CHAPTER III

THE WITNESS OF CHURCH HISTORY

The ministry THE conception of the Christian ministry described

in church

history

in spite of variable features

in the last chapter is confessedly no mere ideal. It represents what has been, beyond a doubt, a fact of primary importance in the Christianity of history.

In many respects, indeed, if we were to trace back the genealogy of the ministry in the Church, we should find that it has passed through strange vicissitudes, and from time to time has wonderfully changed its appearance. It may be well to call attention to this at once, so that variations of aspect, which are even startling, may serve to make more emphatic the principles and facts which have been throughout permanent and unchanging.1

For example, the episcopate of the first period, when, speaking generally, every town Church had its independent episcopal organization and country bishops arose to superintend the scattered flocks of the rural districts, was a very different thing from the episcopate of the mediaeval epoch, when the great dioceses of Teutonic Europe were formed, when bishops became great feudal lords, and the feudal character at times almost superseded the spiritual. Very different again was the organization of the Celtic

1 Cf. Dr. Liddon A Father in Christ p. 26 f.

Church of Ireland (and thence of Scotland), where the presbyter-abbots were the real ecclesiastical rulers and the succession of abbots the important succession, while the episcopate, indefinitely multiplied, had its place only as the necessary 'instrument of spiritual generation,' or the appropriate decoration of sanctity, in entire subordination to the monastic authority.

Again, there have been vast changes in the relation of the bishops to secular society, and in their relation to one another. There has been the slow development of the metropolitan system on the lines of the imperial organization; the upgrowth of the papacy; the rise of national Churches; the schisms of the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. There have been 'Erastian' epochs, whether under the Byzantine and Frankish emperors or under English kings, and epochs, on the other hand, when a king1 could complain that 'absolutely the only persons who reign are the bishops,' or when a pope could claim, as in the famous bull Unam Sanctam, to have the sword of secular authority committed to him as well as that of ecclesiastical government.

Again, there have been days when bishops administered, and submitted to, a rigorous discipline, such as finds expression in the early Spanish council of Elvira, and days of the collapse of discipline, such as gives the tone of something like despair to the lamentations of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa in the Arian period in the East, or such as Isidore and Gregory of Tours describe in the West.

There have been, once again, great changes in the idea of episcopal election, as it passes out of the

1 Chilperic (Greg. Tur. H. F. vi. 46); but the context, as well as the circumstances, take away from the force of this.

has been

governed

primitive method-which made the bishop the real representative of the community in the midst of which he had grown up, 'behaving himself well in the inferior offices,'-to become the prerogative in fact, if not in name, of metropolitans, or popes, or kings.

These have been immense changes. In part they throughout have been inevitable and beneficial; in part the by fixed prin. ciples, recognition of them should be a stimulus to the Church to recover in idea, and so at last in fact, a primitive standard which ought never to have been abandoned. But all through these changes there have been certain fixed principles of supreme importance, which have been uniformly maintained, and which all the changes in outward circumstance only serve to throw into stronger relief, and it is with these alone that we are here concerned. These fixed principles represent what the Church has continuously believed with reference to the ministry, and consistently acted upon (let us say to start with) since the middle of the second century down to the period of the Reformation. They may be expressed thus:

such as the

requirement

succession,

(1) that Christ instituted in His Church, by sucof apostolic cession from the Apostles, a permanent ministry of truth and grace, 'of the word and sacraments,' as an indispensable part of her organization and continuous corporate life:

etc.

