The Dudleian Lecture.

The annual Dudleian Lecture was given in the Fogg Lecture Room last night by Rev. Professor Arthur C. McGiffert, D.D., of New York, on the Validity of non-Episcopal Orders, The lecture was an admirably clear exposition of a subject of great theological and didactic interest.

Support of the validity of non-Episcopal orders does not involve an attack against episcopal tenets; it involves a refutation only of the theories of the "high churchmen," whose claims have been combated quite as sturdily by Episcopalians as by members of dissenting sects. With this statement as his introduction, Dr. McGiffert undertook to establish the orthodoxy of the Odissenting sects by historical consideration of the doctrines and organization of the early church.

The apostle Paul laid down the first principles of Christian belief and organization. He believed each Christian to be the dwelling place of Christ's spirit, and, according to his somewhat mystical conception, the church is the body of Christ, because it is the unity into which are bound all Christian individuals. At no time, however, did he teach the especial sancity of the church as compared with the individual, nor believe that Christ revealed himself more truly through its collective organism than through men as units.

Even in the very earliest years of the church, there grew up inevitably certain distinctions between its members. Some were called to the highest positions--to apostleship, to prophecy, to teaching--and to others were given the smaller offices in the organism. But all the authority which came to pertain to church officers was but the authority of missionaries and evangelists over their people, and in no sense the diocesan authority of regularly appointed bishops. Authority was given for and was conditional upon superior spirituality alone, and nowhere is there evidence of a clerical hierarchy understood as established by the will of Christ.

But as the years went on, there arose the need of more compact church organism; for the early spiritual ardor was growing less, and strong authority was necessary to bind together the Christian church. The superintendence of the church's alms, the regulation of the confused church service, the need for some authoritative tribunal to exercise spiritual jurisdiction--all called imperatively for a more firmly established system. In response to these needs of the time, the clerical order did become more firmly established, and in the writings of Clement of Rome, within a generation after the death of Paul, is first prescribed the reverence and obedience due to officers of the church--not, now, as men of lofty spirituality alone--but as those clothed with the dignity of established rank. Men followed the clerical claim of apostolic succession and the corollary claims of especial spiritual grace; then came, too, the increased importance of the eucharist as a sacrament and the priest as the only one competent to administer it, and in these claims lay the seeds of clerical supremacy and sacerdotalism, that afterwards bore the full fruit of the exclusive "high church" ideas. The Roman church adopted these ideas and fully expressed them in the Council of Trent; in Germany and in England the reformers repudiated them, but in the seventeenth century they crept back again into a section of the Anglican church.

The whole doctrine of clerical supremacy, with all it entailed, was an outgrowth of the second and third centuries. The original church did not contain it, and was devoid of all claims of apostolic succession from Christ, of any rigid form of worship or organization, of clerical supremacy and of sacerdotalism.