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: CHAPTER III. THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE: RIVAL THEORIES IN MODERN TIMES. IN the Apostolic Age the Church was governed by Apostles. In the Post-Apostolic Age the Church was governed by bishops. Hence arises a question. Did the Church begin with governing itself in some other manner, as the first Apostles passed away, and then gradually develop this one of leaving almost all governmental authority in the hands of officers called bishops, and finally like its new plan so well as to adopt it universally ? Or did the first Apostles, foreseeing that they must soon pass away, devise this scheme of government and leave it as a legacy of wisdom to the Church? Or again, was it part of the original plan of our Lord Jesus Christ? Christian scholars are much divided in opinion about this matter. We will first look at the two chief theories now held by men of leadership, and then we will call the early witnesses, who lived while the change was going on, and see what they say about it. For the sake of having a convenient label by which to refer to these two theories, we will call them "The Third Century View" and "the Post- Reformation (non-Episcopal) View." 1. The Third Century View. In the middle of the third century the general opinion of the Church about its own history was that when our Lord constituted apostles for the governing of His Church, He meant that office to last till the end of time. It was supposed that when He said to the Eleven, " Lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world," that was a precise promise of the continuance of their body as a body of trustees to whom a certain ministry was committed, until His coming again, and that the only serious changes made in the Church's ministry in passing from the Apostolic Age were two,—(1) the change in method...