istinction between priest and
layman is not a tenable one because it is none of Christ's making.[9]

It has been remarked that perverse conceptions of the Eucharist were
responsible for the equally corrupt teaching about orders. This is the
case. Previously to the third century, the Eucharist remained what it
had ever been, "the breaking of bread," the commemorative meal. Then
there came a change, and men began to read into it a sacrificial
meaning and to interpret it as a mystical repetition of the death of
Christ. From Cyprian this novel theology apparently passed to
Augustine and Ambrose in the fourth century, and thenceforth it became
dominant, though by no means universally so, until the eighth and ninth
centuries. The rise of Athanasianism in the fourth century, and the
abuse of the doctrine of incarnation by that bishop, reacted naturally
in the matter of the Eucharist. Christ, who was proclaimed to be the
solitary incarnation, the Deity hidden behind a veil of flesh,
naturally paved the way for the Eucharist as a sacrament wherein the
Deity is hid behind the veil of bread. The one incarnation is, as it
were, the complement of the other. Hence, a rigidly literal meaning
was given to Christ's utterances about eating his flesh and drinking
his blood, and Christians were taught to believe that by the
manducation of his bodily frame his holy spirit could be incorporated,
as though, for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor
by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael
Angelo. Only mind can know and receive mind, and it is really
difficult to comprehend the grossness of soul which suggests to man the
idea that by feasting on the flesh and blood of his God he may hope to
become like a God.

It would be just as easy to show that in the matter of church
government and discipline everything was, in the early days, on a
thoroughly democratic, or representative basis. Power, as in the
England of to-day, is recognised to reside in the community, not
exclusively in the presbyters. St. Paul's first epistle to the
Corinthians recognises this in the matter of the removal of officers.
The epistles of Clement and Polycarp recognise the same thing. Bishops
are always elected by the people, and the net conclusion therefore is
that no such thing as a hierarchy of ordained deacons, priests and
bishops was known to Christ, to Paul, or the writers of the first two
and a half centuries.