unction; and all, except marriage and holy orders, declared ordinarily necessary to salvation : the eucharist above all the rest, as being (so was that holy rite changed and perverted) nothing less than the propitiatory offering of Christ afresh, through Christ's impersonator the priest, for the sins of both the living of the congregation, and the dead. So that, with baptism (completed by confirmation) to begin with, in first age of childhood, penance (including confession to the priest and his absolution) through all life afterwards, together from time to time with the awful mystery of the eucharistic or transubstantiation sacrament, and extreme unction when dying, the salvation of each man, through life and in death, was made dependent on the priest. Thus, in fact, was the man made, for his very soul's sake, the priest's bond-slave. And hence to the Romish priesthood, or Church, what a measureless source of gain! For what would not a man thus deluded give, especially when dying, for his soul?+

Most naturally may the question arise in each intelligent mind, How could a system so unscriptural, so anti-Christian, have so long and largely been received and prevailed in Christendom? I find the only sufficient answer thus given by St. Paul:-" Because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved, God shall send them strong delusion that they should believe the lie." It is the sad character of man's natural apostacy, through the fall, to shrink from intimate contact with God, even in the offered character of a Saviour; and, with whatever amount of self-delusion, gladly to lean on any human arm, like that of the priest, for salvation, in place of, and preference to, the Divine arm.

* See Hagenbach's "History of Doctrines" on this subject.

How small the treasure accruing from the so-called sacrament of litigants in old Roman heathen times to the heathen temple and priests, (see p. 101 suprà,) compared with that which thus fell to the Roman Church! In Spain and in France, before the Revolution it is said, I think, to have amounted to a full third of the landed property of the kingdom.

8

4. Fourthly, and lastly, comes under review the period, the blessed period, of the Reformation, and of our English Reformed Church's changed teaching thereupon in the doctrine of the sacraments. Here, generally, according to the fundamental Scriptural principles of the Reformation, (just as we saw, p. 15, in regard of confirmation in particular,) our reforming fathers set themselves to compare the long received Romish doctrine with Holy Scripture, and to reject whatever they found to be unscriptural in it. Accordingly, while retaining the old Augustinian definition of a proper Church sacrament,*-viz. as a word applicable most properly to such rites of the Church as had in them the two parts of something outward and visible for the sign, and a correspondent inward and spiritual grace for the thing signified, they insisted on the two following most important differences from the sacramental doctrine of the Church of Rome:-1st, that, as grace could only certainly be considered to attach to such outward signs and ordinances as had expressly been instituted and enjoined by Christ Himself, therefore baptism and the Lord's supper (or eucharist) could alone properly, and as so defined, be called sacraments in a scripturally constituted Church: 2ndly, that the outflow of grace from them would depend, not on the mere ministerial operation of the priestly or episcopal administrator,† whether upon the sacramental elements, or the receiver; but (just as Augustine had long before laid down) on the faith, and right state of mind, of him who partook of

*Not that they overlooked the more general meaning of the word. "In a general acceptation the name of a sacrament may be attributed to anything whereby a holy thing is signified;" so says the Homily on Common Prayer and the Sacraments. But the stricter Augustinian definition they adopted in preference. "If sacraments had not a certain similitude of those things whereof they be sacraments, they should be no sacraments at all. And of this similitude they do for the most part receive the names of the self-same things that they do signify." So Augustine, Lib. ii. Ad Bonifacium.

The "opus operatum." So, as observed in my first Lecture in the 26th of King Edward's Articles, p. 578 (Parker ed.).

them. So generally our Church Article xxv.: while in Article xxviii. there is a special application of the same doctrine to the sacrament of the Lord's supper; the unscripturalness of the doctrine of transubstantiation being there at the same time strongly asserted.— And thus, in fine, these are the four points that the Catechism lays down as expressing succinctly its sacramental doctrine :-Ist, that there is an outward and visible sign, or emblem, in each proper sacrament; as in baptism, water; in the Lord's supper, bread and wine: 2ndly, that there is an inward grace signified; as in baptism, the Holy Spirit's cleansing of the soul; in the Lord's supper, the soul's spiritually feeding on Christ, in remembrance of his propitiatory death and dying love: 3rdly, that there is in it an implied pledge of the communication of this grace to the right receiver, as arising out of the fact of Christ's own appointment and injunction of the ordinance: 4thly, that there are certain spiritual conditions essential to such right reception of the sacrament, in order to its efficacy in the receiver's case for good-viz. the conditions of repentance and faith (true Christian faith)* in both baptism and the Lord's supper; and moreover, in the latter, of gratitude in remembrance of Christ's dying love, selfdevotion to Him, and love to all men.

