Church. This testimonial is submitted to the standing committee, whose office it is to inspect and inquire into the conduct of candidates, and whose recommendation to the Bishop is essential to their obtaining ordination. The Bishop then may proceed to ordain, being satisfied himself from personal knowledge, from examination, or from the testimony of others, that the person is apt and meet to exercise the ministry to the glory of God and the good of the Church. He then propounds to him this most solemn question, "Do you trust that you are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost, to take upon you this office and ministry?"

The admission of men into the sacred order, and the maintaining of discipline among them after they are admitted, are matters of vast importance, and ought to awaken in the clergy and laity the highest degree of attention. Every man in society is implicated in the guilt of an unhallowed profession in the ministry, and it becomes the duty of every well wisher to the cause of religion to hold up his testimony, without favour or fear, against every unworthy intruder.

There is a false complaisance too common amongst us, which induces vestries and others, on very slight grounds, to grant testimonials of character. It has its origin sometimes indeed, in amiable feelings; but it cannot be reconciled with manly principle. Credentials, especially which are to introduce a candidate to the ministerial office, should not be given without the utmost caution and deliberation.

For of all the trusts which God hath put in our hands, that which assigns us the keeping of the interests and honour of the Church, is the most important, as it is the

i XV. Canon.

most extensive in its consequences to mankind. The laws of our Church therefore, ought to be observed with the most scrupulous rigour. Neither friendship, nor compassion, nor interest, nor importunity should make us swerve from truth and honesty. Friendship to any man in this respect, is enmity to God; compassion to an individual is cruelty, and the worst cruelty too, to the community. It is to become partaker of other men's sins, and to be in a great measure answerable for the harm which they do to souls, the disgrace which they bring on their office, the hurt which they do to religion, and the mischiefs which they bring upon the Church of God. Ignorance in a minister who undertakes to expound the word of God, and to make men wise unto salvation, must always prove a disqualification for extensive usefulness. But a worse failing still is ignorance in spiritual science; and still worse a bad life. An irreligious, or unholy life, ill becomes any one who names the name of Christ; but most of all does it deform the character of one who clothes himself in the ministerial garb. A minister without piety is a monster in the Church of God. His ugliness deters those who would approach the holy place so much, that all the exhortations which he gives them to enter thither, are to no purpose. "He resembles those horrid shapes which the poets feign to have stood at the entrance of Elysium. It required uncommon resolution in any person to pass by them, and force his way into the abodes of the blessed."i

The canonical government of the Church in this country, is constructed upon the simple republican principle which pervades all our civil institutions. Each state or

j See Smith's Lectures on the Nature and End of the Sacred Office, a book which ought to be in the hands and heart of every clergy

man.

diocese is secured in its state sovereignty, and has power to make such laws as are not incompatible with the general constitution. An annual convention is usually held in each state or diocese, consisting of the regular clergy belonging to the same, and one or more lay deputies from every parish that chooses to send such representatives. Each state or diocesan convention has the right to elect four of the clerical, and four of the laical order, to represent it in the General Convention, which holds its session triennially. The General Convention consists of two houses, and is constituted by these clerical and lay deputies thus elected, who form one branch, and by all the Bishops of the Church, who compose the other. A vote of both houses is necessary to the enactment of a law, and the law, when thus passed, is binding on every state or diocese that has acceded to the constitution. The frame of government which distinguishes the Church has now attained to that stability and strength, and has settled into that happy balance of power and liberty which not even its friends hoped for, but which are substantiated by the evidence of many years of remarkable unity and expanding prosperity. From the reports handed in at the General Convention of 1838, it appears that she continues to extend herself into the new states, as well as in those in which she has long been planted. May peace long continue to dwell within her walls, and prosperity within her palaces!

CHAPTER III.

ON THE NATURE OF THE CHURCH AND OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.

"THE visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the word of God is faithfully preached, and the sacraments duly administered according to Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

It is a society, and every society is distinguished from the general mass of the community by its order and government. To the establishment of order and government, a regular appointment of chosen men to the administration of particular offices is essential.

This mode of reasoning as far as temporal affairs is concerned, we readily admit. Let it be applied to the case of the Church, considered as a society, formed by God himself, under a particular government, calculated to promote the ends of its institutions; and we may conclude in one case as in the other, that personal qualifications furnish no dispensation for an outward appointment to an office of trust. "No man's gifts or qualities can make him a minister of holy things, unless ordination do give him the power." Personal qualification in the minister is, indeed, requisite to the proper discharge of the sacred office; but as this is a criterion which

a Article XIX. b Hooker's Eccles. Polity, Book V. Sect. 78.

may sometimes deceive, and which in its nature is changeable and precarious, it is necessary for the effectual administration of the office, that a divine authority, and a blessing consequent upon that authority, independent of any personal qualification, should be inherent in the office itself. Thus the divine confirmation of the ministerial act is secured, and made to depend not on the personal qualification, but on the appointment of God: and thus the eye of the faithful is directed to the proper object, and God, not man, receives the glory. But without an external commission, and the delegation to some specific authority to confer it, according to Christ's appointment, how could we know whether we have a valid ministry or not? If any one may rise up in the Church, and claim the power of exercising, or bestowing, this commission, merely by virtue of his being more holy than others, what limit can be assigned to the operation of the principle, and to the confusion that must ensue? Hundreds in the congregation, as well as one, may claim this right, and thus our Jerusalem, whose characteristic it is, that she is as a city at unity with herself, would resemble a Babel, in which no one would understand his neighbour. "This is the crime," as the pious and eloquent Bishop Horne remarks, "for which the leprosy once rose up in the forehead of a monarch, and Korah and his company, holy as they thought themselves to be, went down alive into the pit."

It is manifest from the sacred Scriptures, that of old God had a visible Church on earth, administered by men set apart for that office by peculiar ceremonies, and according to an established and prescribed order; and that the blessings of salvation were promised only to those who had a covenant relation to, and connexion with, this visible Church. The peculiar rite of initiation into its bosom, and the particular form of its ministry, were matters of