the hall of audience, simply because he was the supple instrument of an insolent Italian priest, this was not to be borne; and so the Reformation came, with the mob of the lowest classes, the mass of the respectable middle classes, the most influential of the nobility, and the power of the Crown, all in full cry against the ecclesiastical fox. The revolution thus volcanically effected, and known in history under the name of Protestantism, meant simply the right of every individual member of the Christian Church to take the principles and the practice of his Church directly from the original records of the Church, without the intervention of any body of authorised interpreters; and the necessary product of this right when exercised was first to declare certain practices and doctrines that had grown up in the Church through long centuries to be unauthorised departures from the original simplicity and purity of the gospel; and, further, to deny that there existed in the Christian Church, as originally constituted, any class or caste of men enjoying the exclusive privilege to perform sacred functions, and endowed with a divine virtue to perform sacramental miracles by their consecrating touch,--in a word, that there was no priesthood, properly so called, in the Reformed Christian Church. Nor is this doctrine, as some may think, the teaching only of the Helvetic confession, what certain persons have been fond to call extreme Protestantism; for, though the word priest has been retained in the English prayerbook as a minister in sacred things of a particular grade and exercising a particular function, the attempt made by Archbishop Laud and the Romanising party in the Reformed Church of England to retain in the bosom of the Anglican Church the ideas which the ancient Jews and the Romish Christians attached to the word _priest_, proved a signal failure; and for the sacerdotal despotism which it implied, as well as for the secular despotism which the priest advised and encouraged the unfortunate king to assert, the adviser and the advised justly lost their heads. Of all the teachings of Church history, from the Waldenses in the twelfth century down to the present hour, there is nothing more certain than this, that between Popery and Protestantism there is no middle term possible. They may agree, in fact they do agree, in many essential things, and in a few accidental; but in the fundamental principle of Church administration they are diametrically opposed. The principle of the one is sacerdotal authority, absolute and unqualified; the principle of the other is individual and congregational liberty. The one form of polity is a close oligarchy, the other either a free democracy or an aristocracy more or less penetrated by a democratic spirit.