Discourses upon tradition and episcopacy Author:Christopher Benson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE TRUE HONOUR OF THE CLERGY. 29 good of Christ's household; and many who, it is to be feared, with views of a less holy description, laboured to clothe the ... more »persons of the clergy with such a superiority to the secular power, as might leave them free to act, without the fear of any earthly tribunal; and to give to their teaching and ministrations, such a heavenly sanction as might prevent believers from entertaining a thought of resistance to the authority with which they spake and acted. By that natural process of deceiving and being deceived, through which the workers of evil, though they work it only that good may ensue, are always sure to wax worse and worse, the iniquities and oppressions of the ecclesiastical body, actuated by one uniform spirit of aggrandisement, and directed in the energy of its movements, by one absolute and supposed infallible head, became at last too corrupt and too dreadful to be allowed any longer to continue in unresisted strength. The rulers of this world were impatient under the Church's usurped control; the lovers of money coveted its vast wealth; whilst the holy mourned for its wickedness, and they who knew the truth, had marked and condemned its manifold errors and shameful superstitions. Thus were its blasphemous assumptions of the divine prerogative simultaneously broken in upon, under God's providence, by the united forces of the evil j / and the good; and the ministers of Christ were chapter{Section 4 once more reduced, from the lords over God's heritage, into stewards of his household, and labourers in his vineyard. Since that period a new scene has been presented to the Christian's eye. The reformation, beginning in a resistance to the unjust pretensions, has been followed in too many instances by a denial of the just claims...« less