bishops, is philosophically absurd and historically false. At no period of the Church could any such conspiracy have succeeded in establishing itself in the midst of a reluctant people.

The circumstances which mainly contribute to the existence and power of a priesthood are found in human nature itself. This fact, indeed, has been strongly alleged as no mean support of the caste of the priesthood, as if a general tendency were its own vindication. There are, however, other inveterate and universal proclivities of man, which it is needless to mention, but which, on the same principle, would have been able to defend their folly or their wickedness. Suffice it to say, that the bias of humanity towards a priesthood is no greater nor more general than its bias towards selfishness and sin.

It is incontestable, however, that to this bias towards a priesthood must be traced, in great measure, its intrusion into a Church to whose spirit it is wholly alien, and from which, as we have seen, it was designed to be absolutely excluded. Ill-defined terrors of the future; a fear of God not yet wholly cast out by love; the irksomeness of duties of self-discipline, so needful to the attainment of a higher sanctity of life; the intolerable oppressiveness of a sense of personal responsibility, seeking relief by its transference to others, who were vaguely supposed to be capable of accepting and discharging it; the fatal proneness (alas! too common still, even when most jealously watched) to lift the ritual above the spiritual; and the ingrained

associations of priestism, which the converts imported from Judaism and heathenism alike into the circle of the Christian Church, all contributed to prepare the way for a transformation in the type of that religion which, as inherited from the apostles, knew no earthly mediator. The gradual restriction, too, to certain officers, of definite functions and symbolic rites, insensibly clothed these acts and the men who performed them with exceptional sanctity; and the officers themselves, who were not exempt from the common frailties of humanity, were not always strong enough to decline the deference that was offered them, but little by little assumed as rights what the Church had conferred only as prerogatives and privileges, subject to its own will. Concessions begot further encroachments, and encroachments secured further concessions, until at length the laity sank into the most abject spiritual serfdom. Under the influence mainly of men who were converts from heathenism, and whose minds had been saturated with sacerdotalism and with sacred mysteries, sacramentarianism rose into ascendency over the more moral and spiritual aspects of Christianity. Judaism had been abolished and heathenism had been forsaken, but in their stead had grown up a form of Christianity surpassing both in the splendour of its ritual and in the superstitious homage which was paid to priests and priestly acts.

It is a remarkable circumstance, that while neither in the Eastern nor the Roman Church there is any controversy touching the functions of the priest, the

question remains undetermined in the English Church down to the present hour. Even the bishops themselves contend with each other as to what it is they confer in ordination, and no wonder the priests debate as to what it is they receive. There is no organisation in our land, or in the world, secular or sacred, in which there reigns such hopeless confusion and conflict as to the range of duties and powers assigned to its various functionaries. Some maintain that the clergyman who pretends to be a priest of the sacrificing order is an impostor; and others, that a clergyman who foregoes the claim is a greater impostor still. Dr. Pusey says "that upon the principle of sacerdotalism hangs the future of England's Church;" while the late Archbishop of Dublin maintained that no such principle was recognised in that Church, but that the term "priest" signifies, and was meant to signify, a "presbyter," to whom was assigned no specifically sacerdotal office whatever. Views thus not only divergent, but fundamentally contradictory, are now dividing the Established Church of our nation, and creating contentions, which for heat and bitterness find no parallel in any political controversies. Opposing camps have been formed, in the shape of societies for the purpose of carrying on this internecine struggle, and a new literature has been created, which bids fair to rifle all the resources of our language of their epithets of violence and objurgation. Neither the mitre nor the crown is sacred from assault when any discourtesy is suspected, or even constructively interpreted against

the claims of sacerdotalism. The root of bitterness out of which all this strife has grown is simple. It is this. Does the Church of England recognise a human priest, or does she not? It is for the reader to determine, in presence of the evidence which has been adduced in the two lectures which I now conclude, whether such a priest can bring his credentials from the New Testament. 1

The following may be regarded as a sample of the Christian amenities which have been engendered by the sacerdotal conflict in the Church of England. The "Church Herald" of July 15, 1874, referring to the Worship Regulation Bill, says: "Mr. Gladstone's opportunity was prepared for him by the strange bunglers whose dense stupidity and owlish blindness would be ballast enough to sink any rational cause. His speech must have been gall and wormwood to the Bishop of Gloucester, who sat smirking and admiring himself in the Peers' Gallery. The clergy have been largely alienated from the Tories by Dr. Tait's odious billthe blundering, bungling, floundering bill of the purblind archbishop. . . . . Archbishop Tait lectures and hectors his suffragans with pompous and rude expostulations, scarcely allowing them to maintain that their souls are their own. The cringing, abject, contemptible, slave-spirited manner in which they lick the dust off the feet of this Scotch Erastian and northern adventurer is a sight to make the devils rejoice and angels weep."

The "Church Times" scarcely allows itself to be outdone in this sort of loyal civilities. In its number of January 2, 1874, it says: "The Queen's ostentatious nonconformity, and her scarcely less ostentatious slights to the Church of England, have deprived her example of any religious weight with Churchmen."

And in the same number we read: "When Dr. Ellicott and Dean Law (the bishop and dean of Gloucester) are discrediting their whole faction by dealing with the interests of the Church as if it were a Christmas pantomime, and they severally clown and pantaloon, burning their own fingers with the hot poker they intend for the police, we can have little to complain of the way our opponents, religious and irreligious, alike are acting."