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Title: Church Ministry in Kensington - A Recent Case of Hieratical Teaching Scripturally Considered
Author: Gell, John Philip
Language: English
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Transcribed from the 1867 R. Clay, Son, and Taylor edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
_CHURCH MINISTRY IN KENSINGTON_.
* * * * *
A RECENT CASE
OF
Hieratical Teaching
SCRIPTURALLY CONSIDERED.
* * * * *
BY
JOHN PHILIP GELL, M.A.
PERPETUAL CURATE OF ST. JOHN’S, NOTTING HILL.
* * * * *
LONDON:
PRINTED BY R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR,
BREAD STREET HILL.
1867.
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION _page_ 3
OUR SACRIFICE FOR SIN HAS CEASED 4
OUR PEACE OFFERING ALSO HAS CEASED 5
OUR PROPITIATION IS APPLIED BY FAITH ONLY 6
EUCHARISTIC PROPITIATION IS OF HUMAN INVENTION, CONTRARY 7–11
TO THE LAW OF MOSES, THE APOSTOLIC RECORDS, AND THE
ENGLISH LITURGY
OUR ALTAR IS NOT THE HOLY TABLE 12, 13
OUR PRIESTS CANNOT SACRIFICE CHRIST 14, 15
NOR MOVE HIM TO SACRIFICE HIMSELF 16
OUR PRIESTS REMIT AND RETAIN SINS, BY THE MINISTRY OF THE 17–19
WORD, IN COMMON WITH ALL THE MEMBERS OF CHRIST
WITH WHOM THEY SHARE THE ROYAL PRIESTHOOD 20
THE “POWER OF THE KEYS” _ib._
BISHOP HICKES. AN ERROR INDICATED 21
THEOTÓKOS. “CAUSES OF SALVATION” 22
CONCLUSION 23, 24
* * * * *
_To the_ REV. MAYOW WYNELL MAYOW, M.A. _Perpetual Curate of St. Mary’s_,
_West Brompton_, _late Student of Christ Church_, _Oxford_, _and Author
of Eight Sermons an the Priesthood_, _Altar_, _and Sacrifice_. {3}
YOUR Christmas offering to your former bishop, of Salisbury, to your
flock in South Kensington, and to the public at large, has taken eight
months to reach me; so slowly does literature circulate from end to end
of the ancient parish of Kensington. But I cordially hope that my
present acknowledgments may arrive before Christmas comes again; for you
have chosen an appropriate offering, your own workmanship, in the shape
of Eight carefully-written Sermons, upon the Sacrifice, Altar, and Priest
of the Christian dispensation.
I. “Sacrifice,” says the judicious Hooker (Eccl. Pol. v. 78), “is now no
part of the Church ministry.” Nevertheless your first position is, that
“we (clergy) have this treasure in earthen vessels,” and you take the
text of your First Sermon from the words, though not the meaning of S.
Paul (2 Cor. iv. 7), where he writes, not, as you expound (p. 5), of the
treasure of sacerdotal privilege, but of the treasure of Gospel
knowledge; as he speaks elsewhere of the treasures of knowledge remaining
hid in Christ (Col. ii. 3); a passage which you apply more accurately, as
the text of your Eighth Sermon. You even go so far (p. 40) as to aver
that “by Christ’s own appointment . . . his very body and blood are truly
offered . . . day by day;” though S. Paul says of Christ, that “He
needeth not daily to offer up sacrifices” (Heb. vii. 27). Must we then
offer sacrifices without Him? Surely when you remember the same Apostle
pleading for one death, one judgment, and one offering, as co-ordinate
verities (Heb. ix. 27, 28); and declaring that “there remaineth no more
sacrifice for sins” (Heb. x. 26), you will no longer find a difficulty in
“admitting it to be conceivable,” (should you not say, certain?) “that it
was intended that sacrifice should altogether cease when the Great
Sacrifice was completed” (p. 46).
