a person set apart for the performance of sacrifice, 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. Among the Israelites, after their exod 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 till 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 reason, however, to believe, that it was never disposed of but to some descendant of Aaron, capable of filling it, had the older branches been extinct. (For the consecration and offices of the Jewish priesthood, we refer our readers to the books of Moses). In the time of David, the inferior priests were divided into 24 companies, who were 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 chief.—All nations have had their priests. The Pagans had priests of Jupiter, Mars, Bacchus, Hercules, Osiris, and Isis, &c.; and some deities had priestesses. The Mahometans have priests of different orders, called sheik, and musli; and the Indians and Chinese have their brahmins and bonzes.

It has been 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 we believe with very different significations, according to the different opinions entertained of the Lord's 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 eucharistical sacrifice. These consider all who are authorized to administer that sacrament as in the strictest sense priests. Others hold the Lord's supper to be a staff upon the one sacrifice, once offered on the cross; and these too must consider 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 cannot consider themselves as priests in the rigid sense of the word, but only as presbyters, of which the word priest is a contraction of the same import with elder. See Supper of the Lord.

PRIME VICE, among physicians, denote the whole alimentary duct; including the oesophagus, stomach, and intestines, with their appendages.