clause meaning Christian baptism;-that of which (though not till above a century afterwards) the rite of laying on of hands was an adjunct. 6. There is no mention in the New Testament of the apostles having ever appointed bishops in the Church Barnabas; and that of ministration to the sick. (Gen. xlviii. 14; Lev. iii. 2, xvi. 21; Num. xxvii. 18; Mark xvi. 18; Acts xiii. 3, vi. 6; 1 Tim. v. 22.) It is my impression that the interpretation of Heb. vi. 2, advocated by Pierce, Macnight, Adam Clarke, etc., is the most probable, because the most consistent both with the passage itself and the general argument of this Epistle, as well as with that of other parallel passages in the Epistles of St. Paul; explaining the BаTTIσuoi as they do, of the typical washings under the Levitical law; and the Xεipodeσia of the imposition of hands on sacrificial victims, also Levitically enjoined. For the doctrines thus typically taught under the old law, as also those directly taught of repentance, faith in God, the resurrection, and eternal judgment, were each and all taught in but an elementary way in the Old Testament; (though the Hebrew Christians were in danger of falling back to those elementary teachings called στοιχεια, Heb. v. 12, (just as to the στοιχεια TOU KOσμOU warned against by the apostle in Gal. iv. 3, 9, and Col. ii. 8, 20); and could only have their TλELOTηs, or development in full light, in the Gospel of Christ Jesus; these were what might be called the beginning of, or introduction to, Christ; because alike the Jewish ceremonial law, and the Jewish moral law, were intended each one to act as a schoolmaster, or waidaywyos, in preparing and leading men to Him. The difficulty (might I not say the impossibility ?) of explaining the BаTтioμol of Christian baptism appears strikingly in Chrysostom's comment on the passage. "Why," says he, "baptisms in the plural, when there is but one [Christian] baptism?" "Because," he replies, "of St. Paul's having spoken of not laying again the foundation of repentance, etc., with the Hebrew Christians. For if again they had to be baptized, again catechetically instructed, they would ever remain unestablished in Christian principles." So by baptisms he suggests to have been hypothetically meant repeated baptisms of the same individual, if wavering in the faith !!-The laying on of hands Chrysostom explains, not of any general confirmation rite, as then established in the Christian Church; but of the particular case of imposition of the apostle's hands on the Hebrew Christians whom he was addressing.-Theodoret, let me add, is as little successful as Chrysostom on BаTтioμo. "The plural is used because of the multitudes baptized"!! But why not then επιθεσεις also in the plural ? "as their successors," i.e. as their successors in the apostolic office; nor, I believe, does any Christian writer of the age immediately following say so. Further we do not know (so as Dr. W. says we do) from any sufficient ancient testimony that any of the primitive bishops appointed by the apostles (e.g. Timothy, Titus, Clement, Polycarp, Ignatius,) laid their hands on baptized persons, in a Church rite like that of confirmation, in order to the conveyance to them of the gift of the Holy Ghost. Dr. W. refers for such ancient authorities to the notes on Acts viii. 14-18, and Heb. vi. 2, in his Greek Testament. But none such appear there :† nor, I am persuaded, do any such exist.‡ 7. The total incorrectness of Dr. W.'s assertion that in the earliest Christian Churches, planted by the apos *Subjoined to No. 3 of the Oxford Tracts is a misinterpreted citation from the Roman Clement; as if asserting that, by apostolic appointment, there was ever after to be kept up an "apostolic succession," in the persons of a subsequent line of Church bishops. Now it is not of a succession of the apostolate that Clement there speaks; but, simply and distinctly, of a succession of the episcopate. -Did Dr. W. rely on Clement? (See pp. 8,9, supra). + The earliest of the ancient fathers referred to by Dr. W. on Acts viii. 15-18, as authorities for the practice of the confirmation rite in the early Christian Church, are precisely those same that I have referred to in my first Lecture, viz. Tertullian and Cyprian, about A.D. 200 and 250. The earliest that he cites as identifying the Church rite of laying on of hands, as then carried out, with the apostolic practice, are Augustine and Jerom, about A.D. 400. By Cyprian, however, in his 73rd Epistle, there is earlier implied a correspondence, in his view, of the Church rite with Peter and John's practice at Samaria, as narrated in Acts viii. It should be remembered, as I have said at p. 5, not only that no trace of the confirmation rite appears in the writings of these earliest post-apostolic fathers, Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, etc.; but that the testimony of Justin is directly against Dr. Wordsworth's statement. For, in that notable passage in his first Apology, written near about A.D. 140, or 150, which was referred to in my first Lecture, Justin Martyr, when giving a long and full account of the process of baptism then in use among Christians, not only says not one word of any subsequent process of laying on of episcopal hands for the imparting of the Holy Ghost, but speaks of the baptized adult being, directly after water-baptism, and without any other intervening rite, brought to communicate with his brother Christians in the Lord's Supper. tles, this rite on being used was called Confirmation,* will be seen by reference to what I have said in my first Lecture, p. 7. 8. The incorrectness of his statement that "the same means of prayer and laying on of hands have been used ever since in the Christian Church universal," will appear from the fact stated by me at p. 11, that the Romish Church has now for many centuries discarded the laying on of hands in its rite of Confirmation. 