The sacrificial Hebrew language will always repay attention. It is more
subtle and exact, in matters of sin and conscience, than the Greek;
whereon the inspired writers frequently pile a weight of meaning, to
which the latter language is hardly equal. Hebrew distinguishes
sacrifice from sacrifice, sin from sin. You argue, for instance, in your
Second Sermon, that if Job offered a daily sacrifice, before the coming
of the Law, then Christians also, after the Law, may probably offer the
like. But Job made a sacrifice for sin (Job i. 5), which was all burnt;
we offer nothing for sin, and our oblation is all eaten. And though the
Eucharistic sacrifice of praise might perhaps have been deemed, as a
peace-offering, to be also in some sense an offering of blood (Lev. vii.
12), yet S. Paul has carefully obviated the idea. He will not even allow
the venerable reading of the prophetic text (Hos. xiv. 2), which he
quotes (Heb. xiii. 15), _pharim_, or “calves” of our lips, because the
blood of beasts must be excluded entirely from Eucharistic comparisons,
and, with blood, all idea of expiation in the Eucharist. And, therefore,
with the LXX. he reads _pheri_, “fruit” of our lips giving thanks to the
name of God.
Rightly, therefore, do you style the Eucharist (p. 124), “the sum and
substance of our praises and thanksgivings;” though S. Paul does not go
with you in adding that “it is the highest means of applying to our sins
the mercies of God through the ever-availing sacrifice of Christ.” He
reserves this pre-eminence to faith (Gal. v. 5); and faith is actually
represented as the sacrificing priest of the spiritual house by Romanus
the martyr of Antioch, about the beginning of the fourth century, in his
dying address, which Prudentius versifies (Peristephanon x. 351). You
will pardon the rudeness of an old English translation, made in the days
of our Reformation, when heart answered to heart between the martyrs of
earlier and later ages:
“At th’ holy porch a Priest is standing there,
And keeps the doors, before the church which been;
Faith is her name, a virgin chaste and clear,
Her hair tied up with fillets, like a queen.
For Sacrifices, simple, pure, and clean,
And such she knows are pleasing, bids this Priest
Offer to God, and to his dear Son, Christ.”
The sacrifices, thereafter described, being such as holy fear, sound
knowledge, sobriety, and liberality. This, you will say, is declamation,
not doctrine. But so is the mass of Nicene and ante-Nicene material
which contradicts Romanus. If the one pleases you, the other may equally
please me. Let, then, both of us be cautious, consistent, and
scriptural.
At times you seem to retreat from your position that the Eucharist is a
true sacrifice, describing it only as “the presenting afresh, and
pleading afresh, and causing Christ himself to plead afresh, the merits
of that one precious death” (p. 60). Certainly, to commemorate, present,
or plead afresh a sacrifice once offered, is not the same thing as to
offer it. But ever and anon you re-assert the Eucharist to be a true
sacrifice, agreeably, you say, “to the sense of Holy Scripture, as
attested by the consent of the Church from the beginning” (p. 77). Yet
no such word as “sacrifice” is ever mentioned, in a Eucharistic sense, in
any of the Apostolical Fathers; and an interpolation in S. Ignatius shows
how much this deficiency of evidence was afterwards felt. “Without the
bishop, baptize not [neither offer nor present sacrifice], nor make a
feast of love” (Smyrn. 8). You extenuate the same significant absence of
the word “priest,” which is never applied by those Fathers to any church
minister, by telling us (p. 66), that Mr. Carter informs you that the
omission is satisfactorily accounted for by the smallness of their extant
writings, extending, he says, over no more than thirty octavo pages. You
will find, however, in the Oxford edition, about 3,300 lines of SS.
Clement, Ignatius (the shorter recension), and Polycarp, in Greek;
besides some Latin fragments. This would fill a hundred printed pages in
octavo, and is just equal to the united Gospels of S. Mark and S. John.
