with extreme bitterness of a deceased elder who had appointed a brother elder the executor of his will, declaring that the clergy “should in no way be called off from their holy ministrations nor tied down by secular troubles and business.” [579:3] But the common sense of the Church revolted against such high-flown spiritualism, as in many districts where the disciples were still few and indigent, they could not afford a suitable support for all entrusted with the performance of ecclesiastical duties.  Hence, before the recognition of Christianity by Constantine, even bishops in some countries were permitted by trade to eke out a scanty maintenance.  “Let not bishops, elders, and deacons leave their places for the sake of trading,” says a council held in the beginning of the fourth century, “nor travelling about the provinces let them be found dealing in fairs.  However, to provide a living for themselves, let them send either a son, or a freedman, or a servant, or a friend, or any one else:  and if they wish to trade, let them do so within their province.” [580:1]

It is clear, from the New Testament, that, in the apostolic age, ordination was performed by “the laying on of the hands of the presbytery,” and this mode of designation to the ministry appears to have continued until some time in the third century.  We are informed by the most learned of the fathers, in a passage to which the attention of the reader has already been invited, [580:2] that “even at Alexandria, from Mark the Evangelist until Heraclas and Dionysius the bishops, the presbyters were always in the habit of naming bishop one chosen from among themselves and placed in a higher degree, in the same manner as if an army should make an emperor, or the deacons choose from among themselves one whom they knew to be industrious and call him archdeacon.” [580:3] As Jerome here mentions various important facts of which we might have otherwise remained ignorant, and as this statement throws much light upon the ecclesiastical history of the early Church, it is entitled to special notice.

In the letter where this passage occurs the writer is extolling the dignity of presbyters, and is endeavouring to shew that they are very little inferior to bishops.  He admits, indeed, that, in his own days, they had ceased to ordain; but he intimates that they once possessed the right, and that they retained it in all its integrity until the former part of the preceding century.  Some have thought that Jerome has here expressed himself indefinitely, and that he did not know the exact date at which the arrangement he describes ceased at Alexandria.  But his testimony, when fairly analysed, can scarcely be said to want precision; for he obviously speaks of Heraclas and Dionysius as bishops by anticipation, alleging that a custom which anciently existed among the elders of the Egyptian metropolis was maintained until the time when these ecclesiastics, who afterwards successively occupied the episcopal chair, sat together