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solicitude that marked both the precipitancy of personal affection, and an ignorance of the great work which his Saviour came to fulfil, "took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, be it far from thee, Lord; this shall not happen unto thee." And what was our Saviour's reply? He turned, and said unto him, "Get thee behind me, Satan*, thou art an offence [hindrance] unto me; thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men." St. Peter mistook the nature of the Messiah's kingdom; and therefore could not reconcile to the expectation, which he then had, of the temporal salvation of Israel, the thoughts of humiliation, death, and suffering. The same misapprehension of his Master's kingdom followed him even to the garden in Gethsemane, and induced him to resist with the sword the multitude that came to take Jesus; when our Saviour again took occasion to correct his mistaken judgment: "Put up thy sword into the sheath; the cup, which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it ?" But this misapprehension was not

*There was, probably, less harshness in this expres sion, than the words appear to imply. "Satan," means tempter, or evil counsellor, or enemy." Away with your earthly fears; they would defeat the end for which I came into the world."

peculiar to St. Peter; the eleven Apostles were in the same error, even after the death and resurrection of their Master. "When they were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" St. Peter and the ten Apostles were a more august council than any Pope with all his Cardinals, and the whole body of his suffragan Bishops; yet the Apostles, in their uninspired state, were not exempt from error-a very great error and they probably continued in it, till, by the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit, they were led into all truth. And yet you think the Church of Rome infallible and incapable of error,

But to return to St. Peter's individual history. Jesus was walking on the sea near the ship in which his disciples were. When their fears, excited at the first sight of his miraculous appearance, had subsided, St. Peter threw himself into the sea, to walk to him. Unequal to the trial to which he had exposed himself, his faith gave way to his fears, and he began to sink. In this apparent danger he exclaimed, "Lord, save me!" Our Saviour said to him, "O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" St. Peter was here as much mistaken in the

knowledge of himself, as he was before in the knowledge of the Messiah's kingdom.

You lay great stress on our Saviour's commission to St. Peter to feed his sheep, and his lambs, as if it implied the supreme government of his Church. Your sense of this passage is probably nearly the reverse of the truth. The reiteration of our Saviour's question, Lovest thou me, and of the charge to feed his flock, was rather a doubt of St. Peter's constancy, and a tacit admonition, than a commission of supremacy; and so St. Peter himself seemed to feel it, for "he was grieved, because Jesus said unto him, the third time, Lovest thou me?". That our Saviour alluded to the failure of St. Peter's former professions of his love to him, is evident from the first question: "Simon, lovest thou me more than these?" for when Jesus forewarned them, that they would all desert him, St. Peter said, "Though all should deny thee, yet will not I." St., Peter, who expressed his devotion to his Master in stronger terms than the rest of the Apostles, had more remarkably failed. The prominent part, therefore, of this conversation was directed to that failure, and seems to have been intended to fortify his future resolutions by the remembrance

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of the past. The care of Christ's flock was required as the evidence of his love; not enjoined as a commission of supremacy.

Our Saviour had indeed expressly admonished them against any such ambition, when they were contending who should be the greatest: (a contention, as we shall see presently, decisive against the supposed supremacy of St. Peter:) "The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over thembut ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve:" your only distinction shall be humility and mutual service.

In the several incidents of St. Peter's history before mentioned, we find no resemblance to the stability of a ROCK; and if to them we add the facts, that St. James, and not St. Peter, presided at the first council held at Jerusalem; and that St. Paul, on another occasion, withstood St. Peter to his face, we shall have any thing but evidence of St. Peter's supremacy.

Long after our Saviour's words, "On this rock I will build my Church," which you suppose to be a proof of St. Peter's supre

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macy, we find the Apostles engaged in a dispute, which shewed their unconsciousness that any such supremacy had been assigned to St. Peter, as you ascribe to him. During last Supper which Jesus had with his Apostles, "there was a strife among them which should be the greatest." This strife could not have taken place, if they had supposed that Christ had already given to St. Peter the supremacy over them,

We have, besides, St. Peter's own appeal to the authority of St. Paul, whose Epistles St. Peter places on a level with the other Scriptures. In another passage St. Peter calls himself a fellow-presbyter with other elders, and gives to Christ alone the title of Supreme Pastor,

Your notion, therefore, of St. Peter's supremacy, is not warranted by any thing that St. Peter says of himself, or of the

* "And account that the long-suffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given unto him, hath written unto you, as also in all his Epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood (from the spiritual nature of the subjects,) which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction."-2 Pet. iii. 15, 16.