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    Damascus , because he had no other means of escaping the fury of the bigots there ; and he crossed the waters in a vessel , where if he went voluntarily , or as a prisoner , there is reason , quantum sat , to convince us a state cabin was not fitted up for his accommodation . On land he travelled on foot . Covered with dust , with callous foot , with weary limbs , his spirit rose above the depression of bodily fatigue , and the spot he reached was destined to hear him commence preaching the beauty and the glory of the dispensation of grace of which he was a minister . Who has not wished to see him ? When Raphael paints * Paul preaching at Athens , ' he takes his notion too much from the orator of Greece or Rome . There is the graceful perfection of a commanding form , there is the well turned elevation of the arm , there is the flowing gown effectively adjusted . But this accords not with * a bodily presence weak and contemptible , ' nor with that ' spirit with power , ' which , having divine aid , disdained all the adventitious aid of art . His dress and appearance were , indeed , far from canonical . It resembled that of his brother bishops _ , and though no prescribed dress is on record , yet we incidentally hear that it differed not from that of other men : for it is stated that Peter ( the xar' e ^ o ^^ v bishop ) wore * his fisher ' s coat . ' But in the absence of all worldly pomp and wealth ; of all pretensions to civil rank and respect ; of all artificial polish from the coveted advantages of the world ; what glory attaches to their effective

    zeal , to their sufferings and their success ; to their difficulties and the spirit with which they surmounted them ! What a mi ghty moral change did they effect ! what a shaking amongst the drybones , or drier and more dirty prejudices of the whole living and thinking world did they cause ! And weighing celebrity in the scale of extensive renown on earth , who share it from the cottage almost to the throne , on the tongue , in the mind and heart like this Paul—Paul the youthful conscientious zealot , Paul the

    humble convert , Paul the active apostle of the gentiles , Paul the bishop who founded churches , and fixed over them pastors to take the charge , and to be scarcely any charge to them whose spiritual wants they sedulously supplied . The idle disputes that have been maintained about the meaning and application , and gradation of rank attached to the terms presbyter or elder , bishop or overseer , would never have attracted the attention or wasted the time of thinking men , if they had confined themselves to what the sacred documents teach . They mean a witness and a minister ; an example and a teacher . Paul is a presbyter , an elder , and he makes the elders of the church at Ephesus ' bishops , * by imparting to them the txrvsv / uLac oiyiov * Now upon the common principle—fortes creantur fortibus et bonis—neque feroces progenerant aquilra columbas—a presbyter is as good and great as a bishop . And as age is commanding in a lite well iuid intellectually spent , the bishops seemed to

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    470 tPTiat constitutes a Bnhop' 9

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1832, page 470, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1816/page/38/