God, are honored in belonging. She speaks "as unto wise men." She addresses the understanding and the heart. She commends herself and her doctrines unto men, and not merely as unto babes and children in Christ. She speaks forth the truth, and the whole truth; and giving into their hands the heavenly oracles, she calls upon her members to judge her words, and to search the scriptures, whether such things are so. She looks scripture in the face, and holds with it direct, immediate, and constant communion. She does not build her faith upon shreds and patches; upon forced constructions, and hypercritical analogies; or upon illogical inferences; "picking and choosing" what suits with her established wishes. She renounces, and calls upon all her followers to abandon, this "popery of the heart," and to seek the solution of every doubt, and direction in every perplexity, in that sure word of prophecy, to which she gives earnest heed, as unto a light shining in a dark place.

But to proceed: Hadrian Saravia, in his Treatise on the Priesthood, published in the year 1591, says, in one place,1 "THERE IS NO QUESTION but that the apostles held the first rank; evangelists the second; prophets the third; pastors and presbyters the fourth; teachers the last:" thus making five orders, besides deacons. These are "the different degrees of authority, appointed in the beginning by our Lord, and continued by the apostles." And yet does this writer take upon him to reverse this decision. "Although," says he, "St. Paul mentions prophets in the second place, I remove them into the third-following, not so much the order of dignity, as the time of institution of the offices of the New Testament:"2 as if he knew the time of their institution.

What can exceed-in such bold and irreverent assumption of a power to interpret scripture, to the liking of their own priestly notions-the declaration of this same writer, "the happy author of many learned tracts" "concerning episcopacy;"-"that since the apostolical traditions concerning the government of the church, and its externals, were drawn FIRST by OUR SAVIOUR himself, and afterwards by his apostles, from the Old Testament; with such modifications as differences of time and place required; no fault can be found with the fathers, if they should appear to have taken certain regulations from the same source!" What is this, I ask, but to reduce our blessed and divine Saviour to a level, as an instituter of sacred laws, and as an interpreter of scripture, with the apostles and the fathers;

1) Oxf. ed. 1840, p. 57.

2) Ibid, p. 77.

3) Saravia on Priesthood Pref.

and to exalt the fathers and apostles, to the same pre-eminence in authority and wisdom, with the Son of God himself.

Nor is there less presumptuous arrogance in the declaration of this same "happy author,"-made after he had himself otherwise interpreted and applied these very passages--that the orders of patriarchs, archbishops and metropolitans, “are denoted by the titles of apostles and evangelists;—in the epistle to the Romans, by the words, 'he that ruleth,' (Rom. xii. 8,) and in the epistle to the Corinthians, by the term, 'governments.' (1 Cor. xii. 28.)1

We are thus led by these examples, to the notice of another striking feature of prelacy, as contrasted with presbyterianism, and that is, the spirit of lightness and irreverence with which it treats the word of God, and makes it subservient to its own purposes. This it does by teaching, first that a discretionary power is given to prelates, to decree rights and ceremonies which shall be enforced, as necessary terms of communion with the church of Christ. Secondly, by teaching that prelates are the authoritative interpreters of scriptures, so that it must mean what they are pleased to say it does mean. Thirdly, by teaching that primitive tradition is parallel to the scriptures-and of an equally divine original-and binding necessity. And we have just seen how, acting upon these principles, the defenders

1) Ibid, p. 240.

2) "Therefore," says the Rev. Mr. Boyd, in favor of the prelatic theory, "for our nonconformity with the conduct of our Master, (which we deny was intended in this case to be a binding pattern,) we plead His nonconformity to the rule and ancient usage of Israel." That is, because Christ thought proper to abrogate a Jewish rite, both in its matter and manner of observance,therefore, Episcopalians are at liberty to tamper with his holy institutions." (Presb. Def. p. 266.)

3) What can be more absolutely destructive to all inherent, original, and independent authority, in the written word of God, than the authority claimed by prelatists for tradition and the church. Thus Dr. Bowden delivers their views: (Works on Episcop. vol. i. p. 116:) "As episcopacy appears from a cloud of witnesses to be the government of the church, at the close of the apostolic age, it can never be admitted, that any thing in the New Testament militates against this fact."

Dr. Campbell, of Armagh, in his Vindication of the Principles and Character of the Presbyterians of Ireland, (London, 1787, 3d ed. p. 6,) alludes to "the famous debate between Hoadley and Sherlock, in which we find Parker, bishop of Oxford, asserting the king was superior to Christ."

Pope Innocent, of course guided by his infallibility, clearly discovered the divine origin of his office in the first chapter of Genesis. "For the firmament of heaven, (i. e.) of the universal church, God made two great lights, (i. e.) he ordained two dignities or powers, which are the pontifical authority, and the regal power; but that which rules the day, (i. e. spiritual matters,) is the greater, but that which governs carnal things, is the lesser.'

Thus also, by the tops of the mountains, in the seventy-second Psalm, nothing can be more rightly designed than the prelates and priests of the church, as we are taught by Mr. Sclater, a Romanist. (See in Notes of the Church, p. 318.)

of prelacy can even boast that there is little or nothing about it in the Bible, nothing certainly of a clear or satisfactory nature; and how even an apostle can be set right, when, in prelatic judgment, he mistakes as to the relative dignity or order of these hierarchical rulers.

