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 THE PROPER GIFT 
 
 OF THE 
 
 CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 
 
 AND 
 
 THE SACRAMENTAL MODE OF ITS 
 TRANSMISSION 
 
 BY / 
 The Rev. THOMAS RICHEY, D.D. 
 
 S, Mark? s-in~the-Bowerie Professor of Ecclesiastical History , General 
 Theological Seminary, New York 
 
 37 
 
 ■ o^tf-a- 1 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CROTHERS & KORTH 
 
 246 Fourth Avenue 
 
 1897 
 
6< 
 
 Copyright, 1897, by 
 CROTHERS & KORTH 
 
 Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
 Astor Place, New York 
 
TO THE 
 
 Rev. R. B. FAIRBAIRN, D.D., LL.D 
 
 WARDEN OF S. STEPHEN'S COLLEGE, 
 
 THIS REVIEW OF THE ORDINAL, 
 
 MADE AT HIS REQUEST, 
 
 IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 On Rites and Ceremonies i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Sacrament of Order 17 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Bishops, Priests, and Deacons . . . .31 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The Minor Orders 51 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The Doctrine of Intention 64 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The Revised Ordinal 76 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 L'Envoi 90 
 
LEO XIII. AND ANGLICAN ORDERS, 
 
 I. 
 
 ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 
 
 BEYOND the fact of the institution of the 
 two great Sacraments of the Evangelical Dis- 
 pensation, we have no fixed order of Rites 
 and Ceremonies prescribed for the use of the 
 Church. The reason for this we have not to 
 go far to seek. Had our Lord Himself put the 
 stamp of His divine authority upon things of 
 secondary importance, they must of necessity 
 have remained fixed under all changes of times 
 and circumstances, without regard to peculiar- 
 ities of taste and temperament among different 
 races and conditions of men. 
 
 There was an additional reason why it was 
 not expedient at the first to establish an order 
 of ritual for the infant Church. A Jew, ac- 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 
 
 cording to the flesh, Jesus did not attempt to 
 break away from all the traditions of the past : 
 He came, as he tells us, not to destroy but to 
 fulfil; He aimed, not to abolish, but to trans- 
 form. Instead of destroying that which had 
 already been established, His custom was to 
 plant the germ of the new order of things in 
 the soil which had been providentially pro- 
 vided for it, and leave it there to assimilate 
 by virtue of its own formative instinct, what- 
 ever was of permanent value in the dispensa- 
 tion ready to perish. 
 
 How much the great Head of the Church 
 saw fit to communicate to the Apostles, when 
 He spoke to them, during the forty days after 
 His resurrection from the dead, of " the things 
 pertaining to the Kingdom of God" (Acts i. 
 3), we know not. But of this we may be sure, 
 that the " glory " of the new dispensation was 
 not in this respect inferior to the old, when 
 Moses for forty days was taken up into the 
 Mount, and had revealed to Him the images 
 of the things which, in process of time, are to 
 reach their fulfilment under the economy of 
 the Holy Ghost. 
 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 3 
 
 In dealing with the mystery of sacramental 
 grace, we have always to bear in mind that, 
 in themselves, words are mere counters, liable 
 to change as differentiation takes place, giving 
 to them, instead of the more general, a tech- 
 nical and specific meaning. This is true of 
 the words " Rites " and " Ceremonies " : they 
 have a common or general use; and a techni- 
 cal and specific use, a thing to be kept stead- 
 ily in view in dealing with the subject now 
 under consideration. 
 
 Our Lord Himself, as we have seen, told 
 His Disciples when He instituted the two 
 great Sacraments generally necessary to salva- 
 tion, what they were to do, but He did not lay 
 down any positive rule as to the way they 
 were to do it. We find, accordingly, that in 
 dealing with the two great sacramental rites 
 of the Incarnation, the Church has seen fit to 
 order that it is necessary, as far as possible, 
 to preserve intact both the matter and the 
 form of the original institution. The matter 
 of Baptism is water according to divine insti- 
 tution : the form of words, the Name of the 
 Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 
 
 Ghost. For a like reason, bread and wine are 
 to be used in the Holy Eucharist as the mat- 
 ter of the rite; and we are to use the same 
 manual acts, and, as far as possible, in the act 
 of consecration, the same words which our 
 Lord Himself made use of in instituting the 
 rite. If these provisions, for any sufficient 
 reason, cannot be carried out in the letter, 
 they must at least in substance be recognized 
 as necessary to the proper form of the Sacra- 
 ment. Reverence, not less than regard to 
 the authority which of necessity belongs to the 
 words and acts of the Son of God, requires all 
 this at our hands. 
 
 In addition to the matter and form of the 
 Sacrament, there are also ceremonial adjuncts 
 which demand consideration. It is nothing 
 more than meet and right that holy things 
 should have holy places set apart for them. 
 There are associations connected with every 
 sacramental rite, which crave expression in 
 conformity with the mystery that is repre- 
 sented sacramentally to our view. In addi- 
 tion to the use of water in Baptism, as of the 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 5 
 
 essential matter of the rite, it was the custom 
 to use oil and salt to represent the calling of 
 the baptized to be the salt of the earth, and 
 the light of the world. But it is always to be 
 borne in mind that these ceremonial accom- 
 paniments, intended to add dignity and to 
 give significance to the rite, neither increased 
 by addition, nor took away by diminution, 
 from the essential character of the Sacrament. 
 ' The promise of Grace is not made to acci- 
 dental ceremonies but to essential ones/' 
 Bellarmine, on the Sacrament of Order (ch. ix), 
 rightly says. 
 
 There never has been any question, in like 
 manner, that in the rite of Ordination the 
 only two things, absolutely necessary to the 
 validity of the rite, are the laying on of 
 hands, after the manner of the Apostles, and 
 the invocation of the Holy Ghost. The one 
 corresponds to the matter, the other to the 
 form of the rite. The hand, as the instru- 
 ment of conveyance, is of the matter of the 
 rite, consisting as it does of the transmission 
 of that which had been received by the Apos- 
 tles, and their successors for the carrying on 
 
6 ON RITES AND CEREMONIES, 
 
 of the work of the Ministry; the invocation of 
 the Holy Ghost is of the form of the rite, for 
 it belongs to the Holy Ghost, in His relation 
 to the economy of the Church, to take of the 
 things of Christ and give them unto us. 
 
 There is a difference, it is true, between the 
 two Sacramental rites, through which is con- 
 veyed the grace of the Incarnation, and the 
 rites which belong to the economy of the 
 Holy Ghost, but the latter no less than the 
 former, have an indelible character, which, as 
 we shall see hereafter, separate them from all 
 common uses. The breathing upon the Apos- 
 tles when after His resurrection, Jesus met 
 with them and said, " Receive ye the Holy 
 Ghost : whose soever sins ye remit, they are 
 remitted unto them ; whose soever sins ye 
 retain they are retained " (John xx. 21, 22), was 
 manifestly of the nature of a Sacramental Act, 
 differing in kind from the promise given to 
 Peter to bind and loose before the Resurrection 
 (Matt. xvi. 19). The act of breathing was an 
 outward and visible sign of the gift of the 
 Holy Spirit to the whole body of the Apos- 
 tles, proceeding from the risen Lord, now de- 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 7 
 
 clared to be the Son of God with power by the 
 resurrection from the dead. 1 The Twelve be- 
 fore the resurrection had been separated and 
 trained as " Apostles designate": Now that 
 He is about to be taken away from them, 
 Jesus sends them forth, as He had been sent 
 by the Father, to supply His visible presence 
 among men. 
 
 If such be the august nature of the rite of 
 Ordination, it is surely to be expected that, as 
 in the case of other Sacramental Rites, it shall 
 be celebrated with ceremonial observances 
 worthy of its high dignity. One of the earli- 
 est of these ceremonial adjuncts was the plac- 
 ing of the Book of the Gospels on the head of 
 a Bishop, when set apart to his sacred office. 
 
 1 " The breath, Ttrevua, is The Spirit which the Lord 
 
 an emblem of the Spirit (John now imparted to them was 
 
 iii. 8), and by 'breathing/ as His Spirit, or, as it may be 
 
 S. Augustine observes, the expressed, the Spirit as dwell- 
 
 Lord showed that His Spirit ing in Him. By this He first 
 
 was not the Spirit of the quickened them, and then sent, 
 
 Father only, but also His according to His promise, the 
 
 own. This act is described as Paraclete to be with them and 
 
 one (£veq)v6f/6e) and not re- to supply all power for the 
 
 peated. The gift was once exercise of their functions." — 
 
 for all not to individuals, but Westcott. 
 to the abiding body. . . 
 
8 ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 
 
 What symbol could be more significant than 
 the four-fold representation of our Lord's 
 own life and ministry, given by the inspiration 
 of the Holy Ghost for the instruction and 
 guidance of the Church ! 
 
 But these and like ceremonial acts, it is ever 
 to be remembered, have nothing to do with 
 the essence of the rite: they do not, be they 
 less or be they more, affect the validity of the 
 rite when duly performed by the laying on of 
 hands, and the invocation of the Holy Ghost. 
 And yet they are not altogether without mean- 
 ing and significance : while not of the essence 
 of the Rite, they have their value as signs of 
 investiture and induction into office. 
 
 Investiture, as a token of entrance upon a 
 new condition of life, was a time-honoured 
 custom, among the Greeks, and Romans, as 
 well as among the ancient Hebrews. The as- 
 sumption of the toga virilis was kept as a fes- 
 tival and celebrated by festal rites among the 
 Romans. The putting on of the philoso- 
 pher's gown was preceded by the taking of a 
 bath, and was looked upon in the light of en- 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 9 
 
 tering upon the office of a teacher of philoso- 
 phy with a feeling amounting to religious de- 
 votion. The candidate for knighthood in the 
 middle ages was solemnly invested with the 
 consecrated weapons of his warfare before en- 
 tering upon his high calling. So was it also 
 in religion. Ordination was looked upon, not 
 only as a sacred rite, but partook of the nature 
 of an induction into office. The Deacon re- 
 ceived for his use the ripidion or Sacred Fan, to 
 guard against the approach of insect life to the 
 sacred species. The Priest was invested with 
 a stole, corresponding to the yoke of the ox in 
 preparing the ground for the casting in of the 
 seed. In course of time, these ceremonial ad- 
 juncts were increased or altered, according to 
 the varying tastes of East or West, North or 
 South. While the ritual act itself remained 
 fixed as to matter and form, the ceremonial 
 investiture, symbolizing the induction into 
 office, was changed, without affecting the 
 validity of the rite itself. 
 
 All this seems simple and plain enough : and 
 yet we know as a matter of fact that it is con- 
 stantly forgotten, not only in the affairs of 
 
IO ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 
 
 ordinary life, but also in religion. We have 
 a notable example of this in the way a cere- 
 monial custom, intended at the first to symbo- 
 lize induction into office, came to be declared 
 as of the essence of the Rite of Ordination, to 
 the confounding of the difference between es- 
 sential and non-essential, of Ordination as a 
 sacramental act bestowing grace, and induc- 
 tion into office for a particular purpose. 
 
 It grew to be a custom at Rome in Or- 
 dination for the Pope to give the new Priest 
 the vestments to be used in the celebration 
 of the Mass, and the instruments of his 
 office, gold or silver; and for a procession to 
 be made by the people of the parish, accom- 
 panied by the Pope and the parish Priest, 
 as a conclusion of the ceremony. It was 
 a fitting and impressive mode of induction 
 into office, in entire accordance with the 
 manners and customs of the age when it was 
 first introduced. But as time went on, what 
 had at the first been intended to serve the 
 purpose of a ceremonial induction into office, 
 came to be regarded, upon doctrinal grounds, 
 as an essential part of the rite itself. Euge- 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. II 
 
 nius IV. (1431-1447) ignorant, or forgetful, of 
 the difference between the ceremonial adjunct, 
 and the rite itself properly so-called, declared 
 the " porrectio instrumentorum " to be of the 
 essence of the Rite, notwithstanding that the 
 Council of Florence over which Eugenius pre- 
 sided, acknowledged the orders of the Greek 
 Church, conferred without the giving of the 
 paten and the chalice, to be valid orders. 
 
 The immediate result of this decree of Eu- 
 genius IV. was to introduce confusion and 
 disorder into the Ordinal of the Western 
 Church. The question arose, when does the 
 Ordination take effect ? Is it at the beginning 
 of the rite, when, after the laying of hands 
 silently, the hands are extended and the in- 
 vocation is made, or is it at the conclusion of 
 the Rite, when the ' porrectio instrumento- 
 rum ' takes place, and the Accipe Spiritum 
 Sanctum, etc., with the power to remit sins, is 
 uttered? To maintain the former would be to 
 contradict Eugenius IV. : to assert the latter, is 
 to affirm that the laying on of hands and the 
 invocation of the Holy Ghost, do not consti- 
 tute the matter and the form of Ordination. 
 
12 ON RITES AND CEREMONIES, 
 
 The only way out of the difficulty was to di- 
 vide the action into two parts, making the first 
 to consist in the laying on of hands and the 
 invocation for the gift of the Holy Ghost, and 
 the second, in the giving of the power to sac- 
 rifice and forgive sins, as defining the function 
 of the Priesthood. 
 
 But the end was not yet. When Morinus, 
 converted by Cardinal du Perron to the Roman 
 Church, was called by Urban VIII. in 1639 to 
 Rome to assist the congregation appointed to 
 assimilate the creeds and rituals of the East, 
 to the Roman rites, it was found, after an 
 exhaustive examination, that the Accipe Spiri- 
 tum Sanctum of the Roman Ordinal had no 
 existence prior to the fourth century; and the 
 " traditio instrumentorum, ,, declared by Eu- 
 genius IV. to be of the essence of the rite, 
 had no recognition, in either East or West, 
 until after the tenth century. The conclu- 
 sion to be drawn was that for one thousand 
 years there had been no Priesthood in either 
 Eastern or Western Christendom. It was a 
 conclusion from which there could be no es- 
 cape, except by way of retreat. ' Forced to 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 1 3 
 
 it," Morinus says, " the schoolmen have at 
 last betaken themselves to imposition of hands, 
 which alone the ancient Fathers and all the 
 ancient Rituals, both Greek and Latin, ac- 
 knowledge." (De Sac. Ord., pt. iii, ex. 2, 
 ch. i, § 2.) 
 
