Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

Another monstrous abuse born out of the bosom of the Church, though not so directly, is Sacerdotalism. I say not so directly, because the genius of Christianity is so distinctly negative of all priesthood that, had there been even an express prohibition of it, its contradiction to the whole tone of the New Testament could not have been more apparent. Not more certainly are the sacrifices of the Jewish law abolished in the sacrifice of Christ, according to the Pauline theology, than the Levitical priesthood stands abolished in the priesthood of Christ and in the priesthood of the individual members of his spiritual body (2 Peter v. 9).20 Whence, then, came our Christian priesthood? Partly, I suspect, as the Jewish Sabbath was interpolated into the Christian Lord’s Day, from the nearness and external similitude of the two things—the presbyter being to the outward eye pretty much the same as the priest was to the Jewish worshippers; partly from the self-importance which is the besetting sin of all bodies of men prominently planted in the social platform, and which induces them to magnify their vocation, and in doing so stilt their professional pride up into the attitude of a very stately and a very reputable virtue. The proper functions of the office-bearers of the early Christian Church, call them overseers, bishops, or what you will, were so honourable and so beneficent that, especially with an unlearned and unthinking people, the reverential respect due to the actors might easily pass into a superstitious belief in the mystical virtue of the operations of which they were the conductors; and this ready submission on the part of the people, holding out a willing hand to the natural self-importance and potentiated self-estimate of the clerical body, resulted in a four-square system of sacerdotal control, sacerdotal virtue, and sacerdotal influence, to which we shall search for a parallel in vain through all the annals of Asiatic and African heathenism. Nay, I can readily believe that those who can find a priesthood in the genius of the gospel and the apostolic institution of the Christian Church, will naturally be inclined to maintain that the superior power of the Gregories, Bonifaces, and Innocents of the medieval Church, as contrasted with anything that we read or know of the Egyptian, Hebrew, and Roman pontiffs, is the natural and necessary outcome of the superior excellence of the Christian religion; and this, no doubt, is the only comfortable belief on which all forms of Christian sacerdotalism can repose.