inspiration and not the individual's response thereto, which conveyed the authority. No doubt the use or sanction of processes like these might be very unlike the method of God's dealing with men in His Church. They might be a very extreme instance of the old maxim Vox populi vox Dei. But it would still be only as vox Dei that the vox populi could be supposed to suffice.

The one idea, then, which is altogether incompatible with the passages quoted is the idea that the difference between ministry and laity is a difference merely of secular or politic convenience. Even on the extremest form of antiecclesiastical theory I must venture to repeat that the belief that the congregation could constitute a minister must mean a belief that that which speaks through the choice of the congregation is God's voice; that it is Himself pronouncing and appointing through this particular means. The idea of a secular appointment as secular, a distinction of convenience drawn on the basis of convenience, without reference to the Divine purpose, or consciousness of being instrumental to a Divine Act, is the one idea which may be regarded as wholly untenable. It is not too much to say that any theory of ministry such as this stands condemned beforehand as an impossibility.

But if this be put wholly aside, there remain, it seems, three alternative forms which the idea of a Divine designation might take. First, there is the view that Divine appointment manifests itself solely within the individual conscience of a man who is called, because he feels that he is called, by God to minister. Secondly, there is the view that the witness in the individual conscience must be accompanied by appointment on the part of the general Church body, or some adequate portion of it, but without reference to any particular 'ministerial' method or continuity, of transmission. Church appointment to ministry, on this view, is not to be dispensed with. But the Church is in no way bound. She can provide herself

ministers and instruments wherever, or however, she thinks fit. And, thirdly, there is the familiar Church view that none can be held to be divinely commissioned until he has received commission on earth from those who themselves had received authority to commission from such as held it in like manner before them; that is, when the matter is pressed home, that valid ministerial authority depends, upon its earthward side, upon continuous transmission from the Apostles of Jesus Christ.

It seems to me worth while to consider these alternatives to some extent separately. As to the first alternative, I am hardly perhaps concerned to deny so much its abstract possibility, as its practical possibility under Church conditions. At the least, I am persuaded that the presumption against its credibleness in any particular case is for practical purposes overwhelming. The principle that inward acts through outward, grace through means of grace, Spirit through Body, is a principle which in the great vital fact of the Incarnation seems to have received its full and final consecration; and thenceforward to abide for ever, as what may truly be called at once an essential principle, and a revealed law, of the life of Christ's Church. The principle requires, first of all, and finds its expression in, the fact of the organization, or Body, of the Church of Christ. But that the Church should be an organized Body at all, and yet that this principle should be set aside in a matter of importance quite cardinal to the entire administration of the Church, is, to the theology of the Incarnation, nearly inconceivable. If the principle of the consecration of the material and the outward has no place in the public authorization of ministers to minister in spiritual things, the entire method which pervades the life of Christ's Church, the whole rationale of the sacramental system, is pro tanto invalidated. Baptism by water, Communion in Bread and Wine, cease to be of one piece with the entire revelation of the religion of the Incarnate, and become rather isolated and fragmentary

observances, imposed upon an obedience which is longer intelligent.

no

In spite however of considerations like these, there are still three points, I imagine, which might be urged in support of the theory. These are, first the precedent of the Old Testament prophets, in the light e. g. of Amos vii. or Jeremiah i.; secondly, the precedent of St. Paul, according to his own determined insistence in Galatians i. and ii.; and thirdly, the picture of the Christian prophets as portrayed in the Didache.

If appeal is made to the precedent of Old Testament prophecy, it must be answered that the very contrast of the Old Testament bears emphatic witness, in this matter, to the character of the New. Broadly, in the old dispensation, the material and the spiritual were still kept apart-the spiritual being still, itself, symbolically rather than directly spiritual. But in the new covenant all reality is spiritual; the material is nothing but the direct expression of spirit. Thus in the Old Testament it may perhaps be said that the formal regularity of the outward or material is represented by the hereditary priesthood; the transcendency of the spiritual inward by the occasional and variable inspiration of prophets. In the New Testament these two principles coalesce. The ministry is not of hereditary descent, but of personal vocation: its outwardness lacks full reality except it be the outward of an inward, the representation of a Spirit; yet its succession is not casual but orderly, not inscrutable but through regularity and solemnity of method. In this it exactly accords with all the fundamental methods of the earthly revelation of the kingdom of heaven.

