SECTION XXIV.

THE INTRODUCTION OF LAY ELDERS BY CALVIN.

No instance of a lay presbyter occurs in the history of the church before the Reformation.-They had no place among Catholics.-The Culdees of Scotland and Ireland were Catholics.-The Syrian Christians were episcopal, and were planted in the fourth century; the Vallenses or Pied- montese, the persecuted Bohemians and Moravians, and Waldenses of France, were all Catholics, and as really Episcopalian as the Eastern and Western churches.-They were introduced by Calvin as a compromise, under the name of inspectors, and quasi presbyters, as a check upon the clergy; but really to secure a majority on the Protestant side, in their new consistory at Geneva, where the Catholic clergy had defeated his efforts to reform, by their numbers.-How the expedient was successively adopted in other cantons, France, Netherlands, Scotland, and finally in America, in 1788.-But still many churches deny any scriptural warrant, and do as they always have done, choose and ordain deacons, and call them elders.

WHEN they who compose, execute the laws, their own practice, under the rules they have indited, is the fairest criterion of interpretation. If lay presbyters had no existence in the first ages, commencing in the days of the apostles, and extending through four centuries; there is more than violent presumption, there is the strongest negative evidence, that they rest neither on precept nor example, in the church of Christ.

The government of the Christian church, from the death of the last apostle, unto that of the first Leo, after whom no change obtained, until the Reformation, has been detailed; that of the Waldenses, particularly investigated; and the common mistake with respect to their government exposed. They were covertly episcopal, though, after Claude, not papal; but never presbyterial, prior to the Helvetic abjuration of popery.

The Culdees, Colidei, worshippers of God, of Scotland and Ireland, the Scotia of ancient writers, have been passed in silence, because modern ideas of them rest only in vague traditions and opinions. The Celtic language had no alphabet. The Scots have no history, written within a thousand years of the Christian era; and little can be ferreted out of foreign authors. A sentence is found in Tertullian, and another in Prosper; both uncertain. Gildas of England, A. D. 560, represents them as episcopal. The earliest period assigned to the gospel among them by Bede of of 730, was, when it was every where episcopal. Their oldest historian was an arch-deacon of St. Andrews, in the eleventh century; their second was of the thirteenth. Both are lost. Hector Boethius, quoted by Blondel and Selden, has been convicted by Lloyd of disingenuousness. The credulity of these writers, as well as of Buchanan and Knox, is on this point visible. Let their veracity remain unimpeached; belief is not knowledge, and neither can their offer, nor could our réception of it as testimony, make it truth. The Culdees who were removed from Abernethy to St. Andrews, were monks; and such were those at Armagh in Ireland. They may have been clerical, since in each place they elected arch-bishops; but they were Catholic, for they appealed to Rome. Columba, also, the apostle of the Picts, was, according to Bede, "a monk in priest's orders," and planted monasteries in Ireland and Britain.

The Syrian Christians, the Culdees, and the Waldenses, were all of episcopal origin. Old men have lived in every age, whose prudence and experience have been brought into requisition; but of presbyters without authority to preach, neither a word nor an example is found, from the demise of the last apostle, unto the Reformation in Switzerland; they neither existed in the original form of government, nor in the secondary, which was parochial episcopacy; nor in

that which absorbed the rest, the diocesan, which became, so far as we yet know, literally Catholic.

Such was christendom until the period of the Reformation. The Eastern church speaks for itself. Rome had been sacked in 1527, and the pope captured; also, Charles V. as well as Francis I. had defied the enmity of the court of Rome; nevertheless, they were both intolerant Papists, and maintained and enforced episcopal government. In England, the power of the pope had been abolished by parliament in 1532, yet the doctrines and ecclesiastic government, in other respects, remained the same. James V. then reigned in Scotland, and died in 1542, a devoted Catholic, leaving his kingdom under papal administration. The Reformation commenced in Germany in 1517. The protestation of Saxony, Hesse, Anhalt, and fourteen cities, against the violent measures of the diet at Spice, was signed in 1529. The Augsburg confession was made and condemned in 1530. The Protestant defensive league was entered into at Smalkald in 1531. But it was the papal, not the episcopal government, that had as yet been renounced. In Switzerland, in 1308, three cantons confederated: they afterwards subdued two others, and placed them on equal terms. In 1332, Lucerne acceded to the confederacy. In 1353, Berne and Zug joined them. In 1383, they sustained themselves against the duke of Austria. In 1471, they received the Grisons. In 1481, Friburg and Soleure, in 1501, Basil and Schaffhausen, and in 1513, Appenzel were admitted. In the battle of Nancy, they defeated and slew Charles the bold.

