"If we contrast this vain boasting of the Tractarians with indisputable facts, how strange does it appear! Here I find from the life of Williams, that instead of studying at Cambridge or Oxford, he was serving as an apprentice to an ironmonger, in the City Road, London; and, if not a positive infidel, he was addicted to habits of impiety, if not intemperance, spending his Sabbath evenings at a public tavern. On one occasion, a pious female friend saw him loitering about in front of the tabernacle in Moorfields, where he expected to meet the companions of his nightly revels; but to mortify them because they were not punctual to their engagement, he yielded to her entreaties to go with her into the tabernacle and hear the sermon." Then, taking up the Life of Williams,[33] which lay on a side table, he read the following passage:—"Such a state of mind was anything but favourable to the serious consideration of sacred subjects; and few ever entered the house of God less prepared to profit by its services. The Rev. Timothy East, of Birmingham, occupied the pulpit that evening, January 30, 1814, and preached from the weighty question, 'For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?' (Mark viii. 36, 37). The word came with power, and with demonstration of the Holy Spirit upon the mind of his youthful auditor." "Now this young man," continued Mr. Roscoe, "reclaimed from the error of his ways by what Paul calls the foolishness of preaching, after tarrying at home long enough to give evidence of the genuineness of his conversion to God, and receive instruction to fit him for the work to which he had devoted himself, goes to the South Seas, learns the language of the natives, and commences the work of evangelizing them; and this book is a faithful record and report of his extraordinary labours. He received no episcopal ordination in the regular line of descent; but was he not God's ambassador of grace and mercy to these once savage and cannibal islanders? and if so, Dr. Hook asserts what is not absolutely true, that none are God's ambassadors except the clergy of the Church of England and Papal priests."
Mr. Stevens.—"The minister who preached the last anniversary sermons in my chapel, in behalf of our Sabbath-schools, informed me, when we were chatting about apostolic succession, that he knew the ecclesiastic ancestors of Mr. Williams, and gave me his pedigree, remarking that he was descended from 'a succession of bishops, who neither had palaces nor seats in the House of Lords.' Mr. Jay, of Bath, was the instrument employed by the Spirit of God in the conversion of the Rev. O. A. Jeary, of Rodborough, Gloucestershire, who was employed by the Holy Spirit in the conversion of the Rev. T. East, and he was employed by the same Divine agent in the conversion of the Rev. J. Williams. We thus see that the moral revolutions and spiritual transformations which have taken place in the South Sea Islands are not to be ascribed, in the slightest degree, either subordinately or instrumentally, to the intervention of Episcopal power or authority. Not one employed in any department of this wondrous work, occupied a position in the regular line of descent from the apostles, nor had any one of them received ordination from an Episcopal bishop."
Rev. Mr. Guion.—"A Tractarian who admits the truthfulness of Mr. Williams' report of the success of his own labours, and those of his coadjutors, would probably look on this as an exceptional case to the established law of order prevalent in the church, which we all know requires ordination to precede preaching or the administration of the sacraments. And I see no very strong objection to this view of the matter, because we find that, even in apostolic times, the disciples who were scattered at the persecution of Stephen went to different places preaching the Word, though they were not ordained to the work as the apostles were (Acts xi. 19, 20)."
