The minister may be revered for his character, followed for his eloquence, admired for his learning, loved for his amiable qualities, but he can never be what the priest was in past ages, and is still, in the Roman Church.  Dr. Arnold’s definition may be found fault with, but it has a very real meaning.  “The essential point in the notion of a priest is this:  that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us morally,—­an unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity.”  He did not mean, of course, that the priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a special power, quite independent of his personal character, which could act, as it were, mechanically; that out of him went a virtue, as from the hem of his Master’s raiment, to those with whom his sacred office brought him in contact.

It was a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a tangible personality of like nature with themselves as a mediator between them and the heavenly powers.  Sympathy can do much for the sorrowing, the suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking directly through human lips, to feel the touch of a hand which is the channel of communication with the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is the privilege of those who looked and those who still look up to a priesthood.  It has been said, and many who have walked the hospitals or served in the dispensaries can bear witness to the truth of the assertion, that the Roman Catholics know how to die.  The same thing is less confidently to be said of Protestants.  How frequently is the story told of the most exemplary Protestant Christians, nay, how common is it to read in the lives of the most exemplary Protestant ministers, that they were beset with doubts and terrors in their last days!  The blessing of the viaticum is unknown to them.  Man is essentially an idolater,—­that is, in bondage to his imagination,—­for there is no more harm in the Greek word eidolon than in the Latin word imago.  He wants a visible image to fix his thought, a scarabee or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are to our own time what these were to the ancient Egyptians.  He wants a vicegerent of the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him godspeed on his last journey.  Who but such an immediate representative of the Divinity would have dared to say to the monarch just laying his head on the block, “Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel”?

It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly republicanize the American Protestant descendant of the ancient priesthood.  The history of the Congregationalists in New England would show us how this change has gone on, until we have seen the church become a hall open to all sorts of purposes, the pulpit come down to the level of the rostrum, and the clergyman take on the character of a popular lecturer who deals with every kind of subject, including religion.