AN ESSAY, &c.

THE Church of England confers ordination on her priests in the very words with which our Lord consecrated his apostles; and, in her Office for the Visitation of the Sick, she authorizes her priests, so ordained, to give the penitent, after confession made, a full and authoritative absolution from his sins. Both these points have given great offence. It appears intolerable presumption for the ministers of the church in the present day to claim, in this respect, equality with the apostles; and to arrogate to themselves a power peculiar to the godhead is nothing less than blasphemy.

I. Now it was often alleged by the fathers of the church, as a triumphant argument of the proper divinity of our blessed Lord, that he assumed to himself an absolute authority to pardon the sins of men. A very full selection of passages from the writings of the fathers, from Irenæus to Bede, who have used this argument, may be found in Archbishop Usher's Answer to the Jesuit's Challenge, pp. 79-85. ed. 1686; and in

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the Origines Ecclesiasticæ of the accurate and learned Bingham, who judiciously remarks, that "the argument could have proved nothing, (1) "had men been equal sharers in this power with "him." B. xix. c. 1. For sin being the transgression of the divine law, God alone can have in himself the right to pardon it: and as without repentance sin cannot be pardoned, a permanent judicial authority to pronounce its full and final absolution cannot be possessed by any being who is not (2) able infallibly to scrutinize the inmost recesses of the human heart. Consequently, they who speak most largely of the Church's absolving power, unless they will assert, that they to whom this authority is given have a concurrent power of discerning the sincerity of men's repentance, must either acknowledge, that (3) all human absolution is conditional; or else affirm, that the all-seeing God will forgive sin without repentance, whensoever a Christian minister shall, either in charity or ignorance, pronounce its pardon.

But if the power of remitting absolutely the future penalties of sin neither is, nor can be, given to ignorant and sinful men, in what sense are we to understand these words of our Lord to his apostles: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose"soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto "them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are "retained?" The inquiry is one of great importance; for as the same words are used in the ordination of our priests; and as it cannot be

supposed, that those venerable and pious men by whom our Liturgy was reformed designed to mislead by an equivocal sense, when they retained in this form of ordination, without any restriction or qualification of their meaning, the identical words which our Lord employed in the consecration of his apostles; the necessary inference is, that they meant them to be taken strictly in the same sense; and designed to claim for the ministers of our Church (4) the same gift of the Holy Spirit, the same divine authority to absolve

and to bind.

To know whether this claim is consistent with truth and piety, we must not take it for granted that the figurative phrase " to bind and to loose," or "to remit and to retain sins," (5) is to be interpreted literally, and according to the idioms of European languages; but should rather inquire in what sense our Lord himself employed, and the apostles understood it.

The primo-primitive apostolic Christian church, in its laws, in its public service, and in the ordination of its ministers, appears to have been formed on the exact model of the Jewish synagogue. This point, of great importance to our present inquiry, will require to be more fully examined; for it has been maintained by certain authors, with surprising confidence, that the orders of the Christian ministry were copied from those of the Aaronical priesthood; and that the respective offices and functions of our bishops, priests, and deacons, were framed in exact confor

mity to the corresponding appointments of the high priest, priests, and Levites, in the temple service. The arguments in support of this groundless notion amount simply to this; that there were three different gradations and orders established among the ministers of the Jewish temple; and that there are three similar degrees of subordination in the Christian ministry. In this way it might be easy to demonstrate, that our civil constitution of king, lords, and commons, is copied from the high priest, priests, and Levites of the Jews. Nothing indeed can be more groundless than this strange hypothesis. Must we not, if it were well-founded, have met with, at least, some trace of it in the numerous epistles of St. Paul; who so often describes the various offices of the Christian ministry, and insists so forcibly on the right they have to a competent support from those over whom they preside, and for whose benefit they are appointed? Is it credible, that in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which contains so perfect an exposition of the ministry and appointments of the temple, such a topic should have been wholly omitted, if the apostle had known, that the presbyters and pastors of the Christian church succeeded to the rights and privileges of the Aaronical priesthood? On such a subject, on which the Scriptures have maintained a fatal silence, it is in vain to look for an independent proof in the writings of the fathers. Their sentiments, however clearly expressed, in such a case can only shew what was the preva

lent opinion at the period in which they wrote. One of the strongest of these passages, when separated from its context, is contained in the wellknown epistle of Jerom to Evagrius: "Et ut "sciamus traditiones apostolicas sumptas de Ve"teri Testamento, quod Aaron et filii ejus, atque "Levitæ in templo fuerunt, hoc sibi episcopi et presbyteri, et diaconi vendicent in ecclesia:" yet this, promising as it appears, makes nothing for the purpose; for it was the great object of Jerom, in this epistle, to check the insolence of one who had presumed to exalt the office of deacons above that of the presbyters; "audio quen"dam in tantam erupisse vecordiam ut diaconos "presbyteris, id est episcopis, anteferret ;" and he takes great pains to prove that the office of a bishop and a presbyter was originally the same. Consequently, to be consistent with himself, he can only mean, in the passage above cited, that as Aaron and his sons were superior to the Levites under the Law, so bishops and presbyters are superior to deacons in the gospel ministry.. To lay too great a stress on this testimony of Jerom's may therefore not be prudent; and to wrest his words from their proper meaning cannot be fair.

The Christian church, whilst it continued under the government of the apostles, borrowed nothing from the Jewish temple, of which the rites and ceremonies, the sacrifices and oblations, the ministrations and the ministers were virtually abolished by the death of Christ, and were then in