authority of priests of the church catholic to preach the word of God, although they preach other things for which they have no authority.

They have a true authority to administer the sacraments, although they have no authority to institute new sacraments; and we doubt not, notwithstanding their presumption in preaching adventitious doctrines, and in obtruding supernumerary sacraments, that the true word preached by them, and the true sacraments administered, are accompanied with God's blessing, and produce a salutary effect on the heart of the hearer.

Again, the bishops of this corrupt church have, in common with the bishops of the Protestant and of the Greek churches, all the authority of the first successors of the apostles, that may be supposed to subsist without the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit.

If they usurp rights which the inspired apostles never claimed, their just claims are not invalidated by those unwarrantable pretensions: they are to judge of the qualifications of those that would be ordained: they have authority to appoint to the priest's office, and to consecrate to their own by the imposition of their hands: they are the overseers of Christ's flock: they have the power to suspend heterodox or immoral priests from the exercise of their function, and to exclude laics of scandalous lives from the sacraments: in a word, to inflict ecclesiastical censures and penalties for ecclesiastical offences. Like other magistrates, they are accountable to God for any abuse of power, but still the right of government is in their hands. In their own church, and over those of their own communion, they have a true episcopal jurisdic

tion. And this is the avowed opinion of the church of England, as it must be the opinion of all who acknowledge the divine institution of the episcopal order. For when a priest who has received his orders from a bishop of the church of Rome openly abjures the errors of that church, and declares his assent to the articles of the church of England, he becomes immediately a priest in our church without any second ordination from a Protestant bishop: as a laic of that church who openly abjures its errors is admitted to our communion without any second baptism by the hands of a Protestant priest.

Now, since in these days the church of Rome, though corrupted with idolatry, has her priests and her bishops, it may seem the less strange that the ancient patriarchal church, when she became corrupted with a similar idolatry in an equal degree should have her priests and her prophets. True priests and true prophets, though not perhaps untainted with the errors of their times; priests who offered sacrifices to the true God, and had authority to accept the oblations of the laity; prophets who were commissioned to resist the prevailing corruption, and to prophesy of the great redemption. That these two orders were maintained through the wonderful mercy of God in idolatrous countries, till the degeneracy came to that extreme degree that he judged it fit to separate the apostates, and to put his chosen people under the safe keeping of the law, I shall now prove from the sacred records.

And, first, for the priests of the patriarchal church in her corrupted state.

In the days of Abraham, a prince of a Canaanitish nation, Melchizedek, king of Salem, was the priest of

the Most High God. The Jews have, indeed, a vain tradition that this Melchizedek was the patriarch Shem. According to the chronology which the Jews choose to follow, Shem might be alive at the time that Melchizedek received the tenths from Abraham. But by a truer account, which the Jews followed in more ancient times, and which was followed by all the primitive fathers of the Christian church, Shem was dead above four hundred years before Abraham was born; and if we were even to grant that he might be living in the days of Abraham, the Jews have not yet explained how he came by the kingdom which this tradition gives him in the land of Canaan. But we have it on better than rabbinical authority, on the authority of an apostle, that Melchizedek had no connection with the family of Abraham. "He counted not his descent," saith St. Paul, "from them." And St. Paul's argument, as is acutely remarked by the learned Bishop Patrick, would be equally inconclusive whether Melchizedek's descent were counted from Abraham, or Abraham's from him. Melchizedek, therefore, was neither descendant nor any ancestor of Abraham. He was, as Josephus, the learned historian of the Jews, candidly acknowledges, a prince of Canaan.

Yet was he no self-constituted usurping priest, but a priest by divine appointment and commission, as appears by the deference which Abraham paid him: "For consider how great this man was, unto whom even the patriarch Abraham gave the tenth of the spoils." This tenth of the spoils was no payment to Melchizedek in his temporal capacity as king of Salem, for any assistance he had given Abraham in the battle; for he went out to meet him when he was returning

from the slaughter of the kings. The king of Salem, therefore, had taken no part in the expedition; he had remained at home inactive, and went out to meet the patriarch upon his return, in the quality of God's high priest, to pronounce God's blessing upon him, to bear his public testimony to Abraham as God's chosen servant, and to declare that it was by the immediate succour of the arm of the Most High God, whose priest he was, that Abraham's little army had overthrown the confederate kings; and the tenths, being no payment for a military service, could be nothing else than a religious offering on the part of Abraham, by which he acknowledged the protection of the Most High God, and acknowledged the authority of Melchizedek's priesthood; the divine authority of which appears again more strongly in this circumstance, that this priest Melchizedek was no less than the type of that high-priest who now standeth at God's right hand making intercession for the sins of all mankind. Of his universal everlasting priesthood, the priesthood of Melchizedek was the type.

The prophet David declares the nature of Christ's priesthood, by the analogy it bears to the priesthood of Melchizedek. And from this analogy, St. Paul builds his great argument for the superiority of Christ's priesthood above the Levitical. Christ is for this reason a priest for ever, because he is after the order of Melchizedek.

From all this it appears, that in the days of Abraham, at least, there was a priesthood among the Canaanites of higher rank than the Levitical, and more exactly typical of the priesthood of the Son of God. Again, in the days of Joseph, we find in Egypt a

Potipherah a priest of On, whose daughter Joseph married; and in the days of Moses, a Jethro a priest of Midian, whose daughter Moses married. It has been made a question concerning both these persons, whether they were priests at all. The doubt arises from the ambiguity of the Hebrew word, which is used in some parts of Scripture for a prince or magistrate. But it is to be observed, that not a single passage is to be found in the books of Moses where it is used in these senses, except it be in these two instances. That they were both priests, was clearly the opinion of the Jews who made the first Greek translation of the Pentateuch, of the Jewish historian Josephus, and of St. Jerome.

And if they were priests at all, they were priests of the true God, the one in Egypt in the town of On in the days of Joseph, the other among the Midianites in the days of Moses. For it is hardly credible, that Providence should have permitted either Joseph or Moses to contract an alliance by marriage with a priest of any idolatrous temple.

Thus it appears, that the true God had an order of priests in the Gentile world down to the time of the Mosaic institution. These priests were the corrupt remains of the ancient priesthood of Noah's universal church.

We have then, I think, found the priests of the patriarchal church in its corrupted state; let us now look for its prophets. This is a point still more material to establish than the existence of the priesthood, because it is the existence of true prophecies among idolatrous nations which is the chief subject of our enquiry; and true prophecies, that is, prophecies of divine original, could not have been found among