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"as their successors," i.e. as their successors in the apostolic office; nor, I believe, does any Christian writer of the age immediately following say so.* Further we do not know (so as Dr. W. says we do) from any sufficient ancient testimony that any of the primitive bishops appointed by the apostles (e.g. Timothy, Titus, Clement, Polycarp, Ignatius,) laid their hands on baptized persons, in a Church rite like that of confirmation, in order to the conveyance to them of the gift of the Holy Ghost. Dr. W. refers for such ancient authorities to the notes on Acts viii. 14-18, and Heb. vi. 2, in his Greek Testament. But none such appear there :+ nor, I am persuaded, do any such exist.

7. The total incorrectness of Dr. W.'s assertion that in the earliest Christian Churches, planted by the apos

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* Subjoined to No. 3 of the Oxford Tracts is a misinterpreted citation from the Roman Clement; as if asserting that, by apostolic appointment, there was ever after to be kept up an apostolic succession," in the persons of a subsequent line of Church bishops. Now it is not of a succession of the apostolate that Clement there speaks; but, simply and distinctly, of a succession of the episcopate. Did Dr. W. rely on Clement? (See pp. 8,9, supra).

The earliest of the ancient fathers referred to by Dr. W. on Acts viii. 15-18, as authorities for the practice of the confirmation rite in the early Christian Church, are precisely those same that I have referred to in my first Lecture, viz. Tertullian and Cyprian, about A.D. 200 and 250. The earliest that he cites as identifying the Church rite of laying on of hands, as then carried out, with the apostolic practice, are Augustine and Jerom, about A.D. 400.

By Cyprian, however, in his 73rd Epistle, there is earlier implied a correspondence, in his view, of the Church rite with Peter and John's practice at Samaria, as narrated in Acts viii.

It should be remembered, as I have said at p. 5, not only that no trace of the confirmation rite appears in the writings of those earliest post-apostolic fathers, Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, etc.; but that the testimony of Justin is directly against Dr. Wordsworth's statement. For, in that notable passage in his first Apology, written near about A.D. 140, or 150, which was referred to in my first Lecture, Justin Martyr, when giving a long and full account of the process of baptism then in use among Christians, not only says not one word of any subsequent process of laying on of episcopal hands for the imparting of the Holy Ghost, but speaks of the baptized adult being, directly after water-baptism, and without any other intervening rite, brought to communicate with his brother Christians in the Lord's Supper.

tles, this rite on being used was called Confirmation,* will be seen by reference to what I have said in my first Lecture, p. 7.

8. The incorrectness of his statement that "the same means of prayer and laying on of hands have been used ever since in the Christian Church universal," will appear from the fact stated by me at p. 11, that the Romish Church has now for many centuries discarded the laying on of hands in its rite of Confirmation.

9. Once more, the further incorrectness of the statement made in our 60th Canon, that "the custom has continued in God's Church from the apostles' times that all bishops should lay their hands on baptized children when instructed in the Catechism of the Christian religion,"a statement endorsed by Dr. W.,-appears from the fact stated and illustrated in my first Lecture, that in the earliest post-apostolic times in which the practice of the confirmation rite is recorded, viz. about A.D. 200, (an epoch separated by the ominous chasm of 100 years from the death of the longest-lived apostle, St. John,) the children of Christian parents so confirmed were infant babes! And so for ages afterwards.

Let me beg, in fine, to suggest to Dr. W. whether the doctrine of opus operatum, thus taught by him, respecting the communication of the Holy Spirit's saving grace, as if actually and only given by the bishop's laying on of hands, with prayer, is not a doctrine directly antagonistic to that of the Reformed English Church, as well as to that of the Bible? Moreover, whether it is not in perfect accordance with the doctrine and spirit of the Church of Rome;-that Church which he has himself again and again, with so much force and justice, denounced as the Church of Antichrist? In fact, admit but this antiChristian doctrine of the priestly opus operatum,+ in the matter of the communication of God's life-giving Spirit, as a beginning, (I use the word anti-Christian, as before, *So Wordsworth pp. 5, 6.

+ See my Notes + and +, p. 10, suprd.

in its proper sense,) and then Rome's Church of Antichrist must, in all consistency, be the ending.

II. DR. GOULBURN'S MANUAL.

What has been said thus fully on Dr. Wordsworth's Manual renders it unnecessary to notice at all at large points similarly objectionable, as I conceive, in Dr. Goulburn's. Suffice it here to say, 1st, that Dr. G. at the outset similarly fails to mark the distinctive miraculous character of the gift of the Holy Ghost communicated through the laying on of the apostles' hands at Samaria and Ephesus, as constituting those cases sui generis; and therefore not to be reasoned from as a Scriptural rule on the mode of communication of the ordinary enlightening, sanctifying, and saving influences of the Spirit, such as are so often spoken of in the Epistles as given quite independently of it:*—2ndly, that he makes the communication even of these ordinary saving influences of the Holy Spirit to depend on, and to be the result of, the laying on of the hands of "the highest order in the ministry;" such being "their prerogative"-seeing that, 3rdly, he also recognises the bishops of the Church as answering in this matter to, and standing in the place of, the apostles.+ Indeed, at p. 11, he has a very awful passage to this effect. I

* See pp. 148, 149, suprd.