Yet those most primitive Fathers know of no such thing as a Priest, or a
Sacrifice, among the ministers and ordinances of the Church on earth;
though it is the subject upon which their compositions almost exclusively
turn, and they tell us much about Elders. This hardly looks like “the
consent of the Church from the beginning” (p. 77).
But you urge that “the doctrine was maintained continuously for fifteen
hundred years” (p. 99); and let me rejoin, opposed continually, upon
scriptural grounds. Not seventy years after the decease of S. John, the
Christian Athenagoras tells the Emperor Aurelius (Legat. 13), “The Framer
of the Universe needs not blood, nor the fragrance of flowers and
incense; the noblest sacrifice to Him is to know Him:” (here we have S.
Paul’s “treasure”) “offering bloodless sacrifice,” (here is S. Paul’s
“fruit of the lips,”) “and reasonable service,” (meaning, after S. Paul,
our own bodies. Rom. xii. 1.) But it would fill a volume were I to
trace onwards, from age to age, these Pauline streams of thought.
It is true that the Church liturgies are, many of them, full of the idea
of Eucharistic sacrifice. But does the Church of England, as you say (p.
99), “maintain, in her office, the whole substance of these liturgies,”
or even “all their main points”? Now, we will not assume as main points
any but those which are repeated in all the principal classes, somewhat
fancifully termed the liturgies of SS. James, Mark, Peter, and John. And
these points are twelve; whereof seven—the _Sursum corda_,_ Tersanctus_,
recital of the Institution, Prayer for the Church on earth, Lord’s
Prayer, the act of Communion, and the act of Praise—are preserved in our
English liturgy; while four have disappeared—the Kiss, the Prayer for the
descent of the Spirit on the elements, the Prayer for the dead, and the
Mingling of the bread and wine. A fifth main point, the Oblation of the
elements, had disappeared as well, from ordinary eyes, until recently
discerned in a slight addition made to the rubric in 1662: “the Priest
shall then place upon the table . . . bread and wine.” Not without
reason did our liturgical Reformers shake themselves clear of the whole
arrangement, and of four-twelfths of the substance of these offices,
reducing the residue to a more Scriptural type. The Reformers knew the
web that could be woven out of these liturgical materials, to entangle
men, not merely in your “perfect accordance and harmony with the doctrine
of a true propitiatory commemorative sacrifice offered up in the
Eucharist to God” (p. 104), but in other doctrine, more advanced than
you, or any man who studies the Bible, would be willing to accept.
If you would suffer the Law to be your schoolmaster, instead of these
Liturgies, you would scarcely be able so much as to imagine that the
“signs” of the Holy Communion could, under any circumstances, “be
effective for sinners’ pardon through Christ’s body broken and his blood
shed” (p. 104). For you would never bring yourself to understand how an
unbloody could effect any part of the work of a bloody sacrifice, in a
matter of propitiation. What a sacrificial solecism is it to speak, as
you do (p. 131), of “an unbloody . . . propitiatory sacrifice”! Without
shedding of blood is no remission of sins. “All that true and holy thing
which the Church has ever had, as Christ’s own appointed means for the
pardon of our sins,” is not, as you surmise (p. 131), the Eucharistic
sacrifice, but faith in the blood of Jesus. The Church has never had
anything else. Hers the faith; His the blood. “Lord, save me,” she
prays; “thy faith hath saved thee,” He replies, from age to age. And her
“pure offering,” which you correctly adduce from Malachi (i. 11), as
referable to the Eucharist, is but a _mincha_, a bloodless meat-offering;
fruit, of no use for pardon or propitiation.
Your reference (p. 150) to “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the
world” (Rev. xiii. 8), might suggest, though it does not establish, your
idea that the one offering of Himself is, in some sense, continuous (p.
56) to the present day. But I know not why the framers of our Authorized
Version did not render this passage as they rendered the same phrase when
they came upon it again, four chapters further on (Rev. xvii. 8); “whose
names were not written from the foundation of the world in the book of
life of the Lamb that was slain.” However translated, the passage must
be expounded in accordance with S. Paul (Heb. ix. 26, 28), “Christ was
once offered, in the end of the world.”
