One of the most striking characteristics of the ecclesiastic, as opposed to the religious mind, is its tendency to concentrate its attention upon detail to the exclusion of fundamental principles. We are assured that the same habit distinguishes the statesman from the party man, or mere politician. At any rate, we have had abundant evidence during the past fifty years—evidence which has been emphasised during the past year—that the love of detail, of all that comes under that washing of cups and platters, of first places and salutations in the market-place, resplendent raiment and broad phylacteries, which Jesus so summarily denounced in the official religion of his own time, is still a mark of the ecclesiastic temper in the England of to-day. If a man—even though that man be a pope—should question the validity of its "orders," volleys of sacerdotal refutation are fired from the press, the whole atmosphere is electric with the controversial charges such profanity provokes. But let a man proclaim that there is no such institution as "orders" at all, that true religion, that Christianity, as conceived by its founder, is destitute of ritual, priest and sacrifice, and everything is still as a Quakers' meeting. How is it that men will seriously devote their energies to repelling such side attacks as those directed against them by rival churches, while they totally neglect to satisfy an enlightened age as to the validity of the fundamental assumption on which their entire system reposes? The pope and the Eastern Churches may be serious rivals in the camp ecclesiastic, but what are our native pontiffs and priests to reply to men like Hatch, Jowett and Stanley, to say nothing of Martineau, who roundly proclaim that "orders," as understood by them, are nothing more nor less than a superstition? For instance, what would the patrons of the "mass in masquerade" answer to Stanley's direct and emphatic pronouncement: "In the beginning of Christianity there was no such institution as the clergy; it grew naturally out of the increasing needs of the community . . . the intellectual element in religion requires some one to express it, and this, in some form or other, will be the clergy"?[1] Surely if there were no "orders" in the beginning, then a priesthood was no creation of Jesus, his apostles were no priests, they created, therefore, no priests, and a priestly caste grew up as an intrusion in Christendom just as it arose in the religion of the holy Buddha in India, and attempted, though unsuccessfully, to invade the severely simple religion of Mohammed.

The view which ethical religion takes of sacerdotalism is very well known, but it is essential to do more than merely repudiate the notion of priesthood as an integral portion of religion; our duty is also to possess ourselves of the facts of history and criticism so as to satisfy ourselves and others who may need such instruction, that sacerdotalism is not only not ethical, but is anti-Christian, and that the greatest anomaly the world presents to-day is that of the clergymen of the Eastern and Western Churches arrogating to themselves the possession of powers which the founder of their religion and his earliest followers not only never exercised, but of which they had not even a remote conception.

A singular interest has been added to this inquiry by the recently-revived controversy between two of the many Churches into which Christendom is divided on the highly debatable matter of Anglican orders. The said controversy had been in a state of suspended animation from the time of the Stuarts up to the Tractarian movement, when it was partially revived, and a fair crop of literature sprang up around it. It has been reserved, however, for our own days to witness its complete vivification under the auspices of the High Church societies and certain sagrestani among "the nobility and gentry" of our day. To the credit of the female sex, we hear of no ladies being prominently identified with the movement. Even Oxford, once "the home of lost causes and impossible ideals," concerns itself with these minutiae no more. Like the later pantheon of imperial Rome, it offers its impartial hospitality to representatives of every form of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The shadowy warfare is now waged, apparently, in the London press and magazines, in the bulls of popes and the responsions of archbishops. Of course, the renewed inquiry set on foot by the industry and temerity of Lords Halifax and Nelson—tanti nominis umbra surely, in this latter case, to engage itself in such a battle—could have but one ending, namely, the reiterated and emphasised condemnation of our national ecclesiastics as nothing better than mere laymen, and the renewed degradation of the officiating curate to the level of his neighbouring Nonconformist minister who celebrates "the Supper" and preaches in his coat.

