no such succession, for she rejected Episcopacy with the loathing with which she fled from Rome. We cannot trace "the sacred chain" though a line of popes, possessing no succession of holiness, of doctrine, or of decency and morality. Gregory Nazianzen affirmed, "He that holdeth the same doctrine is of the same chain: but he who is an enemy to the doctrine, is an enemy to the chain." Even Pope Felix was constrained to admit, "Those who would share the Apostleship, must follow the Apostles' doctrine." No such bond connected the Roman popes. They were according to Baronius the Papal annalist, "a long succession of monsters in vice and folly." Guiciardini speaking of this line preceding the sixteenth century, says, "He was esteemed a good pope in those days, who did not exceed in wickedness the worst of men." Yet to admit the succession scheme, we must believe that these men, utter strangers to Christ and all religious experience-these thieves and robbers who climbed up some other way, in many instances Arians and heretics—whose history is one of war, bloodshed, treason, perjury, blasphemy, licentiousness, incest, and horrid impieties far transcending the infamous roll of the Roman emperors-a succession, according to Dr. Geddes, rent by twenty-four schisms, according to Baronius, by twenty-six, while Onuphrius the most accurate of writers, makes them thirty, and Labbeus and Binius tell us in the interim, of "A three-headed beast rising from the gates of hell, infesting the holy chair in a woful manner," in the form of three reigning perjured popes at once we must believe that these men, many of whom, on the authority of Baronius, "were FALSE PONTIFFS" intruded into the chair of St. Peter, by sordid and abandoned courtesans, were the genuine successors of the Apostles, empowered to transmit the Holy Ghost by prayer and the imposition of hands to the Hughes, the Onderdonks, and De Lanceys of the present age!

Nor were the bishops during these dark periods of the world's history, either morally or religiously superior to the popes. "We read," says Archbishop Whately, "of bishops consecrated when mere children-of men officiating who barely knew their letters-of prelates expelled and others put into their places by violence-of illiterate

and profligate laymen and habitual drunkards, admitted to Holy Orders, and in short, of the prevalence of every kind of disorder, and reckless disregard of the decency which the Apostle enjoins." Would the imposition of the hands of such men upon the heads of infidels and heretics, transform them into ministers of Christ? Would the canonical ordination of Captain Kidd and the pirate Gibbs, bring them into the true rank of the priesthood, and render them safe conductors of the Apostolic chain? Shocking as the supposition is, the advocate of the suc cession scheme must maintain it, or abandon his dogma as untenable. Worse men than they, and sinning against greater light, have been connecting links in the papacy and prelacy. The chief authors of heresy, immorality, and schism, have been the bishops. The men who pour ed out the blood of the Waldenses in the valleys of the Alps, of the Lollards, in England, of the succeeding Reformers and Non-conformists of all nations, have been prelatical. Their energies were directed to the destruction of the gospel, rather than to its sustenance. We owe the blessings of a reformed Christianity, to a non-prelatic Wicklif, Luther, Calvin, Zwingle, Knox, rather than to the adherents of an anti-Christian hierarchy.

The English succession is identical with the Roman. Bishop Godwin has shown that seventeen Archbishops of Canterbury, twelve Archbishops of York, nine bishops of Durham, and eight bishops of Winchester, were ordained immediately by the Pope, or his legates. In many cases these popes were not only monsters in wickedness, but mere pretenders to the chair of St. Peter. Thus Pope Formosus, conspicuous for his enormous vices, ordained Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 891. His suc cessor Stephen VI., who, says Baronius, 66 was so wicked that he would not have dared to enrol him in the list of popes, were it not that antiquity gives his name;" declared all his ordinations void. Yet Plegmund ordained bishops in England for twenty-five years afterwards. Pope Gregory XII., one of three pretenders to the popedom, ordained Henry Chickley Archbishop of Canterbury in 1414. Subsequently he was set aside, as neither pope nor bishop, by the council of Constance. Chickley, however, continued

for twenty-nine years to ordain bishops and priests, thus de perpetuating an uncanonical succession, severed, null and der void, in its commencement!

