serviceable to the Church, as well for the maintenance of good morals, as for upholding the dignity of the Ministry in its relation to the State. For although in things gross and material, that which I have mentioned may often happen by inevitable necessity, yet in moral subjects it is not so: for in them it is possible for the good to be retained and restored, whilst the bad and hurtful is removed.

The question, then, which I discuss, is not one involving salvation, but a question concerning the best guides and masters by whom we may be led in the way to eternal salvation. Some men imagine, that the censorship of morals should be entrusted entirely to the civil Magistrate, and ascribe to the Ministry of the Gospel the mere and simple preaching of the Word and administration of the Sacraments: a notion, which I wonder how theologians ever could adopt, seeing that it cannot be established either from the word of God, or from any usage of our forefathers. Others ascribe all power of Ecclesiastical

censure to the Bishops, and those who are really as well as in name Presbyters, both possessing that authority which God gave to the Apostles, and the Bishops their successors. A third class consists of those who, rejecting the Episcopate, associate with their Pastors temporary Elders, to whom they commit the entire regimen of the Churches and all Ecclesiastical discipline; which form of government they call divine, pronouncing the government by Bishops to be human.

The controversy resembles that which is raised among philosophers concerning the best form of civil government. Some imagining the government of one man to be the best, as, in fact, it is; others preferring the government of the chief men ; others again a democracy; whilst a fourth class approve of a mixed form, combining the three just mentioned in nicely-balanced proportions: which, they assert, must be the best of all. Be that however as it may, the question, in the case of civil government, is not concerning the kind of government itself, so

much as concerning the character and condition of those who are to be governed, and for whose good the government is to be devised; so that that may be esteemed the best form of government for them, which in itself and absolutely is not the best, although very necessary and very salutary for the particular nation, or time or place in question.

Hence God has never given to any particular nation any fixed and perpetual form of civil government, such that it should not be lawful to alter as time or place might require. But the regimen of which I have to treat is different from this: for since it has proceeded immediately from God, men may not alter it at their will, neither can it be necessary so to do. For Divine wisdom has so tempered it, that it is itself adverse to no form of civil government. So soon, however, as any entire State has become a Church, the government of that State receives some modifications, although not such as to change its essence. When a State has so become a Church, the rulers of the Church and those

of the State, who till then had been alien from each other, holding nothing in common, forthwith become bound to reciprocal duties. Whatever others may think, when Church and State are well ordered in unison, the Christian Magistrate will not be viewed by the Church as a private individual, nor will the Ministers of Churches be thought such by the State.

From not duly seeing this, have arisen confusion and discord concerning Ecclesiastical discipline and polity. For my part, I consider Bishops indispensably necessary to the Church; and I hold that form of Church discipline and government to be the best, and to be of divine origin, which is conducted by the hands of holy Bishops and Presbyters, truly so called, according to the rules of the word. of God, and of the old Councils. When, however, I reflect on the iniquity of the times, and the condition of some places in which it has pleased God to gather together His scattered sheep from Babylonish captivity by the hands of pious and learned men,

I do not see how true Bishops could have been restored in them.

I have held the office of Pastor in the Churches of Flanders and Holland: but I can scarcely describe the hindrances to such a restoration which I there met with. Still, granting this, an irregularity; which has occurred inevitably in some few places and in only one age, cannot establish a law which Ishall bind the whole world. Our present dissensions on this subject would never have existed, had not the tyranny of some Bishops given rise to an opinien opposed to the consent of all antiquity, which makes men look with suspicion on all Bishops alike. But it is remarked, that a similar prejudice is even now gaining ground against the consistories we have invented, whether right or wrong I do not now say: wherefore I conclude, that the facts of the case should be calmly examined by whoever would come to the truth of the matter.

In the six and twenty years last past, I have over and over again declared my opinion con

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