for the reinstatement in clerical rank of Novatianist clergy willing to be
reconciled with the Church, the arrangement was subject always to the
maintenance of the principle that there should not be “two bishops
in the city.” The very rivalries between different claimants of one
episcopal throne serve to bring out the same result—witness the earliest
instances of pope and anti-pope of which we have documentary knowledge, those of Cornelius and Novatian in 251, and of Liberius and Felix
about 357. In the latter case Constantius, with a politician’s eye to
compromise, recommended the joint recognition of both claimants: but
the Roman people—Theodoret, to whose History we owe the details,
is careful to note that he has recorded the very language used—saluted
the reading of the rescript in the circus with the mocking cry that two
leaders would do very well for the factions at the games, but that there
could be only “one God, one Christ, one bishop.” Exactly the same
reason had been given a century earlier in almost the same words, by
the Roman confessors when writing to Cyprian, for their abandonment
of Novatian and adhesion to Cornelius: “we are not unaware that there is one God, and one Christ the Lord whom we have confessed, one Holy
Spirit, and therefore only one true bishop in the communion of the
Catholic Church.” Both in East and West, in the largest cities as well
as in the smallest, the society of the faithful was conceived of as an
indivisible unit; and its oneness was expressed in the person of its one
bishop. The παροικία of Christians in any locality was not like a hive of bees, which, when numbers multiplied inconveniently, could throw off
a part of the whole, to be henceforward a complete and independent
organism under separate control. The necessity for new organisation
had to be met in some way which would preserve at all costs the oneness
of the body and its head.
It followed that the work and duties which the individual bishop could no longer perform in person must be shared with, or deputed to, subordinate officials. New offices came into being in the course especially of the third century, and the growth of this clerus or clergy, and its gradual acquisition during the fourth and fifth centuries of the character of a hierarchy nicely ordered in steps and degrees, is a feature of ecclesiastical history of which the importance has not always been adequately realised.
Of such a hierarchy the germs had no doubt existed from the beginning; and indeed presbyters and deacons were, as we have seen, older component parts of the local communities than were the bishops themselves. In the Ignatian theory bishop, presbyters, and deacons are the three universal elements of organisation, “without which nothing can be called a church” (ad Trail. 3). And the distinction between the two subordinate orders, in their original scope and intention, was just the distinction between the two sides of clerical office which in the bishop were in some sort combined, the spiritual and the administrative:
