true to life; that is helpful to morality and reverential to Christianity. Good literature is an imperative necessity to a country where every man is a sovereign.

This is an age of periodical literature. The secular press seems to have reached the golden age of its prosperity. Its influence has been both eulogized and censured. It is in some instances characterized by literary merit, moral integrity, and healthful influence. But alas! it too often seems to be simply the sources through which the filth of society flows into the public mind. The Nation said some years ago that the duty of the press was threefold: to publish accurate news, to publish no false news, and not to color the news to suit editorial taste. What shall be said of the press, judged by this standard? As says the same journal: "News is an impalpable thing, an airy abstraction; to make it a purchasable, merchantable commodity, somebody must collect, combine, and clothe it in language. Its quality and value depend on the men who do this. work. Some men are accurate, painstaking, true to the facts; but many, even many most prominent men, are not so. Honest accuracy, exact truthfulness, are often considered inferior to smartness, spiciness, and enterprise. The reporter is sent out to gather as much as others; as much as possible. If his professional ambition should lead him to listen behind doors or beneath windows, or stealthily to secure private confidential correspondence; to praise and puff a charlatan or a pretender into notoriety and success; to vilify the pure and good-he is too often regarded as smart, shrewd, and successful, rather than as a vilifier of society and a corrupter of morals. This is to live, and to teach others to live, no better than the criminal code requires, or pecuniary interest demands.

It is the function of religious journalism to teach that righteousness exalteth a nation while sin is a reproach to any people; to teach that virtue is virtue and vice is vice. May the Methodist Episcopal Church, so richly endowed in its facilities, agency, enterprise, financial and literary ability, be governed by wise counsels, and prove worthy of its marvelous possibilities!

W. F. Whitlock

ART. III. THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE: A SYMPOSIUM.

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE.

UNITY itself is dead, or carnal at the best, if the spirit of unity be wanting. Hence the spirit of unity is precious and fulfills the law given to all Christians, so far as the individual is concerned, if he makes himself in no wise responsible for the divisions of Christendom, and does all that in him lies to restore that primitive unity which answers to the requirements of the Master. The organic unity of a body-of a "whole body "is the requisite for effective work and progress of the Christian army against the "world lying in the evil one." Thus only shall the world believe that the Son of God is sent by the Father for its salvation.*

66

The Primitive Church realized this ideal from the period when "the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch." The spirit of unity (so forcibly outlined in Acts ii, 41, 42) was predominant for ages; and to violate unity and create a schism was recognized as a sin against the Holy Spirit. This fact must not be entangled with the fact that, from the first, schisms were generated. The point is, that unity was the recognized law of ecclesiastical life. When Athanasius stood 'against the world" there were practical blunders as to truth, but the law was recognized in principle, so that unity was only functionally disturbed; the body was sound and returned very soon to healthful vitality. The spirit of unity in every healthful Christian heart responds to a law of the Gospel which operates for the restoration of organic unity now; but only the Spirit of God can effect this great restoration. It is something not to be worked out by man's wisdom; but let the spirit of Christian unity be revived, and the Spirit of Christ can surely bring about a universal conformity on the part of his children to what he himself commands. It is in this hope that I enter upon a subject the godly and charitable discussion of which must lead to good results.

It has been the successful stratagem of the enemies of the Reformation to credit it with the divisions of Christendom,

*St. John xvii, 21.

and thousands, disgusted with these divisions, have blindly "leaped in the dark," and landed in Rome to escape from the evils of schism. Such a leap had been emphatically out of bad into worse, for (the fons et origo malorum) the fruitful parent of all these disorders is the Paparchy itself. I say the Paparchy* with emphasis, as differing from the papacy as it first appeared in Boniface III. In its first form, as it still recognized the canons of the great Councils, it could not enforce any supremacy. It was held by those canons to a mere primacy of order, and all the Easterns, with many bishops of the West, † knew how to resist the aggressions of Rome by an appeal to canons and councils. The " Decretals" were forged to break down the whole system of the Councils and to frame a new canon-law for the West, when organized by Charlemagne into an empire separate from the East. On these forgeries Nicholas I., in the ninth century, took his stand, and assumed a "supremacy to which the East indignantly refused submission. But the East was historically the matrix of the Church, and the schism of Nicholas damaged not them, but the Latins. To help himself he created the unscriptural theory of Petrine supremacy and the fable that this was perpetuated in the Roman See. From the intolerable confusions and inextricable errors generated by the schoolmen to sustain such pretensions came all the divisions of the Reformers. Their system had so perverted all true and primitive ideas of the Church, that, in the great struggle for fundamental truth and righteousness, there was little thought of the frame-work in which the truth was originally enshrined. He who made the body of man for the human spirit was not less the author of a similar system to embody the vitality of the Church. It was the mystical body of Christ. Not for a moment should this historic refutation of papal arrogance be forgotten. History convicts the papacy of creating and fomenting almost all the divisions of Christendom.