* * * * *
II. And so vanishes the Sacrifice from our altars, all but the fruit of
our lips, giving thanks to the name of the Lord. But have we any Altars?
One of your three arguments in the affirmative, taken from Scripture, is
that our Lord would not have said, “Leave there thy gift before the
altar,” unless we all had altars (p. 48). Nor in the same strain, could
you forbear to add, would He have said, “Cast not your pearls before
swine,” unless we all had pearls. But to proceed to your more serious
proofs.
“We have an altar” (Heb. xiii. 10) is a strange text for you to adduce in
the second place (p. 97); for it is S. Paul’s illustration of the fact
that Christian hearts are “not established with meats, which do not
profit those who have been occupied therein” (_v._ 9); as we find in
parochial experience, when a more than Scriptural emphasis is put upon
the Eucharistic bread and wine. The Apostle simply observes, in the text
you quote (_v._ 10), that the ministers of the (Christian) tabernacle
cannot eat, like Jews, of their altar; because the body of the single
Christian sacrifice was, ritually speaking, wholly burnt without the
camp. Granting, therefore, that we have an altar, it is not a
Eucharistic one, whereof we eat.
And this further shows that in your third Scriptural proof (p. 45): “Are
not they which eat of the altar, partakers with the altar?” (1 Cor. x.
18,) no altar but the Jewish is meant; and you should not suppress the
beginning of the sentence, “Behold Israel after the flesh,” but permit
the Apostle to limit his remark to Jews, as distinct from Christians,
exactly in the way he himself proposes. And here you come to the end of
your Scriptural arguments for altars in church.
Passing from Scripture, the belief of the Church is not, as you assume
(p. 53), continuous in favour of our having a ritual altar. The Gentile
heathens blamed the early Christians for having no altars in their
churches, and the Christians admitted the truth of the allegation.
(Origen, c. Cels. 8. 17; Minucius Felix, Octav. 32; Arnobius, adv.
Gentes, 6, 7. I borrow these references from the Bishop of Chester’s
_Patres Apostolici_.) The earliest meaning of “altar” in a Christian
sense seems derived from the Jewish idea, that the LORD took equal
pleasure in the several portions of the sacrifice, whether burnt or
eaten; and that the eaters were as much his altar, as was the altar of
burnt-offering itself. Hence Polycarp (Phil. 4) says the widows are an
altar; and Ignatius, probably in one place (Philad. 4), and certainly
elsewhere (Trall. 7), calls the clergy, and (Eph. 5) the congregation,
the altar. It was left to after ages to suggest, in the last passage,
“the society where sacrifices are offered.” But before they admitted the
propitiatory character of such sacrifices, men had lost S. Paul’s
doctrine (Heb. xiii. 11), that JESUS was a sin-offering, wholly burned
without the camp; and they had become insensible to the incongruity of a
symbolism which could imply the eating of such an offering. Far from
blending the idea of an altar, whether Jewish or heathen, with that of a
Christian table, as you seem to assume that he did (p. 54), S. Paul was
too learned a ritualist not to keep them distinct. And as the point of
comparison, throughout the passage which you discuss (1 Cor. x.), was not
the offering, but the eating; as it was eating which joined Christians to
Christ, Jews to their altar, and Gentiles to demons; S. Paul had no need
to speak of a Christian altar. A table was the symbol which he required,
and to that he carefully adhered. He certainly knew of a Christian
altar, but it was one of which neither he, nor any other servant of the
true tabernacle (Heb. viii. 2; xiii. 10), had a right to eat; and I
cannot see how you are enabled to say (p. 98), “of course, it is in the
celebration of the Holy Eucharist that this altar,” on which Jesus died
(Heb. xiii. 12), “is used, and the sacrifice made;” after all the pains
with which the Apostle has set forth the premises which forbid your
conclusion.