The papal representatives in this country have published a rejoinder to the official reply of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, which, if I may shelter myself behind the authority of the Times[2] reviewer, does not err on the side of dignity, moderation and scholarship. It is said to be jaunty, perky, off-hand, suggestive of "the smart evening journalist"—this last is very serious—and, worse than all, it is an appeal, not to theologians or scholars, nor even to thoughtful and instructed men, but "to the gallery".

Who the gallery in this particularly Divine comedy may be I really do not know. I strongly suspect that if the piece were put upon the boards—and everything is now dramatised, from the trials of Satan to the Dreyfus case—the gallery would be the emptiest department of the theatre. And this opinion I am pleased to see confirmed by the closing remarks of the review above noticed, which warns the Christian bishops and pastors of the present day that the comparative merits of one set of "orders" as opposed to those of another set have "little interest and not much meaning for nine Englishmen out of ten".

But what, I think, the average man would be interested to know is whether there be such things as "holy orders" at all. Very many of them are, in this matter, I believe, in the position of those interesting Asiatics who "knew not whether there be such a thing as a Holy Ghost," and I think it will be abundantly easy to show that the ignorance of the ordinary man as to the precise nature of "orders" was shared in also by our Asiatic friends whose existence is noticed in an early chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. We shall therefore proceed to show the groundlessness of the entire controversy from evidence which satisfactorily establishes that the authentic form of Christianity, as fixed by its founder and his followers for two centuries, admits of no such thing as a priesthood in the sense contemplated by the disputants whose wordy warfare has now, we understand, been closed for ever.

To begin, then, whence arose the idea of a priest? What is the meaning of the word? Etymologically, we may take it to be identical with the Saxon word preost, which again is doubtless, though it is not admitted on all hands, identical with the Greek presbys or elder. A priest, then, originally and literally, signified senior or elder, whether in the family or the State. How an elder came to be associated with religion was in this wise. Every philosopher and anthropologist has been constrained to admit the presence in man of an instinct of unity, impelling him not merely to society or intercourse with his fellows, but to communion with a power unseen. This instinct, as already defined in a former chapter, is religion. Now the initiatory development of this aboriginal instinct was very humble, and if we wish to know what our direct ancestors once were, we need only consult the record of anthropological research among such savages as the Fijians or Tonga Islanders. The shape assumed by religion amongst such people was most probably ancestor or ghost worship. The dead father or chieftain is still seen in the dreams of his children or people, and the mysteriousness of the new shape and presence he assumes excites the awe and reverence which is at the root of the religious habit. The chief becomes the tutelary deity or protector of his tribe, or locality over which he ruled. Other chieftains are added to him in course of time, and soon we have a veritable pantheon of gods, good and evil, whom it is necessary to placate by certain offices and functions, very much as it is necessary to covet the favour of powerful men on earth. Whose duty shall it be to perform such rites? Naturally, it falls to the head of the family and the head of the State. They are the born officers of religious functions, the father for his home circle, the chieftain for his clan or tribe. Thus Livy tells us that Numa, the Roman king, was accustomed to offer sacrifice, but that the increasing cares of State caused him to relinquish the office in favour of specially appointed individuals who were called Flamens, and Mr. McDonald,[3] in his account of the Blantyre negroes, informs us that during the temporary absence of a chief, it devolved upon his wife to take his place at the sacrificial altar. Numberless instances are supplied in such works as Tylor's, Lubbock's, and Spencer's Ecclesiastical Institutions, which go to show this primatial or pontifical authority resident in the chief of the State, and the transference of its offices to subordinate people, who gradually and naturally became an official body or caste called priests or elders, as representatives of heads of families, or of the tribe or State.[4] At any rate, however much interested people may be inclined to dispute the lowly origin of religion and worship, the indisputable fact remains that such worship and sacrifice goes on among aboriginal peoples at this very hour, and there is not one shred of evidence, beyond a mistaken prejudice, which goes to show that our religion had any other origin than that.