 The learned Benedictine, Martene, of the 
 congregation of S. Maur (1654), in his De 
 Antiquis Ecclesice Ritibus arrived at the same 
 conclusion: "Since it cannot be said that 
 the delivery of the instruments are of the mat- 
 ter of ordination to the Presbyterate, it fol- 
 lows," he says, " that the essence of it is in 
 the imposition of the hands and the prayers 
 that follow after. . . This alone the 
 
 Orientals, this alone the ancient Fathers, this 
 alone (Holy) Scriptures acknowledge." (Lib. 
 i, ch. viii, art. ix, sec. 18.) The ground thus 
 taken by Morinus and Martene has been 
 accepted by the leading authorities of the 
 Roman Communion, was adopted with one or 
 two reservations by the Council of Trent, 1 and 
 
 1 The Council of Trent and form of the Sacrament : 
 (Sess. xxiii.) does not define it confines itself to anathema- 
 positively the proper matter tizing those who deny that the 
 
14 ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 
 
 is generally admitted at the present day as 
 beyond dispute. 
 
 It would appear then — -and this is the first 
 point of our contention — that the Church at 
 Rome according to the testimony of its own 
 chosen and accredited witnesses, in utter dis- 
 regard of Catholic tradition, and in defiance of 
 the fundamental difference between rites and 
 ceremonies as such, incorporated into the 
 Ordinal of the Western Church, and made part 
 and parcel of the constituent elements of the 
 Rite of Ordination, a ceremonial custom un- 
 known to the universal Church, before the 
 eleventh and twelfth centuries. It would ap- 
 pear, moreover, that at the very time when the 
 Eastern Church was engaged in seeking to rec- 
 oncile the differences between Constantinople 
 and Rome, Eugenius IV. in his celebrated 
 letter to the Armenians, notwithstanding the 
 fact that the Council of Florence over which 
 he presided received without question the or- 
 ders of the Eastern Church by imposition of 
 
 words Accipe Spiritum Sane- "the ceremonies of order" 
 turn, etc., do not confer the are not necessary to be ob- 
 gift of the Holy Ghost, and served (Can. iv, v). 
 
ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 1 5 
 
 hands and the invocation of the Holy Ghost, 
 declared that the Roman addition of the giv- 
 ing and taking of the chalice and paten must 
 be regarded as part of the matter and form of 
 ordination, and of the essence of the Sacrament. 
 
 And it appears, as the result of this declara- 
 tion, that the Roman See is not only open to 
 the imputation of insincerity in its dealings 
 with the Eastern Church at the time, even as 
 it is open to the same charge in opening nego- 
 tiations with the Anglican Church at the pres- 
 ent time, but it is liable to the still more 
 serious charge of making its own act in the 
 laying on of hands invalid by placing the per- 
 son ordained in the position of one who is 
 still to be made the recipient of additional 
 powers, not provided for in the Apostolic Rite 
 of Ordination. 
 
 The truth is that the Roman Ordinal, as it 
 now stands, is an aggregation of parts, consist- 
 ing (i) of the original Apostolic rite of im- 
 position of hands and prayer of invocation, 
 which sufficed for over one thousand years, (2) 
 of the mediaeval ceremony of the " Porrectio," 
 or presentation of the vessels, originally a 
 
1 6 ON RITES AND CEREMONIES. 
 
 formula of induction, and (3) of a new imposi- 
 tion of hands in connection with the prayer 
 Accipe Spiritum Sanctum, etc., by way of ap- 
 pendix or supplement to the whole. We have 
 then (1) a silent imposition of hands, (2) an 
 imposition of hands with a prayer of invoca- 
 tion, (3) another imposition of hands associated 
 with the giving of the sacred vessels, and the 
 power to forgive sins, as a special mark and 
 sign of the priesthood. These diverse elements 
 have been gathered together at different times, 
 without any attempt to mould them into a 
 consistent whole. All this is to be kept in 
 mind as bearing upon the question of the Re- 
 vision of the English Ordinal, and the results ul- 
 timately arrived at in the Prayer Book of 1662. 
 The thing to which, at this stage of our ar- 
 gument, I desire to invite special attention, 
 is the practical substitution of a Rite of its 
 own, to take the place of the Apostolic and 
 universal Rite; and the making of a Roman 
 ceremony to be of the essence of the Sacra- 
 ment of Order, by declaring that it belonged 
 to the matter and form of Ordination. 
 
II. 
 
 THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 
 
 It is beyond all question that the gift con- 
 ferred upon the Apostles, when our Lord, 
 after His resurrection from the dead, 
 'breathed' upon them, was a supernatural 
 gift; nor can it for a moment be doubted, 
 that in breathing upon them, He intended 
 to impart to them, sacramentally of His own 
 fulness, and make them thereby partakers 
 of His own incarnate life. We must dis- 
 criminate here between the gift of inbreath- 
 ing, whereby our Lord, as Head of His body 
 the Church, brings the Twelve Apostles into 
 corporate union with Himself; and the gift of 
 the Holy Ghost, bestowed upon the whole 
 body of the faithful, assembled with the Apos- 
 tles, in one place, in prayer and supplication, 
 on the day of Pentecost. " The relation of 
 the Paschal to the Pentecostal gift, is the re- 
 
1 8 THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 
 
 lation of quickening to endowing. The one 
 answers to the power of the resurrection \ and 
 the other to the power of the Ascension 
 (Godet) ; the one to victory — the other to sov- 
 ereignty/' 1 In the original the gift is de- 
 scribed as one and not to be repeated. A gift 
 made once for all, " not to individuals but to 
 the abiding body." The Apostolate, in other 
 words, after the Ascension of the Head into 
 heaven, is to take the place of Christ Himself 
 in the world. As we are accustomed to say in 
 legal phrase that '* a corporation never dies," 
 but has an existence of its own after the indi- 
 viduals composing it shall have passed away; 
 so the Apostles, after the resurrection of Jesus 
 from the dead, came into the possession of a 
 corporate life of which Jesus as the God-man, 
 the second Adam, is the Fountain and the 
 Source. The Apostolic Ministry, accordingly, 
 lives on by virtue of the power of a corporate 
 life, after the Twelve have passed away, per- 
 petuating in the world, and imparting to 
 others, sacramentally, by the laying on of 
 hands, the same Spirit by which Jesus was 
 
 1 Westcott, 
 
THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 1 9 
 
 declared to be the Son of God with power, 
 after His resurrection from the dead. 
 
 Now, it is this imparting to others that which 
 had been already, in the act of inbreathing, 
 received, which makes Ordination in the true 
 meaning of the word a sacramental act ; and 
 that in three ways more especially: (i) As our 
 Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the great Head 
 of the Church, took upon Him the form of a ser- 
 vant, so He consecrated the service of others, 
 done in His Name, to be a sacramental chan- 
 nel for keeping alive and perpetuating His own 
 Ministry in the world. Charity, in the Chris- 
 tian meaning of the word, is something differ- 
 ent from philanthropy : not self-glorification, 
 but self-abasement is of the essence of a good 
 deed done in the Name, and for the sake, of 
 Christ. As the Head of the Body, in coming 
 into the world, first humbled Himself, that 
 He might without offence minister to the poor 
 and needy, so the Church in carrying on the 
 work of our Lord's Ministry has made provi- 
 sion that there shall always be perpetuated an 
 order of men " full of the Holy Ghost and wis- 
 dom," whose duty it shall be to minister in 
 
20 THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 
 
 her behalf to others, in the Spirit of her Lord 
 and Master. 
 
 (2) Nor is it only in stooping to save that 
 Jesus has set us an example that we should 
 walk in His steps. In coming into the world, 
 He not only took our flesh upon Him, but He 
 placed His own will absolutely at the disposal 
 of His Father's will. He gave up that which 
 as a Son He had a right, as a matter of justice 
 to claim, and He took the place of a slave. 
 He became sin for us, died as slaves died, and 
 was crucified as a malefactor. He endured 
 poverty, hunger, thirst, shame, sorrow, pain, 
 desertion, the hiding of His Father's face, and 
 the pangs of death. And why ? In order 
 that He might constitute Himself to be an 
 High Priest, to make intercession to God for 
 us. He allowed Himself to be tempted, that 
 He might learn how to succour them that are 
 tempted. Almighty, yet He put Himself for 
 our sakes in our place, that He might make 
 the world, with all its load of sin and suffering 
 and trial, a divinely appointed sphere where 
 a new order of supernatural virtues may be 
 called into existence, in which self is willing 
 
THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 21 
 
 to be made a sacrifice, giving up that which it 
 has the right to claim, if there may be created 
 thereby another self, strong to bear the weak- 
 nesses and infirmities of others, and minister 
 comfort to the broken and contrite heart. 
 Now it is this mystery of voluntary suffering 
 for others' sake that is represented in the sec- 
 ond order of the Ministry, one of whose chief 
 functions is to absolve the penitent and 
 deal tenderly with the broken-hearted. The 
 world questions its existence, and pretends 
 to doubt its power, and yet it has itself 
 acknowledged the virtue of its claims, in the 
 saying, ' Fellow-feeling makes us wondrous 
 kind!" 
 
 (3) As Joseph, under the Old Testament, was 
 taken from prison and from judgment, and 
 raised to sit upon a throne, so Jesus, after His 
 condemnation by Pontius Pilate, had given to 
 Him a name above every name, that at His 
 name every knee should bow, of things in 
 heaven, and things in earth, and things under 
 the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus 
 Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father 
 (Phil. ii. 8-10). It is this lordship over all 
 
22 THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 
 
 things for His body's sake which is the Church, 
 that finds sacramental expression in the over- 
 seership which gives to the Episcopate the first 
 rank in the hierarchy of Order. 
 
 But whatever the variety of administration, 
 or the distinction of office, it is the same Holy 
 Spirit of the Word Incarnate which makes 
 the work of the Ministry in its three-fold order 
 of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons effectual for 
 the accomplishing of the end for which it was 
 created. There is not one kind of grace 
 needed for the Diaconate, another for the 
 Priesthood, another for the Episcopate. The 
 Deacon, in serving the poor, needs quite as 
 much the gift of the Holy Spirit that he may 
 minister charity in the spirit of his Divine 
 Master, as the Bishop in ruling over others 
 needs the same grace that he may not play the 
 part of " lord over God's heritage " (i Pet. v. 
 3). The Priest in absolution needs the same 
 grace that he may not only afford relief to the 
 conscience, but minister comfort to the heart. 
 The specific work to be done is one thing, the 
 power by virtue of which the person is to do 
 the work, another and a different thing. It is 
 
THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 21, 
 
 this power which is, sacramentally, conveyed 
 in the gift of order. 
 
 The Twelve, as the representatives of the 
 twelve tribes of the ancient Israel, were first 
 of all separated, and by special training fitted, 
 to discharge the duties of the Apostolic Min- 
 istry: after the resurrection they were made 
 partakers of the same Holy Spirit by virtue of 
 which Jesus had been raised again from the 
 dead, to enable them to perform the duties 
 to which they had been appointed. 
 
 The Church of the living God, accordingly, 
 is not in figure, nor in word only, the Body of 
 Christ. It is His own Divine creation formed 
 by His taking flesh of the Virgin Mary, and 
 made to be in His own earthly ministry the 
 archetypal germ of all ministry for His name's 
 sake. Declared to be the Son of God, with 
 power, after His resurrection from the dead, 
 the same Jesus has sacramentally incorporated 
 Himself with the body which before the resur- 
 rection He had formed for Himself, by impart- 
 ing to it of His own risen and supernatural life. 
 He dwells in it, and acts through it by the 
 
24 THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 
 
 power of the Spirit breathed into it, so that 
 " the gates of hell cannot prevail against it." 
 This is what we mean in the Creed by the pro- 
 cession from the Father and the Son. It is 
 the same Holy Spirit who at the first by His 
 quickening agency gave effect to the Word by 
 which the world that then was, began to as- 
 sume order and form and beauty, that in the 
 new creation after the Word by whom all 
 things were made had formed the nucleus of 
 the Christian Church out of the remnant of the 
 old dispensation, took possession of it, and 
 made it to be that which we see it to be in the 
 Acts of the Apostles — a living body, quickened 
 and animated by the consciousness of an in- 
 dwelling supernatural life, working wonders, 
 and doing miracles by the power of the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 If nature, as we call it, be not a congeries of 
 atoms, nor a mere system of organic law, but 
 as the Greeks long ago believed it to be, a 
 living force which in spring-time, and summer, 
 and harvest, manifests itself in tree, and 
 shrub, and flower, covering the earth with 
 beauty, and filling the world with music in 
 
THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 2$ 
 
 brake, and glade, and forest, why should it be 
 thought a thing incredible that the same Spirit 
 in a still higher and more glorious order of 
 creaturehood, can, by the creative energy of 
 the same eternal Logos, put forth in the form 
 of a new creature, born again after the image 
 of Him that created it, a moral and spiritual 
 world of saintliness and self-consecration 
 which, in due season, will " make the wilder- 
 ness rejoice and blossom as the rose "? 
 
 In the new creation, as in the old, we are 
 bound to recognize the power and presence 
 of the One in Three, co-operating one with 
 another and indissolubly bound together in 
 working towards the same end. Deep calleth 
 unto deep : Creation to Redemption. As in 
 the beginning God the Father, the sphere of 
 whose manifestation is the economy of nature, 
 brought all things into being through the 
 eternal Logos— the archetype and first-born of 
 every creature, by the quickening and opera- 
 tive agency of the Holy Ghost : so is it also in 
 the new creation, in which the Son manifests 
 the Father not as power, but as goodness, 
 walking the earth in the form of a man. Here 
 
26 THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 
 
 too the eternal Logos appears as the sent of 
 the Father, whose will He comes to carry into 
 effect by calling into being a new order of Son- 
 ship, like unto His own, through the operation 
 of the Holy Spirit, whose it is in the new 
 creation, as in the old, to impart productive 
 energy to each living thing, and enable it to 
 bring forth fruit after its kind. 
 
 Nor have we yet sounded to its depth the 
 mystery of the Sacrament of Order. In the 
 everlasting Godhead there is not only a co- 
 operation of will, but each person, in addition 
 to the relation which he bears to the others, has 
 that which is proper to Himself. The Father 
 from whom all things proceed manifests Him- 
 self in Nature; the Son in Redemption; the 
 Holy Ghost in the economy of the Church. 
 The third person, equally with the first, and 
 the second, has His own sphere, which is 
 proper to Himself. It is not by accident that 
 we join together in the Creed our confession 
 of belief in the Holy Ghost and the Holy 
 Catholic Church. Baptism needs to be sup- 
 plemented by Confirmation and the laying on of 
 hands for the bestowal of the gift of the Holy 
 
THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER 2J 
 
 Ghost. As in nature it is not enough to re- 
 ceive the gift of life and be born into the 
 world, but the life needs to be educated and 
 trained by the help of teachers and governors 
 for the development of the reason and the 
 education of the heart; so is it also in the 
 economy of grace, it is the work of the Holy 
 Spirit, through the Church, to educate and 
 train the new life given in Baptism by the 
 agency of Pastors, and Teachers, and Govern- 
 ors until it advances to perfection. 
 
