Page:A short account of the rise and progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in America.djvu/105

 Dictionaries; also, Lord King's account of the same, and Scripture references: see St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, 1st chap, and 1st verse—1 Peter, 5th chap. and 1st verse—the Acts of the Apostles, 20th chap. 17th and 28th verses—Titus, 1st chap. 5th and 7th verses—1 Timothy, 3d chap. 1st and 8ih verses—making but two orders of ministers in the primitive church: and as the Rev. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, was a regular ordained priest of the Protestant Church of England, we see no difficulty nor impropriety in claiming the name of Episcopal; although the venerable Wesley refused to do so for himself, because he would not interfere with the established order of the church of which he was a member; but he submitted to the term Superintendent, which we arc satisfied to claim; and with these views we fellow John Wesley's mode of government, with some slight alterations, in consequence of being under a Republican government. We shall now proceed to give some extracts from the writings of Lord King, who has given us a view of church government, from the days of the Apostles, down for three hundred succeeding years, so that we may be informed how Bishops were made by the ancient churches.