9. Once more, the further incorrectness of the statement made in our 60th Canon, that "the custom has continued in God's Church from the apostles' times that all bishops should lay their hands on baptized children when instructed in the Catechism of the Christian religion,"a statement endorsed by Dr. W.,-appears from the fact stated and illustrated in my first Lecture, that in the earliest post-apostolic times in which the practice of the confirmation rite is recorded, viz. about A.D. 200, (an epoch separated by the ominous chasm of 100 years from the death of the longest-lived apostle, St. John,) the children of Christian parents so confirmed were infant babes! And so for ages afterwards. Let me beg, in fine, to suggest to Dr. W. whether the doctrine of opus operatum, thus taught by him, respecting the communication of the Holy Spirit's saving grace, as if actually and only given by the bishop's laying on of hands, with prayer, is not a doctrine directly antagonistic to that of the Reformed English Church, as well as to that of the Bible? Moreover, whether it is not in perfect accordance with the doctrine and spirit of the Church of Rome;-that Church which he has himself again and again, with so much force and justice, denounced as the Church of Antichrist? In fact, admit but this antiChristian doctrine of the priestly opus operatum,+ in the matter of the communication of God's life-giving Spirit, as a beginning, (I use the word anti-Christian, as before, *So Wordsworth pp. 5, 6. + See my Notes + and , p. 10, suprd. in its proper sense,) and then Rome's Church of Antichrist must, in all consistency, be the ending. II. DR. GOULBURN'S MANUAL. What has been said thus fully on Dr. Wordsworth's Manual renders it unnecessary to notice at all at large points similarly objectionable, as I conceive, in Dr. Goulburn's. Suffice it here to say, 1st, that Dr. G. at the outset similarly fails to mark the distinctive miraculous character of the gift of the Holy Ghost communicated through the laying on of the apostles' hands at Samaria and Ephesus, as constituting those cases sui generis; and therefore not to be reasoned from as a Scriptural rule on the mode of communication of the ordinary enlightening, sanctifying, and saving influences of the Spirit, such as are so often spoken of in the Epistles as given quite independently of it:*—2ndly, that he makes the communication even of these ordinary saving influences of the Holy Spirit to depend on, and to be the result of, the laying on of the hands of "the highest order in the ministry;" such being "their prerogative"-seeing that, 3rdly, he also recognises the bishops of the Church as answering in this matter to, and standing in the place of, the apostles.+ Indeed, at p. 11, he has a very awful passage to this effect.I *See pp. 148, 149, suprd. So generally, at pp. 5, 6, of Dr. G.'s Manual. At confirmation the candidate "lays the whole of his heart at the apostles' feet; and woe be to him if, like a second Ananias, he keeps back part of it, by some mental reservation, for sin and the world.' Dr. Goulburn recognises the presbyter meaning of the word priest, in our Church. But does he always so apply it? At p. 9 he says, "presbyter or priest." It is only in the sense of presbyter that our Church uses the word: not the sacerdotal sense, which so many of our clergy, and writers in Church Periodicals, seek to fix upon it. In the Latin Prayer Book of 1560, indeed, I see the terms minister, pastor, presbyter, interchanged with sacerdos. But in our authoritative Art. xxiii. it is simply "ministers." See page 118, suprà. Also let me refer on this point to my Letters on Bishop Hamilton (of Salisbury)'s late Charge; the same that I before eferced to, p. 119, suprà. And thus there is here too the doctrine of the opus operatum; which, as said before, is so antagonistic to the doctrine of the Church of England,* and so essentially anti-Christian, in the true sense of that word. In the devotional Meditations, indeed, appended to the Manual, Dr. G. more than once or twice warns the candidates against supposing that the bishop's laying on of hands will act as a spell, or charm, "independently of the candidate's own state of mind when receiving it."+ But I do not think that he anywhere intimates that the Holy Spirit may previously otherwise have sealed an individual for his own. On the contrary, at p. 13, after citing Eph. i. 13, In whom, after that ye believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise," he identifies that sealing with the (supposed) action of the Holy Spirit on the heart, distinctively, at confirmation. "In baptism we confess our faith, and are placed under the Spirit's guidance in confirmation we are sealed by the Spirit; and authenticated as his by the descent on us of power from on high." God forbid that we should Says Mede, on 1 Cor. iv. 1, (p. 27, Ed. of Works 1672,) "Priest is the English of presbyter, not of sacerdos." It is observed by Bishop Burnet, on the 25th Article of our Church, that in King Edward's Book, (1552,) after that clause, as it now stands in the Articles, "In such only as worthily receive the same have sacraments any wholesome effect or operation," there was added, "not as some say, ex opere operato [a point observed on in my Note, p. 16, supra]; which terms....yield a sense which savoureth of little piety, but of much superstition." But, adds Burnet, this was afterwards considered unnecessary; for that" the virtue of the sacraments being put in the worthy receiving excludes the doctrine of opus operatum as formally as if it had been expressly condemned." Assuredly it does. But Dr. G., not very consistently with himself, would apparently inculcate the opus operatum princi ple conjointly with that of the worthy receiving, in the case of adults, + So p. 38; also p. 62; and elsewhere. Similarly in the Meditations, p. 37: 'Many a time has God called me by his Holy Spirit moving on my conscience." But the possibility of God having done much more than to call the individual by movement on the conscience previous to, and independent of, the rite of Confirmation, Dr. Goulburn (strange to say) does not here seem even to contemplate. To the same effect, when referring at p. 6 to the controverted |