THE DOCTRINE OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2303, 21 April 1898, Page 9

THE DOCTRINE OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION.

In tbe half of First Church on the 12fch the Rev. Dr Watt delivered his opening lecture of the session in connection with the Presbyterian Synod's Theological College, the subject being "The Relation of the Christian Ministry to the Church, or the Doctrine of Apostolic Succession. 1 ' In the absence of Mr E. B. Cargill tvics-chancellor of the University of Otago), who was to have presided, the Rev. William Will was voted to the chair. The Rev. Dr Watt commenced his lecture by remarking that there were two mutually antagonistic theories of the relation of the Christian ministry to the church. One— the sacerdotal theory — exalted the ministry above the church, declared that the church was built on the foundation of the ministry, so that without the ministry there conld be no church, and that the ministry had descended in regular succession from the d&y Christ Himself was on earbh, each generation receiving from its predecessor and transmitting to its successor the sacred office, along with a certain qualifying grace of which the office was the Christ-appointed organ. The other theory was that the church was above the miuistry, that the ministry was for the church and not vice versa, that the ministry was a gift which the risen Loid had conferred upon the church, that Christ had promised to be •. present whenever 'two or three (even common laymen) were gathered together in His name, constituting them a part of the church catholic, and that even if by some extraordinary fatality the whole body of what wa3 called the clergy were swept out of existence tc-morrow the church — by which was meant in that case the lay membership— could, in the exercise of her TioMle officium, in virtue of Christ-delegated power, resuscitate the lapsed ministry, and man the vacant ecclesiastical offices once more. — (Applause.) That was the opinion held on this subject by so-called evangelical Protestants with whom they classed themselves. The view held by the Romish Church on the iubjecfc of the true source of ecclesiastical authority was very simple. That church taught tha<i the church had delegated authority to Peter as His vicar on earth, that the Apostles exercised ecclesiastical functions as subordinates to Peter as their cbiaf, that Peter transmitted his authority to the bishops of . Borne, his successors, and that to-day no oae who was sot subject to the chair of St. Peter had any right ,to preach or to dispense ordiiiEiwes. Tbe episcopal churehe?, which rejected *he primacy of the Pope and which were, notwithstanding, sacerdotal in doctrine, placed the seat of church authority in the collective episcopate, the bishops being regarded as the d/rfefc successors of the Apostles and inheriting all the Wit i tual standing and prerogatives of tbe latter in the church. These churches lf,ught that Christ gave to ail the Apostles coordinately tbe keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that the Apostles bad, in their turn, passrd over the power of the keys to their successors, the bishops, and that consequently no one had a right to exercise any sacred function in the church i^nless he ha y d received ordination and its accompacyiDg grace from the laying on of the hands , of one who himself fcad received them through a long file of spiritual ancestry from the Apostles, s-nd ultimately from Christ himself. There were abundant evidences that this doctrine of the apostolic succession was a living doctrine, and that it was held with more or less tenacity and conviction of it 3 vital importance by myriads of members of episcopally constituted churches to this very hour. They had all heard with regret of the recent appeal made by some Anglicans to Leo XIII, with the view of obtaining from his Holiness some recognition of the validity of Anglican orders, and they had also heard, with such profound regret, of the somewhat curb and cavalier rebuff with which that appeal was met.— (Applause.) They who were what they might be allowed without offence to call evangelical Protestants objected to the doctrine of ax>ostol : cal succession as a huge mistake on several grounds. In the first place, even granting for the moment for the sake of argument, that there were bishops in the church continuously from the days of the Apostles, and that some ministers of the Gospel to-day rightfully claimed to h&ve had hands laid upon them, on the occasion of their first introduction to office, by men who had themselves had hands laid upon them in regular succession from the Apostles, it was altogether alien from the Gospel as a dispensation of the spirit versus the flesh and the letter to lay so much stress in the matter of qualifying a man for the ministry upon so external and carnal and trivial a point as the imposition of episcopal hands upon him. — (Applause.) The mechanical theory by which grace was tied down to the touch of the bishop, coming at the touch and refusing to come without it, though it was germane to the whole High Church doctrine oi sacramental grace, was degrading to the Holy ' Spirit, derogatory to the sovereignty of Him who refused to be yoked to the car of man's will, and whose chosen emblem was the wind blow- ' ing where it listeth. — (Applause.) If the Apostle Paul were to fall in with a minister of the Gospel of our day who prided himself on having had episcopal hands laid upon him, and who forbade a brother who had not enjoyed the same advantage from preach J ing at all, debouncing him perhaps as a thief and a robber who had not come into the fold by the door, the lecturer could not see haw the Apostle who had so strongly condemned the pride of the Jew on his descent from Abraham and his carnal trust on his circumcision, could, in consistency with his so often declared principles, refrain from characterising contemptuously the intolerant brother who prided himBelf on his episcopal ordination as only glorying in the flesh. — (Applause). They might feel 6ure that the only apostolical succession the Apostle would value in his fellow-workers in the Gospel would be success in the work and the possession of apostolical graces of character. — (Applause.) - In the second place, evangelical jprolestants rejected the dogma of apostolical 'succession, because the pretension based upon £t formed part of a great retrograde move)ment, which, setting in in the church very tearly, swept her back in the direction of Judaism, from which she had come out jit the call of God. Thirdly, they rejected ifc because it was bound up ■ yiibh and based upon * theory of the relation ' fof the ministry to the church at» large, which fchey believed to be entirely erroneous. They -held that the view taken at the Reformation, 5a the location of ecclesiastical authority under JDhrist in the whole body of believers, was more jbontonant than the whole sacerdotal theory With the action of the Apostles themselves in settling the doctrine and discipline of the phurch arid with the view they evidently took of their own powers and functions. The Apostles j3id not act as lords over God's heritage, as men iwho had magisterial authority given them in /Christ's place and name to arraDge everything '*.fc their own discretion— as they ought to have acted had the sacerdotal view been correct ; — th«y acted as men who were ucder responsibility to the church, and who felfc that in all Jtheir actions they musfc carry tLa church with )&§m, Id Illustration, the lecturer referred

