that they alone have the right and power of ordination, and that they communicate to the priest ordained, authority to exercise the office of a minister of the Gospel by means of the laying on of their hands, and by their prayers. The person was before a layman, he is now a clergyman; and has received a new character and new powers, by means of his ordination.

However plausible these pretensions may be, many objections may be brought against them. A diocesan bishop, it may be pleaded, is a being unknown to the Scriptures of the New Testament, and unknown to the purest antiquity. And shall this unknown being possess the whole power of admitting ministers into the church Christ? Shall they, in this respect, have the keys of the kingdom of the Redeemer, so that they shall open, and no man can shut; and shall shut, and no man can open? The authority pleaded for such a power should be very express. But if instead of this there be not a word in the Scripture to countenance and support it, the foundation is built on air.

Should it be allowed that diocesan bishops possess the right of ordination, it may be enquired, what does the person ordained receive from them? Perhaps it may be said, a layman is converted into a clergyman ; he acquires a different character from what he had before; and he becomes capable of holding any preferment in the church of England, to which he may be introduced by his interest, or his merit. But this is merely a political regulation deriving its authority and efficacy from a statute of the king, and the lords and commons in parliament assembled. Rise from ecclesiastical to divine authority, and all this harlequinade vanishes from the sight. Instead of magic ceremonies, which change the character, and make a person

a different being from what he was before, we perceive only the unassuming pastors of the churches rejoicing on the entrance of a man of God into the Christian ministry, reminding him of the duties of his office, and imploring the blessing of God to rest upon him.

If this will not satisfy, but it is still insisted on, that the bishop conveys office power, and authority, to the person whom he ordains, and hereby makes him a minister of Christ, let the following question be answered. Can a bishop, by imposition of hands, and uttering his form of words, make an ignorant man wise, or an irreligious man holy, or a mere man of the world a man of God? In these respects, the person remains the same as he was before. What then is the extent of the bishop's power? He may make him a clergyman of the church of England; but he does not, and cannot make him a minister of Jesus Christ. The Head of the church has described their character, and specified the qualifications which they must possess. If a person destitute of these qualifications applies for ordination, all the bishops on earth cannot make the man a minister of Christ, or convey to him what is called office power, and authority. The man is, in the eyes of Christ, a hireling, a thief, and robber; he may be any thing but a minister of Christ-that he cannot be. An ignorant creature, a man of the world, an irreligious person is not, and can never be a minister of Christ by the imposition of all the hands of all the bishops that ever lived. The pretentions of the church of Rome to convey, by the imposition of their prelates' hands, indelible character, which an apostasy into mahometanism, or deism, or even atheism, nay,

an

which death, and hell, and heaven cannot destroy, are more calculated to make infidels than ministers of Christ'. That any protestant church should ever have made the remotest approaches to such a spirit, is justly a subject of lamentation. Christianity suffers by the folly; and infidels are hardened in their unbelief.

The claim of an uninterrupted succession from the apostles, which was at this time strenuously urged by the high-church party, as the ground of their exclusive right of conferring ordination, is perhaps one of the weakest and most ridiculous which was ever made. When such a pretence is set up by the church

Campbell's Ecclesiastical History.

k Again; either the church of Rome is an heretical church or not. If she be, it follows again, that she has no lawful ministry, nor a power to transmit it to others. If not, there follows a train of the most destructive consequences to all the reformed churches. For if she be not an heretical church, then her whole faith is orthodox; and it follows, that the pope's supremacy, the churches infalFibity, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass, the lawfulness of communion in one kind, of invoking the saints, and honouring their religious images and pictures, and many more articles denied by the reformed churches, are all articles of revealed faith, because they are all proposed as such by the church of Rome: and if any of them were not revealed truths, she would be manifestly guilty of heresy; because to add to the revealed word of God, is as much heresy as to detract from it: that is to say, in plainer terms, whatever church declares that to be an article of revealed faith which really is not so, is no less an heretical church than that which denies articles of faith revealed by God.

Well, then, supposing the church of Rome not to be an here tical church, it follows, 1, That she is the true church of Christ... 2. That all the reformed churches have separated themselves from the true church of Christ. 3. That in so doing, they are all schismatical churches. 4. That they are likewise heretical churches in denying the forementioned articles, proposed by her as revealed truths. And, 5, That being heretical churches, they are incapable

of Rome, it is with a better grace as to the reality of it, and it is more of a piece with the superstitious absurdities of her abominable system. But for a protestant to plead in its behalf may justly cover him with shame, and make his mother church blush for the folly of her son. What priest in the world can prove that he has derived his ordination from the line of this interrupted succession? Credulity herself must dwell in the bosom of him who entertains such a thought. But making the impossible supposition that a person did prove that his ordination. may be traced in legal succession to St. Peter, and that a certain virtue flowed from hand to hand, what does he gain? Can the virtue received from the hands of a pope Joan, or (if the existence of such a personage be denied) from the whoremongers, adulterers, murderers, sodomites, infidels, and atheists (for such even Romish writers assert some of the popes to have been) communicate any thing that is good? If it is conceived that any influence was actually communicated, it must be of so deleterious a quality, that a person of a pure mind who had viewed the channel through which it ran, on seeing the lawn sleeves lifted up to confer ordination, would cry out in terror, "keep off your filthy hands from me: the head of Judas Iscariot would be polluted by their of having any lawful ministry, because no man, or society of men, ever had a lawful power to preach heresy. This I call a train of of consequences, destructive to all the reformed churches, if the church of Rome be not an heretical church; and if she be one, they can have no lawful mission from her: and so they are hemmed in betwixt the two horns of this dilemma, one of which must give them a mortal wound, let them turn themselves what way they please." The Touchstone of the new Religion, &c.

touch'." Besides, do the Scriptures teach men to place any dependence on such a thing? Does the genius of Christianity countenance the claim? Nay, does it not with a voice of thunder condemn it as a contemptible superstition, directly opposed to both the letter and spirit of the Gospel ?

If from these giddy heights, to which high church fanaticism soars, we descend to the sober vale of common sense, and peruse the New Testament with serious attention, astonishment must fill the soul to perceive that so great importance has been attached to episcopal ordination; and by many of these zealots so little to the spiritual qualifications of the person, on which the word of God lays the whole stress.

In addition to this reasoning, if it be considered that the person ordained by presbyters manifests as much of the spirit of a Christian minister as he who has received the imposition of his grace of Canterbury's hands; that the most evident marks of divine approbation accompany his labours in the conversion of sinners, and the edification and comfort of the disciples of Christ; and that the kingdom of Christ in all its interests is as effectually promoted by him, we shall be in no danger of drawing a wrong conclu

If the French protestants had set any value on an ordination from men who professed to have derived their powers in a regular line of succession from the apostles, they had the noblest opportunities of receiving it with peculiar splendour. Not only bishops but cardinals came over from Rome to the reformed religion: but so far were they from considering it as an honour, that they accounted it contamination; and when one of the converted bishops wished to officiate as a presbyterian minister, looking upon his popish orders as a nullity, he requested to be, and was ordained anew by the elders of the reformed church.