that so much care has been taken in Scripture, and by God's Providence guiding His Church in all ages, to guard the doctrines once for all delivered to the Saints, and keep men steady and uniform in them. If this were not a principal object in the eye of Divine Wisdom, is it conceivable that the great Apostle should have introduced it as he has done when speaking to the Ephesians as one main result of the coming of the Holy Ghost, the very bond between heaven and earth? It is one of the passages, in which he writes like one soaring majestically upward, flight after flight beyond what he had at first intended:—"Unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ;" i.e., according to that portion of special infused grace which God sees needful for our several callings in His Church. "Wherefore he saith, When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men." What gifts? Surely, to those who think slightly of Apostolical order in the Church, the answer must appear very surprising. "He gave some, Apostles, and some, Prophets, and some, Evangelists, and some, Pastors and Teachers." I do not of course press this text as proving by itself the Apostolical authority of our three orders. But thus much, undoubtedly, it proves, that some kind of order was instituted in the beginning, of so important and beneficial tendency, as to deserve a very high place in the enumeration of those royal gifts, by which the Holy Comforter solemnized the inauguration of the Son of God. We may, or we may not, enjoy that order still. We may have irrecoverably lost it by God's Providence justly visiting human abuse of it: in which case it might not strike us as a practical topic of inquiry: but to suppose that it still exists, or may be recovered, and yet to speak of it as an idle dream, a worn out theory, or (still worse) a profane superstition—this is not what one should expect from those who reverence the Divine Inspirer of this and similar passages in St. Paul. But to proceed: the Apostle goes on to mention unity of doctrine, as one main final cause of the institution of this Apostolical system. The Apostles, Prophets, and the rest, were given to the Church by the Holy Ghost, "that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, by cunning craftiness,
