ægyptum, si desit episcopus, consecrat presbyter." Quæst. CI. By the Benedictine editors this work is pronounced spurious: but the author is supposed to have lived not later than the close of the fourth century.

"Hence it followeth that many things which in some cases presbyters may lawfully doe, are peculiarly reserved unto bishops, as Hierome noteth,-"Potius ad honorem sacerdotii quam ad legis necessitatem,”—rather for the honour of their ministry than the necessity of any law. And therefore we read that presbyters in some places, and at some times, did impose hands, and confirm such as were baptized: which when Gregory bishop of Rome would wholly have forbidden, there was soe great exception taken to him for it, that he left it free againe. And who knoweth not that all presbyters in cases of necessity may absolve and reconcile penitents: a thing in ordinary course appropriated unto bishops? And why not by the same reason ordaine presbyters and deacons in cases of like necessity? For if the power of order and authority to intermeddle in things pertaining to God's service be the same in all presbyters, and that they be limited in the execution of it only for order's sake, so that in case of necessity every of them may baptize and confirme those whom they have baptized, absolve and reconcile penitents, and doe all those other acts which regularly are appropriated unto the bishops alone; there is no reason to be given, but that in case of necessity, wherein all bishops were extinguished by death, or being fallen into heresie should refuse to ordaine any to serve God in his true worship; but that presbyters, as they may do all other acts, whatsoever special challenge bishops in ordinary course make unto them, might do this also."- Field, Of the Church, book iii. c. 39. Compare Hooker, E. P. lib. vii. o. 14. 11.