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ii. JOHN III. AND THE CHURCH ORDER. 233
"
So now must a bishop have oversight over all that are
under his government, especially the clergy, that they may
rightly and duly set forth God s word among the common men,
rightly administer the sacraments, preach and hear the catechism
at the proper season, hear confession when it is proper, exhort
and bring the people to common prayers, visit and console the
sick, bury the dead and faithfully and diligently perform all else
that the ministry of the Church and the priestly office justly
demands."
This passage is a good specimen of the simple style of
Laurentius and of his persuasive method of putting his
case. An English Churchman would say that the case
might have been easily improved by a reference to our
Lord s institution of the apostolate, and by the inference
which is thence drawn by many Presbyterians, as well as
by ourselves, that He intended us to have a ministry created
from above, and not from below, and that this should be
an integral and permanent part of His system of Church
government.
Further, we should have welcomed a statement of what
is our own position and that generally of episcopal
churches, that there is a certain connection between the
apostolate, as the highest office in the primitive Church,
and the episcopate, as the highest office in the sub-apostolic
Church. This, indeed, is an interpretation of history,
rather than an absolutely certain fact of history, just as
Laurentius theory of the growth of the episcopate, drawn
from St. Jerome s Epistle to Evangelus, is. But the two
interpretations naturally range together, as Richard
Hooker shows in his seventh book, where he first says :
The first bishops in the Church of Christ were His blessed
apostles
"
(E. P., vii., 4, i), and later :
"
The cause where
fore they under themselves appointed such bishops, as
were not everywhere at the first, is said to have been those
strifes and contentions, for remedy whereof whether [i.e.,
either] the Apostles alone did conclude of such a regiment,
or else they together with the whole Church (judging it a
fit and a needful policy) did agree to receive it for a cus
tom
"
(ibid. 5, 2).
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