SUBJECT OF THE TREATISE. XIII the Christian ministry into a privileged order, superior in spiritual dignity to the Christian people, and to exalt the church above the gospel. When we hear Cyprian affirming that every bishop is in his own church, for the present, judge in Christ's stead; and that our Lord Jesus Christ, one and only, has power to prefer us to the go- vernment of his church and to judge of our actings;1when we hear Basil asserting that a church governor (xcanyóv¡kevos) is neither more nor less than one sustaining the person of Christ (öuóev Ërepov ;ens, ñ t nu eoirijpos sareyav orp6oaorov);5 or Chrysostom saying, " We have received the commission of ambassadors, and are come from God; for this is the dignity of the episcopate; "$ such magnilo- quence, however its terms may be interpreted, too surely indicates the direction which the stream was taking. A vague notion, apparently countenanced by some expressions of the early fathers,' though plainlyat variance with thedoctrine of the New Testament, that the Christian ministry was formed on the model of the Aaronic priesthood, may have induced some, in that infantine age, to yield more readily to these assumptions. It is needless to show that the ancient priesthood was emblematical, not of the Christian ministry, but of the priesthood of Christ in present- ing the great oblation by which all the sacrificial types of the temple were fulfilled; and of the priesthood of the Christian people, who are enjoined to "present their bodies a living sacrifice, holy and accept- able to God." But how sorely the advocates of sacerdotal power were put to their shifts in attempting to bolster up their title is apparent from the fictions and forgeries, unparalleled in audacity and in num- ber, which they invented. We instanceonly the counterfeit epistles of the apostolic Ignatius, the interpolated works of Cyprian, the ficti- tious councils of the church, and the fabulous Apostolical Canons and Institutions, all of themmore or less tending to invest the "clergy" as the officers or servants of the church began to call themselves) with apower equivalent to that of their divineMaster himself. The neces- sary consequence of all thiswas the gradual depression of the " laity,". that is, thepeople (xaós) of Christ, and the exclusive claim of the clergy to represent the church. One thing only was wanting to com- plete this strange perversion of Christianity. A priesthood required some instrument of mediation; an altar, a victim, a sacrifice, must be found or invented. This was done by converting the simple feast of 1 Cypr., F.p. lv. 8 Basil. Const. Mon., cap. xxii. a Chrysost. in Coloss. Orat. iii. 4 The allusion of Clemens Romanus, in his only genuine epistle to theCorinthians, to the Jewish hierarchy, is susceptible of a sense very different from that afterwards as- signed to it.
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