of encouraging at the same time the co-operation of voluntary charity and piety.

(6) That in this application of the said principles, He is a guide to us, leaving rules both positive and negative,showing us that, although we may not vary the principles themselves, there are some examples of their application, which being general in their nature and object we are bound to follow; others which being expressly declared by God to be absolute, or relating to peculiar circumstances, not in operation in our times, we ought not to follow,-and lastly others which, relating to things indifferent, may be lawfully copied or not, as most conducive to edification, and expedient for the Church.

(7) That it is not a matter of indifference whether a man be a member of the society or not, nor consequently whether or not he shall disobey its rulers and fly in the face of its rulers. To the faithful members of the Church are His promises made,-on the disobedient and outcast are His penances denounced. Rebellion and separation from the Church are invariably represented in the Old Testament as rebellion against God. . . . As long as Jesus Himself, the Lord of the Church, chose to exercise His authority in bodily communion and presence, as God had done before in the patriarchal Church, and in a less degree in the Mosaical, He needed not to delegate it to others. The Church was in a state somewhat analogous to that of the time when God held converse with Adam and the earlier patriarchs. He Himself governed and directed. But, as when under the Jewish dispensation, varied circumstances called for varied applications of the fundamental principles of the society in the Christian Church, Jesus likewise provided for the government of it, by the formal appointment of persons to whom after His departure His authority was to be delegated, and who were to provide for succession of persons commissioned, as they had been commissioned, and as their Lord before them had been commissioned and with visible signs of commission. And at this stage of the Church we find its government developed, with a careful observance of the same principles, as had prevailed in the Church from the beginning and under Jesus Himself. Though called and sent by Him in person the apostles reverently followed His precedent; and, before they presumed to act, they waited for the appointed signs, which were to be for the Church the

visible proofs and credentials of their commission. Though they had been chosen by Jesus Himself to act in His Name, the Church had not yet witnessed the public sign and seal; their public ordination was not complete till the Day of Pentecost. That which was equivalent to the laying on of hands, or rather of which the laying on of hands was afterwards the means, as well as the sign, had not taken place.

Now, observe, their remarkable - their scrupulously strict proceeding. The treachery and punishment of Judas had caused a vacancy in the twelve appointed by the Lord. But they did not (as they afterwards did, when they received the public tokens of their ordination) presume to ordain, by the laying on of their own hands, a successor. No, they called upon the Lord Himself, in Whom was vested personally the government, not yet publicly delegated to them, to decide, which of two chosen by the disciples should be numbered with the twelve, to receive the miraculous ordination which had been promised. And accordingly, Matthias, on whom the lot fell, stood in the same position as the eleven whom the Lord had sent, called, and chosen when on earth; and all alike waited for and received the outward sign, which certified the Church, that to them was delegated the authority of God and the government of the Church. . .

I do not profess to give a fiftieth part of the mass of evidence which is to be produced. It is impossible in our limits to do so even if I could expect your patience to be unwearied. But can the advocates of rulers, selfconstituted, or constituted by man's authority, produce anything like even these testimonies from Scripture for their system; which system they acknowledge to have been abandoned by the general consent of the Church as early as the year 140 and to have left no trace of its existence for fifteen centuries. And out of those 140 years see how great a portion of it is accounted for as during the existence of the Apostles or Apostolic men. St. Paul, whose episcopal instructions to Timothy and Titus are notorious, is supposed to have lived till the year 65. Timothy was young, as St. Paul tells us, when he received these instructions; he is recognised in ecclesiastical history as Bishop of Ephesus, and his death is stated about the year 97. Titus, Bishop of Crete, is said to have lived to the age of 94; St. John to have died in the year 100. Now,

while during their lives no trace is to be found of Church government in spiritual concerns being left to selfconstituted men nor to man's appointment, but the very reverse, we have also men whose writings are yet extant, and who were their contemporaries, whose lives carry us still closer to the year, after which it is acknowledged that episcopacy, as we now find it, had overspread the Church. In these writings we not only find no allusion to any such an important and rapid change as must have been in progress, if only forty years after the death of St. John the authority of the bishops had been usurped. We find no Church mentioned in which any other form prevailed. We have no remonstrance against the introduction of episcopacy,-no defence of any other polity; nay, not even any formal defence or recommendations of episcopacy itself; but we find episcopacy clearly and distinctly asserted and alluded to, not as a matter of controversy or question, but as a matter of universal notoriety and practice. I take, then, two of the earliest primitive fathers,-Clement of Rome, and Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. The question after their time is abandoned even by our opponents. There are clouds of witnesses. These two witnesses undeniably connect the practice of the Apostles with that of the Church in the second century.

