Excerpt from The Government of the Church in the First Century: An Essay on the Beginnings of the Christian MinistryThe Catholic Church bases her authority to teach and govern on the apostolic succession of her hierarchy. Christ founded a Church, and gave the apostles whom he placed over it certain ecclesiastical powers to be transmitted by them to their successors to the end of time. The ecclesiastical superiors of to-day claim' to teach and rule, not by election or delegation of the faithful, but by a kind of spiritual descent instituted by Christ. In this age of political Liberalism and popular Sovereignty, it is not surprising to find the Church assailed for her oligarchical constitution. Advanced Protestants would have the people supreme in the Church as in the State while the. Modern rationalists would have us believe that our hierarchical jurisdiction is the effect of evolution and the growth of centuries, and that it was unknown and unheard of in the early Church. It is with a View to answering these difficulties that I propose to inquire into the govern ment of the primitive Church, and to Show that its constitution was, in principle, the same in the first century as it is in the twentieth.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.