institution to enable changeable man to apprehend the unchangeable.
Because man is changeable, the church is also changeable; changeable,
not in its object, which is for ever one and the same, but in its means
for effecting that object; changeable in its details, because the same
treatment cannot suit various diseases, various climates, various
constitutional peculiarities, various external influences.

The Scripture, then, which is the sole and direct authority for all the
truths of the Christian religion, is not in the same way, an authority
for the constitution and rules of the Christian church; that is, it does
not furnish direct authority, but guides us only by analogy: or it
gives us merely certain main principles, which we must apply to our own
various circumstances. This is shown by the remarkable fact, that
neither our Lord nor his apostles have left any commands with respect to
the constitution and administration of the church generally. Commands in
abundance they have left us on moral matters; and one commandment of
another kind has been added, the commandment, namely, to celebrate the
Lord's Supper. "Do this in remembrance of me," are our Lord's words; and
St. Paul tells us, if we could otherwise have doubted it, that this
remembrance is to be kept up for ever. "As often as ye eat that bread or
drink that cup ye do show the Lord's death _till he come_." This is the
one perpetual ordinance of the Christian church, and this is commanded
to be kept perpetually. But its other institutions are mentioned
historically, as things done once, but not necessarily to be always
repeated: nay, they are mentioned without any details, so that we do not
always know what their exact form was in their original state, and
cannot, therefore, if we would, adopt it as a perpetual model. Nor is it
unimportant to observe that institutions are recorded as having been
created on the spur of the occasion, if I may so speak, not as having
formed a part of an original and universal plan. A great change in the
character of the deacon, or subordinate minister's office, is introduced
in consequence of the complaints of the Hellenist Christians: the number
of the apostles is increased by the addition of Paul and Barnabas, not
appointed, as Matthias had been, by the other apostles themselves, but
by the prophets and teachers of the church of Antioch. Again, the
churches founded by St. Paul were each, at first, placed by him under
the governmen