From 1526, when Zuinglius, the Swiss reformer, was excommunicated by a Catholic diet, unto the autumn of 1531, when his death was achieved, he offering himself a victim in defence of liberty of conscience and the cause of the Reformation, the cantons of Zurich and Berne, with the towns of Basil and Schaffhausen, maintained an unremitting struggle against

the intolerance of five Catholic cantons, which those, who were neutral, were unable to repress. But although Zurich and Berne, and Basil, and Schaffhausen, had abolished popery, and church temporalities within their territories, they had neither removed the subordination of ministers, nor created new offices in the church. At length, peace was restored, because their existence as free states was at last seen to depend upon their confederacy; and each was to adopt and maintain its own form of government, both civil and ecclesiastical; and public safety to be bartered away no more for religious predilections..

Calvin, passing by Geneva, in August, 1536, on his way northward, was importuned by some of the clergy, who were favorable to the reformation, to remain, and aid them in preaching, and to become a reader in divinity.

The season was favorable, the rulers and people having been exasperated by the conspiracy of their bishop with the duke of Savoy against their liberties; who, being chargeable also with crimes of a private nature, had fled away a few months before. Although the preachers of Geneva, as well as Calvin, and all the people, were Catholic, they were not, in fact, under episcopal government; and their submission to their pastors rested merely on persuasion. Of the six ministers of Geneva, two only were favorable to the doctrines of the reformation, and confidants of Calvin; the rest being licentious, and inclined in heart to popery. But a majority of the people were, from obvious motives, haters of ecclesiastical fraud, sensuality, and oppression. In this state of vacillation and licentiousness, Calvin adopted the expedient of preparing an outline of doctrine and discipline, to be sworn to and subscribed, as an antidote against popery. The obligation of an oath to adhere to the rules and doctrines advised by a minority of the ministers, was a perilous, but decisive measure. Nevertheless, it was taken by a majority in the summer of 1537.

In the next year, Farell, Calvin, and Corald, aiming at a stricter discipline, declared they could not administer the supper to people so irregular, and discordant among themselves. Advantage was immediately taken by the Catholics, and, within two days, a general council having been convened, they voted, that those three ministers should leave the city.

Calvin went to Zurich, and afterwards to Strasburg, where he became the pastor of a French church. Corald died. Farell retired to Neufchatel, and never consented to be again a minister at Geneva. Notwithstanding his exile, Calvin answered the letter of the bishop of Carpentras, written against the Reformation at Geneva; but would not hear the recantations of the Genevese. He refused to become a cypher among colleagues, and a people incompetent to discriminate between the discipline of Christ and papal tyranny.a He attended by appointment the conferences at Worms and Ratisbon, with Melancthon and others. Interest had been made in behalf of Geneva, and he was there pressed by the heads of the Reformation to return to that canton, as a thing indispensable. He yielded, upon condition he should not be interrupted in ecclesiastical discipline. Accordingly, in September, 1541, he 'resumed his labors at Geneva, still subject to the claims of Strasburg, as Viret was to Berne, but the canton soon obtained his release. His colleagues professing reconciliation, and reaching out the hand, were suffered to remain; yet were they an incumbrance, possessing neither zeal nor learning.

To secure the ascendency of himself and Viret over their co-presbyters, was the first necessary effort. "I detailed," he says, " to the senate my labor;

a "Locum sine ullâ auctoritate teneam? Quid enim faciemus? Unde sumemus exordium, si res collapsas velimus instaurare? Si verbum fecero quod displicuerit, mox silentium imperabunt." Calv. epist. 12.

b"Suo ipsi judicio obstricti erunt, ne reclament amplius, aut quicquam ad ordinem nostrum turbandum moveant." Epist. 25.