So with eternal life in view, as the ultimate end and object of your career, march forward resolutely, dear young Christians, on the heavenly road. Forget not ever the name you bear. Remember that the Lord Jesus has chosen you to be to Him "a peculiar people:" his witnesses, as it were, before men; in the world, yet not of the world; so" showing forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light." By example, as well as in other ways, try to influence others, especially of your own families, and nearest friends, in the same sacred cause. In regard to this world, think of it as the wisely appointed scene of your pilgrimage to a better world: as in that favourite child's hymn, "I'm but a pilgrim here; And sometimes, I trust, the joyous anticipation will be vouchsafed you which is expressed in another of our well-known hymns; "Hallelujah! I am on my way to God." TWO POST-CONFIRMATION SACRAMENTAL LECTURES. LECTURE I. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND'S SACRAMENTAL DOCTRINE HISTORICALLY ILLUSTRATED. DEAR young friends, it is probably the case that many of you may be proposing on the next coming Sunday to partake for the first time of what our Church, in its address of invitation read by me last Sunday, calls "the most comfortable sacrament of the body and blood of Christ." And I cannot think my confirmation instructions complete without the addition of yet two more Lectures, the object of which will be to prepare you, in accordance with our Reformed Church's teaching respecting it, for a right and intelligent participation in that holy sacrament. 13 Now here a primary point on which the more intelligent among you may naturally wish for information from me is this:- Why does our Church thus call the Lord's Supper a sacrament; and in the Catechism, moreover, speak of Christ having ordained two sacraments, and only two, in his Church, viz. baptism and the Lord's Supper: certain other Church ordinances, which had long previously, it would seem, been called sacraments, being in its 25th Article pointedly excluded from the appellation? 'Whereas," you will add, "if we may judge from our English New Testament (and indeed this inference is in nowise negatived by anything to be found in the original Greek Testament), neither the word sacrament, nor any apparent Greek equivalent to the word, would seem to have been there applied to these, or any other ordinances of Christ." Well, in order to understand our Church's meaning in all this, you must of course, in the first place, mark carefully our Church's own very peculiar definition of the word sacrament. "It means," says the Catechism, " 'an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given to us; the sign being ordained by Christ Himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof." And, taking the word in this complex sense, you will easily see (as indeed I shall have later on more fully to notice) that both the baptismal Christian ordinance answers to it, and also that of the Lord's Supper. But, if you wish to understand how the simple Latin word sacrament (for it is a Latin, not Greek word) came to have this peculiar meaning attached to it, and what the reason and occasion for our Church's pointed exclusion of other ancient Church ordinances from all right and title to the appellation, it will need that you trace the history of the word, through its chief successive changes of Church usage, from after the apostolic times down to that of our English Reformation. This is what I purpose doing in the present Lecture. And I shall arrange what I have to say on the subject under the four following chronological æras;-viz., the æra from St. John's death, near about A.D. 100, to Augustine's entry on the episcopate, shortly before A.D. 400; then the æra of his episcopate, while the Goths and Vandals were making their first irruptions into the Roman Western empire ;-then the Papal æra, after the establishment of the Romano-Gothic kingdoms of the West under the Roman Pope's spiritual headship, an æra begun about A.D. 600;-finally the æra, 900 years later, of the Reformation. If I mistake not, this historic sketch will furnish lessons of instruction to you most useful, not only for the present time, but for all after life-lessons never assuredly more needed than now. May the Lord's help and blessing attend us in it! It may be well to premise, by way of introduction, that in the time of Christ and his apostles, down to the end of the first century of the Christian æra, the Latin word sacramentum, though etymologically susceptible of application to any sacred thing,* was yet practically, among the heathen population of the western or Latin-speaking division of the Roman empire, applied almost only to a sacred oath; especially that of allegiance to the emperors, which was taken, on enlistment, by the Roman soldiery. Now and then indeed it was also used to designate a sacred money deposit, which in certain cases of lawsuit was placed by the litigants in one of the heathen temples, under keeping of the priests; with the recognised condition of the temple-treasury being enriched, on conclusion of the suit, by the forfeiture to it of the unsuccessful suitor's share of the deposit. But this use of the word was comparatively rare. The one specific use of it common among the Latin- peaking Romans of the apostolic times was, as I said, that of the military oath of allegiance. 1. And now then, turning to the subject of the Christian application of the word in the first of our four chronological periods,-viz., that which commenced from after St. John's death, and end of the apostolic * Sacramentum, a thing consecrated or sacred, from sacrare: just like other words of cognate origin; such as juramentum, a thing sworn, or oath, from jurare. + See Facciolati on the word. æra, or æra of primitive Christianity in the only authoritative sense of the phrase, about A.D. 100,—it might, à priori, I think, have been anticipated that Latin-speaking Christian writers would have used it in much the same sense as that just above noted; applying it to express, simply and distinctively, the Christian's solemn oath, or profess.on of alle iance, to the Lord Jesus Christ. In which then common sense of the word both Baptism and the Lord's Supper might fitly, of course, have been called sacramental,- -as fitly indeed as in our present more complex sense of it; seeing that alike in the one, and in the other ordinance, a solemn vow of allegiance to Jesus Christ was wont from the earliest times to be made by each Christian disciple. In fact, somewhat remarkably, the younger Pliny, Roman governor of Bithynia very shortly after St. John's death, in his celebrated letter to the emperor Trajan respecting Christians who had been there brought before his tribunal, on the criminal charge of abandonment of Rome's heathen religion for Christianity, reports of them as so using the word respecting themselves. For, says he, they affirm that in their Sunday assemblings for Christian worship, after singing hymns to Christ, as to a god, they are wont to bind themselves by a sacrament," or oath, (evidently as in expression of their allegiance to Christ,) to abstain from committing anything evil.* And there are to be found moreover, here and there, examples of a similar Christian application of the word, subsequently, by one and another of the early Christian Latin fathers.+ 66 * "Affirmabant quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire, carmenque Christo, quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem; seque sacramento obstringere ne furta committerent," etc. +E.g., Tertullian, Ad Martyr, c. 3; "Vocati sumus ad militiam Dei vivi jam tunc cum in sacramenti verba respondimus:" i.e. at baptism. And De Corona Milit. Lib. c. 11; "Credimusne humanum sacramentum divino superduci licere?" In which latter passage he contrasts the Christian soldier's oath of allegiance to Christ with the heathen soldier's to the heathen emperor; and intimates the |