mits the statement of Chemnitz, whom he is assailing, that in the New Testament this name (priest) is not employed in the received signification, he proceeds to assign a reason why its employment is avoided, and this reason has been adopted by some of the Anglican school. "Because," he says, "in the time of the apostles the Jewish priesthood was still in force, and bloody sacrifices were offered in the temple at Jerusalem, the apostles, under the inspiration of their Lord, did not employ the names priesthood, sacrifice, temple, altar, and similar things, that they might the more easily distinguish the Christian from the Jewish sacrifices; and lest they should, by using the same words, be thought to renew, or confirm those rites. But a short time afterwards, on the overthrow of the temple at Jerusalem, and on the cessation of the Jewish sacrifices, the most ancient Fathers began freely to use all these names as they thought necessary." I

This explanation of Bellarmine is a pure hypothesis, for which there is not a shadow of evidence in the New Testament itself; nor have we anywhere an instance of the avoidance by apostles of terms which have a definite and characteristic meaning, simply on the ground that the same terms have been employed in other connections.

As to the importance of distinguishing Christian from Jewish sacrifices, what danger was there of confounding them when the whole stress of apostolic preaching was calculated to draw their hearers away

Bellarmine," Controver." ii. 332.

from the ceremonial of Judaism to the more spiritual realities of the Christian dispensation? Who was likely to confound the fishermen of Galilee, or Matthew the publican, or St. Paul, with the priests who were of the lineage of Aaron? or, when apostles wrote to Churches in various cities, who could imagine that in addressing the bishops of such Churches as priests (if they had ever done this), they would have created confusion between the priests of the Christian communities and those of the temples of Venus, Artemis, or Jupiter? The Jews had not relinquished their religious terminology in those heathen cities in which they had established colonies, lest, when they spoke of priest, sacrifice, and propitiation, they should be confounded with their heathen neighbours, or lest they should give encouragement to idolatry; and what more urgent need did there exist for the avoidance of these terms on the part of the early Christian teachers? But, in fact, the terms were not avoided. Temple, priest, and sacrifice, were employed and transfigured into glorious spiritual significations, in harmony with that dispensation of grace and truth of which Judaism had been the shadow and the preparation. And as to the name "priesthood" (iepáтevμa), it became a designation of the whole Church of God, and was never appropriated by apostles to themselves, or accorded by them to other teachers in the Church. Is it credible that if the priestly and sacrificial function of the ambassadors of Christ be that which by its mystery and glory casts every other into the shade, and if this were known

by the apostles (as it must have been if there were any truth in the supposition), that they would have foregone the use of that very term which, more than any other, would express the nature of their commission? Was the Apostle Paul (to say nothing of his brethren in the apostolate) the man to make such a concession to the Jews, when we find him speaking of Christ as the Propitiation, and as our Passover, and thus fearlessly interpreting the types with which the Jews were so familiar by the great facts of the Christian Dispensation? Was he not rather the man to rescue the name from its simply Jewish and Pagan use, and to clothe it with the higher dignity of designating the ministers of a faith that was to fill the world?

In the light of these considerations, the common, unvarying, persistent repudiation by the apostles of the word "priest " as an appellation of the Christian minister possesses a striking significance. They do not denominate him a priest, because they do not consider him to be a priest. There is no need for the recondite, not to say whimsical reason of Bellarmine, which makes the apostles suspend the use of the term until the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem; while it must also be urged that it was not, as the Jesuit controversialist affirms, "soon," but at least a century after that event, that the ministry was denominated a priesthood as distinct from the laity.

Let us, then, endeavour to estimate the full significance of the fact that nowhere in the New Testament are those officers who are declared by sacerdotalists.

to be priests by pre-eminence, distinguished by this designation. We have letters to Jews and to Gentiles, and to both combined, but, throughout them all, the conception of a priest, as a Christian functionary -subordinate or supreme, stationary or itinerant, inspired or uninspired—is not even suggested in the faintest degree. This circumstance is of the gravest moment, even viewed apart from the inspiration which controlled and guided the thoughts of the apostles. Looking at their epistles as simply human productions, the absence of the sacerdotal element cannot fail to strike us, and to demand explanation. But when we regard the apostles as inspired expounders of truth, we cannot with reason or reverence assign any explanation of the uniform and consistent absence of the term "priest," except as we find it in the fact that all that was essential in the priesthood had been fulfilled in the great sacrifice of the Cross. Whether we consider the men who wrote the letters, or the Churches to which they were addressed, the more significant will the absence of the word "priest " appear. For if the apostles were, not in some indefinite metaphorical sense, but, in a sense the most real, "priests," and if those whom they appointed to the work of the ministry were "priests," then considering the awful prerogatives involved in the exercise of such a sacred and stupendous function-it is incomprehensible that the claim should not have been distinctly made, and made with a reiteration and emphasis that should have rendered it impossible for any reader of their epistles to

resist the conclusion that their priesthood was their crowning distinction. And if they were priests, nothing could have contributed more directly and powerfully to root this conviction in the minds of the people than the constant assumption of the name. "Paul, a priest of Jesus Christ," would have been as easily written as "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ," and would have possessed the additional advantage of being a more , precise designation. True, the Churches might have been amazed at the title when dissociated from its usual accompaniments; they might have wondered at the absence of altar, victim, incense, and sacred vestments. But this would have afforded an opportunity for the apostle to have expounded the infinite superiority of his priestly functions over those of the Jewish or heathen hierarchies, by asserting his power to imbue the water of baptism with a regenerative virtue; to transmute the common perishable elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, to be offered on the altar; and, by a judicial act, to open and shut the kingdom of heaven. The apostle magnified his office when his commission was rudely or ignorantly questioned, and proved that his credentials were as valid as those of his brethren who had been the companions of the Lord; and if the sacerdotal function had been the crowning and culminating duty of his apostleship, no respect for an expiring Judaism would have restrained him from asserting a power compared with which that of the Aaronic priests was but a shadow or a name. We