Hooker, Presbyter and Doctor.—Ecclesiastical Polity. Book v. § 77.
... In that they are Christ's ambassadors and His labourers, who should give them their commission, but He whose most inward affairs they manage? Is not God alone the Father of Spirits? Are not souls the purchase of Jesus Christ? What angel in heaven could have said to man, as our Lord did unto Peter, "Feed my sheep,—preach—baptize—do this in remembrance of Me. Whose sins ye retain, they are retained, and their offences in heaven pardoned, whose faults you shall on earth forgive?" What think we? Are these terrestrial sounds, or else are they voices uttered out of the clouds above? The power of the ministry of God, translateth out of darkness into glory; it raiseth man from the earth, and bringeth God Himself from heaven; by blessing visible elements it maketh them invisible graces; it giveth daily the Holy Ghost; it hath to dispose of that flesh which was given for the life of the world, and that blood which was poured out to redeem souls; when it poureth malediction upon the heads of the wicked, they perish; when it revoketh the same, they revive. O wretched blindness, if we admire not so great power; more wretched if we consider it aright, and notwithstanding, imagine that any but God can bestow it! To whom Christ hath imparted power, both over that mystical body which is the society of souls, and over that natural which is Himself, for the knitting of both in one, (a work which antiquity doth call the making of Christ's body,) the same power is in such not amiss both termed a kind of mark or character, and acknowledged to be indelible. ..... "Receive the Holy Ghost; whose sins soever ye remit, they are remitted; whose sins ye retain, they are retained." Whereas, therefore, the other Evangelists had set down, that Christ did before His suffering promise to give His Apostles the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and being risen from the dead, promised moreover at that time a miraculous power of the Holy Ghost, St. John addeth, that He also invested them even then with the power of
