s indeed
supremely contemptible.

With these considerations on my mind,--while quite aware that some of
the bishops were good and valuable men,--I could not help feeling
that it would be a perfect misery to me to have to address one of them
taken at random as my "Right Reverend Father in God," which seemed
like a foul hypocrisy; and when I remembered who had said, "Call
no man Father on earth; for one is your Father, who is in
heaven:"--words, which not merely in the letter, but still more
distinctly in the spirit, forbid the state of feeling which suggested
this episcopal appellation,--it did appear to me, as if "Prelacy"
had been rightly coupled by the Scotch Puritans with "Popery" as
antichristian.

Connected inseparably with this, was the form of Ordination, which,
the more I thought of it, seemed the more offensively and outrageously
Popish, and quite opposed to the Article on the same subject. In the
Article I read, that we were to regard such to be legitimate ministers
of the word, as had been duly appointed to this work _by those who
have public authority for the same_. It was evident to me that this
very wide phrase was adapted and intended to comprehend the "public
authorities" of all the Reformed Churches, and could never have been
selected by one who wished to narrow the idea of a legitimate minister
to Episcopalian Orders; besides that we know Lutheran and Calvinistic
ministers to have been actually admitted in the early times of the
Reformed English Church, by the force of that very Article. To this,
the only genuine Protestant view of a Church, I gave my most cordial
adherence: but when I turned to the Ordination Service, I found the
Bishop there, by his authoritative voice, absolutely to bestow on
the candidate for Priesthood the power to forgive or retain
sins!--"Receive ye the Holy Ghost! Whose sins ye forgive, they are
forgiven: whose sins ye retain, they are retained." If the Bishop
really had this power, he of course had it only _as_ Bishop, that is,
by his consecration; thus it was formally transmitted. To allow this,
vested in all the Romish bishops a spiritual power of the highest
order, and denied the legitimate priesthood in nearly all the
Continental Protestant Churches--a doctrine irreconcilable with the
article just referred to and intrinsically to me incredible. That
an unspiritual--and it may be, a wicked--man, who can have no pure
insight into devout and penitent hearts, and no communi