[127] It is a curious thing that three parties otherwise very much opposed unite in this view: the extreme High Church party in England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Wesleyan Conference, which latter body restrains all questions of doctrine and discipline to ministers alone as rigorously as either of the others. The Presbyterian Assemblies are in many respects open to the same charge, the elders who represent the laity being ordained by imposition of hands as truly as the ministers and signing the same doctrinal tests. I cannot say how far this may be true of the Established Assembly in Scotland, but as far as the Free Church and the Irish General Assemblies are concerned, I am bold to say that no unordained layman sits in them. I was much amused some time ago reading the charge of a Wesleyan President of Conference to the newly ordained ministers of the Irish Conference, when he bid them remember that Christ had entrusted to them alone the care of all questions touching doctrine and discipline. See for the High Anglican theory, which is just the same as the Wesleyan President's, Joyce's _Acts of the Church_, A.D. 1531-1885, p. 12. There is not indeed a hint which would lead us to conclude that the Pharisees, who rose up and argued on behalf of the binding character of the law of Moses, held any spiritual office whatsoever. So far as the sacred text puts it, they may have been laymen pure and simple, such as were the ordinary Pharisees. I cannot, indeed, see how any member of the Church of England can consistently maintain either from Holy Scripture, ancient ecclesiastical history, or the history of his own Church, that laymen are quite shut out from councils debating questions touching Christian faith, and that their consideration must be limited to bishops, or at least clergymen alone. The Apostolic Church seems to have admitted the freest discussion. The General Councils most certainly tolerated very considerable lay interference. The Emperor Constantine, though not even baptized, obtruded much of his presence and exercised much of his influence upon the great Nicene Council. Why even down to the sixteenth century, till the Tridentine Council, the ambassadors of the great Christian Powers of Europe sat in Church synods as representing the laity; and it was only in the Council of the Vatican, which met in 1870, that even the Roman Catholic Church formally denied the right of the people to exercise a certain influence in the determination of questions touching faith and discipline by the exclusion of the ambassadors who had in every previous council held a certain defined place. While again, when we come to the history of the Church of England, we find that the celebrated Hooker, the vindicator of its Church polity, expressly defended the royal supremacy as exercised within that Church on the ground that the king represented by delegation the vast body of the