less was it intended by their authors that it should be obtained by a collation of them all.

Such a collation was impossible until a collection of the various writings had been made, and their authority settled; and as this was not done till many years after the death of the writers, Christians for several generations would have been without an accurate knowledge of a rite that each and all of these documents allude to as of the utmost importance.

c. It seems now to be maintained by Protestants that, though it never entered into the design of the authors, singly or collectively, to inform the Church by their writings of what she ought to know regarding baptism, yet the Holy Ghost so overruled their minds and pens, that the collected writings do now supply her with that rule of faith and practice which the Apostolic Church had in oral Tradition; that though each writer, taken alone, is obscure, yet one supplies what is wanting in another, and one clears up what in another is doubtful.

The overruling Providence of God in the formation of the New Testament is a Catholic Tradition; but this supposed Providence, which makes the collected Scriptures into a perfect and sufficient rule of faith and practice, Catholic Tradition rejects, and Scripture itself supplies no evidence of it. If Protestants want us to believe that we are to gather our information about baptism by collating all the books of the New Testament, let them begin by proving that, without the help of Tradition, any satisfactory information on which they themselves can agree can be gathered from those books. They will then have to prove, in the second place, that the original mode of transmitting revelation, instituted by Jesus Christ and His Apostles, was afterwards to be set aside in favour of this new one, which is of an utterly different nature. Until they have proved these two points, the theory or assumption-for it is nothing else-of the sufficiency of Scripture is not even plausible.

2. We will now examine whether the New Testament gives us more complete information regarding the other rite that Protestants accept, than it does regarding Baptism. They call it The Lord's Supper.' It matters not to inquire whether

this expression is used in Scripture of the Communion instituted by Jesus Christ, or only of those love-feasts observed by the first Christians in connection with the Holy Communion, or whether, as some appear to think, these are one and the same rite. Call it what we may-Holy Eucharist, Holy Communion, Blessed Sacrament, Holy Mass with Catholics, or Lord's Supper with Protestants-in what way did its Institutor, Jesus Christ, intend that His disciples in future ages should learn its nature and its manner of administration ?

From an accurate and critical collation of all the texts concerning it in the various books of the New Testament-such is the Protestant answer.

This was evidently not the primitive method, for such a collation was of course impossible until the various books of the New Testament had been sifted, their authority settled, and the Canon drawn up. No one will maintain that for so many generations Christians were without the means of celebrating correctly one of the principal rites of Christ's institution.

Should it be said that this method of learning our Lord's will was only intended for later ages, I would reply that there is not a trace, in any one of the books of the New Testament, of any design on the part of their authors to teach men how to celebrate the Lord's Supper, or to explain its meaning to those who are in ignorance.

St. John says not one word about its institution. St. Matthew and St. Mark record our Lord's own act, but they say nothing from which their readers could conjecture that the ceremony which Jesus Christ then performed was to be an institution among Christians. They do not record the words: 'This do for a commemoration of Me.' They give neither command, counsel, nor even permission to repeat the action. And no man who read those Gospels alone, without any other knowledge on the subject, could have gathered in any way that there was to be a Christian rite called the Lord's Supper, or Holy Communion. The recipients therefore of those Gospels, had they not possessed Tradition, far from seeking more full and detailed information, would not have seen any need whatever to concern themselves about it.

Those to whom St. Luke's Gospel came would indeed have discovered that their Master, after breaking the bread, and saying, 'This is My body,' added, 'Do this for a commemoration of Me.' They would therefore have studied attentively his account of the rite, in order to know how to perform it. They would probably have noticed that St. Luke, in speaking of the cup, does not renew the injunction. They might therefore not unnaturally have supposed that this was no part of the future rite. Perhaps at some later period of their life the Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians might have fallen into their hands, and then they would have discovered their mistake, since he tells us what no Evangelist records-that Jesus Christ commanded the cup also to be used in the commemoration. But did no one know this until he wrote his Epistle, about twenty-four years after our Lord's ascension ?

