Apostolic succession

“ If its bishops for many generations persecuted Catholics to death or tortured them as ‘idolaters’ this was only a quarrel of brothers, and they were as deeply enamored of the Catholic faith as those whom they murdered for professing it. If for more than a hundred years they gave the highest dignities to men who had never received episcopal ordination, that fact proved nothing against their reverence for the apostolic succession, or their conviction that they possessed it themselves. ”

“ Now, reason and common sense teach, that if men are real successors to apostolicity, they will be like Peter and Paul in all their qualifications and attributes; but reason also teaches, that after the ascension of Jesus, no man can be qualified for the apostleship unless the Lord appear to him, as in the case of Paul. But the truth is, that this claim of apostolic succession is as groundless as the claim of the clergy of the apostasy to tithes on the ground of their succession to the rights of the Levitical priesthood. ”

“ But rather the reverse; because it must have been very possible that some one, or more, of the line might have died suddenly, before the ordaining of the Successor; in which case the Succession would be lost, unless some other Church were applied to. It is plain that no particular Church, whether in Constantinople, Canterbury, or Rome, can pretend to possess an exclusive line of Apostolic grace. It is plain that no Church can be strictly said to “derive its orders” from another. ”

“ Now, the High Church position is this—it claims apostolic succession. Wherever the succession is, the true Church must be, and to be outside of it is to be outside the true Church. This is their position. ”

“ In the first place, it is clear from the Scripture that St. Peter's supremacy was to continue. A number of the ablest Protestant writers have proved most conclusively what is called the Apostolic succession, that is, that Bishops are the successors of the Apostles, tracing their authority and descent in an unbroken line of ordination to the Apostles. ”

“ If not, then He addesses the individual in such words as—“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear;” and “to him that overcometh will I do so and so,” etc. Now, how does all this comport with the notion of apostolic succession ? Apostolic suc cession supposes that divine government is always present to keep things right ; whereas the Lord’s own apostles testify that nothing would be kept right in the Church after their decease, and com mend the Church to God and the word of His grace. ”

“ In tracing up the succession of the defunct “Establishment,” the author gives very succinct and accurate sketches of every incumbent, Catholic and Protestant, of every diocese in Ireland from the middle of the XVIth century and proves by dates, facts, and public documents that the “reformed” prelates have no more right to claim apostolic succession than they have to claim to be the apostles themselves. ”

“ But if one turns one's attention to its continuous unity down the ages, again it must be recognized that one main link of unity has been in fact the apostolic succession of the ministry; that is the permanence in the Church of a spiritually-endowed 'stewardship of divine mysteries' received continually by the original method of the laying on of hands in succession from apostolic men. The necessity for each individual Christian to remain in relation to these commissioned stewards if he wishes to continue to be of the divine household, has kept men together in one body. ”

“ Hence unbelief had no excuse. By divine commission there were bishops, priests, and deacons in the new hierarchy, and it was through the Apostolic Succession that he, their rector, derived his sacerdotal powers. There were, no doubt, many obscure passages in the Scripture, but men's minds were finite; a catholic acceptance was imperative, and the evils of the present day—a sufficiently sweeping statement—were wholly due to deplorable lapses from such acceptance. The Apostolic teaching must be preserved, since it transcended all modern wanderings after truth. ”

“ It was no apostle who laid his hands on the blinded Saul in that house in Damascus and said, 'Receive the Holy Ghost.' An apostle stood by passive and wondering when the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In reality apostolic succession is absurd, because there is nothing to succeed to, except what cannot be transmitted, personal knowledge of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. ”

“ This is the famous theory known as “apostolic succession.” The idea of the apostolic appointment of church officers is as old as Clement of Rome (see 1 Clement 44) , but the use of the theory to guarantee the apostolic character of episcopal teaching was due to the exigencies of the Gnostic conflict. Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. iii. 3 ff., iv. 26, iv. 33, v. 20) , Tertullian (De prescriptione, 32) , and Hippolytus (Philosophumena, bk. i., preface) are our earliest witnesses to it, and Cyprian sets it forth clearly in his epistles (e.g. Ep. 33, 43, 59, 66, 69) . ”

“ Such were perhaps the “apostles” of the Didachē. Of the notion of apostolic succession in ministerial grace conferred by ordination, there is little or no trace before Irenaeus. The famous passage in Clement of Rome (xliv. 2) refers simply to the succession of one set of men to another in an office of apostolic institution. The grace that makes Polycarp “an apostolic and prophetic teacher” (Mart. Polyc. 16) is peculiar to him personally. ”

“ Neither have they that lofty faith in God which will trust Him in the face of seeming improbabilities. Therefore, surely, it is a Christian thing to endeavour, now as far as we are able, to remove such difficulties as obstruct the faith of some, concerning the Ministry of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church: only premising that our object here is not to prove the truth, but to facilitate its reception. The truth of the Apostolical Succession, being confirmed by foregone proof, cannot, however, be affected by the measure of our success in clearing up difficulties. ”

“ Though we may not believe in apostolic succession in the churchly sense, we are the successors of the apostles in this sense, that the apostles filled the office which we hold, or hope to hold, and illustrated the manner in which its duties should be discharged in such a way as to be an example and an inspiration to all its subsequent occupants. ”

“ This change of conception helped to further the notion of a certain devolution of apostolic powers to successors constituted by act of ordination. The earliest idea of an apostolical succession meant simply the re-emergence in others of the apostolic spirit of missionary enthusiasm. “The first rank in the succession of the apostles” consisted of men eminent as disciples of theirs, and so fitted to continue their labours (Euseb. iii. 37) ; and even under Commodus (A.D. 180–193) there were “evangelists of the word” possessed of “inspired zeal to emulate apostles” (v. 10) . ”

