nted individuals who were called Flamens, and Mr.
McDonald,[3] in his account of the Blantyre negroes, informs us that
during the temporary absence of a chief, it devolved upon his wife to
take his place at the sacrificial altar. Numberless instances are
supplied in such works as Tylor's, Lubbock's, and Spencer's
_Ecclesiastical Institutions_, which go to show this primatial or
pontifical authority resident in the chief of the State, and the
transference of its offices to subordinate people, who gradually and
naturally became an official body or caste called priests or elders, as
representatives of heads of families, or of the tribe or State.[4] At
any rate, however much interested people may be inclined to dispute the
lowly origin of religion and worship, the indisputable fact remains
that such worship and sacrifice goes on among aboriginal peoples at
this very hour, and there is not one shred of evidence, beyond a
mistaken prejudice, which goes to show that our religion had any other
origin than that.

We may now enter on the further inquiry whether Christianity, meaning
thereby the religion personally professed and practised by Jesus of
Nazara, was a sacerdotal or sacrificial system in the sense already
explained. Such an inquiry necessarily resolves itself into this
further one, namely, whether there is any reliable evidence that the
founder of the Christian religion was himself a priest, taught a
sacerdotal doctrine, or exercised any sacerdotal functions.

Though he died a comparatively young man, if we may believe the gospel
narrative, which makes him to have lived either to thirty-one or
thirty-three years, though Irenaeus emphatically asserts that he lived
to fifty years, we may most assuredly proclaim him a priest in the
sense of elder, or leader of men. One whom schools of thought,
represented by men so opposed as Mill, Renan, Matthew Arnold, Spinoza,
Goethe, Napoleon and Rousseau, conspired to honour must have been
indeed a "king of men". But this is not what is meant by the question.
By priest we mean here what the ecclesiastic means, namely, one who is
set apart by the act of God, signified by some external rite or
ceremony, whereby power is conferred to perform certain definite
functions impossible to the ordinary man. He alone, in virtue of his
consecration, can mediate between man and the Deity, can propitiate him
for the sins of men, can forgive those sins, and mechanically
communicate holiness