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Updated: May 20, 2025
And now all our praises shall make up one melody, and all our churches one church; and all ourselves but one body; for we shall be one in Christ, even as He and the Father are one. It is a question with some whether we shall know each other in heaven or no. Surely there shall no knowledge cease which we now have, but only that which implieth imperfection! And what imperfection can this imply?
But the righteousness under consideration, with which the man, in that of John, is made righteous, is a perfect righteousness; not only with respect to the nature of it, as a penny is as perfect silver as a shilling; nor yet with respect to a comparative degree, for so a shilling arriveth more toward the perfection of the number twenty, than doth a twopenny or a threepenny piece; but it is a righteousness so perfect, that nothing can be added to, nor can any thing be taken from it; for so implieth the words of the text, he is righteous as Christ is righteous; yea, thus righteous before, and in order to his doing of righteousness.
Now that Luke, in this place, useth the word in the proper sense, and not in the synecdochical, Gerhard proveth from the words which he subjoineth, to signify the ordaining of those elders by the laying on of hands; for he saith that they prayed, and fasted, and commended them to the Lord, in which words he implieth the laying on of hands upon them, as may be learned from Acts vi. 6, “When they had prayed, they laid their hands on them;” Acts xiii. 3, “When they had fasted, and prayed, and laid their hands on them;” so Acts viii. 15, 17, prayer and laying on of hands went together.
By so doing a man doth authorise others to distrust him; for it can be no wrong to distrust him who doth not pretend to be a credible person, or that his saying alone may safely be taken: who, by suspecting that others are not satisfied with his simple assertion, implieth a reason known to himself for it.
And Hooker hath told us, that albeit the successors of the apostles had but only for a time such power as by prayer and imposition of hands to bestow the Holy Ghost, yet confirmation hath continued hitherto for very special benefits; and that the fathers impute everywhere unto it “that gift or grace of the Holy Ghost, not which maketh us first Christian men, but when we are made such, assisteth us in all virtue, armeth us against tentation and sin.” Moreover, whilst he is a-showing why this ceremony of confirmation was separated from baptism, having been long joined with it, one of his reasons which he giveth for the separation is, that sometimes the parties who received baptism were infants, at which age they might well be admitted to live in the family, but to fight in the army of God, to bring forth the fruits, and to do the works of the Holy Ghost, their time of hability was not yet come; which implieth, that by the confirmation men receive this hability, else there is no sense in that which he saith.
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