To embody in any system such a series of contradic- tions and oppugnanccs was to plant the seeds of inter- minable strife, and to such a strife has the Church of England been subjected from the days of the Reforma- tion downward. Nor has the strife been limited to words. In its earlier periods, persecutions, bloodshed, and martyrdoms were frequent results. Sometimes one ■ party was in the ascendency, sometimes the other, and in the progress of events the controversy of which our subject was the centre assumed a variety of phases. Sometimes the issue was direct, as between popery and Protestantism. Sometimes it was triangular, as be- tween the papacy, Protestant prelacy, and Puritanism. At length various forms of dissent and independency
ORDINATION
419
ORDINATION
began to appear, only to multiply forms of discussion, into nearly all of which questions relating to ordination entered more or less prominently. While separation led forth into distinct organizations perhaps the greater part of the more pronounced anti-prelatists, there has always remained in the Church of England an influen- tial body of evangelical or Low Churchmen, who, while they accept episcopacy as a scriptural form of Church government, and episcopal ordination as both appro- priate, expedient, a;id scriptural, nevertheless disclaim its exclusive validity, its uninterrupted prelatical suc- cession, and its claims to be of special divine appoint- ment— de jure divino. On the other hand, the same Church has never lacked prelattsts of the highest pre- tensions who, notwithstanding their own clerical or- ders are scouted bj' the Itomanists as null, both on the ground of irregularity and illegality, nevertheless zealously assert the main principle of the Romish theory of succession. Indeed, the bigotry and preten- sions of the Asiglican High-Churchmen have rarely found a parallel, unless in the groundlessness of their claims, both as judged from opposite points by Roman- ists and other Protestants. The debate between them and their brethren of lower views, as well as with those large branches of the Protestant Church whose orders and ministry they have affected to despise, has never known an intermission ; yet the excitement attending it has gradually decreased in proportion as the princi- ples of tolerance have become recognised in the legisla- tion of the kingdom. It was exceedingly bitter in the days of the vestment controversy, when ministers were constrained by law to wear garments symbolical of a priestly office which they rejected as unchristian, and also under the Act of Uniformity, by which thousands of godly ministers were ejected from their churches and their livings because they declined an oath of conform- ity to requirements with which their consciences for- bade compliance. After such severities had toned down under the advance of general enlightenment, the subject was debated more as a matter of opinion and ecclesi- astical partisanship, in which tastes and associations largely governed individual action.
The 18th centurj' witnessed a new phase of this old controvers}', growing out of the rise of Methodism. When John Wesley, as an evangelical clergyman, found himself providentially called on to provide for the ad- ministration of the Christian ordinances to the religious societies which he had been instrumental in organizing, first within the Church of England, and subsequently in America, he first applied to the bishop of London for the ordination of some of his lay-preachers. Hav- ing been repeatedly refused, he associated with himself other presbyters, and proceeded to ordain deacons, el- ders, and a superintendent or bishop for America. In justification of this act he pleaded the urgency of the providential necessity, his conviction of the utter base- lessness of the theory of uninterrupted lineal succession, and the precedent established by the apostolical Church of Alexandria, in which, as recorded by Jerome, the presbyters elected their whole line of bishops, from the days of INIark the Evangelist downward, for one hun- dred and fifty years. From this action of Weslej' there not only arose the Wesley an Methodist churches of Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, in which presby- terial ordination is practiced, but also the Methodist Episcopal churches of the United States and Canada. In the last-named churches the episcopal office, apart from any prelatical idea or assumptions, has had a wide field of action, and, in connection with an earnest spirit of evangelical effort, has been attended with a measure of success worthy of apostolic times. In the Methodist Episcopal churches the formula of ordination is that of the Church of England expurgated of the word priest and of every term that might be construed to ex- press the idea of sacerdotalism, or any temporal head- ship of the Church of Christ. Two clerical orders only are recognised, those of deacon and elder. The bishop-
ric is regarded not as a third order, but as an office to which an elder having been elected is consecrated by prayer and tlie imposition of hands by other bishops and presbyters. It is a special function of the bishop to ordain ministers, not singly, but in co-operation with presbyters. In all this the churches in question claim to follow ancient, if not strictly apostolical usage. They also insist with great urgency upon the personal con- viction of each candidate for any form of the ministe- rial office that he is moved thereto by the H0I3' Ghost.
In America the High-Church controversj' as respect- ing ordination has had but a limited range, and a corre- sponding influence. It was inherited by the Protestant Episcopal Church as a direct legacy from the mother Church of England, but, having been wholly disassoci- ated from questions of temporal sovereignty and state emolument, it was for a long period entirely quiescent, merely arising as a matter of opinion between clergy- men of different altitude in the same Church, or be- tween zealous representatives of that Church and those of other Protestant churches, all agreeing in opposition to the prelatical claims of Romanists.