The principle of suc.

important

than the

form of the ministry.

they receive, like Aaron and his sons, their consecration from above.1

It is a matter of very great importance-as will cession more appear further on-to exalt the principle of the apostolic succession above the question of the exact form of the ministry, in which the principle has expressed itself. What is meant is this: there have always (it is here supposed) existed in the Church ministers, who, besides the ordinary exercise of their ministry, possess the power of transmitting it; they, may, so far, be one or many in each community; but, when they ordain men to the holy offices of the Church, they are only fulfilling the function intrusted to them' out of the apostolic fount of authority. There are other ministers, again, who have certain clearly understood functions committed to them, but not that of transmitting their office. Should these ever attempt to transmit it, their act would be considered invalid. For this is the church principle: that no ministry is valid which is assumed, which a man takes upon himself, or which is merely delegated to him from below. That ministerial act alone is valid which is covered by a ministerial commission

In the Dissertation on the Christian Ministry, appended to his commentary on the Philippians (on which see Appended Note A), Bp. Lightfoot maintains that the priestly tribe of the Old Testament were only the delegates of the people'⚫ the nation thus deputes to a single tribe the priestly functions which belong to itself as a whole' (pp. 182, 183: this essay will be referred to throughout the present work as Dissertation). Surely 'dormitat Homerus.' His reference is to the laying-on of hands by the people upon the Levites (Numb. viii. 10). But whatever significance this act had, it must not lead us to forget the ordination of the priests, the sons of Aaron. These had been consecrated to their office 'before this laying-on of hands upon the Levites took place, and with far different ceremonies, by Moses himself, without any intervention of the people whatever' (Willis Worship of the Old Covenant p. 112). Thus, if the Levites represent the self-consecration of the people, the 'laypriesthood' (Numb. viii. 10-20), Aaron, who is to offer the Levites before the Lord' (ver. 11)-Aaron, to whom, with his sons, God is said to have 'given the Levites as a gift to do the service of the children of Israel' (ver. 19)-Aaron, and his sons the priests, represent the ministers of the covenant instituted by God Himself, whose prerogative was so jealously guarded, even against the sons of Levi, 'in the matter of Korah' (Numb. xvi.). 'Moses himself, as the representative of the Unseen King, is the consecrator' (Smith's Dict. Bible, s.v. PRIEST, ii. p. 917). [I am speaking of the Mosaic Law in its final form, as the writers of the New Testament knew it, without discussing the date of its different portions.]

received from above by succession from the Apostles. This is part of the great principle of tradition. 'Hold the traditions,' reiterates the Apostle. The whole of what constitutes Christianity is a transmitted trust— a tradition which may need purging, but never admits innovation, for ' nihil innovandum nisi quod traditum ' is a fundamental Christian principle. For instance, the truth revealed in Christ is adequate to all time. It is fruitful of innumerable applications and adaptations to the new wants of each age. It may need setting free and purifying from accretions from time to time, but not more. What breaks the tradition is heresy the intrusion, that is, of a new and alien element into the deposit, having its origin in personal self-assertion. This conception of heresy is involved in the very idea of a revelation once for all made. Now, what heresy is in the sphere of truth, a violation of the apostolic succession is in the tradition of the ministry. Here too there is a deposit handed down, a trust transmitted in the Church; and its continuity is violated, whenever a man 'takes any honour to himself' and assumes a function not committed to him. The individual, of course, who is guilty of the act may in any particular case, through the absence of right knowledge or from other causes which exempt from responsibility in whole or in part, not incur the responsibility; but judged by an ob-` jective standard, that is, in the light of the due relation between the individual member and the whole body, the act has the moral discolouring of self-assertion. The Church's doctrine of succession is thus of a piece with the whole idea of the Gospel revelation, as being the communication of a divine gift which must be received and cannot be originated,-received, moreover, through the channels of a visible and organic society; and the principle (this is what is here emphasized) lies at the last resort in the idea of

Its import

ance

(i) as a bond of union in a spiritual society;

succession rather than in the continuous existence of what was called above 'monepiscopacy,' that is the maintenance of the succession through a single bishop in each see-even though it should appear that this too is of apostolic institution, and that the Church, since the Apostles, has never conceived of itself as having any power to originate or interpolate a new office.1

It will be easy to see that the existence of an apostolic succession serves several important ends.

(i) It forms a link of historical continuity in a society intended to be universal and permanent. Nations have many bonds of union. There is the unity of blood and language and common customs: there is the unity of a common government over men inhabiting a common territory. Such bonds of union are lacking to a universal spiritual society such as the Church claims to be. Embracing all peoples and languages, admitting and consecrating the greatest varieties of local custom and taste, inhabiting no separate territory but spread over all the earth, how should the Church preserve or exhibit its identity and continuity as a visible society without some such instrument and evidence of succession as is afforded by the ministry as traditionally conceived? No doubt it may be urged, and with partial truth, that the real unity of the Church lies in the Spirit, which lives in

The words of the Anglican Art. xxi. are: 'Non licet cuiquam sumere sibi munus publice praedicandi aut administrandi sacramenta in ecclesia, nisi prius fuerit ad haec obeunda legitime vocatus et missus. Atque illos legitime vocatos et missos existimare debemus, qui per homines, quibus potestas vocandi ministros atque mittendi in vineam Domini publice concessa est, in ecclesia cooptati fuerint et asciti in hoc opus.'

It should be noticed that the principle of mission is here asserted before the specific reference (Art. XXXVI. with the ordinal read into it) to actual orders in the ministry.

