But this, even from the first, was not the chief Christian use of the word. Nor was it from this that there sprang, in the course of time, that peculiar Church use of the word of which I propose now to give account. Consequently I need to say no more about it. For the real origin of that use of the word sacrament which I have to illustrate we must ascend higher to the large general meaning which from its etymology attached to it, as a word applicable to any sacred thing :-combined, as the thought of their own Christian sacred things was, in the minds of all early Christians, with an idea of virtue attaching to them: and this a virtue unknown and unintelligible to the heathen around them; and, consequently, with something of the mysterious attaching to it.*

Now in the case of Christian sacred things appointed by God, such as the Christian sacred rites and ordinances, they had of course good reason, from the very fact of their divine appointment, for ascribing virtue to them; supposing only a right observance on the part of Christian worshippers. And the same too in regard of the divinely appointed sacred things of the Jewish Old Testament religion; though in but an inferior measure, and as deriving chief virtue from their being typical shadows of Christian realities. Whereas to heathen so-called sacred things, not only could no such virtue attach, but directly the contrary. They did not deserve the name of sacraments.

Well, it was with these three associated ideas more or less strongly on their minds, of the sacredness, the virtue, and the mystery attached to them, that Christian Church writers of the western or Latin

absurdity of the idea of any supersession of the former by the latter.

So, again, Cyprian, Ep. 74; "Divinæ militiæ sacramenta solvantur." And Arnobius; "Fidem rumpere Christianam, et salutaris militiæ sacramenta deponere."

So I Cor. ii. 7; "We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery."

speaking half of the Roman empire began, in the period now under review, to apply the word sacraments alike to Old Testament sacred things and New Testament sacred things;-sometimes expressly in regard to all the three points; sometimes only by implication:— besides a use of the word now and then, I must add, not a little fanciful.

Thus Tertullian, in one place, without any express specification of the virtue and the mystery attached to them, speaks of the whole general system of Christian doctrine, Christian religion, and Christian faith as a sacrament:* in another, of the Church priestly orders, offices, and rites as sacraments:-sacraments parodied, he says, under inspiration of the Evil Spirit, in the systems of heathenism.+ Similarly Tertullian's eminent disciple in the African Church, Cyprian, designates the testimony of Holy Scripture as a sacrament; and comments on the many sacraments, or sacred truths and breathings, in the Lord's Prayer. § -Much more generally, however, there is in these writers an express reference to its mystical virtue, when they speak of a sacrament. For example, we find Tertullian in various places speaking of the brazen serpent, of the wood by which Moses made sweet the bitter waters at Marah, and of the wood by throwing which into the water Elisha caused the lost iron axe-head borrowed by his disciple to swim, as each one a sacrament ;-these having each one some mysterious saving virtue attached to it, because of

*Tertull. de Præscr. c. 20. To all Christian Churches, he here says, there has come down "ejusdem sacramenti traditio;" having just before designated this as "eandem doctrinam." Also Adv. Marc. v. 18; where he translates Eph. iii. 9, by "dispensatio sacramenti occulti ab ævis in Deo.'

+ De Præscr. c. 40.

Cyprian, Ep. 63; "Scripturarum omnium sacramento, ac testimonio, Christi sanguis effusus prædicatur.'

§ Ib. De Orat. Dominic.-In much the same general way Cyprian's friend Firmilian, in a letter to Cyprian (Ep. 75), speaks of the sacraments of Easter, and other Christian festivals.

each one's mystically typifying the cross of Christ.* And, for the same reason, (just to give one example of his fanciful speculations on the subject,) he sets forth the sacrament and sacramental virtue of the Hebrew letter Tau; resembling as it did, in its old Samaritan form, somewhat like our own capital T, a cross. For this, he says, (by a fanciful misconstruction of the original Hebrew,) was God's mark, stamped on the foreheads of those who were to be safe from the swords of the destroying angels, in that vision of Ezekiel narrated in his ninth chapter :-a mark indeed, he adds, the sacrament of which is set forth in various ways in Holy Scripture.+-And, as Tertullian, so too Cyprian. Thus Noah's ark he designates as a sacrament; and the Red Sea, in which Israel was baptized unto Moses, as a sacrament; the manna in the wilderness as a sacrament, and Rahab's house of refuge as a sacrament; all with saving virtue in them; from the fact of the ark and Rahab's house having each and either typified Christ's Church as the one refuge of safety; the Red Sea baptism of the Israelites, Christian baptism; and the manna, Christ; however mysterious, and undiscoverable at the time, must have been the secret of that virtue. -As to specific Christian sacraments these Fathers so designate prominently, of course, Baptism and the Eu* So Tertull. Adv. Jud. c. 11, 13.-Elsewhere “ figurarum sacramenta," and "allegoriæ sacramentum,' are expressions used by him in this sense. So Adv. Marc. v. 1 and 4.

