With these considerations on my mind,—­while quite aware that some of the bishops were good and valuable men,—­I could not help feeling that it would be a perfect misery to me to have to address one of them taken at random as my “Right Reverend Father in God,” which seemed like a foul hypocrisy; and when I remembered who had said, “Call no man Father on earth; for one is your Father, who is in heaven:”—­words, which not merely in the letter, but still more distinctly in the spirit, forbid the state of feeling which suggested this episcopal appellation,—­it did appear to me, as if “Prelacy” had been rightly coupled by the Scotch Puritans with “Popery” as antichristian.

Connected inseparably with this, was the form of Ordination, which, the more I thought of it, seemed the more offensively and outrageously Popish, and quite opposed to the Article on the same subject.  In the Article I read, that we were to regard such to be legitimate ministers of the word, as had been duly appointed to this work by those who have public authority for the same.  It was evident to me that this very wide phrase was adapted and intended to comprehend the “public authorities” of all the Reformed Churches, and could never have been selected by one who wished to narrow the idea of a legitimate minister to Episcopalian Orders; besides that we know Lutheran and Calvinistic ministers to have been actually admitted in the early times of the Reformed English Church, by the force of that very Article.  To this, the only genuine Protestant view of a Church, I gave my most cordial adherence:  but when I turned to the Ordination Service, I found the Bishop there, by his authoritative voice, absolutely to bestow on the candidate for Priesthood the power to forgive or retain sins!—­“Receive ye the Holy Ghost!  Whose sins ye forgive, they are forgiven:  whose sins ye retain, they are retained.”  If the Bishop really had this power, he of course had it only as Bishop, that is, by his consecration; thus it was formally transmitted.  To allow this, vested in all the Romish bishops a spiritual power of the highest order, and denied the legitimate priesthood in nearly all the Continental Protestant Churches—­a doctrine irreconcilable with the article just referred to and intrinsically to me incredible.  That an unspiritual—­and it may be, a wicked—­man, who can have no pure insight into devout and penitent hearts, and no communion with the Source of holy discernment, could never receive by an outward form the divine power to forgive or retain sins, or the power of bestowing this power, was to me then, as now, as clear and certain as any possible first axiom.  Yet if the Bishop had not this power, how profane was the pretension!  Thus again I came into rude collision with English Prelacy.