Wesley Corpus

4. Concerning diocesan Episcopacy, there are several questions which I should be glad to have answered: as (1) Where is it prescribed in Scripture (2) How does it appear that the Apostles settled it in all the Churches which they planted (3) How does it appear they settled it in any so as to make it of perpetual obligation It is allowed that Christ and His Apostles settled the Church under some form of government. But (i) Did they put all Churches under the same precise form If they did, (ii) Can you prove this to be the precise form and the very same which now obtains in England 5. How Phavorinus [Favorinus, so called from Favera, his birthplace, was a Benedictine, who in 1512 became librarian to the future Leo X. He was made Bishop of Nuceria in 1514, and died in 1537. He compiled a Greek Lexicon.] or many more may define heresy or schism I am not concerned to know. I well know heresy is vulgarly defined ‘a false opinion touching some necessary article of faith, and schism a causeless separation from a true Church.’ But I keep to my Bible, as our Church in her Sixth Article teaches me; therefore I cannot take schism for a separation from a Church, because I cannot find it so taken in Scripture. The first time I meet the term there is 1 Corinthians i. 10: I meet with it again, chap. xi. 18. But it is plain in both places by schism is meant not any separation from the Church but uncharitable divisions in it. For the Corinthians continued to be one Church, notwithstanding then strife and contention; there was no separation of one part from the other with regard to external communion. It is in the same sense the word is used chap. xii. 25. And these are the only places in the New Testament where the term occurs. Therefore the indulging any unkind temper towards our fellow Christians is the true scriptural schism.