A26892:5938
A Christian Directory
A Christian directory, or, A sum of practical theology and cases of conscience directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith, how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties, how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortify every sin : in four parts ... / by Richard Baxter.A Christian directory, or, A summ of practical theologie and cases of conscience directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith, how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties, how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortifie every sin : in four parts ... / by Richard Baxter.
London: printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
Quest. 11. Whether an uninterrupted Succession either of right Ordination or of Conveyance by Jurisdiction, be necessary to the Being of the Ministry, or of a true Church?
Quest. 11. Whether an uninterrupted Succession either of right Ordination or of Conveyance by Iurisdiction, be necessary to the Being of the Ministry, or of a true Church?
The Papists have hitherto insisted on the necessity of successive right Ordination: But Vo•tius de desperata Causa Papatus hath in this so handled them, and confuted Jansenius, as hath indeed showed the desperateness of that Cause: And they perceive that the Papacy it self cannot be upheld by that way; and therefore Johnson, alias Terret, in his Rejoinder against me now concludeth, that it is not for want of a successive Consecration that they condemn the Church of England, but for want of true Jurisdiction, because other Bishops had title to the places whilst they were put in: And that successive Consecration (which we take to include Ordination) is not necessary to the being of Ministry or Church. And it is most certain to any man acquainted in Church History, that their Popes have had a succession of neither. Their way of Election hath been frequently changed, sometimes being by the people, sometimes by the Clergy, sometimes by the Emperors, and lastly by the Cardinals alone. Ordination they have sometime wanted, and a Lay-man been chosen: And oft the Ordination hath been by such as had no power according to their own Laws. And frequent intercisions have been made, sometime by many years vacancy, when they had no Church, (and so there was none on Earth, if the Pope be the Constitutive Head) for want of a Pope; sometime by long Schisms, when of two or three Popes, no one could be known to have more right than the other, nor did they otherwise carry it, than by power at last: Sometimes by the utter incapacity of the possessors, some being Lay-men, some Heretics and Infidels, so judged by Councils at Rome, Constance, Basil; and Eugenius the fourth continued after he was so censured and condemned and deposed by the General Council. I have proved all this at large elsewhere.