is found to need a central shrine where divine

authority shall speak.

Thus two different ideas of the Church's function find expression in the general councils and in the papacy; and at least a differently balanced idea of the function of the episcopate finds expression in the catholic conception of the bishop as securing the channels of grace and truth and representing the divine presence, and in the Roman conception of an external hierarchy of government centering in the papacy. The conflict between the two conceptions begins perhaps even in the days of Victor or Stephen ; it bears fruit in the Great Schism and in the further schisms of the Reformation.1 Of course the Roman doctrine of church unity does not annihilate the other and older conception. The bishop remains still in the Roman Church what he was from the beginning, but another idea has been superadded, and it is this superadded idea which differentiates the Romanized from the primitive and undivided Church. With this superadded conception we shall not be further concerned in this argument. We have only to do with the fundamental doctrine of the visible Church as the body of Christ, which is inseparably associated with the doctrine of the faith and the sacraments, and which we are now in a position to assume was a conception held from the first, running up for its primary authority to the will of Christ the King.

It is not suggested that the Roman claims were more than one among severa causes of these schisms.

[On the whole subject of chapter 1. reference should be made to Dr. Mason's essay 'Conceptions of the Church in early times' in Essays on the Early History of the Church and the Ministry (Macmillan, 1918).]

CHAPTER II

APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION

institute a

JESUS CHRIST, we are now in a position to assume, Did Christ founded a visible society, which, as embodying God's ministry? new covenant with men and representing His goodwill towards them, was intended to embrace all mankind. As that society has existed in history, it has exhibited a more or less broad and marked distinction between clergy and laity, priests and people, pastors and their flocks. Such a distinction would, it may be argued, inevitably grow up on the same principles which regulate the division of labour in other departments of human life. The question then arises Is the Christian ministry simply, like a police force, a body which it has been found advantageous to organize and may be found advantageous to reorganize? Did Christ in instituting His society leave it to itself to find out its need of a differentiation of functions and develop a ministry, or did He, on the other hand, when He constituted His society, constitute its ministry also in the germ? Did He establish not only a body, but an organized body, with a differentiation of functions impressed upon it from the beginning?

It may be urged that the former alternative is The idea not improbable; more in accordance with what we should expect,1 for it will exhibit the Christian ministry as of a piece with the ordinary products of social evolution. Such a presumption might be met in a measure,

1 As by Hatch B. L.3 pp. 17-20.

antecedently to the question of historical evidence, by the consideration that founders of great institutions, where they successfully observe and correspond to the conditions of their time, are able, to a certain degree at least, to anticipate the results of evolution and impress upon their foundations from the first an abiding form.1 But it is a more satisfactory consideration that the Church is naturally of a piece with the Incarnation, the fruits of which it perpetuates; and that, as was pointed out in the last chapter, has a finality which belongs to its very essence. It is not that the religion of Christ, as final and supernatural, has no progress or development in it; it is not a code of rules covering all possible occasions of the future. But it is a religion which in its principles and essence is final-which contains in itself all the forces which the future will need; so that there is nothing to be looked for in the department of religion beyond or outside it, while there is everything to be looked for from within. This essential finality is expressed in the once for all delivered faith, in the fulness of the Spirit's presence and operation once for all granted to the Church, in the visible society once for all instituted; and it is at least therefore a 'tenable proposition' that it should have been expressed in a once for all empowered and commissioned ministry.

2

That it is much more than a 'tenable proposition' -that it is a proposition which states a fact of history-it will be the business of succeeding

This is conspicuously the case with Islam. Mohammed incorporated pre-existing elements of Arab and Jewish belief-of the Christian faith also in a debased form; it may be said with truth that there was no originality in the theology of Islam. But its founder incorporated the elements that came to hand into a book, and on the basis of his book founded a religion which with its motives, its institutions, its obligations, was a new thing in the world and yet had a remarkable completeness ab ovo. That is to say, it was as complete as its fundamental idea would allow of its being.

* See Hatch B. L.2 pref. p. xii, where the coherence of ideas is recognised.

ciple of the

must be

chapters to show. What it is proposed to do now but the prinis to clear up the idea of the Christian ministry-to ministry explain what is meant by it, and why it is a reason- first ex able idea-before we go on to test, with as rigorous a criticism as can be applied, its basis in history.

Why adopt such a method? it will be said. Why explain first what you are going to look for, and then proceed to look for it? Why not let the principle, whatever it may be, emerge simply from the facts? The answer is perhaps a twofold one. First, that the method here proposed corresponds to the method by which we actually in most cases arrive at convictions. We do not start afresh; we take the traditional belief, the traditional position, and test it. This is the normal method of human progress. If the traditional belief will not bear the light of facts, it has to be modified, or even reversed; we have to go through the process which a modern writer calls the correction of our premises.' But we give, and rightly give, a prerogative to an accepted position, so far at least as to start from it. Secondly, it may be answered that the method of hypothesis is one of the most normal methods of scientific inquiry. The scientific investigator is not asked to approach the facts without antecedent ideas, without anticipations, without desires; to ask this of him in the field of nature or of history is, in most cases, to ask an impossibility. What we have a right to expect is that the facts shall be looked at with severe impartiality and be allowed their legitimate weight to support, or contravene, or modify the original hypothesis. And further, the scientific investigator, when he makes public demonstration of the results of his investigations, is not expected to re-enact all the process he has himself gone through. He asks the right question at once; he propounds at once the right hypothesis, and proceeds

plained,

to verify it. That is what it is proposed to do here. There have been several theories-or, to speak more accurately, modifications of one theory-of the Christian ministry, which, as having more or less authority in tradition, have some prerogative claims to be examined, but which will not, as they are, stand the verifying test of facts. Underlying them there is a theory that will. There are, that is to say, a number of more or less perverted conceptions of what the Christian ministry has always essentially meant, as well as a true one. In what follows an attempt will be made to distinguish the true idea from its perversions.

Any one who undertakes to vindicate for any Christian truth or institution its claim to permanence or authority-its claim, that is, to be an integral part of the Christian revelation-is confronted on the threshold of his undertaking with a difficulty. The idea or institution has been abused, or overlaid with what exaggerates or disfigures it. He has to attempt what makes a considerable claim on mental patience, to draw distinctions between the abuse of a thing and its use, between the permanence of a thing in its fundamental principle and its permanence with the particular set of associations which in this or that epoch have clustered round it. This is remarkably true of the institution of the Christian ministry and because its the associated idea of the apostolic succession. It have caused is maintained, though not perhaps with very much truth, that superseded elements of Judaism survived and discoloured more or less the conception of the ministry in the Church: it is much more certain that in the early Middle Ages this, with every other Christian institution, ran a great risk of becoming incrusted with associations left by the dying forms of paganism. Again, the ambition of the clergy and the spiritual apathy and ignorance of the mass of the

perversions

misunder.

standing.