 Nor does the work of the Holy Ghost end 
 with the education and training of the individ- 
 ual. It is His work also to carry on in the world 
 the work which Christ in His Ministry on earth 
 begun. And in doing this He adds that which 
 is proper to Himself to the works of the Father 
 and the Son. When we read in the New Tes- 
 tament that the Holy Ghost was not yet, be- 
 cause the Son was not glorified (John vii. 39), 
 it is not meant that the Holy Ghost did not 
 speak through the Prophets, but that the Holy 
 Ghost waited for the entrance of Christ into 
 the heavenly places before He undertook, in 
 His own proper character, to carry on to its 
 
28 THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 
 
 completion the work which Jesus had begun. 
 He waited until the day of Pentecost, and then 
 He came like the rushing of a mighty wind, in 
 the form of fiery tongues separating them- 
 selves, and giving not to the Apostles only, 
 but to the whole body of Disciples gathered 
 together, power to preach in every language 
 the wonderful works of God. This is that 
 baptism of fire spoken of by Jesus to His 
 Disciples which, in addition to the baptism of 
 water, is needed for the cleansing and purifying 
 of the Church. The gift of Pentecost is that 
 foretold by the prophet Joel (ii. 28, 29) in the 
 words, " And it shall come to pass after- 
 ward, that I shall pour out my Spirit upon 
 all flesh ; and your sons and your daughters 
 shall prophesy, your old men shall dream 
 dreams, your young men shall see visions. 
 And also upon the servants and upon the 
 handmaidens in those days will I pour out my 
 Spirit." 
 
 We find, accordingly, that in addition to the 
 regularly organized Ministry of which Christ 
 in His Incarnation was the Archetype, in its 
 three grades of Deacon, Priest, and Bishop, 
 
THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER. 2g 
 
 there appears in the New Testament after the 
 day of Pentecost a more widely extended Min- 
 istry of Prophets, Teachers, after that miracles, 
 then gifts of healing, helps, governments, di- 
 versities, tongues (i Cor. xii, 28). This is 
 that Ministry of charismatic gifts, peculiar to 
 the economy of the Holy Ghost, intended not 
 to supplant, but to supplement, the work of 
 the organic Ministry; and, as we shall have 
 occasion to see, formed the nucleus of the 
 Minor Orders which, under one form or an- 
 other, both East and West, have existed at 
 all times in the Church; and are to be recog- 
 nized as a remnant of the Pentecostal gift given 
 as a reward of victory to aid in the carrying 
 forward the work which Christ in His Minis- 
 try on earth had begun. It is worthy of note 
 that in the original, where the gift of the Spirit 
 after the resurrection by breathing upon the 
 Apostles is mentioned, it is without the defin- 
 ing article; w T hereas when the Holy Spirit ap- 
 pears in His own proper character on the day 
 of Pentecost, it is with the article. 
 
 Confirmation and Ordination belong equally 
 to the economy of the Holy Spirit: they have 
 
30 THE SACRAMENT OF ORDER, 
 
 a sacramental character of their own, differing 
 from the two great sacraments of the Incarna- 
 tion. As Confirmation supplements the rite 
 of baptism by the superadded gift of the Holy 
 Spirit to educate and train, through the agency 
 of the Church, the life given in Baptism, so in 
 Ordination, the Holy Spirit is given to carry 
 on and complete the Ministry of Christ as 
 Prophet, Priest, and King by the bestowal of 
 the whole fulness of the Godhead to quicken, 
 not only the organic Ministry to do its ap- 
 pointed work, but to sanctify the natural gifts 
 of the whole body of the faithful, to aid in the 
 extension of the Kingdom of heaven in the 
 world. 
 
III. 
 
 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 The Diaconate. 
 
 The growth and development of the Chris 
 tian Ministry, from the original stem of the 
 Apostolate, furnishes us with a good illustra- 
 tion of the difference between the logical and 
 chronological order of ideas. It will be ob- 
 served, then, that the chronological order of 
 the Ministry is in the inverse ratio of its logical 
 order. It has always been a vexed question, 
 whether the seven men first set apart by the 
 Apostles to the work of the Ministry were 
 Deacons, in the later and technical meaning of 
 the word. The answer to the question is that 
 names have at first a general, afterwards a 
 technical meaning, when differentiation takes 
 place. 1 The mistake made is in thinking that 
 
 1 " The sum of the matter is are formed, new words are not 
 this : Though new institutions coined for them, but old ones 
 
32 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 the Church in its development moved along 
 the lines of some previously devised scheme or 
 plan, given by its Divine founder, and not, ac- 
 cording to the law of all other organic bodies, 
 by way of growth and development, under 
 the conditions of time and experience. The 
 primitive Church had thrown upon it — one 
 could wish the same were true of the Church 
 
 borrowed and applied. Erfi- 
 6H07to$, whose general idea is 
 overseer, was a word in use 
 long before Christianity ; a 
 word of universal relation to 
 economical, civil, military, 
 naval, judicial and religious 
 matters. This word was as- 
 sumed to denote the govern- 
 ing and presiding persons of 
 the Church, as AkxkovoS (an- 
 other word of vulgar and dif- 
 fused use) to denote the minis- 
 terial. 
 
 " The Presbyters therefore, 
 while the Apostles lived, were 
 'EititiKortoi, overseers. But 
 the Apostles in foresight of 
 their approaching martyrdom 
 having selected and appointed 
 their successors in the several 
 cities and communities as S. 
 Paul did Timothy at Ephesus, 
 and Titus at Crete, a.d. 64, 
 
 four years before his death ; 
 their modesty, as it seems, 
 made them refuse it : they 
 would keep that name proper 
 and sacred to the first extraor- 
 dinary messengers of Christ, 
 though they really succeeded 
 them in their office, in due 
 part and measure, as the 
 ordinary governors of the 
 Churches. 
 
 " It was agreed, therefore, 
 over all Christendom at once, 
 in the very next generation, 
 after the Apostles, to assign 
 and appropriate to them the 
 word 'E7ti6KQ7toS, or Bishop. 
 From that time to this that 
 appellation, which before in- 
 cluded a Presbyter, has been 
 restrained to a superior order." 
 Bentley, Remarks upon a late 
 Discourse of Freethinking, 
 pp. 136, 137. 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 33 
 
 now — the distribution of money, and the care 
 of temporal affairs in providing for the flock, to 
 an extent far beyond anything we have any 
 conception of at the present time. It was the 
 custom then — one could wish it were the cus- 
 tom now — for rich men to bring thek money 
 and lay it at the Apostles' feet. Under the 
 distress of the times, occasioned by the pass- 
 ing away of the elder economy, men began to 
 realize in a living way that there is such a 
 thing as laying up " treasure in heaven/' If, 
 as the prophet says, there is " a bag with 
 holes," as many a man who puts his money 
 away in a bank, instead of spending it in good 
 works, before being called to his account, is 
 now-a-days finding out to his cost, so the 
 Christians of the Apostolic age found that the 
 best thing to do with money is to give it to 
 the poor and needy, and so lay up treasure in 
 heaven. The Apostles, oppressed by the tem- 
 poral burdens they were called upon to bear, 
 determined, accordingly, to create an order of 
 men, noted for their honesty and good sense, 
 and capacity for wise administration, in order 
 that they might have more time to give to the 
 
34 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 care of the worship of the Church, and the 
 ministration of the Word : i. e., to the adapta- 
 tion of the Word, under the form of Creed, and 
 Gospel, and Catechetical Instruction, to the 
 needs of the growing Church. But this separa- 
 tion of the Diaconate as a Ministry of serving, 
 did not exclude the seven from preaching and 
 baptizing, as in the case of Philip the Evan- 
 gelist. The Deacons, when the time comes 
 for them to be recognized as an Order, appear 
 as attendants upon Bishops, and helpers in 
 matters of administration. 
 
 The Diaconate of the early Church was, as 
 an Order, of far more account than it is at 
 present, in any part of the Church, East or 
 West. In Rome, the Deacon had the over- 
 sight of the ecclesiastical divisions of the city, 
 and was the recognized man of affairs in con- 
 nection with the temporalities of the Church. 
 Next to the Bishop himself, he was the most 
 influential man in the city of Rome. When 
 Gregory the Great was made a Deacon, he was 
 sent to Constantinople, in the character of a 
 plenipotentiary or representative (apocrisia- 
 rius) y by Benedict I. Pelagius II. uses him 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 35 
 
 afterwards in the same capacity, when he wants 
 to urge the Emperor to send help to Rome 
 against the Lombards, both in money and men, 
 since the Exarch at Ravenna had become pow- 
 erless to assist. We see the same thing at 
 Alexandria, in the time of John the Almoner. 
 The Church had a fleet of ships which provided 
 corn for the poor and the desolate cast upon 
 her care. There were not less than a hundred 
 Deacons constantly employed in connection 
 with the Cathedral Church ; they had, all the 
 time, more than enough to do in the work of 
 ministration. The number seven marked the 
 Diaconate as in an especial sense the Ministry 
 of the Holy Ghost, through whose agency the 
 Church made her light shine before the world, 
 in relieving the necessities of the poor, and 
 ministering comfort to the widow and the 
 orphan ; and the Deacons did all this, not in 
 the form of benefactors or patrons, dispensing 
 in a lofty way their dole of charity, but as 
 consecrated persons anointed by the Holy 
 Ghost to do in the form of servants, as their 
 Lord and Master did it before them, to the 
 sick and needy members of His Body the 
 
$6 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 Church. It was Christ's hands which, in an 
 order of men created for that very purpose, 
 ministered to the wants of a world suffering 
 from famine, and pestilence, and war. 1 
 
 1 The form for making a who use this office well pur- 
 Deacon in the Greek Church chase to themselves a good de- 
 expresses all this and more, in gree ; and make Thy servant 
 the prayer which precedes and perfect. For Thine is the 
 closes the act of Imposition of Kingdom," etc. 
 Hands. The Bishop laying Then" The Ectene being fin- 
 his hand on the head of the ished, the Bishop lays his hand 
 new-ordained saith this pray- upon the head of the new-or- 
 er : " O Lord our God, who dained and saith this prayer 
 in thy prescience dost pour out in a low voice : O God our 
 the abundance of Thy Holy Saviour, who by Thine ever- 
 Spirit upon those whom Thou lasting Word didst appoint 
 dost set apart by Thine inscru- the order of Deacons to the 
 table power for Thy Minis- Apostles, and didst call Thy 
 try, and to wait on Thy spot- proto-martyr Stephen to be 
 less mysteries; preserve in all the first to fulfil the office of 
 things honest him whom Thou a Deacon, as it is written in 
 hast now been pleased to pro- Thy Holy Gospel ; if any de- 
 mote by me to the office of a sire to be chief among you let 
 Deacon ; that he may hold the him be your Minister. Grant, 
 mystery of the faith in a pure O Lord, to this Thy servant, 
 conscience. Give him the whom Thou hast been pleased 
 grace which Thou didst im- to appoint to this Ministry, 
 part to the proto-martyr the aid of Thy holy and life- 
 Stephen first called by Thee giving Spirit ; and replenish 
 to this work of the Ministry ; him with faith and charity, 
 and grant him to fulfil this with virtue and holiness ; for 
 office vouchsafed unto him by not by the imposition of my 
 Thy goodness according to hands, but by the abundance 
 Thy good pleasure ; for they of Thy mercies is grace vouch- 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 37 
 
 The Priesthood. 
 
 We have seen that, when the needs of the 
 Church required it, the Apostles transferred to 
 others that which, at the first, had been con- 
 centrated in their own persons. In so doing, 
 they did not create new offices, but shared with 
 select persons that which they had hitherto 
 exclusively possessed. As they had already, 
 to meet a pressing necessity, set apart " hon- 
 est men of good report " to attend to the dis- 
 tribution of the money which had been placed 
 
 safed unto those who are and saith in a loud voice 
 
 worthy of Thee. Grant there- worthy; then those within 
 
 fore that he being freed from the Altar sing worthy thrice ; 
 
 all sin may stand unblamably and each chorus repeats worthy 
 
 before Thee, and obtain Thy thrice. Then the Bishop gives 
 
 promised reward, for," etc. him the Epimanikia (or 
 
 I shall add the Rubric with sleeves) and saith worthy ; 
 
 which the service is brought which is sung in the same 
 
 to a conclusion for the purpose manner as before by those 
 
 of illustrating in a practical within the Altar, and by the 
 
 way the difference between the choruses without. The Bish- 
 
 Ritual Act consisting of the op then gives him the fan and 
 
 laying on of hands and prayer, saith, worthy ; which is again 
 
 and the ceremonial accessories repeated as before. After 
 
 to the Act. '''After Amen, which he kisses the Bishop's 
 
 The Bishop taking the Orarion shoulders and waiteth at the 
 
 puts it on his left shoulder, Holy Table." 
 
38 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 in their charge, to provide for the wants of 
 the poor and suffering; so when the time came 
 for the multitude of disciples to be gathered 
 into separate congregations, the Apostles gave 
 to men known to rule their own households 
 well, a share in the power which they had 
 reserved to themselves of attending to " the 
 prayers " and " the ministry of the word/' 
 
 The first mention made of a localized 
 Ministry is in Acts xi. 30, where the Elders at 
 Jerusalem are mentioned as receiving, at the 
 hands of Barnabas and Saul, the money sent 
 from Antioch for the relief of the famine which 
 at that time prevailed in Judea. Some time 
 after, when the same two Apostles set out 
 on their missionary journey throughout Asia 
 Minor, they followed the example of Jerusalem 
 and " ordained them elders in every Church ' 
 (Acts xiv. 23). It would appear to have been 
 the uniform practice of the Apostles at this 
 time wherever they found any number of con- 
 verts congregated together, to appoint Elders 
 to take the oversight of the flock, still holding 
 in their own hands the care of the churches 
 they had planted. Thus S. Paul sends for the 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 39 
 
 Presbyters of Ephesus to meet him at Miletus, 
 and exhorts them to feed the flock over which 
 the Holy Ghost had made them overseers. It 
 is not until after the year 64 that we find 
 Presbyters and Deacons recognized, as distinct 
 orders in Philippians and the Pastoral Epistles, 
 This was the second step towards permanent 
 Church organization. 
 
