interpreted their experience-or to what extent is it true to say that the aegis of this authority of theirs covers only the moral and religious values which their lives exemplify? We are here entering upon admittedly difficult ground. Primarily, no doubt, the experience of the saints is testimony rather to the essential validity of a certain way of life than to any particular mode of formulating or attempting to formulate its intellectual implications. Nevertheless, the modern tendency to distinguish sharply between fact and interpretation, theology and religious experience, may easily be carried too far. In the concrete the two are often hardly separable. Doubtless we are not committed in detail to the systematized theologies of the past, or absolved from the obligation of formulating our own by our conviction that behind them was a solid basis of reality. Doubtless, too, the notion of authority has often been stretched unjustifiably, and made to cover intellectual deductions and historical judgments for which, as we now perceive, religious experience afforded no warrant. But it by no means follows from these admissions that the hypothesis of the validity of the Church's spiritual experience will not be found to involve dogmatic implications as to the nature of the universe or of God, or even to carry with it certain judgments of fact in matters of history. It is difficult, for instance, to see how the spiritual and moral values of the Christian life could be regarded as independent of the existence of God, of freedom, and of immortality; or, again, of the historical existence of our Lord, the fact of His resurrection, or the truth of His divinity; and, speaking generally, it may be said that in each of the dogmatic statements of

1 "Although it may be rightly said that belief in particular historical facts is morally indifferent, this is not the same thing as to say that for Religion, when it has come to reflect upon itself, its historical circumstances might just as well be other than they are. In the simplest language used by religion itself, the way in which God has chosen to manifest Himself must be the best; in more philosophical phraseology, we shall not in the last resort be content to ascribe to the universal a complete indifference to the particulars in and through which alone it has its being " (C. C. J. Webb, Problems in the Relations of God and Man, p. 101).

the historic creeds we are to see the intellectual reflex of an experienced fact, which we are at liberty to express (if we can!) in other terms, but to whose validity we must in any case do justice.

Christian theology may perhaps be defined as the process of drawing out and formulating in intellectual terms the inferences, historical and metaphysical, which are legitimately involved in the present and past experience of spiritual persons; and more especially, no doubt, in the experiences—“classical and normative" for Christianity-of the apostolic age. Forms and habits of thought change from age to age, and thus in a limited sense new theologies are required; but unless we are to suppose the Christian thinkers of the past to have done their work wholly amiss, we ought not to expect to find the new theologies turning out to be radically at variance with the old. Human nature, after all, varies but little from age to age, and "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

Summing up, we may lay it down as the function of authority in religion neither to compel assent nor to override reason, but to testify to spiritual experience. Its province is not to define truth for the intellect, but to guide souls into the way of peace. Nevertheless it is bound to assert that that which has been discovered has also been revealed that the way of life and peace is equally the way of truth; and of the underlying truth of every dogma, whether ecclesiastical or biblical, it should be the aim of each of us to take account.

Towards the Church with her wider life and her agelong experience the individual must ever stand related as a disciple towards his teacher, and he who would teach a new truth or reject an old (and to do so is a vocation to which in every generation some men are called) must both expect to meet in practice with the persecutions by which true prophets are assailed, and must also face the prima facie likelihood that his own prophecy may turn out false.

II. AUTHORITY AND CHURCH ORDER

Qui maior est in vobis, fiat sicut minor, et qui praecessor est, sicut ministrator. Evang. Sec. Luc. xxii. 26.

Prophet or priest-which? Is it by virtue of a delegated commission to act for the Church, or by virtue of a prophetic vocation to speak for God, that a man becomes a minister of Christ? If from the problem of Authority and Truth we pass to that or Authority and Church Order, from a consideration of the corporate "auctoritas" of the Christian Society as bearing witness to spiritual values, to that of the nature and sanction of executive and administrative authority within the Christian Body itself, we find ourselves confronted, upon the very threshold of our inquiry, by a radical divergence of view as to the very nature of that Christian ministry which forms the subject of discussion. "By what authority doest thou these things, and who gave thee this authority?" question asked of the Master is the question still, and men debate the old antithesis-" From heaven, or of men?"-in many cases without having considered whether it may not, after all, be a false one, and whether the true answer should not be "From both."

