As we believe ourselves included in the universal Church, i. e. in the number of Christian believers, we acknowledge no authority but that which thus included us,—the authority of Christ himself: to no other voice but his, as delivered in Scripture, do we listen with submission; and to none do we commit the office of interpretation; believing that God has given to every man the inalienable right and sufficient power to ascertain for himself what doctrines and duties are necessary to salvation. What the Romish Church may be which, so far from being 'universal' expressly assumes the power of guiding and informing Christian believers, we profess not to understand, having received no evidence of its origin and no attestation of its claims; but we know that in the Christian Church there has never been, since the apostolic age, 'one uniform faith and subordination of government;' nor do we believe that such subordination is designed by Providence, or that such uniformity is compatible with the present nature of man, or essential to his safety and peace. Believing that the Scriptures contain the word of God, and that the natural faculties of man are its appropriate interpreters, we dare not commit to others the task of receiving a message which we know to be addressed immediately to ourselves; especially as we are convinced that, since the apostolic age, no peculiar gifts of wisdom or of tongues have been conferred on any man. The same Spirit which dictated the Gospel we believe to pervade the whole spiritual universe, giving wisdom liberally to all who seek it, and enlightening those who do the will of God respecting the doctrine which is of God.
Since the Roman Catholic Church cannot find a basis for its claims in the Scriptures, those claims must be founded on the 'apostolical and ecclesiastical traditions' which she requires her members 'most firmly to admit and embrace.' The question between the Catholic and Protestant Churches on this subject is,—what traditions are to be received and what rejected; for the one Church would be as unwilling to receive all that have been current, as the other to reject all that have been substantiated. It is evident, as the Protestant Church admits, that the Christians who were not converted by the Apostles themselves, and who lived before the publication of the canonical Scriptures, could have had no other foundation for their faith than tradition; and on the same ground we establish our belief in the genuineness of the Scriptures; i. e., we declare them canonical.
When we reject traditions therefore, it is not as traditions, but in proportion to their evidence. If they appear inconsistent with the sacred writings, incompatible with the convictions of reason, or disagreeing with the circumstances of the age, we feel that the balance of evidence is against them. If they be merely vague and inconsequential, and not contradictory to each other or to any known truth, we hold them loosely, without firm conviction and without positive disbelief. If they be, not only consistent with, but corroborative of ascertained truth, clear in the origin, and early and extensively held, our faith in them is willing and steadfast. Of the first class are those traditions which were pleaded before the second Council of Nice, A. D. 787, on behalf of the worship of images, which we reject on all the grounds mentioned above; viz. because they are inconsistent with the spirit and letter of the sacred books; because they are incompatible with the convictions of our reason, and because they are perfectly irreconcileable with the practice of the Apostles and the discipline of the primitive Church. Of the second class are those which relate the various fate of the first followers of Christ, and which we admit in the absence of all other evidence, though on such slight grounds as to have no firm conviction of their truth. Of the third class are those by which we receive the sacred books as genuine, and which command belief from their universal prevalence, their strong inherent probability, and perfect consonance with the contents of the books themselves. It will be easily anticipated from what we have said, that we reject those traditions which corroborate the claims of the Roman Catholic Church to a special divine commission; since such traditions are in opposition to what we recognize as the spirit of the Gospel, and unsanctioned by the conduct of the Apostles, especially of Peter. Rejecting these traditions, we hold the opinion suggested by the record of the Acts of the Apostles, that their special commission expired with themselves; that apostolical ordination was a temporary institution; and that the special influence of the Holy Spirit was designed to be a temporary sanction.
The church of England appears to us to merit the censure and even the ridicule cast upon her by the Roman Catholic Church for the inconsistency of her institutions with the principle on which she professes to act,—the principle of the Reformation,—that the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants. Catholics and protestants Dissenter join in challenging her to produce from the Bible the grounds of the practice, among others, of episcopal ordination; including, as it does, the declaration of the regular transmission of the office, with its peculiar gifts of the Spirit, from the times of St Peter till the present day. Rejecting, as she does, the ecclesiastical traditions on which the Catholics depend, and unable as she is to adduce authority from the Scriptures to which Dissenters appeal, she has no alternative but to own the practice ungrounded, or to adduce some third authority, hitherto unheard of.
Some of the most objectionable forms of ordination for Christian pastorship were, notwithstanding, retained by various denominations of Dissenters long after their separation from the Church of England, and are still partially held; but Unitarians have altogether relinquished the conception that the teachers of the Gospel are peculiarly qualified for their office otherwise than by their voluntary devotion to it, and by those natural means of study, reflection and prayer which their duty requires them strenuously to employ.
We conceive that the Church of England has been led into the inconsistency mentioned above by conceiving in common with the Catholics, and as we think erroneously, that the institutions of Church government established in the apostolic age are a part of Christianity, and therefore destined to be permanent. Her Church government is, it is true, not the same, because it cannot, by possibility, be so, the lapse of ages having wrought unavoidable changes; but this mutability, which ought to prove to her the temporary nature of the institution, only makes her cling the more eagerly to the points of resemblance which she conceives to have been preserved between her own constitution and that of the primitive Church; forgetting that such supposed resemblance is immediately derived from that very Catholic Church whose superstitions inspired her with so much horror at the Reformation. Whatever resemblance the two Churches bear to the primitive Church in its external offices, they bear in common.
