gard, so were the words of our Lord. If the words of Jesus imply the office of priesthood, then the Ordinal when it uses them implies just the same, and they are just as effective for the successors of the apostles as they were for the apostles themselves.

The Roman Catholic Bishops of England, in their Vindication, endeavour to meet this issue, but in vain. They venture to say:

"And it has been claimed that these further addresses to the candidates furnish the necessary determination of the meaning, and should have been taken into account by the Bull. But to remit sins is not to offer sacrifice, nor, although the sacrifice is intimately connected with one of the sacraments, do the words, “Be thou a faithful dispenser . . . of His holy Sacraments," draw special attention to that particular sacrament, still less bring into prominence its sacrificial aspect. Nor does it avail to say that the Lord used these words to confer the priesthood, and that therefore they must have been sufficient for the purpose. For it is not true that our Lord conferred the priesthood by the use of these words. He had conferred the priesthood on His apostles at His Last Supper by the words: "Do this in remembrance of me" (cf. Council of Trent, Sess. xxii, cap. ix., can. 2). What he did on Easter evening by the words "whose sins you shall forgive" was to annex to the priesthood the supplementary power of forgiving sins, or possibly only to indicate that it had been annexed already. (P. 36.)

This argumentation is nothing less than a perversion of Holy Scripture, which does not justify the opinion that Jesus conferred the priesthood at the Lord's Supper, and that the other commissions of the apostles reported in the Gospels are supplementary thereto. These other commissions are much better sustained by Biblical criticism than the words upon which the priestly commission is supposed to be based. All of the evangelists agree in a commission given by our Lord to his apostles after his resurrection, before his final departure from them.' These vary in their terms, but agree in substance. And these must be regarded, from a Biblical point of view, as the real, essential and final commission.

'Matt. xxviii. 16–20; Mk. xvi. 14-20; Lk. xxiv. 44-53; John xx. 19-23.

The celebration of the Lord's Supper is reported by only three of the evangelists, and these make no mention whatever of the words, "Do this in remembrance of me"; and the later text of Luke, which gives it, was derived from St. Paul. It is impossible, therefore, to suppose that the Gospels understood that to be the Apostolic Commission. What they understood to be the Apostolic Commission they give, all four of them, among the last words of Jesus to his apostles.

3

It may also be said that St. Paul himself was commissioned by our Lord in Christophanies as the great apostle to the Gentiles. We have several reports of his commission in Acts;1 and in the Pauline Epistles, upon which St. Paul bases his apostleship, and in not one of them is there the slightest hint of the performance of priestly acts; but there is the same emphasis upon a prophetic ministry as in the apostolic commissions. And yet St. Paul was certainly a priest as well as a prophet, and upon his statement' rests the whole fabric of the Papal opinion, that the essential ministerial function is the offering of the real sacrifice of the Eucharist, without which there is no valid ministry.

The Roman Catholic tradition singles out one of the apostolic commissions, and that one only incidental to the institution of the Eucharist, and the one not contained in the original report of the institution of the Eucharist given by the Synoptic Gospels, but given only in St. Paul's report, and one, not so much a commission to the apostles, as a command to do the one thing, celebrate the Eucharist. It singles out one thing, and makes that so essential to the Christian ministry that without it there can be no ministry at all.

There is no warrant in Holy Scripture, or in primitive Tradition, for such an exaggeration of priesthood in connection with the sacred Eucharist above all other functions of the Christian ministry, and other priestly acts; and there

1 1 Acts ix. 3-18; xxii. 6-21; xxvi. 12-18.

2 Gal. i. 5-17; I Cor. ix. 1; II Cor. xi. 5; xii. 11-12. 3 Cf. Messiah of the Apostles, pp. 70 seq.

'I Cor. xi.

fore the Pope's test of the validity of Anglican Orders is no valid test. The Anglican Ordinal ordains priests with the use of one of Christ's own commissions, and supplements it with words which in Biblical usage imply priestly and prophetic functions; and that is a sufficient and effective form, implying all that Christ would have his priests to be.

