The doctrine of apostolic succession alone satis

evidence.

Church that it should put on this form, which worked as surely as the growth of a particular kind of plant from a particular kind of seed. Everywhere there was a development which made unerringly for the same goal. This seems to speak of divine institution almost as plainly as if our Lord had in so many words prescribed this form of church government. He, the founder, the creator of the Church, would seem to have impressed upon it this nature.'1

Mr. Darwin, writing about his theory of the process of evolution in nature, uses these words: 'I fies all the fully admit that there are very many difficulties not satisfactorily explained by my theory of descent with modification, but I cannot possibly believe that a false theory would explain so many classes of facts as I think it certainly does explain. On these grounds I drop my anchor, and believe that the difficulties will slowly disappear.' It is interesting to notice what grounds of evidence a great scientific teacher thinks adequate to support a far-reaching doctrine and it is impossible not to perceive what infinitely higher grounds we have for our theory of the apostolic succession. It not only 'explains many classes of facts,' but it, and it only (though of course the cogency of the positive evidence for it is different at different stages), appears to explain all the phenomena of the Christian ministry from the beginning. We, then, have better cause to drop our anchor.'

Application of the principle

1

It is not proposed to carry very far the application of the principles which have been enunciated and

1 Stanton Christian Ministry Historically Considered in Lectures on Church Doctrine, series iii, pp. 16, 17, I have altered the tenses to adapt the quotation to the context, but with no change of sense.

2 Life and Letters of Charles Darwin ii. p. 217. Cf. p. 286: 'it seems to me that an hypothesis is developed into a theory solely by explaining an ample lot of facts.'

date non

ministries;

defended in this book. It is not for instance proposed to discuss whether such and such Churches or religious bodies which call themselves episcopal have really the historical succession, nor on the other hand to investigate the theories of ordination, more or less subversive, which have been current since the Reformation. But it will appear at once as a conse- (a) to invaliquence of all this argument that the various presby- episcopal terian and congregationalist organizations, however venerable on many and different grounds, have, in dispensing with the episcopal successions, violated a fundamental law of the Church's life. It cannot be maintained that the acts of ordination, by which presbyters of the sixteenth or subsequent centuries originated the ministries of some of these societies, were covered by their commission or belonged to the office of presbyter which they had duly received. Beyond all question they 'took to themselves' these powers of ordination, and consequently had them not. It is not proved-nay, it is not perhaps even probable that any presbyter had in any age the power to ordain. But it is absolutely certain that for a large number of centuries it had been understood beyond all question that only bishops could ordain and that presbyters had not episcopal powers; and no exceptional dignity, belonging to any presbyterabbot had ever enabled him to transcend the limits of his office. It follows then-not that God's grace has not worked, and worked largely, through many an irregular ministry where it was exercised or used in good faith-but that a ministry not episcopally received is invalid, that is to say, falls outside the conditions of covenanted security and cannot justify its existence in terms of the covenant.

on this of

present experience)

This conclusion once accepted has of course an immediate bearing on the obligations of individuals who may find themselves members of presbyterian or congregationalist bodies; but it has also another and more general bearing on the relation of large communities of Christians to the properly constituted (the bearing Church. How can you suppose, they indignantly ask, that we can accept conclusions which would falsify the prolonged experience we have had in our Churches of the systematic action of the grace of God? The answer to such pleading is surely this. We do not ask you to deny any spiritual experience of the past or the present. The blame for separations lies, on any fair showing, quite sufficiently with the Church to make it intelligible that God should have let the action of His grace extend itself widely and freely beyond its covenanted channels. We ask you then to be false to no part of experience but rather to be more completely true to experience in all its aspects. For must you not admit that viewed on the whole the results of our divisions have been disastrous; that the present state of Christendom is intolerable? Let me quote the very serious words of an eminent presbyterian theologian:1

'If it be the duty of the Church to represent her Lord among men, and if she faithfully performs that duty, it follows by an absolutely irresistible necessity that the unity exhibited in His person must appear in her. She must not only be one, but visibly one in some distinct and appreciable sense-in such a sense that men shall not need to be told of it, but shall themselves see and acknowledge that her unity is real. No doubt such unity may be, and is, consistent with great variety-with variety in the dogmatic expression of Christian truth, in regulations for Christian government, in forms of Christian worship, and in the exhibition of Christian life. It is unnecessary to speak of these things now. Variety and the right to differ have many advocates.