Such is our Church's doctrine of the sacraments; such the history of the word illustrating it.

*I say true Christian faith, or faith resting directly and immediately on the Lord Jesus Christ, as contrasted with the sacramental faith, approved and inculcated by Rome. For example, in the directions for the Communion of the Sick, alike the Romish pre-Reformation York and Sarum Manuals, and the Rubric in our Reformed Church's Prayer Book, say that, in case of the sick man being too sick to swallow the sacramental bread, his faith will suffice instead;-" Tantum crede, et manducasti." But in the Romish Manuals the faith intended is faith in the fact of the consecrated water being in very truth transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ;-"Credis quòd sacramentum... sub formâ panis, est verum corpus et sanguis Domini nostri Jesu Christi. In our Rubric it is true evangelic faith in Jesus Christ, and what He has done and suffered for our salvation.

SACRAMENTAL LECTURE II.

PRACTICAL PREPARATORY ADMONITIONS.

DEAR young friends, in the preceding Lecture it

was my object to trace out for you the somewhat remarkable and instructive history of the uses in successive ages of the word sacrament: in illustration of our own Church's use of it; and application, distinctively and only, to the two divinely instituted Christian ordinances of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. It only remains that I now, in conclusion, address to you a few words of practical instruction and admonition; as a help to your better preparation for a right participation in the last-mentioned holy ordinance. In doing which I shall have an eye generally to our Church's teaching and exhortations on the subject: well persuaded that these are on every point admirably in accordance with the teaching of God's holy Scriptures.

Of course the one grand object for both the memory and the eye of faith to rest upon in the sacred ordinance is our Divine Saviour CHRIST JESUS:-on Jesus, as having once died for us: Jesus as also still (indeed for ever) living to make intercession for us; with the all-prevailing plea of that his precious death of atonement on our behalf before the throne of God. And oh ! how touching is the memorial, represented as it were to our very eyes in the Lord's supper, of Jesus Christ's grace and love in thus dying for us! How significant those visible symbols in it, by Himself so fitly appointed, of the broken bread to be eaten, and wine

poured out to be drunk, by the communicant, as indicative of the character, object, and necessary personal application, in order to salvation, of his death:its character, as the accursed death of the cross; whereon his body (may I not add his human heart too?)* was racked and broken; with blood and water intermingled gushing forth in real sacramental significance from his side, when pierced by the spear of the Roman soldiery+:-its object, that of bearing the curse of God's violated law as our self-devoted substitute :the blessing, however, being one only to be realized by those who through faith apply and feed upon his dying grace and love, as the very sustenance of the soul's inward spiritual life; just as man's body is nourished by bread and wine.

Now here, and in connection with these several points, a few words of fuller admonition, and of caution also, may, I think, be useful.

Ist, then, forget not ever that it is simply as a memorial of Jesus Christ's death of atonement on the cross at Calvary that you are to regard, and to participate

I refer to the medical essays on the physical cause of Jesus Christ's death by three eminent Edinburgh physicians and surgeons, appended to Dr. Hannah's "Last Days of Christ," all in confirmation of Dr. Stroud's opinion, that its natural cause was the rupture of the walls of the heart.

Bishop Ellicott, in his "Life of Christ," dissents from this opinion, as ingenious rather than true; and himself prefers to explain the outflow of blood and water as preternatural. But he does not, and I believe cannot, controvert the fact that the various remarkable phenomena recorded answer physically to death by rupture of the heart, and to no other. Now the preternatural ought not surely to be resorted to, in explanation of recorded facts, where the natural suffices. Jesus was truly man in his death, as well as in his life. And had it not been written of Him, "Reproach hath broken my heart"?

I have myself had a touching opportunity of observing the correctness of the medical description given by the Edinburgh physicians of death by rupture of the heart; but, in that case through structural defect, such as in Jesus Christ's case did no exist.

In the early Church a little water was usually mixed with the sacramental wine, in memorial of this. See Bingham, xv. 2, 7.