We may now enter on the further inquiry whether Christianity, meaning thereby the religion personally professed and practised by Jesus of Nazara, was a sacerdotal or sacrificial system in the sense already explained. Such an inquiry necessarily resolves itself into this further one, namely, whether there is any reliable evidence that the founder of the Christian religion was himself a priest, taught a sacerdotal doctrine, or exercised any sacerdotal functions.

Though he died a comparatively young man, if we may believe the gospel narrative, which makes him to have lived either to thirty-one or thirty-three years, though Irenaeus emphatically asserts that he lived to fifty years, we may most assuredly proclaim him a priest in the sense of elder, or leader of men. One whom schools of thought, represented by men so opposed as Mill, Renan, Matthew Arnold, Spinoza, Goethe, Napoleon and Rousseau, conspired to honour must have been indeed a "king of men". But this is not what is meant by the question. By priest we mean here what the ecclesiastic means, namely, one who is set apart by the act of God, signified by some external rite or ceremony, whereby power is conferred to perform certain definite functions impossible to the ordinary man. He alone, in virtue of his consecration, can mediate between man and the Deity, can propitiate him for the sins of men, can forgive those sins, and mechanically communicate holiness by the adoption of a definite ceremony and the pronouncement of a precise formula. Nay, in virtue of his peculiar status, the priest is able to superinduce a physical sanctity in solid and liquid substances, like bread and wine, and quite independently of his own belief, or the belief of the bystanders, or even the recipients, cause those substances to be no longer what to every conceivable physical test they still continue to be, but the body and blood of a man who lived more than 1800 years ago. In a word, a ritual may be described as "a system of consecrated charms or spells, and the priest is the great magician who dispenses them".[5]

What we ask, then, is precisely this: Was Jesus a priest in this sense? Unhesitatingly and most emphatically we reply—and without any fear of serious attempt at refutation—that he was not, and that, in consequence, the whole scheme of sacerdotal religion as prevalent in the Roman and Oriental Christian Churches, and to a moderate extent in the Anglican Church, is entirely baseless, grounded, not on the institution of Jesus their reputed founder, but on an infantine superstition which the third century of Christianity took over from the Jewish and Pagan traditions which had preceded it. Hence the whole protracted controversy, which has set no end of theological hair on end, about the validity of these orders and the invalidity of those, is so much beating the air, because Christianity, as understood and instituted by Christ, knows no place, any more than Buddhism or Mohammedanism, for priest, rite or sacrament.

Let us proceed to offer some evidence for this statement. In the first place, the whole tenor of Christ's life was not that of the priest, but of something entirely different; Christ was a prophet. What is a prophet? We shall very imperfectly appreciate the character of the prophet if we look upon him as nothing more than an historian "for whom God has turned time round the other way," so that he reads the future as if it were the past. Most extraordinary instances of clairvoyance are brought to our notice in which things, eventually realised, turn out to have been previously known, but the clairvoyant is not the prophet. The prophet is the spirit representative of the Supreme Spirit before our own. He is the image—perfected by intercourse with the Unseen—of "the Invisible Goodness". He uses no rites, sacraments or symbols, for he is all that in himself. If his pure, lofty, ennobling life cannot impress the eternal upon the souls of men, then assuredly no bread, wine or oil, can do it.[6] Hence, we see, a prophet is born, not made. No consecration can make one any more than installing a scene painter in the studio of a Raphael could ensure a reproduction of a Transfiguration, or the Madonna di Foligno. And no desecration, no excommunication from church, chapel or sanhedrin can unmake him. The prophet is one of those royal beings who are kings by right Divine, aye and human too, for all fall down instinctively before him. It is the verdict of history that all that is most blessed we owe to the prophets—not to the priests—to Moses, Confucius, Chrishna, Buddha, Socrates, Zoroaster and Christ.