* We know how familiar a boast this is with early Christian writers. Cf. e.g. Ep. ad Diognet. 5: 'Christians [of the "new race" which has just come into the world, c. 1] are distinguished from the rest of mankind neither by land, nor by language, nor by customs. They have neither cities of their own, nor exceptional language, nor remarkable mode of life. But inhabiting Greek or barbarian cities as the lot of each determined, and following the local customs in dress and food and general conduct of life, the character of their own polity which they exhibit is everywhere wonderful and confessedly strange.' Cf. Iren. I. x. 2.

ing men's

a dependence is of Christ;

A Chris

on the gifts

her, and in the truth she holds and teaches; but that truth was committed to a society, as to what Irenaeus calls its rich depository,'1 and that Spirit has a body-and how can the outward organization, which enshrines and perpetuates the inner life, maintain or exhibit its identity without some such bond as the apostolic succession of the ministry affords ? 2 (ii) The ministerial succession serves the end of (ii) as declarimpressing upon Christians that their new life is communicated gift, and from this point of view it naturally associated with the sacraments. tian of apostolic days was taught by St. Paul to look back to the day of baptism as the moment of his incorporation into the life of Christ. He had received the gift of the Spirit by the laying on of apostolic hands. He was fed with the Body and Blood of Christ through the 'effectual signs' of bread and wine.5 This sacramental method went to impress upon his mind the idea of his dependence upon grace given from without. True, this grace given from without could only be appropriated, incorporated, used, by the inward faculty of faith. This is the Christian principle of correspondence. When Christ was on earth healing men's sickness, the 'virtue' which went out of Him could-speaking generally only be liberated to act in effective power on those who had 'faith to be healed,' and it was thus men's faith which made them whole, though the

1 Iren. III. iv. I: 'quasi in depositorium dives.'

* For an interesting statement of the function of the episcopal succession from this point of view, see F. D. Maurice's Kingdom of Christ pt. ii. ch. iv. § 5; also Gladstone Church Principles Considered in their Results ch. v. esp. pp. 193, 194: 'If it were attempted to insist on succession in doctrine as the sole condition of the essence of a Church, any such proposition would be self-contradictory, inasmuch as that which would be thus perpetuated would not be a society at all, but a creed or body of tenets.' What is required is 'succession of persons,' as well as 'continuous identity of doctrine.'

Gal. iii. 27; Rom. vi. 3; 1 Cor. xii. 13; Tit. iii. 5.

Acts viii. 17-20, xix. 6; cf. Heb. vi. 2.

I Cor. x. 16, 17. I do not see how it is possible to deny that the New Testament does attach inward gifts to external channels, i.e. is sacramental.

E

means of their healing was the virtue of Christ's body which came from without. His permanent redemptive activity upon the souls of men exhibits, and with less possibility of exception, the same law. He saves in virtue of an inward faith but by the instrumentality of a gift given from outside. This outward bestowal of grace was no peculiarity of the Apostolic age, though the symbolic miracles which at first called attention to it passed away. It is impossible to deny that the early Christians believed in the sacraments as the covenanted channels of divine grace. It is, indeed, part of God's condescending

1 I may refer, in confirmation of what is said above, to the way in which the Fathers, at the end of the second century, emphasize the sacramental principle, as of a piece with the principle of the Incarnation, against the Gnostic depreciation of what is material. See a vigorous passage of Tertullian (de Resurr. Carn. 8), emphasizing how, at each stage of the spiritual life, the inward gift is mediated through the material body-and that, of course, implies through a material sacrament. 'When the soul is attached to God, it is the flesh which enables it to be attached. The flesh is washed that the soul may be cleansed: the flesh is anointed that the soul may be consecrated: the flesh is signed with the Cross that the soul too may be protected: the flesh is shadowed with the imposition of hands that the soul too may be illuminated by the Spirit: the flesh is fed with the Body and Blood of Christ that the soul too may be filled with the fatness of God.' Cf. de Bapt. 2, quoted on p. 164. This is no advance upon the principle of Irenaeus. To Irenaeus the bread and wine are consecrated to become the Body and Blood of Christ, and so to impart eternal life even to man's body (IV. xviii. 5): and again, 'the cup which has been mixed and the bread which has been made receives the word of God, and becomes the Eucharist of the Body [and Blood] of Christ, and the substance of our flesh grows and gains consistence from these. How, then, can they say that our flesh is not susceptible of the gift of God, which is eternal life-our flesh, which is nourished by the Body and Blood of the Lord, and which is His member?' (v. ii. 3). Irenaeus' contemporary at Alexandria, Clement (though his exact view of the Eucharist is hard to grasp or state), certainly believed that the sacraments convey to us the life and being of Christ; cf. Paed. i. 6. This would appear in Dr. Bigg's references B. L. pp. 105, 106 [ed. 2 pp. 140, 141]. But we may go back earlier. The simple account which, earlier in the second century, Justin Martyr gives of the meaning of the Christian sacraments (Apol. i. 61, 65-67) carries conviction that Irenaeus and Tertullian are stating no new doctrine: 'for not as common bread or common drink do we receive these things; but just as our Saviour Jesus Christ was made flesh by the word of God, and for our salvation had both flesh and blood, so we have been taught that that food by which our flesh and blood are nurtured is, when thanks are offered over it by prayer in words that come from him, the flesh and the blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.' We go back to the beginning of the century, to Ignatius, and we find the same stress on the sacraments in the earliest stage of controversy with Gnosticism. 'The heretics,' he writes (ad Smyrn. 6, 7), 'abstain from the Eucharist and prayer, because they confess not that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, which by His goodness the Father raised up. They, therefore, who speak against the gift of God, die by their disputing.' [Bp. Lightfoot cites in illustration of this Tertullian's Hoc est corpus meum, id est figura mei corporis.' Tertullian's language about the Eucharist is remarkable, but taken