 The Apostles, while they lived, watched 
 over the churches which they had established. 
 The Episcopate still slept in the Apostolate. 
 James, on account of his blood relationship to 
 our Lord, was acknowledged as head of the 
 Church at Jerusalem. S. Paul before he is 
 taken away delegates to Timothy at Ephesus, 
 and to Titus at Crete, authority over the 
 churches there. Titus is left at Crete to or- 
 dain Elders (Tit. i. 5), and Timothy is told to 
 lay hands suddenly on no man. He is not 
 to be hasty to receive accusations against an 
 Elder; mindful of his youth, he is not to 
 rebuke an Elder, but to entreat him as a father 
 (1 Tim, vi. 1). The Apostolic delegate has 
 begun to assume the function of a Bishop in 
 the technical meaning of the word. 
 
40 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 From this time forth the chronological order 
 gives place to the logical order of Bishops, 
 Priests, and Deacons. The conclusion reached, 
 I shall take the liberty of stating in the words 
 of another: 
 
 " Until Christ gave commission to His Apos- 
 tles to go forth and to teach, and to gather 
 into His Church from ' all nations ' and lan- 
 guages, and peoples, He continued in His own 
 person all the offices of that Church, without 
 any to partake with Him in the Ministry, the 
 Priesthood, or the overseership. He was the 
 ' Bishop ' of all souls in that Church, from 
 whom all Bishops derive their office of rulers. 
 He was the great High Priest, the typical and 
 germinal Priest of His Church, from whom 
 every Priest derives his office. He was the 
 Deacon of His Church, who came for this very 
 end, to be the Deacon or Minister of the 
 Church; that is, He came not to be ministered 
 unto — for none could minister unless they de- 
 rived power from Him — but He came to min- 
 ister and to give this Ministry as He gave His 
 life for others, since He came as much to minis- 
 ter as to ransom. He thus not so much cen- 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 4 1 
 
 tered in His own person the whole official life 
 of the Church as He was the essential life itself, 
 the source from which the official life of the 
 Church springs, for He did not gather up life 
 into His own person, but He was the light and 
 life in the concrete. He then is not only 
 the ' chief ' corner-stone, the protection of the 
 Church, He is its one foundation stone, Bish- 
 op, Priest and Deacon : And when He breathed 
 on His Apostles and sent them forth in His 
 Name, He gave them the power to be the 
 outward presentment of Himself. When the 
 needs of the Church required it His Apostles 
 did not create new offices, but they gave up a 
 portion of that which they had hitherto exclu- 
 sively possessed, and which was concentrated in 
 their own persons. That they might no longer 
 be distracted from their higher duities by the 
 necessity of serving tables, but might give 
 themselves up to the oversight of the flock, 
 they conferred on chosen men the power which 
 they themselves possessed of ministering to 
 that flock. When the growth of the Church 
 demanded it, they gave to others a share in the 
 office of Priests of Christ's Church, By ordi- 
 
42 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTR Y. 
 
 nation and the laying on of hands, they con- 
 ferred this power. But no one can confer that 
 which he does not himself possess. The 
 means, moreover, by which that power is con- 
 ferred, the stretching, the laying on of hands, 
 is also symbolical of the reality of the gift of 
 which the Giver has the whole in His own 
 power, and which he therefore is able to give 
 to others ; not that the higher has power to 
 confer the lower because it is lower, but be- 
 cause he himself possesses that lower office 
 .which he confers. The Apostles therefore 
 continued to be that which their Lord had be- 
 come; that which He had made them to be, 
 the Deacons of His flock, the Priests of His 
 Church, the Bishops of His people; conferring 
 indeed on others, yet, without stripping them- 
 selves of any ministerial grace, or creating any 
 higher office in order to supply the defects of 
 the lower. In a word the Church was * de- 
 veloped not from below but from above/ 
 Nay, more, the three-fold Ministry embodies, 
 and sets forth visibly before the eyes of men, 
 the unseen mystery of the eternal Three in 
 
 1 Denton on the Acts of the Apostles, pp. ci, cii. 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTR Y. 43 
 
 their work for the salvation of men : the eternal 
 Father, the fountain of jurisdiction in the send- 
 ing of the Son, has his representative in the 
 Bishop who still remains the foundation of ju- 
 risdiction in the Church ; the eternal Son, who 
 in the offering of His Body constituted Him- 
 self a Priest for men, has His counterpart in 
 the Priest who serves the altar, and has power 
 to pardon the penitent; the Holy Ghost, who 
 proceedeth from the Father and the Son, is 
 manifested in the seven-fold Diaconate, whose 
 work it is to bestow gifts, and so make the 
 light of the Gospel shine throughout the world, 
 that men may be led to glorify their Father 
 which is in Heaven. 
 
 The Episcopate. 
 
 The question whether the Bishopric is to be 
 
 accounted a third order of the Ministry, or is 
 to be reckoned only as a different grade of the 
 Priesthood, is in reality a figment of the schools, 
 the answer to which depends entirely upon the 
 point of view from which we approach the 
 consideration of the subject. It is beyond all 
 
44 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 dispute that, in the order of the hierarchy, the 
 Bishop ranks only as a Priest of a higher grade ; 
 but in the sacrament of order, on the other 
 hand, we have not to do, only or chiefly, with 
 the order of the Priesthood, but with the per- 
 petuation of our Lord's own Ministry in all the 
 plenitude of its powers, to the end of time. 
 The subject in hand is not the abstract ques- 
 tion of what constitutes the sacerdotium, or the 
 relation which Priest and Bishop bear each to 
 the other as Priests; but the concrete question 
 of the Apostolate, as the divinely appointed 
 channel for the transmission of the grace, which 
 flows through the work and ministry of the 
 incarnate Lord as the sent of God for the sal- 
 vation of the world. From the point of view 
 of the perpetuation of the succession of the 
 Ministry, it remains true that the Episcopal 
 order is not a higher grade of the second order, 
 but is the first or chief order, through which 
 the other two orders of the Ministry are to be 
 perpetuated. The Episcopate accordingly has 
 an indelible character of its own, not given to 
 either the Diaconate or to the Presbyterate. 
 It belongs to the order of Bishops to perpetu- 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 45 
 
 ate the succession of the Ministry, and with it 
 the authority to rule : to the Presbyter belongs 
 neither the power to ordain nor has he jure 
 divino, an inherent right to govern, but is to 
 obey his Bishop as " sent of the Father." If 
 we may, without intruding into things beyond 
 our mortal ken, be allowed so to speak, we may 
 venture to say that the Episcopate, as contain- 
 ing all the other orders within itself, is the rep- 
 resentative of the principle of the moral unity 
 which binds the three orders of the Ministry 
 together, even as the eternal Father is the 
 representative of the unity of the everlasting 
 Godhead. He is the source from which the 
 Godhead of the Son originates by way of gener- 
 ation, as that of the Holy Ghost by way of pro- 
 cession. It is this aspect of the Episcopate as 
 the representative of the principle of moral 
 unity, which appears in the Ignatian Epistles. 
 
 If, then, there be anything of a sacramental 
 nature in the three orders of the Ministry es- 
 tablished by the Apostles, and acknowledged 
 before the close of the second century by the 
 whole Church throughout the world — by what 
 
46 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 right, it is fair to ask, does the Roman Church 
 take upon itself to invalidate the authority of 
 the Episcopate by turning it into a grade 
 of the Priesthood, and substituting in its place 
 the Sub-diaconate which, until the time of 
 Innocent III., had never been recognized as an 
 order of Ministry in the sacramental meaning 
 of the word ? It is a question which I shall 
 leave others to answer, whether the Latin 
 Church, by its introduction of a grade of Min- 
 istry which does not properly belong to the 
 three orders ordered by Christ and His 
 Apostles into the hierarchy of order, has not 
 laid itself open to the charge of breach of trust 
 of the most serious kind. Nor is it difficult to 
 see how the innovation, gradually, but surely 
 came about. 
 
 It will be found upon examination that, as 
 the result of the teaching of the Schoolmen, 
 a new order of Ministry silently sprung up 
 alongside the three orders of the Apostolate 
 during the Middle Ages. It became the cus- 
 tom, after the ceremonial of the Mass received 
 additions in order to give greater dignity to 
 the rite, for the celebrant to be assisted by 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 47 
 
 two clerks, known respectively as Deacon and 
 Sub-deacon, performing different functions of 
 a higher and lower grade. 1 While the Church 
 of England preserving the Apostolic tradi- 
 tion knows only one degree below the Priest- 
 hood, " the order of Deacons," the Roman 
 Communion recognizes two major orders infe- 
 rior to Priests — Deacons and Sub-deacons — the 
 four minor orders of Exorcist, Reader, Acolyte, 
 and Janitor being placed in a different grade. 
 By the introduction of the Sub-diaconate, after 
 the Council of Beneventum in 1091, into the 
 hierarchy of order, and its recognition by 
 Innocent the Third, there was thus created a 
 triple Ministry of worship, which soon de- 
 manded recognition as of Divine institution, 
 not less than the three-fold order of the Min- 
 istry established by the Apostles themselves. 
 We have now found out the solution of the 
 addition to the ordinal, made at this time in 
 the West. Why should there be a double 
 laying on of hands in the Roman rite differ- 
 ent from the Greek rite, and from the Anglo- 
 Saxon rite, up to the twelfth century ? How 
 
 1 Eager, The Christian Ministry in the New Testament, ch. \v. 
 
48 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 can the same person be, at the same time, an 
 ordinatus and an ordinandus? What reason 
 can be given for regarding the Apostolic rite 
 of laying on of hands and the invocation of the 
 Holy Ghost which takes place in the early part 
 of the rite, incomplete, until the newly in- 
 vented ceremony of the " Porrectio " has taken 
 place, and the additional power given to offer 
 Masses for the living and dead, with a new in- 
 vocation and a new laying on of hands, have 
 taken effect ? If we consult Roman authori- 
 ties we find that S. Bonaventura, Morinus, 
 Goar, Tournely, Perrone are of the opinion 
 that the essential matter and form of the Rite 
 consists in the imposition of hands and the 
 invocation ; Capreolus, Vasques, Dominicus 
 Soto, Gonet maintain with Eugenius IV. that 
 the essential matter and form are to be found 
 in the delivery of the instruments, and the 
 accompanying form with the laying on of 
 hands ; Bellarmine holds to the theory of a 
 " double partial matter " and a " double partial 
 form/' The whole subject is discussed by 
 the learned Dominican Billuart in his Cursus 
 Theologice juxta Mentem D. Thomce (1746- 
 
THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 49 
 
 51), who, after stating the various opinions 
 held by men of repute, arrives at the conclu- 
 sion that, since in Confirmation and the Sacra- 
 ment of Order Christ gave no specific direction 
 as to the matter and form of the Sacrament, 
 He left it open to the Greek Church to adopt 
 one form of Ordination, and the Latin Church 
 another (sic), as they might think reasonable 
 and find most expedient (vol. Ill, Trac. de 
 Sac. Ord., diss, ii, art. 1). 
 
 But there is another and a better answer, 
 based not upon theory but fact. There grew 
 up in connection with the scholastic doctrine 
 of the Priesthood and the Sacrament of the 
 Altar an entirely new order of Ministry, which, 
 insensibly to the actors themselves, increased 
 in importance until it took the place in the 
 popular mind of the hierarchy of order, as 
 previously established by Apostolic authority. 
 It grew in popular estimation by being contin- 
 ually kept before the eyes of the people in every 
 parish Church ; and by the introduction of the 
 
 Porrectio ' into the ordinal, it secured at 
 
 length from Eugenius IV. the recognition of 
 
 a popular ceremony; not as a symbol of in- 
 4 
 
50 THE THREE ORDERS OF THE MINISTRY. 
 
 duction into office according to its original 
 intent, but as of the very essence of the Rite. 
 To make the process of the substitution of 
 the new invention of the Schoolmen for the 
 original function of the Apostles complete, it 
 was necessary to provide that there should be 
 another imposition of hands and another act 
 of invocation before the ordination should be 
 regarded as a fait accompli. 
 
 It will be observed that we have in the ac- 
 complishing of all this both a violation of 
 fundamental principles, and a setting aside of 
 well-established rules of order. The Sub-diac- 
 onate now made part and parcel of the higher 
 orders of the Ministry, for the first time in the 
 twelfth century, takes the place vacated by the 
 Episcopate under the scholastic theory of 
 orders : and to what end ? To make way for 
 putting in its place one invested with absolute 
 power, who to complete the confusion is not 
 able, as not included in the organic Ministry, 
 to transmit to others the office which he has 
 himself usurped, except through the Episco- 
 pate which he was created to destroy. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE MINOR ORDERS. 
 
 The Minor orders of the early Church were 
 a survival of the Pentecostal Gift. There was 
 a difference, from the very first, between the 
 organic Ministry transmitted by the laying on 
 of hands, and a more widely extended minis- 
 try of Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, Helps of 
 many kinds, each, according to their several 
 ability, contributing his gift towards the edi- 
 fication of the Church. The organic Minis- 
 try, as we have seen, took the place of our 
 Lord Himself in His threefold capacity of 
 Prophet, Priest, and King. But in addition to 
 the gift of the Spirit received by inbreathing, 
 and as formative principle transmitted through 
 the channel of the organic Ministry, the 
 Church on the day of Pentecost received the 
 Gift of the Holy Spirit, not as an indwelling 
 principle of organic life, but in the form of 
 
5 2 THE MINOR ORDERS, 
 
 charismatic gifts bestowed upon the whole 
 body of believers, and distributed to each 
 member of the body according to his ability to 
 receive. It is a mistake to imagine that these 
 charismatic gifts ceased with the Pentecostal 
 Age. They still continued, under another 
 form, in all lay persons who formally conse- 
 crated their gifts to the service of God and 
 His Church, in preference to wasting them in 
 secular occupations for the sake of worldly 
 gain. They were recognized by the whole 
 Church under the name of the Minor Orders 
 of the Ministry. 
 
