It was evident to me that this very wide phrase was adapted and intended to comprehend the "public authorities" of all the Reformed Churches, and could never have been selected by one who wished to narrow the idea of a legitimate minister to Episcopalian Orders; besides that we know Lutheran and Calvinistic ministers to have been actually admitted in the early times of the Reformed English Church, by the force of that very Article.

To this, the only genuine Protestant view of a Church, I gave my most cordial adherence: but when I turned to the Ordination Service, I found the Bishop there, by his authoritative voice, absolutely to bestow on the candidate for Priesthood the power to forgive or retain sins!--"Receive ye the Holy Ghost! Whose sins ye forgive, they are forgiven: whose sins ye retain, they are retained." If the Bishop really had this power, he of course had it only _as_ Bishop, that is, by his consecration; thus it was formally transmitted.

To allow this, vested in all the Romish bishops a spiritual power of the highest order, and denied the legitimate priesthood in nearly all the Continental Protestant Churches--a doctrine irreconcilable with the article just referred to and intrinsically to me incredible.

That an unspiritual--and it may be, a wicked--man, who can have no pure insight into devout and penitent hearts, and no communion with the Source of holy discernment, could never receive by an outward form the divine power to forgive or retain sins, or the power of bestowing this power, was to me then, as now, as clear and certain as any possible first axiom.

Yet if the Bishop had not this power, how profane was the pretension! Thus again I came into rude collision with English Prelacy.
The year after taking my degree, I made myself fully master of Paley's acute and original treatise, the "Horae Paulinae," and realized the whole life of Paul as never before.