III. But without your Sacrifice and Altar, what becomes of your Priest?
“The priesthood,” you say (p. 6), “is the chiefest means for applying to
us the pardon of the Cross.” In the priesthood you also find (p. 16)
“the appointed mode of our applying to Christ for his intercession;” and
you indicate a danger which may arise from shaking men’s confidence in
such opinions, “that they would, no doubt, begin to fail in their
allegiance to the Church, and be afraid longer to trust their souls to
her teaching or her keeping” (p. 16). I should recommend such adherents
to be fed on very little of S. Paul, less of our judicious Hooker, and no
Church history. And even could they be thus dieted and kept, I should be
inclined to question whether they would prove worth their feed. Access
to the Jewish ritual would be sure to awaken their suspicions as to the
meaning of a Christian ordination. For who ever heard of a real
sacrificing priest of God being ordained by the imposition of hands? On
the contrary, when the people laid hands on the Levites’ heads (Numb.
viii. 10), it meant quite a different thing from ordination. Melchisedec
was not so ordained, nor Aaron, nor any of his race, nor our Great High
Priest, though He condescended to every form of the Law for man. Yet
laying on of hands was well used and understood, as conveying a divinely
authorized ministry in the congregation to such men as Joshua (Deut.
xxxiv. 9), “in whom was the Spirit” (Numb. xxvii 18), and the church
elders and ministers of a later age (Acts xiv. 23). But none of these
ordained men sacrificed as priests.
And now, taking up your own appeal (p. 43), “if it be true that a
Christian priesthood and . . . these sacrificial powers . . . remain, and
must remain ever in Christ’s Church, what words shall describe”—the error
of saying with S. Paul (Heb. x. 26), “there remaineth no more sacrifice
for sin,” nothing that calls for the exercise of these sacrificial powers
in the Church.
But, leaving S. Paul, “the whole sense,” you say (pp. 60, 77), “and usage
of the Church from the beginning is explained and justified,” will we but
see more in Scripture than Scripture says, and assume the existence of
the Christian priesthood. But your “beginning” is not the very
beginning. You omit the Apostolical Fathers again, a generation of good
men, who never mention Christian priests. Perhaps you will rather
commence with a later age, and will prefer applying your theory to
mitigate such lofty flights as we find in S. Chrysostom (On the
Priesthood, iii. 2): “When you behold the Lord sacrificed and prostrate,
and the Priest standing over the sacrifice and praying, and all stained
with that precious blood, do you then suppose you are among men, and
standing upon the earth?” But why attempt to explain or justify such
perilous matter as this? Why admit its eloquent author to the privilege
of developing S. Paul, or lightening the darkness of the Apostolical
Fathers? And if not S. Chrysostom, whom can we admit besides? Often do
I wonder at the artless boldness with which our homilists quote those
Nicene Fathers, whose uncertain authority is just as much opposed to the
Scriptures in some places, as it sustains them in others.
Such variations and discrepancies must be perplexing to those who expect
to find safe guidance in the early Church. You and I, however, “are
persuaded that Holy Scripture contains sufficiently all doctrine required
of necessity for eternal salvation, through faith in Jesus Christ. And
we have determined, by God’s grace, out of the said Scriptures to
instruct the people committed to our charge; and to teach nothing, as
required of necessity to eternal salvation, but that which we shall,”
each of us, “be persuaded may be concluded and proved by the Scripture.”
(Ordination Vow, II.)
The Established Church of England knows only of the “lawful” priest,
whose character is evident to all men reading Holy Scripture and ancient
authors. He has been spoken of from the time of the Apostles, at first
by the name of Elder, and afterwards by that of Priest; and, like every
other member of Christ, he is God’s fellow-worker, he has a share in
Christ’s priesthood, and he has received the Holy Ghost for his
particular ministry.