 It is due to the Roman Church to say she 
 took the lead, in the third century, in organiz- 
 ing these relics of the Pentecostal Age into an 
 effective and closely combined order of the 
 second rank. It is, as Harnack in his late 
 valuable essay on the Sources of the Apostolic 
 Canons does not hesitate to say, " a striking 
 witness of the way in which the Roman Church 
 understood how to overcome the dangers 
 which still always threatened her from a dead 
 organization of the Church, to build up her 
 
THE MINOR ORDERS. 53 
 
 episcopal-presbyterian constitution/ ' and to 
 adopt the religious and civil elements of Ro- 
 man life. The Church created thereby a nurs- 
 ery for the higher order of Bishops, Priests, and 
 Deacons, and out of the perishing remnants 
 of the Pentecostal Age formed a training 
 school for the Ministry of the most valuable 
 kind. One has only to think of the modern 
 Sexton (" the maker of the dead man's bed ") 
 combining, in addition to his lucrative employ- 
 ment of undertaker, the whole five grades of 
 the lower orders of the Ministry; or the parish 
 choir, made up of opera singers and strolling 
 theatrical performers, not to wish that the 
 services of the Minor orders of Ministry in the 
 Church were again in the hands of persons 
 who had some marks of consecration for their 
 office. 
 
 Fabian, in the middle of the third century, 
 was the first of the Roman Bishops, Har- 
 nack tells us, to break with the Pentecostal 
 idea of the number seven as representing the 
 economy of the Holy Ghost; but he did this 
 in a way not to shock the traditional feeling 
 of the Church. Instead of creating fourteen 
 
54 THE MINOR ORDERS. 
 
 Deacons to attend to the fourteen divisions 
 of the city, he appointed seven sub-deacons to 
 assist the seven Deacons, and so " in deference 
 to Holy Scripture the number seven was not 
 increased/ ' 
 
 The effect of this change, adopted at the first 
 for the purpose of convenience, and wisely so, 
 was not at the time foreseen. It resulted, as 
 we have seen in the previous chapter, in the 
 taking of the sub-diaconate out of the grade 
 of the lower orders where it had formerly stood, 
 and where it still remains in the Greek Church, 
 arid made it to be a stepping-stone to the 
 higher orders of the Hierarchy. 
 
 For this Innocent III., and not Fabian, 
 was to blame, but it points a moral to which 
 I desire to call attention at this stage of our 
 inquiry. To say that the Latin Church pos- 
 sesses in a peculiar degree, above either the 
 Greek Church or the old British Church, the 
 secret of organization is only to say that she 
 inherits the great gift of the Roman people; 
 but while the gift of order is in itself a most 
 admirable thing, its virtue depends on the 
 use that is made of it, and whether, in mat- 
 
THE MINOR ORDERS. 55 
 
 ters affecting the order and ritual of the 
 Church, it be of God's making or of man's 
 making. When it is proposed, as we have 
 seen it proposed in the last chapter, to sub- 
 stitute a theory of the Schoolmen for the 
 teaching of Holy Scripture and the witness 
 of the primitive Church, on the subject of the 
 Episcopate; when the attempt is made to 
 foist into the ordinal, with the view of giving 
 practical effect to the substitution of the order 
 of worship for the hierarchy of order, a cere- 
 mony which had no place there for a thousand 
 years; when an order which, according to the 
 Statuta Ecclesice Antiqua, has never received 
 imposition of hands, is given a place in the 
 hierarchy of order, to countenance the notion 
 that the Episcopate is not an order with an 
 indelible character of its own; when, as a con- 
 sequence of these things, confusion and inter- 
 mixture are introduced into the ordinal so 
 that the wit of man cannot any longer dis- 
 cover where the act of ordination properly 
 begins or ends — can it be questioned that 
 the time had come for the Episcopate, as an 
 order, to stand upon the defensive, and for the 
 
56 THE MINOR ORDERS. 
 
 attempt to be made to restore the ordinal 
 again to something like its original harmony 
 and unity of idea ? 
 
 Things had come to such a pass that it had 
 ceased to be a question about Rites and Cere- 
 monies. It was a contention for the original 
 constitution of the Church and the Faith once 
 delivered to the Saints. Fortunately we pos- 
 sess in the Apostolical Constitutions and the 
 Statuta Ecclesice Antiqua the rule of the Church, 
 East and West, at the close of the fourth cen- 
 tury, both as defining the relative position of 
 the three orders of Bishops, Priests, and Dea- 
 cons, and the exclusion of the Sub-diaconate 
 from the hierarchy of order. The rule for the 
 Western Church as laid down in the ancient 
 collection of Canons, known as the Statuta 
 Ecclesice Antiqua, is as follows: — 
 
 First. When a Bishop is ordained, let two 
 Bishops lay and hold the Book of the Gospels 
 upon his head and neck, and one saying the 
 blessing over him, let the other Bishops who 
 are present touch his head. (Can. II.) 
 
 Second. When a Presbyter is ordained, while 
 the Bishop is blessing him and holding his 
 
THE MINOR ORDERS. 57 
 
 hand upon his head, all the Presbyters shall 
 hold their hands in conjunction with the hand 
 of the Bishop on his head. (Can. III.) 
 
 Third. When a Deacon is ordained, let the 
 Bishop who blesses him alone put his hand 
 upon his head, because he is set apart (conse- 
 cratur) not to the Priesthood, but to the office 
 of the Ministry. (Can. IV.) 
 
 Fourth. When a Sub-deacon is ordained, in- 
 asmuch as he does not receive imposition of 
 hands, let him receive from the hands of the 
 Bishop the empty paten and the empty chal- 
 ice; moreover, let him receive from the hand 
 of the Archdeacon a Ewer (urceolus), the 
 Mantile, 1 and the Manutergium. (Can. V.) 
 
 Now, these Canons prove indisputably that 
 the law r of the Western Church at the close of 
 the fourth century recognizes (i) the existence 
 of three orders, Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, 
 as constituting the hierarchy of order; (2) they 
 bear witness to the fact that the laying on of 
 hands accompanied by the invocation of the 
 
 1 On the reading here see Maskell's note in his Monu- 
 Hefele, History of the Coun- menta Ritualia, vol. Ill, p. 
 cils, vol. II, p. 411 ; and 183. 
 
58 THE MINOR ORDERS. 
 
 Holy Ghost . was the sacramental channel 
 through which these higher orders were trans- 
 mitted ; (3) they place the Sub-diaconate 
 among the Minor or lower orders on the 
 ground that it does not receive imposition of 
 hands, but is inducted by the presentation of 
 the paten and chalice; thus making a difference 
 between the Ritual act (properly so called) 
 as of the essence of the rite, and the Cere- 
 monial act of induction to a special duty, not 
 regarded as an official act. 
 
 By what authority was the Sub-diaconate 
 taken out of the category of the lower orders 
 of the Ministry, and elevated by Innocent III. 
 into the hierarchy of order ? It was an innova- 
 tion, but an innovation with a purpose. It 
 moved the Priesthood up a step, and placed it 
 in the first grade ; the Deacon appears not as 
 the minister of the Bishop, but as associated 
 with a subordinate, who is to assist him in 
 waiting upon the Priest. In other words, to 
 carry out the Scholastic idea of the Priesthood 
 as supreme, the order of worship consisting of 
 Priest, Deacon, and Sub-deacon is substituted 
 for the Apostolic Ministry of Bishops, Priests, 
 
THE MINOR ORDERS. 59 
 
 and Deacons. The Revolution is complete. 
 Let us now see the result as it affects the dis- 
 cipline and lives of the Clergy in the thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries. 
 
 The most enthusiastic admirer of the Middle 
 Ages cannot ignore the decline which took 
 place in the Western Church, in the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries. It is marked by the neg- 
 lect of preaching on the part of the Priesthood, 
 and the growth of the temporal power of the 
 Papacy, culminating in the Babylonian exile 
 and the Great Schism. Lucius III., and the 
 Council of Verona (1184), resisted the attempt 
 made by Peter Waldo (11 79) to establish an 
 order of poor preachers ; and invoked the aid 
 of the secular arm to put down by force the 
 growing spirit of reform. The Dominicans 
 and Franciscans undertook the work of revival. 
 Grosstete, in England, bewails the secularized 
 condition of the Clergy; and calls to his aid 
 the preaching friars to instruct the poor and 
 ignorant. 
 
 With the preaching friars and their work 
 there is no fault to find ; but whatever their 
 
60 THE MINOR ORDERS. 
 
 value, it remains true that they were a human 
 invention utilized by the Papacy, now advanc- 
 ing into power over the legitimate claims of 
 the Episcopate, to do the work which properly 
 belonged to the organic ministry of the Church. 
 It is at this time the conflict between the 
 Seculars and the Regulars, with its shameful 
 consequences, begins to run its course. The 
 Church is like a household divided against 
 itself. The Monks are allowed to take the 
 place of the parish clergy; they hear confes- 
 sions and preach indulgences. Abbots begin 
 to assume the mitre, and confront the Bishops 
 everywhere, denying their claims to jurisdic- 
 tion. The struggle for precedence enters the 
 Universities, where the Popes take the side of 
 the Monks against the regularly constituted 
 authorities. It was the Dominicans who were 
 chiefly responsible for the crusade against the 
 Albigenses. The spirit of the Revolution 
 which had begun in the substitution of the 
 Priesthood for the Episcopate, and the placing 
 of the Minor order of the Sub-diaconate on 
 the same footing as the three regular orders 
 of the Ministry, now reveals itself in the com- 
 
THE MINOR ORDERS. 6 1 
 
 bination between Innocent the Third urged on 
 by the Dominicans, and Simon de Montfort 
 to destroy by force the one institution of the 
 Middle Ages to which we owe all that is 
 noblest and best in modern society — the insti- 
 tution of chivalry. 
 
 What Innocent, by the aid of the Domini- 
 cans and the secular arm accomplished in 
 southern France, he attempted to do in Eng- 
 land. He took sides with the King to nullify 
 the effect of the declaration of rights in the 
 Magna Charta, the great bulwark of English 
 liberty. Nor did the spirit of the Revolution 
 end here. It sought foreign fields of conquest. 
 Unable to get the Eastern Church to surrender 
 its legitimate claims, Innocent joined with the 
 Crusaders to drive the Greek Metropolitans 
 from their thrones, and lent the aid of the 
 Church in the West to found the Latin Empire 
 of Constantinople, when a drunken soldiery 
 made a harlot entertain them by rehearsing 
 ribald songs, and performing indecent dances, 
 before the high altar of S. Sophia; and a 
 Venetian Patriarch was appointed Patriarch of 
 Constantinople. 
 
62 THE MINOR ORDERS. 
 
 Abroad and at home, piracy and plunder 
 followed in the footsteps of the Revolution. 
 Honorius III. (1216-1227), the successor of 
 Innocent III., claimed the right of presenta- 
 tion to two prebendal stalls in every Cathedral 
 in England. Gregory IX. (123 1) forbade the 
 Bishops to appoint to English benefices until 
 he had made provision for the Roman See. 
 The Bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln were 
 ordered to find benefices for three hundred 
 foreigners, not able to speak a word of the 
 English tongue. When Grosstete refused to 
 be made the tool of Innocent IV. by promot- 
 ing his nephew to a canonry in Lincoln, and 
 took occasion to remind the Pope that i( no 
 sin can be more adverse to the doctrine of the 
 Apostles, more abominable to Jesus Christ, or 
 more hurtful to mankind than to defraud and 
 rob those souls which ought to be the object 
 of the pastoral care and instruction, which by 
 the Scriptures they ought to enjoy," he was 
 laughed at for his pains, and consigned to 
 obscurity for the rest of his life. 
 
 The only deliverance which the Church of 
 England could hope for to free her from the 
 
THE MINOR ORDERS. 63 
 
 far-reaching Revolution, which had overthrown 
 the legitimate authority of the Episcopate 
 throughout the world, was to go to the root 
 of the evil and demand that the ordinal should 
 be revised, and restored to its original condi- 
 tion, by virtue of which the constitution of the 
 Church, in the three orders of the Ministry as 
 established by the Apostles, should be recog- 
 nized, the mediaeval patch of the " Porrectio ' 
 taken out of the way, and this we shall find, 
 in dealing with the revision of the ordinal, she 
 before long proceeded to do. 
 
V. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 
 
 AMONG the things which the nation and peo- 
 ple of England find it hard to understand 
 is the art of deception. Blunt to a fault, 
 the Englishman despises finesse, diplomacy, 
 double-dealing — anything and everything that 
 is open to the charge of trickery or de- 
 ceit. It is for this reason that he loathes a 
 Jesuit, and regards with disfavour the writings 
 of Liguori and his satellites. He is accus- 
 tomed to think of casuistry as falsehood made 
 a fine art ; and has his doubts about the- con- 
 fessional as anything more than medicine 
 for sick people; not intended to be taken 
 at all times, as a steady diet. It may be 
 that the English allow their prejudices, in 
 favour of honesty and truth, to run away with 
 them ; and do not make allowance, as they 
 should, for the moral obliquity which, to a 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 65 
 
 greater or less degree, seems to be characteris- 
 tic of the Celtic and Italian races, leading them 
 occasionally to try their hands at steering 
 their way between downright falsehood and 
 inventing the truth. 
 
 It is this prepossession in favour of fair 
 dealing, especially in matters of religion, which 
 makes it difficult for the English mind to take 
 in what is meant by " intention/' It is a 
 word that does not properly belong to the 
 Saxon tongue, and is of the nature of an 
 importation from a foreign source. It is 
 difficult to imagine that anybody should, in 
 religion, say or do anything that he did not 
 really intend to do or say. We can understand 
 how abroad, and especially at Rome, that the 
 insinuation of doing, in religion, what would be 
 regarded as an evasion unworthy of a gentle- 
 man in the affairs of ordinary life, is not made 
 with the intention of giving offence, but is said 
 in good faith, as something recognized by the 
 Church of Rome in dealing with her own 
 children. As it is a matter of contention 
 
 among ultramontanists themselves whether the 
 5 
 
66 THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 
 
 oracle of the Vatican gives its response in ac- 
 cordance with facts as they are presented to 
 it, or utters its voice from the depth of its 
 own inner consciousness, we shall in this case 
 give it the benefit of a doubt, and conclude 
 that it is not, after all, the voice of Leo XIII., 
 but an echo from a nearer shore, that is re- 
 sponsible for the utterance evidently based 
 upon an entire misconception of the " inten- 
 tion " of the framers of the English ordinal. 
 