Certainly he did not write with the intention of making it known; for he says that he had delivered to them the doctrine orally before; and the reason why he again recalls the institution is, not that they may learn to celebrate correctly, nor to teach them the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, but that from that doctrine, already perfectly well known to his readers, he may urge upon them certain moral conclusions: first, as to the eating of meats offered to idols (in the tenth chapter), and then as to the abuse of the love-feasts (in the eleventh chapter); and for these reasons he introduces the mention of this rite by these words: 'I speak as to wise men, judge ye what I say' (ch. x. 15); i.e. you are well instructed, reflect then on the truths of faith, consult your own reason, your own consciences, and see if my conclusions are not just.

St. Paul, as the Anglican Brett has correctly observed, does not write to inform his readers what is necessary for the consecration of the Eucharist. 'It is an instruction to them to consider what is administered to them, and how they ought to receive it, but does not appear to be any direction to the ministrator how or in what manner he was to consecrate the elements, or with what words he was to bless, eucharistise, or give thanks, over them. He plainly supposes that the administrators of the Eucharist had rightly performed their parts (bating

their not excluding the ignorant and unworthy from partaking the divine mysteries); otherwise he would not have instructed the communicants only, but the administrators also. Neither would he have told the communicants that they received the Lord's body, though they did not discern it, if what had been given to them had not been consecrated in such a manner as to be made the Lord's body, in such a sense as Christ intended it should be understood to be so. Neither does St. Paul say what liquor was to be in the cup, which would have been necessary if he had intended to direct the minister of this sacrament what he was to say and do on this occasion.' 5

Since not one of the writers of the New Testament wrote with any design of teaching men how to celebrate this great Christian rite, since they all suppose their readers well instructed in both the practice and the doctrine, what grounds have Protestants for their persuasion that, without the Tradition which the sacred writers presuppose, they can attain, by a general and critical collation of all these writers, to an accurate knowledge of what not one of them intended to teach?

The investigation we have been pursuing brings us to the conclusion that, with regard to Ritual at least, the New Testament requires a key, and that the key of Apostolic Tradition was possessed by those to whom the books of the New Testament were originally written. This Tradition was not merely a doctrine orally handed down. It was the Ritual itself received from the Apostles, and alluded to in the New Testament, though not derived from it. This Ritual must have embodied doctrines as well as facts. If men were baptised into the name of Jesus, they must have known who Jesus was; if they were baptised in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, they must have known the signification of those three words; they must have known certain doctrines regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which St. Paul speaks of as symbolised by Baptism. They must have known the nature of the Church into which Baptism had introduced them, the kind of authority claimed by those who had baptised them, in a word the whole truth and discipline of Christ in its ele

5 Brett, Dissertation on the Liturgies.

mentary and essential facts. Those who had learned from Apostolic lips how to celebrate or how to receive worthily the Body and Blood of Christ knew well what was meant by those words. They needed no critical conjectures and collation of texts to inform them whether that Rite was a sacrifice or a sacrament, or both or neither.

In a word, they possessed in the doctrines they had been taught, and in the familiar Ritual with which those doctrines were intimately connected, a living and full Tradition, by means of which they were either able to dispense with Scripture altogether, if they had it not, or to use or interpret aright those portions they possessed.

SECTION IV. OTHER RITES.

THE two rites we have been considering in the last section were chosen by way of illustration of a principle. That other rites are mentioned in the New Testament is quite as clear as that Baptism and Communion are there to be found. The question, therefore, immediately suggests itself, do the Holy Scriptures without tradition tell us anything about the number and the relative importance of the various parts of Ritual? It is as necessary to know the place and importance of a rite as to know its nature and external form. If the New Testament mentions several rites, this is not sufficient for our instruction, unless we are told which of these is of temporary, which of permanent institution, which is intended for a class and which is of universal use, which is merely permitted or counselled, and which is of strict obligation. It is certain that the New Testament is either silent on such points, or conveys its information only indirectly and by inference. This consideration is of vital importance to Protestants, and it may be well to develop it by comparing together the Scripture testimony with the received Protestant traditions and usages.

There are ceremonies holding a conspicuous place in the New Testament narrative, which, rightly or wrongly, are omitted in ordinary Protestant Ritual. I choose as examples