different ways and degrees, do, on analysis, hold authority too. It is not that authority is really merged in moral influence: both are present still in undiluted fullness: only, in the atmosphere of love, the antithesis between the two is dissolved1. On the whole, then, I must venture to submit the following proposition, if not as scientifically proved, yet at least as the natural outcome of what has been said; as a basis, then, which it is reasonable at least to accept provisionally and test by acceptance, viz. that, in the history and government and development of the Church, everything depends upon the apostolate; everything emanates from the apostolate; nothing comes into existence on a basis independent of the apostolate; the Apostolate is, throughout, the assumed condition which lies behind as the basis and background of everything. When it is said that everything emanates from apostolate, what is particularly meant in the present connection is that neither the perpetuation, in any form, of apostolate, nor the creation of any other ministerial offices, different from itself, could rest upon any other than an apostolic basis. And this indeed appears to be the one aspect 1 I cannot therefore but deprecate, as a seriously misleading understatement, Dr. Hort's mode of putting it, when after denying that the Apostles had received from Christ any formal authority for government, he goes on to say [p. 84], ‘But it is inconceivable that the moral authority with which they were thus clothed, and the uniqueness of their position and personal qualifications, should not in all these years have been accumulating upon them by the spontaneous homage of the Christians of Judaea, an ill-defined but lofty authority in matters of government and administration': and applying this to the question of Acts xv. about the Gentiles [p. 83]: 'A certain authority is thus implicitly claimed. There is no evidence that it was more than a moral authority; but that did not make it less real.' And again [p. 85]: 'Hence in the letter sent to Antioch the authority even of the Apostles, notwithstanding the fact that unlike the Jerusalem elders they exercised a function towards all Christians, was moral rather than formal; a claim to deference rather than a right to be obeyed.' No one need desire to deprecate anything that is here said about the reality of the moral authority in itself; but it is surely illegitimate so to use the 'moral,' as to deny that Apostles possessed any other possibility of, authority. Authority is not the less authority because it is fused in love. which is, for our present purpose, really important. We do not really need so much to explore exactly what Apostles, as Apostles, did. But we do need to conceive of apostolate as constituting, in the literal sense of the word, the universal and unvarying hypothesis underlying all ecclesiastical organization and life1. II. Proceeding chronologically, the first extension or variation of any kind which we meet with in the history of ministerial office, is the institution of deacons in Acts vi. Great attention is drawn in the narrative of the Acts to the new departure in Church ministry which this institution involves. It is presented as one of the great steps in the rapid process of the widening of the Church. The institution of the diaconate2, with the circumstances which had necessitated it; the work and death of St. Stephen; the history of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus; the circumstances, first and last, of the baptism of Cornelius, and the defence of St. Peter; these are the great successive moments which separate the Church of the early pentecostal days from the Church of the apostolate of St. Paul. 1 It is hardly necessary to discuss in this connexion the wider use of the word dwóσTodos in the New Testament: for it is plain that the existence of a wider does not destroy the significance of the narrower application of the title. This possibility of ambiguous use is perfectly natural in the case of a word which did not cease to express its own etymological meaning because it was also acquiring, or had acquired, a special and technical sense. The same is certainly true of the words πрeσßúтepos and diákovos; perhaps even of Xhpa. On the wider use of dwóσToλos, see Lightfoot, Galat., p. 95 sqq. 2 On the identity of the 'seven' with 'deacons' (which the instinct of the Church has never doubted), see Bishop Lightfoot's Essay, p. 186. He adds: 'The narrative in the Acts, if I mistake not, implies that the office thus created was entirely new. Some writers, however, have explained the incident as an extension to the Hellenists of an institution which already existed among the Hebrew Christians, and is implied in the "younger men mentioned in an earlier part of St. Luke's history (Acts v. 6, 10). This view seems not only to be groundless in itself, but also to contradict the general tenor of the narrative. It would appear, moreover, that the institution was not merely new within the Christian Church, but novel absolutely. . . . We may fairly presume that St. Luke dwells at such length on the establishment of the diaconate because he regards it as a novel creation.' Lightfoot, l.c., p. 187. As to the conception of the office, two things are made very clear on the face of the history of its institution. The first, that 'the work primarily assigned to the deacons was the relief of the poor.' The second, that, by contrast with the apostolate itself, this work of diaconate was looked upon as comparatively external and secular. It was to release the apostolate from a ministry 'of tables'; and to enable them to be given more continually to 'prayer' and to 'the ministry of the word.' It is probable, however, that this aspect of the office has been somewhat exaggerated in the Christian idea-though hardly in the practice-of diaconate. Bishop Lightfoot points out the closeness of the connexion which naturally existed between these duties of diaconate and some of the most valuable of ministerial