patient development. These are qualities to which we are sorry to say Mr. De Quincey has no legitimate pretensions; and while we express the most cordial admiration of his genius, his sagacity, and his exuberant imagination, we must say that the present work can be only justly assimilated to a maglificent ship in full sail, without cargo and without ballast.

ART. IV.

ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY.

Few discussions are more interesting than the one we have selected, as few questions are more important than the one affecting the just authority, and the proper limits of the authority of the ministers of Jesus Christ. Christ placed the ministry of the gospel in the hands of a human instrumentality. There can be no doubt that the divine author of the gospel left the church in the hands of regular officers, to be by them transmitted to other officers by the institution of ordination, administered, of course, by none but regular officers. This is called the apostolical succession.

Many religious writers upon this subject maintain that these regular officers, who alone have the right to ordain, are the bishops, who are the successors of the apostles. Others say presbyters are these regular officers, who have the right to ordain, and that they are the successors of the original ministry after the apostles, both parties insisting upon a right of ordination, as subsisting in a certain class of ministerial officers, to the exclusion of the residue of mankind. If presbyters have the right to ordain, this argument for presbyterial organization is of course sufficient. But then those controversalists who maintain this, do not deny, they cannot deny,

because the fact is indisputably true, that there has been a break in the line of regular presbyters. Hence the argument is now, in presbyterial churches, without foundation that presbyters have any greater right to ordain than any body else, since there has been a break in the regularity of their trausmitted authority. We are to understand by a break in the authority the admission of an irregular authority. Wherever an irregular authority comes in, and the irregular authority is esteemed to be authentic, then an irregular authority may come in as well at one time as another, and this destroys the distinctive character of the ministry of Jesus Christ.

We cannot be made to believe that the church of Christ is without a guard. We cannot be made to believe that the ceremony of ordination does not distinguish church dignitaries from the residue of mankind. This ceremony draws the distinction between the ministry of Jesus Christ and the world broad and clear. We are unable to discover any trace of the abrogation of the apostolic office in the Christian church. We think we behold much to the contrary. It would be the wonder of the gospel if an office in the church, instituted by Jesus Christ himself, in his lifetime, and in full prevalency after his death, in the case of the apostles, should be abrogated by a kind of non-user, without any trace of special repeal, or any distinct provision, dispensing with it in the future church.

Our views upon this subject are, that the office has never been abolished, and now subsists with the Christian church, and that that church is irregular in which this office is not distinctly recognised. We hold that bishops are the successors of the apostles. We hold that bishops, as the successors of the apostles, have the exclusive right of ordination. Entertaining these sentiments, and being a member of the Methodist church, from conscientious convictions that she is now a regular church of Jesus Christ, notwithstanding she arose from presbyterial ordination, which we admit to be irregular, we feel called upon to maintain our consistency. We think we have done so in the following pages. We beg the reader's

careful consideration of the investigation of this important question that is to follow.

We understand the doctrine of the apostolical succession to be this, that when Christ left the world, he left the Christian church in the hands of regular officers, bound by a particular law of divine authority, to be used by them alone in the perpetuation of the institution; that the church, a divine institution to subsist throughout all time, is to be propagated only by those regular officers who are clothed with the exclusive authority of administering the rite of initiation; upon the administration of which, in due form, the principle of transmitted ministerial authority depends, and that the regular officers, clothed with this power, are the bishops of the church, who are in reality the successors of the apostles in their official relation. The whole argument proceeds upon the divine character of the commands of Jesus Christ, as uttered by the apostles. The conclusion which the advocates of this doctrine deduce from it is, that a Christian church cannot be organised except by these regular officers, in unbroken succession of ordination, nor by them, except by the observance of this law of transmitted authority, and that this law of transmitted authority is the divine ordinance of ordination. We propose to argue this question, and we wish to state it fairly.

If the doctrine can be made out to be of divine authority, then it is contended that there can be no departure from it without sin. We understand the advocates of this doctrine to insist that the Saviour of the world, after having completed his mission, and after having declared the laws and disclosed the purposes of his dispensation, found it necessary to unite his followers into an organised society, called the church, and enacted certain laws for its government, respecting the mode of perpetuating it, so that it might be free from the exterior, or unhallowed interference of the world of outsiders, to be transmitted in an unbroken succession of regular and authentic officers throughout all time. Such being the doctrine, the consequences are plain and unmistakable.

It is a plain result, they contend, that persons outside of

the order of the regular and authentic officers of the church of Christ, to whom appertains the right of ordination, the law by which the authority of the Christian church is to be transmitted, cannot perform the functions of regular officers without a disregard of the divine authority which passed the law and organised the institution. If Christ committed the government of the church to the apostles, and this government was by them reposed in successors, made so by the observance of an angust and divine ceremonial institution, which constitutes the exclusive mode of transmitting authority, the advocates of the doctrine say, with much apparent force, that they do not perceive how other persons, persons other than regular officers, other than authentic persons, in a word, mere private persons, can organise a Christian church. They say that a society, organised by persons not having any authority from Christ, by being within the order, to whom appertains the right exclusively of organising churches, is not and cannot be a church of Christ, but is a mere human association of a voluntary character; that being human, and not being ever capable of rising higher than its source, it must continue human, and therefore necessarily dispossessed of all the high privileges and rights that belong to a Christian church.

It is farthermore contended, that the successors of the apostles are the bishops of the church, made officers by existing officers, in conformity with the directions of the divine law respecting the august ceremony of ordination, and that none but these regular bishops, as successors of the apostles, and clothed with apostolic power, can organise a Christian church; so that any society organised by a presbyter, must always continue a society, having none of the characteristics of a church of Christ. We take this to be a fair exposition of the doctrine. We propose to enquire into it. An argument can hurt nobody. It binds no one, only so far as it is true. If it be true, then it binds all. If it be untrue, it binds none. So far as we have any acquaintance with the past discussions of this question, the arguments of the advocates of the doctrine have been met by Protestant churches generally, by contending

that presbyters, in respect to the right of ordination, are successors of the apostles, as rightfully as are bishops, and consequently have the same right to ordain. We We propose to discuss this subject, by admitting that the duty of organising and governing the church of Christ appertains to the office of bishop, and that this office is the apostolic office; that office having never been, as far as we have been enabled to discover, ever abolished in the Christian church-of course then we are under a necessity of regarding presbyterial ordination in general as revolutionary.

It may be considered as a very singular attempt upon the part of any one to undertake to show that any man can disregard a plain statute of Jesus Christ without sin. If it be a statute of Jesus Christ that the rite of ordination is to be performed by bishops, as the successors of the apostles, how can a presbyter, who is not a bishop, violate this statute without sin? We do not apprehend that there is any difficulty in the question. We have only to draw the distinction between a duty and a right. The rite of ordination in the church of Christ belongs, by divine authority, to the office of bishop in the church, as a matter of ministerial duty, and not as a matter of personal right. In order to understand the point at issue, we are to bear in mind that Christ Jesus did two things for the human family. In the first place, he granted and disclosed to the human family a saving dispensation, or a method of recovery from the ruin of the fall, called the "gospel of salvation." In the second place, he employed human beings, as his agents, to preach this gospel, and to organise and govern a Christian church, which he instituted. Hence, the church is the agent of Jesus Christ, instituted, not for the benefit of the officers of the church, but for the benefit of the human family, themselves included. Hence, the human family have rights independent of the church, and of church officers. Whoever admits that mankind have religious rights in virtue of the gospel, granted by Jesus Christ, distinct from and anterior, in point of origin, to the institution of a human agency in the affair of salvation, thereby abandons, as we shall show, the