(2) that while there are different offices in this ministry, especially an episcopate, a presbyterate, and a diaconate-with functions and mutual relations

1 A sermon of Dean Stanley's-'The Burning Bush' (quoted in Remarks on Dr. Lightfoot's Essay on the Christian Ministry, by C. Wordsworth, Bishop of St. Andrews, pp. 2-6)-illustrates how these fixed principles can be ignored. He describes, for instance, the mediaeval abbeys and the great universities as 'fragments of presbyterianism imbedded in the midst of the episcopate' (p. 4). Their relation to the papacy is quite forgotten.

fundamentally fixed, though containing also variable elements-there belongs to the order of Bishops,1 and to them alone, the power to perpetuate the ministry in its several grades, by the transmission of the authority received from the Apostles, its original depositaries; so that, as a consequence, no ministry except such as has been received by episcopal ordination can be legitimately or validly exercised in the Church:

(3) that the transmission of ministerial authority, or Ordination, is an outward act, of a sacramental character, in which the laying-on of hands, with prayer, is 'the visible sign.' It will appear also

(4) that the Church, without change of principle, and merely by the clearing-up of ideas, came to reckon the effect of ordination as indelible, and to recognise as a Priesthood the ministry of bishops and presbyters, which it conferred.

The general recognition of these principles during the period specified will hardly be matter of dispute. In the latter part of the second century of the Christian era, the subject [of the apostolic succession] came into distinct and formal view; and from that

1 I reckon the bishops as a distinct order; see, however, on the supposed anomaly of the Church of Alexandria, and what it implies, pp. 124 ff. and 302 ff. The later tendency to reckon the episcopate as constituting with the presbyterate only one ordo sacerdotum (Catech. Conc. Trident. ii. 7. 25) was due partly to the desire to emphasize the pre-eminent dignity of the sacerdotium; partly to the desire to reduce church orders to the mystical number of seven; partly to the wide influence of Jerome in the West (see below pp. 157 ff.). It has its parallel in early days when the bishop was sometimes reckoned with the presbytery. But so long as bishops are regarded as having special functions of their own, which presbyters cannot validly perform, and are ordained with a special ordination (Catech. Conc. Trident. 1.c.) the exact ordering of grades is rather a matter of nomenclature. See on the variations Dict. Chr. Ant. ii. pp. 1474-5 s.v. ORDERS, HOLY. Morinus, however, among more recent Roman theologians (A.D. 1686) says of those who reckon eight orders of the ministry, major and minor, by counting the episcopate as a distinct order: 'huic sententiae plurimum favent rituales omnes tam Graeci quam Latini et universa prope ecclesiae traditio' (de S. Ord. p. iii. ex. i. 2. 26), and his authority is deservedly very high.

time forward it seems to have been considered by the great writers of the catholic body a fact too palpable to be doubted, and too simple to be misunderstood.' The agreement, however, as to what has historically been accepted in the Church on the subject of the ministry is not nearly complete enough to render argument unnecessary. We proceed then, first of all, to review the evidence for the successions existence of the threefold ministry, after the middle of the second century, with the accompanying principle of the apostolic succession and the limitation to bishops of the right of ordination,

Evidence produced 1. Of the episcopal

from A.D. 150.

as appealed to by Iren

aeus.

I. The basis shall be laid in the testimony of Irenaeus. Irenaeus had been born in Asia Minor not later than A.D. 130. He tells us that in early youth he had sat at the feet of Polycarp,' who had been appointed by Apostles a bishop for Asia in the Church of Smyrna'-a venerable old man, whose appearance and ways of life were, he assures us, indelibly imprinted on his memory-and that he had listened to his discourses in public and private,* and that he had also had opportunities of instruction by Asiatic 'elders,' amongst whom some at least had been disciples of Apostles. Thus imbued with the traditions of the Asiatic Church, in which especially St. John's influence was a living reality, he passed as a young man, probably before Polycarp's martyrdom (c. A.D. 155), from Asia to Rome. How long he remained there we do not know; but at the latest in the year 177, when the persecution fell upon the Churches of South Gaul and the aged bishop Pothinus 1 Gladstone Church Principles p. 189.

2 The reason for not at first going back behind about A.D. 150 will appear after. wards, p. 199.

3 For this and other details of St. Irenaeus' life see Dict. Chr. Biog. iii. p. 253 f. 4 See his epistle to Florinus in Euseb. H. E. v. 20.