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, Melchizedek, 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 reason 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 Mohammedans have priests of different orders, called scheiks and muftis; and the Indians and Chinese have their Brahmins 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 eucharistical 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 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, therefore, cannot consider themselves as priests in the rigid sense of the word, but only as presbyters, or, in other words, elders.