form a complete ecclesiastical organization, but how they were to do it was by no means clear. They had no bishop, and, as matters then stood, there was no way in which they could obtain one from the mother Church. An act of Parliament prohibited the English bishops from ordaining any bishop, elder, or deacon, unless the candidate took an oath of allegiance to the king of England, both as a temporal sovereign and the head of the Church. This fatally embarrassed the case. In this dilemma, Dr. White proposed the election of a permanent president of the Episcopal Convention, who should ordain deacons and elders, and thus supply the Churches with ministers, "without waiting," as he expressed it, "for the succes sion." He did not forget, however, Paul's exhortation to "comfort the feeble-minded," and he therefore adds the suggestion, that, if at any future time the succession should be obtained, "any supposed imperfection of the intermediate ordinations might, if it were judged proper, be supplied without acknowledging their nullity by a conditional ordination, resembling that of conditional baptism in the liturgy." To lend additional strength to his project, he states that it was an expedient once proposed by Archbishop Tillottson, and Bishops Patrick, Stillingfleet, and others, and that it had been actually practiced in Ireland by Archbishop Bramhall.

Dr. White here proposes to do precisely what Mr. Wesley did in the case of Dr. Coke; that is, to constitute a true bishop, and yet, for prudential reasons, withhold from him the official title. Dr. White's "president," like Mr. Wesley's "superintendent," was to perform all the duties of the episcopal office. In regard to irregularity, as the successionists would regard it, it is difficult to say which bears the palm, Mr. Wesley, who, being himself only a presbyter, proceeded to ordain his bishop, or Dr. White, who proposed that his bishop should proceed to act without being ordained to his of fice. The fact is, both were right; yet both hesitated to follow their own logic to its inevitable conclusion. Wesley would have done well to call Dr. Coke a bishop, as he certainly became such when accepted by the Conference. Dr. White and his fellow presbyters had a scriptural right to elect a bishop, and ordain him with their own hands. They had historic precedent in the example of the ancient Church of Alexandria,

where, for more than two centuries, the same presbyters who elected the bishop ordained him to office. The power to confer office implies of necessity the power to induct into office.

Dr. White's project did not meet with favor; but, on the contrary, it was determined to apply to foreign Churches for ecclesiastical authority to establish an American Church. Sundry young men were sent to England to secure ordination, but the archbishop of Canterbury very properly decided that he had no authority to ordain any man who declined to take the oath of allegiance, and to acknowledge the king of England as the head of the Church. They then made inquiries in France whether any one there, Catholic or Protestant, could be found to perform the all-important ceremony, but failed in the search. The whole affair is a spectacle of pitiable human weakness. No English bishop could impart authority of any kind in an American organization which had been wholly severed from the English Church. There was no more fitness in the inauguration of an American bishop or presbyter by foreign hands than in the inauguration of an American president or governor by the same agency. The same authority which elects must induct into office.

How solemnly men sometimes cast anchor in a great truth, and then, with equal solemnity, cut their cables and go drifting down the tide. In May, 1784, the leading clergy and laymen of the Episcopal Churches met in Philadelphia, and with all formality laid down certain "fundamental principles," as the Convention termed them. Dr. White presided over the deliberations. It was resolved

1. That the Episcopal Church of these States is, and ought to be, independent of all foreign authority, ecclesiastical or civil.

2. That it hath, and ought to have, in common with all other religious societies, full and exclusive power to regulate the concerns of its own communion.- Wilson's Life of Bishop White, p. 99.

Who would imagine, after the enunciation of solid truths like these, that Dr. White would be found on his way to England to ask an English bishop to give him authority to perform the duties of the episcopal office to which he had been elected by his brethren? The principles which determine the case are clear, and of easy application. The Church of England is

a State Church. The laws of the realm demand that every candidate for orders shall take a solemn oath of allegiance to the English sovereign. Consequently, when the American colonies became independent of the mother country, it was impossible for the Episcopal Churches in this country to remain a part of the Church of England. By a series of events, which the Episcopalians of the United States were certainly entitled to regard as providential, they had been totally and forever severed from the jurisdiction of the mother Church. Having no authority whatever in the American Church, English bishops could bestow none. Dr. White had been duly elected to his office, and therefore had the essential element of a valid title to it. The presbyters of the American Episcopal Churches ought to have recognized the rights which their independent position gave them, and to have ordained their bishop with their own hands. Thus the Churches would not have been compelled to wait, Bishop White would have escaped a useless voyage, and the British Parliament would not have been put to the trouble of framing a special law, permitting the omission of the oath of allegiance in this particular case.