This resemblance, however, is but slight. In the primitive Christian Church, regulated by elders chosen from the people, and in no way distinguished from them in rank or learning, and served by deacons, whose office was to distribute the funds held by all in common, we can scarcely recognize the original of the pompous establishments in which religion is now believed to be preserved in its purity, till, on examining the history, we trace the degrees by which spiritual domination was secured. The most distinguished of the elders served the office of moderator in the assemblies which met for the transaction of business. In time, the office became permanent, and the 'constant president' was allowed to appropriate the title of 'bishop,' which had before been common to all the elders. When numbers increased so that smaller congregations were separated from one larger, each colony had an elder at its head, and the chief of the parent Church became a diocesan bishop. Large country congregations were, however, empowered to choose a complete set of officers for themselves, consisting of bishops, elders, and deacons, and were independent of the city Churches, till the Council held at Antioch A. D. 341 forbade country bishops to ordain priests or deacons, and allowed them the power of choosing only the inferior officers of the Church. The next step was to abolish the order of country bishops; country deans and arch priests being substituted. At length, synods were held, at which the bishops met as deputies of the people, to communicate concerning affairs of common interest, forgetting from time to time the character in which they appeared, and venturing to make decrees by their own authority, and even to claim a power of prescribing in matters of faith and discipline. The principal bishop in a large district was employed by his brethren to convoke these assemblies; and as the choice usually fell on the chief officer of the metropolitan Church, the title of metropolitan bishop or arch-bishop was applied to him; which term became common in the Church after the year 430. The patriarchs were of a higher rank still; and there were only five of them, belonging to the sees of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. They were not called Primates till the time of Leo I. The ambition of the clergy found extensive means of gratification in the changes made by Constantine, who adapted the government of the Church to that of the State, which he had newly divided and ordered. As the superior clergy grasped at greater power, the inferior clergy pressed upon their steps; and we soon hear of arch-presbyters and arch-deacons, and of the occasional union of the offices of priest and deacon in the same individual. Thus did the servants gradually become the masters of the Church; and thus, in four centuries, was the constitution of Christian congregations so entirely changed, that scarcely a shadow of their original institutions remained.
This brief detail (the truth of which is so well known that it is needless to give as our authority every accredited ecclesiastical history) affords the best argument for the temporary nature of the institutions of Church government, and sanctions the declaration of those who are charged by either Church with schism, that before they can again be required to join the Establishment, that Establishment must be reduced to the simplicity of government and discipline which characterized the primitive church. The bishops must assume nothing over their brethren, and be superior in no respect but in holiness; they must be stewards of God, not given to lucre, but eminent in faith, in temperance, in charity. The deacons must administer the common revenues of the church for the benefit of those who have need, appropriating nothing themselves nor suffering others to appropriate. The church itself must be, in all its views and objects, not of this world; having no respect of persons, not awarding to the man in goodly apparel a better place than to the poor man in vile raiment, rejecting every inducement to the usurpation of secular power, and leaving to the conscience of every man, as Peter referred to the conscience of Ananias, the obligation of contributing to the common revenue. 'While the land remained, was it not thine own? And after it was sold, was not the price in thine own power?' is not the language of ecclesiastical tax-gatherers in the present day: and till all contributions to the churches become strictly voluntary, till the churches abjure all temporal authority, and free their discipline and ritual from the encroachments of spiritual tyranny and the defilements of superstition, neither the one nor the other can advance any claim to spiritual allegiance, and men who dissent from both may hold themselves innocent of the sin of schism.
Thus much we say on the supposition that it might be possible or desirable to restore the ancient constitution of the Church. But we make such a supposition only for the sake of meeting the views of those who, feeling that the ecclesiastical establishments of the present day are unchristian, would fain substitute for them the simple institutions of the primitive Church. Believing as we do, that all such institutions must be classed among the non-essentials of Christianity, we would have them modified according to the circumstances of the age and country in which they are to be used. It is not possible that some of the original Christian ordinances can be advantageously employed in every country and through every age. The first Christians belonged, for the most part, to the middling and lower classes of society, and consequently had few possessions. These possessions, with whatever was voluntarily offered by the few rich men among them, were gathered into a common stock, in order that all might be so far freed from secular cares as to be able to devote their minds and hearts to the furtherance of the cause of the Gospel. It is obvious that the same reasons for establishing a community of goods do not exist in a Christian country, where the faith has no longer to maintain a struggle with the powers which opposed its first promulgation. Nor could such a community of goods answer the same purposes in a wealthy commercial state and among the cantons of Switzerland, among the nobles and boors of Russia, and the back-woodsmen of America; in states where civilization is most advanced, and in regions where the rights of property are almost unrecognized.
The same may be said of the external modes of worship. Granting that the complex ceremonies of Roman Catholic worship, so nearly resembling the rites of Paganism, might, by possibility, admit of a connexion with pure Christian faith, it cannot be supposed that the cross, wax lights, and incense can ever form a ritual appropriate to the customs of Arabs or Indians, or that they will help the devotion of the fiftieth generation from the present. Primitive modes of worship have, by a singular ordering of circumstances, been preserved among the Vaudois, and are still consonant with their secular state: but men who dwell amidst ravines and mountain forests think and feel differently, and therefore worship differently from those who inhabit the cities of the plain; while the faith of all is essentially the same. It is, therefore, unreasonable of the Catholic Church to require of all her members, dwell where they may, in the north or in the south, in the metropolis or the wilderness, the vow, 'I also receive and admit the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, received and approved in the solemn administration of all the seven sacraments.'