James Ussher and a Reformed Episcopal Church: Sermons and Treatises on Ecclesiology (Library of Early English Protestantism Book 1) by James Ussher

Author:James Ussher [Ussher, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-25T08:00:00+00:00

THE ORIGINAL OF BISHOPS AND METROPOLITANS (1644)[589]

THE GROUND of episcopacy is derived partly from the pattern prescribed by God in the Old Testament, and partly from the imitation thereof brought in by the apostles, and confirmed by Christ himself in the time of the New. The government of the Church of the Old Testament was committed to the priests and Levites, unto whom the ministers of the New do now succeed; in like sort as our Lord’s Day hath done unto their Sabbath, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, touching the vocation of the Gentiles, “I will take of them for priests, and for Levites, saith the Lord.”[590]

That the priests were superior to the Levites, no man doubteth; and that there was not a parity, either betwixt the priests or betwixt the Levites themselves, is manifest by the word of God, wherein mention is made of the heads and rulers both of the one, and of the other.[591]

The Levites were distributed into the three families of the Gershonites, Cohathites, and Merarites, and over each of them God appointed one נשיא, ἄρχων, or ruler.[592] The priests were divided by David into four and twenty courses,[593] who likewise had their heads, who in the history of the New Testament are ordinarily called ἀρχιερεῖς, or chief of the priests,[594] and clearly distinguished from that singular one, who was the type of our “great High Priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God.”[595] Yea, in the eleventh chapter of Nehemiah, we find two named bishops, the one of the priests, the other of the Levites that dwelt in Jerusalem. The former so expressly termed by the Greek in the fourteenth, the latter both by the Greek and Latin interpreter in the twenty-second verse,[596] and not without approbation of the Scripture itself, which rendereth the Hebrew word of the same original in the Old,[597] by the Greek ἐπισκοπὴ in the New Testament.[598]

Of Levi it was said by Moses the man of God: “They shall teach Jacob thy judgments, and Israel thy law; they shall put incense before thee, and whole burnt sacrifice upon thine altar.”[599] Because this latter part of their office hath ceased with them, and the Levitical altar (the truth prefigured thereby being now exhibited) is quite taken away, may not we therefore conclude out of the former part (which hath no such typical relation in it) that our bishops and presbyters should be, as the apostle would have them to be, διδακτικοὶ, “apt to teach,”[600] “able by sound doctrine both to exhort, and to convince the gainsayers”?[601] Nay, and out of the latter part itself, where God had appointed, that “the priests, the Levites, and all the tribe of Levi should eat the offerings of the Lord made by fire,”[602] doth not the apostle by just analogy infer from thence, that forasmuch as “they which waited at the altar, were partaker with the altar; even so had the Lord ordained, that they which

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