e God's will, and foretell His purposes.
They ranked after the apostles in virtue of their prophetic gift[23].
But even they were to be restrained by the exigencies of church order.
'The spirits of the prophets are subject unto the prophets; for God is
not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the
saints.' Next to the prophets, St. Paul specifies the 'evangelists.'
They were no doubt, as their name implies, officers engaged with the
apostles in the general work of spreading the gospel, that is of
founding and organizing churches. Timothy, who is exhorted to 'do the
work of an evangelist[24],' would probably have ranked amongst them;
and if so, Titus and other similar companions and delegates of
apostles. At any rate, by whatever name they were called, such men
belonged to {167} the specially 'gifted' class, if we may judge by the
case of Timothy. But he, though marked out by prophecy, received his
'gift,' as a church officer, with the laying on of the hands of a whole
presbytery, while the hands of the apostle himself were the divine
instruments for imparting the gift to him[25]. The 'pastors and
teachers'--one class of men and not two--are, we may say certainly,
identical with the presbyters or 'bishops' as they were called by St.
Paul at Ephesus; and these again were men of spiritual endowment, but
also local church officers who had received a definite apostolic
appointment[26], and there is no reason to doubt by laying on of hands.
Thus the Church, as St. Paul conceives it, is a body differentiated by
varieties of spiritual endowments imparted to definite officers, for
the fulfilment of functions necessary to the life and development of
the whole body. Thus the outward unity of the {168} society at any
particular moment, and the necessary connexion of each individual
Christian with it, is secured both by the existence of social
sacraments or means of grace, and by the existence of a ministry
spiritually endowed and commissioned, to whom individual Christians
owed allegiance, and who ranked as the more honourable limbs of that
body to which they must belong if they would belong to Christ.

vi.

St. Paul is not here thinking of the unity of the Church otherwise than
at a particular moment. But if one turns one's attention to its
continuous unity down the ages, again it must be recognized that one
main link of unity has been in fact the apostolic succession of the
ministry; that is the pe