which the laying-on of hands was the 'outward sign.' On the other hand it was urged by Dr. Hatch that the idea of 'ordination' in the earliest Church carried with it only the association of official appointment, such as belonged to contemporary secular society. The words by which it is described 'were in use to express appointment to civil office. When other ideas than those of civil appointment came beyond question to attach themselves to ecclesiastical appointment other words were used.'1

This is a strange argument in view of the history of Christian terminology. 'Ecclesia' was a common term enough in the Greek language; but did it carry to St. Paul no special Christian associations? 'To break bread,' 'to give thanks,' were common terms; but the bread which we break,' St. Paul says, 'is the communion of the body of Christ.' 'Baptism' had common enough associations in connexion with pots and cups, brazen vessels and tables; but we could not therefore argue that it was only when the sacrament of initiation came to be known as 'the enlightenment' or 'the salvation,' that associations of spiritual power began to be attached to it. It is the earliest Christian writings that are most suggestive in this respect. It is the simplicity of the language in which Tertullian speaks of Christian baptism and Justin describes the Christian Eucharist, which throws into high relief the profound conception which they entertained of their spiritual efficacy.3 So far as technical language is concerned, certainly

' Dr. Hatch B. L. p. 129. In notes 33 and 34 he says: The words in use in the first three centuries are χειροτονεῖν, καθιστάνειν, κληροῦσθαι, constituere, ordinare After the first three centuries there were not only other words of the same kind, e.g. προελθεῖν, προάγεσθαι, promoveri, praeferri, but also χειροθετεῖσθαι, iepaobai, consecrari, benedici.

Bingham Ant. xi. 1. §§ 4, 5.

Tertullian is quoted above p. 164. Justin Martyr's account of the Eucharist is studiedly simple. There is no term which is not of common life, yet he concludes with the well-known passage: 'We receive it not as common bread and common drink, but . . . we have been taught that the food . . . is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh' (Apol. i. 65, 66).

and conferred by laying-on of hands.

Christianity poured new wine into old bottles. Accordingly, it will not at all surprise us that the author of the Acts should speak simply of Paul and Barnabas 'appointing' elders in every Church (xeipotoveîv, Acts xiv. 23), or that St. Paul should leave Titus to 'appoint' elders (kalioτával, Tit. i. 5); and that we should elsewhere be, as it were, let into the secret of such appointment' by St. Paul attributing it to the Holy Ghost (Acts xx. 28), and speaking to Timothy of the gift or special endowment of the Spirit 'which was in him by means of the laying-on of his hands' (2 Tim. i. 6, 7).

We may recognise, further, that in the whole process of her ordinations the Church seems to have borrowed a good many elements from the civil society round about her. The elements of appointment to civil offices were nomination, election, approval, and the declaration of election by a competent officer' the 'renunciatio.' Then there was the 'usurpatio iuris'; the consul or praetor designate, for example, formally exercised his office and by exercising it entered upon its legal tenure.1 Now some of the steps of this process belong to human nature and would reproduce themselves in all appointments; but it is impossible to avoid tracing back to this civil process some of the features of the Church's later forms of ordination. 'If election, testimony, examination, approval must necessarily have been there, yet we need not have found, as in fact we do, the 'renunciatio' to be an element in the ordination ceremony of the West, and still more of the East, though in characteristic Christian language. Further, the reading of the Gospel by the newly-ordained deacon; the 'concelebration' of the newly-ordained priest; the celebration of the Eucharist and benedic1 See Dr. Hatch B. L.1 pp. 129-131; Dict. Chr. Ant. s.v. ORDINATION § ii. pp. 15031508.

Dict. Chr. Ant. loc. cit. p. 1507; and below, App. Note C.

tion of oil by the newly-consecrated bishop;1 the giving to the persons ordained to the minor or (much later) to the higher orders the 'instruments' of their ministry-all such ceremonies are probably enough the Christian form of the 'usurpatio iuris.' 2 But most or all of these features in the ordination ceremonies of East or West were additions of varying and uncertain date. As what stamped the Christian ministry from the first had been the idea of divine mission and authorization, so the rite which corresponds to this idea had been all along the central and characteristic rite. Derived from Jewish traditional practice but stamped by the Apostles with a new

1 See the Church Order of Hippolytus, p. 133 supra.

• Morinus (de S. Ord. pars iii. ex. xi. c. 5) saw this, and seems to draw the right conclusion. He notes:

(1) The fundamental identity of the method of ordaining bishops, presbyters, and deacons in East and West.

:

on

(2) The divergence with reference to the minor orders as they grew up in the East they were ordained with laying-on of hands, but in the West by the 'tradition of the instruments' of their office, with some appropriate injunction. (See, for the ordination of reader and subdeacon, the Church Order of Hippolytus-in this respect the Ap. Constitutions deserts its Roman prototype-and the Statuta ecclesiae antiqua, quoted by Morinus pars ii. p. 260: 'subdiaconus cum ordinatur, quia manus impositionem non accipit, patenam de manu episcopi accipiat vacuam et calicem vacuum; de manu vero archidiaconi accipiat urceolum cum aqua et aquamanile ac manutergium': and so for the other orders.) This he compares to the method of assuming civil or military office by adopting or receiving the 'insignia.' So e.g. Dio Cassius (Hist. Rom. Ixviii. 16) speaks of the giving of the sword by the emperor as the method of appointing the praetorian prefect: ὅτε πρῶτον τῷ μέλλοντι τῶν δορυφόρων ἐπάρξειν τὸ ξίφος, ὃ παραζώννυσθαι αὐτὸν ἐχρῆν, ὥρεξεν, ἐγύμνωσέ τε αὐτὸ καὶ ἀνατείνας ἔφη· Λάβε τοῦτο τὸ ξίφος, ἵνα, ἂν μὲν καλῶς ἄρχω, ὑπὲρ ἐμοῦ, ἂν δὲ κακῶς, κατ ̓ ἐμοῦ αὐτῷ χρήσῃ. Reimar says in his note: 'hinc periphrasis praefecti praetorio è rò έídos iv, ap. Philostratum'; and gives references, quoting also cum insigne potestatis, uti mos est, pugionem daret' from Victor Caes. xiii. 9.

