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448

Power of the Metropolitans increased;

APPENDIX. wait for the determination which a full synod of the province shall make upon the judgment of his case."

NO. VIII.

What, I desire to know, are we to think of this canon? It makes little, in my opinion, for the power of the laics. Nay, it most evidently demonstrates that the Church of the fourth century did not so much as dream of this right of the laity, whether divine or original, or whatever other title they are pleased to honour it with. The council commands in express words that a bishop duly ordained by the bishops of the province, and confirmed by the metropolitan according to the ancient canons, ought to remain a bishop, and perform the episcopal functions, though the laity make never so much opposition. This was the method of the elections of the fourth century. But afterwards the metropolitans obtained a much larger power, not without a very great advantage to the Church. They appointed a synod of bishops in their own Churches; hither they summoned the bishops, and by their common counsel set pastors over the Churches. To this purpose is that of St. Gregory Nazianzen": "Ye have called me to the metropolis, I suppose, to take some [hitherto consultations about a bishop." The people had even yet1 also, ed. 3.] power to propose a person to be ordained, and to desire the bishops to set him over them; but the nomination and election belonged only to the metropolitan in council with his provincial bishops. Nay, without the metropolitan's leave they had not power to take to themselves so much as a vacant bishop (as the canonists speak.) This we are most plainly taught by the sixteenth canon of the council of Antioch, in these words ": "If any vacant bishop shall come into a vacant church, and by stealth invade the throne, without leave of a full synod, he ought to be ejected, though all the people whom he has invaded have chosen him for their bishop. Now that is called a full synod in which the metropolitan bishop is also present." And this very canon is

* κεκλήκατε ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ τὴν μητρόπολιν, ὡς οἶμαι, περὶ ἐπισκόπου τι βουλευσάMevo. Greg. Naz. Epist. xliii. [Op., tom. ii. p. 38. ed. Par. 1840.]

· εἴ τις ἐπίσκοπος σχολάζων ἐπὶ σχολάζουσαν ἐκκλησίαν ἑαυτὸν ἐπιῤῥίψας, ὑφαρπάζοι τὸν θρόνον δίχα συνόδου τε

λείας, τοῦτον ἀπόβλητον εἶναι, καὶ εἰ πᾶς ὁ λαὸς, ὃν ὑφάρπασεν, ἕλοιτο αὐτὸν, τελείαν δὲ ἐκείνην εἶναι σύνοδον, ᾗ συμπάρεστι καὶ ὁ μητροπολίτης.—[Cone. Antioch. Canon xvi. Concilia, tom. ii. col. 592, D.]

that of the laity ultimately taken away.

449

DISSERT. VI.

quoted by the fathers of the council of Chalcedon in the HUGHES eleventh session, in which the cause of Bassianus is pleadeda. This full power in elections remained in the metropolitans to the time of the Emperor Justinian, so that they elected bishops without the consent or testimony of the people. But it is beyond the limits of my purpose to follow it any farther. It is sufficient for me to have shewn the practice of the second and third and fourth centuries; that from thence we may clearly discern what power in elections of bishops was allowed to the Christian people, even in the purest ages of the Church; and for what reasons it was necessary, as that power increased daily, and became insolent, first to restrain it, and at last wholly to abolish it.

From all this history of the primitive Church these following particulars do most evidently appear:

1st. That in the most ancient times of the Church the people had no suffrages which were truly elective.

2ndly. That all that power which they afterwards exercised was not derived from any divine or original right, but from the leave and indulgence and corrupt remissness of the bishops.

3rdly. That the Church did for most just causes, and by a most just authority, abrogate this tumultuary method of ordaining, and restrain the mad rage of the people within its proper bounds.

THE CONCLUSION.

