A treatise of miscellany questions wherein many useful questions and cases of conscience are…A treatise of miscellany questions wherein many usefull questions and cases of conscience are…

Object: 6. If we hold Ordination necessary, and essential to the calling of a Minister, we bring our selves into this snare, that either the Ministers in the reformed Churches, are not true Ministers, but falsely pretended to be so, or otherwise we must hold that those in the Church of Rome, from whom the Protestant Ministers, in the beginning of the Reformation, had their Ordination, were true Ministers of Christ. For if those in the Church of Rome who did ordain, were not true Ministers of Christ, then they had no commission from Christ to make Ministers for him. And who can bring a clean thing out of that which is unclean: If so, then the Protestant Ministers, who first ordained other Protestant Ministers (from whom Ordination hath come to us downwards) having no Ordination, but what they received in the Church of Rome, they had not power to ordain others with such an Ordination, as hath a divine stamp and character upon it.

Object: 6. If we hold Ordination necessary, and essentiall to the calling of a Minister, wee bring our selves into this snare, that either the Ministers in the reformed Churches, are not true Ministers, but falsely pretended to be so, or otherwise we must hold that those in the Church of Rome, from whom the Protestant Ministers, in the beginning of the Reformation, had their Ordination, were true Ministers of Christ. For if those in the Church of Rome who did ordaine, were not true Ministers of Christ, then they had no commission from Christ to make Ministers for him. And who can bring a clean thing out of that which is unclean: If so, then the Protestant Ministers, who first ordained other Protestant Ministers (from whom Ordination hath come to us downwards) having no Ordination, but what they receaved in the Church of Rome, they had not power to ordain others with such an Ordination, as hath a divine stamp and character upon it.

This argument is much insisted upon by the Author of the Queries touching Ordination: If it can do any thing, yet it is no new light, but the very same which hath been formerly objected by Papists, and answered by Protestant writers. Whereof see one instance in Gerhard, loc: com: tom: 6. de Minist: Eccles: § 157.