has nothing to do with the poor, but who give themselves entirely to the ministration of the word and ordinances, and do everything that any ministers claim to do, except confirm and ordain.

In the apostolic times, we read of no hierarchy in the church, no subordination among the apostles. Paul claimed a full equality with the rest. "I am not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles," and he on one occasion publicly reproved Peter, who has since been considered to have had a primacy among them. If there was any one, to whom a special deference was paid, it was James, who seems to have presided over the church at Jerusalem. So far as we are informed, the churches were perfectly independent of each other, and acknowledged no head but Christ. Paul reproves the Corinthians for saying, "I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas: Is Christ divided?"

It would have been a radical defect in the organization of the primitive churches, if they had not been perfectly independent of each other. They could not have answered the purpose of churches, if they had not had individually all the powers and faculties of a church. There must have been, in the nature of things, some officer in every church, capable of discharging all the functions of a minister of Christ, or the power would have been defective of carrying out the very purposes of the existence of a church. Without the power to ordain, no church could have had the means of perpetuating itself. Its very existence would have depended on the will of a person or persons foreign to it. If it be meant by the saying, "There

can be no church without a bishop," that there can be no church without an officer, or officers, who have the authority to ordain, it is perfectly true, but it entirely destroys the relation of bishop to more than one church.

With the right of ordination goes the right of administering the sacraments. If the officers of any particular church have not the power to perpetuate themselves, then their church may be at any moment cut off from the possession of the Christian ordinances, and indeed all Christian privileges, and the door is opened to the greatest tyranny and oppression. And the church which gives up this power is instantly enslaved. Accordingly, this was the point in which the liberties of the Christian world first began to be invaded, and the simple power of ordination was the engine by which a domination was established in Europe, at which nations bowed down, and monarchs trembled on their thrones.

Another conspicuous feature of the early church, was its popular character. In fact, Christianity is the mother of all the free governments which now exist upon the earth. The apostles did not fill the place of Judas by their own election. The whole church chose two candidates, and then they cast lots between them. The seven deacons, too, were chosen by popular vote.

What then are the points, which we may consider established with regard to the primitive church? That it was one with respect to its faith, one in respect to the God whom it worshipped, one in regard to the Master it obeyed, and one as respects its spirit and character.

The outward form and organization of the church was the result of circumstances, not ordained by Christ, nor made a subject of perpetual enactment by the apostles. Its officers were the result of circumstances, and many of them could not be permanent, nor have any successors. Teaching was not appropriated by any class or order, but was exercised by all. There was no subordination among the apostles, and the churches were independent of each other; and, moreover, the power was evidently with the people, and officers were chosen by popular election.

But no sooner were the apostles dead, than what did the world see take place in the Christian church? From these humble beginnings, a most magnificent edifice was constructed. One elder of a church, from the mere necessity of having a presiding officer, began to assume superiority over the others, and to appropriate to himself the name of bishop, which was at first common to them all. Parent churches assumed superiority over their colonies and dependencies, and one of the elders of a church soon found himself the bishop of a city, then of a province, then of all Christendom. And the same causes which made the churches of Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople, the Metropolitan churches of their respective provinces, made the church of Rome the mistress of the world. Then came the ages of darkness and superstition, when the Roman Empire fell in ruins, and the Pope, in fact, stepped into the vacant throne of the Cæsars, and the successor of the humble fishermen of Galilee summoned the kings of the earth to do him homage, drew to Rome the riches of the nations, and

assumed the prerogative of God himself, of opening or shutting the gates of heaven upon mankind.

But the bishops, in order to confirm and perpetuate their own supremacy, were compelled to claim to do something which no one else could do. They assumed the right of making each other forever, and they invented a new rite, which neither Christ nor his apostles had instituted, that of confirmation, and which none but themselves had the authority to administer.

A new species of unity was introduced. All men must acknowledge, not only one God, and one Lord, but one bishop. In the meantime, by the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, the church became amalgamated with the civil power, and then force took the place of truth, and authority of conviction. But this new species of unity, enforced by external power, became instantly fatal to the true unity, that of the spirit. Unity of conviction never can be enforced, though a thousand Emperors conspire to decree it. The unity of faith became broken by the very attempts which were made to preserve it. There was in the church originally, but one faith, expressed in the form of baptism. But soon men began to speculate as to the meaning of its terms. Its second article, so intelligible to a Jew, "I believe in Jesus, as the Son of God, or the promised Messiah," the convert from Paganism began to interpret in a different sense. He changed the word Son, from an official to a literal signification. He said that Jesus was the Son of God, not because God sent him, but because he was begotten of the Virgin by the Holy Ghost. Another said that he was the Son of God, because he was be

gotten by the Father out of his own substance, before all worlds. At the conversion of Constantine, those who held this last opinion as to the metaphysical nature of Christ, happened to be in the majority in the church, at the command of the Roman Emperor they assembled and altered the original creed, by inserting into it their interpretation of its terms, and Constantine by his sword forced it upon the church universal. Those who refused to subscribe to it, were not only excommunicated from the church, but banished like criminals by the civil power, and the unity of the church from a unity of spirit, became a unity of oppression. This amalgamation of church and state, consummated by Constantine, in the fourth century, was perpetuated till the formation of the American constitution. It was shaken by the Reformation, but not dissolved, in any nation of Europe. And strange as it may seem, the Nicene Creed, the first fruit of this unholy alliance, still continues to be recited in some of the churches of the United States, with as much solemnity, and apparently as of as much authority, as the Bible itself.

And here, friends and fellow-citizens, in our glorious Republic, the church being severed from the civil power, the great and last experiment of Christianity is working itself out. The church is returning to the only unity that it ever can possess on earth, that of the spirit. Deprived of the external pressure which forced them upon mankind, church creeds and organizations are falling to pieces, and are found to be nothing but a rope of sand. Every church is becoming, as it was at the beginning, essentially independent. There is not a bishop nor ec