The

By

It is well to begin by a definition of terms. prophet," accordingly, shall be meant, for the purposes of the present discussion, a man called and empowered of God to preach the Gospel; by "priest " a man ministerially commissioned and authorized by the Church to act for certain purposes as the organ of her corporate life. It will be obvious at the outset, that amid all the diversities of doctrine and practice with regard to the ministry which characterize existing Christendom we may distinguish two broadly-contrasted types we may call them "Protestant " and " Catholic respectively-of which the one tends to regard the

ministry as primarily prophetic, the other as primarily sacerdotal. Doubtless in practice this antithesis is never quite absolute that is to say, the "prophet" or pastor is commonly" set apart " by some form of "ordination," while in the candidate for priesthood evidence of vocation is required. Nevertheless, it is from a divergence of respective emphasis upon the prophetic and the priestly elements in the ministry that whatever is distinctive in the two great historic Christian positions proceeds. Upon the one hand we have the ministry of Sacraments subordinated to that of the Word; a tendency to depreciate "forms and ceremonies "; and the interpretation of ordination not primarily as the bestowal of an endowment or commission, but as the "recognition" of a gift already bestowed from on high. On the other we have the ministry of Sacraments given the primary place; stress laid upon institutions as the media of the Spirit's operation; the conception of ordination, not as the recognition, but as the bestowal of an office, and therewith of the "charisma" or gift of grace needed to sustain it; and the strict requirement that men shall not take upon themselves the discharge of functions in the Church to which they have not been formally commissioned.

It will be necessary later on to develop this antithesis at somewhat greater length; but before doing so it may be well to point out that if discussions upon the subject of the Christian ministry have hitherto resulted in little that is determinative, the reason is to be found in a failure to recognize the real point at issue. Essentially, as we have said, what really underlies the dispute is a radical divergence in the conception of the ministry itself; but in a majority of controversial discussions of it, the case has been represented as depending on the alleged form assumed by the ministry in the first age of the Church. Writers upon the one side have sought to show that the continuous succession of the bishops from the original Apostles is in the

strictest sense a literal historical fact: to demonstrate, either that the threefold ministry in something like its present form goes back to the beginning, or (at the least) that there has from the beginning existed in the Church an ordained hierarchy commissioned by recognized ecclesiastical superiors in regular succession, and that from the beginning no "valid" ministry, at least of Sacraments, could be exercised in the Church except by ministers so ordained and commissioned. Writers who represent the opposite standpoint have sought to disprove this assertion on historical grounds, and to account for the existing evidence upon some alternative hypothesis.

Now, it may fairly be said, with regard to this whole method of approaching the subject, that the resultant position is one of stale-mate. In its strictest and most traditional form the theory of an original Apostolic succession has perhaps broken down ; but the liberalized restatement of it, which is to be found in the writings of Duchesne and Batiffol abroad and the present Bishop of Oxford at home,' is at least a tenable interpretation of the evidence as viewed in the light of certain antecedent presuppositions. It is not, however, likely, in the nature of the case, to carry conviction to those who do not approach the evidence with the presuppositions in question; for though a view with which the facts are compatible, it is not one which they necessitate.2 The same, mutatis mutandis, may be said of the goodly variety of competing theories which divide with those of Bishop Gore and Catholic investigators abroad the

1 Duchesne, Histoire Ancienne de l'Eglise and Origines du Culte Chrétien; Batiffol, L'Eglise Naissante; Gore, The Church and the Ministry and Orders and Unity. See also Hamilton, The People of God, vol. ii.

2 The point of controversial weakness in Bishop Gore's treatment of the subject is the position assigned to the itinerating "prophets and teachers" who appear in the Didache as taking precedence, at the celebration of the Eucharist, over the local "bishops and deacons." The Bishop apparently identifies them with the "apostolici viri" of Tertullian (Tert. De Praescr. Haeret. xxxii.), and describes their office as "quasi-Apostolic." It is not made clear, however, in what way these men received their authority, or upon what ground of principle they are to be differentiated, for example, from the Irvingite "Apostles " of modern times.