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+Adv. Jud. c. 12.-It would seem that the old Latin version of Tertullian's time, like the Vulgate afterwards, translated the Hebrew thus, "et signa Thau:"-the Samaritan Tau,

T, being of cruciform shape, +. Tertullian adds, "Hujus signi sacramentum variis modis prædicatum est." "The Hebrew words," says Dr. A. Clarke, in loc. (Ezek. ix. 4), "signify literally, Thou shalt make a mark, or sign a sign; but give no intimation what that mark or sign was.' Gesenius, however, seems to favour the idea of the particular mark intended having been in the form of a cross. Lexicon, in Voc.

Cyprian, Ep. 74; "Ad arcæ unius sacramentum (i.e., arcæ Noe) Dominicâ unitate Ecclesia fundata est."-The other sacramenta noticed above are in Ep. 69.

charist, or Lord's Supper.* And when Cyprian applies the appellation equally to the rite of laying on of hands,† it is from his regarding that rite as a necessary adjunct of the baptismal sacrament, so as was stated in my first Lecture. In each case this was with strong views of mystical virtue in the sacrament.

Nor, descending downwards yet 150 years, to the times of Jerom and Augustine, do we find in Jerom's writings, or in the earlier writings of Augustine, much material difference in their application of the word; though, as I shall show under the next period of my review, Augustine after a while narrowed the definition. They speak of the multitudinous sacraments, or sacred observances, enjoined on the Jews of the Old Testament; with similar notices from time to time of the mystical meaning and virtue attached to them, In the sheet let down from heaven, with animals in it clean and unclean, according to the Jewish ritual, St. Peter, says Jerom, learnt Christian sacraments before unknown.§ Says Augustine: "The sacrificial victims of the old law had in them a great sacrament, from their typifying Christ's sacrifice on the cross; whence indeed their only virtue." For, as he elsewhere observes, "The sacraments of the Old Testament promised a Saviour and salvation; whereas those of the New Testament (however mysteriously) minister salvation."|| Indeed so much did Jerom associate the idea of mystery with the idea of a sacrament, that in his famous Latin translation of the New Testament, called afterwards the Vulgate, (that same of which I spoke in my first Lecture on Confirmation,) he often rendered the word μvorηpion, or mystery, in the original Greek of the New Testament, by the Latin word

*Tertull. Adv. Marc. iv. 30; "Sacramentum baptismatis et eucharistiæ."

"Tunc plenè sanctificari, et filii Dei esse possunt, si sacramento utroque nascuntur.' Ep. 72. See pp. 6 and 26, suprà. Jerom on Ezek. xli. August. on Ps. lxxii.

sacramentum.

St. Paul's saying, "This is a great mystery," in that passage in Eph. v. where he speaks of marriage as figuring the union of Christ and his church, Jerom renders in Latin, "This is a great sacrament." God's mystery, hidden for ages, about the admission of Gentiles into his covenant, referred to in Eph. iii., Jerom translates, "God's sacrament; " and so too that in 1 Tim. iii. 16, "Great is the mystery of godliness." Let me add that Jerom sometimes, like Tertullian, indulges a little in fancy, when speaking of Old Testament sacramental types and figures.'

2. I now come to the second period which I proposed to pass under review on the subject before us; viz., the Augustinian æra, or later and chief period of the episcopate and writings of the great Augustine.

Dark and stormy were the times in which the later lives of both Jerom and Augustine were cast. It was at the commencement of those Gothic and Vandal irruptions, which swept like a desolating flood over the whole Roman western world :-irruptions begun about the year 400, with the Gothic chief Alaric's first invasion of Italy; and which continued surging, with the flux and reflux of the flood, for some 150 years over those once flourishing provinces of the empire: until, like as after the subsiding of Noah's flood, a kind of new Romano-Gothic world appeared emergent out of it, but with the desolating marks of the inundation left everywhere. Jerom died A.D. 420, far away in a monastery at Bethlehem : quite heart-broken at the thought of the Roman empire perishing; and, consequently thereupon, according to his interpretation of Scripture prophecy, of the probably near advent of the predicted Man of sin, or Antichrist. The saintly Augustine died ten years

*So e.g. on Cant. i. 14; where the bride figures her beloved as, in his relationship to her, like a grape-cluster in the vineyards of Engedi. On this Jerom speaks of the grapes' early sourness to the taste, and subsequent sweetness; as a sacrament, or sacred figure, of Christ's sweetness being that which is only tasted after a while by the believing soul. Hom. ii. ad. fin.