The Sacrament of Holy Orders
By I. E. Kimball
THE CREED OF CATHOLICISM. No. 3.
The Sacrament of Holy Orders.
By the sacrament of holy orders, ministers are set apart or consecrated to their respective offices. The different ranks are particularly bishops, priests, and deacons; the minor orders, doorkeepers, readers, exorcists, and acolytes. The vow of celibacy must precede holy orders; and the tonsure, or cutting off of the hair—the shaven crown—is made to show separation from the world. “St. Peter’s tonsure” was formerly made quite round the head, to resemble the Lord’s crown of thorns, and in “St. Paul’s tonsure” the whole head was shaven. Other forms have also been used. I shall in this connection consider holy orders in the light of the hierarchy of Rome. Ordination is supposed to confer the grace necessary to discharge the duties of the office. The lay priest and deacons may be mentioned first, who have charge of congregations or bodies of believers. They receive ordination from the bishop, who must be able to trace his succession through a line of bishops back to the apostles. Ordination is thought to bestow the power of God even upon an unworthy or wicked man. And even this is accepted in the Anglican Church. The “gift of truth” is supposed to come down therefore from the apostles, sometimes, of course, through very wicked men. Who can but see that the visible is to them all, and the spiritual nothing? But this will not be admitted, inasmuch as ordination confers the grace, even as baptism is supposed to take away original sin. But all sin is in the heart, and neither baptism nor ordination can save from the curse pronounced of God upon one “whose heart departeth from the living God.” All sinners are under the power and control of Satan. Of such God says, “What hast thou to do to declare my statutes, or that thou shouldest take my covenant in thy mouth?” But lineal succession through such men is of vast consequence to the Church of Rome, and such men (as even staunchest Catholic authorities will acknowledge) are found in the priesthood, who are supposed to have all authority to remit sin, and bind in heaven and earth, according to their judicial notion of authority. The weak point in this is that such a priest has the carnal mind, which is not, and verily can not be, subject to the law of God, neither can he know spiritual things, which must be spiritually discerned. See Rom. 8:7; 1 Cor. 2:14–16. So then he can not even discern the truth, and conversely can not know who are sinners. God will not smell in the assemblies of such men. Various congregations form a diocese over which a bishop presides. As the people find their head in the priest, so he is a child before the bishop, who in turn is suffragan to the archbishop, who is in charge of several dioceses, like an imperial province; metropolitans or primates come next, as national vicars, who rank above other prelates; and above all stands the pope of Rome, as the fountain from which flow the living streams to all the ends of the earth—and he a murderer and a knave and a madman, as, indeed, popes have been according to their own confession; yet the office sanctifies the man, and the pure waters flow forth from this corrupt fountain so that Christ by his power reigns through his vicar! Impossible. I must now refer to the Vatican council of 1870. It was called to proclaim the Dogma of Infallibility, which puts the capstone to papal pretensions. All future ecumenical councils were made unnecessary by the proclamation of the personal infallibility of the pope for all time. When speaking from his chair (ex cathedra), that is, in official capacity, on subjects relating to faith, morals, discipline, and government, his decrees are irreversible; and this is believed to have been the sentiment of the church all through the ages. This dogma is “the whole system in a nutshell,” as Schaff well observes. Every bishop is simply the pope’s vicar, and the priest is the bishop’s vicar. Whoever, therefore, is thrust into St. Peter’s chair, is thereby made infallible by virtue of his office and the special dispensations of Christ, not infallible in private opinions, but in public official utterances. And therefore it is that eternal damnation must come to every soul upon the earth who so much as rejects openly one of the papal bulls promulgated during eighteen hundred years of the past. But now the papal belief and system are so dressed up under the magic touch of her writers, and the glow and tinsel of her teachers, that all deformity and sin are wrapped up in what seems to stand before the world as a miracle of righteousness and grace.7Her logic seems pure and convincing. She stands before the world professedly as the kingdom of God, with all her opponents under a Satanic spell, doomed to the pit, unless they seek her fold. Jew, Protestant, Mohammedan, heathen, belong to the kingdom of Satan, and are the enemies of the “church of Christ”(?). Now if they are correct in all this, then we are doomed, if not to torture in this world, yet surely to eternal torments in the next. And as papal infallibility is the whole thing in a nutshell, let us test this thing as best we are able in few words. Having such considerations as that popes have hurled anathemas at each other, ex cathedra; that two and three rival popes have had their sustaining factions at the same time; that councils have condemned popes as heretics; that even their own canon law makes provision for judging and deposing the pope for heresy; that popes have been deposed on the charge of despicable crimes (notably in the case of John XXIII., May 29, 1415, condemned by the Council of Constance); that the Fathers almost universally are against the dogma, and the “unanimous consent of the Fathers” would put down such pretensions—I will proceed to test it wholly by the Bible. Is passive submission all that is required to dogmatical definitions of faith? or are we required to search for the truth, to try the spirits, to detect false prophets by their life and fruits, not merely by their belief?—Certainly the latter. Are we to believe in a vicar present and a Christ absent, and defer to the vicar, when Christ says, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world;” and, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”? Surely in this we would turn to Christ, who sups with us personally. Is it not a virtual surrender of the Spirit of truth when we ignore the Scripture, which requires to “prove all things,” and receive like machines whatever is ground out for us? Are we to conclude that, after the repeated assertions of Christ that all the church were brethren and none should be called “father” or “master,” and whosoever should so exalt himself should be abased, that they should be all taught of God, not one alone, and should be subject one to another in all humility, in the face of all this, one may be exalted as infallible over his brothers, and the care and soul of his brothers be in his keeping, yea, and he assume the very name “father,” which Christ condemned, and not only the name but the prerogative, which Christ also implied? Must I trust my soul to a man, when the Lord says, “Cursed is the man that trusteth in man?” Shall I even imagine that the gift of the Spirit, promised to one as fully and copiously as to another, must necessarily constitute us infallible? We know that difference of opinion existed amongst even the apostles. And is it not a continued gift of the Spirit to the one who “trembles at God’s word,” which gives continued discernment and power, and not a continuation of power by virtue of an official succession? When Christ spoke of Peter as “rock” upon which the church was built, we know he was good material; so were some of the other apostles likewise; but who would imagine that, although Peter was “rock” as well as his Lord, Christ meant to give a weak, pusillanimous successor of Peter the same title? Was succession at all hinted at?—It was not. Peter was to feed the Lord’s sheep; so were they all. And none can find where Peter exercised one particle of sovereignty over James or Paul or John or any of the rest. We can just as easily conceive of a carnal church wholly devilish being in deed and truth the church of God as we can conceive of a carnal pope being at the same time the vicar of Christ. The fleshly mind is not the spiritual mind, and until it is put away, none will believe in the miraculous overrulings of the Spirit in a church where naught but the carnal heart is found. “I keep my body under and bring it into subjection,” said Paul; but monstrous fiends of cruelty, and filled with fleshly passions, have posed as vicars and lords of God’s heritage. Such men God will not speak through, honor, or allow to speak in his name. Ps. 50:16. The perfecting of the church was not to be effected through the compulsory, lordly authority of one man, and he possibly a fiend, but through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, leading all into loving union.