“ He says if the world comes to an end in his lifetime, he will know God has happened to look this way, and perhaps overheard a bishop say something vastly important about Apostolic succession or the validity of the Anglican Orders or Transubstantiation or 'communion in two kinds' or something. ”

“ Since the Apostolic age seventeen centuries have rolled away— exactly eighteen hundred years have elapsed since the delivery of Christ's recorded promise; and, blessed be God, the Church is with us still. Amid all the political storms and vicissitudes, amid all the religious errors and corruptions which have chequered, during that long period, the world's eventful history, a regular unbroken succession has preserved among us ministers of God, whose authority to confer the gifts of His Spirit is derived originally from the laying on of the hands of the Apostles themselves. ”

“ If it be a fact capable of proof, and which was believed by all Christians for 1500 years, That there was a true Succession of Ministers from the Apostles—are we not taking the very surest ground against Romanists, when we show, that we possess just such a descended p. 85Ministry, in no degree dependent on communion with their Church, or any other single Church? If we could not show such a Ministry, then the man, who from examination found out the truth of the necessity of an Apostolic Church, might be obliged indeed to resort to the communion of Rome. ”

“ The Roman Catholic Church is at least consistent in its claim that a line of succession in the priesthood has been maintained from the apostolic age to the present, though the claim is utterly untenable in the light of a rational interpretation of history. ”

“ The Catholic Church alone is truly apostolic, not only in the continual preservation of the sacred doctrine delivered to her by the apostles, which, by the very rule of her faith, can never be altered, but also in the constant uninterrupted succession of lawful pastors, with all the sacred powers of the priesthood and mission derived from the same source. ”

“ The church of Rome is sustained by apostolical succession; but apostolical succession is not an institution complete in itself; it is a part of a whole; if it be not part of a whole it has no foundation. ”

“ So that if, for example, we should produce a list of every Archbishop of Canterbury to the very first, who was consecrated by a French Bishop, and should then add the name of every one that had preceded that French Bishop in his see, up to the Apostles’ days, still we should not have proved the existence of any One line of Apostolical descent. No single line of Succession confined to a single Church is possible. Every newly ordained Bishop in every See comes of a new line ”

“ In fact, to this day, what is called the episcopal succession in the ancient Church of Rome is an historical riddle. At first no one individual seems to have acted for life as the president, or moderator, of the presbytery ”

“ The State had then nothing to do with the matter; and the people (such was their temper and disposition) would have thought of owning a heathen for a Bishop, as soon as a man not duly ordained. Nay, there was even a holy emulation among the Churches; in consideration of which we might in a qualified sense, admit an additional kind of sacredness and certainty, so to speak, in the Succession of those Episcopates, which were noted for peculiar carefulness; as in the Ante-Nicene times that of Alexandria appears to have been. ”

“ Where the Church must needs have some ordained, and neither hath nor can have possibly a bishop to ordain, in case of such necessity the ordinary institution of God hath given oftentimes, and may give place. And therefore we are not simply without exception to urge a lineal descent of power from the Apostles by continued succession of bishops in every effectual ordination.” There can be little doubt, we think, that the succession, if it ever existed, has often been interrupted in ways much less respectable. ”

“ And it only evinces a want of thinking, for any man to say, for example, “that such and such a Church derives its orders from the Church of Rome.” Every one must have observed the false position in which English Churchmen have allowed themselves to be put, by overlooking this simple point. They have thus admitted, practically, that the Church of Rome had a private line of Apostolical Succession, of which she could impart to others!—forgetting that the Bishop of Rome himself is necessarily indebted to the Bishops of three other Churches for his own consecration. ”

“ The Apostles, it seems, thought fit not to delegate their full authority to many, but only to here one and there one. They might have constituted a plenary Successor of themselves in every congregation of the Baptized, and have created no other Order of Ministers; but they did not so. In that case every ordained man must have been a Bishop, and capable of ordaining others. ”

“ Paul and the rest of the Apostles made known to the Church in all ages their right, and the right of the Bishops, their successors, to mark out such heretics as might arise from time to time, and put the faithful on their guard against them. And thus quite down from the time of our Lord, the Apostolical succession of pastors has continued, as a divinely-appointed guard, meant to secure the integrity of Apostolical doctrine. ”

“ But every one must surely perceive the difference of our position from that of our Reformers. We assert precisely the same principles, and in their own language. But we have to act towards men who on principle reject the Succession; who are not for certain possessed of any Catholically Ordained Teachers, or so surely Baptized people: and who are perpetuating this awfully doubtful and Schismatical state of things. ”

“ But what will become of us, if some heretick should have formerly usurped these holy garments, without having passed through all the precedent ceremony and operation? What if he should have happened to have consecrated and ordained a great many others, such as have continued the succession? Then, alas! the whole chain of succession may have been broken, never to be pieced again by human skill; and we can never know who amongst us are regular Christians, or in a regular way of salvation. ”

“ Or again, who would say that after a pope's death and in the interval between the pope's death and the election of his successor, no man dying in that period could be saved? Blessed also be God Almighty, who ordains that His militant church shall have such life that, when a pope is dead, she is not on that account without a head or dead! Because not upon the pope but upon the head, Christ, does her life depend. And blessed be God that, when a pope is insane or become a heretic, the church militant remains the faithful spouse of the Lord Jesus Christ! ”