long be willing to limit the voting to the presbytery.  The people chose their presbyters and deacons, and now that the office of moderator possessed substantial power, and differed so much from what it was originally, why should not all the members of the Church be allowed to exercise their legitimate influence?  Such a claim could not be well resisted.  Thus it was that the bishops were ultimately chosen by popular suffrage. [533:1]

Some have imagined that they have discovered inconsistency in the statements of Jerome relative to prelacy.  They allege, in proof, that whilst he describes the Church as governed, until the rise of “parties in religion,” by the common council of the presbyters, he also speaks of bishops as in existence from the days of the apostles.  “At Alexandria,” says he, “from Mark the Evangelist, [by whom the Church there is said to have been founded] to Heraclas and Dionysius the bishops, [who flourished in the third century] the presbyters always named as bishop one chosen from among themselves and placed along with them [533:2] in a higher position.” [533:3] It must appear, however, on due consideration, that here there is no inconsistency whatever.  In the Epistle where this passage occurs Jerome is asserting the ancient dignity of presbyters, and shewing that they originally possessed prerogatives of which they had more recently been deprived.  In proof of this he refers to the Church of Alexandria, one of the greatest sees in Christendom, where for upwards of a century and a half after the days of the Evangelist Mark, the presbyters appointed their spiritual overseers, and performed all the ceremonies connected with their official investiture.  But it does not therefore follow that meanwhile these overseers had always possessed exactly the same amount of authority.  The very fact mentioned by Jerome suggests a quite different inference, as it proves that whilst the power of the presbyters had been declining, that of the bishops had increased.  In the second century the presbyters inaugurated bishops; in the days of Jerome they were not permitted even to ordain presbyters.

Jerome says, indeed, that, in the beginning, the Alexandrian presbyters nominated their bishops, but we are not to conclude that the parties chosen were always known distinctively by the designation which he here gives to them.  He evidently could not have intended to convey such an impression, as in the same Epistle he demonstrates, by a whole series of texts of Scripture, that the titles bishop and presbyter were used interchangeably throughout the whole of the first century.  By bishops he obviously understands the presidents of the presbyteries, or the officials who filled the chairs which those termed bishops subsequently occupied.  In their own age these primitive functionaries were called bishops and presbyters indifferently; but they partially represented the bishops of succeeding times, and they always appeared in the episcopal registries as links of the apostolical succession, so that Jerome did not deem it necessary to depart from the current nomenclature.  His meaning cannot be mistaken by any one who attentively marks his language, for he has stated immediately before, that episcopal authority properly commenced when the Church began to be distracted by the spirit of sectarianism. [534:1]