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127 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA snblapearianiem Sucoeasion concerned not so much with the exact form of the ministry, as with the transmission of the commission to execute ministerial functions by those who have received authority to transmit it. The college of presbyters at Alexandria, to which Jerome refers, was probably a college of presbyters possessed of full ministerial power, including the right of or daining. All this was generally recognized in the Christian Church for 1,500 years. Where the rule was then reluctantly abandoned, this was done (as was thought) by force of necessity, as the lesser of two evils, in order to preserve a pure faith. Two further points should be mentioned. It was to the consentient testimony of the Scriptures and of the due successors of the Apostles that Irenaeus (A.D. 180) appealed against false teaching (Ham, iii. 2, 3). As a matter of history the traditional faith has been linked with the traditional ministry; the one has very largely depended on and failed with the other. The episcopate with its chain of succession serves as a link of historical continuity, such as is needed in a universal spiritual society. ARTHUR C. A. HALL. II. The Syrian Succession: The doctrine of apos tolic succession, which includes necessarily the his toric episcopate as continued generation after gen eration in all branches of the Christian church, was scarcely ever questioned (or denied) during the con ciliar and medieval ages. The first serious opposition occurred when various leaders of the several reform ing movements of the sixteenth century had gained sufficient popular support to enable them to dispute the truth of the traditional Catholic teaching of an ecclesiastical hierarchy consisting of three orders, bishops, presbyters, and deacons. Of the immediate results of the ecclesiastical conflicts of that memorable period in the progressive development of the Western church, the first, the, steady and continuing weakening of the inner or spiritual authority of the Latin church, as exem plified by the increasing deviations from the accepted doctrines of the medieval theologians, was soon fol lowed by the defiance of its outer or hierarchical authority, by the ordination of presbyters by presbyters instead of by bishops. This departure from the historic, ecumenical order of the Catholic Church was then and is even now justified by the appeal not only to the assumed presbyteral polity of the Apostolic Church, but also by the citation of the statements of certain of the Fathers and ecclesias tical historians of the primitive and conciliar ages. Although the presbyteral polity was first introduced by the German reformers into those parts of con tinental Europe which had generally accepted their ecclesiastical leadership, through the influence of the Genevan reformers it soon passed into Scotland and England, in which latter country it in turn gave birth to an even more radical departure from the episcopal government of the Latin church, Congre gationalism or Independency. There are, as a re sult of these various reforming movements in the Western church, the three distinct theories of the Christian ministry, the episcopal or monarchical, the presbyteral or collegiate, and the congregational or democratic, corresponding closely to the three
modern forma of the secular state, autocracy, limited monarchy, and democracy (see POLITY, ECCLEBIAgTICAL). The solution of the question of apostolic succession, or the constitution of the Christian Church, is of even greater importance to-day than during the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, because the antagonisms and polemics of those centuries are all but forgotten, and the consciousness of the weakness of the divided Western Church is inspiring an increasing longing for the suppression of sectarianism, and for the restoration, especially in America, of that imposing unity and visible solidarity which was the glory of the postapostolic age.
It is a fundamental fact, not sufficiently recognized or emphasized in the discussions of the original constitution of the Christian ministry, that the apostolic age of the Church was a formative period during which neither the New-Testament canon, the, polity, nor the ritual was defined decisively or fixed finally. Therefore it is in the post-apostolic or conciliar canons and decrees, rather than in the primitive or ante-conciliar writings descriptive of the transition state from a Judeo-Hellenic to a pan-Hellenic homogeneous ecclesia, that this debated question of the received polity of the one.holy, catholic, and apostolic Church of Christ can find a satisfying historic solution of the perplexing problems involved. That monarchical episcopacy,. as it has been established for many centuries in both the Latin and the Greek church, was not known in the apostolic age, is no longer authoritatively asserted by ecclesiastical historians of the present period. The earliest evidence in favor of the former, or traditional, theory, are the well-known quotations from the epistles of Ignatius of Antioch (q.v.). These impassioned pleas for the willing recognition of each parochial bishop as the only head of the Christian congregation of the city, used again and again as positive proof of the apostolic authority for a monarchical episcopacy, are now met by other equally credible citations from contemporaries and even from later writers, whose several statements suggest unmistakably that isolated peculiarities of a persisting presbyt.eral polity were well known to them. That monarchical episcopacy, whether or not owing its final form to the Apostle John, as one tradition asserts, became slowly and silently the prevailing polity of the entire Christian Church, as is admitted by all historians, can be explained only on the assumption that the experience of the early Church with sectarianism, already evident during the apostolic age, emphasized the necessity of concentrating in the bishop, as the head of the established presbytery of parochial clergy, that spiritual authority which was formerly exercised in common by them with the itinerant prophets and other apostolic coworkers mentioned in the Pauline epistles, the Didache (q.v.), and other newly discovered authentic descriptions of the congregations and services of the primitive period. The correctness of this theory of the general adoption of episcopacy in its final form, is indicated by the fact that in the first ecumenical council of the Church, convened at Nicaea in 325, bishops from all parts of the then known world assembled as the sole representatives of their