So generally, at pp. 5, 6, of Dr. G.'s Manual.

At confirmation the candidate "lays the whole of his heart at the apostles' feet; and woe be to him if, like a second Ananias, he keeps back part of it, by some mental reservation, for sin and the world.'

Dr. Goulburn recognises the presbyter meaning of the word priest, in our Church. But does he always so apply it? At p. 9 he says, "presbyter or priest." It is only in the sense of presbyter that our Church uses the word: not the sacerdotal sense, which so many of our clergy, and writers in Church Periodicals, seek to fix upon it. In the Latin Prayer Book of 1560, indeed, I see the terms minister, pastor, presbyter, interchanged with sacerdos. But in our authoritative Art. xxiii. it is simply "ministers." See page 118, supra. Also let me refer on this point to my Letters on Bishop Hamilton (of Salisbury)'s late Charge; the same that I before eferced to, p. 119, suprà.

And thus there is here too the doctrine of the opus operatum; which, as said before, is so antagonistic to the doctrine of the Church of England,* and so essentially anti-Christian, in the true sense of that word. In the devotional Meditations, indeed, appended to the Manual, Dr. G. more than once or twice warns the candidates against supposing that the bishop's laying on of hands will act as a spell, or charm, "independently of the candidate's own state of mind when receiving it."+ But I do not think that he anywhere intimates that the Holy Spirit may previously otherwise have sealed an individual for his own. On the contrary, at p. 13, after citing Eph. i. 13, "In whom, after that ye believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise," he identifies that sealing with the (supposed) action of the Holy Spirit on the heart, distinctively, at confirmation. "In baptism we confess our faith, and are placed under the Spirit's guidance: in confirmation we are sealed by the Spirit; and authenticated as his by the descent on us of power from on high."‡ God forbid that we should

Says Mede, on 1 Cor. iv. 1, (p. 27, Ed. of Works 1672,) "Priest is the English of presbyter, not of sacerdos."

*It is observed by Bishop Burnet, on the 25th Article of our Church, that in King Edward's Book, (1552,) after that clause, as it now stands in the Articles, "In such only as worthily receive the same have sacraments any wholesome effect or operation," there was added, "not as some say, ex opere operato [a point observed on in my Note, p. 16, supra]; which terms....yield a sense which savoureth of little piety, but of much superstition." But, adds Burnet, this was afterwards considered unnecessary; for that" the virtue of the sacraments being put in the worthy receiving excludes the doctrine of opus operatum as formally as if it had been expressly condemned." Assuredly it does. But Dr. G., not very consistently with himself, would apparently inculcate the opus operatum principle conjointly with that of the worthy receiving, in the case of adults, + So p. 38; also p. 62; and elsewhere.

Similarly in the Meditations, p. 37: "Many a time has God called me by his Holy Spirit moving on my conscience.' But the possibility of God having done much more than to call the individual by movement on the conscience previous to, and independent of, the rite of Confirmation, Dr. Goulburn (strange to say) does not here seem even to contemplate.

To the same effect, when referring at p. 6 to the controverted

believe any such thing. Many and many a one, I am very sure, has been sealed by God's Spirit for his own long before, and altogether independent of, any rite of Confirmation. Moreover, by what Dr. G. says on a subject passed over quite in silence by Dr. Wordsworth, I mean the ancient ministration of the rite of laying of hands on infants,- he seems to teach the Romish doctrine of the opus operatum almost even more strongly than Dr. W. For, "so far as its Scriptural ground is concerned," says Dr. G., "confirmation is altogether independent of the age of the recipient. It is not an ordinance for youth exclusively." So that, "though it is more judicious to defer it, there is nothing in the administration of it to an infant which need surprise or shock us." "In the primitive Church [?] confirmation followed immediately after baptism, if the bishop were present to administer it; whether the neophyte were an infant or an adult."* And he supports his opinion of the non-objectionableness of infants being confirmed by the precedent of infants being bap

passage of Heb. vi. 2, he characterizes the imposition of hands, there spoken of, with the "transmission of the Holy Spirit" for its accompaniment, as "standing at the threshold of the Christian life." As if the Christian life could not otherwise have even begun!

How different the teaching of Augustine! In his De Trin. L. xv. c. 46, he speaks thus:-"Christ both received the Holy Ghost and dispensed it; received it as man, dispensed it as God. On the other hand, we can indeed, according to our measure, receive the gift. To pour it out however on others we cannot; but only invoke that God to give it them who alone can effect the work." This is the passage referred to by me in the note §, p. 10.

*So pp. 7, 9.-I have already endeavoured to impress upon my readers that the primitive Church, whose practice may rightly be referred to as a precedent carrying authority with it, (unless marked indeed so as in 1 Cor. xi. 22, with apostolic disapproval,) is the Church, distinctively and only, of apostolic times. In the times following after St. John's death, and with regard to any Church practice then first introduced, so as was that of baptismal confirmation, (for this is first recorded, as I have shown, only a little before A.D. 200,) the question should be considered whether it was not a thing of "the apostacy," which as St. Paul said, had its germ even in apostolic times, and was afterwards to be gradually more and more unfolded, rather than of the true Gospel.

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