community of goods; yet the Apostolic Church had all things in common. We do not feel obliged to wash one another's feet, yet one of the last commands of Christ obliged the Apostles to do so. If then we do not scruple to deviate from Apostolic practice in things like these, which evidently have a moral meaning, to lay great stress on Episcopacy, if a mere matter of form, seems little better than a refinement.

Again, what can be flatter and less interesting, in a religious point of view, than long historical researches to prove the Apostolical succession, if no other inference is to be drawn from it, than the formal identity of Episcopal Christian communities among us with communities set on foot by the Apostles? such an identity, for instance, as that subsisting between the Free Masons' Society of the present day and the Secret Societies of the middle ages. To investigate such a point might indeed afford amusement for the leisure hours of the curious, and undoubtedly the fact is very remarkable: but to lay stress on it as part of religion would certainly be trifling in the extreme.

Let it only be assumed, as it is now almost universally assumed, that the sole ends for which the Church was instituted are decency, order, and the propagation of true doctrine, and an end is put at once to all ground for arguing about the Apostolical Church Government and Succession. Any religious community which answers these sole ends, for which the Church was instituted, answers every

good purpose which the Church can possibly answer; and the question between one community and another will be, not, Which can trace back its succession farthest, or which retains most of the Primitive forms, but, Which best fulfils these great essentials, the maintenance of order, decency, and true doctrine. Judging as the world now judges respecting the nature and intention of the Church, to prefer one community to another for any other superiority than this, is laying undue stress on nonessentials, and confusing formal with real religion. And so far those persons are right, who, taking for granted the common notions about the Church, discard the consideration of any merely Ecclesiastical questions.

Let it not however for a moment be supposed, that it was any undue attachment to non-essentials, or any inability to distinguish between the forms and the spirit of religion, which has in all ages led so many holy and humble men of God to treat these merely Ecclesiastical questions as matters of vital importance. It was not for want of discriminating between external and internal, or between doctrine and discipline, or between forms and realities, that such men as the great Hammond wrote and thought so much on the divine institution of Bishops, and the invalidity of Presbyterian ordination, and the obligation that all Christians are under to communicate with the Apostolic Church. It will be remembered by most persons that the Reformed Church of England has given birth to two Martyrs,

an Archbishop and a King, and that these blessed Saints died for Episcopacy. But was it for a form, or a point of discipline, that they resisted thus unto death? surely not. Whether mistaken or not, they had far other thoughts of the cause in which they suffered. In their view it would have been just as shallow theology, to say that the Church was instituted solely for decency, order, and the maintenance of sound doctrine, as to say that Christ came into the world only to establish order, decency, and sound doctrine. And when they contended for Episcopacy as one of the essentials of religion, they no more regarded it as an external and a form, than they regarded Christ's death upon the Cross as an external and a form. As they conceived Christ's coming into the world, and death upon the Cross, to be mysterious parts of the Divine Economy for the salvation of sinners, so they regarded the institution of the Visible Church as a not less mysterious part of the same Economy towards the same end': and Episcopacy they considered as a Divine Mystery for perpetuating this Church.

Their belief on this subject seems to be contained in [the] following propositions.

1. That, before Jesus Christ left the world, He breathed the Holy Spirit into His Apostles; giving them the power of transmitting this precious gift to others by prayer and the imposition of hands;

1 [i. e. Christ's death the meritorious cause, and the Church the instrument and means of our salvation.]

that the Apostles did so transmit it to others, and they again to others; and that in this way it has been preserved in the world to the present day.

2. That the gift thus transmitted empowers its possessors, (1.) to admit into or exclude from the mysterious Communion, called in Scripture "the Kingdom of Heaven," any one whom they judge deserving of it; and this with the assurance that all whom they admit or exclude on earth, and externally, are admitted or excluded in Heaven, and spiritually, in the sight of God and of Holy Angels: (2.) that it empowers them to bless, and intercede for, those who are within this Kingdom, in a sense in which no other men can bless or intercede: (3) to make the Eucharistic bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ, in the sense in which our Lord made them so: (4.) to enable delegates to perform this great miracle by ordaining them with imposition of hands.

In these propositions is contained the substance of what the great champions of Episcopacy have contended for: and these, if admitted to become in the remotest degree credible, evidently give a new complexion to the whole question. To be admitted within the mysterious precincts of the Kingdom of Heaven, to be miraculously blessed, and miraculously fed with the Bread that came down from Heaven, these are surely something more than forms and externals; and the Episcopacy that has (if indeed it has) preserved them to us, is something more than

a matter of bare Discipline, observed in confiemity

to Apostolical practice.

According to this view of the subject, to dispense with Episcopal Ordination is to be regarded not as a breach of order merely, or a deviation from Apostolical precedent, but as a surrender of the Christian Priesthood, a rejection of all the powers which Christ instituted Episcopacy to perpetuate: and the attempt to substitute any other form of ordination for it, or to seek communion with Christ through any non-episcopal Association, is to be regarded, not as a schisın merely, but as an impossibility'.

It must not therefore be taken for granted, that questions relating to Church Government, and to what are commonly called externals, are on that account the less connected with the very vitals of religion, or the less deserving our most serious attention. If the Church really is what so many great men, who have lived and died for it, have believed it to be; then, though external, it as vitally affects our spiritual condition, as the death of Christ did, which was not less external. And the only question, which remains to be considered, is whether the belief of these great men is so absurd as not to be worth examination? For, if this belief be only supposed possible, the practical consequences of it are so awfully important, as to demand all the examination we can give them.

1 [Not that the members of such an Association are certainly destitute of Communion with Christ, but that, if they have that privilege, it is not through the Association.]