LECTURE XII.

In the prelections I have already given on the ecclesiastical history, I have traced the progress of the hierarchy as far up as the patriarchate, and shown by what steps that kind of oligarchy arose in the church. The only article that now remains to be considered, and which completes the edifice of spiritual despotism, is the papacy. Ye all know the common plea, on which the retainers to Rome have, not indeed from the beginning, but for many ages past, founded the right of papal dominion; namely, first, the prerogatives they affirm to have been given by our Lord to the apostle Peter; and secondly, the succession of their bishops to that apostle, and consequently to those prerogatives. Every judicious and impartial inquirer must quickly discover, that both the premises, by which their conclusion is supported, are totally without foundation. Neither had Peter the prerogatives which they pretend he had, nor have their bishops the shadow of a title to denominate themselves his successors.

I acknowledged, in a former lecture, that Peter appears to have been honoured by his Master to be the president of the sacred college of his apostles, and the first in announcing the doctrine of the gospel both to the Jews and to the Gentiles. I have also shown, that this is the highest prerogative of which there is any vestige in the writings of the New Testament, and that there was not any particular species of power which was given to him, that was not also, by their common Lord, communicated to the rest. They are all represented as alike foundations of this new Jerusalem, which, in their Master's name, and as his spiritual kingdom, was to be reared. They all receive from him the same commission for the conversion and instruction of all nations. They are all encouraged by the same promises and the same privileges. Nay, as a convincing proof that Peter, far from claiming a superiority over the other apostles, did, on the contrary, subject himself to their commands,

we see (Acts viii. 14.) that "when the apostles which were at "Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, "they sent unto them Peter and John." Nor did Peter, any more than John, disdain to serve in the capacity of legates from that sacred body. Now whether is greater, the sender or the sent? Canonists, and other Romish writers, affect much to compare the Pope and his cardinals, to Peter and his fellow-apostles. Yet, I suppose, they will acknowledge, it would look very oddly in the Pope, and be in fact incompatible with papal dignity, to be sent ambassador from the conclave, though nothing be more common, in the members of that college, than to receive legatine commissions from him. But passing this; whatever were the prerogatives of Peter, they were manifestly personal, not official, in reward of the confession which he was the first to make, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God; a confession which may justly be denominated the foundation of the whole Christian edifice. Besides, the apostleship itself, as I showed at some length, was an office in its nature temporary, extraordinary, and incapable of succession. In point of right, therefore, no peculiar privilege can be claimed by any church as derived from this apostle.

And if from the question of right we come to the matter of fact, the special relation of the see of Rome to this eminent ambassador of Christ, the partizans of papal ambition have never been able to support their affirmations by any thing that deserves the name of evidence. It has been questioned whether Peter ever was at Rome. The only ground on which the Papist builds his assertion, that he was in that city, and founded the church in it, is tradition; and such a tradition as must appear very suspicious to reasonable Christians, being accompanied with a number of legendary stories, which are totally unworthy of regard.

In opposition to such traditionary legends, it has been urged, that mention is no where made in scripture that this apostle was ever there; notwithstanding that there were so many favourable occasions of taking notice of it, if it had been fact, that one is at a loss to conceive how it could have been avoided. hint is there of such a thing in the Acts of the Apostles, though a great part of that book is employed in recording the labours

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of this apostle for the advancement of the gospel, and mention is made of different places, Jerusalem, Samaria, Lydda, Joppa, and Cæsarea, where he exerted himself in this service. In the first of these, he assisted at the consultation which the apostles, elders, and brethren, held in regard to circumcision, and the ceremonies of the law; though this happened a good deal later than the time when the Romanists suppose his charge at Rome to have commenced. When Paul afterwards came himself to Rome, mention is made of the Christians he found there, but not a syllable that Peter either then was, or had been formerly among them. Paul, in his long epistle to the Romans, or the church of Christ at Rome, does not once mention the person whom these men pretend to have been their bishop. This silence is the more remarkable, that, towards the close of the epistle, he seems solicitous not to omit taking particular notice of every one by name, who, residing there, could be denominated, in any respect, a fellow-labourer in the common cause. Nay more, in the beginning of that epistle, he expresses the earnest desire he had to visit them, that he might impart to them some spiritual gifts, that they might be established. This, if we consider the purpose for which Peter and John were sent by the apostles to the Samaritans, converted by Philip, as recorded in the eighth chapter of the Acts, will appear at least a strong presumption that no apostle had been yet at Rome. Paul afterwards wrote from Rome, where he was twice a prisoner, to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, to the Colossians, to Philemon, to Timothy, without taking notice of Peter in any of the six letters, or sending any salutations from him, notwithstanding the attention, in this respect, he pays to others. When he said to Timothy, "At my first answer," to wit, be fore the emperor at Rome, "no man stood with me, but all "men forsook me," there would surely have been an exception in favour of Peter, if any such person had been there. Would he have said, in writing to the Colossians from the same place, that Tychicus, Onesimus, Aristarchus, Marcus, and Justus, were his only fellow-labourers to the kingdom of God, who had been a comfort to him, if Peter had been in Rome? Or lastly, when he told his beloved son Timothy, that the time of his departure was at hand, and sent him salutations from all the

