This view, so clearly deducible from the promise of our Lord, and the conduct of His Apostles, is most unanswerably confirmed by the whole history of the Primitive Church. Every where the Bishops were the chief pastors, and the government and order of the Church was vested in them. To separate from them, except they were proved grossly heretical, was accounted schism. Why? Because it was universally understood, that the Bishops were the connecting chain which bound the successive generations of Christians to the first generation, the holy Apostles; nay, and to our Lord Jesus Christ himself. For the believers of those days were too well instructed not to know that our Saviour's promises were made to the Church through the Apostles: so that if they broke off their connection with the Apostles, they broke off their connection with Christ.
Would you hear some of the very words of those holy men of old? Take the following, which are part of a letter written by St. Ignatius, the friend of the chiefest Apostles, when he was on the verge of martyrdom. They are some of his last words, written to warn the friends for whom he was most anxious, against the heresies which were springing up in the Church.
"By submitting yourself to your Bishop as to Jesus Christ, you convince me that you guide your lives by no rule of man's invention, but by the rule of Jesus Christ, who died for us, that ye, believing in His death, might escape altogether from death. It follows, of course, that in no part of your conduct ye separate yourselves from your Bishop: which thing also ye now practise."
No test could be shorter or more simple. "You are in communion with your Bishop, humbly receiving from him, or those by him deputed, the genuine word and Sacraments of Jesus Christ: therefore, I make no question but you are also in communion with our Lord Jesus Christ himself; at least, as far as Church Privileges go; as far as I or man can judge."
Surely the holy martyr, St. Ignatius, was as good a judge of what Christian communion depends on, as any person can be supposed in our days. And we see that he judges of it, not by those tests which we now hear most insisted on; not by convictions, and emotions, and highly-wrought feelings; but by the simple fact of adherence to that system, which our Lord himself