Mr. Roscoe.—"I admit there is some force in the popular saying—'There is no rule without an exception;' and I admit, also, that the exception establishes rather than subverts the rule from which it is a deviation; but then there must be some proof that it is really an exception. Regarding the case of the dispersed disciples to which you have referred, I see no evidence in confirmation of its being a deviation from any fixed rule of government established within the pale of the church, because I find other cases reported which bear such a strong analogy to it, that I am compelled to believe that no absolute and undeviating regulations on this subject can be found in the New Testament. We find for example (Acts i. 26), that Matthias was chosen to the apostleship as the successor of Judas; but it does not appear from the record of the transaction, that he was ordained to this office by the other eleven apostles with whom he took rank. Again, the case of Paul is still more decisive against the Tractarian dogma that no one can preach or administer the sacraments with efficacy, unless he derive his official authority and power to do so from the apostles, or some one to whom they have delegated their authority and power. He assumed the designation of an apostle, and did the work of an apostle, some years before he saw any one of the twelve, acting as independently of them, as they did of him; and when they met at Jerusalem they did not require him to submit to ordination administered by them: and, at a subsequent period of his history, when he was called by the Holy Spirit (Acts xiii. 1-5) to go and preach the Word of God in the synagogues of the Jews in Seleucia and other places, he[34] was set apart to this work, not to any office, by subordinate members of the church at Antioch, termed prophets and teachers, who, when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on Paul and Barnabas, sent them away. These things occurred just when a new system of government was introduced into the church, that was to be perpetuated through all future ages. Here, then, we see pious laymen sallying forth and preaching in different places the Lord Jesus, with such power that many believed and turned unto him (Acts xi. 19-21); and we see also some holding the highest office in the Christian church without undergoing the ceremony of consecration by pre-existing officials, and yet these facts are recorded in Scripture without any notification that they are exceptions to fixed and absolute laws. Such a notification would have proved a decisive evidence in confirmation of such laws had they been established. We thus see that the plain, indisputable facts of the New Testament are in direct opposition to the high church principles of our Tractarians."
Rev. Mr. Ingleby.—"I have long maintained that this dogma of apostolical succession is an ecclesiastical monopoly which has no sanction from the Word of the Lord, and it is too selfish in its nature to harmonize with the free and generous spirit of the Christian dispensation. If it be the will of Jesus Christ, the supreme Legislator of his church, that no one shall preach the gospel or administer the sacraments with spiritual efficacy until he is ordained to the work by an apostle, or some bishop who can trace his lineal descent from an apostle with absolute certainty, how can such a restricted law as this be known unless he expressly enacts it either by an immediate revelation of his will, or through the medium of the inspired writers? No one pretends that an express revelation has ever been given in reference to such a restriction, and I have never been able to find an implied regulation in any chapter or verse of the New Testament. To say that we, and we exclusively, are the priests of the Lord, and, if you wish to be saved, you must intrust your souls to our ghostly power—that we, and we only, have the keys of the kingdom of heaven—that we open and shut by virtue of the authority delegated to us by St. Peter and St. Paul—is nothing less on the part of the Papal and Tractarian clergy than a monopoly of official authority and power, unsanctioned by the authority of Jesus Christ, and a subtle manœuvre to magnify their own order. That a Papist should believe this, who is trained in the belief that the laws and regulations of his church are absolute and unchangeable, is not surprising; but that a Protestant should believe it, who has free access to his Bible, and been taught to hold its absolute and exclusive authority on all articles of faith and practice, is indeed a moral paradox which I cannot explain."
Rev. Mr. Guion.—"Yes, Sir, it is a monopoly which has no sanction from Jesus Christ, the supreme Legislator in his church, and one which entails repulsive and fearful consequences. It compels its advocates to shun all Christian alliance with many of the excellent of the earth, and drives them into the closest connection with many who are moral miscreants, men of impurity, sceptics, and scoffers. Such men as Chalmers and Wardlaw, Robert Hall and William Jay, are branded as usurpers in the church, with whom it would be a sort of treason to associate, and whose ministrations must be denounced as a fatal curse to their deluded adherents, while those clergymen who have received the so-called apostolical ordination, however immoral they may be in conduct, or heterodox in teaching, are to be revered and obeyed as the true and faithful ministers of Jesus Christ. There is in all this something so repugnant to common-sense and Christian feeling—so derogatory to personal dignity and pure taste—and so calculated to excite the contempt of infidels against the whole clerical order, that I am astonished how any one who cherishes the slightest degree of reverence for the authority of Jesus Christ, or who has imbibed a particle of his pure and loving spirit, can submit to its dominion and governing power, especially when he is told that, if he has not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his."