was seen

* *

At the period of the Reformation, the links were again de broken. The Church of England was excommunicated with all her bishops and other clergy, once under the reign of Henry VIII., and again under Elizabeth. No church, on her own principles, was ever left in a more hopeless state. If the Roman church was the true one, the then is the Episcopal twice dead, and severed from the only infallible channel of grace. But if the Romish was a false church, and in the language of the Homilies " a foul, filthy, old, withered harlot; the foulest and filthiest that ever as it at present is, and hath been for nine hundred years, IT IS SO FAR FROM THE NATURE OF THE TRUE CHURCH, THAT NOTHING CAN BE MORE," then it is evident, that the Episcopal has not the Apostolical succession, the former had no succession to give but that of apostasy. The popes, those men of sensuality, impiety, blasphemy, usurpation, and antichrist, had no Apostolic orders to bestow. They were cut off by the canon laws, - by the discipline of Christ's kingdom, and by common sense, from the line of his witnesses and ministers. The Episcopal Church may hang upon which horn of the dilemma she prefers-both are fatal to her claims. If the Romish was the true church, on high-church principles she ought never to have separated from her connection, and being separated and excommunicated, she is ecclesiastically dead; but if, according to her own standards, the Romish Church is the "MOTHER OF HARLOTS," she could have received no valid Apostolic commission at her hands. As well might Satan give grace, as the Apocalyptic Anti-christ bestow the ministry of salvation. Šatan cannot cast out Satan. The Episcopal Church has not the Apostolic succession.

But granting that the so-called "sacred chain" passed unsevered the gulf of the Reformation, subsequently, in several instances, its links were broken. Canonists are to this day doubtful as to the validity of the ordination of Archbishop Parker, one of the first links in the reformed series. He was consecrated by four deposed bishops who

were never afterwards restored. Barlow, the principal consecrator seemed never to have been consecrated at all, the archives of the Archbishop containing no mention of his name. Parker was not only consecrated by incompetent persons, but in an insufficient and invalid form, and unless the parliamentary statute passed to meet the difficul ty of the case, did make a defective consecration validunless the interference of the State rectified the uncanonical prelate-making power of the church, the proba bility is, that the Anglical chain was there rudely interrupted. But other difficulties present themselves. Many of the English bishops received only. what the church considers lay-baptism, which is about as invalid as lay-ordination. Bishop Butler, and Archbishop Secker who baptized his sacred majesty George III., together with Bishop Reynolds, Hopkins, Cooper, and Leighton, received no other baptism but this. And worse still. Dr. Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, was never baptized at all. Thus as the system teaches, he was not even a member of the church-v -was never sacramentally regenerated,—could neither receive nor confer orders. He was never ordained a deacon, and of course could not be ordained a priest, as taught the 10th canon of the council of Sardica. And when ordained uncanonically as a priest, he was ordained by Sysderf, who had himself no valid orders to give. We might show, that the Scottish succession, through which bishop Seabury, the earliest American bishop received his orders, was utterly worthless, and that-but we pause. We need not travel on to inspect the whole length of a chain, when, if unsound in one part, if broken in a single link, the mass falls by its own weight. The chain was broken before it had a begin ning.

The doctrine that the Apostles, instead of being an extraordinary class of ministers, were an order of diocesan bishops that their office was to be perpetuated in the church-that Archbishop Laud and Pope Alexander VI., were charged conductors of the chain-givers of the Holy Ghost-while Baxter and Edwards were usurpers of the ministerial office-may be numbered, (ridiculous and abominable as it is,) as the worthy dogma of a church holding

it "as the principle of her continuance," conjoined to baptismal regeneration and sacramental holiness. No church, but one intoxicated by frequent draughts from the cup of Papal abominations, would ever broach it. Its exposition is its refutation, to every mind well instructed in the oracles of God, and the luminous history of the past.

SECTION V.

DIOCESAN EPISCOPACY UNKNOWN IN THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH.

If the Apostles were not diocesan bishops, there are no such functionaries known in the New Testament. Those of whom we there read as bishops, did not sustain any such character. Eminent Episcopalian writers readily grant this. Says Onderdonk, late bishop of Pennsylvania, "The name bishop which now designates the higher grade of the ministry, is not appropriated to that office in scripture. That name is there given to the middle order, or presbyters; and all that we read in the New Testament concerning bishops, (including of course the words, 'overseers' and 'oversight' which have the same derivation,) is to be regarded as pertaining to that middle grade." Thus the reader sees, that when the Bible speaks of bishops, or of exercising the authority of the episcopate, it means only a Presbyterian bishop, and the oversight of a single congregation. As we have seen, to the New Testament writers, prelatical bishops were a nameless order; they had nothing to say of them, about them, or to them, and for the evident reason, such an order had no exist

ence.

The shifts which Prelatists make use of to establish the triple order of their priesthood, are remarkable. They tell us that during the Redeemer's stay on earth, he was the bishop, the Apostles the presbyters, and the seventy the deacons; thus making Christ an order of his own ministers in his own church, the Apostles unprelatical, and the seventy an order existing before their time. After his ascension they find no difficulty in advancing the Apos tles into the first order, into that which was vacated by Christ, though unable to tell who transferred them with