INCLUDING TWO POST-CONFIRMATION SACRAMENTAL LECTURES. WITH AN APPENDIX. BY THE REV. E. B. ELLIOTT, M.A., INCUMBENT OF ST. MARK'S, BRIGHTON, に AND LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND IMPROVED. SEELEY, JACKSON, AND HALLIDAY, FLEET STREET. TO THE RIGHT HON. AND RIGHT REV. ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL TAIT, LORD BISHOP OF LONDON.* I MY DEAR LORD BISHOP ; FEEL very grateful for your kindness in permitting me to dedicate to your Lordship this second edition of my little volume of Confirmation Lectures. Under such a sanction it cannot but be more widely circulated, and more carefully considered; and thus, in so far as the views and sentiments expressed in it may be judged to be right, more influential. It will of course be understood by my readers, as it is perfectly understood by myself, that your Lordship is not necessarily pledged by this permission to agreement with the Book in every minor and less important point of expression or statement. But I infer from it a decided agreement on your part with the general view that it propounds of the Confirmation rite, as intended by our Church to be one of reasonable and spiritual service for the candidates admitted to it, contradistinc* Now Archbishop of Canterbury. (3rd Ed.) tively to the superstitious doctrine of the opus operatum in the rite, as taught and ministered characteristically by the Church of Rome; and your approval of my endeavour so to represent it in these Lectures, and so to improve it. It seems alike strange and painful that there should have been of late years a reassertion of much of the old Romish superstitions by influential members of our Church, both clerical and lay; and attempts made sedulously and ostentatiously to stamp this character on its present Services, reformed though they be, and avowedly and distinctly anti-Romanistic. Our Confirmation Service is one which perhaps more often than almost any other has been thus superstitiously expounded, and superstitiously enforced. But I trust that, as illustrated in the Lectures following, and especially with the light of preceding Church history there reflected, as will be seen, upon it, its character will approve itself to sensible and honest-minded readers as in perfect accord, like our other Church Services, at once with pure Scriptural evangelic truth, and with sound reason and common sense. From many a heart, my Lord, among both rich and poor in your diocese, and many too outside of it, thanksgiving has gone up to Almighty God for your present partial amendment of health. Nor will there soon be forgotten those self-denying labours of Christian love, last summer and autumn, among the sick and suffering, through which your health, then far from strong, could not, it was with too much reason feared, but be yet more severely shattered. With the earnest hope and prayer that it may please God to complete your recovery, and in every way to fit and enable you to be an effective instrument in his hands, at this time of crisis in our Church, for helping to maintain it in the truth against the delusions alike of superstition and infidelity, I am, my dear Lord, Your obliged and very faithful Servant, E. B. ELLIOTT. November, 1866. |