You truly observe (p. 94), that “if we can discover what are the truths
which have been held always, everywhere, and by all, we may be certain we
shall run into no serious error nor perverted interpretation of Holy
Scripture dangerous to our souls.” Caution, therefore, is requisite in
handling the divine words used by our Bishops for the ordination of our
lawful clergy: “whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; whose
sins thou dost retain, they are retained;”—this form not having been
employed always, for we do not find our Church using it till the twelfth
century; nor everywhere, since it only appears as a prayer in the Eastern
churches; nor by all, never having been used at the ordination of some of
our most eminent pastors of non-conforming churches, who, though not
lawful ministers in our sense, have been clearly blessed in their
spiritual work.
We are thus reduced to interpret the form scripturally; and we find that
it has nothing in it peculiar to priests or elders, because our Saviour
first addressed it to others, as well as to ten of the Apostles (Luke
xxiv. 33, 36 = John xx. 24), but not to S. Thomas. Our ordaining Bishop,
in repeating it, reminds the candidate priest of his ministry of
reconciliation and condemnation, entrusted both generally to him, as to
every other member, and likewise specially as to every other minister of
the Church. But not entrusted to him as to a mediating priest, since
none such, so far as we are told, were present before Christ, when first
He spoke the words. Your “sacrifice by means of a priest” (p. 53) is
unknown to S. Paul, who says, of JESUS only, “by Him, therefore, let us
offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually” (Heb. xiii. 15). And
the privilege of forgiveness, which S. Paul exercised, he delegated, not
to the priests of the Church of Corinth, but to the whole people (2 Cor.
ii. 10). Even the Decretals allow that in necessity Christian lay people
may both hear confessions and absolve. A layman, too, or a woman, may
baptize; surely not without remission of sins, as Bishop Jewell remarks.
You ask (p. 89), what our Prayer-book means by “benefit of absolution,”
if there be no power to absolve vested in the priest? Why do you not, in
this case, relinquish “priest,” and adhere to the Prayer-book expression,
“minister of God’s Word,” as it appears in the passage to which you
refer? This is not a question of power in laying on a drastic _absolvo
te_, but of skill in the use and application of God’s Word. Even as the
Pharisees used the word to bind heavy burdens on men, and to unbind the
fifth commandment; or as our LORD used it to unbind the law of the
Sabbath and bind the law of murder; so the Christian minister shows his
might, like Apollos, in the Scriptures.
Nor can you bind and loose consciences with anything less tenacious than
Scripture, accurately declared and reasonably applied. All theological
language, except that of Scripture, breaks down under the tension of
strict use. Take, for instance, your own observation (p. 107), “the body
and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the
faithful, that is, by the baptized Christian people; for so the word is
always used, in strict theological language.” Yet this strict language,
on which you rely, fails whenever the baptized happen to be void of a
lively faith, in which case “they are in no wise partakers of Christ”
(Article XXIX). Take, again, your quotation of “the brief but weighty
saying of Jerome, _Ecclesia non est_, _quæ non habet Sacerdotes_” (p.
111); which is only true when reduced to S. Peter’s standard (1 Peter ii.
9), “ye are a royal priesthood,” or the “kingdom of priests,” of the
Hebrew formula (Ex. xix. 16), exactly as interpreted by the Septuagint.
In any other sense, Jerome’s dogma is liable to endless exceptions,
whenever all the claims of the Church come to be conscientiously weighed.
The “Power of the Keys” is another slippery phrase, which you introduce
(p. 114) rather in the way of suggestion than of argument. It means much
in theological, and little in Scriptural language. In the latter, I read
of the keys being given to S. Peter; he used them, and what he did with
them afterwards I do not find; but the door which he unlocked to the Jews
(Acts ii. 14) and Gentiles (Acts x.) has stood open ever since.
Hickes, the non-juring bishop of Thetford, was not perhaps the worse
theologian for being a schismatical intruder into the diocese of Norwich;
but to quote him page after page, as you have done (pp. 102, 103), in
your orthodox Kensington pulpit too (pp. 109, 110, 121), was a grand
experiment upon the historical predilections of your people, and a
dubious addition to the authorities in support of your view.