Now, surely no one can seriously question that the life of Christ as described in the gospel narrative is of a pronounced anti-sacerdotal type. He was not of the priestly family, no man laid hands upon him, he never exercised priestly functions. His teaching so directly tended to the disparagement of priesthood as such, that the official hierarchy of his country, quick to perceive it, compassed his death in the interest of their self-preservation. "What do we, for lo! the whole world has gone after him?" His first sermon was the announcement of a prophetic mission. In the synagogue of his own town, among the humble folk who had seen him grow from boyhood to youth and manhood, he made the announcement: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor". If he entered the stately courts of the temple, it was to teach rather than to worship, and never to sacrifice. At the close of a day's teaching, he retires to the hillside of Olivet, and feels the Great Presence in the night breeze upon his brow and in the heaven above him as deeply as within the walls of the "Holy Place". It is not, "Lo here, lo there!" for "the Kingdom of God is within you". A priest would have said the Divine Presence is upon the altar, but Christ discerns it always and everywhere. His teaching was almost entirely delivered under the canopy of heaven—on the mount of beatitudes, in a public street, in the market-place, from a fishing boat to crowds upon the strand, in a corn-field, or occasionally in some private dwelling-place. The only invective that broke the calm of his peaceful speech was directed against the ruling sacerdotal influence; he was emphatically a "Prophet of the Most High".

The word hiereus, or sacrificing priest, is never once applied to him in the Gospels, and only in one epistle, that to the Hebrews, and there its appearance is not unworthy of our notice. Christ is declared to be a hiereus, or priest, only after his removal from earth. It is stated that it is an office which did not, which could not have belonged to him while on earth—precisely the point we contend. But how is it that in this epistle he comes to be designated as a priest at all? It was probably due to the exigencies of controversy. The epistle must be looked upon as a polemical pamphlet directed against those Hebrews who refused to embrace the new reform and derided its absence of priest, sacrifice and altar. Conscious that Jesus left no priesthood behind him, that his teaching was anti-sacerdotal and non-sacramental, there was nothing for the writer but to suggest that the great prophet himself was the high priest, the solitary member of the caste in the new gospel, and that therewith men are to be satisfied, because more than compensated thereby for the absence of the altar and hierarchy of old. So we have here an unique instance of the exception which proves the rule. Once and once only is the founder of Christianity affirmed to be a priest, and then by an anonymous writer, in a production which the whole Western Church for centuries refused to acknowledge as inspired, and on examination it turns out that by the very nature of the priesthood ascribed to him, such an institution is no longer possible on earth; it is banished for ever into invisibility, and can have no longer any representatives amongst men.

In like manner we find no instance of any attempt on the part of Jesus to make his immediate followers priests. He called them "witnesses," bade them "preach" and "teach". If he told them to baptise, or to break bread in memory of him, we shall soon see that, in the first three centuries of Christian history, his words were emphatically not taken to mean that no one but they, or such as they, could perform these offices. That which men call "the apostolic succession," and to which some of them apparently attach supreme importance, is nothing but a chimera, positively unknown to Jesus or his apostles, and absolutely unintelligible to the Christian Church for more than 200 years. The most profound silence on the whole subject prevails during this period, in vivid contrast with the language held on the subject by subsequent writers. In the face of available, and even readily accessible evidence, it is impossible to maintain that, before the age of Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, who flourished about the middle of the third century, there was any such distinction between clergy and laity as the apostolic succession theory maintains to-day. The very names of the clergy, such as deacon, presbyter, and bishop, are lay terms, borrowed from civil not ecclesiastical life. A deacon is a domestic servant; a presbyter, an elder; and a bishop an overseer or bailiff; and in conformity with these names there was no office or function of the Church so exclusively proper to the clergy as not to be capable of performance also by the laity. And if this can be shown, what follows but that the whole conception of "holy orders" is an absolute innovation upon the original teaching of Jesus—a corruption fruitful in disorders, or rather disasters, of the most deplorable character, and at this very hour tending more than any other ascertainable cause to divide man from man, and perpetuate the mischief of religious dissension?

