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A Dissertation Historical and Critical on the Christian Ministry
A Dissertation Historical and Critical on the Christian Ministry Author:John Jackson 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: by making certain sacrifices, shorten, or even terminate, the torments their ancestors and friends were enduring in purgatory."—D'Aubigne's History of the Reform... more »ation, vol. i. p. 37. These sacrifices generally consisted in the payment of money, and thus this diabolical scheme, operating on the minds of the ignorant and superstitious, became the source of an immense revenue to the clergy. The evil of priestcraft, however, had now reached its height, and the reformation became inevitable. CHAPTER III. THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY SINCE THE REFORMATION. We have shown how the Christian ministry became perverted soon after the times of the apostles, by individuals claiming an ecclesiastical authority inconsistent with the genius and teaching of the gospel. We have shown how, by gradual encroachments on the rights of the people, religious liberty became almost extinct, and an order of men, claiming to succeed to the privileges and immunities of the ancient Jewish priesthood, finally monopolized to themselves the absolute right of being the spiritual teachers of mankind, under the title of T7ie Holy Catholic Church, and maintaining that, by virtue of their priestly functions, they had power to perpetuate their institution by successive ordinations among themselves to the end of time. We have shown that one of the greatest corruptions of Christianityconsisted in the claims of this self-constituted priesthood to a maintenance at the expense of the church. In consequence of the glaring departures of the clergy, and the popes and cardinals of Rome, from the simplicity and purity of the Christian religion, all devout persons had become so disgusted with the church, that a reformation was regarded as necessary, to rescue the name of Christianity from universal reproach. The reforma...« less