 Whatever be the strained interpretation of 
 the doctrine of 'intention' to be found in 
 casuistical writers of the Liguorian type, it 
 never could have been the mind of the Catholic 
 Church to lay down, as a principle, that the 
 validity of a sacramental rite can ever be held 
 to depend upon the meaning which the ad- 
 ministrator reads into his own act; provided 
 he duly performs, according to the mind of the 
 Church, the function which, as her Minister, he 
 has been empowered to fulfil. There are cases 
 where the Early Church might seem to have 
 strained a point in upholding the doctrine 
 that the grace of the sacrament depends upon 
 the intention of the Minister of the rite, as in 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 6y 
 
 the matter (if it be true) of Athanasius, playing 
 at baptism when he was a boy. No one imag- 
 ines for a moment that the mock rites of 
 Michael the Dipsomaniac, in his drunken re- 
 vels in Constantinople, were valid ordinations. 
 Nor can it be granted that any ordinations, 
 outside of the Sacrament of order, are valid 
 any more than in any other Sacramental rite 
 where there is neither proper matter nor 
 proper form. But if there be both matter and 
 form — the old Nag's head fable being put 
 out of court as no longer tenable — then, to 
 challenge the validity of Anglican orders on 
 the ground of ' intention/' is to argue either 
 schismatical pravity after the fashion of the 
 Donatists, or to betray an entire ignorance of 
 the fundamental principles of Canon Law. No 
 one, it is held for granted, takes seriously the 
 modern Roman fad of re-baptizing converts 
 from the Anglican Church ; nor is it possible to 
 imagine that the late pronunciamento entitled 
 " Apostolicce Curce " had any other origin than 
 that of misconception, based upon misrepre- 
 sentation of the real merits of the case. The 
 fault found with the revisers of the Anglican 
 
68 THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 
 
 ordinal, evidently, is not lack of intention, for 
 nothing could be plainer than that the inten- 
 tion was to restore the Episcopate to the place 
 it originally held in the hierarchy of order — this 
 is openly declared and reiterated, again and 
 again — and in doing so, to make union with 
 Rome forever impossible, except on condition 
 of its recognition of the three orders of the 
 Ministry, as handed down from the Apostles, 
 to be the only valid form of Church organiza- 
 tion. The Council of Trent, while it is afraid 
 to express itself with clearness on the subject, 
 is forced to acknowledge this, and may fairly 
 be claimed as not in sympathy with the late 
 declaration. 
 
 It is equally plain that the office of the 
 Priesthood provided for is not the type of 
 Priesthood which the Church of Rome in her 
 tampering with the ordinal has tried to intro- 
 duce into the teaching of the Catholic Church. 
 It is a Priesthood which, in its approach to the 
 mystery of the Christian sacrifice, is taught to 
 discriminate between the Sacr amentum, the 
 res Sacramenti, and the virtus Sacramenti, and 
 offer worship to the Three Persons of the 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 69 
 
 Ever-blessed Trinity in the relation which 
 they bear, each to the other, in Creation, Re- 
 demption, and Sanctification. The Priest who 
 ministers at the altar is not supposed to be 
 of the order of Aaron offering a bloody victim, 
 but in the line of Melchizedek, without father 
 and without mother, by the virtue of the power 
 of an endless life. It is not contact with the 
 lamb once slain he seeks to effect, " sensual- 
 it er ; ' nor does he propose " non solum Sacra- 
 mento sed in veritate to handle with his hands, 
 bruise, and grind w T ith his teeth, the Body and 
 Blood of Christ," * as the Roman Church in 
 the time of Innocent II. (1059) compelled 
 Berengar of Tours, under penalty of death, to 
 affirm to be his belief; but, in the spirit of 
 the Eastern Liturgies, " rendering thanks to 
 the Creator of the Universe, to eat the bread 
 offered with thanksgiving and prayer over the 
 things offered, which becometh, for the pray- 
 
 1 " Panem et vinum . . . Sacramento sed in veritate, 
 
 post consecrationem, non so- manibus sacerdotum tractari, 
 
 lum, sacramentium, sed etiam frangi, et fidelium dentibus 
 
 verum corpus et sanguinem atteri." — Robertson, History 
 
 Domini nostri Jesu Christi of the Christian Church, vol. 
 
 esse et sensualiter, non solum iv, p. 361. 
 
70 THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 
 
 er's sake, a certain Holy Body, which hal- 
 loweth those who use the same for a holy 
 purpose." 
 
 It was the deliberate " intention ' of the 
 Revisers of the Ordinal to reject from it the 
 carpocratian notion of physical contact with 
 the Body and Blood of Christ, declared in the 
 words just quoted to be the doctrine of the 
 Roman Church. That with this " intention ,; 
 it should be charged that the Anglican Church, 
 in the office headed " The Form and Manner 
 of Ordering Priests/ ' is using words intended 
 to deceive, is to be interpreted only as mean- 
 ing that she rejects the notion of Priesthood 
 and Sacrifice, held by the Roman Church, as a 
 fond invention of the Aristotelian philosophy, 
 and puts in its place the doctrine of S. Paul 
 in his Epistle to the Hebrews. Du Pin, in the 
 fourth volume of his History of the Christian 
 Church (pp. 174-5), puts the question at issue 
 so clearly, that I cannot do better than quote 
 his own words: " The manner of handling the 
 Christian Religion and its mysteries has not 
 always been uniform in the Church. It has 
 changed at different times, according to the 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 7 l 
 
 different circumstances, or different inclina- 
 tions of men. The Apostles were contented 
 to teach the doctrines they had learned from 
 Jesus Christ with simplicity. The holy Fathers 
 and Ecclesiastical Authors who lived in the 
 first ages of the Church, did not enlarge upon 
 the explication of our mysteries, and never 
 made use of philosophy but to baffle the 
 errors of the Pagans. Afterwards heresies 
 gave occasion to search into doctrines more 
 narrowly, to fix the terms to be made use of 
 in order to express them, and to draw conse- 
 quences from articles expressly revealed ; but 
 it was only through a kind of necessity that 
 the Fathers entered into that discussion and 
 they were very cautious of forming new ques- 
 tions about our mysteries out of wantonness. 
 As they wrote about doctrines but upon the 
 occasion of heresies, so they wrote no treatises 
 expressly in theology upon the doctrines of 
 religion : but they handled them occasionally 
 when any new heresy appeared. The Holy 
 Scriptures and tradition were the principles 
 which they depended upon, nor did they em- 
 ploy reasoning, but only to discover the sense 
 
72 THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 
 
 of Scripture, and the Fathers. ... It was 
 not till the eleventh century that they began 
 to teach in public schools the philosophy of 
 Aristotle, according to the method of the Ara- 
 bians. It was insensibly brought into divinity, 
 and it was produced not only to explain and 
 decide common questions, but also made use 
 of to raise new ones. . . . But as it is 
 difficult * not to wander when one takes a new 
 road/ several of these authors fell into divers 
 errors, or at least expressed themselves in a 
 manner that was condemned by those who 
 were used to the opinions and ways of speak- 
 ing of the Fathers. This method likewise 
 raised abundance of controversies and disputes 
 among the divines. Every one, in order to 
 maintain his own opinion, employed what- 
 ever was most subtle in the logic and meta- 
 physics of the Aristotelians, which produced 
 an infinite number of questions and dis- 
 putes, full of so many quirks and turns, that 
 none but such as were conversant in that art 
 understood anything of the matter, and which 
 it was impossible ever to terminate/ ' No 
 words could more aptly characterize the nature 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 73 
 
 of the changes in the Ordinal of the Roman 
 Church, by the additions made to it from time 
 to time, to give expression to the teaching of 
 the Schoolmen, and the results which followed, 
 in the "quirks and turns' which none but 
 such as were conversant with the metaphysics 
 of the schools could understand, and which it 
 was impossible ever to terminate. Morinus, 
 as we have seen, does not hesitate to declare 
 that the Schoolmen, in making the essence of 
 the sacrament of Ordination to consist in the 
 delivering of the paten and chalice, and the 
 taking part in the offering of the sacred 
 species, were in utter ignorance of what they 
 ought to have known, viz. : that in the Latin 
 Rites before the eleventh century, as well as 
 among the Eastern Churches, Greek, Coptic, 
 and Syrian, from time immemorial, the deliv- 
 ery of the vessels with the words " Receive 
 power to offer sacrifice to God and to celebrate 
 Masses " was a thing unknown. 
 
 Martene went over the ground anew, and 
 came to the conclusion: " Since the matter of 
 Ordination to the Presbyterate cannot possibly 
 be the traditio instrumentorum, nor the form, 
 
74 THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 
 
 the solemn words which the Bishop pro- 
 nounces when he delivers them, we are forced 
 to conclude that the whole essence of the Rite 
 is in the imposition of hands, and in the pray- 
 ers which follow after, especially the three 
 long prayers which by way of preface are 
 sung, known in the Ancient Pontificals by the 
 name of the Consecratio. This alone the Orien- 
 tals, this alone the ancient Fathers, this alone 
 (Holy) Scripture acknowledge." What, then, 
 becomes of Eugenius IV., and his declaration 
 that the essence of the Rite consists in the 
 delivery of the sacred vessels and taking part in 
 the offering of the sacred species ? The Council 
 of Trent, taking warning from the examination 
 given to the subject by the later Schoolmen, did 
 not controvert the position taken by Morinus 
 and Martene, and contented itself with the 
 proviso that the Accipe Spiritum Sanctum, at 
 the close of the Rite, is not said in vain by the 
 Bishop. Which is the greater authority — the 
 Council or the Pope? Both, say some: im- 
 possible, it is afifirmed, by others. At length 
 the happy discovery was made, that the act of 
 Ordination consists of two things, different in 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION. 7$ 
 
 kind, yet making one complex whole. The 
 reputation of Eugenius was saved, by saying 
 that the " Porrectio'instrumentorum " is of the 
 matter of the Rite, and the Accipe Spiritum 
 Sanctum, with the power to remit sin, the 
 form. But what if the Bishop should die be- 
 tween the acts ? Billuart answereth not. 
 
 It is to be remembered, as bearing upon 
 the question of intention, that the Prayer 
 Book and Ordinal of 1662 were the act of both 
 Houses of Convocation, and express the mind 
 of the Church of England both in opposition 
 to the rival parliamentary Book of Common 
 Prayer, prepared by the House of Commons 
 Committee of Religion, at the time, and to 
 the attempt afterwards made under William 
 III. to substitute the word "Minister" for 
 " Priest " in the rubric before the Absolution, 
 and to omit the words '* remission of sins " as 
 " not very intelligible "I 1 
 
 1 See Joyce's The Church of as Testified by the Records of 
 England her Own Reformer her Convocations, pp. 232-244. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE REVISED ORDINAL. 
 
 THREE things the Church of England sought 
 to accomplish in her revision of the Ordinal. 
 She had it in mind, first of all, to justify the 
 ground she had always taken against the 
 usurped claims of the See of Rome, by re- 
 establishing the hierarchy of order as left by 
 the Apostles. She had, in the second place, 
 to purge the Ordinal from the mediaeval accre- 
 tions which, under the cover of the decree of 
 Eugenius IV., had introduced a new order of 
 Ministry in the place of Bishops, Priests, and 
 Deacons. These things accomplished, she 
 had, in opposition to sectaries of every kind, 
 to maintain and preserve, in the third place, 
 the traditions of the Catholic Church. The 
 Prayer Book of 1549 is the product of the first; 
 the Book of 1552 is the witness to the second; 
 the Revision of 1662 is the result of the third. 
 
THE REVISED ORDINAL. 77 
 
 The reformation of the sixteenth and seven- 
 teenth centuries was not a thing of man's de- 
 vising, but of God's sending. It was a flood 
 in which the old world perished, and a new 
 order of things sprung to life. It was, in Bib- 
 lical phrase, an end of the world in which the 
 old and the new came together, collided and 
 assimilated. It was a Divine visitation, in 
 which, as in the fall of Jerusalem, Judgment 
 and Salvation went hand in hand together. In 
 Italy, in Germany, in England, in France, in 
 Spain, in the Netherlands, and in the countries 
 of Northern Europe, Church and State alike 
 felt the shock. The Council of Trent was, 
 after a fashion, a Reforming Council. The 
 Jesuit order arose out of the attempt to rec- 
 oncile the old and the new. In England the 
 travail was great, the conflict prolonged. 
 Church and State in England joined hands 
 together, demanding release from the exorbi- 
 tant and constantly increasing demands of the 
 Papacy. The State refused any longer to al- 
 low its money to go to the support of foreign 
 hirelings. The Church, in Convocation, asked 
 to be freed from an usurpation which could 
 
78 THE REVISED ORDINAL. 
 
 not, in support of its claim to jurisdiction in 
 England, produce a single Canon of any 
 Ecumenical Council. 
 
 To destroy is one thing; to rehabilitate 
 and restore, another. In the preface to the 
 Ordinal, the Church of England says that " It 
 is evident unto all men, diligently reading 
 Holy Scripture and ancient authors, that from 
 the Apostles' time there hath been these 
 orders of Ministers in Christ's Church, Bish- 
 ops, Priests, and Deacons : which Offices were 
 evermore had in such reverent estimation, 
 that no man by his own private authority 
 might presume to execute any of them, except 
 he were first of all called, tried, examined, and 
 known to have such qualities as were requisite 
 for the same. And also by public prayer, 
 with imposition of hands, approved and admit- 
 ted thereunto. And therefore, to the intent 
 these orders should be continued, and rever- 
 ently used, and esteemed, in this Church of 
 England, it is requisite that no man (not being 
 at this present, Bishop, Priest, nor Deacon) 
 shall execute any of them, except he be called, 
 tried, examined, and admitted, according to 
 
THE REVISED ORDINAL. 79 
 
 the form hereafter following. " The Church of 
 England in this declaration cut the gordian- 
 knot, by the sword of the Spirit. She appealed 
 from the schoolmen and their subtleties to 
 Holy Scripture and ancient authors as testify- 
 ing to the Apostolic constitution of the Church : 
 she provided for the perpetuating of the suc- 
 cession, and forbade any man in his " own 
 private authority " to attempt to execute any 
 Office of the Sacred Ministry, without first 
 being duly called to the same. 
 
