Ordain
Dictionary of Terms and Phrases Used in American or English Jurisprudence · Benjamin Vaughan Abbott · 1879
Dictionary of Terms and Phrases Used in American or English Jurisprudence
To ordain, according to the etymology and general use of the term, signifies to appoint, to institute, to clothe with authority. When the word is applied to a clergyman, it means that he has been invested with ministerial functions or sacerdotal power. Ordination, properly speaking, is restrained to the investiture of authority. In the Episcopal Church, the conferring on a person the holy orders of deacon or priest is the invariable mode of ordination. In the Methodist Church, the deacons and priests have conferred on them, by a general ordination, the investment of their ministerial functions, but are never by that act placed over a particular church.
Kibbe V. Autram, 4 Conn. 134.