phatically a "Prophet
of the Most High".

The word _hiereus_, or sacrificing priest, is never once applied to him
in the Gospels, and only in one epistle, that to the Hebrews, and there
its appearance is not unworthy of our notice. Christ is declared to be
a _hiereus_, or priest, _only after_ his removal from earth. It is
stated that it is an office which did not, which could not have
belonged to him while on earth--precisely the point we contend. But
how is it that in this epistle he comes to be designated as a priest at
all? It was probably due to the exigencies of controversy. The
epistle must be looked upon as a polemical pamphlet directed against
those Hebrews who refused to embrace the new reform and derided its
absence of priest, sacrifice and altar. Conscious that Jesus left no
priesthood behind him, that his teaching was anti-sacerdotal and
non-sacramental, there was nothing for the writer but to suggest that
the great prophet himself was the high priest, the _solitary member of
the caste_ in the new gospel, and that therewith men are to be
satisfied, because more than compensated thereby for the absence of the
altar and hierarchy of old. So we have here an unique instance of the
exception which proves the rule. Once and once only is the founder of
Christianity affirmed to be a priest, and then by an anonymous writer,
in a production which the whole Western Church for centuries refused to
acknowledge as inspired, and on examination it turns out that by the
very nature of the priesthood ascribed to him, such an institution is
no longer possible on earth; it is banished for ever into invisibility,
and can have no longer any representatives amongst men.

In like manner we find no instance of any attempt on the part of Jesus
to make his immediate followers priests. He called them "witnesses,"
bade them "preach" and "teach". If he told them to baptise, or to
break bread in memory of him, we shall soon see that, in the first
three centuries of Christian history, his words were emphatically not
taken to mean that no one but they, or such as they, could perform
these offices. That which men call "the apostolic succession," and to
which some of them apparently attach supreme importance, is nothing but
a chimera, positively unknown to Jesus or his apostles, and absolutely
unintelligible to the Christian Church for more than 200 years. The
most profound silence on the whole subject prevails during this period