It is the prerogative of God and of God alone to select the men who shall be invested with authority in His church, and the validity of this Divine call is evinced to others and rendered satisfactory to ourselves by the testimony of our own consciences,— the approbation of God’s people, and the concurrence of God’s earthly courts. Conscience, the Church, the Presbytery — these do not call into the ministry, but only declare God’s call — they are the forms in which the Divine designation is indicated — the scriptural evidences that he who possesses them is no intruder into the sacred ministry. Dr. Breckinridge shows that “ at every period and under every dispensation God has been pleased to reserve to Himself a great and a direct agency in designating those who should minister to His people in holy things.” Under the Levitical economy none could be invested with the Priesthood without the appointment of God, and under the Christian economy, the sanction of Christ the Lord is equally indispensable to any who would become stewards of His mysteries. “ The analogy between the methods by which persons were admitted into the visible church and called of God to the service of religious functions, as compared with each other, under the Old Testament Dispensation, and the methods adopted for the same ends, is compared with “each other, under the New Testament Dispensation,” is very strikingly exhibited on the fifteenth page of the sermon. If this great truth be admitted, and we do not see how it can be questioned, that it is God, and God alone, who can either call or qualify for the sacred office, the consequences which flow from it are absolutely incompatible with many prevailing principles and practices. The doctrine of the American Education Society, a doctrine, we are sorry to say, which has found favour in quarters where it ought to have been rebuked, that every young man of talents and attainments should devote himself to the ministry without some special reason to the contrary is exactly reversed, and the true doctrine is that no man, whether young or old, rich or poor, learned or unlearned, should presume to dispense the mysteries of Christ without, the strongest of all possible reasons for doing so — the imperative, invincible call of God. No one is to show cause why he ought not to be a minister, he is to show cause why he should be a minister — his call to the sacred Profession is not the absence of a call to any other pursuit — it is direct, immediate, powerful to this very department of labour. He is not here because he can be no where else, but he is no where else, because he must be here.