We nowhere read in Scripture, though you appear to inform us that it was
the fact (pp. 12, 86), that Jesus appeared to the Eleven between the
resurrection and his breathing on the disciples. Though it is always
worth while to be accurate, I should be far from making a man an offender
for a word, did not your error, though minute, indicate a certain want of
strength in the Scriptures. If the divine who said _rúbricæ_ for
_rubrícæ_, in the Jerusalem Chamber, could not be trusted to make a copy
of verses in praise of Convocation, far less should an inaccurate student
of Scripture venture on pulpit statements of Church doctrine. Strict,
constant, indefatigable reference to those old Fathers, Matthew and Mark,
Peter and John, James and Paul, is the only means of keeping the younger
Fathers right, and of testing the miscellaneous coinage of terms and
doctrines which have passed current from their day to ours. Such coinage
as Theotókos, for instance, which appears in the fine argument of your
closing Sermon (p. 140), never rings so truly as the words which have met
and satisfied the ear of an inspired writer. The term may cover good
doctrine, and it may escape the almost profane triviality of its Latin
equivalent, _Deipara_, as well as the unreasoning coarseness of the
English “Mother of God:” but, take it which way you will, it is a poor
ambiguous piece of Greek, which must mean one thing in a Christian
pulpit, and another on Mount Olympus, had Homer condescended to introduce
it there.
Is it not refreshing to pass from the discussion into which you venture
with Calvin, who fortunately is not alive to answer for himself, on the
causes of grace (p. 118); or, again, your thesis on the causes of
salvation (p. 153), wherein you do not mention, what the Schoolmen tell
us, that most things have five kinds of causes; and to range at large in
the simplicity of the Scriptures, which teach us that the cause of
salvation is not only JESUS, His life, His love, His work, His blood; but
also faith (Eph. ii. 8), hope (Rom. viii. 24), grace (Eph. ii. 5), the
bath of regeneration (Tit. iii. 5), the engrafted Word (James i. 21), the
gospel minister (Rom. xi. 14), and student (1 Tim. 16); and then, the
hearer (Phil. ii. 12), his prayers (Phil. i. 19), and penitence (2 Cor.
vii. 10); cause heaped upon cause with creative profusion, until we begin
to see that your proposal of priestly mediation, in the Eucharistic way,
as another cause of salvation, however kindly meant, is like the offer of
a church candle in broad day.
* * * * *
To conclude. I have found fault with your Sacrifice, Altar, and Priest;
but I think I can answer for it that you will find no fault with mine.
The Christian Sacrifice was a sin-offering, once made eighteen centuries
ago, without the gate of Jerusalem. It has often since been remembered,
but never repeated. The Altar was of earth, the vast sin-burdened wreck
of this fallen world, so well beloved of God, which drank up the blood.
The Priest is JESUS; but He has made no sacrifice since, nor used an
earthly altar.
So much for the doctrine. I will make you a free gift of all the poetry
which attaches to the words Sacrifice, and Altar, and Priest, in the
varied play of religious imagination and allegorical induction. But we
cannot build anything so serious as the way of our acceptance with God,
or the character of our ministry in the Church, upon such frail
foundations as these. And if we will but avoid the inconvenient
confusion of sacrificial and Eucharistic terms, and adhere to the
accurate phraseology of Scripture, as in a great measure our Liturgy
does, we shall clear our thoughts, and expedite our conclusions, upon the
important points to which you have ably directed attention.
* * * * *
“_For the priest’s lips should keep knowledge_, _and they should seek the
law at his mouth_; _for he is the messenger of the LORD of
hosts_.”—Malachi II. 7.
* * * * *
* * * * *
LONDON: R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.
Footnote.
{3} J. Parker & Co. Oxford and London. 1867. 8vo. pp. 156.
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