1 Dr. Milligan Resurrection of our Lord pp. 199-202.

We have rather at present to think of unity and the obligation to agree. As regards these, it can hardly be denied that the Church of our time is flagrantly and disastrously at fault. The spectacle presented by her to the world is in direct and palpable contradiction to the unity of the person of her Lord; and she would at once discover its sinfulness were she not too exclusively occupied with the thought of positive action on the world, instead of remembering that her primary and most important duty is to afford to the world a visible representation of her Exalted Head. In all her branches, indeed, the beauty of unity is enthusiastically talked of by her members, and not a few are never weary of describing the precious ointment in which the Psalmist beheld a symbol of the unity of Israel. Others, again, alive to the uselessness of talking where there is no corresponding reality, seek comfort in the thought that beneath all the divisions of the Church there is a unity which she did not make, and which she cannot unmake. Yet, surely, in the light of the truth now before us, we may well ask whether either the talking or the suggested comfort brings us nearer a solution of our difficulties. The one is so meaningless that the very lips which utter it might be expected to refuse their office. The other is true, although, according as it is used, it may either be a stimulus to amendment or a pious platitude; and generally it is the latter. But neither words about the beauty of unity, nor the fact of an invisible unity, avail to help us. What the Church ought to possess is a unity which the eye can see. If she is to be a witness to her Risen Lord, she must do more than talk of unity, more than console herself with the hope that the world will not forget the invisible bond by which it is pled that all her members are bound together into one. Visible unity in one form or another is an essential mark of her faithfulness. . . . The world will never be converted by a disunited Church. Even Bible circulation and missionary exertion upon the largest scale will be powerless to convert it, unless they are accompanied by the strength which unity alone can give. Let the Church of Christ once feel, in any measure corresponding to its importance, that she is the representative of the Risen Lord, and she will no longer be satisfied with mere outward action. She will see that her first and most imperative duty is to heal herself, that she may be able to heal others also.'

This is strong pleading. And, if it be the case that we are bound to seek organic unity; if it be the case that the results of our past divisions, of our past individualism, are such as to satisfy us that there has been something fundamentally wrong about current

(6) to recall episcopal

conceptions of Christian liberty and Christian progress; if further it be the case that new moral and doctrinal perils, consequent upon the collapse of Christian discipline and accompanied with the 'shaking' of established institutions in all directions, are constantly pressing upon us the obligation to consider afresh the basis of Christian life and order,—all this coincides to give new force and meaning to the claims of the apostolic succession.

For it alone, embodying as it does the principle of the historical continuity of the Church, affords a possible basis of union: it alone, while on the one hand it cannot possibly be abandoned, and while the Churches which possess it cannot be asked1 (if there be anything in this argument) to regard it as simply one of many permissible forms of church government, on the other hand is not, when taken in its true breadth and in all its possibilities of application, open to objection as if it were itself inadequate or unsatisfactory.2

Nor is it the case that in this matter the Anglican Churches to Church is simply asking for a cause to be decided all

their true principles.

her own way; for she has herself to say nothing of other portions of the Church-much to do to recall herself to her true principles. God's promise to Judah was that she should remember her ways and be ashamed, when she should receive her sisters Samaria and Sodom and that He would give them her 'for daughters, but not by her covenant'3: and certainly, if it were granted to the English Church to become

1 As Dr. Milligan would I suppose ask them. Some words imply this, in the context from which I have quoted.

2 I had occasion to point out before that episcopacy is a much wider principle than has sometimes been supposed by both its friends and its enemies, see p. 65 f.

Ezek. xvi. 61.