 But it was not enough to re-establish the 
 primitive order and discipline of the Church ; 
 there were still left the abuses which had 
 sprung out of the introduction of the '* Por- 
 rectio ' into the ritual of Ordination. As 
 early as the Council of Paris, 12 12, the saying 
 of Masses, for the living and the dead, had 
 begun to assume the form of a trade. In 
 the fifteenth century, the founding of Chan- 
 tries where one or more Priests were paid 
 to celebrate, daily, one or more Masses for the 
 founder and his family, became a popular 
 form of religious devotion. Private Masses 
 began to take the place of the one common 
 
80 THE REVISED ORDINAL. 
 
 Mass : it was held that special Masses were of 
 more avail for the delivering of souls from 
 purgatory than the regular offering of the 
 Eucharistic sacrifice in public worship. It is 
 the rule of the Eastern Church that a Priest 
 cannot repeat the offering in the same Church 
 on the same day; but in the West no sooner 
 did the offering of private Masses become a 
 matter of gain, in the hands of the Chantry 
 Priests, than any number of Masses were 
 said; and no Priest would receive Commun- 
 ion at another Priest's hands. In the Ordi- 
 nal of 1549, the giving of paten and chalice 
 was retained as a sign of induction into office, 
 but to mark that the Priest was to be a 
 Minister of the Word, as well as of the 
 Sacraments, a Bible was added; in 1552 the 
 " Porrectio instrumentorum " was stricken 
 out, as the root from which had sprung the 
 whole of the superstitious growth that had led 
 to the multiplication of altars, and the selling 
 of Masses for purposes of gain. The over- 
 laying of the original Rite of laying on of 
 hands and the invocation of the Holy Ghost, 
 by a mass of ceremonial, which, however much 
 
THE REVISED ORDINAL. 8 1 
 
 calculated to attract the masses, had ceased 
 to be either impressive or significant, brought 
 on a reaction in favour of greater simplicity 
 in the inducting of Bishops and Priests into 
 office. It was found, by experience, that the 
 ceremonial adjuncts had not only been the 
 means of keeping out of sight the original 
 significance of the Rite, but had been made a 
 cover for the introducing of novelties of every 
 kind, to the detriment of the faith, and the 
 hurt of true religion. If it served no other pur- 
 pose, the Ordinal of the second Prayer Book of 
 Edward VI. made it clear that the essential ele- 
 ment in the Sacrament of Order is the laying on 
 of hands, and the invocation of the Holy Ghost. 
 Roman Catholic writers, of the ultramon- 
 tane type, have made the Ordinal of Edward 
 VI. their special object of attack ; their 
 reason for so doing is, that it uncovers the 
 weakness of their position, by sweeping out 
 of existence the blind which, under the guise 
 of ceremonial, they have used for introducing 
 their scholastic doctrine of Transubstantiation 
 into the making of Priests. It is in vain they 
 attempt to prove that matter and form are 
 
82 THE REVISED ORDINAL. 
 
 not preserved, in the simple rite of laying on 
 of hands, and the invocation of the Holy 
 Ghost. Driven from their position, by their 
 own most approved theologians, they take 
 refuge in " intention " ; and in doing so shuffle 
 and play false with the principle, which it is to 
 the honour of the Roman Church that she has 
 put beyond contradiction, viz., that the valid- 
 ity of the Sacrament does not depend upon 
 the subjective condition of the Minister of the 
 Rite, either in the way of personal holiness, 
 or logical apprehension of that which he is 
 called upon to perform. 
 
 Done with the intriguing Jesuitical faction 
 which has never ceased to labour to disturb 
 her peace, the Anglican Church had another 
 enemy to overcome before she was permitted 
 to be at rest to do her appointed work. Two 
 Martyrs, at least, witness to the purity of her 
 ' ' intention ' ' in seeking to maintain the Catholic 
 doctrine of Sacrifice and Priesthood, and the 
 liturgical worship of the Church, as part and 
 parcel of the tradition which from the begin- 
 ning has been received by the Church of Eng- 
 land. The great question of the time was, 
 
THE REVISED ORDINAL. 83 
 
 whether the old Church of England is to be 
 the Church of the nation, or there is to be a 
 new Church, and a new Prayer Book, to suit 
 the demands of the Puritans. The results of 
 the struggle, to which King and Archbishop 
 gave their lives, are embodied in the Prayer 
 Book of 1662. As the Puritans contended 
 that there is no difference between Priest and 
 Bishop, since their offices were not distin- 
 guished at the time of Laying on of Hands, 
 the revisers of the Prayer Book of 1552, in 
 order to set the matter at rest, so far as the 
 intention of the Church of England is con- 
 cerned, added the words " for the office and 
 work of a Priest/ ' in the one case, and " for 
 the office and work of a Bishop," in the other, 
 to the simpler form of 1552. In so doing she 
 went farther than the Roman Church has ever 
 done in declaring her " intention," and " has 
 killed two birds with one stone": — she has 
 not only replied to the Puritan quibble, but 
 has also put herself in declaration, against the 
 Roman notion of the Episcopate being only a 
 higher grade of the Priesthood, and not a dif- 
 ferent Order. 
 
84 THE REVISED ORDINAL. 
 
 The answer to the plea of lack of inten- 
 tion, then, is the Prayer Book of 1662. The 
 Church of England, in answer to the Puritan 
 attempt to degrade the Episcopate, and to put 
 the Presbyterate in its place, has put herself 
 upon record that she holds to the Apostolic 
 tradition of three Orders of the Ministry, 
 each with its own indelible character, each in 
 its own way perpetuating the three-fold Minis- 
 try of our Lord. She has affirmed, moreover, 
 that a Priest is sent not only to be a Minister 
 of the Word, but a sacerdos, whose duty it is 
 to offer in behalf of the people, and admin- 
 ister the Sacrament. She required, more- 
 over, that every Minister who, at the time, 
 held any preferment in the Church shall 
 affirm his belief in the Ordinal, by making 
 the following declaration: " I, A. B., do 
 declare my unfeigned assent and consent to 
 all and everything contained and prescribed in 
 and by the book, entitled ' The Book of Com- 
 mon Prayer, and Administration of the Sacra- 
 ments; and other Rites and Ceremonies of the 
 Church/ according to the use of the Church 
 of England, together with the Psalter or 
 
THE REVISED ORDINAL. 85 
 
 Psalms of David, pointed as they are to be 
 said or sung in Churches; and the Form and 
 Manner of making, ordaining, and consecrat- 
 ing of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. " 
 
 There is no portion of her Liturgical Version 
 of which the Church of England has such good 
 reason to be proud as her Ordinal. It is as far 
 superior to the Roman Pontifical, as it is to 
 the attempt of Baxter to reform the Litur- 
 gy after his own fashion. Nowhere do the 
 wisdom and moderation which characterized 
 the Church of her England, in dealing with 
 the opposition she had to encounter, on 
 the right hand and on the left, manifest itself 
 more than in the way she approached the 
 reconstruction of the discordant elements with 
 which she had to deal when she attempted 
 the revision of the Ordinal. It was a work for 
 which Cranmer was peculiarly fitted. What- 
 ever his logical defects when he had to deal 
 with matters of doctrine, his Litany will endure 
 as long as the English tongue is spoken, to 
 attest his appreciation of all that is noblest and 
 best in the devotional literature of the past. 
 
86 THE REVISED ORDINAL. 
 
 In the year 1541 we find him superintending 
 a revision of the Service-books. In 1542 he 
 gives notice " that all Mass-books, Antiphon- 
 ers, portiuses (breviaries) in the Church of 
 England should be newly examined, correct- 
 ed, reformed, . . . and that after ejecting su- 
 perstitious Orations, Collects, Versicles, etc., 
 their places should be supplied by services 
 made out of the Scriptures and other authentic 
 doctors/' The Ordinal of 1550 was in all es- 
 sential points the same as the Sarum Pontifi- 
 cal. The distinction between what was of the 
 Essence of the Rite, and the Ceremonies 
 which in the growth of centuries had been 
 allowed to accumulate around the Rite, was 
 carefully observed throughout. 
 
 Among the ceremonies dispensed with was 
 the anointing of the hands of Priest and 
 Bishop — a ceremony which had crept into the 
 Roman Rite from the Celtic Church, by way 
 of Gaul, after the ninth century; the cere- 
 monies of the Ring and Mitre in the consecra- 
 tion, of still later introduction, were likewise 
 set aside. The truth is that ceremonial had be- 
 come so burdensome that it had ceased to be 
 
THE REVISED ORDINAL. 87 
 
 significant. It was regarded not as an acces- 
 sory, but as necessary to valid Ordination ; and 
 the time had arrived when it was desirable to 
 make plain what is of the Essence of the Rite 
 of Ordination, and what is not. 
 
 But more important still was the casting out 
 of the things which had been introduced with 
 mischievous intent and were used to symbolize 
 false doctrine. The presentation of the ves- 
 sels, as a sign of induction, was allowed in 
 the Prayer Book of 1549, but afterwards re- 
 moved for the reason that it symbolized that 
 half truth, which the mediaeval Church had 
 made everything ; and had therefore come to 
 be regarded as essential. " The priest's lips 
 should keep knowledge ' (Mai. ii. 7). The 
 celebration of the Holy Mysteries is one part 
 of the priestly calling, not the whole. We 
 know as a matter of fact how hard it is to 
 strike the balance between the devotional and 
 ceremonial part of religion, and the building of 
 the people up in the duties of their high calling. 
 
 And it was not only the striking out of the 
 *' Porrectio ' that was necessary, but the re- 
 moval also of the adjuncts which had gathered 
 
88 THE REVISED ORDINAL, 
 
 around it and made it appear to be of the 
 very " Essence of the Rite of Ordination/' 
 The second Imposition of Hands in the Ro- 
 man Ordinal must mean either that the first 
 was not sufficient; or it was intended to de- 
 grade the Apostolic Rite and make it serve 
 their purpose of an introduction to something 
 more vital than itself, without which it was to 
 be regarded as of little or no account. Hence 
 Maskell, in speaking of the insuperable diffi- 
 culties which had baffled the efforts of the 
 Council of Trent to bring order out of dis- 
 order, says, in speaking of the revisers of the 
 Anglican Ordinal, " it was still more wise and 
 accordant with all ancient precedent both of 
 opinion and practice, by uniting the two Forms, 
 and restoring the one imposition of hands, to 
 remove all doubts and difficulties on the sub- 
 ject ' {Mon. Rit. Celebratio Ordinum, vol. iii, 
 p. 221, n.). 
 
 It may then be confidently affirmed, without 
 fear of contradiction, that the Ordinal of 1662 
 is in every way superior, both as to matter 
 and form, to the modern Roman Rite. It 
 has reduced to unity that which for centuries 
 
THE REVISED ORDINAL. 89 
 
 had been a mere disjecta membra, without 
 connection of parts: it has provided for the 
 necessary ceremonial adjuncts to give signifi- 
 cance to the Rite ; it has taken out of the way 
 all possible objection to the form of the Rite 
 by discriminating between Bishops, Priests, 
 and Deacons, in the receiving of the Grace of 
 Ordination. It is in this respect more perfect 
 than the Roman Ordinal itself. When to these 
 things we add the declaration under which it 
 was set forth, it will be seen how futile the 
 attempt is to invalidate English Orders on the 
 ground of intention: " And be it further 
 enacted by the authority aforesaid that no 
 person whatsoever shall henceforth be capable 
 to be admitted to any parsonage, vicarage, 
 benefice, or other ecclesiastical promotion or 
 dignity whatsoever, nor shall presume to con- 
 secrate and administer the Holy Sacrament of 
 the Lord's Supper before such time as he shall 
 be ordained priest according to the form and 
 manner in and by the said book prescribed, 
 unless he have formerly been made priest by 
 Episcopal Ordination " (Act of Uniformity ', 14 
 Charles II., cap. 4, A.D. 1662). 
 
VIL 
 
 L ENVOI. 
 
 The tone and temper of the Italian Mission 
 in England have undergone little or no change 
 within the last thirteen hundred years. When 
 Augustine, at the instance of Gregory the 
 Great, entered on his work he found himself 
 at variance with the remnant of the British 
 Church that had survived the inroad of the 
 Angles and Saxons, in some unimportant 
 matters of ceremonial observance. The Ro- 
 man Monks differed from the British in the 
 w T ay of cutting the hair. The Roman tonsure 
 was in the form of a circle, around which was 
 left a fringe of hair, more or less wide, mys- 
 tically regarded as symbolizing the Saviours 
 crown. The Celtic tonsure was in the form of 
 a half moon extending from ear to ear, with 
 the back of the head unshorn. The Roman 
 party, with a view to put the stamp of op- 
 
L ENVOI. 91 
 
 probrium on the native Rite, declared it to 
 be the invention of the Arch-heretic, Simon 
 Magus; while others, to show their contempt 
 for the national Church, attributed its origin 
 to the swineherd of King Logharie. 
 
 Another point of difference was the time for 
 keeping of the Easter festival. Prior to the 
 Council of Nicaea the two Churches were in 
 the habit of celebrating Easter at the same 
 time, the most ancient Roman table being in 
 accord with that of the British Church. The 
 British Church during the time of its separa- 
 tion, through the irruption of the barbarians, 
 held on to its old eighty-four-year cycle, while 
 the Roman Church adopted an improved form 
 of intercalation, not on theological but on 
 astronomical grounds. 
 
 There were other differences, both in the 
 mode of administering baptism, and the prac- 
 tice of single ordination, but with the excep- 
 tion of the latter the diversities were few, and 
 not of a serious kind. They would have been 
 arranged probably but for an unfortunate oc- 
 currence which took place some time after the 
 starting of the Mission. Held in doubt as to 
 
92 U ENVOI. 
 
 what was best under the circumstances to do, 
 the British Bishops took the advice of a wise 
 and holy man. He advised them to be guided 
 by circumstances when they met with Augus- 
 tine according to appointment. If he rose to 
 meet them when they approached they were 
 to enter into conference ; if he refused to do 
 so, they were to withhold their confidence. It 
 was a simple test, yet it implied a good deal. 
 The British Bishops were to be ready to sur- 
 render things of minor importance, but when 
 it came to assumption of authority, they were 
 to be on their guard. It is a story with a 
 moral to it, and I propose to devote this con- 
 cluding chapter to its illustration. 
 
 One of the earliest controversies in the 
 Christian Church was about this very matter 
 of the keeping of Easter. The Jewish con- 
 verts to the faith were accustomed to join to- 
 gether in one their celebration of the Jewish 
 and the Christian Passover. It was in some 
 respects a good thing, for it kept alive the 
 notion of the organic unity of the old and the 
 new dispensations. But there were disadvan- 
 tages which, from another point of view as 
 
C ENVOI. 93 
 
 time went on, came to light, and more than 
 counterbalanced the advantages. What if the 
 day for the keeping of the Jewish Passover, 
 the 14th of Nisan, fell upon a Friday ? The 
 Gentile Churches, not bound by Jewish tradi- 
 tion, solved the difficulty by keeping the feast, 
 not on the day of the new moon, but on the 
 Sunday after. It was the better day, for it 
 brought to light the fact, that our Lord was 
 the beginning of a new dispensation, as well 
 as the fulfilment and completion of the old. 
 
