same kind or of the same number came in their stead. They went out once, and returned back to their Master, to go out no more. The Church, the Christian Society, existed in those faithful followers, even from the beginning, and will doubtless last to the very end. Wherever, in any time or country, two or three are gathered together by a common love and faith, there will be a Christian Church. But even for years after the Lord's departure, such a society existed without a separate order of clergy. The whole Christian brotherhood was full of life, and there was as yet no marked distinction between its different portions. All were alike holy-all were alike consecrated. Therefore it is that the institution of the Christian ministry has never been placed in any ancient Creed amongst the fundamental facts or doctrines of the Gospel; therefore it is that (in the language of the English Church) ordination is not a sacrament, because it has no visible sign or ceremony ordained by Christ Himself.

Yet there is another sense in which the Christian ministry is a gift of our Divine Master. It is brought out in the well-known passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians : "When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. And He gave some

to be apostles, and some to be prophets, and some to be evangelists, and some to be shepherds and teachers.” 1 What is it that is meant by saying that it was only after His withdrawal from us, that He gave these gifts to men, and that amongst these gifts were the various offices, of which two at least (the pastoral and the intellectual) contain the germs of all the future clergy of Christendom? It is this that not in His earthly life, not in His direct communion with men, not as part of the original manifestation of Christianity, but (so to speak) as a 1 Eph. iv. 8-11.

Divine afterthought, as the result of the complex influences which were showered down upon the earth after its Founder had left it, as a part of the vast machinery of Christian civilization, were the various professions of Christendom formed, and amongst these the great vocation of the Christian ministry.

The various grades of the Christian clergy have sprung up in Christian society in the same ways, and by the same divine, because the same natural, necessity, as the various grades of government, law, and science - a necessity only more urgent, more universal, and therefore more divine, in so far as the religious and intellectual wants of mankind are of a more general, of a more simple, and therefore of a more divine kind than their social and

physical wants. All of them vary, in each age or country, according to the varieties of age and country — according to the civil constitution, according to the geographical area, according to the climate and custom of east and west, north and south. We find popular election, clerical election, imperial election, ministerial election, ordination by breathing, ordination by sacred relics, ordination by elevation of hands, ordination by imposition of hands, vestments and forms derived from Roman ivil life, or from a peculiar profession from this or that school, of this or that fashion spheres more or less limited, a humble country village, an academic cloister, a vast town population, or a province as large as a kingdom. The enumeration of these varieties is not a condemnation, but a justification, of their existence. The Christian clergy has grown with the growth and varied with the variations of Christian society, and the more complex, the more removed from the rudeness and simplicity of the early ages, the more likely they are to be in accordance with truth and reason, which is the mind of Christ.

This, therefore, is the divine and the human side of the Christian ministry. Divine, because it belongs to the inevitable growth of Christian hopes and sympathies, of increasing truth, of enlarging charity. Human, because it arose out of, and is subject to, the vicissitudes of human passions, human ignorance, human infirmities, earthly opportunities. In so far as it has a permanent and divine character, it has a pledge of immortal existence, so long as Christian society exists with its peculiar wants and aspirations; in so far as it has a human character, it seeks to accommodate itself to the wants of each successive age, and needing the support, and the sympathy, and the favor, of all the other elements of social intercourse by which it is surrounded. It has been at times so degraded that it has become the enemy of all progress. It has been at times in the forefront of civilization.

CHAPTER XI.

THE POPE.

THREE hundred years ago there were three official personages in Europe of supreme historical interest, of whom one is gone, and two survive, though in a reduced

and enfeebled form.

The three were the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the Pope of Rome, and the Sultan of Constantinople. They were alike in this, that they combined a direct descent of association from the old classical world with an important position in the modern world, — a high secular with a high ecclesiastical position, a strong political influence with a personal authority of an exceptional kind.

the Holy

The Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was the greatest sovereign in Europe. He was, in fact, properly Emperor of speaking, the only sovereign of Europe. Other Roman Em- kings and princes were, in strict parlance, his pire. deputies. He was the fountain of honor whence they derived their titles. He took precedence of them all. He was the representative of the old Roman Empire. In him, the highest intelligences of the time saw the representative of order, the counterpoise of individual tyranny, the majesty at once of Religion and of Law. No other single potentate so completely suggested the idea of Christendom as a united body. No throne in Europe presented in its individual rulers personages of grander character, or at least of grander power, than the Empire could boast in Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa,

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Frederick II., and Charles V. Long before this splendid dignitary passed away, his real power was gone, and Voltaire had truly declared of him that there was in him nothing Holy, nothing Roman, and nothing Imperial." But it was not till our own time, in 1816, when the Holy Roman Empire was changed into the Empire of Austria, that he finally disappeared from the stage of human affairs. The Emperor of Germany, as regards Germany, took the vacant place in 1871, but not as regards Europe.

The Sultan.

The two others remain. They in many respects resemble each other and their defunct brother, perhaps in the fragility of their thrones, certainly in the concentrated interest of their historical, political, and religious position. The Sultan perhaps comprises in his own person most of the original characteristics of the institution which he represents. He is at once the representative of the Byzantine Cæsars and the representative of the last of the Caliphs, that is, of the Prophet himself. He is the chief of a mighty empire, and at the same time the head of a powerful and wide-spread religion. Of all the three, he is the one whose person is invested with the most inviolable sanctity. His temporal dominion in Europe has almost vanished. But he still retains "the Palaces and the Gardens" of the Bosphorus, and his ecclesiastical authority over his co-religionists remains undisturbed if not undisputed.

The Pope.

It is of the third of this august brotherhood that we propose to speak. The Papacy is now passing through a phase in some degree resembling that of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1816, and that of the Sultan of Constantinople at the present moment. its peculiarities are too deeply rooted in the past to be entirely shaken by any transitory change.

But