NOTE.

In order to prevent the possibility of misunderstanding, it is proper to repeat what has been often said by others, that the English word “priest” has two significations,—­the one according to its etymology, through the French pretre, or prestre, and the Latin presbyterus, from the Greek [Greek:  presbuteros]; in which sense it is used in our Liturgy and Rubrics, and signifies merely “one belonging to the order of Presbyters,” as distinguished from the other two orders of bishops and deacons.  But the other signification of the word “priest,” and which we use, as I think, more commonly, is the same with the meaning of the Latin word sacerdos, and the Greek word [Greek:  iepeus], and means, “one who stands as a mediator between God and the people, and brings them to God by the virtue of certain ceremonial acts which he performs for them, and which they could not perform for themselves without profanation, because they are at a distance from God, and cannot, in their own persons, venture to approach towards him.”  In this sense of the word “priest,” the term is not applied to the ministers of the Christian church, either by the Scripture, or by the authorized formularies of the Church of England; although, in the other sense, as synonymous with Presbyters, it is used in our Prayer Book repeatedly.  Of course, not one word of what I have written is meant to deny the lawfulness and importance of the order of Presbyters in the church; I have only spoken against a priesthood, in the other sense of the word, in which a “priest” means “a mediator between God and man;” in that sense, in short, in which the word is not a translation of [Greek:  presbuteros], but [iereus].

LECTURE I.

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GENESIS iii. 22.

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.

This is declared to be man’s condition after the Fall.  I will not attempt to penetrate into that which is not to be entered into, nor to pretend to discover all that may be concealed beneath the outward, and in many points clearly parabolical, form of the account of man’s temptation and sin.  But that condition to which his sin brought him is our condition; with that, undoubtedly, we are concerned; that must be the foundation of all sound views of human nature; the double fact employed in the word fall is of the last importance; the fact on the one hand of our present nature being evil, the fact on the other hand that this present nature is not our proper nature; that the whole business of our lives is to cast it off, and to return to that better and holy nature, which, in truth, although not in fact, is the proper nature of man.