inter alia to the election to the vacancy in the ranks of the Apostolic College caused by the treason and death of Judas. Peter did not take upon himself to elect the man, as on the Popish theory it was altogether fitting that he should have done, nor did the eleven choose him, as the High Church Anglicang naturally thought they ought to have done ; it was the whole body of believers, then present, regarded as representing the Invisible Hoad of the Church, and not Peter alone, and not Peter and the ten only, who elected. Further, evangelical Protestants rejected the doctrine of apostolical succession because that doctrine presupposed the existence of a chain, an uninterrupted succession of diocesan bishops going back from the present day to the day of the Apostles — a fact which their growing acquaintance with the early history of the church absolutely discredited. The rsv. lecturer quoted freely from authorities in his elaboration of this point, and questioned whether, what between the certainty that the first names on the lists of the bishops of Rome were simple pre»byters and the unaccountable confusion that had crept into thoie lists, any impartial law court in Europe would decide the claimant to an estate or a peerage to be the true heir on the precarious evidence on which Leo XIII claimed •to-day to ba the legitimate successor and lineal spiritual descendant of St. Peter. Once more, evangelical Protestants rejected the doctrine of apostolical succession because there waß no evidence of the presence of any special ~ graca or any spiritual power working in churches claiming to possess the succession over churches which made no such claim.— (Applause.) They blessed God for the noble service the Church of England had been privileged to render to the cause of evangelical religion and for the large file of men distinguished for their piety and eloquence and sanctified learning who had adorned her ministry and membership, and yet they affirmed nothing which the great English-speaking public would not at once concede when they ventured to say that the great non-Episcopal communions, working side by side with the Anglican Church on the soil of England, had, in their own d?gree and in proportion to their inferior social influence and fewer numbers, produced ju6t as Kouch of the fruits of a living Christianity in the character and life of those on whom they had been operating.— (Applause.) Great and honoured as were the names which wero inscribed on the Church of England's roll of worthies, he questioned whether there were nny greater and worthier of honour than the names of the Puritan John Owen and of B. W. Dale, of recent years in tha ranks of the Congrcgationalists, and the eames of John Banyan, C. H. Spnrgeon, and Alexander M'Laren, belonging to the Baptists ; and he wonld command the assent of all who were conversant with the facts of the ca<? c when he said that the Scottish Presbyterian Church, in her various branches, need not be ashamed of the manner in which she had cultivated the portion of the vineyard allotted in tho providence of God to h«r. — (Applause.) In a field in which a church claiming to possess a certain spiritual power had been working side by side with other cburches which made no such claim, they did not find in point of fact that the church claiming to possess thi* soecial power, this grace of apostolical succession, was one whit more efficient in producing the fruits of Christian intelligence and practical holiness in these among whom she exerpised her ministry than the sister communions did which advanced no such claim. Going a step further, the lecturer declared that, so far from the apostolical succession adding any element of strength to the churches which prided themselves on possessing if;, 6f>me of those churches were tho most backward in Christendom, and he specially instanced the Russian and Abyssinj&n Churches. In concluding tha lecturer said : Let us suppose that a great epidemic is raging in a land which is divided into territorial divisions, like our own provinces, each province with its own medical staff empowered to combat the plague in its own way, without any interference from any central authority. Let uc suppose further that the medical men of our province recommend a certain specific, and have the utmost confidence in its curative efficacy, and make Urge use of it in the public hospitals and in private practice. In the neighbouring province the medical staff has no faith in the remedy co extensively used in the sister province, and refuse to give it a place in their pharmacopoeia. We laymen are naturally perplexed, and do not know what to believe in this not uncommon case of diversity of opinion among doctors. If, when in this perplexity, we find on making inquiry that in the province in which the belauded specific is vigorously tabooed She mortality was not a bit greater than where the specific is used, and that the percentage of recoveries is quite as high without as with the use of it, we are inclined to suspect that the efficacy of the much praised remedy is a matter of pure imagination. — (Laughter.) But suppose that on entering a third province we found that the remedy was in extraordinary vogue there, men praising it up to the skies and regarding it as a panacea for every 511 that flesh is heir to, and suppose further that we discovered on examination that the mortality in the province which made such large use of the remedy was appallingly greater than in the province which would have nothing to do with it whatever, we could not help drawing the inference that the remedy, if not positively deleterious and itself the cauie of the high mortality, was injurious to the extent that reliance on a worthless remedy prevented recourse being had to better remedies and due attention being paid to the general improvement of the sanitary conditions. — (Laughter.) We scarcely need to expound our parable. When of two churches which are working side by side we find that the one which claims apostolic succession does nofc show one whit greater vitality or fruitfulness than tbe other which makes no such claim — when we find, further, that churches that pride themselves on possessing, as they think, the spiritual grace are among the most spiritually impoverished and morally debased churches in Christendom, — we cannot help drawing the conclusion that there is nothing in apostolic succession at all, that neither if a church had it would she be the better, nor if she had it not would she be the worse, and the only danger is that a church leaning on the broken reed of the succession might neglect to cultivate' the real sources of spiritual strength and usefulness. — (Applause.)

The Rev. J. Gibb moved a vote of thanks to Dr Watt for "his admirable, interesting, instructive, and scholarly lecture," which was peculiarly appropriate in view of statements recently made in certain quarters regarding the attitude of Presbyterians to an historic episcopate.

The vole of thanks was carried by acclamation.