 When Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna and dis- 
 ciple of S. John, went to Rome, the difference 
 of observance, between the Jewish and Gentile 
 Churches, became a practical question. Shall 
 Polycarp be compelled to do as Rome does ? 
 Or shall religion stoop to acknowledge the 
 courtesy due to a stranger and respect his 
 wishes ? Anicetus, who was Bishop of Rome 
 at the time, placed at the disposal of the 
 Bishop of Smyrna a Church where he might 
 celebrate the feast at his own time, and in his 
 own way. It was a courteous act, and it 
 affords positive proof that diversity of Rites 
 and Ceremonies was not only tolerated at 
 
94 r envoi. 
 
 the time in Rome, but was regarded as part 
 of the Church's Catholic heritage. 
 
 Forty years after, things came to an issue 
 between Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, and 
 Victor of Rome. Victor, with a view of se- 
 curing uniformity, sent out a request to the 
 Churches asking them to meet together in 
 Council, and take action on the Paschal ques- 
 tion. The Bishop of Ephesus, in replying for 
 the Churches of Asia Minor, stood upon the 
 Apostolic traditions of his See, and the prac- 
 tice of S. John, and gave Victor to understand 
 that he was prepared to defend his position, 
 and would not suffer dictation from the Ro- 
 man See. Victor did not heed the warning 
 of the venerable Bishop of Ephesus, and took 
 upon himself to excommunicate the Churches 
 of Asia Minor, and all who were in sympathy 
 with them in their keeping of the Easter feast. 
 His action was not sustained by the Episcopate 
 at large ; it did not please all the Bishops, 
 Eusebius tells us (book V, xxiii-xxv). Ire- 
 naeus, who had been brought up in Asia Minor, 
 and followed in Gaul the Western custom, 
 wrote to Victor and " fittingly admonished 
 
n envoi. 95 
 
 him that he had no right to cut off whole 
 Churches of God which observed the traditions 
 of an ancient custom/' Gaul, under the 
 leader of Irenaeus, joined Asia Minor in rebuk- 
 ing the arrogant spirit of Victor of Rome, and 
 the Churches of Asia Minor went on following 
 their own customs for eighty years and more, 
 notwithstanding the excommunication. The 
 Roman See, through its hasty and violent 
 action, found itself virtually excommunicated 
 by the Church throughout the world. The 
 first Papal decretal failed of its mark, and it 
 was left to the Council of Nicaea — the first 
 Ecumenical Council — to adjust, in a conciliar 
 way, the difficulty which the Decretal of Vic- 
 tor only made worse. The significance of all 
 this will appear later on when I come to deal 
 with the False Decretals. It will then be seen 
 that the Roman See has not only put another 
 Ministry in the place of the Ministry insti- 
 tuted by the Apostles, but has also used ille- 
 gitimate means to force its " decretal system 
 of law," and substitute it for " the conciliar 
 law* of the Church, acting through its ecu- 
 menical and provincial Councils. 
 
96 U ENVOI. 
 
 The Church of North Africa held a position 
 very similar to the Church of Asia Minor in 
 the post-Apostolic age. It fought for the 
 unity of the Church in opposition to schism 
 as Asia Minor had contended for the Faith 
 against heresy. It was ever ready to acknowl- 
 edge the honorary primacy of the Roman See, 
 but refused to recognize its claims to suprem- 
 acy — happily for the Church, for had it done 
 so the battle of Pelagianism would have been 
 fought in vain. 
 
 The African Church, in the year 416, in 
 synods held at Carthage and Mileve, condemned 
 Pelagius and Caelestius as heretics. They sent 
 notice of their condemnation to Innocent I. 
 who excommunicated them also. Zosimus, 
 after succeeding Innocent in 417, opened up 
 the case anew, called a synod at Rome and 
 restored both Pelagius and Caelestius to com- 
 munion, summoned Paulinus to appear at 
 Rome, and excommunicated Heros and Laz- 
 arus, Bishops of Gaul, who had taken part in 
 accusing the heretics. Thereupon, after some 
 correspondence with Zosimus, a Council of 
 two hundred Bishops met at Carthage, which 
 
V ENVOI. 97 
 
 not only in the most unmistakable terms con- 
 demned Pelagianism as a heresy, but forbade 
 appeals to Rome, on pain of excommunica- 
 tion. It was declared to be a violation of all 
 established law, that a Roman Council, under 
 the dictation of the Pope, should undo the 
 action of another provincial Council, approved 
 and confirmed by his own predecessor. Pauli- 
 nus, when called upon to appear at Rome, 
 had refused to do so ; the Council of Carthage 
 now takes the further step of forbidding ap- 
 peals to Rome altogether. Zosimus, like Vic- 
 tor, found he had made a bad mistake. He 
 roused up Augustine, as Victor had Irenaeus to 
 deal with. He crept out of the position he 
 had put himself in, by writing a high-flown 
 letter on the claims of the Roman See, declar- 
 ing his readiness to consult his brethren, 
 though of course the chair of Peter did not 
 need any one to help it in determining what it 
 ought to do! The Emperor Honorius now 
 appeared upon the scene, and issued a rescript 
 from Ravenna (418) condemning the new 
 heretics. Thereupon Zosimus faced about, 
 joined in the excommunication of Pelagius and 
 7 
 
98 n envoi 
 
 Caelestius, and required all Bishops to sub- 
 scribe to his circular letter on the subject. 
 
 The relations between Rome and North 
 Africa are illustrated by another case of a dif- 
 ferent kind, in which the Roman See falls into 
 the snare in which pride and arrogance are sure 
 to be caught, when they refuse to make con- 
 fession of their fault, and are determined, at 
 all hazards, to maintain an unjust case. What 
 cannot be done by fair means must be done 
 by foul. A Priest of Mauritania, who had 
 been excommunicated by Urbanus of Sicca, 
 appealed to Zosimus for restoration. Zosimus 
 ordered Apiarius to be restored, but Bishop 
 Urbanus paid no heed to the command. Zosi- 
 mus thereupon sent Faustinus, Bishop of Po- 
 tentia, with two presbyters, charged with a 
 commonitorium in his name. They appeared 
 at a Council called to receive their communi- 
 cation. They were ordered to produce their cre- 
 dentials. When Faustinus the legate read the 
 commonitorium , in which was inserted a Canon, 
 quoted as one of the Canons of Nicaea, by which 
 a Bishop, deposed by a provincial Council, 
 
L ENVOI. 99 
 
 was allowed to appeal to Rome, Alypius, who, 
 it will be remembered, was a life-long friend 
 of S. Augustine, was present at the Council, as 
 Bishop of Tagaste. When the Canon quoted 
 as a Canon of Nicaea had been read, Alypius 
 interrupted the Roman legate, saying, " We 
 do not find these words in the Greek copies of 
 the Canons of Nicaea." After some discussion 
 the Council was adjourned, until opportunity 
 should be given to obtain certified copies of 
 the Canons of the Great Council. It was 
 found, upon examination, that the Canon 
 quoted as a Canon of the Council of Nicaea 
 was a Canon, not of the Great Ecumenical 
 Council, but a Canon of the Council of Sar- 
 dica, in which Roman influence had predomi- 
 nated. The case was opened up anew. Api- 
 arius made confession of his wrong-doing. He 
 was dismissed from his See, and the African 
 Church wrote to Celestine I. (the successor of 
 Zosimus), begging that, in future, he would not 
 lend an ear to persons who came from Africa. 
 ' The receiving of appeals/' they declared, 
 ' was an attack upon the rights of the African 
 Church. What was alleged in its favour as a 
 
100 V ENVOI. 
 
 Nicene Canon could not be found in the genu- 
 ine Acts of Nicaea, which had been obtained 
 from Constantinople and Alexandria " (Hefele, 
 vol. iii, p. 480). 
 
 It would seem to be beyond the bounds 
 of credibility that, after such an exposure, 
 the Roman See would ever attempt again to 
 ground its claims to supremacy by tampering 
 with the Canons of the Council of Nicsea. 
 Notwithstanding, when the question of suprem- 
 acy came up anew, at the Council of Con- 
 stantinople, the very same claims were made, 
 and the proof of forgery was even more fatal 
 to the justice of the claim than in North Africa. 
 This time the contest was between Leo the 
 Great, represented by his delegates, and the 
 See of Constantinople, " the New Rome," 
 now rising into power. When the Imperial 
 Commissioners who presided at the Council, 
 called upon the opposing parties to produce the 
 Canons on which they based their claims, the 
 Roman delegate Paschasinus produced the 
 6th Canon of the 318 holy fathers on the side 
 of Rome, quoting the words, " Quod Eccle- 
 
V ENVOI. 10 1 
 
 sia Romana semper habuit primatium," etc. 
 ^Etius, the Archdeacon of Constantinople, 
 who defended the action of the Council in 
 conferring new powers of jurisdiction on the 
 Imperial City, handed a codex to one of the 
 secretaries, and asked for the authentic Greek 
 words of the Canon, cited by Paschasinus, to 
 be read aloud. No Greek word corresponding 
 to primatium (primacy) could be found in the 
 Greek text. On the contrary, according to 
 the " ancient customs/' it was found that 
 Rome was placed on an equal footing with 
 Antioch and Alexandria. It has been urged, 
 in behalf of Zosimus, that he may himself 
 have been deceived in quoting the Sardican 
 Canon on appeals as a Canon of the Council 
 of Nicaea, for the reason that the Sardican 
 Canons were found, as an appendage to the 
 Canons of Nicaea, at Rome ; and it was the 
 habit of the Romans to regard the one as of 
 equal authority with the other. It is a poor 
 excuse for a See claiming infallibility. But 
 whatever apology may be pleaded in behalf of 
 Zosimus, there is no excuse to be offered for 
 tampering with the Canons of Nicaea and the 
 
102 L' EN VOL 
 
 placing of the word primatium in a Canon 
 where the Roman See is made to hold the 
 same rank as the Sees of Antioch and Alex- 
 andria. The very Canon on which Leo, follow- 
 ing * * the custom of the Roman Church, ' ' rested 
 his cause (even if it had not been tampered 
 with by introducing a word which has nothing 
 to correspond to it in the original), would not 
 have helped to establish the Roman claim, for 
 it declares that the privileges of the three great 
 patriarchal Sees, Rome, Antioch, and Alexan- 
 dria, were accorded to them by u the ancient cus- 
 toms " ; not based, as alleged, on Divine right. 
 
 Not able to force the ancient law of the 
 Church into a recognition of the absolute 
 supremacy of " Peter's Chair," the next thing 
 to be done was to make a new form of law, 
 which shall take the place of the old " con- 
 ciliar law" of the Church; and so establish 
 the claim to plenitude of power which cannot, 
 without the charge of fraud, find recognition 
 in the Canon law of the Nicene age. How 
 shall it be brought about ? Who can be found 
 to make the attempt ? 
 
i: envoi. 103 
 
 Many literary forgeries have been attempted 
 to impose upon the credulity of mankind, but 
 it may without exaggeration be affirmed that 
 never has been a forgery committed so won- 
 derful in its character, so far-reaching and 
 mighty in its results, as that which made its 
 appearance in the middle of the ninth century, 
 known as " the False Decretals." It was, from 
 first to last, a stupendous fraud. It emanated 
 from the school of Boniface of Mentz, and 
 was put forth with a view of justifying the 
 pretensions of the Roman See from the time 
 of Zosimus to Nicholas I. So artfully was 
 the forgery done that the Popes of the time 
 were themselves betrayed into a belief of 
 the alleged Decretals. The wish was father 
 to the thought ; they greedily swallowed the 
 bait, and began to act upon the newly discov- 
 ered letters of Popes, extending in regular suc- 
 cession from Siricius up to S. Clement, the 
 immediate successor of S. Peter in the Roman 
 See. Victor I., in the close of the second 
 century, writes a letter to Theophilus of Alex- 
 andria, in the beginning of the fifth century. 
 The early Bishops of Rome quote the Revised 
 
104 V ENVOI. 
 
 Version of S. Jerome with the greatest famil- 
 iarity. Anacletus, named as second in the 
 order of Roman Bishops, assures us that " this 
 sacrosant and Apostolic Roman Church did 
 not obtain its primacy, or acquire its eminence 
 of power, over all Churches, and the whole 
 flock of the Christian people, from the Apos- 
 tles, but from our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ/ ' And " this Apostolic See has been 
 made the hinge and head of all Churches by 
 the Lord Himself, and no other; and as a door 
 is guided by the hinge, so, through the Lord's 
 institution, all Churches are guided by the 
 authority of the Holy See." Anacletus, in 
 his elaborate attempt at symbolism, does not 
 think it worth while to tell us who invented 
 the " hinge." Gratian, in the twelfth cen- 
 tury, embodied these forged Decretals in his 
 Concordantia Discordantia Canonum y and they 
 became part and parcel of the Ecclesiastical 
 Law to which the Popes are chiefly indebted 
 for the authority they exercised in the thir- 
 teenth and following centuries. The genuine- 
 ness of the False Decretals was taken for 
 granted, their principles were carried out sys- 
 
VENVOL I05 
 
 tematically ; and so Decretal law, based upon 
 the Decrees of the Popes, was made to take 
 the place of the old Canonical system. It was 
 not until the middle of the sixteenth century 
 that the fraud was exposed by the Magdeburg 
 Centuriators. Blondell, in the seventeenth 
 century, the two Ballerini, in the eighteenth 
 century, succeeded in securing universal ac- 
 knowledgment to the spuriousness of the 
 Decretals before the time of Siricius. But 
 Gratian had done his work; the Decretal sys- 
 tem took the place of the old Conciliar system. 
 As the Schoolmen had succeeded in substitut- 
 ing a new order of Ministry, Priest, Deacon, 
 and Sub-deacon, for the three Orders instituted 
 by the Apostles,' so the school of Canon Law, 
 founded at Bologna by Gratian, substituted 
 the Decretal system which made the Pope a 
 law unto himself for the system of Canon Law 
 based upon the acts of the Ecumenical Coun- 
 cils, and the practice of the Universal Church 
 in its Provincial and Diocesan synods. 
 
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