IN the brief outline which I have submitted in these discourses of the evidences for the doctrine of the Christian priesthood, altar, and sacrifice, I first met the objection sometimes made to there being any such treasure (in our Church at any rate) because lodged in earthen vessels; secondly, I traced, at least in part, the witness of the whole world before Christ’s coming to the belief in, and usage of, sacrifice and altar, with the necessarily attendant priesthood; and thirdly, I adduced some very small portion of the proofs both from Holy Scripture and from the universal consent of the early Church in its interpretation of Scripture, that priesthood, altar, and sacrifice did not expire with the law, but were intended to be continued, and were continued in and under the Christian dispensation, in and under Him who was and is a High Priest of surpassing power and dignity, not after the pattern or lineage of the priests of the sons of Aaron, but “called an High Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek;” of Him who, fulfilling that royal type, was “King of Righteousness,” and after that also “King of Salem, which is King of Peace,” and yet, again, in like manner, “priest of the Most High God,” and who “abideth a priest continually.” {80} We brought our examination of this evidence to the fourth century of the Christian era by, as I think it must be allowed, the summary of an unexceptionable witness to the substance of the early Christian writings upon that point, and by a reference to the five most ancient liturgies of the Christian Church. It is unnecessary to say a word as to the same doctrine being the universally received doctrine of the Church from the fourth century to the sixteenth, because its very opponents adduce the teaching of that thousand or twelve hundred years, in this among other things, as proving the great darkness and corruption which had then fallen upon the Church, and obscured, in their view, the simplicity of the Gospel. So that, whatever may be thought of its orthodoxy, the fact is not disputed, that for such period the whole of Christendom, with the most insignificant exceptions, believed in the doctrine which we are considering. Whether, as is affirmed by such objectors, this universal belief were a mark of the corruption and ignorance of “the dark ages,” as the self-complacent pride of later times has designated them, (when perchance in God’s judgment they may be as light itself compared with much of the “philosophy and vain deceit” {81a} of this free-handling nineteenth century, which so often “darkens counsel by words without knowledge” {81b}); or whether such consent, following the track of the earliest ages, be not rather the mark of a true understanding of the mind of the Spirit pervading that body with which Christ has promised to be, “even to the end of the world,” is another question. It is one which I need not now pursue, as what we have to say of the course taken and the