Mr. Roscoe.—"Your very just and forcible remarks remind me of a paragraph in the Edinburgh Review,[35] which I marked for reference, and which, by your permission, I will read: it is an amplification of your remarks on this very objectionable feature of Tractarianism:—'The strongest and most irrefragable argument against the principles held by the Tractarians appears to us not their absurdity, though that is flagrant enough, but their essential uncharitableness. We stand absolutely confounded at the fatuity of men, who, with the New Testament in their hands, profess to be willing to fraternize with Rome, but cannot fraternize with Lutherans and Presbyterians; who affect to consider the points of difference between the Church of Spain and the Church of England less vital than those between the Church of England and that of Scotland; who, for the sake of such a figment as apostolical succession and other figments as shadowy, remorselessly exclude a large portion of the communities of Christendom from the very name, rights, and privileges of Christian churches; who can imagine the great doctrines in which both they and their opponents coincide, and which form the theme and triumph of inspired eloquence, of less moment than doctrines and rites on which the Scripture is ominously silent, or which seem to stand in shocking contrast to the moral grandeur and magnanimous spirit of the Christian institute. Yet so it is; and we need no other evidence of the degrading and narrowing effects of such principles than that this most melancholy result of them should inspire so little sorrow, or rather should be so frequently proclaimed more in triumph than with regret. The generality of the Oxford school proclaim the consequences of their principles not only with an arrogance which ill befits such equivocal conclusions, but without a particle of sorrow, which, if true, they would naturally excite in the breast of every benevolent man.'"
Rev. Mr. Guion.—"As they are, in common with their Papal brethren, intolerant on principle, and that principle one which, in their opinion, involves the honour of the church, and the final happiness of the soul of man, they cannot feel any regret, when adverting to its necessary consequences in its application to other churches and sects, without being self-convicted of positive inconsistency; they must adhere to their principle of exclusive intolerance, in spite of all the odium it may cast on their theory of belief. And this stern and steady adherence to a principle which compels them, as by the force of a Divine law, to prefer fraternizing with the Papacy, with all its arrogant claims, its assumed prerogatives, and its repugnant ceremonial regulations, rather than fraternize with their Protestant brethren who contend earnestly for the pure faith of the New Testament, is to me a conclusive proof that their theory of belief is anti-Christian in its character and tendency, as the unerring test may be applied to principles as well as to persons—'If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his,' Rom. viii. 9."
Rev. Mr. Ingleby.—"If we are to receive the doctrine of apostolical succession as correct, we must then admit as a fact what to every reflecting mind will appear most incongruous and extraordinary. The theory held by our Tractarian clergy in common with the Romish Church, is, That each bishop, from the apostolical times, has received in his consecration a mysterious gift, and also transmits to every priest in his ordination a mysterious gift, indicated in the respective offices by the awful words, 'Receive the Holy Ghost;' that on this the right of priests to assume their functions, and the preternatural grace of the sacraments administered by them, depends; that bishops, once consecrated, are invested with the remarkable property of transmitting the gift to others; that this has been the case from the primitive age till now; that this high gift has been incorruptibly transmitted through the hands of impure, profligate, heretical ecclesiastics, as ignorant and flagitious as any of their lay contemporaries; that, in fact, these gifts are perfectly irrespective of the moral character and qualifications both of bishop and priest; and reside in equal integrity in a Latimer or a Bonner—a virtuous man or a profligate—an imbecile or a genius."
Rev. Mr. Guion.—"I believe, Sir," said he, addressing the Rev. Mr. Roscoe, "you were once a strenuous advocate of this theory of apostolical succession; will you permit me to ask you a few questions, which may tend to expose its gross absurdity—its shameless jugglery to magnify the glory of an ambitious priesthood, who evince more zeal and devotion in behalf of their own order than they do for the purity and spiritual triumphs of the Christian faith?"