incapable of preaching the glad tidings of the Gospel, or of exercising the commission given them of binding and loosing in the name of Christ? Or, think of St. Paul, with his fellow-helper and companion in labour, Aquila, working with their hands at their craft, “for by their occupation they were tent-makers;” {13b} aye, even “working night and day,” that they “might not be chargeable” to others: and will any say, Herein they shewed themselves too like to other men to put forward any pretence or claim to have or exercise any priestly or sacerdotal function. Will any again call to mind that St. Peter was certainly a married man; (“Peter’s wife’s mother,” we read at one time, “was sick of a fever;”) as also certainly was Aquila the companion in labour of St. Paul, (for he came “with his wife Priscilla;”) or, once more, St. Paul’s own claim to the right (though he did not exercise it, but still the right) to marry if he thought fit; as he says, “Have we not power to eat and to drink? Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other Apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas?” {14} will any consider so much, and then say, you must needs have a celibate priesthood, if you are to have any priesthood at all in the Church of Christ; or, if there be one, it must be one so separated from all earthly pursuit as to be recognised at a glance as of a different order? Nay, my brethren, such things are surely no arguments of even a feather’s weight in the mouth of any man against a true priesthood in the Church of England; and one can hardly see how they can be supposed, by any sober-minded thinker, to be either contained in, or deduced from, Holy Scripture. They are, in fact, objections merely playing with the prejudices of those who have already come to a foregone conclusion, and intended rather to point an unjust shaft at the Church of England, through a mock admiration of the Church of Rome, than to advance the cause of truth. And this with no justice, even towards Rome herself, either in praise or blame; for Rome herself may have something to say in defence of her practice as to the distinctions with which she marks her priesthood, if looked on merely as matters of expediency and not of faith or doctrine; and at the same time, we certainly have no little reason to maintain that in many of these things, (and however there may be incidental disadvantages which we need not deny, on the ground of expediency also,) yet we come the nearer of the two to the following of the Apostles, in the not making too broad an outward distinction between priests and people, and in the not having laid a yoke hard to be borne, perhaps, as a wide and extended rule, too hard to be borne, upon our priesthood’s neck; and, in short, that we are at any rate close upon the very type and pattern which St. Paul mentions in our text, in that we too have our treasure in earthen vessels, and may, in one sense at least,