“By our reception or denial of priesthood in the Church, our entire view of what the Church is must be affected and moulded. We shall either accept the idea of a visible and organized body, within which Christ rules by means of a ministry, sacraments, and ordinances to which He has attached a blessing, the fulness of which we have no right to look for except through the channels He has ordained (and it ought to be needless to say that this is the Presbyterian idea), or we shall rest satisfied with the thought of the Church as consisting of multitudes of individual souls known to God alone, as invisible, unorganized, with ordinances blessed because of the memories which they awaken, but to which no promise of present grace is tied, with, in short, no thought of a Body of Christ in the world, but only of a spiritual and heavenly principle ruling in the hearts and regulating the lives of men. Conceptions of the Church so widely different from each other cannot fail to affect in the most vital manner the Church’s life and relation to those around her. Yet both conceptions are the logical and necessary result of the acceptance or denial of the idea of a divinely appointed and still living priesthood among men.”[48]
FOOTNOTES:
[47] See an admirable article on the Christian ministry by Dr. Salmon in the Expositor for July, 1887; also the present writer’s Church of the Early Fathers, pp. 58 ff.; 92 ff.; 2nd ed. Longmans, 1887.
[48] Professor W. Milligan, D.D., on “The Idea of the Priesthood,” in the Expositor for July, 1888, p. 7.
CHAPTER XI.
THE APOSTLE’S RULE RESPECTING SECOND MARRIAGES; ITS MEANING AND PRESENT OBLIGATION.
“The husband of one wife.”—1 Tim. iii. 2.
The Apostle here states, as one of the first qualifications to be looked for in a person who is to be ordained a bishop, that he must be “husband of one wife.” The precise meaning of this phrase will probably never cease to be discussed. But, although it must be admitted that the phrase is capable of bearing several meanings, yet it cannot be fairly contended that the meaning is seriously doubtful. The balance of probability is so largely in favour of one of the meanings, that the remainder may be reasonably set aside as having no valid ground for being supported in competition with it.