Selected quad for the lemma: truth_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
truth_n	apostle_n	church_n	day_n	1,993	5	4.2614	4	false

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ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A46649	A sermon preached at the consecration of the Honourable Dr. Henry Compton, Lord Bishop of Oxford, in Lambeth-Chappel, on Sunday, December 6, 1674 by William Jane ...	Jane, William, 1645-1707.	1675 (1675)	Wing J455; ESTC R21231	23,378	49

A SERMON Preached at the CONSECRATION Of the HONOURABLE Dr. HENRY COMPTON Lord Bishop of OXFORD IN LAMBETH-CHAPPEL On Sunday December 6. 1674. By WILLIAM JANE B.D. Student of Christ-Church and Chaplain to his Lordship LONDON Printed by W. Godbid and are to be sold by R. Littlebury at the Kings-Arms in Little-Britain 1675. To the Right Reverend Father in God HENRY LORD BISHOP of OXFORD My Lord ALthough I am too conscious of the manifold defects of this poor Discourse to lay any claim to your Lordships acceptance as the encouragement of its Publication yet I have had such great experience of your Lordships favour as to conceive some hopes that it may find the same shelter with its Author under your Lordships patronage and protection When I first received your Lordships command which engaged me upon this duty I esteemed it a great Honour than my own ambition could ever have aspired to It was happiness enough for me to bear any part how inconsiderable soever in that days Solemnity which in the judgement of all who have a real kindness for the Church was so signal an argument of Gods Care and Providence over it But since by my intire resignation of this weak performance as I was in duty bound to your Lordships Judgement it is no longer at my own disposal and that which I thought too mean to attend your Lordships CONSECRATION has been thought fit to live with the remembrance of it I have this further favour to request for it that I may be allowed to thrust it forth into the world under your Lordships Name I shall only add my unfeigned desires to the God of Heaven that as he has been pleased in this declining Age to raise up to his People such an able instrument of his Glory so he would go on to give success to your Lordships designs answerable to the expectation of your Country and the necessities of his Church Which shall ever be the daily Prayer of My Lord Your Lordships Most humbly devoted Chaplain WILLIAM JANE ACTS 20.28 Take heed therefore unto your selves and to all the flock over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers to feed the Church of God which he hath purchased with his own blood WE read in the 17th vers of this chap. that St. Paul sent from Miletas to Ephesus and called 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the Elders or Presbyters of the Church In this vers which contains a considerable part of his Visitation Sermon he tells them 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the Holy Ghost hath made you Bishops This seeming confusion of Names in this and other places of Scripture indiscriminately applied to the Pastors and Officers of the Church was the pretence of Aerius though Pride and Ambition were the reason to inferr a like communion in the dignity of Bishop and Presbyter and a total parity in their Office And though this is surely a very slender argument to any considering men to violate the unity of Christians and to cashier that form of Government which ad been received universally in the Church from the Apostles days unto their own upon a pretence that Antichrist begun betimes yet neither is it so slight and despicable but that it has exercised the greatest Wits in all Ages even those in which it cannot be pretended that Truth was twisted with design in endeavouring a probable solution of it For to omit the interpretation of some that such as were Presbyters when St. Paul sent for them he here consecrates Bishops by telling them that the Holy Ghost had made them so as being a groundless and arbitrary conjecture if we consult those Opinions which carry the greatest vogue and reputation in the World we shall scarce find one in which two have consented when we have excluded those from the number who do not pretend to deliver their own sense but professedly transcribe from others The immediate question wherein our Authors are divided is Whether Bishop and Presbyter were two distinct Orders at the time of the writing the Books of the New Testament or in a small space of time after the one were superadded to the other Those who defend the latter are further subdivided as far as the subject will admit For we are told on the one hand that the names of Bishop and Presbyter were once promiscuously given to the inferiour Order of the Clergy which were afterwards used with distinction when for the future preventing of Schism Episcopacy was introduced upon it● which seems to be the Judgment of St. Hierome And with greater probability on the other that they were indifferent appellations of the higher Order of Church Officers to whom the name of Bishop became then appropriate when upon the increase of their charge by the multitude of their Proselites inferiour Presbyters were universally admitted in some measure to ease them of the burthen An opinion with infinite accuracy and variety of learning first cleared and defended by the Reverend Dr. Hammond They who have pitcht upon the defence of the former part of the main Question That both Orders were Coaeval and distinguished from one another by their Author at the Primitive institution of them are yet more divided in their explications For some tell us which Dr. Hammond admits for probable that the world Presbyter is the Scripture appellative of the inferiour Order of the Clergy whereas both were common to the Bishop in as much as both Offices designed by them were eminently vested in him St. Chrysostom on the contrary thinks it no inconvenience at all that the distinction of Offices should remain inviolate notwithstanding the confusion of names Whereas a third Opinion sufficiently distinguished from the other two asserts that Bishop and Presbyter were common denominations of the second Order of Priest-hood those whom we now stile Bishops being at that time called Apostles A Comment first suggested by Theodoret and since maintained by the Judicious Hooker in the days of our Forefathers and with a little variation by the learned Thorndike in our own I have not produced these Opinions to compare them with one another or to examin the several claims which each of them pretends to truth but only considering them jointly to make these few remarques upon them all And first our Assertors of the Presbyterian Hierarchy may do well to consider whose Cause it is which is with so great eagerness maintained by them No the Cause of God or of his Church but of a noted Heretick infamous upon the records of Epithanius St. Austin Philastrius and other Fathers of the Church for the point in question and consequently branded for the same by the Church it self whose Judgments those Fathers expressly testifie He who was notorious in his own time for the great disturber of the word is now set up by our pretended Disciplinarians for the great Champion of Truth Nor do they so much help themselves by saying that Arrianism was Aerius his Heresie and indeed Epiphanius calls him an Arrian altogether

