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Updated: June 16, 2025
Polycarp, and the presbyters that are with him, to the Church of God which is at Philippi: mercy unto you and peace from God Almighty and the Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour, be multiplied.
The lower house having incurred the imputation of favouring presbytery, by this opposition to the bishops, entered in their books a declaration, acknowledging the order of bishops as superior to presbyters, and to be a divine apostolical institution.
And we do solemnly engage to render you all that respect, duty, and submission, which we believe do belong and are due to your high office, and which, we understand, were given by the presbyters to their bishop in the primitive Church, while in her native purity she was unconnected with and uncontrolled by any secular power."
Whereas this craves the abolition of prelacy, and the superiority of any office in the church above presbyters in Scotland, simply as it hath been a great and insupportable grievance and trouble to this nation, and contrary to the inclinations of the generality of the people ever since the reformation from Popery, without regarding the divine right of Presbytery, and the contrariety of Prelacy to scripture revelation.
The very names of the church officials of whom we read in the later canonical epistles are taken over from the municipal governments of the time. The presbyters, or elders, were old men selected by common consent from the members of the congregation as a sort of advisory council.
This day I hear at Court of the great plot which was lately discovered in Ireland, made among the Presbyters and others, designing to cry up the Covenant, and to secure Dublin Castle and other places; and they have debauched a good part of the army there, promising them ready money.
On the one hand money was collected for the Brethren; on the other, some person or persons unknown denounced them as Hussites, declared that their Bishops could not be distinguished from Presbyters, and contended that, being followers of Wycliffe, they must surely, like Wycliffe, be enemies of all episcopal government. Again Jablonsky came to the Brethren's rescue.
He taught the servants of God, and he wrote three hundred and sixty-five canonical and other books relating to the catholic faith. He founded as many churches, and consecrated the same number of bishops, strengthening them with the Holy Ghost. He ordained three thousand presbyters; and converted and baptized twelve thousand persons in the province of Connaught.
The same causes which at first had destroyed the equality of the presbyters introduced among the bishops a preeminence of rank, and from thence a superiority of jurisdiction.
Has not God ordained priests and presbyters through whom he dispenses his grace and administers his kingdom? Yet history witnesses that at times few men stand in God's way more than ecclesiastics. They are rarely the men that earliest hear a new message: God must usually tell it to some one else first.
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