538 THE CONSTRUCTION OF SHEEPFOLDS

and so having power to absolve from sin:-with all the other endless and miserable falsehoods of the Papal hierarchy; falsehoods for which, that there might be no shadow of excuse, it has been ordained by the Holy Spirit that no Christian minister shall once call himself a Priest from one end of the New Testament to the other, except together with his flock; and so far from the idea of any peculiar sanctification, belonging to the Clergy, ever entering the Apostles’ minds, we actually find St. Paul defending himself against the possible imputation of inferiority: “If any man trust to himself that he is Christ’s, let him of himself think this again, that, as he is Christ’s, even so are we Christ’s” (2 Cor. x. 7). As for the unhappy retention of the term Priest in our English Prayer-book, so long as it was understood to mean nothing but an upper order of Church officer, licensed to tell the congregation from the reading-desk, what (for the rest) they might, one would think, have known without being told,-that “God pardoneth all them that truly repent,”-there was little harm in it; but, now that this order of Clergy begins to presume upon a title which, if it mean anything at all, is simply short for Presbyter, and has no more to do with the word Hiereus than with the word Levite, it is time that some order should be taken both with the book and the Clergy.¹ For instance, in that dangerous compound of halting poetry with hollow Divinity, called the Lyra Apostolica,² we find much versification on the sin of Korah and his company: with suggested parallel between the Christian and Levitical Churches, and threatening that there are “Judgment Fires, For high-voiced Korahs in their day.” There are indeed such fires. But when Moses said, “a

¹ [Compare Fors Clavigera, Letter 49, where Ruskin refers to this passage and denounces the “equivocation” between Priest and Presbyter, and Letters on the Lord’s Prayer and the Church (vol. i. § 237 of On the Old Road (1899), reprinted in a later volume.]

² [Lyra Apostolica; a volume of Poems (by J. W. Bowden, R. H. Froude, J. Keble, J. H. Newman, R. I. Wilberforce, and I. Williams), subscribed a, b, g, d, r, z respectively, 1836. The piece here referred to is No. cli., “Korah, Dathan, and Abiram,” by Keble (g).]

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