, even if we were to admit that they could at
any time constitute its voice legally. But, for my present purpose, we
may take for granted that Mr. Newman's system as to the pre-eminence of
the sacraments, and the necessity of apostolical succession to give them
their efficacy, was the doctrine of the early church; then I say that
this system is so different from that of the New Testament, that to
invest the two with equal authority is not to make the church system
divine, but to make the scriptural system human; or, at the best,
perishable and temporary, like the ceremonial law of Moses. Either the
church system must be supposed to have superseded the scriptural
system[6], and its unknown authors are the real apostles of our present
faith, in which case, we do not see why it should not be superseded in
its turn, and why the perfect manifestation of Christianity should not
be found in the Koran, or in any still later system; or else neither of
the two systems can be divine, but the one is merely the human
production of the first century, the other that of the second and third.
If this be so, it is clearly open to all succeeding centuries to adopt
whichever of the two they choose, or neither.

[Footnote 6: This, it is well known, has been most ably maintained by
Rothe, (_Artfange der Christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung_,
Wittenberg, 1837,) with respect to the origin of episcopacy. He contends
that it was instituted by the surviving apostles after the destruction
of Jerusalem, as an intentional change from the earlier constitution of
the church, in order to enable it to meet the peculiar difficulties and
dangers of the times. To this belongs the question of the meaning of the
expression, [Greek: oi tais deuterais ton Apostolon diataxesi
parakolouthaekotes], in the famous Fragments of Irenaeus, published by
Pfaff, from a manuscript in the library of Turin, and to be found in the
Venice edition of Irenaeus, 1734, vol. ii. _Fragmentorum_, p. 10. But
then Rothe would admit that if the apostles altered what they themselves
had appointed, it would follow that neither their earlier nor their
later institutions were intended to be for all times and all places, but
were simply adapted to a particular state of circumstances, and were
alterable when that state was altered: in short, whatever institutions
the apostles changed were shown to be essentially changeable; otherwise
their early institution was defective, which cannot be