To suppose that the Apostle ordained a Presbyterian system without the machinery which such a system requires to ensure its permanency, is to ascribe to him an ignorance of human nature and a carelessness about human frailty with which assuredly he of all men is not to be taxed.

What, then, docs the Apostle St. Paul ordain as the permanent regimen of the Churches which he had planted?

I answer, Apostolical Succession. Not so much Episcopacy as we now understand it, as Apostolical Succession pure and simple. The only Epistles giving the least account of any permanent provision which he made before his death, are the pastoral Epistles, and in these such men as Timothy and Titus appear rather as delegates, vicars, or successors of the Apostle, than as diocesan bishops. In the First Epistle to Timothy, for instance, that saint is addressed as the delegate of the Apostle; in the Second, as his successor.

In these letters, St. Paul earnestly desires to assure the persons whom he addresses that they possessed as much of his own authority as possible. He makes over to them all powers of selecting subordinate ministers, of ordaining them, and of exercising discipline. There is not one word throughout these Epistles to show that the Apostolic delegates were to be controlled in the exercise of any of their powers by any board of presbyters, or by delegates of particular congregations.

Now besides these two men, there were at least twelve or fourteen others, occupying the same position by the side of the Apostle, as his companions and helpers-his archdeacons, in fact. In all human probability he committed to each of these the same power to govern and ordain as he committed to Timothy and Titus; for the same reasons which would induce him to make these men

the chief overseers of large districts, would make him put such men as Sylvanus and Tychicus into similar positions in the Church. The continued existence in the Church of such men as Sylvanus, Timotheus, Tychicus, Trophimus, Luke, and others, for many years after the Apostle's death, must have rendered the due action of any Presbyterian or Congregational system, as we now understand the terms, next to impossible. Men who had been the constant companions of the Apostle, sharers in all his dangers, cognisant of his most secret thoughts and anxieties, continually sent by him on his most delicate and difficult missions, could not upon his death subside into mere presbyters, and take their places at a board, and record, when a division was called for, a vote which would count for as much, or as little, as the vote of the merest neophyte. And, as I have said, it is futile to urge that the commission given to these Apostolic delegates was for a time only, for, if so, it was given at the wrong time. Just at the time when the presbyters, freed from the Apostolic oversight, ought to have begun the exercise of that independent action which, on Presbyterian principles, is so necessary to the preservation of Christian liberty; just at this time, I say, the yoke was bound upon them anew by the Apostle, in the authority which he made over to his delegates; so that Christian liberty was strangled at its very birth, by no other than Apostolic hands. Did, then, these men, at the death of the Apostle, become overseers of local Churches-i.e., diocesan bishops? Most probably not; but they must end in being so. would, in all probability, act at the first as they had been accustomed to do in the lifetime of the Apostle; they would exercise quasi-Apostolical authority over large and somewhat indefinite areas, but as men rose up in the Church with gifts of character equal to the task, these

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Apostolical delegates would commit more definite parts of the Church to their oversight. So that the Episcopate was formed out of the Apostolic office by localization, there being between the two the link of the Apostolic delegate.1

The idea of an Apostolically-ordained Presbyterian, or other such system, following upon the death of the Apostle and existing for any length of time, appears to me to be involved in the greatest difficulties. For Presbyterianism, if organized, as it must be to be worth anything, and with traditions to insure its permanency impressed upon it, is by no means a weak form of government, and certainly not one easily set aside. In our Western parts it has held its own with remarkable tenacity. It seems incredible that a Presbyterate appointed by Knox and Melville should have lasted three hundred years, whilst a supposed corresponding system appointed by St. Paul himself hopelessly collapsed in half a century.

Presbyterianism, as it exists amongst us, is anything but a weak system. It fosters powers of debate of no mean order, and trains up those who are under it in cultivating to the utmost united action and party organization. The writer of these pages has, in his youth, lived amongst Presbyterians in parts where they formed the bulk of the population. He has had abundant opportunities of watching the working of the system, and he freely confesses that the elements of power in it appear to him to be such that he cannot conceive of any such a system (especially if it had but one grain of Apostolic prestige in its original establishment) being superseded, except at

Of course the Episcopate must have been mainly recruited from the ranks of the Presbyterate, but this is very different from its being, in its origin, a mere development of the lower office.

the cost of a disruption of the Christian Church from its commencement.

Let us now briefly recapitulate.

1. We have the Lord Himself personally appointing the Apostles, and (apparently) assuring them that their ministry would last till the end of the world.

2. We have in the New Testament the history of the first thirty or forty years of the Church, during the whole of which period the one sole, supreme government is the Apostolic, with the exception of the Church in one city.

3. This exception is the mother Church of Christendom, which (if St. James be not an Apostle) is under Episcopal as distinguished from Apostolic rule.

4. We have the great Apostle of the Gentiles ruling the Churches committed to him with an hyper-Episcopal oversight, keeping apparently all power of every sort in his own hands.

5. We have the Apostle at the close of his career writing letters to the men through whose means he had exercised his Episcopal control over Churches in all parts of the civilised world, in order to instruct them in the right use of the quasi-Apostolic powers he had made over to them.

Then there is a gap of some seventy years at the most, and at the end of this period history presents us with the spectacle of the Christian Church everywhere officered by men possessing the governmental and ordaining powers of the Apostolic delegates, though (as was to be expected) with more defined and localized spheres of action.

And yet apparently for the one almost avowed purpose of interposing some break, and proving a disconnection between the Apostolic and any later ministry, we are asked to assume the existence of some intermediate Pres

byterian or Congregational system, of the constitution of which history has not preserved to us one fragment, and which, if established, must have been established without any principles of permanency impressed upon it, so that, according to the confession of those who conjecture it, its very memory had perished out of the mind of the Church within a hundred years after its appointment.

Apostolical Succession, as a principle of continuity in the Church, seems required by the ideal of the Church as set forth by Christ and by his servant St. Paul. The ideal of the Church as set forth by Christ is that of a vine and its branches; and the Apostles are the first and chief branches, which themselves spring directly from Christ, and are at once the support of the rest of the branches, and the means of their connection with the stem as one organization. The ideal of the Church as set forth by the Holy Spirit through St. Paul, is that of a head, and the members of the body, which are so joined to it as to partake of its life. "The head from which all the body, by joints and bands having nourishment ministered and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God." What were these joints and bands at the first but the Apostles? They were the chief nerves, as it were, by which the life of the head flowed into the members, but the smallness of their number, and the shortness of their sojourn compels us (I think not unduly) to carry on the figure, and to assume that other nerves and bands branched out, as it were, from them, by which the life peculiar to the mystical body reaches its extremities.

What is the sense of endeavouring to prove a break betwixt them and us, except we wish to get rid of the awful yet most blessed unity of the whole mystical body, existing as one body in the first age and in the last?

I desire to recognise, and to thank God for, the

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