brethren, naming Eubulus, Pudens, Linus, and Claudia, would he have omitted Peter, if, agreeably to that very tradition formerly alluded to, he had been not only in that capital at the time, but a fellow-prisoner in the same jail?

The only pretence of scriptural evidence, advanced by the Romanists, is indeed a very poor one, not to call it ridiculous. Peter, say they, in his first epistle, presents the salutations of the church at Babylon, by which they would have it, that he must certainly have meant Rome. If they think he spoke prophetically, they do not, by this interpretation, pay a great compliment to the throne of the hierarchy. The propriety of the application, in this view, we do not mean to controvert. But our adversaries, on this question, must be sensible, that their explanation is merely conjectural. And is not the conjecture, which others make, at least as plausible, that by Babylon is here meant Jerusalem, which the apostle so denominates, on account of its apostacy, by the rejection and murder of the Messiah, and on account of its impending fate, so similar to that denounced against Babylon? But why, say others, should we, without necessity, recur to a figurative sense, when the words are capable of being literally interpreted? To do so, would seem the more unreasonable, in this case, as the epistle is written in a simple, and not an allegorical, style. Why must the apostle be supposed not to mean the ancient Babylon in Chaldea, which was still in being, and was then, I may say, the head-quarters of the Jews in the East; a place famous for the residence of many of their most celebrated doctors, and for giving birth to some of their most learned performances on the law? That the apostle of the circumcision should go to preach the gospel in Babylon, the capital of the Jews in dispersion, will be thought to have a degree of probability, which it would require positive evidence to surmount. Yet I have heard nothing, on the opposite side, but supposition, founded on vague and obscure traditions. But, setting aside the imperial seat of the Chaldeans, there was, at that time, a Babylon in Egypt, a city of considerable note. What should make it be thought improbable, that this epistle was written there? That either of these was the <fact, appears to me beyond comparison more likely, than that the apostle should date a plain letter in so enigmatical a man

ner, as could not fail either to mislead his readers, or to puzzle them. A tolerable reason for this conduct I have never heard. For had there been any danger to the writer from what was contained in the letter, it would have led him rather to suppress his own name, than to disguise the place where it was written, a thing of no imaginable consequence. But the openness with which he introduces his name and addition at the head of the epistle, ought, in my opinion, to remove every suspicion of that kind. The case is very different in the interpretation of prophetic writing, such as the Apocalypse, in which the style is purposely symbolical and obscure. Thus we are fully warranted to say, that there is no notice taken in scripture, notwithstanding the numerous occasions there were of doing it, that Peter ever was in Rome. I add, that there is not the least notice of such a thing to be found in the writings of any of the apostolic fathers, who had been in the former part of their lives contemporaries of the apostles, and had survived them, and consequently, of all the ecclesiastical writers, had the best opportunity of knowing. Clement of Rome, it is true, mentions Peter's martyrdom as a known fact, without specifying the place. It had, besides, been foretold by our Lord. I am inclined to think that it must have been at Rome, both because it is agreeable to the unanimous voice of antiquity, and because the sufferings of so great an apostle could not fail to be a matter of such notoriety in the church, as to preclude the possibility of an imposition in regard to the place. But with this opinion I see no way of reconciling the silence of scripture, but by saying that Peter's journey to Rome was posterior, not only to the period with which the history of the Acts concludes, but to the writing of Paul's epistles. In this case it is manifest, that he could not have been the founder, nor even one of the earliest instructors, of the Roman church. It is astonishing, that at the very time, as is pretended, of the institution of the papal supremacy, and of the instalment of the first hierarch, from whom all the rest in succession derive their authority, an authority by which the whole church, to the end of the world, was to be governed, at the time when among Christians it ought to have been most conspicuous, and to have attracted the greatest attention, so profound a silence, in regard to it, is observed on