To begin with, then, preaching was indiscriminately permitted in the apostolic times and subsequently. This may be gathered freely from the Acts and Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter xiv. Moreover, one of the most interesting monuments of the second century is a homily delivered by a layman at Rome, a fragment of which had long been known as the second epistle of Clement,[7] and the remainder of which came to light in 1875 in two forms, a Greek MS. and a Syriac translation. Moreover, the Apostolical Constitutions, which are still later—going well into the second century—expressly contemplate preaching by a layman. Dr. Hatch does not hesitate to say that the earliest positive prohibitions of lay preaching were issued solely in the interests of ecclesiastical order, not because there was any inherent right in the priest to teach as opposed to the layman.

Next, in regard to baptism, there need be no hesitation in admitting the capacity of the layman to baptise, because the Church of Rome admits it to-day, nay, it admits that a Mohammedan, or even the heathen Chinaman—if indeed he be such—could lawfully and validly perform that function. This, I submit, is not to be construed as an act of liberality on the Church's part. It is simply the result of the impasse to which it would otherwise be brought by the grotesque teaching that the Deity would condemn everlastingly the soul of an unbaptised infant. This, according to Augustine, being the Christian religion, naturally some loophole had to be fabricated, because priests are not always at hand in moments of emergency, and consequently the validity of lay baptism had necessarily to be recognised.

But there is one office which the Anglican, no less than the Roman Church, would reserve to the priest, and that is the celebration of the Eucharistic Supper.[8] It is abundantly clear to historians that the root-source of the superstitious belief in orders is to be found in the Eucharist and the theories which sprang up in the third century concerning the elements. It cannot be doubted that previously to the age of Cyprian, the communion was held to be what its name designates—an holy assembly, a pledge of unity symbolised by the common partaking of bread and wine after the example of Christ. Now, it is clear from the Ignatian epistles, writings of the second century, whoever may have been their author, that the Christians of those days were accustomed to hold Eucharistic meetings other than those over which a presbyter or elder presided. The practice is indeed reproved by the writer, but in exceeding gentle tones. "Break one bread," says the writer; "be careful to have only one Eucharist"; "let that be the valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop or by some one commissioned by him".

It is surely positively inconceivable that Ignatius of Antioch, or whoever the author of these letters is, can have held the sacramental doctrine subsequently introduced and have used language of such mild remonstrance to the Asiatic Christians he addresses. What would the present occupant of the See of Antioch, of Lincoln, or of Rome say to a number of Christians who assembled together to-day, took bread and wine, and after repeating the Lord's prayer—for they did no more in the early centuries—proceeded to partake of it? Their holy horror is scarcely conceivable. And yet, these lay folk would be the true Christians, not their sacerdotal denunciators. Let us repeat, there was no office open to the priest which was not equally open to the layman. Merely considerations of order and procedure restricted ecclesiastical functions to a particular body or caste of men, and consequently the theory of the essential distinction between priest and layman is not a tenable one because it is none of Christ's making.[9]

It has been remarked that perverse conceptions of the Eucharist were responsible for the equally corrupt teaching about orders. This is the case. Previously to the third century, the Eucharist remained what it had ever been, "the breaking of bread," the commemorative meal. Then there came a change, and men began to read into it a sacrificial meaning and to interpret it as a mystical repetition of the death of Christ. From Cyprian this novel theology apparently passed to Augustine and Ambrose in the fourth century, and thenceforth it became dominant, though by no means universally so, until the eighth and ninth centuries. The rise of Athanasianism in the fourth century, and the abuse of the doctrine of incarnation by that bishop, reacted naturally in the matter of the Eucharist. Christ, who was proclaimed to be the solitary incarnation, the Deity hidden behind a veil of flesh, naturally paved the way for the Eucharist as a sacrament wherein the Deity is hid behind the veil of bread. The one incarnation is, as it were, the complement of the other. Hence, a rigidly literal meaning was given to Christ's utterances about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and Christians were taught to believe that by the manducation of his bodily frame his holy spirit could be incorporated, as though, for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo. Only mind can know and receive mind, and it is really difficult to comprehend the grossness of soul which suggests to man the idea that by feasting on the flesh and blood of his God he may hope to become like a God.

