In the temple was the priest consecrated according to a precise regulation, and a sarcedotal succession laid down by God himself, with the altar and its sacrifices at which he officiated, the incense which he burned, the holy places into which none might enter but those to whom it was especially assigned. In the synagogue was the reader of the Scriptures, the preacher or expounder of religious and moral truth, the leader of the common devotions of the people, unconsecrated by any special rites, and unrestricted by any rule of succession; with a reading desk or pulpit at which he stood, but with no altar, sacrifice or incense, and no part of the building more holy than the rest. And without attempting now to dwell upon all the remarkable contrasts thus displayed, it may suffice to say that the temple exhibited in a grand combination of typical places, persons and actions. God dwelling with man, reconciling the world unto himself in the person and work of Christ; and pardoning, justifying and graciously receiving those who come to him through the appointed Saviour; while the synagogue exhibited a congregation of men, already reconciled to God, assembled as devout worshipers for prayer and praise, for instruction in divine knowledge, and edification in righteous living. And the two systems—the one gorgeous and typical, the other simple and real; in one, God drawing near to man, in the other, man drawing near to God—never clashed or interfered with each other; were never intermingled or confounded together. In the temple there was no pulpit, in the synagogue there was no altar.... They (apostles) retained and adapted to Christian use some Jewish forms and regulations; but they were taken altogether not from the temple, but from the synagogue. The offices which they appointed in the church, and the duties and authority which they attached to them, together with the regulations which they made for Christian worship, bore no resemblance in name or in nature to the services of the priesthood in the temple. The apostles had been divinely taught that those priests and services were typical forms and shadows, which were centered, and fulfilled, and done away in Christ; and to reinstate them in the Church would have been in their judgment to go back to the bondage of “weak and beggarly elements” from the liberty, strength and rich completeness of the Gospel dispensation. They saw that as the ordinances of the temple represented the work of God wrought out for man, not man’s work for God, to continue them after that work was finished in the life and death of Jesus, would be in effect so far to deny the efficacy of the Saviour’s mission, and to thrust in the miserable performances of men to fill up an imagined imperfection in the Son of God. (Ecclesiastical Polity, pages 96-98.)