one

and more explicitly recognized as the channels divinely appointed for indispensable order, were at first too freely and too richly overflowed to be formally distinguishable as channels. They were overflowed, naturally enough, under the conditions of a period which, while it was marked on the hand by an effervescence of spiritual enthusiasm-attested for the time by miraculous manifestations, yet in its very nature and necessity transient-was on the other hand necessarily as yet incapable of understanding either the indispensable necessity, or the indispensable conditions, of a system of order guaranteed and continuous, throughout the life of a great historical community.

If we maintain that the Churches depended really from the first upon apostolic commission, and that the outcome of the apostolic age was a definite conception as to the principle of transmission of apostolic authority, as illustrated in one aspect by Clement of Rome and in another by Ignatius of Antioch, we certainly shall not doubt that it had been only by degrees, in the natural process of a living experience, that this principle became formal and explicit in the Christian consciousness, and therefore rigid in its expression as outward method or rule. If, for example, it was by St. Paul, and in dependence on St. Paul's apostolic authority, that presbyters were constituted in the churches of Asia Minor, we do not therefore suggest that during the many consecutive years of St. Paul's imprisonment in Caesarea and in Rome there never was, because there never could have been, under whatever necessity, any fresh accession either to

the ranks of the presbyters or to the number of 'confirmed' and communicant Christians. This is just the wrong sort of emphasis to lay upon what was doubtless establishing itself as principle before it was yet crystallized as rule. We may indeed fairly say that presbyterate was derived from the apostles; that the recorded history, from the very first, shows us this principle in (as it were) instinctive operation; and that the apostolic age as a whole left it translated into the form of definite outward necessary usages which at once directly expressed and directly protected it. But we can hardly doubt that there was a period, while apostles were remote and the direct action of the Spirit was on all sides miraculously manifest, when consciousness as to limitations of outward method was not yet definite, and questions about the distinction of mediate or immediate exercise of apostolic government were neither asked nor answered. We do not deprecate a recognition of historical gradualness so obviously probable and lifelike as this. What we do deprecate is the inference which is apt to be drawn, that the explicit consciousness of such outward principles and rules of method (which we claim as the direct outcome of apostolic work, and as having, with whatever fringe of indefiniteness, underlain the recorded and instinctive action of apostles from the first) was still-when it did become explicit as necessary rule-mistaken, or not necessary, or not expressly apostolic and divine.

Our point, then, is not that there was no element of natural development about the grades or forms of ministry, but that the threefold order was the

form which a certain divine and essential principle had already taken from the earliest moment at which it could be recognized as having any definite form at all; and that the principle once for all identified with this form of expression within the consciousness of the apostolic age, and incorporated into the fabric of the Church's being as its central guarantee alike of coherent unity and of spiritual life, is no longer practically separable from the Church's history, on the ground of any later exegetical theory that the history of the Church could as legitimately have been otherwise shaped. It is within the life and under the special care of the last surviving apostle; it is therefore from the time, and as the outcome, of the translation of the divine principle of ministry into living action through the working of the Spirit in the apostolic age as a whole, that episcopacy stands forth, not as a novel, still less as a merely accidental growth, but as original, fundamental, and essential to the unity, continuity, and spiritual security of the Church.

Does any one demur to so close a juxtaposition, in thought, of a definite outward with a spiritual infinite? So far from being a forced or unnatural paradox, this is the familiar condition of that concrete expression of spiritual things which, in this world, is necessary for their realization as spiritual. On every side we are met by definiteness, sharp, concrete, and material, which is none the less rightly definite in outline for us, because it eludes the effort of our thought to press it at all points fully home, but fringes off-sometimes quickly into that infinite out of which it came and

which it only existed to signify. Distinctness, fringing off into mystery, this is the very characteristic of things spiritual on earth. But because of the mystery which fringes it, to deny the distinctness often the very sharp and peremptory outwardness—is not really so much to vindicate what is spiritual as to make it all unreal. There is all the difference in the world between a recognition that the definiteness, even of things most sharply definite, shades off by-and-by with blurred edges into indefiniteness; and a refusal, to whatever is ultimately (in that sense) indefinite, of any right or claim to be definite or peremptory anywhere.

I should like to refer, for the illustration of this thought, to a very memorable sermon preached by the Bishop of Rochester before the Church Congress of 1896, from which I have ventured to transcribe a few sentences.

'Our witness is primarily spiritual-we speak that we do know: . . . we testify to His work when on earth; to His work ascended, by the Spirit; to the facts of His grace; to the actual and living Church of His building; to the ascertained direction of His will. But it can only be imperfectly, tentatively, with certainty shading off fast into uncertainty and conjecture, that we give precise account of the how and why, the explanations and the limits' . . . 'even of the things that are known and seen.'

We may venture, perhaps, to borrow and apply to this thought of the Church and its ministry another sentence, and to say that their truth is ‘a truth of spiritual fact, with all which that means

of largeness, of elasticity, of undefinableness, by even necessary, and, much more, unnecessary, terms of human language and human logic.' Such a fact is bound to require, on our parts, a combination of obedience that is concretely practical with thought that is very speculatively patient; a tolerance of the gaps or difficulties which result to logic when the infinite is really represented by the finite. So the bishop broadly claims as a part of the duty of Christian thought not to know, as well as to know, to see truth shading off into the unknown, and not to be able exactly to draw a dividing line; to be exercised in the endurance of much ignorance and difficulty without petulantly flying to the cheap solution that there is no definite truth to be known; to be thrown back upon ourselves, to ponder and consider and pray over the bearings which known truth may have beyond its plain

contents.'

But because we cordially echo words such as these, are we therefore to give up all the language about the reality of an outward order expressive of the inward reality or the duty, as practical and binding, of corporate membership; or the legitimate rightness of one outward order rather than another; or the true correspondence between the outward and the inward; so that identity with the inward -identity, indeed, not consummated or absolute, yet ideal and essential-is the only real or adequate mode of statement of the proper value and significance of the outward order? Not at all. The clearest recognition that God's working is not simply conterminous with His appointed means