It would be just as easy to show that in the matter of church government and discipline everything was, in the early days, on a thoroughly democratic, or representative basis. Power, as in the England of to-day, is recognised to reside in the community, not exclusively in the presbyters. St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians recognises this in the matter of the removal of officers. The epistles of Clement and Polycarp recognise the same thing. Bishops are always elected by the people, and the net conclusion therefore is that no such thing as a hierarchy of ordained deacons, priests and bishops was known to Christ, to Paul, or the writers of the first two and a half centuries. The teaching and belief of those days was nonsacerdotal and non-sacramental, and nothing but a superstitious accretion overlaying the original truth can account for the spectacle which vast portions of the Christian world now present, as indeed do vast portions of the Buddhist world. The fate reserved for both these great prophets seems to be identical, the submergence of their pure and elevated ethical teaching beneath an accumulated mass of traditionary and ceremonial law; but here in the West, at all events, there appears to be a well-grounded hope that it is not altogether impossible to get back to Christ and his pure and wholesome teaching. Prophets have arisen in this past century who have far more influence than many priests, and there may be "some standing here" who will witness the close of the reign of the priest and the restoration of the dominion of the prophet.

The priests and scribes sat in the chair of Moses in the days of Christ, and that chair is overturned. No one knows where to look for it. Now we have another priest who sits in Peter's chair, a third who holds Augustine's seat, and a fourth and a fifth who can trace back their priestly ancestry in unbroken line to some era of superstition and decay. The same thing goes on in India and Ceylon, and in Thibet you have the Grand Lamas, to whom successively is united, by a sort of hypostatic union, the holy Spirit himself. Always and everywhere the shadow of the priest, the mystical, magical dispenser of the favours of heaven! We look to the days when religion shall be purified of such conceptions, when no one shall venture to stand between a man and his conscience, or claim to possess powers unattainable by other men, or pretend that the favour of heaven can be purchased by any other means than those indicated by the prophet of old and no less by the conscience of mankind—a life in accordance with righteousness, that is, a life in conformity with the moral law and the example of that supreme among the prophets of the race—Jesus who was called the Christ.

[1] Christian Institutions, p. 193.

[2] See Times, 5th February, 1898.

[3] Quoted in Spencer's Ecclesiastical Institutions.

[4] The appointment of Aaron by Moses, the leader of the Hebrew people, is the exact counterpart of the institution of the Flamens by Numa.

[5] Martineau, Studies of Christianity, p. 38.

[6] And, therefore, we note the inconsistency of the sacramentarian theory. It insists on moral goodness in the recipients and ministers of sacraments. But if the rite works of itself, its mechanical performance should be sufficient. But no; goodness is needed to secure any benefit therefrom; and this, of course, is the explanation of the alleged results of the sacraments. The moral goodness of the recipient has already secured the blessing before any rite has been administered.

[7] So that what had been thought to be a papal letter turns out to be a lay homily, showing that a layman could preach as well as a pope in the second century of our era. This suggests the notorious fact that unordained ministers are equally, if not more, successful in awakening ethical and religious emotion than priests and bishops. Nay, women like Catherine of Siena could hold Europe, its kings, and popes spell-bound, when "mere men" were powerless. Has any one in this generation read more powerful appeals to the religious sense than the fragments of the sermons of Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, more thrilling descriptions of an unavailing remorse than in the sermon on the text, "Keep innocency, and take heed to the thing which is right, for this shall bring a man peace at the last," which is preached by the agonised minister in The Silence of Dean Maitland?

[8] The recent papal rescript on Anglican ordination makes it the test of the comparative value of the rival "orders".

[9] Tertullian in the De Corona distinctly declares that though "it is only from the hands of our president we receive the Eucharist, if there be an emergency, a layman may celebrate as well as a bishop". I am indebted to the late Dr. Edwin Hatch for the historical evidence above adduced as to the church practice prevalent in the earliest centuries of Christianity. I would recommend interested readers to consult his Bampton Lectures, delivered in 1882.