had established for our salvation. Now, we know from every page of St. Ignatius, what bis view of that system was. It was the system of Christian Ordinances, administered by Bishops, with Priests and Deacons under them. That, in the mind of St. Ignatius, was the sure mark of the Church of God.
Nor was this a mere private opinion of his: it was rather the constant tradition of the Church Universal. What is very remarkable, it was the tradition not only of the sound part of the Church, but of the heretics also. In those early days, even those who corrupted the doctrine of the Church seldom or never dared to breathe any thing against the Apostolical Succession of her Bishops. To do so, if they possibly could, would have been greatly to their purpose; because one very plain argument by which their misrepresentations of doctrine used to be confuted, was by appealing to the traditional account of the same doctrines, preserved in many of the most famous Churches, by means of the regular succession of the Bishops. Some of the Fathers thus reckon up the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, for more than three hundred years, from the time of the Apostles, and are thereby enabled to trace back as far the true interpretation of certain hard places of Scripture, relating to the great truths of the Gospel. The heretics who disputed those truths, no doubt, would have been too happy, could they have proved that the chain of tradition wanted a link; that the succession from the Apostles was not clearly made out, or that being made out, it signified nothing. But the ground they used to take was quite different. They never dreamed of denying the past succession: it was too certainly known to be denied; but they took very great care to secure future succession for themselves. They hardly ever broke off from the Church, until they had got some Bishop to patronize their heresy: through whom they might continue the Apostolical commission in a line of pastors of their own.
Thus as well the enemies of the Church as her friends bore witness in those early days to a truth which too many of both seem now agreed on forgetting: That Episcopal Authority is the very bond which unites Christians to each other and to Christ: so that it was apparently a kind of proverb with them, Without the Bishop do nothing in the Church.
What is more, the teaching of the Primitive Church brought
