cnosequences which, so far as they affect the faith, impede its vital power, rather than constitute one of its essential conditions. Its first fruit is rivalry. It has become the fashion for the Bishops of the Episcopal sect in this country, to take the name of our Commonwealths. This custom has neither propriety nor antiquity nor precedent to justify it. The pretension may not do much harm now, but if the sect should largely increase, who that observes the strife for all other offices does not know, that the old question of the disciples"Who shall be greatest?"-will frequently come up in dispute and bitter feeling, and party division? How wise, then, was the Saviour's counsel "Ye are all brethren!"

These, then, are the weak foundations, and the objectionable fruits of the principle of Church Authority, as imposed upon Christians without warrant of Scripture. Our grounds of assurance, our duty to resist it, are plain. It will not be necessary that we set ourselves in constant warfare against it. Error is ever continually struggling to correct itself; indeed it accomplishes much that way, though amid blunders. The upholders of the anti-Protestant principles, which we have examined, exercise the private judgment which some of them deny to us, by quarrelling with one another. One of our comforts, though not altogether the most Christian solace, must be, that those who insist upon the claims of Ecclesiastical authority have disputes among themselves. Rome and England will never join hands upon it. Archbishop Whately, primate of the English Church in Ireland, has bred confusion in his own camp, by denying the Divine right and the Scriptural sanction of Episcopacy, as he rests it upon expediency and civil liberty to choose amid forms where all is free. The Bishop of Ohio has cast public censure upon the Bishop of New York. As to the little ceremonies and observances which some would restore, as parts of the ancient faith, it is not probable that laymen, to any extent, will feel an interest in them. They are fitted to give pleasure only to a priestly or a formal spirit, to engage the feelings of him who enacts them, and the children among the spectators. They remind us always of a military parade, in which the officers have all the glory.

Let it be understood how and why we object to the formularies and ceremonies appointed by Church Authority. Their illegality is their first obnoxious feature, their inherent ten

dency to increase and exalt themselves is another; and besides these features, common to all which an attempt is made to enforce, they come at last to be confounded with the essential conditions and principles of faith. Great and good was the example of Hezekiah, king of Judah; for when he came to his throne we are told, that he did what was right in the sight of God, demolishing images, and breaking in pieces even the brazen serpent, which Moses had made, because prostituted to idolatry.

While we thus entirely renounce all Church Authority, as beset with manifold evils, we are thrown upon the Protestant principle of Private Judgment applied to the Bible. We go all lengths with this principle, we allow it, we urge it, we insist upon it. But we are reminded of the dangers which beset this principle too, of the wild vagaries of Sectarianism, of Mormonism, and Millerism. We answer that we regret all this, but we cannot help it, neither could Church Authority restrain it, when the Church was all powerful. We know the dangers of Rationalism and Infidelity. They are fearful. But how are they to be resisted? Authority is the most weak of all bulwarks against them. If Miller undertakes to deduce the era of the last conflagration from the length of horns and trumpets, Church Authority will not convince him he is wrong. If the prophet of the Mormons has found another Bible, the hierarchy, which professes to sustain itself upon the older book, will be no match for him. We do indeed require that common sense, sober, instructed reason, and sound discretion be admitted, as the conditions of the right interpretation of the Bible, as of all other books. Then the risk and hazard, which is run in the exercise of private judgment as respects faith, is no greater than the risk and hazard as respects conduct in life, which is run by every individual in the exercise of his moral freedom, in a world where sin abounds.

We are content to rest the security of the Christian Religion upon the wants of the human heart and the value of the Bible. We have no fear that it will perish for want of a hierarchy. The necessities and wants of every age will give to it proper forms, services, and institutions. Our fathers were satisfied with unwarmed meeting houses, with deaconing their hymns, and with the music of the human voice. We have introduced the furnace and the organ; some of us kneel,

some of us stand, and some of us sit, when we pray ; and we believe that the song of praise and the prayer of faith reach the throne of the Most High now as of old time. So long as the Epistles to Timothy and Titus are extant, Christians will know what are the qualifications of worthy ministers, in heart and mind, in temper and talents, and in life, and will need no priestly office or support. Paul directs Timothy as follows: "And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also,"— faithful men, able to teach, these are the New Testament qualifications for Christian ministers. 2 Tim. ii. 2. Those who love ceremonies may place them on their proper basis of taste, temperament, and preference, and then they will occasion no Holy Wars.

We can feel the power both of ceremonial and of simple worship. We confess that we have been impressed by the solemn services of the ancient cathedral, where emblems of holiness and loveliness addressed all the senses, where each Christian grace and virtue had an altar, a saint, a marble statue, and a painted canvass, where a mysterious awe enthralled the feelings, and the melodious symphonies of choral strains raised mortals to the skies and brought Seraphim down, where the priests appeared to be a holy company and the frankincense an accepted offering. We confess the power of such a worship. And we have felt the same, we know not whether more or less, in the cold churches of Scotland, where paint and organs are heresies, and the worship is stif fened without a form. Let us combine, if we will, all that impresses us in either, in our own Churches, remembering always the only condition of accepted worship, which has the authority of Jesus Christ—“ God is a spirit, and they that worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth."

G. E. E.

NOTE. Page 295.

Bishop De Lancey in his Sermon at the consecration of Bishop Eastburn, (page 17,) quoted these "Epistles of Ignatius," with the same apparent reverence with which he quoted Scripture, neither dropping the slightest hint, or making the most distant reference, which would warn his hearers or readers of the exceeding dubiousness allowed by scholars to invest those documents. Is this candid, even though he be fully persuaded of their authority? We prefer the eloquent and truth-telling plea of the great Milton, who says,

"To what end then should they cite him [Ignatius] as authentic for Episcopacy, when they cannot know what is authentic in him, but by the judgment which they brought with them, and not by any judgment which they might safely learn from him? How can they bring satisfaction from such an author, to whose very essence the reader must be fain to contribute his own understanding? Had God ever intended that we should have sought any part of useful instruction from Ignatius, doubtless he would not have so ill-provided for our knowledge, as to send him to our hands in this broken and disjointed plight; and if he intended no such thing, we do injuriously in thinking to taste better the pure evangelic manna by seasoning our mouths with the tainted scraps and fragments of an unknown table, and searching among the verminous and polluted rags, dropped over-worn from the toiling shoulders of time, with these deformedly to quilt, and interlace the entire, the spotless and undecaying robe of truth, the daughter, not of time, but of heaven, only bred up here below, in Christian hearts, between two grave and holy nurses, the doctrine and discipline of the Gospel."-Prelatical Episcopacy.

We subjoin a few authorities from the "house divided against itself."

BISHOP STILLINGFLEET.

"By the loss of records of the British churches, we cannot draw down the succession of Bishops from the Apostles' times.

REV. E. J. RIDDLE.

"Whatever may become of the Apostolic succession, as a theory, or an institute, it is impossible, at all events, to prove the fact of such succession, or to trace it down the stream of time. It is impossible to prove the personal succession of modern bishops, in an unbroken Episcopal line, or from the Apostles, or men of the Apostolic age."

BISHOP BURN.

"Bishops and Priests, both were one office, in the beginning of Christ's religion. It is not of importance whether the Priest made the Bishop, or the Bishop the Priest; considering that in the beginning of the Church, there was no difference between a Bishop and a Priest.

Bishops, as they be now, were after Priests. In the New Testament, he, who is appointed to be Bishop or Priest, needeth no consecration, for election thereto is sufficient. Temporal men may preach and teach, and in cases of necessity, institute Ministers - they may preach the word of God and minister sacraments, and also appoint men to those offices, with the consent of the congregation."

BISHOP BURNET.

"This ransacking of records about a succession of orders, is not a thing possible for any to be satisfied about - for a great many ages, all those instruments are lost, so that how ordinations were made in the primitive church, we cannot certainly know. The condition of Christians were very bad, if persons must certainly know how all ministers have been ordained since the Apostles' days for it is impossible to satisfy them, unless the authentic records of all the ages of the church could be showed, which is impossible, for though we were satisfied that all the priests of this age were duly ordained, yet, if we be not assured that all who ordained them, had orders rightly given them, and so upwards till the days of the Apostles, the doubt will still remain."

ARCHBISHOP WHATELY.

"There is not a minister in all Christendom who is able to trace up, with any approach to certainty, his own spiritual pedigree. It is inconceivable that any one, even moderately acquainted with history, can feel a certainty, or any approach to certainty, that, amidst all the confusion and corruption of the dark ages, no one unduly consecrated or ordained was admitted to sacred offices. Even in the memory of persons living, there existed a Bishop concerning whom there was so much mystery and uncertainty prevailing as to when, where, and by whom he had been ordained, that doubt existed in the minds of many persons living, whether he had been ordained at all. Suppose the probability of an unbroken succession to be as 100 to 1 in each separate case, in favor of the legitimacy and regularity of the transmission, and the links to amount to 50, (or any other number,) the probability of the unbroken continuity of the whole chain must be computed at 99-100 of 99-100 of 99-100, &c. to the end of the whole fifty."