and to trace the interest of the Holy Ghost in constituting Church Governors from the first Foundation of Christianity to this day to find him not only once fitting Bezaleel and Aholiab with Skill and Wisdom for the Building a material Tabernacle But in every Age empowering and qualifying serviceable Persons for the Strength and Beauty of his Church This was the Commission which the great Bishop of our Souls produced for himself at his entrance upon his Pastoral Charge The Spirit of the Lord is upon me and hath anointed me to Preach the Gospel Luke 4.18 Nor was this merely personal to our Saviour as Baronius would have it who confines that Text to the first year of our Saviours Preaching but when he comes to Ordain a Succession we shall find this to be the Rite and Solemnity of the Consecration As my Father sent me so send I you Where if the similitude will not infer the Gift of the Holy Ghost the next words will express it And he breathed on them and said receive ye the Holy Ghost John 20.21 And after that he bids them tarry at Jerusalem till they were endued with power from above Luke 24.49 which is Interpreted Acts I. endued with the Holy Ghost The Holy Ghost must first say separate before Saul and Barnabas undertake the Charge Acts 13.2 Nor could the laying on of hands have made Timothy a Bishop unless Prophecy had gone before And lest these should seem choice and peculiar instances of an extraordinary deputation of some persons to whom God was pleased to vouchsafe extraordinary Revelations of himself and we know those who have hence inferred that Timothy and Titus were Evangelists not fixed and standing Officers of the Church as Walo Messalinus and others We have the full attestation of Clemens Romanus in his Epistle to the Corinthians of the Apostles practice of Ordaining Bishops out of those whom they had Converted 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 after they had first tryed and approved them by the Revelation of the Holy Ghost whom Clemens Alexandrinus also calls 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 such as the Holy Spirit had designed and signified to them Nay so clear is this truth of the Spirits superintendency in these great Solemnities through the ancient Monuments of the Church that Cardinal Baronius however a stiff Asserter of the Popes Incroachments both upon the right of Bishops and the Holy Ghosts prerogative in their delegation yet is forced by the evidence of truth to confess that as Christ breathed the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles in like manner have they transferred the same upon all their Successors to this day in as much as they must undoubtedly partake of the Spirit of Christ who minister in Christs stead in the Sacred Offices of his Church It is an opinion fastned upon Durandus that when God made the World he threw it out of his Hands and left all things in it ever since to act of themselves from those several principles of Life and Motion which he distributed among them at the Creation A like conceit have some endeavoured to introduce into the Church that the world Spirit in Holy Scripture is to be confined to that plentiful effusion of it upon the Apostles on the day of Pentecost those miraculous Gifts and Graces which in the infancy of Christianity accompanied the Preaching of the Gospel Which Commission being personal to the Apostles by consequence expired withy them so that their Successors in the work of the Ministry for any concern the Holy Ghost has in them are left to shift for themselves or at most to subsist upon that stock of reputation which was at first gained in the World by the mighty Signs and Wonders of their inspired and gifted Predecessors But as the Schools from the common Principles of Reason have solidly maintained against the former that so precarious and dependent is the Creature as such both in its being and operation that should God subtract his influence and concurse whereby every moment he makes it and works with it all its operations are immediately suspended the whole Creation falls asunder and molders into its primitive Confusion so a like assertion if the Scripture were silent would common sense and experience suggest to us for a Confutation of the latter For so powerful are the batteries that are daily made by the Lusts of Men and the Malice of the Devil and so impotent and unarmed a thing is the Church of God considered in it self to withstand the assaults of either that not only the gates of Hell but the powers of the World would long ago have finally prevailed against it but that it was ever Founded upon the Rock of Ages and Supported by the Hand of Heaven The daily Sacrifice had long since ceased and the abomination of desolation been standing in the Holy Place And Christs Mystical Body had not so long survived his Natural did not the same Spirit which was at first breathed into it go on continually to actuate and enliven it Surely therefore now as well as then there is a heavenly Treasure in earthen Vessels and the continuance of the Ministration is from God and not from us He is God and not Man and therefore the Sons of Jacob are not consumed Bishops are the Stars in Christ's own right Hand and from this arises the utter impossibility for the Tayl of the Dragon to sweep them away for the force of Men to pluck them thence or for the powers of Darkness to extinguish them The Apostles then did not carry their Commissions with them to the other World which they knew were left them for a perpetuity of succession in this both for them and their Heirs for ever 'T was he told his Disciples who was never yet taxed with being worse than his word Behold I am with you to the end of the World He could not mean it doubtless of their persons who did not long survive him nor can the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 notwithstanding some bold Criticisms upon the words refer to any other period of time than that wherein the Fabrick of the World shall be dissolved when Time it self shall be no more He is still therefore with their Successors as he was with them after his Ascension Vicariâ spiritûs presentiâ as Tertullian speaks though not in the various distributions and admirable virtue of their 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the extent of their Jurisdiction and extraordinary measure of their revelations yet in the effectual Administration of all those Ordinances which were to reside for ever in his Church in order to the salvation of the World Such are the Preaching of the Word Administration of the Sacraments Ordaining Ministers Ordering Church-discipline inflicting Censures and the power of the Keys All which as long as they are necessary for the edifying of the Body of Christ so long is the presence of the Holy Ghost necessary to authorize persons to dispence them Well therefore may we presume that our Veni Creator