This is what I thought fit to say concerning these most important controversies. What judgment others will make of what I have said it is neither easy to conjecture nor safe to enquire. And yet I am not unwilling to believe, at least I am apt to flatter myself, that what has been here said will not displease such as are impartial judges, and true and orthodox sons of the Church of England. Upon a serious review of these Dissertations I have been able to find nothing in them which is not abundantly confirmed both by the holy Scriptures, and by the most ancient and uncorrupt judgment

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NO. VIII

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APPENDIX. of the Catholic Church. For which reason I am willing to hope that the sound and entire part of the Christian world, who are addicted to no parties, and have Christ and His Church only at heart, will be of my opinion, and with their suffrages readily confirm all that I have said.

AN ADVERTISEMENT CONCERNING THE TWO PRECEDING TRANSLA-
TIONS OF ISAAC CASAUBON DE LIBERTATE ECCLESIASTICA, AND
OF MR. HUGHES' PRELIMINARY DISSERTATIONS a.

TOR'S AD

MENT.

I NEED say but very little concerning the former of these TRANSLA translations. Having undertaken it at the command of the VERTISERev. Dr. Hickes, (for whatever he condescends to request, though in his usual obliging manner, will always have the authority of a command with me,) after I had almost finished it upon the late Amsterdam edition in folio, which is very uncorrect, especially in the Greek quotations, I had an opportunity of consulting the author's own edition, printed in the year 1607, in 8vo.", and of verifying from thence many of the corrections I had already made, though neither is that impression without faults. As to the author's citations, those of them which I had convenience of examining, though not easily found for want of more particular references, yet appearing when found to be faithfully set down, I was the less concerned to enquire into the rest, and contented myself to give the English reader only a translation of most of them.

But as to Mr. Hughes' Preliminary Dissertations, (for the insertion of which into this Appendix I had no more than the permission of Dr. Hickes, having been engaged in that translation by another,) I found the errors of the press so many, and the negligence of those whom I suppose the author employed in transcribing the citations, so great, that I thought it necessary to take the pains of examining them all, excepting some few which I am not able to find, what for want of references in some places, and through the uncorrectness of them in others, and a few also for which I had not the convenience of books. And when I had taken this pains, I judged it would be both for the advantage of the book to put down all the citations in the margin as I had corrected them from the authors themselves, and also for the benefit of the reader to give him them sometimes more fully than the learned author thought it necessary to do, who wrote

[This Advertisement is that of the Translator, Hilkiah Bedford, see above, vol. i. p. 33.]

[For an account of the editions here referred to, see above, pp. 97, 253.]

NO. VIII.

452 What has been done by the Translator of the Dissertations.

APPENDIX. only to such as are supposed to be well enough acquainted with the books he cites to be usually able from the least sentence of them to understand what they are alleged to prove ; whereas those who are strangers to these authors cannot so readily enter into the force of such arguments without also seeing some part of the context.

And because the learned author has actually divided this work into six dissertations, though for want of distinguishing them a little more in the impression the whole does rather seem no more than one, and the reader is for some time at a loss why the title is expressed in the plural, therefore I thought it convenient to make this division more conspicuous, and by adding the proper figures to his subdivisions, where they are often wanting, to render his method, which is very good, more apparent to the reader at the first sight for whose farther benefit I also judged it not amiss. to prefix, by way of plan to the whole work, the contents of each dissertation, as we see done by Casaubon himself before that piece of his which I have translated.

:

One passage in the fifth dissertation (p. 494c) may be liable to misconstruction, where the author, in answer to an argument for lay administration of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, brought from the first institution of the sacrifice of the Passover, in the room of which this sacrifice and Sacrament succeeds, may seem to own too much, when he grants that the Passover was appointed to be sacrificed in private houses, and by the fathers of families. But what he there asserts must be confined to the times before the institution of the Levitical priesthood, when the fathers of families were priests, and their own dwellings were all the temples they had for after the Levitical priesthood was instituted the paschal lamb was sacrificed neither privately nor by the fathers of families, but the place of celebrating this feast was one where all the people could meet, which ever since King David's time was Jerusalem, and the ministers of this sacrifice were the priests and the Levites. Of both these facts we have this undoubted proof, viz. :

1st. With regard to the place. In the 16th of Deuteronomy (ver. 2 and 5) there is this command: "Thou shalt [See above, p. 421 of this edition.]

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