If appeal be made to the instance of St. Paul, and his claim in the Epistle to the Galatians, it must be answered that the very case of St. Paul, in proportion as it was exceptional, bears exceptional witness to the strength of the principle contended for. That spiritual reality was not, in the kingdom of heaven, to supersede, but rather to be

guaranteed by, outward form, is a principle made sufficiently clear in the normal Church processes: but it is stamped with greater emphasis still in a few instances which are abnormal. The principle that Spirit-baptism was not to be without water, is never enforced quite so strongly as when Cornelius and his companions, even after they had first (for special reasons) received the presence of the Holy Ghosta presence made manifest by miracle-were nevertheless ordered to be baptized. So the principle that commission to ministry is by laying on of hands, while it is illustrated, comparatively incidentally, by the positive instances recorded in the New Testament, is nowhere made quite so emphatic as when St. Paul, with Barnabas—after his Divine call, his mission to the Gentiles and his courageous preaching, and with all his sense of vocation to apostleship direct from Jesus Christ personally-yet with fasting and prayer, is set apart by the laying on of hands of his brother 'prophets,' for the great missionary work to which the Holy Ghost was calling him. Such exceptional instances emphasize most strongly the place which was to belong to the outward' in the Church of Christ.1

But it may be said that even if individual inspiration be not the regular mode of appointment to ministry, yet it may validly stand side by side with a ministry of more regular method. Does not the Didache, it may be asked, show clearly that it did so at the first? and if at first, why not now, if men really feel themselves to be inspired? I am not prepared to admit, on the authority of the Didache, that it was so at the first. But of that there will be occasion to speak by-and-by. Meanwhile, even supposing that this premiss were granted, I should deny the sequitur. Whatever there may be supposed on any side to be, either of abstract possibility or of actual evidence, for a merely supernatural setting apart in the earliest days and there are the gravest doubts about either, even apart from the great improbability constituted by the 1 See Note, p. 125.

case of St. Paul-I shall submit that not even the supposition that it existed then, would carry us any material distance towards a belief in its credibleness now. If it be granted, for the sake of argument, that the prophets of the Didache were unordained men, who superseded the ordained in the highest functions of their ministry; yet I should certainly not allow the principle to pass unchallenged, in abstract form, that what God did then He might at any time do. Some things which of old He praised, or commanded, or did, became, in the process of His development of man, inherently incredible and impossible. If we cannot say as much as this of a Divine, but non-ministerial, ordination to ministry, it would none the less be doubtful whether there could be evidence adequate to convince us, in any individual case, that He had so ordained. God does not contradict His own revelation of Himself. Direct interposition of the kind supposed might with perfect consistency be conceived of as a consolidation of the infantine, and yet as a dissolution of the organized, Church. In proportion as Church order is apprehended as itself a part of the revelation of the character of God, a great change comes over the evidence which should convince us that it has been overruled by the act of God. The presumption against such overruling becomes by degrees so enormous that it is open to question whether-say in the nineteenth century, any conceivable evidence would be adequate to rebut it. Evidence after all, if offered, can only be valid as evidence if it has a certain relation of admissibleness to the fundamental convictions of the apprehending mind. There are cases in which any amount of apparent evidence would be felt to be delusive, and that even in proportion to its very appearance of convincingness. On such a ground some minds-on their own essential hypothesis consistently enough-reject beforehand any conceivable evidence for miracle. On such a ground a Christian, with the highest intellectual cogency, condemns before examination, as manifestly contradictory and immoral,