[Footnote 8:  Only elders are spoken of as governing the church of Corinth.  It is impossible to understand clearly the nature of the contest, and of the party against which Clement’s Epistle is directed.  Where he wishes the heads of that party to say, [Greek:  ei di eme stasis kai eris kai schismata, ekchoro, apeimi, ou ean, boulaesthe, kai poio, ta, prostassomena upo tou plaethous], c. 54, it would seem as if they had been endeavouring to exercise a despotic authority over the church, in defiance of the general feeling, as well as of the existing government, like those earlier persons at Corinth, whom St. Paul describes, in his second Epistle, xi. 20; and like Diotrephes, mentioned by St. John, 3 Epist. 9, 10.  But in a society where all power must have depended on the consent of those subject to it, how could any one exercise a tyranny against the will of the majority, as well as against the authority of the Apostles?  And [Greek:  ta prostassomena upo tou plaethous] must signify, I think, “the bidding of the society at large.”  Compare for this use of [Greek:  plaethos], Ignatius, Smyrna. 8; Trallian. 1, 8.  A conjecture might be offered as to the solution of this difficulty, but it would lead mo into too long a discussion.]

[Footnote 9:  Insomuch that he wished all marriages to be solemnized with the consent and approbation of the bishop, [Greek:  meta gnomaes tou episkopou], that they might be “according to God, and not according to passion;” [Greek:  kapa Theon kai mae kat epithomian].—­Ad.  Polycarp. 5.]

On two points, however,—­points not of detail, but of principle,—­the Scripture does seem to speak decisively. 1st.  The whole body of the church was to take an active share in its concerns; the various faculties of its various members were to perform their several parts:  it was to be a living society, not an inert mass of mere hearers and subjects, who were to be authoritatively taught and absolutely ruled by one small portion of its members.  It is quite consistent with this, that, at particular times, the church should centre all its own power and activity in the persons of its rulers.  In the field, the imperium of the Roman consul was unlimited; and even within the city walls, the senate’s commission in times of imminent danger, released him from all restraints of law; the whole power of the state was, for the moment, his, and his only.  Such temporary despotisms are sometimes not expedient merely, but necessary:  without them society would perish.  I do not, therefore, regard Ignatius’s epistles as really contradictory to the idea of the church conveyed to us in the twelfth chapter of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:  I believe that the dictatorship, so to speak, which Ignatius claims for the bishop in each church, was required by the circumstances of the case; but to change the temporary into the perpetual dictatorship, was to subvert the Roman constitution; and to make Ignatius’s language the rule, instead of the exception, is no less to subvert the Christian church.  Wherever the language of Ignatius is repeated with justice, there the church must either be in its infancy, or in its dotage, or in some extraordinary crisis of danger; wherever it is repeated, as of universal application, it destroys, as in fact it has destroyed, the very life of Christ’s institution.