Not such, however, is the spirit of presbyterianism. It claims indeed the right of private judgment, in ascertaining what is the true word of God, and what that word truly saysbut there it stops. It bows reason, private judgment, and all discretionary opinions, whether private or public, individual or synodical, to the supremacy of this divine and infallible standard. It assumes no power of binding any conscience, in any matter in which God has left it free. It boasts of no reserved treasury of primitive traditions, from whose dark recesses it may draw forth auxiliary troops, whenever it would assault some battery of opposing truth. It pleads no commission to interpose between God and his people; and to say unto them, thus only shalt thou understand-whatever else you may believe it means the proclamation of Heaven's will. It reverently receives from God's hands his own divine and precious gift. It enthrones it in the sanctuary. It affixes it to every sacred desk. It admits of no appeal beyond it, or from it. This is with it, the alpha and the omega of all authority; the hearer of all questions; the judge of all controversies;-the settler of all disputes, and the fountain of all antiquity. Whatever is in this, it receives. Whatever is beyond it, it rejects. It turns away from all the wisdom, and eloquence, and power of man, to listen to the still small voice of divine mercy, as it comes forth from this urim and thummim of the holy oracles. And to doubt

cavil at-wantonly tamper with-alter-amend, or add to, the words and ordinances of this book, it regards as a spirit, whose tendency is towards rationalism and infidelity, and that too of the worst and most fatal kind.

While, therefore, we have, and should have, no disposition to think less charitably as to our fellow-christians of other denominations, who may, as conscientiously as we, obey, as they think, the divine will; we may well think more honorably than we have done, of the claims of our own Zion. We may bless God, who has preserved our churches from the reception of doctrines which expose their adherents to such inevitable temptation to tamper with, or irreverently supersede, the teaching of God's holy word. Believing, as we do, that the church is "that true tabernacle which the Lord pitched, and not man;" and that all her arrangements and essential forms, have been designed by this unerring Architect, we are reverently held back from the

indulgence of our own sense of architectural beauty, and the fitness of proportion, by the warning voice-"see that thou make all things according to the pattern showed thee in the mount."1

1) "In an inquiry, what is sin," says Matthew Henry, (A Brief Inquiry into the Nature of Schism, London, 1717, p. 5,) "let those books be opened which must be opened at the great day. If sinners must be judged by those books shortly, let sin be judged by them now, and let not any man or com

pany of men in the world assume a power to declare that to be sin, which the sovereign Rector of the world hath not declared to be so, lest in so doing, they be found stepping into the throne of God, who is a jealous God, and will not give this branch of his glory to another."

ADDITIONAL NOTES TO LECTURE FOURTH.

NOTE A.

On this subject, Bishop Hurd,* in exposing the folly of the reformers, in allowing an appeal to the primitive fathers as interpreters of scripture, remarks: "When the state of the question was thus changed, it was easy to see what would be the issue of so much indiscretion. The dispute was not only carried on in a dark and remote scene, into which the people could not follow their learned champions, but was rendered infinitely tedious, and indeed interminable; for those early writings, now to be considered, as of the highest authority, were voluminous in themselves, and what was worse, were composed in so loose, so declamatory, and often in so hyperbolical a strain, that no certain sense could be affixed to their doctrines, and any thing or every thing might with some plausibility be proved from them.

"The inconvenience was sensibly felt by the protestant world; and after a prodigious waste of industry and erudition, a learned foreigner at length showed the inutility and the folly of pursuing the contest any further. In a well-considered discourse on the Use of the Fathers, he clearly evinced that their authority was much less than was generally supposed, in all points of religious controversy, and that their judgment was especially incompetent in those points which were agitated by the two parties. He evinced this conclusion by a variety of unanswerable arguments, and chiefly by showing that the matters in debate were for the most part such as had never entered into the heads of those old writers, being indeed of much later growth, and having first sprung up in th barbarous ages; they could not, therefore, decide on questions which they had no occasion to consider, and had in fact never considered, however their careless or figurative expression might be made to look that way, by the dexterous management of the controversialists. This discovery had great effect; it opened the eyes of the more candid and intelligent inquirers; and our incomparable Chillingworth, with some others, took the advantage of it, to set the controversy with the church of Rome once more on its proper foot, and to establish for ever the old principle, that the Bible, and that only, (interpreted by our best reason,) is the religion of the protestants."

The inconsistency of the reformers, in appealing to the fathers, is also exposed by Herbert Croft, bishop of Hereford, in his Naked Truth, or the True State of the Primitive Church: "The evangelical doctors, so called because they chiefly urged evangelium, the gospel, for the defense of their doctrine, were most of them bred up from their infancy in the popish church, and therein taught, even to adore all councils and fathers, and (education being of great force to command and awe both the wills and judgments of men) made them very shy and timorous to reject that authority which they had long reverenced; in modesty, therefore, some of the evangelical doctors were content to admit the authority of fathers for three or four of the first centuries; some admitted five or six, whereby they were reduced sometimes to great straits in their disputations; for though neither

*Introduction to the Study of Proph. Serm., xii. ed. 1839. London, p.

241.

† Published in 1675, and to be found in Scott's Coll. of Tracts, vol. vii. pp. 279 and 280.