Page:(1848) Observations on Church and State- JF Ferrier.pdf/7

Rh and a divine. The human title every man had who was a believer. To become a clergyman, it was necessary that the aspirant should be a Christian. No process of ordination (effective as that ceremony was considered) could have made a Jew or a Mahommedan an office-bearer in the Roman Catholic church. This, then, was the preliminary title to the ministry. But it was merely a human qualification. It required to be supplemented by a divine commission—by ordination from God, received at the hands of the successors of the apostles,—and then the clergyman's title was complete. Now, it is obvious that this ordination separated the priests, as a caste, from the rest of the community. In so far as their human title was concerned, they still stood on a par with their fellow-men. But, in addition to this, they had something which these had not—a divine commission, by means of which a distinction was clearly established between them as clerical, and all others as laical.

But what titles did our Reformers regard as the essential qualification of a Christian minister? Precisely the same as those insisted on by the church of Rome—only they transposed the characters of the two titles. They regarded Christian belief as the divine part, and admission to office as the human part of the ministerial qualification. They held that every Christian man was a churchman, a priest by God's commission; but that a human appointment was necessary to complete his title to the ministry. This was not the ceremony of ordination. The first “Book of Discipline” thought that “not necessary.” It abjured the apostolical succession. His divine commission the applicant for orders had got already in common with all other Christians. That was not what he required, He wanted nothing but his human title; and this he obtained by the election of the people and the approbation of the learned. Is the man now a clergyman as contradistinguished from a layman? We may call him so for convenience' sake; but it is a distinction without a difference. In the Romish church the clergy were separated from the laymen by the whole diameter which lies between the human and the divine. In their ordination the priests received a divine commission which the laity did not possess. Hence they were invested (or were supposed to be so) with a spiritual attribute peculiar to themselves, and which stamped them as a class apart; but