of the Church is something which has been conferred on him once for all, and which dominates everything that he does, or is. It does not cease when he leaves church. Only its external opportunities are alterednot its essential character-when he is withdrawn from parochial office altogether. Wherever he is, he still, in his personal life, bears the same relation to the Church, and to the world. He cannot but be a representative persona. He is always, in his own spiritual attitude and effort to Godward for man, to manward for God-called to realize, and (as it were) to personify, the characteristic priestliness of the Church. This is not because he is an intermediary between Christ and His Church; it is not because he is something which the Church is not; but because he is set to represent, in his own personality, with an eminent distinctiveness, that which the whole Church cannot but essentially be. If she is priestly because from her proceeds the aroma of a perpetual offering-her mystical identity with the perpetual selfoffering of her Lord-before the Majesty of the Father's presence; if, in corresponding necessity of spirit, she is priestly because her arms are perpetually lifted up to intercede for, and to succour, those who need the sacrifice of love; ever presenting to God on their behalf the homage. which they have not learnt to present for themselves, and spending and suffering for God in service to them; so is it with him, as by God's will and act specially ordained to be her ministerial representative.

The inwardness, then, of priesthood is the spirit of sacrifice; and the spirit of sacrifice is the spirit of love in a world of sin and pain, whose expression in the inner soul is priestly intercession, and whose utterance in the outward life is devotion of ministry for others' :-for others, from the Christ-like point of view, as for those for whom Christ died. The Levitical priesthood belonged distinctively to the side of ceremonial function, and might be both adequately fulfilled and adequately defined in terms of

ceremonial enactment only; but a Christian priesthood misapprehends itself which can be content to find the beginning and end of its definition or meaning in terms only of what is outward and ceremonial, or in any sacramental service, however intelligent it may be or reverent in itself, which does not sweep in the whole heart, and action, and life. There are not only priestly functions, or priestly prerogatives: there is also a priestly spirit and a priestly heart-more vital to true reality of priesthood than any mere performance of priestly functions. Now this priestly spirit-I must repeat it once more—is not the exclusive possession of the ordained ministry; it is the spirit of the priestly Church. But those who are ordained 'priests' are bound to be eminently leaders and representatives of this priestliness of spirit, and they have assigned to them an external sphere and professional duties which constitute a special opportunity, and a charisma of grace which constitutes a special call and a special capacity, for its exercise. Such opportunity and call are inseparable from the oversight of the life of the Christian body to Godward, and they are as wide as is the life of the Christian body. Leadership in Eucharistic worship, truly understood, is its highest typical expression, the mystical culmination of its executive privilege; but Eucharistic leadership, truly understood, involves many corollaries of spirit and life-the bearing of the people on the heart before God; the earnest effort of intercessory entreating; the practical translation of intercession into pastoral life, and anxiety, and pain. Things like these are necessary elements in that inwardness of spirit which should correspond to and explain the outward dignity of executive function; and apart from which the outward dignity of executive function, even in its highest point of mystical reality, is as the shell or the shadow, the outward presentment and image, the technical enacting -not the true heart-of Christian priesthood.

It is necessary, then, to emphasize unreservedly the

truth that the priesthood of ministry and of laity are not really antithetical or inconsistent, but rather correlative, complimentary, nay, mutually indispensable ideas1. Magnify first the solemnity of ministerial priesthood, and then from that expound the dignity and power of the priesthood of the laity; or, if you will, magnify lay priesthood first, and mount from thence to its concentrated meaning in those who are set apart personally to represent the collective priesthood, and to wield it ministerially in either case your exposition will lead to results which will be no less. true than they may well be felt to be amazing. But use the phrases 'priesthood of the laity' (or 'priesthood of the body') in order to discredit the idea of ministerial priesthood; and from ministerial priesthood thus explained away turn to draw out what the universal priesthood practically means; and you will have succeeded, with admirable skill, in conjuring both realities into empty air. It will only remain to toss the whole nomenclature aside, as an unmeaning or misleading metaphor.

1 I have thought it convenient, upon the whole, to leave in this place the phrase 'priesthood of ministry and of laity.' But it has been pointed out to me-and the observation is of some importance-that there is a certain inexactness in the collective phrase 'priesthood of the laity,' which cannot be alleged against Jerome's 'sacerdotium laici.' The laity, collectively as laity, have no distinctive priesthood. There is a collective priesthood of the ministry; and there is a collective priesthood of the body as a whole. In this all members of the body, whether ministers or laymen, share. But though there is assuredly a priesthood in which every layman should claim part, yet any phrase which seems to imply that the laity corporately, as laity, have a priesthood in which the ministry does not share, or which may be set over against the priesthood of the ministry, is, so far, misleading.

III.

It will be observed that if the present contention be true, if the Church of Christ is, because Christ is, inherently priestly, and the ministry of the Church is the ministerial presentment of the Church's priestliness, and priestliness, to be real, must be the perfect outward expression of correspondingly perfect inwardness, there will follow a principle of considerable importance. It will follow that the 'priestly' aspect of the ministry, whose executive culmination is Eucharistic leadership, and its aspect as guiding and governing with general oversight (коý), or as ministering pastorally to, the Body and its members, are not things substantially different: they cannot be properly sundered: each in its reality requires and implies the other: they differ not as two things, or as three, but as several aspects of one. The true priestliness necessarily carries with it the pastoral character: the real pastoral character is but an expression, in outward life, of priestliness. And if they thus, of inward necessity 1, contain and imply each other, then of course they must always have done so, from the very first. 'Sacerdotalism' may have acquired some disproportionate exposition, or been linked to exaggerated claims: but if sacerdotalism, name and thing, be in any true sense a later accretion to the idea of Christian ministry; if it did not, in essence, belong to it inherently from the first; if oversight of the Christian body had not always this inner

1 It is not denied, of course, that either can be-and often has beenartificially taken apart, in injurious and un-Christlike isolation from the other. Only in its proper richness of Divine power can neither of them be realized without the other.

character, and this inner character did not always imply the spirit and activities of pastoral oversight-then indeed we must sorrowfully admit that our entire interpretation is at fault; and with it, the mind and language of the Church as a whole, for at least some seventeen centuries.

But were the two things ever separate? Think first of the Scripture. Now I shall admit that in the words of Scripture, both the connexion of Christian ministry with Eucharistic leadership, and the application to Eucharistic worship of sacrificial and priestly language, is less explicit than we might perhaps at first sight have expected. One or two reasons, however, suggest themselves which constitute a perfectly sufficient answer to any question on this score. First and foremost, Christian life and Christian worship are essentially spiritual. If the spiritual expresses itself by material means, the material means are to be only expressions of the spiritual. Any approach to very strong insistence, in the Scripture itself, upon the means, as such, would almost inevitably have resulted in an exaggeration of the intrinsic sanctity of what was outward and mechanical. Considering the extreme readiness of human nature to take refuge from spiritual reality in mechanical observance; considering the extent to which this has been done, and (one may almost say) the daily difficulty of preventing its being done, in this very matter of the materializing of sacramental worship

-we can hardly, on second thoughts, feel any surprise if, in the scriptural picture of the Apostolic Church, we find a marked and most impressive reserve from any such emphasis on the external ordinances of religion. But if there is, in the Acts and Epistles, less direct emphasis than mere men might have laid upon sacramental outwardness, it remains none the less-but rather the more -emphatically to be remembered, first, that to the Church and her life the atoning Blood of Christ (including in that word not its shedding only, but its offering in heaven) is everything; secondly, that Jesus Christ bequeathed, when