IV. THE VALIDITY OF PRESBYTERIAN ORDERS

The Reformation of the Church in the several countries of Northern Europe resulted in the organisation of national Churches. This was inevitable because the jurisdiction of the Pope, who refused the reformation demanded, could no longer be recognised without betrayal of the cause of reform. The Church of England was able to become a reformed national Church, with her bishops at her head, because the Crown was sustained by an able primate and reforming bishops. This was not the case on the Continent of Europe, where few of the bishops took part in the Reformation, and these for political reasons were deprived of their jurisdiction by the enemies of the Reformation. It was more the difference of circumstances, than the deliberate opinion and intention of the Reformers, that resulted in Episcopacy in England and Presbyterianism in various forms on the Continent. And so Episcopal ordination continued in England, but became practically impossible on the Continent, where Presbyterial ordination became necessary. The Anglican episcopal succession depends on a very slender thread. Not one of the four bishops who consecrated Archbishop Parker had jurisdiction in any of the historic sees. They received their jurisdiction from the Crown. Queen Mary died in 1558, only forty-two years of age. Her sister lived to her seventieth year. If Mary had lived twelve years longer, only one of Parker's consecrators would have been living, and in all human probability it would have been quite impossible to secure a sufficient number of bishops to consecrate a bishop independent of Rome. If England

had been called upon to choose between a Reformation without bishops or bishops without Reformation, can we think she would have chosen the latter?

The situation on the Continent was somewhat different. Hermann, Archbishop of Cologne and Elector of the Empire, a man of greater eminence and nobler Christian character than the Archbishop of Canterbury, began the reform of his diocese in 1536. In 1542-3, with the aid of Bucer and Melancthon, representing the two sides of the Reformation on the Continent, the Lutheran and the Reformed, he became a champion of the Reformation and was followed by the Bishop of Munster and others. But the German Emperor, by force of arms, deprived him of his electorate and archbishopric and destroyed the Reformation in his Electorate. If Maurice of Saxony had thought more of his religion and less of his personal animosities, and had led the Protestants against the Emperor at this time, instead of five years later, the Archbishop of Cologne would in all probability have been the great leader and mediator of the Reformation on the Continent.

It was, indeed, the providential interference of God in cutting short the life of Queen Mary, and postponing the Protestant rally about Duke Maurice, and not the deliberate choice of the Reformers, that made the Church of England Episcopal and the Churches of the Continent non-Episcopal. The situation might have been the very reverse.

Under these circumstances it is altogether unhistorical and unbecoming for the Anglicans to exalt themselves above their Protestant brethren on the Continent, as if they alone had the true Apostolic Ministry. It was due to the short life of Queen Mary and the long life of Queen Elizabeth that England was saved from the religious wars that for a generation devastated the Continent, and out of which the Protestant Churches emerged in feebleness and poverty to do the best they could under the circumstances.

Presbyterian Orders were accepted as valid by the Anglican Reformers. Bucer and Peter Martyr were received from

the Continent and made professors of theology at Oxford and Cambridge, and no one thought of questioning their Orders. All through the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century there was good-fellowship between the Anglicans and the Protestants of the Continent, even though the Puritans during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I were ever striving to make the Church of England more conformable to the Churches of the Continent in her ministry and her ceremonies. The Puritans were Presbyterians in their doctrine of church government, and they strove to put their doctrines into practice. They succeeded in Scotland under the leadership of Knox, but they failed in England. And yet neither in Scotland nor in England nor in Ireland did either party think of dividing the Church because of these differences. It was a conflict between a reforming and a conservative party in the same Church.

It was the well-nigh universal opinion of the leading divines of the Church of England in the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries that Presbyterian Orders were valid, even in the very time of conflict between Episcopacy and Presbyterianism in England, Scotland and Ireland. Thus Hooker, the chief Anglican authority on the Church, over against Cartwright, the contemporary Puritan authority, says in 1593:

There may be sometimes very just and sufficient reasons to allow ordination made without a bishop. The whole Church visible, being the true original subject of all power, it hath not ordinarily allowed any other than bishops alone to ordain; how be it, as the ordinary cause is ordinarily in all things to be observed, so it may be in some cases not unnecessary that we decline from the ordinary ways.

Where the Church must needs have some ordained, and neither hath, nor can have, possibly a bishop to ordain; in case of such necessity, the ordinary institution of God hath given oftentimes and may give place. And therefore we are not simply without exception to urge a lineal descent of power from the apostles by continued succession of bishops in every effectual ordination. (Ecclesiastical Polity, VII, 14.)

Richard Field, in 1606, in his great work, Of the Church, Four Books-in two different passages makes an able and