every reason to believe that, after the death of their Master, they pursued their missionary labours with renovated ardour.  That they were called apostles as well as the Twelve, cannot, perhaps, be established by distinct testimony; [46:2] but it is certain, that they were furnished with supernatural endowments; [46:3] and it is scarcely probable that they are overlooked in the description of the sacred writer when He represents the New Testament Church as “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.” [46:4]

The appointment of the Seventy, like that of the Twelve, was a typical act; and it is not, therefore, extraordinary that they are only once noticed in the sacred volume.  Our Lord never intended to constitute two permanent corporations, limited, respectively, to twelve and seventy members, and empowered to transmit their authority to successors from generation to generation.  In a short time after His death the symbolical meaning of the mission of the Seventy was explained, as it very soon appeared that the gospel was to be transmitted to all the ends of the earth; and thus it was no longer necessary to refer to these representatives of the ministry of the universal Church.  When the Twelve turned to the Gentiles, their number lost its significance, and from that date they accordingly ceased to fill up vacancies occurring in their society; and, as the Church assumed a settled form, the apostles were disposed to insist less and less on any special powers with which they had been originally furnished, and rather to place themselves on a level with the ordinary rulers of the ecclesiastical community.  Hence we find them sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history.  A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the statements which describe how most of them finished their career.  It is an instructive fact that no proof can be given, from the sacred record, of the ordination either by the Twelve or by the Seventy, of even one presbyter or pastor.  With the exception of the laying on of hands upon the seven deacons, [47:4] no inspired writer mentions any act of the kind in which the Twelve ever engaged.  The deacons were not rulers in the Church, and therefore could not by ordination confer ecclesiastical power on others.