eparation
only a fresh means to unite him to his great High Priest for a
self-sacrificial life in Him. He is to be no frowning sectary, saying,
"I am holier than thou." He is to be simply a Christian, to whom,
whatever the world may say, or the world-element in the Church, Christ
the crucified is Lord indeed.

Following these appeals, in a connexion which we can trace, the thought
passes (ver. 17) to the Christian Ministry. "Outside the gate" of the
old order, the disciple finds himself at once not an isolated unit but
included in _a new order_. He is one of a spiritual community, which has
of course its system, for it has to cohere and to operate. It has amidst
it its "leaders," its [Greek: hegoumenoi], its pastoral guides and
watchmen, a recognized institution, which always as such (though always
the more as it is more true to its ideal) claims the obedience, the
loyalty, the subordination, of the multitude who are not "leaders."
These "leaders" are set before us as bearing a Divine commission, for we
read that they "must _give account_." So qualified, not as assertors of
themselves but as servants and agents of God, they watch for souls, with
a vigilance loving and tender, asking for response.

Such an ideal of the Christian Ministry is as remote as possible from
that of a sacerdotal caste, or indeed of anything that has to do with a
harsh and perfunctory officialism. Its position is totally different
from that of an agency of mediation between man and God, between the
Church and her Lord. We have one passing note of this in the fact,
present in other Epistles as in this, that the Ministry is addressed and
greeted through the Church rather than the Church through the Ministry.
See below, ver. 24: "Salute your leaders." If we may put it so, the
Christian clergy are so far from being the sole deliverers of the
apostolic writings to the people that the people rather have to deliver
such messages to the clergy.

Yet on the other hand this passage is one of the many which set the
Christian Ministry before us as a vital factor in the life of the
Church, an institution which has its life from above, not from the will
of the community but from the gift of God. In their anxiety to avoid
distortions and exaggerations of the ministerial idea many Christians
have failed to give adequate place in thought to its essentially Divine
origin and commission. A passage like this should correct such a
reaction. There is in the Church,