This brief detail (the truth of which is so well known that it is needless to give as our authority every accredited ecclesiastical history) affords the best argument for the temporary nature of the institutions of Church government, and sanctions the declaration of those who are charged by either Church with schism, that before they can again be required to join the Establishment, that Establishment must be reduced to the simplicity of government and discipline which characterized the primitive church. The bishops must assume nothing over their brethren, and be superior in no respect but in holiness; they must be stewards of God, not given to lucre, but eminent in faith, in temperance, in charity. The deacons must administer the common revenues of the church for the benefit of those who have need, appropriating nothing themselves nor suffering others to appropriate. The church itself must be, in all its views and objects, not of this world; having no respect of persons, not awarding to the man in goodly apparel a better place than to the poor man in vile raiment, rejecting every inducement to the usurpation of secular power, and leaving to the conscience of every man, as Peter referred to the conscience of Ananias, the obligation of contributing to the common revenue. 'While the land remained, was it not thine own? And after it was sold, was not the price in thine own power?' is not the language of ecclesiastical tax-gatherers in the present day: and till all contributions to the churches become strictly voluntary, till the churches abjure all temporal authority, and free their discipline and ritual from the encroachments of spiritual tyranny and the defilements of superstition, neither the one nor the other can advance any claim to spiritual allegiance, and men who dissent from both may hold themselves innocent of the sin of schism.