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was _real_? Yet, if God be the only Judge, they must admit all or reject all until he speaks from heaven, and in the latter case, the
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EXCEPTION might as well have been left unmade. Or shall the church judge? And if so, what church? The church, from which Luther, and Calvin, and Cranmer, and Parker separated? She had her bishops ready to ordain all proper men, and if her judgment had been taken, there would have been no occasion for men to plead necessity. The church, from which came forth the Puritans and Methodists? She also had her bishops, and in her view no necessity could ever have existed. So with every church. None that are founded in Episcopacy could ever {728} admit a necessity without supplying it in the appointed way. And none that reject Episcopacy would care to inquire whether or not there was any such necessity. The church could, therefore, be no judge. She is, in every issue of this sort, a party, not an umpire; but, were she competent to judge, wherein is her decree less valid, when from Rome she excommunicates the Church of England, than when from London or New York she denies ministerial authority to Presbyterians and Universalists? Or is it the individual? There can be no doubt in this answer. It must be. No man can judge of a necessity except he who is placed in it. A little colony of Christians, cast away on some Pacific island, must decide for themselves, whether they will ordain a pastor for their flock or utterly dispense with Christian teaching. A man, whose creed differs from that of the church in which he lives, and yet who feels an inward call to preach the Gospel, as he understands it, must be the sole judge of the necessity of call, upon the one hand, which commands him to preach, and of conscience, on the other, which forbids him to subscribe the creed which is the unrelenting condition of his ordination by authority. Extend it to societies and communities of men, and the rule is the same. These societies become themselves the judges, whether or not, in their case, necessity exists, and no other can judge for them. The law is universal. If necessity be a justification, it must be necessity as judged of by the parties in necessity, and not as judged of by God, unknown to men, or by a church which either will supply the need or treat the whole matter as of little moment. There thus becomes no limit to necessities. They are moral as well as physical. They grow out of duties and responsibilities, as well as out of distances and years. Obedience to the voice of conscience is an indispensable condition of salvation, and no necessity is greater or more potent than the necessity of that obedience. When the Rev. Gardiner Spring was moved, as he believed it, by the Holy Ghost, to do the work of a minister in the church of God, there was not a regularly ordained bishop in the world who would have ordained him, while holding the doctrines he professed. In his case, without a violation of his conscience and the loss of his soul, bishops
human
COULD NOT BE HAD, and presbyters must have validly ordained. When Charles Spurgeon, rejoicing in the new-found light of the Gospel, burned to tell other men the good that God had done to him, the moral necessity was the same, a necessity which compelled him to disobey what he believed to be a command of God, or to receive orders from non-Episcopal hands. Is there any need of multiplying instances? Where is the imaginable limit to which validity must be acknowledged and beyond which it must cease? The High Churchman who starts with the admission, that in case of