The great expounder of the original synodical system of visible unity is Cyprian, the martyr-bishop of Carthage. He knows nothing of any papacy, but accepts the Canons of

*The historic importance of this distinction is illustrated in the Institutes of Christian History by Bishop Coxe, a manual published by McClurg & Co., Chicago.

Notably by Hincmar of Rheims, who resisted Nicholas, and founded the historic school of "the Gallicans," which exists to this day.

Nicæa, which recognized certain apostolic sees (four in the East and one in the West) as local centers of church discipline and order.* Among these none was superior, none inferior; nor was there any inequality thereby created among Christian bishops as such. The sees of Rome and "New Rome" were first and second on the list, for no other reason than that they were the capitals of the empire-its great centers of resort; a reason expressly stated in the canons that created them and endowed them with a co-equal primacy of order only, and no confession of any supremacy whatever. Such an idea was unheard of and unthought of. Cyprian's great canons † were that (1) the apostolate was a unit, expressed in the gift of it as such to one of the apostles first; and (2) that this unit was equally lodged in its integrity with each apostle, as expressed by the same gift to all the other apostles, without any difference or inequality between them. Hence (3) all Christian

bishops, as derived from these apostles, hold apostolic powers in solidarity; all equal, and each one exercising the same gift in its undivided integrity. Great as was his respect for the see of Rome as the matrix of the Western churches, Cypriau yielded nothing to it; "giving place by subjection, no, not for an hour." His great canons were universally recognized by the whole Church, and through them the aggressive spirit of Rome itself was checked and withstood by the entire Orient, and less efficiently by the Latins, down to the time of Nicholas. The Orientals, adhering to the synodical constitutions to this day, regard the Western schism of the papacy just as the Aglicans regard it. They smile at the excommunications and anathemas of Nicholas and his successors, as cutting off nobody but himself and his adherents from the Catholic and scriptural unity of antiquity.‡

"Now look you, Brother Nicholas, how crazy you must be;

Just like the silly little boy that sat upon a tree

Sit not exactly on the tree, but on a westward limb,

And sawed the bough on which he sat, betwixt the tree and him."

The "historic episcopate," then, is to be considered here in its original constitutional simplicity, apart from any theories

*See Ante-Nicene Fathers (New York, 188C), vol. V. Elucidation, xiii, p. 415. Ibid., p. 557; also Firmilian's View, p. 419.

For proof that the see of Rome was only a Greek mission, a mere colony of the Eastern Church, see Milman's Latin Christianity, vol. I, pp. 24-30.

53-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. V.

*

concerning its origin, or the degree of authority it may claim from Holy Scripture. Whether this principle can be proved satisfactorily to be involved in the Ephesine canon of St. Paul, illustrated by other Scriptures, is not now the question. Allow that it was created by church legislation under the great charter of Christ, who binds in heaven what his Church, under the apostles, solemnly enacted. Nobody but those who suppose the episcopate, in its own nature, is unlawful can fail to admit its claims on Hooker's great position, that constitutional law, as such, must bind until what is lawfully established by the whole body is by the whole body lawfully abolished. In point of fact, let us note just here that even the great majority of the Reformed, including Calvin and Baxter and the English Presbyterians, reject the idea that Episcopacy is per se unlawful; of which more hereafter. The Lutherans of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland maintain at least a formal episcopate, and so do the Moravians and the Methodists and others, so that providentially there exists no great discord among these divisions as to the lawfulness of Episcopacy, whatever they may maintain as to its necessity. Nor is there any conceivable difficulty, provided the spirit of unity exists, why all these bodies might not admit that what is lawful becomes expedient, if only its necessity (quoad hoc) be proved, viewing it as a primary condition for the return to unity.

Here, then, are certain obvious facts; namely, (1.) That Greeks, Latins, and Anglicans maintain the practical value (to say the least) of a historic episcopate as something not to be compromised without still further increasing the disorders of Christendom. (2.) Greeks and Anglicans are united in demanding of the Latins a rejection of the paparchy, and among the Latins themselves millions have demanded the same for centuries, on Cyprian's principles, which alike the "Gallicans," the "Jansenists," and the "old Catholics" still maintain theoretically. (3.) As has been shown, Lutherans, Calvinists, Moravians, Methodists, and others, among denominations originating with the Reformation, admit the lawfulness of episcopacy, and formally adopt it in a great proportion of their numbers. (4.) To harmonize the greater differences among Christians thus separated, it is important, in the first place, to unite on what is * Ephesians iv, 13-17.