PRIEST, a person set apart for the performance of sac-
rifice, and other offices and ceremonies of religion. Before
the promulgation of the law of Moses, the first-born of every
family, the fathers, the princes, and the kings, were priests.
Thus Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Melchizedec, Job,
Isaac, and Jacob, offered themselves their own sacrifices.
Amongst the Israelites, after their departure from Egypt,
the priesthood was confined to one tribe, and it consisted
of three orders; the high priest, priests, and Levites. The
priesthood was made hereditary in the family of Aaron,
and the first-born of the oldest branch of that family, if he had
no legal blemish, was always the high priest. This divine
appointment was observed with considerable accuracy until
the Jews fell under the dominion of the Romans, and had
their faith corrupted by a false philosophy. Then, indeed,
the high priesthood was sometimes set up to sale, and instead
of continuing for life, as it ought to have done, it seems,
from some passages in the New Testament, to have been
nothing more than an annual office. There is sufficient rea-
son to believe, however, that it was never disposed of except
to some descendant of Aaron, capable of filling it, if the older
branches were extinct. In the time of David, the inferior
priests were divided into twenty-four companies, who were
required to serve in rotation, each company by itself, for a
week. The order in which the several courses were to serve
was determined by lot; and each course was, in all succeeding
ages, called by the name of its original chiefs.
All nations have had their priests. The pagans had priests
of Jupiter, Mars, Bacchus, Hercules, Osiris, Isis, and other
divinities; and some deities had also priestesses. The Ma-
hommedans have priests of different orders, called scheiks
and muftis; and the Indians and Chinese have their Brah-
mins and Bonzes.
It has been very much disputed, whether, in the Christian
church, there be any such officer as a priest, in the proper
sense of the word. The Church of Rome, which holds the
propitiatory sacrifice of the mass, has, of course, her proper
priesthood. In the Church of England, the word priest is
retained to denote the second order in her hierarchy, but
with very different significations, according to the different
opinions entertained of the Lord's supper. Some few of her
divines, of great learning, and of undoubted Protestantism,
maintain that the Lord's supper is a commemorative and eu-
charistical sacrifice, and consider all who are authorised to
administer that sacrament as, in the strictest sense, priests.
Others hold the Lord's supper to be a feast upon the sacri-
fice once offered on the cross; and these, too, must con-
sider themselves as clothed with some kind of priesthood.
Great numbers, however, of the English clergy, perhaps the
majority, agree, with the Church of Scotland, in maintaining
that the Lord's supper is a rite of no other moral import,
than the mere commemoration of the death of Christ. These,
therefore, cannot consider themselves as priests in the rigid
sense of the word, but only as presbyters, or, in other words,
elders.