Morinus concludes that, whereas the higher spiritual orders which were derived from the Apostles were always conferred in East and West by the apostolic method (even though much later the traditio instrumentorum' was added in their case too), the minor orders, which were a gradual and utilitarian development, were imparted differently in East and West, and in the West by ceremonies suggested by the method of secular appointment. This would be borne out by the evidence adduced by Harnack connecting the development of the minor orders in Rome with the reorganization of civil offices (Text. u. Untersuch. ii. Band, Heft 5, pp. 97-103): ‘Die römische Gemeinde es verstanden hat. . . brauchbare Elemente des römischen Sacral- und Staatswesens zu adoptiren.' He thinks the seven subdeacons were instituted, probably by Fabian, to equalize the diaconate-without losing the sacred number-with the fourteen newly-instituted curatores urbis. Certainly the church organization was developed closely on the lines of the imperial system, as convenience no doubt suggested.

permanent

was believed

to accom.

pany it :

significance, it was the laying-on of hands-accompanied no doubt from the first with a prayer for the gift of the Holy Spirit - which consecrated and empowered the minister in the Christian Church for his pastoral charge.1

IV. That IV. Now we approach the subject of what came character' to be called the 'indelible character' impressed by ordination. So far as church officers are elected representatives and ministers of the congregation, they would naturally be regarded, and all down church history have been regarded, as holding their place on terms of their good behaviour: the disorderly cleric has been deposed. But this does not exhaust the matter. The church officer is also a representative of God: his ordination has given him a divine commission and gift of grace; and as 'the gifts and calling of God are without repentance,' so from this point of view it is necessary to regard him who is once a priest as always a priest, whether he adorn his office or no.2 The later doctrine of the 'indelible character' impressed by ordination in common with baptism and confirmation, and the clearly drawn distinction between valid and canonical

cance.

The 'laying-on of hands' in the Old Testament appears with a double signifi(a) When the people laid their hands upon the Levites, when the priest or the sacrificer laid his hand on the victim, the ceremony meant that the subject of it was made a representative-a substitute (Numb. viii. 1o; Levit. xvi. 21, iii. 2-15, iv. 4-29). The Levites were to represent the people; the victim was taken as a substitute for the offerer. (b) It expressed the idea of benediction (Gen. xlviii. 14), and so specially it is used of Moses consecrating Joshua (Numb. xxvii. 18; Deut. xxxiv. 9, Joshua was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands upon him). It also became, before our Lord's time, the Jewish mode of appointing magistrates and rabbis (Morinus de S. Ord. pars iii. ex. vii. c. 4), and they laid stress upon a succession from Moses (ib. § 8). The characteristic use of it in the New Testament (apart from its use in healing, which however is symbolical) is by the Apostles to convey the gift of the Holy Ghost (Acts viii. 17, xix. 6). Cf. the way in which the apostolic succession is connected with the Jewish in the Clementine Ep. Petri ad Iacobum. See further, for the evidence and significance of the rite in the Christian Church, App. Note G, p. 340.

Harnack states the conditions of the problem well in modification of Dr. Hatch (Die Gesellschaftsverfassung, etc. p. 234 n.18): As far as concerns the bishops and deacons, their activity was almost without control and ranked as charismatic. This, without any doubt, is why the officers in the Christian communities occupied from the beginning a position so wholly different from that held by the officers in the tiago, or guilds.'

ordinations, were the final outcome in the West of the conflict between these two principles involved from the first in the position of the Christian ministry.

We see these opposite principles at work in St. Clement's Epistle. On the one hand, because the presbyterate has been appointed from above and has a divine authority, it is declared to be 'no light sin to cast out of their episcopate those who have holily and blamelessly offered the gifts.' On the other hand, it is implied that had these holders of the sacred office been bad men, the Church, with whose consent they had been elected, might have deposed them from their charge. When Callistus, bishop of Rome early in the third century, repudiates this idea, -issuing his edict that 'if a bishop sin, though it be a sin unto death, he may not be removed '—he is, if correctly reported, stating the 'indelibility of ordination character'2 in a form against which the canonical depositions of bishops, all down church history, are a continuous protest.

In what sense then did the early Christian Church hold this doctrine? In such sense, first of all, that there is no record from the beginning of church history of the reordination of any one episcopally ordained in the Church. Just as with baptism, so with ordination, questions were raised from time to time as to the conditions that were necessary to ensure the full efficacy of the act, and for the one as for the other the line tended to be drawn more narrowly in the earlier centuries than it was afterwards. But so soon as it was admitted that the conditions of a true ordination to a particular office,

1 Clem. ad Cor. 44.

2 Harnack op. cit. p. 258. The words are (Hippolytus Ref. Omn. Haer. ix. 12): οὗτος ἐδογμάτισεν όπως εἰ ἐπίσκοπος ἁμάρτοι τι, εἰ καὶ πρὸς θάνατον, μὴ δεῖν κατατί θέσθαι. Of course it must be remembered that we have only Hippolytus' statement to go by, and that he was concerned to represent Callistus in the worst light possible.