Clement was not only a companion of the Apostles, but, according to the testimony of Eusebius, of Epiphanius, and Jerome, the individual of whom St. Paul, in Philippians iv., makes mention as having his name written in the Book of Life'; and he probably survived the Apostle John. He himself also is declared by the above writer to have been Bishop of Rome. Here, then, we have the evidence of this truly Apostolic man, not only in his own example but in his express declaration.

Irenius, who wrote about the year 170, and is followed in the same line of argument by Hegesippus of the same period, puts the case. He says:

'We can reckon up those whom the Apostles ordained to be Bishops in the several Churches, and who they were that succeeded them down to our own times; and had the apostles any mysteries which they imparted to none but the perfect (as the heretics pretend) they should have committed them to those men to whom they committed the Churches themselves; for they desired to have them in

all things perfect and unreprovable, whom they left to be their successors, and to whom they committed their apostolical authority.'

Is this the language of a man speaking of episcopacy as a novelty, or otherwise than as notoriously the apostolic rule? Can there be a doubt upon the subject? When we look at these testimonies, recorded catalogues of bishops and the cloud of witnesses that followed, it is, as Archbishop Potter has observed, 'as impossible for an impartial man to doubt whether there was a succession of bishops from the Apostles, as it would be to call in question the succession of Emperors from Julius Caesar, or the succession of Kings in any other country.'

These are the testimonies of men both companions and successors of the Apostles. Great, surely, would be the presumption of the learned to set up private opinion or individual caprice against this practice and belief of the Church, universal for fifteen centuries, against the order existing in our branch of that Church, and naturally arising out of this practice and belief. But if we shudder at the presumption of even learned men, what must we think of the audacity with which the most ignorant take upon themselves the authority of the ministry, and of coming, without being orderly sent, in the Name of the Most High. It is not for us to condemn the sinner, but we must condemn the sin,—and, in the outrageous absurdities with which conceited audacity is often accompanied, charity itself cannot but see illustrated the poet's exclamation,- Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.'

THE BAPTIST CIRCULAR

AMONGST the assailants of the Church, at this time, were the Baptists, who issued a curious document entitled :

a

Historic Memorials of the associated Churches; circular letter of the Ministers and Messengers of the Lancashire and Cheshire Association Baptist Churches assembled, in the United Sessions of the Ministers and Messengers of Yorkshire West Riding Association, in West Street Chapel, Rochdale, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the 17th, 18th, and 19th days of May, 1842, maintaining the important doctrines embodied in the Scriptures, inserted in the succeeding page, to the members of the several Churches they represent.

The third resolution in this document urged that the destruction of the Church of England is regarded as a religious duty, devolved upon them by the terms of their Christian profession by a due regard for the religious welfare of their fellow men.'

The grounds on which they based this indictment are somewhat inconsistent :

That this Union avails itself of its annual Session again to record its deep conviction of the unscriptural character of the established Churches in this country. Believing all such institutions to have had their origin in the apostacy which took place shortly after the death of the Apostles of our Lord, to be repugnant in their nature to the spirituality of the Saviour's Kingdom, and to be a fruitful source of social wrong, religious formality, and national scepticism, the brethren assembled feel bound to protest against their continuance. Believing such vices to be the legitimate growth of the principles on which the English hierarchy is founded, and regarding them, at the same time, as subversive of the spirituality of the Gospel, and fatal to the souls of men, this Union, as an assembly of religious men, recognises the obligation under which it is placed, strenuously to exert itself for this dismemberment of Christianity from