,
in vivid contrast with the language held on the subject by subsequent
writers. In the face of available, and even readily accessible
evidence, it is impossible to maintain that, before the age of Cyprian,
the Bishop of Carthage, who flourished about the middle of the third
century, there was any such distinction between clergy and laity as the
apostolic succession theory maintains to-day. The very names of the
clergy, such as deacon, presbyter, and bishop, are lay terms, borrowed
from civil not ecclesiastical life. A deacon is a domestic servant; a
presbyter, an elder; and a bishop an overseer or bailiff; and in
conformity with these names there was no office or function of the
Church so exclusively proper to the clergy as not to be capable of
performance also by the laity. And if this can be shown, what follows
but that the whole conception of "holy orders" is an absolute
innovation upon the original teaching of Jesus--a corruption fruitful
in disorders, or rather disasters, of the most deplorable character,
and at this very hour tending more than any other ascertainable cause
to divide man from man, and perpetuate the mischief of religious
dissension?

To begin with, then, preaching was indiscriminately permitted in the
apostolic times and subsequently. This may be gathered freely from the
Acts and Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter xiv.
Moreover, one of the most interesting monuments of the second century
is a homily delivered by a layman at Rome, a fragment of which had long
been known as the second epistle of Clement,[7] and the remainder of
which came to light in 1875 in two forms, a Greek MS. and a Syriac
translation. Moreover, the _Apostolical Constitutions_, which are
still later--going well into the second century--expressly contemplate
preaching by a layman. Dr. Hatch does not hesitate to say that the
earliest positive prohibitions of lay preaching were issued solely in
the interests of ecclesiastical order, not because there was any
inherent right in the priest to teach as opposed to the layman.

Next, in regard to baptism, there need be no hesitation in admitting
the capacity of the layman to baptise, because the Church of Rome
admits it to-day, nay, it admits that a Mohammedan, or even the heathen
Chinaman--if indeed he be such--could lawfully and validly perform that
function. This, I submit, is not to be construed as an act of
liberality on the Church's part. It is simply the r