It seems marvelous that the mere ceremony of induction into office should be so magnified out of all due proportion. Still, as we look back over the past, we find that three several agencies have been at work to produce this preposterous result. First, the tendency of the Church, especially in times of general ignorance and spiritual declension, to attach undue importance to mere externals; secondly, the ambition of men who have found that their innate love of power and place can be gratified in the Church as well as the State, and who set themselves on high by pretending that divine grace flows only in one channel, and that they are the sole custodians and dispensers thereof; thirdly, the unscrupulous policy of civil rulers, who have seized upon the Church and made it the instrument of their state-craft, violating its rights, stripping it of its spiritual power, and sacrificing to their own unworthy uses its honor and its saving value among men. When a king or emperor has laid hands on the Church with this intent, we might naturally expect that the ecclesiastics who weakly submit to be his tools would seek to cover their shame and main

tain their place before the people by claiming to possess all

manner of ghostly powers and privileges, and thus divert attention from what they have really lost by ostentatiously pretending to have what they never had.

Such, in a degree, is the present condition of the Church of England. When Henry VIII. began his reign, England was but a province of the ecclesiastical empire of Rome. When he declared himself and his people independent of the pope, a servile Parliament by law conferred upon Henry the title of "the only supreme head of the Church of England upon earth," and thus placed the Church at the feet of the State. There it remains to this day. The most important and vital of Church powers, the selection of the chief ministers, is in the hands of the State. This is a usurpation and an outrage. The bishops of the English Church lack the most essential outward element of a true episcopacy-a scriptural election to the office. Where Rome has full sway we reject her anthority as without solid foundation; but thus much at all events can be said in her favor, the professed head of the Church is one of her clergy. The English Church is, in its government, popery with a lay pope, and at the present time a female pope at that. Whoever can find in the New Testament a basis for such a form of organization must possess sharp eyes. We do not say, that because of this usurpation of unscriptural power by the State, the Church has ceased to be a part of the true Church of God. We are certainly tempted to feel that those who plume themselves on a "succession" derived from such sources must be endowed with intellects which are easily satisfied, or a vanity which is easily inflated. The State wrongs and humiliates the Church when it forcibly seizes upon it and makes it the tool of a corrupt government or the prop of a weak one, or when it seeks to avail itself of the moral weight and strength of the Church to anchor itself amid the adverse currents and the driving storms which it fears. No wonder that certain writers make so much noise and pother about ordinations, as if the whole question is determined not by a valid election, but by the laying on of this or that pair of hands.

In comparing the Church of England with the Methodist Episcopal Church it is curious to observe how the weakness of the one and the strength of the other on this vital point comes

to the surface in unexpected places. Our law declares that a bishop is to be constituted by two things-election by the General Conference, and consecration by bishops or elders. In ordaining a bishop the one conducting the service is directed to say, "The Lord pour upon thee the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a bishop in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the authority of the Church, through the imposition of our hands," etc. In the English ritual the archbishop, at a certain stage of the ceremonies, demands that the Queen's mandate for the consecration be produced and read. He then administers the oath acknowledging the Queen as the supreme earthly head of the Church, and after certain other preliminaries, lays his hands upon the head of the candidate, saying, "Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a bishop in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands," etc. The two rituals show on the very surface that in the one case the bishop becomes such by the choice of the Church, and in the other his authority rests upon another foundation, to wit, the will of a female member of the Church. It may not be good sense nor good Scripture to pretend that a valid ordination is every thing, and a valid election nothing; but under certain circumstances it may be good strategy. And yet to say that there can be no true minister unless there is an unbroken succession of ordinations from the days of the apostles is as absurd as to say that there can be no true friendship in modern times unless there has been an unbroken line of hand-shakings from Damon and Pythias. No shadow of doubt rests upon the validity of the ordinations of the Methodist Episcopal Church. At all events, we can never for one moment admit the superior claims of those who were never elected to office in a scriptural, valid way, even if episcopal hands sufficient in number to thatch a cathedral have been laid upon their heads.

Another question, somewhat discussed among us of late, is: Who ought to be set apart by the imposition of hands? It is contended that we have in the Methodist Episcopal Church two orders and one office, while certain other Churches hold that there must be of necessity three orders, and that, if bishops and elders are the same in order, we are not consistent when we induct the bishop into office by a third laying on of hands,