terms of communion are formed according to their own interpretation of the laws of God; and if the deportment of any one is subject to impeachment, the case is decided by the impartial verdict of his brethren. Their officers are few; and their ministers, equal in rank and power, are the servants, not the lords of the people. The entire polity of the apostolical and primitive churches was framed on the principles, not of a monarchical hierarchy, but of a popular and elective government. In a word, it was a republican government administered with republican simplicity.

This exhibition of the original organization of the Christian church suggests a variety of reflections, some of which we must be permitted, before closing this view of the apostolical and primitive church, to suggest to the consideration of the reader.

REMARKS.

1. The primitive church was organized as a purely religious society.

It had for its object the promotion of the great interests of morality and religion. It interfered not with the secular or private pursuits of its members, except so far as they related to the great end for which the church was formed,—the promotion of pure and undefiled religion. Whenever the Christian church has let itself down to mingle or interfere with the secular pursuits of men, the only result has been her own disgrace, and the dishonor of the great cause which she was set to defend.

2. It employed only moral means for the accomplishment of religious ends.

The apostles sought, by kind and tender entreaty, to reclaim the wandering. They taught the church to do the same; and to separate the unworthy from their communion.

But they gave no countenance to the exercise of arbitrary authority over the conduct or the consciences of men. They neither allowed themselves, nor the church, to exercise any other authority than that of the word of God and of Christ, enforced by instruction, by counsel and by admonition. They had ever before them the beautiful idea of a religious fraternity, its members united in the bonds of faith and mutual affection, and striving together in purity and love for the promotion of godliness.

3. The church was at first free from all entanglement with the state.

It had no affinity with the existing forms of state government, and no connection with them. It vested the church power in the only appropriate source of all social power,-in the people. It is only in this voluntary system, in which neither state-power nor church-power can interfere with the religious convictions of men, that the church of Christ finds a guaranty for the preservation of its purity and the exercise of its legitimate influence.

But the church soon began to be assimilated to the form of the existing civil governments, and in the end a "hierarchy of bishops, metropolitans, and patriarchs arose, corresponding to the graduated rank of the civil administration. Ere-long the Roman bishop assumed pre-eminence above all others."157 United with the civil authority in its interests, assimilated to that power in its form of government, and secularized in its spirit, the church, under Constantine and his successors, put off its high and sacred character, and became a part of the machinery of state government. It first truckled to the low arts of state policy, and afterwards, with insatiable ambition, assumed the supreme control of all power, human and divine.

4. It was another advantage of the system of the primitive

157 Ranke's Hist. of the Popes, Eng. Trans., Vol. I. p. 29.

church, that it was fitted to any form of civil government, and to any state of society.

Voluntary and simple in their organization, entirely removed from all connection with the civil government, with no confederate relations among themselves, and seeking only by the pure precepts of religion to persuade men in every condition to lead quiet and holy lives, these Christian societies were adapted to any state of society and any form of government. This primitive Christianity commended itself, with equal facility, to the rich and the poor, the learned and the unlearned, the high and the low; whether it addressed itself to the soldier, the fisherman or the peasant, it equally suited their condition. It gathered into its communion converts from every form of government, of every species of superstition, and of every condition in life, and by its wholesome truths and simple rites trained them up for eternal life. Stern and uncompromising in its purity and simplicity, it stood aloof from all other forms, both of government and of religion. It neither sought favor from the prejudice of the Gentile, nor the bigotry of the Jew. It yielded compliance neither to the despotism of Rome, nor to the democracy of Greece, while it could live and flourish under either government and in any state of society. Can the same be said with equal propriety of Episcopacy? Are its complicated forms and ceremonials, its robes and vestments, its rituals, and all its solemn pomp, equally adapted to every state of religious feeling, or suited alike to refined society, and to rude and rustic life? Are all its complicated forms of government, its grades of office, its diocesan and metropolitan confederacies, and its monarchical powers, equally congenial with every kind of civil government?

5. It subjected the clergy to salutary restraints by bringing them, in their official character, under the watch of the church.

The apostles, as we have already seen, recognized their

own accountability to the church. This continued afterwards to be an established principle in the primitive church. The consciousness that their whole life was open to the judicial inspection of those to whom they ministered, and by whom they were most intimately known, could not fail to create in the clergy a salutary circumspection, the restraints of which, an independent ministry under another system can never feel.

6. It served to guard them also against the workings of an unholy ambition, a thirst for office, and the love of power. This thought is necessarily implied in the preceding, but it is of such importance that it deserves a distinct consideration. Those disgraceful contests for preferment, the recital of which crowds the page of history, belong to a later age and a different ecclesiastical polity.

7. It tended also to guard the clergy against a mercenary spirit.

The vast wealth of a church-establishment, and the princely revenues of its incumbents, offer an incentive to this sordid passion which Paul in his poverty could never have felt, and which none can ever feel, who are contented to receive only a humble competence, as a voluntary offering at the hands of those for whom they labor.

8. The system was well suited to guard the church from the evils of a sectarian spirit.

In the church of Christ were Jews, jealous for the law of their fathers. There were also Greeks, who, independent of the Mosaic economy, had received the gospel and become Christians, without being Jews in spirit. Had now the church assumed the form of a national establishment, with its prescribed articles of faith, its ritual, etc., it is difficult to conceive how the opposing views of these different parties could have been harmonized. The older apostles, with the Jews, might have maintained with greater firmness their Jewish prejudice as they observed the pure direction of Chris

tianity in Paul and his Gentile converts, who again might have been more determined in their opposition to a Judaizing spirit. So that these germinating differences might have ended in an irreconcilable opposition. As it was, this disturbing influence was strongly manifested in all the churches, so that it required all the wisdom and influence of the apostles to unite their Christian converts in an organization so simple as that which they did establish.

9. It left the apostles and pastors free to pursue their great work, without let or hindrance from ecclesiastical authority or partizan zeal.

It allowed free scope for the fervid zeal of the early promulgators of the gospel of Christ, and permitted them to range at large in their missionary tours for the conversion of men, unrestrained by the rules of ecclesiastical authority or canonical laws. An explanation, given and received in the spirit of mutual confidence, reconciled the brethren whose prejudice was excited by the preaching of Peter to the Gentiles. The unhappy division between Paul and Barnabas ended in the furtherance of the gospel, both being at liberty, notwithstanding this sinful infirmity, to prosecute their labors for the salvation of men without being arrested by the ban of a hierarchy, or trammelled by ecclesiastical jealousy, lest the souls whom one or the other should win to Christ, might chance not to be canonically converted.

10. The order of the primitive church was calculated to preserve peace and harmony among the clergy.

One in rank and power, and holding the tenure of their office at the will of their people, they had few temptations, comparatively, to engage in strife one with another for preferment; or to repine at the advancement of one of their number, who by his superior qualifications was promoted to some commanding post of usefulness above them.

We know indeed that Jerome assigns the origin of Episcopacy to the ambitious contentions of the clergy in the