opportunities. Moving about freely among the poorer brethren and charged with the relief of their material wants, they would find opportunities. of influence which were denied to the higher officers of the Church, who necessarily kept themselves more aloof. The devout zeal of a Stephen or a Philip would turn these opportunities to the best account; and thus, without ceasing to be dispensers of alms, they became also ministers of the word' [p. 188]. It may be doubted, however, whether this account, which describes the diaconate as affording opportunities of spiritual work to deacons who happened to be spiritually minded, does adequate justice to the spiritual side of diaconate itself. For it is to be remembered, first, that to be 'full of the Spirit and of wisdom' was among the qualifications to be required as preliminary to election to diaconate; secondly, that men elected upon that qualification, and presented to the Apostles for consecration to their work, were so consecrated by the very same method by which all other ministers were consecrated to distinctively Christian ministry; and thirdly, that from the very moment of that consecration, the actual work which we hear of as discharged by the deacons is work of most essentially spiritual character1. This last fact is 1 So much so that it is, in fact, the deacon protomartyr who gives the mentioned by Bishop Lightfoot: but he adds at once, Bishop Lightfoot appeals to the qualifications for diaconate as sketched by St. Paul in the First Epistle to Timothy1. It is true, no doubt, that there is a distinction observable even there between the qualifications for diaconate and for presbyterate; but the effect of Bishop Lightfoot's appeal to the passage is a good deal qualified when we remember to how large an extent both pictures, as there sketched, are pictures of the antecedent qualifications, in domestic and general life, of those who might become good deacons or presbyters, rather than descriptions of the life or work of those who have already entered upon office2. lead to the whole college of Apostles in the conception of the true catholicity of the Church. Compare also Acts viii. 5 sqq., and the account of Philip the Evangelist 'who was one of the seven,' and his four daughters' which did prophesy,' in Acts xxi. 8, 9. 1 'St. Paul writing thirty years later, and stating the requirements of the diaconate, lays the stress mainly on those qualifications which would be most important in persons moving about from house to house and entrusted with the distribution of alms. While he requires that they shall hold the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience, in other words that they shall be sincere believers, he is not anxious, as in the case of the presbyters, to secure "aptness to teach," but demands especially that they shall be free from certain vicious habits, such as a love of gossiping and a greed of paltry gain, into which they might easily fall from the nature of their duties' [p. 188]. What, it may be asked, is exactly signified by the statement that those who have served well in the diaconate 'gain to themselves. . . great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus'? 1 Tim. iii. 13. 2 Thus Dr. Hort, accounting for the fact that we learn singularly little The further references to diaconate in the New Testament are thus summed up by Bishop Lightfoot: 'From the mother Church of Jerusalem the institution spread to Gentile Christian brotherhoods. By the "helps" in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (A.D. 57) and by the "ministration 2" in the Epistle to the Romans (A.D. 58) the diaconate solely or chiefly seems to be intended; but besides these incidental allusions, the latter epistle bears more significant testimony to the general extension of the office. The strict seclusion of the female sex in Greece and in some Oriental countries necessarily debarred them from the ministrations of men: and to meet the want thus felt, it was found necessary at an early date to admit women to the diaconate. A woman-deacon belonging to the Church of Cenchreae is mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans 3. As time advances, the diaconate becomes still more prominent. In the Philippian Church a few years later (about A.D. 62) the deacons take their rank after the presbyters, the two orders together constituting the about the actual functions' of the ministers in these passages, says, 'Doubtless it was superfluous to mention either the precise functions or the qualifications needed for definitely discharging them. What was less obvious and more important was the danger lest official excellences of one kind or another should cloak the absence of Christian excellences. To St. Paul the representative character, so to speak, of those who had oversight in the Ecclesia, their conspicuous embodiment of what the Ecclesia itself was meant to show itself [on this see below, pp. 258-260], was a more important thing than any acts or teachings by which their oversight could be formally exercised;' p. 195. None the less, he thinks himself at liberty to argue negatively, from the absence of any reference to teaching in the passage in 1 Tim. iii.; and considers that the whole facts are adequately met when he adds, 'On the other hand, we may safely say that it would have been contrary to the spirit of the apostolic age to prohibit all teaching on the part of any diákovo who had real capacity of that kind;' pp. 201, 202. It may be granted that 'teaching,' at least in any formal shape, was no part of the 'official' duty (in the strictest sense of the word official) of the seven as originally set apart. But there was that in diaconate which, from the very first, outran the merely external occasion of its institution. And, ever since St. Stephen himself, Christian instinct and practice has seen in it something more that a merely administrative office to which, in exceptional cases, the 'teacher's' influence was 'not forbidden.' 1 I Cor. xii. 28. 2 Rom. xii. 7. 3 Rom. xvi. I. |